If you have read the “When the Fork Floats” thread, this is a follow on to that, particularly the comments. This is what I am doing with the ordo, and for FV critics, it constitutes what I believe to be an unanswerable problem for them.
I have said before in this space that the ordo is a model — like the paper mache models of the atom in your elementary school classroom. In calling it a model, I am happy with it as a model. I am not disputing it as a model, and am more than willing to work with it as a model. But the paper mache model of the atom is not a photograph of the atom. It is not exactly like the atom in every respect — and saying this is more a recognition of the limitations of models for things like this than it is a proposal for an alternative model. I don’t want an alternative model. So, I work within the contraints of the traditional ordo, happy to do so, and willing to subscribe to it. You bet.
But in this dispute, the FV critics are trying to put the electron into the nucleus, and I am engaged in cheerfully pointing that out. Not only so, but they are doing this in the name of the ordo, long live the ordo. It just ain’t right somehow. Now, that said, just a couple of comments. The first is to respond to a suggestion from an FV sympathizer, and then another to respond to an FV critic.
Roger suggests that folks aren’t regenerated and justified until they are baptized, but that they are believers before this, perhaps minutes or days. Or in the case of modern evangelicalism, years. But this creates an ordo that really can be measured with a stopwatch, along with a host of pastoral problems for the man who has to preach the funeral of the man who was killed on the way to his baptism, or for a stillborn infant. The ordo was always meant to describe the nano-moments of true conversion, before which the person was an object of wrath and after which he is a friend of God. Every person born into this world is in the former condition at one time, and those who are saved make the transition to the latter condition. Now the ordo is meant to describe what happens when you cross that particular border. To apply it to other issues will only tangle us up. If the FV tried to do that (which it has not, despite many assertions from outside), it would either need to make exceptions for the true believers who die shy of baptism, in which case our position will be qualified right out of existence, with much confusion on the way, or we say “tough nails,” you really do have to be baptized in water to be saved, period, in which case, the FV would have to try to get along without my future services.
There are other important events at the headwaters of the Christian life — and I am happy to say that baptism ratifies and seals what happened when the guy first believed, formalizing it before God and man. That is the moment when he is brought into the visible church, ushered into formal covenant membership. Fine. And we can even say that the grace shown during the ordo was the grace of his baptism, and this is possible because the efficacy of baptism is capable of time travel, and that would be fine too. That’s straight out of the Westminster Confession, and who could be against that? Right, guys? And we view things from the vantage of the covenant, speaking in terms of it, which is also fine. Everything’s fine.
But the ordo is talking about the Holy Spirit’s implementation of God’s decrees. We don’t need to measure that, or try to time it when it happens. Indeed, we must not try. But it is important for our theology that we acknowledge that God implements His decrees at a particular moment in the person’s life. We call that the moment of the effectual call and regeneration.
And so here is where FV critics run into their stumper. I have not yet seen them address this question in a way that is even remotely satisfactory. To use the phrase living faith sets them to making accusations of Shepherdism, when living faith as the instrument of justification is demanded by the Confession, the ordo, and by historic evangelicalism. Defending the Confession against their ideas of what Shepherd must have said, they deny the Confession. Greg quoted WCF 13.1. “They, who are once effectually called, and regenerated, having a new heart, and a new spirit created in them, are further sanctified . . .” The result of the effectual call and regeneration is a new heart and new spirit. And that is the heart that repents and that is the heart that believes. A new heart means a new repentance, a new faith. A living heart means a living repentance and a living faith. These men, zealous for their point, are seriously maintaining that God gave us a living tree so that it might bear dead fruit, soli Deo gloria. And they are defending this idea of dead fruit in the name of the evangel of life. Though, to be completely fair, they don’t like calling it dead fruit — that is why they have to come up with something like “not-alive fruit,” or “receiving fruit.” Anything but living. Why? “Because we are evangelicals and cannot abide the idea of new life.”
I am an historic evangelical, and that is what I am down to the bone. When God comes to us in grace and salvation, He brings life with Him, and nothing else. Everything He touches is made alive, and He touches everything. Everything He gives partakes of that life. It is new life from God, and it pervades the whole. Not only so, but it pervades the whole from the first moment of the effectual call, before we do a blessed thing. But one of the blessed things we do is believe, and it is living creatures, alive for the first time, who do this believing. Faith is not an inert substance, but rather an action performed by persons who are now alive.
One last comment and I am done. C.S. Lewis comments on the nature of the early Puritans and Reformers in 16th century — their chief characteristics being their exuberance, their liberation from motive-scratching, their joy, their relief, their delight in new life, their acceptance of something that was too good to be true. The gospel, when it breaks out in power, always has that effect. For those watching this particular controversy, trying to make out what it is all about, here is the basic question to ask. Which group is talking about the ordo as something which bursts all our chains — “my chains fell off, my heart was free, I rose went forth and followed thee” — and which group has the ordo on an anvil, trying to forge it into a chain, one capable of shackling the wind, so that we can always tell where it is coming from and where it is going.