Category Archive: Theology
Jeff Meyers
Jeff Meyers, pastor of Providence Presbyterian Reformed Church (PCA) in St. Louis, recently posted a number of his articles here. Several of the papers look very good. For instance, check out “Some Prima Facie Arguments for the Trinity as the Image of Renewed Sociality in the Church.” Not the catchiest title, but a profound thesis. Meyers argues that “the way that God lives eternally as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit function as the paradigm for human community.” I’m looking forward to reading these papers!
Gaffin on NPP
This evening, I read Richard Gaffin’s “A Reformed Critique of the New Perspective.” In many ways, it’s a frustrating article. First, there are no footnotes, which means that it’s hard for a reader to look up the quotations of Dunn and Wright and read them in context. At times, Gaffin’s criticisms seem to miss the mark completely. For instance, he writes:
Wright relentlessly insists that Paul “did not (as it were) abandon Judaism for something else” throughout his writing. But, while Paul certainly did not abandon the religion of the Old Testament, just for the sake of fidelity to it and to the God of Abraham, he most certainly did abandon the dominant streams in the Judaism of his day, relentlessly opposed first by Jesus and then by himself.
But in What Saint Paul Really Said, Wright argues that Paul was neither breaking away completely from the Jewish tradition (including the Old Testament) nor was he accepting it uncritically; rather, he was functioning within that tradition in a prophetic way as he criticized what Gaffin would call “the dominant streams in the Judaism of his day.” So how does Wright disagree with Gaffin on this point?
For another thing, Gaffin often lumps Dunn and Wright together, as Mark Horne points out, though Wright himself criticizes Dunn at several points. When Gaffin discusses original sin, for instance, he seems to condemn Wright because Wright hasn’t addressed the subject (or if he has, Gaffin is unaware of it) and because Dunn has — badly. So, too, with his discussion of double predestination.
Gaffin also says that “there is little sympathy for, in fact downright antipathy toward, any notion of imputation.” He doesn’t provide any evidence of that antipathy, mind you. He just mentions it in passing. While Wright doesn’t speak of “the imputation of Christ’s righteousness to the sinner,” he does speak a lot about corporate Christology, about Christ as the representative of His people who draws God’s wrath against them onto Himself and in whom His people are declared righteous. That approach doesn’t seem so different from that of John Calvin, who wrote:
Therefore, that joining together of Head and members, that indwelling of Christ in our hearts — in short, that mystical union are accorded by us the highest degree of importance, so that Christ, having been made ours, makes us sharers with him in the gifts with which he has been endowed. We do not, therefore, contemplate him outside ourselves from afar in order that his righteousness may be imputed to us but because we put on Christ and are engrafted into his body — in short, because he deigns to make us one with him. For this reason, we glory that we have fellowship of righteousness with him (Institutes 3.11.10).
I’d expect better scholarship from someone like Richard Gaffin. Wright is certainly not above criticism. Don Garlington, for instance, argues that Wright doesn’t take union with Christ into account sufficiently. Nevertheless, there’s a lot that we can learn from Wright. Rich Lusk points the way in his helpful essay, “A Short Note on N. T. Wright and His Reformed Critics.” Here’s Rich’s conclusion:
I am confident that in the long run, Wright’s work on the NT will come be treasured by the Reformed tradition as the “next step” in our growing understanding of God’s revelation in Christ. Accepting Wright need not mean rejecting the Reformation.
Perspectives on the Word of God
I first read John Frame’s Perspectives on the Word of God: An Introduction to Christian Ethics several years ago, before I went to seminary. Now that I’ve got a couple of years of the ministry (and a lot more reading and thinking) under my belt, I sometimes think I should go back and re-read some of the books I read in the past.
During this vacation, I took that opportunity and read through Perspectives once more. It’s a short book (only 56 pages of text) and it’s based on three lectures Frame gave at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School, so it obviously can’t cover the material in any depth. And yet Frame does cover a lot of ground in this little book and does so in a very helpful and readable way.
The first lecture deals with the Word of God itself. The Word of God is not limited to Scripture. God created everything by His Word. His Word is His power, His authority, and His presence. In fact, God’s Word is even identified with God Himself and is an object of worship (Pss. 34:3; 56:4, 10, etc.).
