Читать книгу When Wright is Wrong - Phillip D. R. Griffiths - Страница 8

The old perspective is that understanding of salvation associated with the Protestant Reformers; men like Luther, Calvin, and Zwingli. It is often referred to as the Lutheran Perspective, principally because of the emphasis Luther placed on sin and justification in his answer to the question, “What must I, a sinner, do to be saved?” Along with the doctrine of total depravity, the most important doctrine to come out of the Reformation was Luther’s rediscovery of justification by faith alone. This rediscovery was the spark that ignited the Protestant Reformation.

Luther’s tumultuous life as an Augustinian monk and his quest to find acceptance with God came to an end when he understood that God had provided in his Son both the forgiveness of sins and a positive righteousness. On coming to a knowledge of the truth as revealed in Romans 1:17, “The righteous shall live by faith,” Luther commented: “Then I grasped that the justice of God is that righteousness by which through grace and sheer mercy God justifies us through faith. Thereupon I felt myself to be reborn and to have gone through open doors into paradise . . . This passage of Paul became to me a gate to heaven.”6 It was justification by faith alone that became, as Calvin declared, “the main hinge on which religion turns,”7 and by “religion” he meant the Protestant Faith.

The Reformers believed all humanity to be by nature sinful. All fell in Adam, and we have all inherited Adam’s sin and sinful disposition. We are all guilty before God, not only because of the first or original sin but because of our own actual sins. It is because of sin that we are all estranged from God and exiled, and incapable of being reconciled to him by anything we might do. What is needed is for another to take our place and do what we are incapable of doing, thereby making God propitious toward us by taking away his punishment, and, also, securing a righteousness without which, none can stand in the presence of the holy God.

The old perspective, or so Wright would have us believe, saw in first-century Judaism a legalistic religion, where the Jews believed that through their own works, or as Wright says, “pulling themselves up by their own moral bootstraps,”8 they could achieve salvation. This, however, is something of a caricature. The Jews believed that they were God’s special people because they were the recipients of the law, they were God’s covenantal people. It was because of this that they believed their works were acceptable to God. They were, however, as we shall see, looking to the wrong covenant; one that offered no possibility of life, but only condemnation and death.

The law as revealed on Mount Sinai was a revival of the covenant of works made with Adam, only where there was a possibility for Adam to provide covenant obedience, there was now, since the fall of Adam, no such possibility; it is now a law, because of the weakness of the flesh, only unto death. This is shown in the manner in which the law was given, in “blazing fire and darkness and gloom and a tempest” (Heb 12:18). Indeed, so terrifying was the sight that Moses said, “I tremble with fear” (v.21). This all signified condemnation.

The Reformation view tells us that God sent his Son into the world to do what sinful man is incapable of doing. God himself became a man like us, yet without sin, to bring man unto himself. He was born in the natural way, born under God’s law, in order that he might redeem his people from that law (Gal 4:4). He did this through his vicarious obedience to both the law’s penal and preceptive demands. Traditionally this has been expressed in terms of Christ’s active and passive obedience. This formula, if it might be referred to as such, is used simply to, “emphasize the two distinct aspects of our Lord’s vicarious obedience.”9 In the former, Jesus met the preceptive demands of the law by perfectly obeying God’s commandments. God the Father vented his holy wrath against sin by punishing his own Son. In his passive obedience, he offered satisfaction to the penal demands of the law by taking upon himself, as our vicar, the full weight of God’s punishment. In the words of Murray, he “took care of our guilt and perfectly fulfilled the demand of righteousness.”10 One does, however, need to be careful not to disassociate Christ’s preceptive and penal obedience. As Turretin reminds us: “the two things are not to be separated from each other. We are not to say as some do that the ‘satisfaction’ is by the passive work of Christ alone and the ‘merit’ by his active work alone. The satisfaction and merit are not to be thus viewed in isolation, each by itself because the benefit in each depends upon the total work of Christ.”11 What we can say is that, in the words of Witsius: “from his very infancy, and through the whole course of His life, especially the close thereof, he endured all manner of sufferings, both in soul and body, humbling, nay, emptying himself, and being obedient to the Father unto death, even death of the cross…in time he fully performed for his people all that the law required in order to obtain a right to eternal life.”12 Shedd, again emphasizes the importance of Christ’s active and passive obedience:

