Category: Forensics

Seriously?

Published on by D. G. Hart114 Comments

Of course, Old Life is a place where you don’t mess with Machen. So it will come as no surprise that Peter Leithart’s recent objections to Machen’s dying words will receive some vinegary blow back.

It is said that as J. Gresham Machen died, he spoke of the comfort he took in the imputation of Christ’s active obedience, which ensured his standing before God.

I don’t know if that was actually Machen’s dying thought. But leave that to the side. I can see the point, but I can’t help but find this disturbing on two grounds. First, nowhere in the Bible is comfort linked with imputation. The closest analogy is Psalm 32:2, which pronounces a blessing on the one to whom God does not reckon sin. Otherwise, imputation in the full theological sense never plays that role.

Second, when the Bible does talk about comfort, the comfort comes from persons. Sometimes from other humans (e.g., Genesis 24:67), often from God. His faithfulness in the past, His word, His promises for the future, but especially God Himself, the God of all comfort, comforts.

“I am comforted by the imputation of Christ’s active obedience” is doubtless often a circumlocution for “I am comforted by my faithful Lord Jesus who is with me by His Spirit.” But the way we say things matters, and de-personalizing and doctrinalizing comfort can, contrary to the best intentions, distance the suffering from the God who comforts.

Aside from a certain amount of reverence for Machen, can Leithart really be that tone deaf? This has nothing to do with kicking a man when he’s on his death bed. It does have to do with trying to obfuscate a relatively simple Reformed belief (which is what those of us who observed Federal Vision always thought their MO was — to raise enough questions, debate enough definitions, cite enough biblical texts to wear out their opponents).

If you take seriously the guilt of sin and its ongoing influence in the life of the believer, you would be inclined to take great comfort in the active obedience of Christ. As Machen explained (can you believe it, he’s not talking about w-w?):

That covenant of works was a probation. If Adam kept the law of God for a certain period, he was to have eternal life. If he disobeyed he was to have death. Well, he disobeyed and the penalty of death was inflicted on him and his posterity. Then Christ by His death on the cross paid that penalty for those whom God had chosen.

Well and good. But if that were all that Christ did for us, do you not see that we should be back in just the situation in which Adam was before he sinned? The penalty of his sinning would have been removed from us because it had all been paid by Christ. But for the future the attainment of eternal life would have been dependent upon our perfect obedience to the law of God. We should simply have been back in the probation again.

Here we begin to understand why Jesus’ passive obedience is not enough – if divorced from his active obedience. The passive sufferings of Christ discharged the enormous debt we owe, due to our sins and the sin of Adam. In effect, Jesus’ passive obedience alone would bring our account from hopelessly overdrawn back to a zero balance – our debt would be retired. But having our debt retired and our sins forgiven does not get us into heaven; it simply returns us to the starting point. More must be done if we are to gain heaven. Righteousness must be completely fulfilled, either by us or by a representative acting on our behalf.

Moreover, we should have been back in that probation in a very much less hopeful way than that in which Adam was originally placed in it. Everything was in Adam’s favour when he was placed in the probation. He had been created in knowledge, righteousness and holiness. He had been created positively good. Yet despite all that, he fell. How much more likely would we be to fall – nay, how certain to fall – if all that Christ had done for us were merely to remove from us the guilt of past sin, leaving it then to our own efforts to win the reward which God has pronounced upon perfect obedience.

But if you think of faith as faithfulness, baptism as regenerational, and salvation as familial, then the forensic character of Christ’s work might seem like an abstraction.

At the same time, why Leithart thinks Machen de-personalized Christ’s work is beyond me. How much more personal could doctrines be that described what Christ actually endured and did in his bodily existence and death on the cross? “My faithful Lord Jesus who is with me by His Spirit” sure seems to abstract from the Christian what Christ actually did. Then again, figuring out Peter Leithart even if intellectually invigorating has never been easy.

