On the theme of Keith’s last post, I think it’s worth considering at least one precedent to another of Wright’s controversial (to some American Reformed writers) belief about final justification. Here are some comments by John Diodati on the epistle of James:

We must of necessity distinguish the meaning of this word justifie, which is used by St. Paul, for absolving a man as he is in his natural state, bound to the law, and subject to damnation for his sin, which God doth by a rigid act of justice, that requireth full satisfaction, which seeing he could not get of man Rom. 8.2, he hath received at Christ’s hand (who was the Surety) imputed to man by God’s grace, and apprehended by a lively faith. Whereas St. James takes the same word for the approving of man, in a benigne and fatherly judgment, as he is considered in the quality of God’s child, and living in the covenant of grace, as having the two essentiall parts of that covenant joyned together, faith to receive God’s grace and Christ’s benefit, and works to yield him the duties of service and acknowledgement; and this justification is no longer opposite to the condemnation of a sinner in generall, but to the particular one of an hypocrite, who rending asunder these two inseparable parts, sheweth that he hat neither the one nor the other: see Luke 17.19.

And here is Wright in the same paper (pdf) Keith quoted:

I repeat what I have always said: that the final justification, the final verdict, as opposed to the present justification, which is pronounced over faith alone, will be pronounced over the totality of the life lived. It will be, in other words, in accordance with “works,” with the life seen as a whole—not that any such life will be perfect (Phil 3:13–14) but that it will be going in the right direction, “seeking for glory and honor and immortality” (Rom 2:7). When I have spoken of “basis” in this connection, I have not at all meant by that to suggest that this is an independent basis from the finished work of Christ and the powerful work of the Spirit, but that within that solid and utterly-of-grace structure the particular evidence offered on the last day will be the tenor and direction of the life that has been lived.

Can someone please tell me the difference between RL Dabney and NT Wright on imputation here?

Dabney:

It may be said, without affecting excessive subtlety of definition, that by imputation of Christ’s righteousness, we only mean that Christ’s righteousness is so accounted to the sinner, as that he receives thereupon the legal consequences to which it entitles. . . . All are agreed that, when the Bible says, ‘the iniquity of us all was laid on Christ,’ or that ‘He bare our sins,’ or ‘was made sin for us,’ it is only our guilt and not our moral attribute of sinfulness which was imputed. So it seems to me far more reasonable and scriptural to suppose that, in the imputation of Christ’s righteousness, it is not  the attribute of righteousness in Christ which is imputed, but that which is the exact counterpart of guilt – the title to acquittal (Lectures in Systematic Theology, Lecture LIV).

NT Wright:

I would be happy to think of Paul thinking something which, in my view, he never explicitly says anywhere: that the verdict “in the right,” “righteous,” which God issues over Jesus at his resurrection, becomes the verdict God issues over us when we believe – in other words, that we are incorporated into the “rightous-verdict,” perhaps even the “righteous-ness” of Jesus himself.” “Justification: Yesterday, Today, and Forever.” JETS (March 2011): 63.

Ummm … so is Dabney denying the gospel here? Hello? *Crickets*

It is easy for evangelicals to lose sight of political meanings inherent in many Christian doctrines, I think. One such example is the doctrine of penal substitutionary atonement. Of course, evangelicals who have studied theology will want to affirm this teaching, but not all of them have reflected exactly on what it means for something to be penal at all. This is a lesson I learned from studying the work of Oliver O’Donovan on political theology and philosophy. Here’s a helpful quote from his work The Ways of Judgment:

We propose as our thesis, then, that punishment is best understood as a judgment enacted on the person, property, or liberty of the condemned party. The following comments help to explain this.

(a) Punishment is judgment, in saying which we presuppose all that has been said about judgment up to this point: it is an act of moral discrimination, that pronounces upon a preceding act or existing state of affairs to establish a new public context. A rational act of condemnation, it is neither irrational, like impulsive revenge, nor inactive, like reflective disapproval, but an “expressive act” or “communication.” It is not a private act, but an authorized act undertaken in the defense of the order of society, an act of social definition. When we speak of God’s own “punishing,” we are speaking of his judgment within the quasi-political context of his covenant faithfulness. Divine punishment is executed, as in Jeremiah’s prayer, bemishpat ”with judgment” (Jer. 10:24), and so is contrasted with God’s absolute wrath, which will “bring me to nothing.” It is God’s disclosure of himself as our good, revealing the truth of our wrong. For this reason Christians have always found it necessary to speak of divine punishment in connection with the Atonement, for the Atonement is the supreme demonstration of God’s covenant-faithfulness.