When a criminal has suffered the penalty affixed to his crime, he has done a part, but not all that the law requires of him. He still owes a perfect obedience to the law, in addition to the endurance of the penalty. The law does not say to the transgressor: “If you will suffer the penalty, you need not render the obedience.” But it says: “You must both suffer the penalty and render the obedience.” Sin is under a double obligation; holiness is under only a single one. A guilty man owes both penalty and obedience; a holy angel owes only obedience.

Consequently, the justification of a sinner must not only deliver him from the penalty due to disobedience, but provide for him an equivalent to personal obedience. Whoever justifies the ungodly must lay a ground both for his delivery from hell, and his entrance into heaven.13

It is because of God’s holy nature that eternal life cannot be granted until the precepts of law have been perfectly fulfilled, nor can sin be forgiven without sin being atoned for. Jesus kept the law that Adam broke, the very law under which humanity stands condemned, as Calvin so rightly expressed, “For we hence infer, that it is from Christ we must seek what the law would confer on anyone who fulfilled it; or, which is the same thing, that by the grace of Christ we obtain what God promised in the law of works.”14 It is all of God, his redemptive work in his Son provides both his just verdict in regard to the sinner, and displays God’s own justice. This is why Paul remarked that, in Christ, God is both the “just and the justifier of the one who has faith in Jesus” (Rom 3:26).

Though it might appear obvious, it must be clearly stated that Jesus’ work would count for nothing if it remained external to us. In his mercy, not because he sees anything good in us, God chooses at a moment in time to call those for whom Christ died into fellowship with Jesus Christ (1 Cor 1:9). He regenerates the individual, taking away his heart of stone and replacing it with a heart of flesh (Ezek 36:26). Through God’s gift of faith, God justifies the believer and adopts him into his family. This faith is itself the result of God’s work in the heart, it is said to be a gift because it is nothing less than a natural consequence of the new birth in Christ (Eph 2:1–10).

Luther said that justification by faith alone was a teaching by which the church either stands or falls:

The article of justification is the master and prince, the lord, the ruler, and the judge over all kinds of doctrines; it preserves and governs all church doctrine and raises up our consciences before God. Without this article, the world is utter death and darkness... If the article of justification is lost, all Christian doctrine is lost at the same time... This doctrine is the head and the cornerstone. It alone begets, nourishes, builds, preserves, and defends the church of God: and without it the church of God cannot exist for one hour…In short, if this article concerning Christ-the doctrine that we are justified and saved through Him alone and consider all apart from Him damned.15

If Jesus had only fulfilled the law’s penal demands it would still be necessary to provide the necessary obedience to the law’s preceptive requirements. In the believer’s justification, there is a two-way transaction, exchange, or imputation. The righteousness that Christ secured by his perfect life in conformity to the law is imputed to the believer’s account and the believer’s sin is imputed to Christ. In the words of Calvin, “we explain justification simply as the acceptance with which God receives us into his favor as righteous men. And we say it consists in the remission of sins and the imputation of Christ’s righteousness.”16 All of this happens because God has by his Spirit, united the sinner with Christ, hence, on the basis of this union, all that Christ achieved becomes the possession of all who believe.

Justification is a forensic and declarative act, whereby the sinner is declared by God to be perfect on account of what Christ has done for him. Jesus could do this for his people because, in the words of Buchanan, “He identified Himself with His people and acted toward God as their substitute and representative. His legal liability on their account depended on His taking their law-place, and becoming answerable for them at the bar of divine justice.”17 The Second London 1689 Baptist Confession tells us that believers are “justified whole and solely because God imputes to them [reckons as their righteousness] Christ’s righteousness. He imputed to them Christ’s active obedience to the whole law and His passive obedience in death.”18

It is important to bear in mind that the person who is declared justified is still, in himself, sinful; while the guilt of sin has been removed its pollution remains. It is the ungodly who are justified (Rom 4:5). Once justification is accomplished, then starts the process of progressive sanctification; that process by which the sinner is conformed to the very image of the glorified Christ. This will not be accomplished until the resurrection of the physical body on the return of Christ.