Audacity Lives

Published on by D. G. Hart67 Comments

This just in from the Vatican:

Pope Francis will grant a plenary indulgence – a remission of all temporal punishment due to sin – to World Youth Day Catholic participants, the Vatican announced July 9.

The head of the Church’s Apostolic Penitentiary, Cardinal Manuel Monteiro de Castro, and its secretary, Bishop Krzysztof Nykiel, released a decree on July 9 that says the Pope will grant it during the July 22-29 event in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.

“The young people and the faithful who are adequately prepared will obtain the Plenary Indulgence, once a day and under the usual conditions (sacramental Confession, Eucharistic communion and prayer in accordance with the intentions of the Holy Father), applicable also to the souls of deceased faithful,” states the decree published July 9.

The document adds that people who cannot attend World Youth Day can receive it “under the usual spiritual, sacramental and prayer conditions, in a spirit of filial submission to the Roman Pontiff.”

But this means they must participate “in the sacred functions on the days indicated, following the same rites and spiritual exercises as they occur via television or radio or, with due devotion, via the new means of social communication.”

While Christian Smith tells us to “get over” indulgences, they are still pretty hard to fathom from a biblical paradigm. I still come back to a point that Luther made in a 1516 sermon, as summarized by Roland Bainton:

To assert that the pope can deliver souls from purgatory is audacious. If he can do so, then he is cruel not to release them all. But if he possess this ability, he is in a postition to do more for the dead than for the living. . . . Indulgences can remit only those private satisfactions imposed by the Church, and may easily militate against interior penance, which consists in true contrition, true confession, and true satisfaction in spirit. (Here I Stand, 71)

Giving A Whole New Meaning to Church Universal

Published on by D. G. Hart187 Comments

While Jason Stellman is trying to exegete his way back to Trent, I wonder in what part of the Bible or early church fathers you would read a statement like this from Pope Francis (yesterday):

“The Lord created us in His image and likeness, and we are the image of the Lord, and He does good and all of us have this commandment at heart: do good and do not do evil. All of us. ‘But, Father, this is not Catholic! He cannot do good.’ Yes, he can. He must. Not can: must! Because he has this commandment within him. Instead, this ‘closing off’ that imagines that those outside, everyone, cannot do good is a wall that leads to war and also to what some people throughout history have conceived of: killing in the name of God. That we can kill in the name of God. And that, simply, is blasphemy. To say that you can kill in the name of God is blasphemy.”

“Instead,” the Pope continued, “the Lord has created us in His image and likeness, and has given us this commandment in the depths of our heart: do good and do not do evil”:

“The Lord has redeemed all of us, all of us, with the Blood of Christ: all of us, not just Catholics. Everyone! ‘Father, the atheists?’ Even the atheists. Everyone! And this Blood makes us children of God of the first class! We are created children in the likeness of God and the Blood of Christ has redeemed us all! And we all have a duty to do good. And this commandment for everyone to do good, I think, is a beautiful path towards peace. If we, each doing our own part, if we do good to others, if we meet there, doing good, and we go slowly, gently, little by little, we will make that culture of encounter: we need that so much. We must meet one another doing good. ‘But I don’t believe, Father, I am an atheist!’ But do good: we will meet one another there.”

Now I guess conservative Protestants are not supposed to notice affirmations like this. So far Jason and the Callers have not been as fired up about Francis as they were in the initial after glow of the Conclave. Then again, their blogs do go to sleep sometimes.

Still, how exactly do you pull tradition, the church that Christ founded, and conservative Christianity out of this? Have the Protestant converts to Rome really accepted the notion that Roman Catholicism is above liberalism, as if modernism doesn’t happen there, as if Pascendi Dominici Gregis was foisted on the Vatican by William Jennings Bryan and William Bell Riley?

Between Francis’ apparent sympathies to liberation theology and his universalism, the task of selling Rome as the conservative answer to Protestant disarray is going to be almost as hard as making a movie about Edgardo Mortara.

