My conversation with Dr. Clark goes on. I asked him to cite some examples of where I have said that God considers the moral quality of my faith (as having been formed by love) as the basis or foundation for justifying me. I deny teaching this. To his credit, Dr. Clark acknowledges that I am at least trying to deny it, but that I am haplessly falling into error on this subject anyway.
At any rate, when I requested a “for instance,” Dr. Clark replied this way:
“I did, in fact, quote Mr Wilson and I’ll do it again: ‘Faith cannot but partake of the qualities of its source.’ To be sure, this statement would be true if it were referring to the function of faith in sanctification, but because Mr Wilson does not make this distinction and because it is the role of faith in the act of justification that is in question, I understand him to be referring to the role of faith in the act of justification. Nothing he has said since, by way of complaining gives me any reason to change my opinion.”
Now it is quite true that I was talking about faith at the moment of justification. But I was talking about the nature of this faith when I said that it partook of the qualities of its source (the regenerate heart). I was not talking about the role of faith in the eyes of God when He justifies me. Dr. Clark quotes this sentence, points out things that I failed to include in that sentence, and assumes certain things about the reasons I must have had for failing to include them. This is not quotation. It is not responsible. It doesn’t establish anything.
I also used the example of the eyeball, and I thought Dr. Clark’s response to this was very telling. I had said:
“True faith is an eyeball and cannot look to itself. True faith sees Christ alone. But unless it is is a living eyeball, it cannot see. Dead eyeballs have no vision. So this life is necessary but is in no fashion meritorious. God does not give living faith so that it might admire itself in the mirror. If you would like me to say this any more clearly — I don’t know, throw in some more adjectives or something — I will be happy to do it. As I as said in my post, we do have disagreements, but whether God reckons any of my virtues into His calculations as He justifies me is not one of them.”
Dr. Clark responded to this:
“All analogies break down and in this context, the analogy has the same problems as the language above. The analogy fails, because, in this case, the one should have to say that it is the object of vision that makes the eye function as it does, but I think an eye is an eye and it’s alive or not whether it has an object of vision or not.”
The object of vision creates the eyeball first, which means that the object of vision is active in this before it is seen. God gives us eyes and then we see. He, being gracious, gives us eyes that function, that are alive. That is the first thing. Then the living eyeball blinks a couple times (repentance) and secondly it sees (faith). What does it see? The object out there, which in this case is Christ. This should not be difficult.
Let me explain what I think is going on here. “About time!” somebody cries. Dr. Clark has made a big point out of the uses of words like because and is. And I keep trying to agree with him, at least on this point. Our justifying faith is alive. God does not reward with justification because we have an alive faith. Okay? Amen.
But there are different uses of the word because. If a mother said to her son, “I am going to give you ice cream because you were a good boy today,” this is a merit system. He could have been otherwise, but he wasn’t, and so he got the ice cream. Some people want to go to heaven this way but they can’t.
But what about this? “I saw Christ in His glory because God gave me a faith that could see Him.” Now what? If someone thinks this means he was justified “on account of what a fine boy he was for having living faith,” then he deserves whatever the Reformed confetti-counters do to him. But if he simply means that had God given him any kind of faith other than the living faith that He did give, and that he was justified because he had been given that kind of faith (instead of the other kind), this is simply Reformed orthodoxy. This is the difference between necessity and merit. It is necessary for me to have living faith, for if I do not, I will be blind to Christ, the sole ground of my justification. But there is no merit in my faith that God uses as a reason for justifying me.
Now notice how thinly Dr. Clark has to slice it here. He admits that faith partakes of the quality of its source when we are talking about sanctification, but he says that to admit that faith partakes of the quality of its source in justification amounts to a denial of the Reformation. But this is like saying that the eyeball is dead and blind when it looks to Christ in justification but mysteriously alive again when it looks to Christ in sanctification. This makes no sense; it is all the same faith. The faith that is the instrument of justification is also the faith that is the instrument of sanctification. I don’t get one kind of disposable faith in order to justified, and then a replacement faith in order to be progressively sanctified. The entire Christian life, soup to nuts, is from faith to faith (Rom. 1:17). The just shall live by faith. But Dr. Clark is insisting that justifying faith has to be considered as ontologically distinct from sanctifying faith. For if you say that it partakes of the nature of its source (while justification is occuring), then you have denied the Reformation. This means that faith at the moment of justification, according to Dr. Clark (if he were consistent), has to be unholy, blind, and dead. For if it were holy, it would be partaking of the holiness of the new heart which produced it.
One other thing. To say that all our sanctity is “evidence only” has a serious problem with the traditional Reformed ordo. What does this do with definitive sanctification? When a man is given the new heart that produces a holy repentance and an (unholy? Dr. Clark?) faith, this happens when he is in an unjustified state. But somewhere in there, love and repentance and holiness are going on, and they are not proceeding from the man’s justification, which according to the traditional ordo, has not happened yet. So all post-justification acts of love are “evidence only” and nothing else. But what are the pre-justification stirrings of love? You can’t deny their existence without denying the reality of regeneration. The new heart hates sin and loves God. That love is not meritorious, and God does not reward it when He justifies a man. But it is sure enough there.
Dr. Clark’s dilemma is not resolved by taking Dr. Gaffin’s solution (although I appreciate what Gaffin says on this point) because even if the ordo is not taken as a chronological business (measured with a stop watch), it still represents the logical order of things as the Reformed have historically understood it. The ordo rightly protects monergism in salvation, and, to borrow a phrase, Dr. Clark is “fiddling” around with this.