When I was in junior high school, I used to play a lot of ping pong. Occasionally, in the course of these bouts, one of my friends would hit a lofter — a slow ball about three feet above the table, just on my side of the net. I confess that when this happened it brought certain feelings to life in me, feelings that could probably be characterized as ungodly. The works of the flesh are manifest, St. Paul says, and one of them no doubt would include the desire to drill a hole through the other side of the ping pong table with your slam, and then to whoop and dance in an unseemly way around your friend’s basement, which is where the ping pong table was located.
Anyhow, what brought these thoughts to mind was the most recent edition of The Trinity Review. John Robbins therein reviews the book recording the Ft. Lauderdale colloquium on the Auburn Avenue theology, which book was edited by Cal Beisner. Anyhow, in these brief comments, I will attempt to restrain myself,
In the first place, since Robbins belongs to the “ready, fire, aim!” school of thought, he takes issue with our debating partners on the other side of the table, who were seeking honestly to determine what we were saying before they decided whether or not they needed to oppose it. This gracious behavior was too much for Robbins, who spends a good deal of time denouncing them for not denouncing us in the manner which Robbins has determined is meet. This kind of indiscriminate approach has been tried in the history of the Church before — “Kill them all and let God sort it out” — but to their credit our discussion partners did not do anything like that. I do think they got us wrong at some significant points, but they conscientiously sought to get what we were saying. I am grateful to be able to say that none of those who differed with us at the Knox colloquium belong in any way to the extremes pursued by Robbins.
But my point here was to briefly respond to some of the howlers that John Robbins directed at me personally, so let me get to it.
1. “Wilson claims, ‘One of our fundamental concerns is this: we want to insist on believing God’s promises concerning our children.’ Unfortunately, neither he nor any other proponent of Neolegalism ever quotes those promises.” The problem for this thesis is that I wrote a little book called Standing on the Promises, the first part of which is dedicated to a discussion of many of promises God has given us in Scripture concerning our children.
2. Robbins says (of Acts 2:39), that “the last clause of the verse, ‘as many as the Lord our God will call,’ modifies and limits all three referents: ‘you, your children, and all who are afar off.’ And to this assertion I cheerfully agree, and further assert that the grammar demands it. But if Peter, in preaching to the crowd at Pentecost had said something like: “for the promise is to you, to those in your neighborhood who live in blue houses, and to those who are afar off, as many as the Lord our God will call,” there would be two comments worth making. The first is the realization that not all who inhabit blue houses in my neighborhood need be elect. On this point, Robbins is correct (and ironically, so am I!) But the second point is that blue houses must be important to this process somehow, otherwise why mention it? Children are singled out. Why? Peter is referring to the promise of the Holy Spirit of God in the Old Testament, which I treat in detail in Standing on the Promises. And those promises graciously invite Christian parents to believe God for the salvation of their children. But they do not do this by giving a list of names for all the elect children that will be born in the history of the church. Herein lies the fundamental flaw in Robbins’ epistemological approach.
Oddly, earlier in the essay, Robbins says that many Christians have a lack of courage in opposing the likes of us because of “a lack of belief in the promises of Scripture.” All right — let us talk about the promises of God in Scripture, and talk further about the problem of specificity. God promises salvation to Abraham directly. He does the same for a handful of other saints in Scripture. But most Christians who believe the promises of God unto salvation do so even though their names are not mentioned anywhere in the Bible.
If I can only believe what is propositionally revealed in the Bible, and if my name is not propositionally revealed in the Bible as one who believes the promise of salvation rightly, then how can I believe the promise? How can I believe any promise there? Do I have direct warrant? No, not at all. I can, however, believe indirectly, but I must supply one of the missing ingredients (which I cannot do apart from grace). Christ promises to give rest to all those who labor and are heavy-laden, and who come to Him (Matt. 11:29-30). I can believe (on Robbins’ terms) that He will do this for a particular group of people. But how can I insert myself into that group? Following Robbins’ logic, I cannot.