What a Difference Three Decades Make

Published on by D. G. Hart56 Comments

In 1981 the PCA turned down the OPC’s decision to join the PCA. The context was something called J&R, joining and receiving. The PCA had invited the RPCES (denominational patron of Covenant College and Covenant Seminary) and the OPC to join and be received by the PCA into one denomination. The RPCES cleared the hurdle. The OPC did not mainly because the PCA had reservations about the teaching of Norman Shepherd and his influence within the OPC.

This week the word came that the PCA has upheld a lower court ruling that exonerates Peter Leithart’s teaching. It is an odd ruling because the PCA had approved a study report that argued the Federal Vision theology, of which Leithart is a proponent, was outside the bounds of the communion’s confessional standards.

It is also odd because the affinities between Shepherd’s theology and the Federal Vision are numerous if not always obvious.

This takes the question of how to fix the PCA to an entirely different dimension.

Forensic Friday: Talking about Holiness with a Protestant Accent

Published on by D. G. Hart379 Comments

The following excerpt from Martin Luther’s 1525 sermon (W.A. 17.1.155f) should be a reminder to would-be perfectionists and neo-nomians about the dangers of misconstruing personal righteousness:

This is the main article which we have to learn. It gives us authority, even if we feel the lust of our flesh or even fall into sin, to say: “Howbeit, it is my will to be rid of the Law, neither am I still under the Law or sin, but I am devout and righteous.” If I cannot say this, I must despair and perish. The Law says: “thou art a sinner.” If I say, “Yes,” I am lost; if I say “No,” I must have a firm ground to stand on, to refute the Law, and uphold my “No.” But how can I say it, when it is true and is confirmed by Holy Scripture that I was born in sin? Where then shall I find the “No”? Of a truth, I shall not find it in my own bosom, but in Christ. From Him I must receive it and fling it down before the Law and say: “Behold, He can say ‘No’ against all Law, and has the right to do, for He is pure and free from sin, and He gives me the ‘No,’ so that though if I look on myself I should have to say ‘Yes’ because I see that I am a sinner and could not stand before the Law, and feel that there is nothing pure in me, and see God’s wrath, yet I can say that Christ’s righteousness is my righteousness, and henceforth I am free from sin.” This is the goal, that we should be able to say, continually, we are pure and godly, for evermore, as Christ Himself can say, and this is wrought through faith.

Luther explains well why some of us find faith in Christ to be much more comforting than the terror that comes from pursuing righteousness as sin-bedeviled saint. (I hope you’re reading Doug and Richard.)

The Dog House or Court Room Paradigm

Published on by D. G. Hart21 Comments

Many thanks to Bryan Cross for introducing me to the wonders of paradigms. They continue to explain differences between Rome and Protestants. Jason Stellman reminds me of paradigmatic analysis’ benefits in a recent post on the place of good works in the Christian’s life. He invokes Chesterton to this end:

It is quite popular among many Christians to insist that any works done by believers, even if they are Spirit-wrought, cannot contribute to our receiving our eternal inheritance, for if they did, we would be robbing God of the glory due him for our redemption from sin and death. Chesterton rightly rejected this inverse porportionality between God’s work and ours, as though God’s glory were a zero-sum game according to which anything we contribute necessarily diminishes his divine contribution. Rather, he insisted, the key to asceticism (which comes from the word denoting the practice of an athlete for his sport) is the paradox that the man who knows he can never repay what he owes will be forever trying, and “always throwing things away into a bottomless pit of unfathomable thanks.”

In a word, the key to asceticism is love.

Chesterton illustrates his point by considering the romantic love between a man and a woman. If an alien culture were to study us, they might conclude that women are the most harsh and implacable of creatures since they demand tribute in the form of flowers, or exceedingly greedy for demanding a sacrifice of pure gold in the form of a ring. What such an assessment obviously fails to see is that, for the man, the love of the woman cannot be earned or deserved, and this, ironically, is why he will be forever attempting to do so.

