My apologies to Green Baggins for taking so long to answer his questions. I have been up to my neck in discussions with atheists. For the same reason, my answers here will be brief, and may come across like a laundry list, but I hope they will still be able to do the work of clarification.
I affirm the traditional three uses of the law. One of those uses, that of convicting sinners and making them aware of their need for a savior is the use of the word law in the law/gospel distinction. The only quirk I bring to this is that I believe that the law is not found in one part of the Bible and the gospel in another. The whole thing is law and the whole thing is gospel. So I reject a law/gospel hermeneutic, but I do not reject a law/gospel application in the lives of men by the Holy Spirit. For a man in rebellion, everything about the Bible convicts, including the gospel. The message of the cross is the stench of death to those who are perishing. For a man forgiven, the whole thing is good news — even the preamble of the Ten Commandments is a promise of gospel. God is the one who brought us up out of the land of bondage.
My beef with merit is grounded in its medieval use, as though it were a fungible currency. But if someone poetically says (or one of our hymns say) that we are saved by the merit of Christ plus nothing, I have no problem with it. I prefer to say that the (entirely praiseworthy) obedience of Christ is imputed to us, rather than that the merit of the obedience of Christ is imputed to us. This is not because I want to take anything away from Christ, for I do not. And I prefer to stay away (if I can) from distinctions like condign, congruent, and pactum merit. I don’t think it is a biblical way of speaking. At the same time, if you persisted, you could probably get something out of me on it, just as you could get me to come down on the infralapsarian/supralapsarian debate if you held a gun to my head. “Okey,” as a character in Chandler would say. “Infra. I’m an infra.”
The next question is this:
“Would Wilson be willing to affirm that Christ’s perfect obedience and full satisfaction gives us pardon of sins and the acceptance of our persons as righteous?”
This is a simple one. Absolutely.
The last question concerns of the “aliveness” of justifying faith. Lane and I agree that the sole instrument of justification is faith, and we both agree that this faith is alive, and not dead. But we do have a disagreement after this, although I do not believe it is insurmountable.
Lane says:
“My position is that it is not its aliveness which makes it fit for justification, although justifying faith is always alive.”
“However, it is not because it is alive that it is the instrument of justification, but because it receives and rests on Christ that it justifies.”
“By saying ‘because of aliveness’ one has introduced a ground that is different from Christ’s righteousness. This is not sound.”
Here’s the difficulty. I have no problem granting that the aliveness of the faith is not the ground of our justification, just as the faith itself is not. God does not look at the aliveness of the faith and say, “Good job there, Wilson!” He does not accept me on the ground of anything in me, including my faith or the aliveness thereof. But He does justify me through the instrumentality of my faith and the aliveness thereof. Lane appears to worry that people might get the wrong idea from this aliveness, and set themselves up to boast. This is a mistake, I grant, but our ability to screw the theology up does not even slow God down. Far more people have made this same mistake with regard to faith than they have with faith and aliveness. But God established faith as the instrument anyway. When Lane says, “This is not sound,” I would urge him to defer judgment until after he has asked a few more questions. “Do you believe that the faith which is the instrument of justification is always alive?” Yes. “Do you believe that God looks on this aliveness as part of His ground in justifying?” Not at all. “Do you believe that a living faith is a ground of justification or an instrument of justification?” An instrument only. And I cannot for the life of me see how such answers even begin to threaten the doctrine of sola fide.