(b) Punishment is judgment enacted, not an additional act subsequent to judgment. The misconception of punishment as an “extra,” a level of retaliation that goes beyond the enactment of justice, is encapsulated in the negative sense of the adjectives “punitive” and “vindictive.” It may possibly derive from the medieval theory of penitential satisfaction, which distinguished between satisfaction for reatus and satisfaction for culpa as two successive levels of punishment; or it may merely be a recurrence of the same intellectual mistake, which is to treat aspects of an action as though they were incremental: as though the unlawfulness of the offense and the lawlessness of the offender were two different things that had to be set right in two successive ways. The judge punishes when he sentences or awards damages. The punishment is not something else that must be done as a supplement to the judgment; what follows the giving of the sentence is merely the carrying out of the sentence. (107-8)

The fact that all punishments are communications can explain why it is right to say God would “wink at sin” if he did not punish it in some way, for this would also be an act that communicated something, namely, that God did not think sin was serious enough to cause serious pain in response as a communication of how evil the sin was. Further, this explanation of punishment as communicative act explains how divine punishment can simultaneously be divine self-revelation: by communicating how wrong wrong really is, it inversely shows how far from the true good of all creation, God, sin really is.

We have decided to eliminate comment nesting at City of God. Older comment conversations, therefore, might be slightly more confusing to navigate. The comments are now posted in chronological order. Hopefully this will help to eliminate future problems with disordered and broken up discussions. As a suggestion, using the twitter convention of “@” can help to clarify who you are responding to when you reply to previous comments.

Jeremy F. Hultin’s The Ethics of Obscene Speech in Early Christianity and Its Environment is definitely worthy of the adjective “interesting”, if nothing else. Rather than write a review proper, I want to point out a few noteworthy facts he brings to light, and engage a little bit with his interpretation of Ephesians and Colossians.

Some notes:

1. He notes that the Old Testament itself is basically silent on the ethics of obscene speech. This is not to say that it approved of it, but just that it makes no explicit comment about it. (113-4; 121)

2. At the same time, the OT on the whole is euphemistic. (114) If nothing else, this reflects that the Bible writers would, on the whole, think that obscene language was, well, obscene, and should be avoided.

3. But in addition, Hultin notes that the Talmud in several cases said that certain biblical words should be substituted with more polite terms. (115) In a parallel way, rabbinic literature in some cases suggested replacing statements that were inauspicious: so curses of Israel would be read instead as curses of the enemies of Israel. (116)

4. In keeping with this general sentiment, rabbinic literature often used euphemistic terms. (117)

5. There are, however, exceptions made. Some rabbis said that foul language could be employed towards idols (b. Megillah 25b; 117-118). Some rabbis also suggested that nasty expressions could be used against idolaters and persons of ill fame. (118) (more…)

Steven and Peter over at The Calvinist International have begun a highly worthwhile project of evangelical resourcement, which I think any of our evangelical readers (at least) should be highly interested in. In their introduction to the project, they say:

The two 20th century men TCI regards as specially exemplary, CS Lewis and Francis Schaeffer, both pointed their readers ad fontes, toward the great sources; and not “back” to these, but rather, “up into” them; they both conceived engagement with the works of great Christian teachers as an elevation, not a retrogression. Schaeffer especially tried to correct certain tendencies prevalent among modern evangelicals- individualism, parochialism, ignorance of history- and called his readers to realize their status as heirs of a great tradition.

Unfortunately, many of those who heard that call often didn’t bother to correct that ignorance of history, which Schaeffer himself had diagnosed, before they did so; then, confusing the evangelical faith as such with the meager offerings of much modern evangelicalism, they often left the evangelical faith altogether, thinking that the only fontes deep enough to drink from were ancient and medieval ones, and consequently, any supposedly direct continuations of those- which “continuations” in fact, though, were very often simply unreformed appropriations of earlier patrimony.

But Schaeffer and Lewis both knew better. The Reformation tradition produced writers, deeply rooted in the truths of the ancient and medieval Christendom, who excelled in and advanced all branches of learning, both sacred and mundane; and helped build the world we live in today- for better, but sometimes for the worse too. But, even with respect to the flaws of the Reformation traditions, one has to understand them first in order to judge them and their effect on us now. Part of what we wish to do here is to offer a comprehensive view of the Reformation traditions especially, so that readers who do take the urgings of Lewis and Schaeffer seriously can do so in an informed manner.

Newsweek ran a provocative article by Andrew Sullivan today, “Christianity in Crisis”. Because Sullivan addresses so many important issues in one place, it provides a helpful occasion to lay out what I see to be the problems with his overall vision of the Christian faith and its relation to politics, as well as my own preferred alternative.

