Wilson might have a tad more free time now that the debate at DRC is over. Not that he is behind or anything. I merely mention it because I have waited until that debate is over before posting any further reviews of chapters of RINE.
One remaining issue needs addressing from Wilson’s posts. And that is the question of whether churches that do not have justification by faith alone taught in them are apostate or merely corrupt. According to Wilson’s definitions of these terms, an apostate church is one that has had its branch completely cut out of the tree, whereas a corrupt church is a branch that has a few scrawny olives on it. The question, then, is whether or not a church has to have justification by faith correct in order to be a true church. I asserted that a church that gets justification wrong is apostate, not merely corrupt. As Wilson has pointed out, this statement needs a bit of qualification. Here’s how I would qualify it. It is possible for a church to teach justification by faith without using those exact words. A church that teaches that our sins are forgiven because of Christ’s sacrifice is certainly on the right track. They might even say that our right to eternal life is dependent on Christ and not on ourselves. A church that teaches this is not necessarily apostate. However, it must be added to this that it is still possible for such a church to be apostate, if they insist, for instance, that the righteousness of Christ becomes ours only by infusion, and not by imputation. The truth, of course, is that it is both. We get the imputed righteousness of Christ in justification, and the infused righteousness of Christ in sanctification.
That being said, I will now move on to chapter 15 of RINE, which concerns apostasy. Wilson starts by asserting that apostasy is a real sin that occurs in real time (p. 132). He further asserts that such an apostate falls away from Christ and from grace. He qualifies this by saying that it is baptism from which he falls. However, he still asserts that there was a “reality” to what the apostate experienced. The John 15 analogy finds its way in here with DW asserting that the apostate had real sap but no fruit.
Wilson objects to the hypothetical view of the warnings, arguing that if apostasy cannot happen to the elect, and the warnings are hypothetical, then the fact of the warnings being in Scripture would be a bit like erecting a “beware of the cliff” sign in the middle of Kansas. Let me interact with this a bit. My view is that the warnings are put there in Scripture both to heighten the condemnation of those who fall away from the visible church, and as being part of the means by which the elect are preserved. This is something which virtually all FV writers miss. The choice is usually presented by them as being between viewing them as hypothetical and therefore useless for the elect, or real, and therefore the possibility of apostasy is also real, even for the elect (speaking from a human perspective, of course: no one is saying that the decretally elect can fall away from God’s perspective). But they leave out the third possibility: the warnings are the very means God uses to keep the elect from falling away. This negates the possibility that the warnings are put there hypothetically and therefore uselessly. To assert that any Reformed author has said so is an illogical extension of that Reformed person’s argument. The presence of a warning does not necessarily mean that there will be any who fall into that category. For instance, take the sign “all tresspassers will be prosecuted.” Does that sign imply that there will in fact be tresspassers of that sign and that property? Isn’t the whole purpose of that sign to prevent tresspassing? The farmer puts it up in the hope that the category of tresspassers will be a null set. The problem here is that the FV has been operating with Aristotelian logic categories, which do not allow for the null set. Boolean categories are necessary for understanding this logic. What this means is that it is possible to talk about a set of people without there actually being any instances of that set. This answers the question of what use a warning has for an elect person. The null set is that of apostatized decretally elect persons. There are no instances of this. But the very warning prevents that from happening.
What about people who fall away? What can we say about them? What do they fall away from? Indeed, as many FV writers have said, this is the question of the FV. My question is this, for Wilson: do the people who fall away have any of the ordo salutis blessings of salvation? Are they justified, adopted, sanctified (leave Hebrews 10 out of it for now)? Wilson seems to be comfortable saying that they left Christ and grace. But what does that mean in terms of specifics? Do they participate in justification, just not the same way as the elect do? Or do they not have any of the ordo salutis benefits? This is the question that the critics have, and have never gotten a straight answer on. The problem here is that the ordo salutis is an all or nothing deal. You cannot force apart piecemeal the various benefits of the ordo and say that someone can one of them without getting all of them. Christ is undivided, as Calvin would say. We either get all of Christ or none of Christ. To say that we have any ordo salutis benefits, but then lose them, is Arminian, no matter what the proponent of said view might say about the decretally elect. I’m not necessarily accusing Wilson of Arminianism here. I am merely pointing out what his answer should be.
Lastly, and this is something that the FV writers fall woefully short on, is the question of the judgment of charity. It is casually and scornfully dismissed by many FV advocates as an explanation of why Paul writes the way he does to the church. But the judgment of charity explains this: why it is that Paul can speak to the entire visible church while using terms that apply only to the elect. By the way, it is usually asserted by FV authors that the judgment of charity means that Paul is not addressing the whole church. Nothing can be further from the truth. We do not know who is elect and who is not. Paul addresses the whole visible church, assuming that all the members are elect, since he is human. That being said, the effect of Paul’s words on the church for the elect are positive. They will assimilate Paul’s teaching and use it for their own benefit. The non-elect will ignore it to their greater condemnation. What, pray, is deficient about such an understanding of Paul’s way of writing? The method of several FV writers has been to ignore this possibility completely, or dismiss it with a casual “I’m not convinced,” (as Wilkins has), and then proceed to redefine every term in the Reformed ordo salutis on the basis of his understanding of Paul. The FV has not even begun to prove that the judgment of charity argument is untenable. They merely assert it.
Green Baggins 