Richard Gaffin is a gracious Christian gentleman, who really knows his subject. I learned a great deal from his talks, and appreciated how careful he was being. Some of this was no doubt because of the setting, for, after all, he was speaking at the Auburn Avenue Pastors’ Conference. This means that his words are going to be gone over in a painstaking way by examiners with unsympathetic eyes, not to mention a small contingent of people who don’t know what “careful” means. Because they will not be careful, Dr. Gaffin needed to be. This meant that Gaffin’s talks could not really be described as stemwinders, but they were thorough, solid, and very good. He did not jump into the fray in media res, but rather started with a prolegomenon, and laid his foundation stones carefully. Some listening to the lecture tapes might initially wonder at the method (“what’s his point?”, but he was simply being diligent in his approach. By the time he was done with his talks, the value of the early preparation work should have been evident.
The most helpful thing to me personally was his treatment of the sense in which we may speak of future justification. Without denying the declarative (and definitive “once-for-all-ness”) nature of justification in the life of the believer, Gaffin did a masterful job of showing how the central “already/not yet” elements of Paul’s theology have to be taken into account when we talk about the final vindication of God’s people in the resurrection. No one could honestly think that Gaffin was saying that God will justify us on the basis of our own autonomous works, and yet he did full justice to the language of Paul on this, particularly when it came to the question of our adoption as sons. This adoption as sons is described by Paul as finalized in the redemption of our bodies. If adoption has a forensic component, as Dr. Gaffin showed, then this means that this declarative and forensic component has a future manifestation. This is just a thumbnail sketch of his argument, and so I refer you to the tapes.
I am very grateful to Dr. Gaffin for his agreement to speak at the conference, for the work he did in preparing for it, and for the help he was to me in his lectures. It was an honor to meet him, and to talk about some of the larger controversies we are all involved in. If more in the Reformed establishment responded to so-called “new stuff” in the sober and sane way that Gaffin has, all of us would be a lot better off. N.T. Wright said during the conference that if New Testament studies had been flowing in a Ridderbosian channel (my expression, not his), the reaction of Sanders to Lutheranism (and Lutheranism gone to seed in folks like Bultmann) would have been unnecessary. In my view, the same compliment should be accorded to Gaffin and his work. That in the New Perspective which is a healthy corrective to older errors actually antedates the advent of the New Perspective.