One would be hard-pressed to find a doctrine more treasured and jealously defended in Reformed theology than the doctrine of free justification. It was, after all, Martin Luther who said that justification is the article by which the church stands or falls.1 If sinners are not made righteous before God, they stand condemned before God. Justification is a matter of eternal life or eternal death.
The Federal Vision’s (FV) definition of justification is notoriously difficult to pin down. Proponents all tend to agree that the historic Reformed definition is deficient, or that the Presbyterian and Reformed today are latently Baptistic in their conception of the covenant; yet, there is no one “FV definition” of justification to which they all subscribe.2 There is, however, one definition that is shared, whether fully or in part, by many FV proponents that demands special attention—that formulated by Norman Shepherd.
The FV and Reformed both agree that man must be justified before God and that the Westminster Standards teach that man’s justification is rooted in the federal head of the covenant of grace, Jesus Christ (WCF 11.1–4). Christ came, lived, and died in order to satisfy the debt of God’s justice on behalf of all the elect. Christ did what fallen man could not do. He suffered all the penalties due to the elect for their sin and positively satisfied all the terms of the covenant of works.3 It is this full righteousness, Christ’s active and passive obedience together, that the Reformed say is imputed or credited to the sinner for his justification. And this justification comes to the sinner through the instrument of faith alone. Faith is the instrumental cause of salvation, not the principle/material cause. Justification does not come from faith but through faith. The righteousness of Christ alone is the principle/material cause of justification. Christ’s righteousness justifies, and faith is the channel by which the believer accesses the justifying righteousness of Christ. Venema references a beautiful analogy used by Luther where faith is said to be the valueless ring that holds an invaluable jewel.4 The value is not in the ring itself, but in what the ring is united to. Faith is said to justify because it is united to the justifying one, who is Christ.
The issue with the FV is that adherents blur the above distinction and speak of faith as though it were both the instrumental and material cause of salvation. Calvin wrote, “Faith, which is only the instrument for receiving justification, is ignorantly confounded with Christ, who is the material cause, as well as the author and minister of the great blessing. . . . I admit not the tortuous figure of the sophists, that faith is Christ; as if a vessel of clay were a treasure, because gold is deposited in it.”5 This is precisely the mistake that the FV makes; it makes the clay of faith part of the gold of justification.
By justification, a number of FV proponents do not mean the imputation of Christ’s active and passive obedience to the sinner as articulated in the Westminster Standards; only Christ’s passive obedience, they claim, is imputed in justification. The issue with this view is that the conditions of both covenants require that man not only be free from guilt but that he be positively righteous before God. It is not enough for God to be merely propitious, he must be favorably disposed, “well pleased” with the sinner. Taking away the guilt and removing the penalties of sin is only half the work of justification. If man is not given the active obedience of Christ, it prompts the question as to where the Christian gets this “second half” of justification. Norman Shepherd’s answer—through covenantal faithfulness. Our personal, faithful obedience is how we become positively righteous before God.
Shepherd taught that faith must produce thankful, non-meritorious works. The Reformed agree with this wholeheartedly; we believe that faith alone justifies but that this faith will never be alone—it will be accompanied by good works. Shepherd, however, takes this one step further and argues that the non-meritorious works that are produced by the Christian’s faith are part of the grounds upon which he is deemed righteous before God. Shepherd defines meritorious works as those which are done with an aim toward justifying oneself. These, he says, will not do for justification. For a good work to be good it must be done out of thankfulness for the imputation of Christ’s passive obedience and all of God’s graces. Again, we agree at this point (WCF 16.2–3). For a good work to be good (i.e., pleasing to God), it must be performed in faith, done in a right manner (according to the Word), and to a right end (the glory of God; see WCF 16.7). But this is where Shepherd parts ways with the Westminster Confession. Venema writes of Shepherd:
Rather than distinguishing between faith as instrument of justification and the works that faith produces, Shepherd insists that faith justifies by virtue of the obedience it produces. The “works” that are excluded, when we speak of justification by “faith alone,” are only those works that are performed in order to “merit” acceptance and favor with God. Once the whole idea of ‘merit’ or ‘meritorious’ works is rejected, we may speak of one “method of justification” that holds for Adam (and all men in Adam) before the fall, for Christ himself, and for all believers. The one method of justification in the covenant relationship before the fall and after the fall involves God crediting the believer’s obedient faith for righteousness.6 (emphasis mine)
In short, the fruit of the believer’s faith (viz. his obedience) within the covenantal relationship is made the grounds of justification, not Christ’s sacrificial death and obedient life![7] Christ’s positive obedience was enough to qualify him as the perfect high priest and sacrifice upon the cross (i.e., to passively obey), but that is as far as it went.8 The best that justification has to offer the Christian is the removal of God’s wrath and restoration to the original state that Adam enjoyed with God, pre-fall—a covenant of works wherein life is obtained only by perfect obedience to God’s law. If Adam, who was perfect and disposed to all good, fell in the covenant of works, how much better do the FV proponents think fallen man will fare if restored to that same covenantal status and in a world fallen in sin?
