Green Baggins

In this post, I will address the third and final  part of Leithart’s exposition of Paul’s doctrine of justification. Part 1 is here. Part 2 is here. I am dealing with page 227-230 of The Federal Vision. Closely related to what I am saying here is this post.

This post will only be by way of adding to the previous post. On page 228, Leithart makes a false dichotomy, when he says (in relation to Romans 6) that “Paul is not dealing with the guilt of sin; the ‘picture’ here is not the courtroom; Paul presents a scene of battle, or, better, he pictures the sinner an oppressed slave under the thumb of a harsh master.” Are we to assume that the image of a courtroom, which has so dominated Paul’s thinking for the entire first 5 chapters is now somehow supposed to disappear like some conjuror’s trick? By Leithart’s own argument, if Christ’s resurrection is in a sense His justification, then why isn’t Paul’s mention of it (verse 4) meant to include all that imagery in our minds? Furthermore, the courtroom scene (though it doesn’t have to be the main image in Romans 6, which is talking about sanctification more than about justification; nevertheless, the close connection between the two should alert us to the fact that justification has not been erased from the picture) is still in Paul’s mind in verse 11, where λογίζεσθε is used. Therefore, Leithart’s rejection of Piper’s position is premature.

Even if we grant that “justify” in verse 7 does not mean the normal declarative sense that it has in most of Paul’s usage, that does not mean that we have to rearrange our doctrine of justification to accomodate this usage. Almost all writers on justification have noted that the λογ- root has a semantic range that goes beyond what the doctrine of justification “needs.” As I have mentioned before, just because a word has a wider semantic range does not mean that we should change our theology on that basis. Just because “faith” can sometimes mean “the Christian faith” in the Bible (as opposed to an individual’s belief and trust in God) does not mean we should change our doctrine of “faith alone” based on this broader semantic range of the word “faith.” I don’t need to grant this point to Leithart (I think that Murray and Hodge, quoted in the previous post on Romans 6:7, are quite adequate to a full understanding of the passage), but even if I did, it would not help his case. This same criticism applies to his exegesis of Acts 13 (pp. 228-229).

Wilkins’s letter to the Louisiana Presbytery, response to declaration 5 of the report. I haven’t commented recently on Wilkins, because Wilson and Leithart have needed more urgency in my estimation. I will continue to comment on their theology, maybe even today.

Here is the paragraph on which I wish to comment:

If, however, the committee means by “union with Christ” the union brought about by baptism (i.e., “covenantal union” or the union we have by virtue of being made members of His visible body, the church — as alluded to in Larger Catechism 167, which speaks of “Christ, into whom we are baptized”) then, clearly, “covenantal union” does not “subsume” all of Christ’s benefits (if by “subsume” they mean “infallibly convey”). I do believe that by baptism and membership in the visible church we have Christ and the benefits of the covenant of grace presented to us or delivered over to us by way of promise (Shorter Catechism 94). Christ must be embraced by faith for all the benefits of His work and the blessings of His salvation to be ours (and, of course, the faith that embraces Christ is itself a gift of God’s grace, Eph. 2:8-9).

Wilkins makes several mistakes here. The first is that he refuses to allow for the sacramental kind of language that the WCF talks about in WCF 27.2: “There is in every sacrament a spiritual relation, or sacramental union, between the sign and the thing signified: whence it come to pass, that the names and effects of the one are attributed to the other.” The FV wants to stress the “union” aspect of sacramental union. But the point of this paragraph is also to explain why it is that language that is meant of the thing signified is sometimes spoken of in language of the sign. In other words, the divines are carefully guarding against an over-identification of the sign and the thing signified. The sacramental union explains why it is that the thing signified is often spoken of in terms of the sign. I would strongly argue that Romans 6  is an example of this, by the way. And since that is not the main point of this post, I will just leave that tantalizing point hanging in mid-air. Okay, beat me. Another post.

The second error that Wilkins makes here is his lack of qualification when he says “all the benefits of His work and the blessings of His salvation” toward the end. Are there any benefits of Christ’s death that accrue to the non-believer? Yes, but only insofar as Christ’s death affects common grace. The clarification so desparately needed here, and lacking in Wilkins’s formulation, is that no saving benefits accrue to the non-elect. Wilkins says “not all” of Christ’s saving benefits come to the non-elect, since they do not have true faith. I would say that none of Christ’s saving benefits come to the non-elect, since they do not have true faith. This is the main difference between the FV and its critics. The FV will say that some saving benefits accrue to the non-elect, and the critics say no. It does not matter here whether the FV qualifies this by adding that these saving benefits that the non-elect receive are not of the same kind qualitatively. The FV thinks they can evade the substance of the criticism by so saying. They cannot. The problem here is their equivocation on the word “saving.” They want to include within that term something that isn’t really saving because it lacks perseverance. They want to call it “covenantal salvation.” Failure to understand this problem of equivocation is one of the main reasons why the FV thinks that the critics don’t understand them. Except that the critics have understood them precisely on this point.