Justification is not simply, as Wright maintains,19 a judge finding one to be in the right. It is, rather, an announcement, a forensic declaration that one is in the right because one is in Christ; the declaration is made in virtue of the sinner’s identification with Christ. The judge then sees not the sinner’s sin, but all that Christ achieved. The sinner is then viewed by God as being righteous because he has become part of Christ. This is why Paul can speak of a Messiah, “who of God is made unto us wisdom, and righteousness, and sanctification, and redemption” (1 Cor 1:30). This union with Christ is the source of the believer’s justification, as Venema tells us, “the believer’s justification on the basis of the imputation of Christ’s righteousness is but a way of saying that the believer is justified by virtue of his or her judicial connection with the work of Christ. Imputation is a corollary of union with Christ, not an alternative to it.”20

Good works within the old perspective are always the result of salvation and never the cause. The believer was once a slave to unrighteousness, “to impurity and lawlessness” (Rom 6:19), however, following his salvation in Christ, “having been raised with him through faith in the powerful working of God” (Col 2:12), he is now a slave to righteousness that leads to his sanctification (Rom 6:19). The believer now walks in Christ, “rooted and built up in him, and established in the faith” (Col 2:7).

Although the believer’s spirit has already been raised to newness of life (Rom 8:11), his mortal body is still in its sinful state and will not be renewed until the last day, when all past and present believers will be given a body like unto Christ’s glorified physical body. The believer’s journey in this world is marked by a tension between his resurrected spirit and sinful body.21 As the apostle says, “For the desire of the flesh are against the spirit, and the desire of the spirit22 are against the flesh, for these are opposed to each other, and keep you from doing the things you want to do” (Gal 5:17). I have, written spirit with a lower case, this is because in this text Paul is speaking, not of the Holy Spirit, but his own resurrected spirit. The believer is therefore called upon to put to death the deeds of the body (Rom 6:19). He is in this life to produce good works in presenting his body as a slave to righteousness that leads to sanctification (Rom 6:19).

As will be shown later, Wright caricatures the old perspective, implying that it embraces a view of life after death that amounts to some kind of vague, nebulous existence where eternity will be spent in an immaterial realm.23 Nothing, however, could be further from the truth. We look forward to a time when our spirits will be reunited with our glorified bodies, bodies that will dwell upon a new earth in a new heavens.

Concerning any future judgment, the believer will never be judged in regard to his justification. Justification is past-tense. It is something that is once and for all true for all those who are in Christ. Any future judgment will concern not the believer’s position, but certain prizes for those already saved. There will never be, as Wright believes, a future justification based on the believer’s post-salvation works.

6. Bainton, Here I Stand, 49–50.

7. Calvin, Institutes. 3:11.1.

8. Wright, What St Paul Really Said, 113. (subsequently referred to as WSPRS).

9. Murray, Redemption Accomplished and Applied, 15.

10. Ibid., 22.

11. Turretin, Institutes of Elenctic Theology, 448.

12. Witsius, The Economy of the Covenants 402.

13. Shedd, Dogmatic Theology, 2:539–540.

14. Calvin, Institutes, 2.17.5.

15. Luther, What Luther Says, 703.

16. Calvin, Institutes III. XI.2.

17. Buchanan, Justification, 299.

18. 1689 Baptist Confession of Faith 11:1.

19. Although Wright does not see those passages that speak of justification in terms of a righteousness secured by another and then imputed to the believer, he does, nevertheless, adopt more of a Reformation view of the believer’s union with Christ from passages like Romans 6.

20. Venema, The Gospel of Free Acceptance in Christ, 245

21. One must not confuse this with what the Gnostics believed. They considered matter to be intrinsically evil. Christianity, on the other hand, sees our present physical body as being polluted by sin, and we look forward to a time when it will be replaced by a glorified sinless physical body.

22. In the ESV Spirit begins with a capital.

23. Wright, I believe, does believe in the intermediate state, but this is surprisingly missing from his latest book, The Day the Revolution Began.”