In my previous post on the Auburn Avenue business, I said something that I think requires a bit more amplification.
I believe that the unfallen Adam was under a covenant that obligated him to obey God completely and entirely. He broke that covenant, and God promised him a redeemer through another kind of covenant, a covenant of grace and forgiveness. The entire remainder of the Scriptures is about the outworking of that covenant of grace — this second covenant is not a recapitulation of the broken covenant of Eden, except in the hearts and minds of the sons of Hagar, who deliberately misread the Mosaic covenant of grace as though it were according to the principle of works. That misreading continues down to the present.
I have objected to the use of words like works and merit to describe all this because such usage tends to obscure and confuse the gracious nature of all God’s dealings with man, whatever covenant we may be talking about.
As with the first Adam, so with the second. But the reason some of our critics get so worked up over this is that if all consideration of merit is excluded from the obligations of the first Adam and the achievments of the second Adam, it is assumed that the merit (which is thought to be inescapable) must be coming from somewhere. And if we are denying that we are justified by Christ’s merit, we must be affirming (somehow, someway) that we are justified by our own merit. But none of this follows — we simply deny that merit can be extracted from a virtous act and stored on shelves. Christ’s obedience is ours because He is the father of the new humanity, and His obedience is ours through covenantal imputation.
The division between grace and works is a post-Fall division. It is the result of sin. Sin and rebellion introduced all such fragmentations, and the perfect Man, Jesus Christ did not come into our world in order to participate in our fragmentations, but rather to overcome them. When we confess that Jesus was without sin, this does not merely mean that He never stole, or lusted, or worshipped idols. It also means that He never accepted or lived by false categories. He was the perfectly integrated personality.
I deny that God dealt with unfallen beings on a raw merit principle, and then, after we demerited His favor, extended it to us on a grace principle. Rather, grace and works were not fragmented or divorced prior to the Fall. Adam was expected to obey, certainly, but there is no reason to think that this obedience, had it occurred, would not have been motivated by faith, hope, and love, sustained by the grace of God. As I have pointed out in many places, if Adam had withstood the temptor, it would have been necessary for him to thank God afterwards. This means that this covenant was fundamentally a gracious one.
And as with the first Adam, so with the second. When Jesus obeyed the Father perfectly, this was not raw obedience, teeth gritted, with no motivation of love. In John 17, Jesus made it clear that He and the Father were one, and they loved each other perfectly. Now, this love — did it have anything to do with Christ’s obedience? Any relationship to His willingness to trust His Father? We have no scriptural reason, apart from the demands of a particular systematic schema, to picture Jesus gutting out His obedience to the Father for the sake of a pristine merit.
In a similar vein, after Jesus successfully completed His life and death of perfect obedience, what did He do? He paid his vows to God (Ps. 22:25). “In the midst of the congregation will I praise thee” (Ps. 22:22). “The pleasure of the Lord shall prosper in his hand” (Is. 53: 10).
But with all this said, there is still good reason for being extremely wary about any admixtures of faith and love together in our justification. But this is not because faith and love don’t go together (they did in Adam, before he fell, and in Christ throughout His life), but because they don’t go together in sinners.
When we are presenting the gospel to fragmented sinners, we have to be very careful not to give or allow for any kind of self-righteous “out.” C.S. Lewis says somewhere about good writing that it is like driving sheep down a lane — you have to keep all the gates closed on both sides of the lane, for if there is any way for the sheep to veer off, the sheep will enthusiastically do so. It is the same sort of thing with any allowance at all being made for the religiously smug. All grace all the time is the only thing that can possibly restore us. Self-righteousness, earning, and merit are all in our bones — detached, divorced, and separated from love. If we give any opportunity for the sinner to boast in himself, then he will do so. Telling him about how his faith needs to work itself out in love is a great way to get inveterate self-saviors to attempt just that. This is not because it is wrong for us to do, but rather because it is impossible for us to do. What is wrong is to kid ourselves after the fact, saying that our faith actually did work its way out in us in love, and that God was tremendously pleased with it, and with us for being so clever as to help out with our justification.
Adam could have obeyed, and had he done so it would have been by grace through faith, and it would not have been detached from any other virtue. Christ did obey, trusting His Father, and neither was this obedience detached from any other virtue. Sin destroyed the possibility of any such integration for us, and sola fide is the only safe way back. But even here we have to be careful — believing in sola fide the wrong way can be a soul threatening error. In this sense, not only is it a work, but it is a tiny and impudent work — considered as a work. But we are forgiven, not because we believe in justification by faith alone, but rather because justification by faith alone is true.
Much more can be said about all this. And I am convinced it needs to be, because in this understanding we can find a full harmonization of the currently discordant elements of the TR and FV visions. But I can find no reason why this should necessarily be so.