Mark Horne » Blog Archive » I think this thought experiment needs a better lab.

I may have a way to clarify a precise problem here (not the only one but a major one):

Imagine further that all that our first father needed to do was to try his hardest and do his best, and once that was done, God would mingle His grace with Adam’s works in order to render them acceptable.

Notice here that grace is defined to mean something that covers an inadequacy.

Now God’s grace for sinners does arrange to cover our sin through Christ’s righteousness. But that is not the definition of grace. For creatures it simply means unmerited favor (or in the case of Jesus, perhaps favor without concern for merit). As I showed before, virtually everyone in the Reformed Tradition acknowledges that God’s covenant relationship with Adam was gracious. As Klinean Bill Baldwin as admitted:

A veritable All-Star team of Reformed heroes have subscribed to one or both of those points, asserting or implying grace in the covenant of works: William Ames, Johannes Cocceius, Frances Turretin, the Westminster Divines, John Owen, Thomas Boston, R. L. Dabney, Geerhardus Vos, John Murray, Louis Berkhof, Anthony Hoekema, Sinclair Ferguson, Richard Gaffin. Only a handful — Johannes Heidegger, Herman Witsius, Charles Hodge — hold out against this tide. And Witsius does so after much agonizing. He knows what he’s up against.

But no one in this “All-star team” ever dreamed that Adam’s works required forgiveness or some other covering in order to be acceptable to God. That has nothing to do with the obvious fact that God created, and made promises to, Adam by his own grace and not because of Adam’s works. If you think this is what these or any other Christians are teaching, then you plainly do not understand the debate at all and need to go back and study.

Insisting that grace can only be about covering inadequacy is exactly what this debate is supposed to be about. By using a definition that is in fact the whole point of the dispute nothing is accomplished–if logical argumentation and understanding are considered desirable.

And the confusion resulted not only in mischaracterizing the alternative view, but asserting that Adam or Jesus could have done their best and still fallen short of God’s requirements, as I pointed out in my first post. This is simply horrible.