When it comes to our relationship with God, it is equally wrong (indeed infinitely more so) to think that we by our acts of love and sacrifice can somehow buy his favors or earn his eternal smile. But this does not preclude our good works. In fact, our own asceticism and love are conditions, but only in a nuanced sense. They are not conditions in a quid pro quo, I’ll-scratch-your-back-since-you-scratched-mine kind of way, but rather they are the wondrous and mysterious conditions attached to a wondrous and mysterious gospel.

But again, what is missing from Roman Catholic or would-be Roman Catholic tributes to charity and agape is that nagging sense of sin that sent Luther for another look at the Bible. What if the relationship between the a person and God is not that between a man wooing a woman, nor even a husband in his wife’s dog house for forgetting to bring home the milk that the kids need for breakfast, but a husband who has had an adulterous affair and now facing a divorce attorney?

That would seem to be the human predicament — one not of finding God’s favor but of facing his wrath and curse for violating his law. Even Rome acknowledges this when it teaches that some people can’t go to heaven without stopping first in purgatory. In fact, it is odd that Rome would seem to teach that it is possible to please God (with the right amount of grace), that all sorts of mechanisms are available to assist believers in this endeavor, not to mention the treasury of merits, and then all of this is not enough to overcome a blight which requires further purging somewhere between heaven and hell.

So if Chesterton were to think about the relationship between sinners and God as one between spouses estranged by unfaithfulness — a biblical image if Hosea is to be believed — I wonder if he might be more interested in a quid pro quo arrangement. How about one in which a savior takes away sin in such a way that the betrayed wife now regards her unfaithful husband as she did on wedding day?

The Sin Paradigm

Published on by D. G. Hart88 Comments

Jason Stellman and the crew continue to debate the merits of an agape or list paradigm, as Bryan Cross described them way back when. What I find hard to fathom is the plausibility of the so-called agape paradigm if human sinfulness really is as profound as Christianity and Judaism have taught. If human beings really are dead in trespasses and sins, as Paul describes them in Ephesians 2, the agape paradigm doesn’t make a lot of sense. We might cooperate with grace all we want, we might do works that show a genuine faith, but what if we still have a sinful nature? This was part of the doubt that haunted Luther.

Rome’s own teaching on the fall would suggest the implausibility of the agape paradigm. The Baltimore Catechism, for instance, is none too cheery about the prospects of human goodness:

45. Q. What evil befell us on account of the disobedience of our first parents?
A. On account of the disobedience of our first parents, we all share in their sin and punishment, as we should have shared in their happiness if they had remained faithful.

46. Q. What other effects followed from the sin of our first parents?
A. Our nature was corrupted by the sin of our first parents, which darkened our understanding, weakened our will, and left in us a strong inclination to evil.

This is not as strong as Heidelberg:

Question 8. Are we then so corrupt that we are wholly incapable of doing any good, and inclined to all wickedness?
Answer: Indeed we are; except we are regenerated by the Spirit of God.

But it is not that far off. Both talk about corruption of human nature and an inclination to evil.

The Baltimore Catechism also teaches the need for a perfect savior who can satisfy God’s wrath for sin:

84. Q. What lessons do we learn from the sufferings and death of Christ?
A. From the sufferings and death of Christ we learn the great evil of sin, the hatred God bears to it, and the necessity of satisfying for it.

Again, this resembles the logic of Heidelberg:

Question 12. Since then, by the righteous judgment of God, we deserve temporal and eternal punishment, is there no way by which we may escape that punishment, and be again received into favour?
Answer: God will have his justice satisfied: and therefore we must make this full satisfaction, either by ourselves, or by another.

Where Rome and Protestants differ, then, is whether Christ fully satisfies for all of a sinner’s sin. According to the Baltimore Catechism:

Q. 801. Why should we have to satisfy for our sins if Christ has fully satisfied for them?
A. Christ has fully satisfied for our sins and after our baptism we were free from all guilt and had no satisfaction to make. But when we willfully sinned after baptism, it is but just that we should be obliged to make some satisfaction.