Sullivan’s Argument:

Sullivan believes, like many do, that we have entered a time of religious crisis in our society. Roman Catholicism has (he says) discredited itself in its many child abuse scandals, and evangelicals have turned into a fearful bunch, trying to hide from the real world in ghettoes of imaginary construction and behind real threats of violence to the other. Further, both have become concerned with things that Jesus either did not mention (homosexuality and abortion), and have ignored things he was concerned with (the problem of divorce, celibacy in light of what he believed to be the immediate end of the world). Sullivan believes there is a rise in atheism and “spirituality”, and that this expresses an awareness in our society that our current situation characterized by emptiness, distraction, and warring is not good enough, and that we want some kind of fundamental spiritual change.   (more…)

Chris Huebner, in a thought provoking article, “Radical Ecumenism, or Receiving One Another in Kaula Lampur,” in The Ecumenical Review, vol 57 no. 4 (2005), writes about the pitfalls that ecumenism can fall into, and frankly, I can’t help but concur with him based on my own experience in dialogue with people across traditions.

And yet while ecumenical dialogue rightly serves to complicate our theological discourse, it walks a fine line in doing so. Even as it encourages an appreciation of the difficulty of Christian speech, there is a sense in which it risks giving rise to certain monothematic and tidy tendencies of its own. Indeed, it might be suggested that the promise of ecumenism is in a strange way bound up with precisely the sorts of problems Hauerwas, Williams, and Eagleton identify. When taken as a whole, ecumenical conversations often contain glimpses of the dialogical virtues noted above. But from a case-by-case perspective, looking at specific statements and contributions to the conversation, one often gets a sense of the corresponding vices. While the meetings in Kuala Lumpur contained many instances of genuine theological dialogue, I also find myself wondering about the temptation to deploy certain favourite words and functional, self-legitimating descriptions in representing our various traditions. Driven by a desire to make a meaningful contribution on behalf of one s tradition, to ensure that its distinctive voice makes it to the table, and perhaps equally a sense of obligation that this is the role we are expected to fill, there appears to be an all too seductive temptation to make caricatures of ourselves. From the other end, in an attempt to be as inclusive as possible, to say something that everyone can identify with, statements often read like a checklist of all the favoured categories Hauerwas points to. The unfortunate result in both cases is that we end up saying very little, if anything at all, that a reasonably informed dialogue partner might not already be able to anticipate. Needless to say, this does not make for much of a conversation. On the one hand, there is a deadening sense of being stuck in a repetitive cycle of introductory niceties that make it difficult to move on to the more interesting and important matters of nuanced detail. On the other hand, behind the surface posture of hospitality, one can often hear the shrill ring of single-issue, special-interest group political manoeuvring that runs counter to any meaningful conception of ecumenical unity. [375]

[This post's title comes from here.]

Among many other important points, Stephen J. Grabill, in his well-needed book, Rediscovering the Natural Law in Reformed Theological Ethics, makes clear Calvin’s support of the existence and knowability of natural law. One such text is from the Reformer’s commentary on that great Psalm ode to the law, Psalm 119:

[Psalm 119:]52.I called to mind thy judgments of old, O Jehovah! In this psalm, the judgments of God are generally taken for his statutes and decrees, that is, his righteousness. … In this place, in consequence of the qualifying phrase, of old, it is more probable that they refer to the examples by which God has made himself known as the righteous Judge of the world. Why does he say that the law of God has been from everlasting? This may to some extent be accounted for from the righteousness here mentioned not being of recent growth, but truly everlasting, because the written law is just an attestation of the law of nature, through means of which God recalls to our memory that which he has previously engraved on our hearts.  [Grabill, 73]

The last phrase, of course, alludes to Romans 2:15 as it has been commonly interpreted, as a reference to the knowledge of right and wrong that God has provided to all people.

This element of Calvin’s teaching is very relevant for the current church, at least in my opinion. It shows that one of the biggest sources of the Reformed tradition was in continuity with the natural law tradition, and that Karl Barth and the Barthians have radically departed from the Reformed tradition on this matter. It also, hopefully, will make it easier for many who have great love for the Reformer to begin to appreciate the expansive and foundational natural law tradition, with its careful analysis of the human person and all the variegated moral situations he can find himself in. Perhaps, through that, the Reformed church might once again be able to reclaim their part in that ongoing project, a project which has untold riches of wisdom on many important contemporary issues, if only we would look.

My friends Steven Wedgeworth and Peter Escalante have created a new web presence which I want to direct our readers to. I can’t really summarize the purpose of the site as well as Escalante himself has done here (do read it), except to say that it’s about fostering a kind of Calvinism that is learned and very much “in the real world”, intentionally avoiding escapist mentalities. In other words, it’s trying to bring back the old school.

Enjoy!

(As a post-script, I want to note that I discussed the concept that the title of their site expresses, some time ago.)