Rich Lusk also has a novel way of speaking of justification, particularly when he speaks of “final justification.” Lusk writes:
Again, we find the Bible teaching that future justification is according to works. Final justification is to the (faithful) doers of the law (Rom. 2:1ff) and by those good works which make faith complete (Jas. 2:14ff). Justification will not be fully realized until the resurrection. In fact, the main reason justification comes up at all in the Scriptures is because someday we will all stand before God’s judgment seat and answer for our deeds done in the body.9
He goes on:
In James 2, “justification” cannot be referring to a demonstration of justification, e.g., justification does and cannot mean something like “show to be justified.” Rather, James has in view the same kind of justification as Paul—forensic, soteric justification. Good works justify persons in James 2, not faith or one’s status as a justified sinner. James is not telling his readers how to “justify their justification” or how to “give evidence of a true and lively faith.” Instead he says their persons will not be justified by faith alone, but also by good works of obedience they have done. The use of the preposition “by” is important since it indicates a sort of dual instrumentality in justification. In other words, in some sense, James is speaking of a justification in which faith and works combine together to justify. Future justification is according to one’s life pattern. No one dare claim these works to be meritorious, but they are necessary. There is congruence between the life we live and the destiny we will receive.10
According to Lusk’s reading, there is not one justification of the sinner, but two. While I might hesitate to say that works “justify our justification” simply to avoid confusion, the standard Reformed reading of James 2 is that our works are corroborating evidences of saving faith and not, alongside faith, the dual instrument of justification. In so stressing that the faith which alone justifies the sinner is not alone, that is without good works, Lusk incorporates those faith-inspired works into the grounds of justification. Lusk’s reading is, quite frankly, closer to the Roman Catholic understanding of James 2 than to the historic Reformed view. Like Shepherd, Lusk’s system makes the Christian’s active obedience (i.e., their covenant faithfulness) part and parcel of what makes the sinner right with God.
In summary, the FV teaches that Adam enjoyed a covenantal relationship with God before the fall. It was not a merely legal, mechanical relationship, but a filial one characterized by grace.[11] The FV is content to say that as long as Adam rendered faithful, imperfect obedience to God as a son does to a Father and did not commit covenantal adultery, that he would have inherited eternal life. And if, as Shepherd reasons, there is “one ‘method of justification’ that holds for Adam (and all men in Adam) before the fall, for Christ himself, and for all believers,” then the believer today is justified by simply not apostatizing from the covenant community. If the covenant is, objectively, union with Christ, and the quality of the righteousness that God requires in order for a sinner to be fully justified is imperfect obedience within the covenantal context, the sinner’s salvation, therefore, depends upon his own works of obedience or “faithfulness” throughout life. The ultimate responsibility to persevere lands squarely upon man’s shoulders. In a 2017 article, R. Scott Clark writes, “Recently I received an email from an evangelical, Protestant pastor, who identified himself as a Calvinist, who wrote that he believes, “under the new covenant” we enter “by faith” but that “we must maintain our place in the covenant, i.e. justification via faithfulness to the moral law.”[12] The faithfulness here described is no different than that described by Shepherd or Lusk. Man is justified—he is kept—by his own good works. This denigrates the holy character of God and his law and robs Christ of the glory due his name as the justifier of all those who have faith in him (Rom. 3:26).
Conclusion
By reducing covenant down to a one-size-fits-all relationship between parties, the FV makes all those in covenant with God recipients of the promised grace of salvation. All in the covenant are effectually called, adopted, and in union with Christ. In their attempt to assure believers of their salvation by virtue of their objective inclusion in the covenant community, FV proponents will go as far as to say all who are in covenant are in saving union with Christ. To explain how it is that some covenant members apostatize and finally fall away, the FV speaks of two types of election and of a union with Christ that persists only for a time. What then becomes the ground of the believer’s assurance? That they have a faith that is actively working through love. The basis of our assurance turns ever so subtly from the infallible grounds of assurance that we have in the person and work of Christ to the fallible grounds of our personal obedience to God’s commands. The FV makes more of our works than the Bible and the Reformed confessions ever do.
The same goes for the FV understanding of justification. The logical end of Norman Shepherd’s view and its offshoots is that the believer’s justification is only as secure as his works are faithful. How faithful is faithful enough? How do you know if your non-meritorious works were not just meritorious works masquerading in non-meritorious clothes? No one knows. Making faith-inspired works the ground upon which man is finally righteous is no different from the externalism of Rome and its doctrine of progressive justification. How faithful does our faithfulness need to be? Man is left with no real answer or assurance.
