1. We affirm that for man to enjoy God as his blessedness and reward requires a voluntary condescension on God’s part.
2. We affirm that God did make such a voluntary condescension in the covenant of works (C 7, L 20, 22, S 12, 16).
True though some (Meredith Kline for example) don’t agree that this should be a separate act from Creation itself. I’ve never heard of anyone getting in trouble with a presbytery for this sort of thing, yet.
There is nothing wrong with these affirmations per se, but what about other terms that have been used for the Covenant of Works both in the Westminster documents itself and by other orthodox Reformed theologians? What about “covenant of life” or “covenant of creation” etc? Since this document only uses one term are we going to see its statements used to narrow the openness of description that has been traditionally allowed? It would be nice for the Presbytery to give us some indication of how these statements are intended to be used. If other confessional and/or descriptions are allowed, then the affirmation is fine.
3. a.We affirm that in this covenant God promised life to Adam and all his posterity on the condition of perfect and personal obedience (C 7.2).
3. b.We deny that this condition of the covenant of works can be equated with the instrumentality of faith in relation to justification in the covenant of grace.
The affirmation above is unproblematic as is its denial, but the oddness of the denial leads me to make some comments. Adam did not need a representative to stand in his place so he could be right with God. His faith did not require the intstrumentality of the sort we find in the covenant of Grace as recorded in both the Old and New Testaments. But quite clearly both Covenants involve a promise which in fact needed to be trusted if Adam was to remain in God’s blessing. Confirming this deduction, the story of Adam’s Fall is a straightforward explanation of how Adam believed a lie from the Serpent rather than a promise from God. This means that Adam fell through unbelief.
In addition, Jesus, the new Adam is held out to us as an example of faith. Hebrews 11.1 begins a great list of the saints who demonstrated the effectiveness of faith. It climaxes with Jesus as the best of all the saints for his faith (12.2). As John Owen points out in this passage:
But he ascends now unto Him who had all in himself, and gave a Asuniversal example of faith and obedience in every kind. From our companions in believing he leads us unto “the author and finisher of our faith.” And therefore he doth not propose him unto us in the same manner as he did the best of them, as mere examples, and that in this or that particular act of duty; but he proposeth his person in the first place, as the object of our faith, from whom we might expect aid and assistance for conformity unto himself, in that wherein he is proposed as our example.
And the respect of Christ unto these promises and prophecies, with his doing things so as that they might be all fulfilled, is frequently mentioned in the evangelists. So was the joy set before him, or proposed unto him. And his faith of its accomplishment, against oppositions, and under all his sufferings, is illustriously expressed, Isaiah 50:6-9.
This blessed frame of mind in our Lord Jesus in all his sufferings, is that which the apostle proposeth for our encouragement, and unto our imitation. And it is that which contains the exercise of all grace, in faith, love, submission to the will of God, zeal for his glory, and compassion for the souls of men, in their highest degree.
No one denies the uniqueness of Christ as object of faith (and as I said, Adam would not need to place faith in another for righteousness the way we do), the fact remains that Jesus as believer is a Biblical teaching. If Jesus kept covenant by faith, why not suggest that Adam was supposed to do so as well? John Flavel, is another Reformed theologian who saw Christ’s belief as important to his work. He writes of Jesus crying out to God in abandonment, “Though God took from Christ all visible and sensible comforts, inward as well as outward; yet Christ subsisted, by faith, in the absence of them all: his desertion put him upon the acting of his faith. “My God, my God”, are words of faith, the words of one that wholly depends upon his God…” (Sermon 33. The fourth excellent Saying of Christ upon the Cross, illustrated).
The simple question here is: What is the purpose of stating the obvious that the condition of the covenant of works is not to be equated with the instrumentality of faith? Either it is intended to refute a position nobody is voicing or it is intended to be used against actual teaching and preaching in the PCA. If the latter, could we see some better description so that we know what is off limits? Otherwise, we will end up living in fear of using Owen or Flavel.
4. We affirm that the penalty of the covenant of works was eternal death for Adam and all his posterity descending from him by ordinary generation (L 22).
5. We affirm that Adam’s violation of the covenant of works brought all mankind descending from him by ordinary generation into an estate of sin and misery wherein they are incapable of any spiritual good and wholly and continually inclined to all evil (L 25).
Absolutely true. Not sure what this has to do with the controversy.
Wrt your first point, the WS themselves use the term “covenant of life.” Nowhere in the quoted statement did we say that the other confessional statements are off limits. But we do affirm that CoW is quite a legitimate way of describing that covenant.