In contrast, Heidelberg teaches:

Question 60. How are thou righteous before God?
Answer: Only by a true faith in Jesus Christ; so that, though my conscience accuse me, that I have grossly transgressed all the commandments of God, and kept none of them, and am still inclined to all evil; notwithstanding, God, without any merit of mine, but only of mere grace, grants and imputes to me, the perfect satisfaction, righteousness and holiness of Christ; even so, as if I never had had, nor committed any sin: yea, as if I had fully accomplished all that obedience which Christ has accomplished for me; inasmuch as I embrace such benefit with a believing heart.

This may seem fairly elementary to anyone who knows the differences between Roman Catholics and Protestants. But the extent and depth of sin seems to be a category not sufficiently considered in the ongoing debates about how we become right with God, whether by faith alone or by a faith that has within it charity of love which will produce good works and will unite us with God. Those wonder-working aspects of the agape paradigm do not address the real problem of sinfulness and God’s just demand for a perfect righteousness. We may love till we’re blue in the face, but given our sinfulness and the ongoing sin in believers’ lives, how do we know if we have really loved enough?

Maybe the agape paradigm is right. If it is, we’re all toast.

How to Account for the Casey Fixation

Published on by D. G. Hart22 Comments

I have to admit that the details of the Casey Anthony case are still a mystery to me. I do see headlines occasionally at my Google homepage which mention proceedings in the trial. But when I log into Comcast to check email and see the electronic equivalent of the celebrity magazines at the supermarket checkout, I generally receive the news about Kim Kardashian’s latest revealing outfit or the best smelling actor according to Tom Hanks. All of which is to say that I’ve had a general awareness of the Anthony trial. But I dismissed it as the television news networks’ attempt to generate viewers during a slow news period.

That was the case until this morning when my wife and I had breakfast at the Jackson County Airport. The setting itself was eye-opening since this airport handles no commercial flights. People who own planes use the airport as one of many such places to land or take off, like boat and yacht owners use any harbor throughout the United States. I had never thought much before about private aircraft and personal flights. I must say it was fascinating to see three different planes land, their pilots park next to the terminal, and then meet the other pilots and passengers for a prearranged breakfast for eight. I didn’t know such a world existed.

And I also learned over breakfast that Fox News is devoting untold people-power to the Anthony trial. The volume was low, but the image on the large flat screen television in the restaurant was bright. And during the time it took to consume an omelet, I counted at least seven different talking heads discussing the concluding days of the Anthony trial. I even saw Greta VanSusteren walking outside the prison facility where Casey is an inmate and under constant surveillance for fear of a suicide attempt.

I understand, even without knowing the details, that this is a trial that titillates the prurient. A mother accused of killing her child would be enough for publicity. Throw in the irregularities of the Anthony family and you have a show that combines Jerry Springer and Judge Judy. It would be easy to ridicule the media and the public that consumes such yellow electronic journalism.

But I also have a hunch that Americans are fascinated by this trial because they also love to watch court room dramas and police shows, and because they have a inherent sense of justice. I know that the television executives who allocate resources and assign reporters are likely more interested in ratings, advertising revenue, and job security than they are in the law, merit, and fairness. But most Americans, I suspect, don’t care about the ephemera of television journalism but do care about wrong doers receiving their just desserts, and justice officials meeting out some semblance of due process.

If I didn’t know better, I’d suspect that what makes the Casey Anthony trial tick as a media extravaganza is natural law — that innate light of nature that gives all people a sense of right and wrong, justice and criminality, good and evil. It is not enough to prevent Comcast from teasing its customers with Kim’s latest dress. But it does account for what seems to be an insatiable interest by most Americans (at least) in law, order, and justice — from Nancy Grace to CSI.