This was originally published on 7 August 2006, the month that disappeared upon transfering to this blog site. A recent blog post reminds me to republish it:
I hadn’t gone to seminary. I had only been Reformed for a few years. I was a college graduate reading a hot Reformed magazine. The issue was Lordship salvation and I read as a fan and a follower. The problem was that I had read too many books. So I’m reading about Lordship salvation and a “Reformed perspective” on the brouhaha between John MacArthur and Zane Hodges. And the Reformed experts in this magazine tell me they are both wrong. Specifically, MacArthur has not kept track of the ordo salutis so that he can properly distinguish faith and repentance. If he understood that faith is prior to repentance then his viewpoint would have preserved the orthodox and gospel view. As I read the article I found myself more and more confused. I reread it. Is he really saying that? Yes he was. John MacArthur was being dismissed because he failed to line up an ordo and put faith before repentance. This was written in a tone of utter confidence like everyone who knew anything about the Reformed heritage knew that this was true. It wasn’t true. And I knew it wasn’t true. And I knew that anyone knowledgeable in basic Reformed thinking should know that it wasn’t true. What I didn’t understand is how I could know this and yet the writer of the article seem completely oblivious to the fact. He’d been to seminary, after all. He would be aware of what the basic writers had written.
I lived out of my office in those days (saved money on the air conditioning bill) and my book shelf was not thee feet away from me. I swiveled my chair around and reached for the book I had recently read: John Murray’s Redemption: Accomplished and Applied. Murray’s book, if you haven’t read it (and that means you should go and do so), describes the ordo salutis, or, if we can give up our worship of the dead past, the “order of salvation.” Each chapter is given a title for a different step in the order. In fact, Murray is even prone to make distinctions that go beyond those found explicitly in the Westminster Confession. He has a chapter on “Effectual Calling,” followed by a separate one on “Regeneration.” Yet, mysteriously, “Faith & Repentance” is a single chapter. He treats faith first and then, in introducing repentance, makes the following statement:
The question has been discussed: which is prior, faith or repentance? It is an unnecessary question and the insistence that one is prior to the other is futile. There is no priority. The faith that is unto salvation is a penitent faith and the repentance that is unto life is a believing repentance.
Everything said to dismiss MacArthur as a worthy Reformed thinker could have been written about Murray, and should have been. After all, Everyone knew MacArthur was a dispensationalist. If this “error” regarding the ordo was so significant, then the writer should have protected his readers from the author with the more established Reformed reputation. But then, who reads Murray anymore? I doubt he is even used that much in seminary. Generically, that is somewhat understandable, since there has been progress made. But in terms of the Reformed tradition, it seems rather like the disappearance of good money in favor of debased currency. The phenomenon I was encountering, but could not recognize because it was unthinkable to me at the time, was that the ones popularizing the Reformed faith for a new generation were altering it according to their own convictions and doing this by pretending that these were the only Reformed viewpoint. If you want to know why the PCA and the OPC are tearing themselves apart right now, it is because we are reaping fruit from a sowing of dishonesty that has been going on for a long time.
Dabney says basically the same thing. He says that faith and repentance are “twin graces,” and you can’t ever have one without the other.
He goes so far as to lay out the position that posits faith existing first and then receiving the ability to repent as an extra and rejects it outright.
Perhaps it was a conflation of chronological priority and logical priority. Repentance does not need to follow faith chronologically, but it does make sense to me to think that faith must precede repentance logically. (Why would one otherwise repent?)
I am a student of Richard Gaffin, Jr., at Westminster Theological Seminary. Gaffin occupies the position at WTS once held by Murray, whom he studied under.
If I understand Gaffin correctly he also is teaching something very similar to Murray. In his recent book By Faith, Not by Sight: Paul and the Order of Salvation, he demonstrates that for Paul both justification and sanctification are “by faith” and both are received not in some artificial “this then that” order but rather as mutual benefits of being “in Christ.”
More importantly, you have put your finger on something crucial to understand in the current troubles in the PCA and OPC: the increasingly shrill and uncompromising voices of those who have decided that their particular narrow definitions of Reformed orthodoxy, positions that can easily be shown to not have been universally held throughout the history of Reformed orthodoxy, are actually, by self-definition, the only Reformed orthodoxy.
Jim I think you’re right in the sense of how these relate to their object. Realizing God is trustworthy precedes any sincere turning away from unreliable idols. So from the stand point of intentionality I’m with you. On the other hand, “turning to” and “turning away from” are more or less like concave and convex.
But, if I seemed too dogmatic, please know my passion is aimed at the way the conversation is being narrowed, not that there are differing opinions on the matter within the Reformed heritage.