The second paragraph point of yours about the oddness of the denial can be answered in this way: some proponents think that the CoW is really a covenant of grace, and that the covenant of grace is really a covenant of works. It is this sort of thing we are trying to head off. BOQ If Jesus kept covenant by faith, why not suggest that Adam was supposed to do so as well? EOQ This is where the difficulty is. By making faith the way of keeping covenant, you wrest works from the covenant of works. This is precisely what we are trying to avoid. Jesus did not fulfill the CoW by faith but by works.
He fulfilled the CoW by dying. Right?
“By making faith the way of keeping covenant, you wrest works from the covenant of works. This is precisely what we are trying to avoid. Jesus did not fulfill the CoW by faith but by works.”
Lane,
1. Hebrews 12.2 says the obedience unto death was by faith.
2. The WCF and Catechisms neither state nor imply the denial you make.
3. You make no attempt to demonstrate such a denial in your affirmations and denials.
4. The story of the Fall gives us a clear and straightforward story of unbelief leading to disinheritance.
5. Even if you disagree on the point, claiming that the opposition “equates” the “condition of the covenant of works … with the instrumentality of faith in relation to justification in the covenant of grace” is nothing more than a wild description necessary to make your own position look tenable. If you were honest you would have said from the beginning, “We deny that Adam before the Fall or Christ in his work kept the covenant of works, or were supposed to keep the covenant of works, by faith.”
Lane wrote: “Jesus did not fulfill the CoW by faith but by works.”
That is the craziest theological proposition I’ve read in a long while. And this from the author and defender of a presbytery position paper that seeks to establish the bounds of Reformed orthodoxy. Amazing.
I admit I’m new to some of these discussions. I might be missing some big issues in relation to all of these things.
But it seems to me that conflict arises on these matters when we perhaps confuse the “conditions” of a covenant with the way one is enabled to fulfill such conditions. Is it not proper to say that Jesus performed the works that met the conditions of the CoW? If so, couldn’t we then say that it was his faith that enabled him to do those works, and thus fulfill the conditions of the covenant?
If we can all say, “yes” to those two questions, my hunch is that we could come to some sort of agreement in relation to Adam’s place in the CoW. Adam was to fulfill the conditions of the covenant by his obedience. He would have been enabled to meet those conditions if he continued in faith. Is that so contraversial? Would affirming that be contrary to the WS?
As to the CoG, couldn’t we all affirm that now faith is both the condition and the animating principle? If so, where is the controversy.
Forgive me if I’m simply stating the obvious or missing something huge. Comments from you gentlemen would be helpful. I’m still learning.
Ken, you raise some good points here. I would remind us that Adam was not in a position to exercise faith, since he saw God face to face. Faith is by definition involved with what we cannot see. Adam saw God; therefore he did not exercise faith. Adam was to have obeyed the CoW by works. Otherwise, it isn’t a CoW. Christ fulfilled the conditions of the CoW by doing works. There is no other way of doing it. If we want to say that Christ’s human nature exercised faith while on earth, I would have to think about that, but my basic instinct says that that is an okay formulation. The divine nature of Christ, of course, did not exercise faith in any sense whatsoever.
Thanks for your interaction, Lane. It’s very helpful. I agree with you that we must carefully distinguish , as much as we can, between the 2 natures of Christ in these discussions.
Concerning your comments about faith and the invisible, were you drawing your conclusions primarily from Heb. 11? It seems to me that the discussion there is more about faith in relation to the still unfulfilled promises of God, not so much faith in relation to God’s invisibility to us on the earth.
Relating all of this to Adam: Even though Adam could SEE the Lord, did he not still have to trust Him in order to obey? Isn’t that trust at all similar to the faith we exercise?
Thanks again for your comments.
Lane,
Your literalist interpretation of faith “only” relating to things unseen (Heb. 11:1) runs into the shoals of the Lord’s own words:
John 14:9 Whoever has seen me has seen the Father
1. Seeing God face to face does not exclude faith.
2. God placed a barrier between heaven and earth and absented himself from earth for a period of time in which time Adam was tested.
3. He quite plainly fell through unbelief, so what was he doing before?
4. It is a covenant of works by demanding perfect obedience, not by excluding that one meet this demand by faith.
5. The Father, Son, and Holy Spirit have always trusted one another. Any faith Christ exercised on earth was an accurate revelation of the true God (of the intertrinitarian relations).
6. the claim that seeing God excludes faith is extraconfessional and has no business being used as a standard for orthodoxy.
7. The claim that the covenant of works must not be kept by faith is extraconfessional and has no business being used as a standard for orthodoxy.
8, The claim that the divine nature of Christ did not exercise faith in any sense whatsoever is extraconfessional and has no business being used as a standard for orthodoxy.
—————-
Ken, your suggestions all sound right to me.
?????
Those question marks are for Lane, by the way.