Christ promises salvation to those who repent and believe. But what warrant do I have for saying that this promise applies to me? God promises to answer prayer. But how can I proceed to pray on the assumption that the promise applies to me? Shouldn’t I wait until after the day of judgment to see if I should have taken God up on it? It is the same with God’s promises to us concerning our children. He promises, on the basis of His covenant, that our children will serve and worship Him. This promise, like all God’s promises, is apprehended by faith only, by faith alone, by faith plus nothing else, by faith apart from works, and by faith all by its own self. (Incidentally, I do understand how this kind of language is confusing to Robbins who sees in it a display of a dangerous mixture of faith and works.)
Why are some children of the covenant lost then? For the same reason that some prayers are unanswered — the prayers were not offered in faith. The children were not brought up in the faith that God would fulfill this promise.
The thing that closes the circle is always faith. This particular faith cannot be based on propositional warrant from Scripture, because Scripture says nothing about my prayers, nothing about my children, nothing about whether I am elect. I close the circle by faith. God gives the general enscriptured promise. He then works in me specifically through the person of the Holy Spirit to bring me to the conviction that these general promises are mine, and so that I may enter into rest. Not only do I have reason to believe the promises, I am commanded to believe them.
But when I believe these promises about children, someone could hand me an exhaustive concordance and demand to see my descendants’ name in there. And when they do, I would just smile, shake my head, and hand it back. “I will show you my grandchildren’s names in Scripture when you show me Gordon Clark’s name there.” “Gordon Clark believed the gospel,” the reply would come. “Yes, he did, without any specific warrant to do so. Just like my grandchildren.”
3. Robbins charges one of our debate partners (Fowler White) with not really believing in the inerrancy of Scripture, and then indicates that I agreed with the general point that Dr. White was making. This treatment shows once again how Robbins (for all his vaunted rationalism) cannot really follow the simplest of arguments. Of course I affirm the absolute infallibily and absolute authority of Scripture. Because I do, I reject the idea that Robbins has picked up somewhere that Scripture must submit to every last stipulated definition of a modern logic text. Now don’t get this wrong (as Robbins easily might do). I am not denying that all reality, grounded as it is in the nature of God, must be internally consistent, and I heartily assert there no such thing as an absolute contradiction. That said, there are uses of “all” in Scripture which do not conform to the standards of All P are Q statements. This is not an embrace of irrationalism, not even a little bit. In a strict A statement, all Ps are Qs, head for head, and every last stinking one of them is distributed, as the logicians say. But in the world inhabited by regular English speakers, the word all admits of a whole bunch of variations. For example, God wants all men to be saved.
Because Scripture is the absolute authority, we must submit to its usages. And when Paul addresses those “called to be saints” in Corinth (1 Cor. 1:2), he is not intending to make the claim that everyone within the boundaries of the visible Corinthian church was necessarily elect. He is not using the vocabulary that way here, because there are a number of places in the same epistle where he warns the saints at Corinth against the danger of falling away, just like the Jews in the wilderness did (1 Cor. 10).
Related to this, John Robbins did not understand my point about levels of discourse at all. So here it is again, in another form. When Paul tells us about the cup of blessing which was the cause of many Corinthians getting sick and dying, is he intending to tell us that it is a blessing to get sick and die under the judgment of God? Or is he speaking about blessing at one level, and then when we get to the specific problems at Corinth, he addresses the situation at another level? When I am preaching to a group of Christians, I address them as saints. I address them as Christians because that is what they are. In the call to worship, I do not welcome the saints to the worship of God, and then in an aside comment on the fact that it is a shame about the reprobates who got in. I address them all as saints because it is a Christian worship service. That is one level of discourse. Later in the week I may be counseling one of the members of the church who is completely defeated by some sin in his life, and may come to the conclusion that he is not regenerate. And I would be bound to try to lead him to the understanding that he needs to be born again to God. That is another level of discourse. It is not a matter of truth shifting — it is rather a matter of avoiding the fallacy of equivocation, where terms admitting of different definitions are used with those different definitions in the course of the same argument. As in: Stevie Wonder is blind. Love is blind. God is love. Stevie Wonder is God. This is a fallacy because the words have different uses and definitions, and they are being treated in the argument as though they did not. The same thing happens with words and phrases like saints and cup of blessing. To recognize that such words have different uses and applications in different settings is to master a basic part of a basic logic course. And to be unable to do this, as Robbins appears to be unable, indicates that he cannot master the logical point (which is unlikely), or that he is too proud to admit that he has attacked me for teaching heretical things that I don’t actually teach.