The second lecture deals with the media of God’s Word, and here Frame makes a very important point:
All of God’s word to us is mediated, in the sense that it always reaches us through some creaturely means. This is true even when revelation seems most “direct.” For example, when God spoke to the people of Israel gathered around Mt. Sinai, and they heard the divine voice from heaven, even then God’s word reached the people through creaturely media. For one thing, God spoke human language. For another, he used the normal earthly atmosphere to transmit the sounds to the eardrums of the people. Further, it was the people’s brain cells that interpreted the sounds as words and interpreted the words as God’s message. God’s word never lacks media when it is spoken to human beings (pp. 19-20).
Frame goes on to discuss three means: events (history, redemptive history, miracles), words (divine voice, prophetic speech, written word, preaching), and persons (human constitution, examples of Christian leaders, God’s own presence). One could wish that Frame had also included the sacraments, perhaps as a subcategory (“rites”) under “event media.”
Frame’s point is worth pondering, especially in connection with a trend in Reformed theology which wants to downplay God’s mediated work as “sacramentalism” or “sacerdotalism” and which emphasizes instead some kind of “immediate” (unmediated) work of God on the believer’s heart. But Scripture speaks of the preaching of the Word as Christ’s own voice (Rom. 1:14-15) by which God regenerates (1 Pet. 1:23-25). And many times in Scripture, we hear about the efficacy of baptism and the Lord’s Supper. God delights in using means to work in the lives of His people, and as Frame says, He never speaks without using means.
The final lecture in the book surveys the three basic secular approaches to ethics (existential, teleological, and deontological), critiques them, and then proposes a Christian ethic which takes into account the strengths of all three. In our ethics, we must work with God’s objective Word as norm, the situation which we are confronting, and the nature of the persons involved. What is the situation? What does God want me to do about it? What changes need to take place in me (him, her) so that I (he, she) may do the right thing?
All in all, a helpful treatment, which whets my appetite for Frame’s long-promised but still unpublished Doctrine of the Christian Life.
Zwingli on Covenant and Election
Wouldn’t you know it? Just when I’ve finished preparing my lecture on covenant and election, I’ve found some more information. This is what Zwingli wrote about covenant children:
For when he includes us under Abraham’s covenant this word makes us no less certain of their election than of the old Hebrews’. For the statement that they are in the covenant, testament and people of God assures us of their election until the Lord announces something different of some one.Â
Elsewhere, Zwingli adds: “Indeed it is my opinion that all infants who are under the testament are doubtless of the elect by the laws of the testament.” Notice what Zwingli is saying. He’s not saying that every child in the covenant is going to persevere to the end. He goes on to talk about Esau, who apostatized. Nor is Zwingli saying that we are merely to presume that the child is elect. He’s talking about “the laws of the testament,” by which he means God’s way of speaking about our children in His covenant.
Peter Lillback, who cites Zwingli’s comments in his The Binding of God: Calvin’s Role in the Development of Covenant Theology, sums up Zwingli’s view this way:
Instead of the pious agnosticism of the divine decree advanced by Cellarius, Zwingli asserted the concept of the revealed law of God and its promise that enabled one to consider his children who had been baptized into the covenant as elect, until they proved otherwise…. Zwingli believed that infant baptism was a sign of the covenant which brought a promise of salvation to the children. The very covenant sign for Zwingli was critical because it was an attestation of the decree of election for the parents and their child. One might later prove that he was not truly one of Christ’s by not manifesting the faith that was the fruit of election. But to assume that of any infant, or even to remain in an uncertain state as taught by Cellarius, was to deny the law of God which undergirded the covenant sign (p. 108).Â
One of these days, I’m going to have read Lillback’s book. It seems to me that Zwingli picked up on something which later got warped (e.g., into presumption) or lost. Later writers, in line with Zwingli’s contemporary Cellarius, don’t seem to emphasize God’s promise — God’s authoritative, covenantal pledge — in connection with election. Instead, they speak of being “internally” or “externally” in the covenant, as if the covenant is really with the elect alone, and the rest are only in the sphere of the covenant. And then people started thinking that we need to “presume” a child is elect and therefore in the covenant (e.g., Abraham Kuyper) or they worried about whether they were really elect. Where do you look for assurance when you can’t look to God’s objective promise?