On a previous occasion, Greenbaggins had said that I was okay on sola fide, but has now come to the end of a chain of reasoning that requires him to say that he no longer believes this. His full post can be found here.
And, although I believe him to be confused on the point, his manner toward me continues to be gracious, as it has consistently been in the past.
“It gives me no pleasure at all to write this post, first of all. To come to this conclusion means thinking worse of a person’s theology, which person has at the very least commanded my respect, and has been very courteous to me throughout our debates.”
Here is his argument in a nutshell.
“I have come to the conclusion that the law/gospel distinction is essential to preserving sola fide . . . If there is no distinction in the text of Scripture between law and gospel (that is, if the difference between law and gospel is only in the application, and not in the text), then all the discussion of faith in the New Testament is both law and gospel, which we’ll call Golawspel. This means that, even in the apostle Paul’s
most rigorous separation of faith and works, which occurs in his discussions of justification, Paul is not really claiming that law observance is separate from faith within the structure of justification. For the definition of faith itself must fall prey to the Golawspel muddlement. If faith, therefore, is not opposed to works in justification, then justification is no longer sola fide . . . This means that every proponent of the Joint Federal Vision Statement denies sola fide.”
And here is my brief reply, beginning in the form of a question.
“For we are unto God a sweet savour of Christ, in them that are saved, and in them that perish: To the one we are the savour of death unto death; and to the other the savour of life unto life. And who is sufficient for these things?” (2 Cor. 2:15-16).
What smell repels those who are perishing? What aroma do they find repulsive? In the text, the aroma is that of Christ. But what is Christ, who is He? Is He law or is He gospel? Christ is both. He is the end of the law (Rom 10:4) to everyone who believes. And Christ is gospel — in Him all the promises of God are yea and amen (2 Cor. 1:20), again, we insist, to all who believe.
So no, I don’t call it Golawspel — that sounds like a semi-Pelagian muddle. There is no impersonal point of integration, no theological intersection where we can mush all this together.
But there is a place of integration, a point where everything hangs together. In Christ, do law and grace meet in perfect harmony? If someone hates Christ, repelled by His aroma, do they recoil from both law and gospel, or from just one? In Christ, what do law and gospel do? According to the Westminster Confession, they do “sweetly comply” with one another.
If Lane’s chain of reasoning is correct, then not only are all the signers of the FV statement deniers of sola fide, but so also the Westminster Assembly (for calling the law of Moses an administration of the covenant of grace, golawspel forsooth!), and let us throw in Robert Letham, author of The Westminster Assembly: Reading Its Theology in Historical Context (pp. 230-233), along with the editorial board of P&R for publishing him, thereby denying sola fide as recently as 2009.