Well, I am done with By Faith Alone — done with the book, that is, not the doctrine. I want to deal with the last three entries in one post all together because I don’t really have a great deal to say about each one.
John Bolt, a professor of systematic theology at Calvin Theological Seminary, defends the the covenant of works as a necessary doctrine. The vast majority of the article was just fine, a perfectly orthodox piece of academic writing. In the chapter, he interacts with Anthony Hoekema and John Stek, two men for whom he has a great deal of respect. He also deals with some of John Murray’s views, and he does this with a great deal of respect also. All of these men reject the phrase covenant of works in various ways, and Bolt is unpersuaded by them — and in this chapter he indicates his “own reasons for rejecting the challenge” (p. 172).
I really only have two objections here, and they are closely related. The first is that in a footnote he says this:
“While considerations of space and potential accessibility to their works by readers, along with my personal relationship with and respect for my teachers, led me to focus on Hoekema and Stek, their challenges, thankfully, are also free from the various tendentious theological agendas characterizing much of the contemporary discussion about covenant of works” (p. 172).
Tendentious means partisan or controversial. Since those who are guilty of such an attitude are left unnamed, we can only guess at their nefarious identity. But, given the theme of this book, I think we could probably guess right. But this is the oddity. In the previous chapter (also on the covenant of works), the concluding words warned us that to misstep on this subject lands us in another gospel entirely (p. 170). This is clearly bad in chapter seven, but here in chapter eight, it is okay to mess around with these ancient landmarks, so long as you do it in an academic manner, and are not tendentious. So, if you are going to deny the gospel, be sure to be sweet about it.
The second question is this: Bolt teaches at Calvin Theological Seminary and he doesn’t have other fish to fry? Now I don’t have any problem with sound conservative men going into questionable places, and fighting the good fight there. Go, fight, win is my take on all such valor. But I do wonder about men who go off to live in the Lousiana swamps to fight alligators and whose published articles are directed against Montana mosquitos.
The last chapter in this book was by Gary Johnson, one of the editors of this volume. And it may surprise you to learn that I thought this chapter was fantastic. My only complaint would be that the editors included it in the wrong book. The chapter title was “The Reformation, Today’s Evangelicals, and Mormons.” The chapter was directed at the current gooey definitions of evangelical in today’s theological climate, and how it has led (in the fevered imaginations of some) to the inclusion of Mormons among the ranks of evangelicals. My sentiments in response are summed up by ptooey, which pretty much encompasses Johnson’s conclusions also. Johnson’s problem here was the reverse of Bolt’s. By its placement in this book I was expecting a fight with the Montana mosquitos, but he wound up killing and skinning several gators. Well, okay. I am all for that. But what is it doing in this book? This is the mosquito book, not the gator book.
The only substantive criticism I would offer is that on the last page of the chapter, Johnson included Wesley in a list of “our evangelical forefathers” (p. 204). But you can’t have everything. Even though he was probably referring to the historical development of evangelicalism, and not to the semi-Pelagianism as such, still. But maybe I am just a little jumpy. At the same time, if I were the editor of a volume on the deterioration of confessional evangelicalism, and if Johnson were to submit this chapter for consideration, I would be happy to include it. Good stuff.
The Afterword was written by Albert Mohler, and I am just sorry about it. He takes the contributions of the writers of this book at face value, and says that FV represents “a repudiation of the tradition received from the Reformers” (p. 205).
“The Federal Vision is gaining influence among Reformed evangelicals who should be least likely to move in the direction of Trent rather than Geneva and Wittenberg” (p. 207).
There is not really any pleasant way to respond to this, so let me just preface it this way. I think Al Mohler is a great man, and I believe he has done wonderful things for the church today. I really like him, and I like the way he goes about his business. I thank God for him.
That said, let me present my credentials for what I am about to say. I was brought up in a Southern Baptist church. I was baptized in a Christmas Eve service as a ten-year-old at my home church, College Avenue Baptist in Annapolis, Maryland. I was surrounded throughout my childhood and most of my adult life by conscientious and godly Baptists. I was steeped in the baptistic worldview, and it wasn’t a dopey or hypocritical version of it either. Some of the people I still respect most in this world are Baptists. And despite great initial reluctance on my part, I became a paedobaptist around the age of forty. I am fifty-four now. All this to say, I know my Baptists.
The dominant form of Christian faith in North America is baptistic. The thought-forms are baptistic. The cultural expectations are baptistic. And the influence on paedobaptist denominations has been baptistic. A large number of Presbyterians do not have infant baptisms anymore so much as they have wet dedications. So when someone like Mohler encounters a paedobaptist who has not been domesticated by the prevailing set of expectations for all evangelicals, his natural reaction is to think of someone who is Trent-ward bound. As I once said in another setting, I set out for Geneva (and have been settling in here for almost twenty years now), but a bunch of my American friends think that I moved to Rome. They can’t tell the difference between Rome and Geneva because both of them are across a lot of water, and are way east of Kentucky.
Mohler is further excused because a lot of the people telling him that FV is bad whiskey are confessional Presbyterians. Why should we expect him to sort out this paedobaptist squabble, and why would we expect him to side with the group farther away from his own baptistic convictions? I sure don’t. But we do need to notice how odd this is. Now I don’t want to say that these Presbyterians attacking us have apostatized — not a bit of it. But they have baptisticised. This can be easily shown — for the contributors to this volume, the differences they have with a Baptist like Mohler are minor. Who did they ask to write the Afterword? I can think of a multitude of subjects that I would ask Al Mohler to contribute a summary statement for . . . but this subject is not one of them.