In the current issue of the Westminster Theological Journal, William Evans from Esrkine College, has an article offering a taxonomy of the current debates over the doctrine of union. In the repristinationist wing he puts Westminster California. He even specifies that the revisionism of Shepherd and Federal Vision provoked the repristinationist effort. The other group in Evans’ taxonomy is the Biblical Theology wing of Vos, Murray, and Gaffin. Some of these distinctions among Shepherd/FV, WTS, and WSC seem a bit arbitrary since all sides claim to stand within the tradition of biblical theology (was anyone more biblical theological than Kline?). What does separate these groups is the way each wing positions itself in relationship to the past, with Shepherd/FV (Mark Horne’s ransacking of the 17th century notwithstanding) being the most novel, the Biblical Theological group extending back mainly to Vos (with a lot of use made of a particular section of Calvin) and the repristinators endeavoring to recover the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century categories for a stable theological program and church life.
Which leads to the way in which Evans characterizes Westminster California:
The overriding motive here is clear and laudable – safeguarding the Reformation doctrine of justification by grace through faith.
Here, first of all, we find a vigorous defense of the Law/Gospel hermeneutic. If salvation is to be truly gracious, then law and gospel must be distinguished. In contrast to the Revisionists, who view the Law/Gospel distinction as genetically Lutheran rather than Reformed, these figures stress the essential continuity of Lutherans and Reformed on this matter, although the attitude toward law is more positive than one finds among some Lutherans. For example, there is consistent affirmation of the “third use†of the law (i.e., the law of God as a guide for the life of the Christian).
Second, in keeping with this, there is vigorous defense of the conceptual apparatus of later federal orthodoxy, especially the bi-covenantal framework involving a Covenant of Works and a Covenant of Grace. The covenant of works as an instantiation of the law principles is viewed as an essential guarantor of the Law/Gospel distinction. Then, in order to underscore the gracious uniqueness of the New Covenant, the Mosaic Covenant is seen in part as a “republication†of the Covenant of Works. There is also defense of a pre-temporal intratrinitarian Covenant of Redemption or pactum salutis between the Father and the Son, which is viewed as providing a foundation for the Covenant of Grace in theology proper.
What is worth noting, aside from highlighting Evans’ piece, is the omission of the worn out canard that Westminster California is simply channeling Meredith Kline. In point of fact, WSC is trying, as Evans concedes, to hold on to the insights of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. As Mike Horton mentioned recently, that sure puts those complaints about Westminster California’s radicalism in a different light.
Old Life 
I’m not convince that the WTS guys can lay claim to Vos. They seem outrages at much of his teaching. For example, consider this passage form Biblical Theology where Vos is explaining the apparent difference between Jesus’ and Paul’s teaching concerning the gift of righteousness:
“The difference lies in two things: Jesus treats the entire gift as an undifferentiated unit, whereas Paul has learned to distinguish between the objective righteousness that becomes ours through imputation and the subjective kind which becomes ours through the inworking of the Spirit. But at bottom both are one as the gift of God, and according to Paul the latter comes as the fruit of the former. The second thing in which a difference is perceptible concerns the terminology. What Paul calls justification, Jesus calls entrance into the Kingdom or becoming a Son of God.” Page 394 of the 2007 reprint by Banner of Truth.
What do you all think of that? According to Vos, whenever you’re reading the Gospels and you read about how our Lord spoke about “entering the Kingdom” or “becoming a Son of God,” you’re reading about justification.
LikeLike
I apologize for the spelling mistakes. I was trying to talk on the phone as I wrote that. I can’t do two things at once.
LikeLike
The question, it seems to me, is who better captures the 16th century theology. Certainly, both seminaries do capture the 16th century theology. But which strand? There remains very little doubt in my mind that Horton does a masterful job of capturing 16th c. Lutheran theology. Kudos! 16th century Lutheran theology is awesome. However, in terms of capturing 16th c. Reformed theology, the East Coast has it. No doubt. Let’s stop pretending its otherwise.
LikeLike
Jim, Vos and Van Till were 20th c. So was Machen and I’m not sure WTS has him. So I’m not sure what you say about WTS and the 16th c. Maybe Owen?
LikeLike
Jim:
I guess Vos is a Lutheran too:
“[Justification] became in the Pauline type of teaching the very foundation of all Christian belief and experience. And Protestantism, especially of the Lutheran kind, has certainly not been wrong in making its true interpretation, over against Romanism, the comprehensive basis of Christian truth generically conceived.†Page 54 of The Pauline Eschatology.
