Scott Clark writes:

Some folk are telling you that, “there are two parts to every covenant, and if you don’t do your part, you’ll fall away just like those folk in Hebrews and all those Israelites.”

As with most errors, this warning is partly true. It’s true that there are two parts to every covenant. It’s true that some of the Israelites did not enter into the promised land. It’s true that some folk in the visible church fall away, but it’s not true that they fell away because they failed “to do their part.” That would be true if we were in a covenant of works, but we’re not. We’re in a covenant of grace.

I might discuss the exegesis which follows these claims because I disagree with Dr. Clark. However, disagreement does not concern me here as much as what seems to me to be a completely false claim on his part that he represents “the Reformed Faith” and is dealing with those who are outside that faith.

When Francis Turretin asked, “Are good works necessary to salvation?” he answered that they were necessary, not as meritorious causes of our salvation but “as means.” Good works “should be considered necessary to the obtainment of” salvation, “so that no one can be saved without them” (see here for context and references).

In explaining himself he included the following argument:

And as to the covenant, everyone knows that it consists of two parts: on the one hand the promise on the part of God; on the other the stipulation of obedience on the part of man. For as God promises in it to be our God, he wishes that we also in turn should be his people. And as that promise includes every blessing of God, so the obligation denotes the duties of all kinds owed by man to God (as was seen when we treated of the clauses of the covenant). Although God by his special grace wishes these duties of man to be his blessings (which he carries out in them), still the believer does not cease to be bound to observe it, if he wishes to be a partaker of the blessings of the covenant (Institutes, 17.3.7; emphasis added).

As you can see from some interaction between Clark and myself, he thinks he can make good on this in a couple of ways.  One involves claiming everything would be answered if I would only read his book and the other a side-step to the “internal/external” distinction.  The first of these responses is dishonorable.  The second is simply irrelevant (even if it were true that I deny the distinction).  The bottom line is that Clark has preached that no Christian is obligated to obey God as their part in the Covenant of grace and that means he has set his face against the Reformed tradition.

More power to him, if he wants to use his Bible (though the evidence is slim I want to hope for the best).  But the revisionism is intellectually and academically inexcusable.  The fact that he uses such fictions to bash other Reformed ministers and falsely accuse them in the most extreme language would be an offense that could get him fired from any church or institution that cared about Christian ethics (so I assume he is pretty safe where he is).

People can disagree with Turretin and still be Reformed.  They can’t accuse him of being a soteriolgical heretic and claim to be in the same heritage as him.  This is my version of Doug Wilson’s statement,

Note, the point is not that Calvin is right and these men are wrong. Their revivalistic version of the Reformed faith might be the Reformed faith come into its own. They could be right on all points, but if they want to consider themselves Reformed, they can’t be saying that they are “Calvinists except for those parts where Calvin is always denying the gospel.”

But that is exactly what is being said.