Like Scarsdale

So here I sit in the Chicago airport, exercising the patience of Job, or at any rate thinking that I ought to be exercising the patience of Job. No, nothing to do with the flights. I just finished reading Michael Horton’s contribution to Covenant, Justification, and Pastoral Ministry. I was seriously disappointed — I think because I really was expecting more.

This was a significant and atrocious misrepresentation. Horton sets out to show that Sanders, Wright, Shepherd, and the federal vision advocates are all advocates of “covenantal nomism.”

“Not only Second Temple Judaism but all of these somewhat diverse challenges to the evangelical doctrine of justification may be accurately described as ‘covenantal nomism.’ This pattern of religion is united by three principal theses: [1] our personal obedience is a condition of justification, but but that this does not mean that justification is strictly merited; [2] there is no qualitative distinction between law and gospel or a covenant of works and a covenant of grace; and [3] we ‘get in by grace, but stay in by obedience’ [Sanders] — that is, a final justification by works” (p. 198, emphasis mine).

You know, I don’t know why I bother anymore, but here it is again. [1] When it comes to conditions of personal and individual justification, our personal obedience, all forms of merit, whether condign, congruent, purple or green, and all individual strivings to be shiny, clean and good, can all go to Hell. I capitalize Hell because, as Fulton Sheen once said, it’s a place, like Scarsdale. [2] There is a qualitative difference between the covenant of life with Adam and the covenant of grace with his fallen heirs. There are two covenants, not one. [3] The view that we get in by grace and stay in by obedience really is a form of semi-Pelagianism. This means that everyone tagged in this essay for believing it is a semi-Pelagian, except for me, of course, because I don’t believe it. But then that means that this essay might not be a reliable guide to who is and who is not a semi-Pelagian.

In his conclusion, Horton says this: “If we are to recover a genuinely Reformed covenant theology, it will require patient exegesis, not reactionary and dismissive polemics that derive from false dilemmas, reductionism, and caricature” (p. 227). These words, at the conclusion of this essay, were right out of a Twilight Zone episode. No false dilemmas, no reductionism, no caricature? Okay, you guys go first. Show us how it is done.

Please note that this is not a federal vision whine about being misunderstood in some nebulous and generic way. Horton has said that federal vision types think the sky is green, and here I am, maintaining that it is blue, just like I always did. This chapter was really unfortunate.

Two theological comments. A lot of the confusion about faith and works in this debate depends upon the idea that the Fall did not radically distort the relationship between the two. But it was the introduction of sin that introduced all the tension. In this chapter, Horton rightly points out that Christ was exalted because of His obedience. But as the perfect man, Jesus did not divide what God had first joined together in the creation. Put it this way. Did Jesus live His perfect sinless life (which, remember, people, was imputed to us) by faith in God? Or by works? Which was it? When His life and His death are imputed to us, was the foundation of this life faith in His Father or not? Was Christ’s obedience faithless or not? Now I agree that Christ’s obedience was imputed to us, but where did this obedience come from? Did Jesus gut it out for us on a works principle, or was His obedience grounded in His absolute trust in His Father? The answer is simple. It was perfect obedience, right? That meant that it was not grounded in the actions of the first successful Pelagian.

Secondly, Horton makes plain his rejection of the Westminster Confession’s identification of the Mosaic covenant as an administration of the covenant of grace (e.g. p. 212). He tries to justify this by some kind of discussion of Galatians, but I don’t know why he is messing around with that when we have the Standards.