LikeLike
dgh, are you disputing whether WTS has Machen? Have you met the faculty there?
LikeLike
RL: Re: Vos,
Having looked at the context, I cannot tell whether Vos is saying (as you take him):
“…Paul has learned to distinguish between justification and sanctification, and for Paul the latter is the fruit of the former…”
OR
“…Paul has learned to distinguish between the objective righteousness accomplished in the atonement and made ours by imputation, and the subjective working-out of that righteousness through Spirit-wrought sanctification…”
There’s just enough there that he could mean either. In the first case, justification is objective and sanctification, subjective; in the second case, the atonement is objective and made ours by imputation (a subjective act); and is distinguished from subjective sanctification.
The point in favor of the second reading is that the atonement is really and truly objective, while justification is a semi-subjective appropriation of the atonement.
I don’t know.
LikeLike
Jeff, you really think justification is subjective? Or sanctification? Both are acts/works of God.
LikeLike
The “objective” and “subjective” are terms Vos uses; I’m attempting to understand what he means by them.
LikeLike
Right, Vos uses them with regard to righteousness, not with justification or sanctification.
LikeLike
So where does Calvin “really” stand here? He does seen closer to the WTS? And St. Paul? He certainly is the one to really find the ‘Law/Gospel’ teaching!
LikeLike
William Evans has an essay on “sanctification” up at Reformation 21.
Evans describes unfavorably “the personal biography and social location” of those who disagree with him about justification and sanctification. He suggests that those who disagree with him are pastors and not academics, and suggest that the “professional theologians and biblical scholars” are on his side.
Evans tells us that “issues of exegetical and theological coherence must be addressed”. But he does not address these issues in this essay. Indeed, Evans simply begs the question about what “union with Christ” means. He ignores any idea of “election in Christ”. He also seems to have no idea of a legal “in Christ” (justification by imputation of Christ’s righteousness) which results in effectual calling, even though this has been discussed in detail by academics like Mike Horton and Bruce McCormack.
What we need from Evans is more “exegetical and theological coherence”. First, he needs to define “spiritual union”. Is it the indwelling of Christ? It sounds neat to say that there is no order of salvation, but if “spiritual union” is always first, then the least Evans can do is define what he means by that concept.
Evans wonders if Techividjian has any “real room in his thinking for the third use of the law”. I can only wonder if Evans has any real room in his thinking for the indicative of Romans 6:7-14 that those baptized by God into Christ’s death are justified from sin and not under law?
When Evans asserts that “the power of sin is not to be collapsed into the penalty”, he fails to understand the doctrine of Romans 6. How was Christ “freed” from the power of sin if not by Christ’s one time death by the law to the law? Or was Christ Himself saved from sin and death by something called “spiritual union”?
LikeLike
Mark M., btw, Philips follow up to Evans on union is not any more helpful. Union “causes” justification and sanctification. So Lutherans can’t claim a doctrine causes benefits but unionists can? What’s up with that?
LikeLike
Dear Dr. Hart, I agree. While Philips has some good things to say about the “judgment according to works”, he seems to be working with the same “non-definition” of “union”. But as McCormack has pointed out, Calvin himself had some of the same confusion. Calvin (with the Lutherans) very much wants the priority of justification by Christ’s alien righteousness, but what he writes about “regeneration” undermines that.
LikeLike
The next time you hear that same old Calvin quotation (as long as outside us, 3:11:10), please read L Berkhof back to the quoter. (from his systematic, p452)
“It is sometimes said that the merits of Christ cannot be imputed to us as long as we are not in Christ, since it is only on the basis of our oneness with Him that such an imputation could be reasonable. But this view fails to distinguish between our legal unity with Christ and our spiritual oneness with Him, and is a falsification of the fundamental element in the doctrine of redemption, namely, of the doctrine of justification. “
“Justification is always a declaration of God, not on the basis of an existing (or future) condition, but on that of a gracious imputation–a declaration which is not in harmony with the existing condition of the sinner. The judicial ground for all the grace which we receive lies in the fact that the righteousness of Christ is freely imputed to us.”
