Goodwin: Faith Is The Alone Condition Of The Covenant Of Grace

When we are in the state of salvation, faith doth all; for whenas all graces else would soon be overcome and cast out again by lusts, and would soon be tripped up from off their standing, faith is able to keep its legs and standing, Rom. 5:2. Therefore, 1 Peter 1:5, we are said to be ‘kept through faith unto salvation.’ If we were in any other grace’s keeping, we were undone; for how soon would all our love be non-plussed if that were the condition of the covenant!.
 
—Thomas Goodwin (1600–80), The Works of Thomas Goodwin (Edinburgh: James Nichol, 1864), 8.462.

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3 comments

  1. Mike Horton—“The New Testament lays before us a vast array of conditions for final salvation. Not only initial repentance and faith, but perseverance in both, demonstrated in love toward God and neighbor…Holiness, which is defined by love of God and neighbor…is the indispensable condition of our glorification. ” God of Promise, 182

    John 15: 6 If anyone does not remain in Me, he is thrown aside like a branch and he withers. They gather them, throw them into the fire, and they are burned. 7 If you remain in Me and My words remain in you….My Father is glorified — you produce fruit and prove to be My disciples.

    Therefore the “not yet” means that we must take the sola out of the sola, the merely out of the merely, and the alone out of the alone…When it comes to “salvation”, and put “justification” in a more limited place, somewhere in there after regeneration and “real union.with the real presence of the person (not the benefits).

    To continue the sarcasm, “the conditionality of future grace” means we need more both/and, and less antithesis. All assurance has a tension, and we are always both sure and unsure

    “Justification in Galatians”, p 172, Moo’s essay in the Carson f (Understanding the Times)—”Nor is there any need to set Paul’s “juridicial” and “participationist” categories in opposition to one another (see Gaffin, By Faith Not By Sight, p 35-41). The problem of positing a union with Christ that precedes the erasure of our legal condemnation before God ( making justification the product of union with Christ) CAN BE ANSWERED IF WE POSIT, WITHIN THE SINGLE WORK OF CHRIST, TWO STAGES OF “JUSTIFICATION”, one involving Christ’s payment of our legal debt–the basis for our regeneration–and second our actual justification=stemming from our union with Christ.”

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