Lane has picked up our discussion of faith as evangelical obedience here, and Tim Prussic has captured the problem with Lane’s argument in the second comment there at Green Baggins.
The issue is not really an exegetical one — I granted in an earlier part of our discussion that his exegesis pointing to sanctification is okay by me in principle (although I obviously have no problem with seeing the same kind of thing at the commencement of the life of faith). But this is not an exegetical issue; it is a good and necessary consequence issue. But Lane has a trump card that voids my application of the laws of logic.
“I suspect that Doug and I will simply not agree on this issue, because my position is based on the law/gospel distinction, which I see as being present in the text, and which Doug sees not as part of the text, but as part of the application of the text.”
When Lane says that he holds to the law/gospel distinction, as opposed to my application of law and gospel from the text, this means that he holds to the law/gospel hermeneutic. Now if you have a law/gospel hermeneutic, you have decided going into your exegesis what that exegesis can and cannot reveal to you. So if I produced a verse that said “Thou shalt exercise justifying faith as your evangelical obedience,” this would not even be a minor challenge to a law/gospel hermeneutic. A law/gospel hermeneutic would chase the verb around the room, until the aorist imperative ran out the door screaming, turning the verse into gospel, remarkably enough.
Look. Here it is again. God commands us to have the kind of evangelical faith that apprehends the righteousness of Jesus Christ, and is thereby justified. Right? People either do that or they don’t do that. Right? Doing that would be best called . . . what? Refusing to do it would be . . . what?
I challenge Lane to come up with any phrase or word that describes a response to a command of God that is not obedience/disobedience or an equivalent set of synonyms. If he doesn’t do it by the next round, I will say checkmate.