LikeLike
Dr. Hart, I was wondering if you have read Orthodoxies in Massachusetts: Rereading American Puritanism by Janice Knight and if the two parties described in that book are in analogy to the two groups in the recent justification/ “union” debate.
Knight: “This book attempts to recover varieties of religious experience within Puritanism, then, by giving voice to an alternative community within what is usually read as the univocal orthodoxy of New England. My purpose is to retrace the social, intellectual, theological, and aesthetic signatures distinguishing two communities within the larger Puritan household—-groups I identify as the “Intellectual Fathers” and the “Spiritual Brethren.”
The first group, familiar to readers of The New England Mind, is composed of Perry Miller’s “orthodoxy” : Thomas Hooker, Thomas Shepard, Peter Bulkeley, John Winthrop, and most of the ministers of the Massachusetts Bay Colony; in England, William Perkins and William Ames were their authorities. These preachers identified power as God’s essential attribute and described his covenant with human beings as a conditional promise. They preached the necessity of human cooperation in preparing the heart for that promised redemption, and they insisted on the usefulness of Christian works as evidence of salvation.. ..Miller, among others, has lamented that these religionists developed structures of preparationism and an interlocking system of contractual covenants that diminished the mystical strain of piety he associated with Augustinianism.
The second body closely embodies that Augustinian strain. Originally centered at the Cambridge colleges and wielding great power in the Caroline court, this group was led by Richard Sibbes and John Preston in England; in America by John Cotton, John Davenport, and Henry Vane. Neither a sectarian variation of what we now call “orthodoxy” in New England nor a residual mode of an older piety, this party presented a vibrant alternative within the mainstream of Puritan religious culture. In a series of contests over political and social dominance in the first American decades, this group lost their claim to status as an “official” or “orthodox” religion in New England. Thereafter, whiggish histories (including Cotton Mather’s own) tell the winner’s version, demoting central figures of this group to the cultural sidelines by portraying their religious ideology as idiosyncratic and their marginalization as inevitable.”
LikeLike
Mark M., I haven’t looked at Knight’s book in a long time. Does she address union directly, or just the steps of preparation?
LikeLike
p 80–“when they did speak of union with Christ, preparationists deployed the trope of marriage so fully affectively elaborated by the Sibbesians”.
Knight does address, with the conclusion that the “revivalists” talk more about “union” than do the “assurance by works” traditionalists. Of course we still have the usual problem of defining “union”. Though it’s clear that the Sibbesians are confident of adoption as a past event (p87), it’s not so clear what either side means when it talks about “union”.
One more example of the ambiguity: Knight writes, “The Amesians often convert the affective union of Canticles into the contractual marriage bond of Protestant practice, a contract stipulating duties and rewards.” p 105
Romans 4:4—“To the one who works, his wages are not counted as a gift but as his due”. God the Father has elected those God will justify in Christ and has blessed them in Christ with every spiritual blessing.
Wives need their husband to work for them. Husbands need their wives to work for them. Love works. But works are not needed to prove that we are already married or that we continue to be married.
It might sound good for Dan Fuller to teach that we grow by the same “faith alone” as we get justified by. But when the faith by which we grow is never alone, this can only mean that the faith by which we are justified is never alone.
Married is married. What we do doesn’t get us more married. And what we do doesn’t prove that we are married. When the elect become justified, they are married to Christ. Christians share in what Christ has, not because of what they do but because they are now married/justified.
Sanctification by synergism doesn’t deny that you are married despite of who you are and what you have done, but now that you are married, it expects more of you because you could now do more if you wanted to. The subtext is even more threatening and ominous: maybe you are married, and maybe you are not, and we shall wait and see what you do…
LikeLike
Jonathan Gibson, “The Glorious, Indivisible, Trinitarian Work of Christ”, From Heaven He Came, p 355—Interestingly, this verse has been neglected in Constantine Campbell’s otherwise comprehensive treatment of union with Christ (PAUL AND UNION WITH CHRIST, Zondervan, 2013)
II Corinthians 5:14 For the love of Christ controls us, because we have concluded this: that one has died for all, therefore all have died; 15 and he died for all, that those who live might no longer live for themselves but for him who for their sake died and was raised.
p 352—”Some conclude that the efficacy of Christ’s work occurs only at the point of faith, and not before. This ignores the fact that union with Christ precedes any reception of Christ’s work by faith. It is union with Christ that leads to the efficacy of Christ’s work to those who belong to Him.”
LikeLike