The Federal Vision is alive and well and, at least for the foreseeable future, shows no signs of going away. As more and more men and women are attracted to churches whose program is undergirded by the FV, we would do well to sound the alarm about what lies beneath the surface—a theology that is out of step with the Reformed confessions and undermines the peace and joy that the gospel promotes in the lives of God’s people.
Notes
- Justin Taylor, “Luther’s Saying: “Justification Is the Article by Which the Church Stands and Falls,” The Gospel Coalition, August 31, 2011.
- As an aside, I find it ironic that NAPARC ministers are so often called Baptistic or Bapterian by men who hold to the FV. Last I checked, in my denomination (PCA) there are zero ministers who subscribe to the 1689 London Baptist Confession. The same cannot be said, however, for the CREC (See Confessional Statements of the Communion of Reformed Evangelical Churches).
- It is at this point, however, that the FV and the historic Reformed tradition differ significantly in their understanding of what was actually required of Adam in the covenant of works (e.g., Norman Shepherd, Rich Lusk) and whether the active obedience of Christ is or is not imputed to the believer in justification. My only point in highlighting these areas of linguistic agreement is to demonstrate that one needs to dig deeper than the mere language of the Confession and ask what one understands those confessional words to mean. The FV and Reformed both agree that Christ actively obeyed the law—but why did he obey the law? Did his active obedience only qualify him to be the mediator and nothing more, as some FV proponents claim? Or is his active obedience imputed to us in justification as the Reformed confessions teach? This is the nub of the issue.
- Martin Luther, Lectures on Galatians 1535 (St. Louis: Concordia, 1963), 89, 134, as quoted in Cornelius Venema, Christ and Covenant Theology: Essays on Election, Republication, and the Covenants (Phillipsburg NJ: Presbyterian and Reformed Publishing, 2017), 339.
- Jean Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion (Peabody, MA: Hendrickson Publishers, 2008), 3.11.7.
- Venema, Christ and Covenant Theology, 356–7.
- The distinction between “meritorious” and “non-meritorious works” in Shepherd’s system is, quite frankly, trivial. What the motivation behind the good work is makes no difference. If man-wrought works of any type are considered as the grounds upon which God deems the sinner righteous and acceptable at the Last Day, then such a salvation is according to works and contrary to that salvation that Paul describes so clearly in Ephesians 2:8–9, “For by grace you have been saved through faith. And this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God, not a result of works, so that no one may boast.”
- See Waters’s discussion of Lusk in The Federal Vision and Covenant Theology: A Comparative Analysis, 79.
- Rich Lusk, “Future Justification to the Doers of the Law,” Theologia, 2003. Lusk has two footnotes for the above quotation that are not included here. To my mind, the qualifications that he makes in those footnotes in no way get him out of the hole he has dug for himself. Lusk’s making justification an ongoing work and not a punctiliar act (Westminster Shorter Catechism [WSC] 33, 35) puts him more in line with Rome’s understanding of justification than Reformed Orthodoxy’s.
- Lusk, “Future Justification.”
- Later on in the article Lusk uses the illustration of calling his 5 year old son “obedient” though he is not sinlessly perfect. This, he argues, is the same type of “obedience” that God expected from Adam—a pattern of obedience, not sinless perfection.
- R. Scott Clark, “In By Grace, Stay In By Faithfulness?” Heidelblog, October 13, 2017.
© Stephen Spinnenweber. All Rights Reserved.
You can find this whole series here.
RESOURCES
- Resources On The Federal Vision Theology
- Subscribe To The Heidelblog!
- Download the HeidelApp on Apple App Store or Google Play
- The Heidelblog Resource Page
- Heidelmedia Resources
- The Ecumenical Creeds
- The Reformed Confessions
- The Heidelberg Catechism
- The Heidelberg Catechism: A Historical, Theological, & Pastoral Commentary (Bellingham, WA: Lexham Press, 2025)
- Recovering the Reformed Confession (Phillipsburg: P&R Publishing, 2008)
- Why I Am A Christian
- What Must A Christian Believe?
- Heidelblog Contributors
- Support Heidelmedia: use the donate button or send a check to:
Heidelberg Reformation Association
1637 E. Valley Parkway #391
Escondido CA 92027
USA
The HRA is a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization
Supplement:
In recent days a friend asked me a very fair question, “When are you going to prove FV is alive and well today? Are you going to have a piece on recent citations or publications?” To that end, here is a link to a 2024 interview of Douglas Wilson and Richard Lusk on FV distinctives. Trigger warning: They call us Bapterians😜 Pay careful attention to Lusk’s comments on final justification. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xIaj2kg5DbM&t=3662s
Thank you for these clear and concise essays on the FV teachings which show that the basis of their assurance acceptance with God is their obedient covenant faithfulness in the covenant community. It brings to mind the final chapters of Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress where we meet Ignorance, a pilgrim who confidently brags about his claim of obedience to God’s law as the basis of his confidence of being accepted by God, as he passes over the river of death, only to be stopped at the gates and his scroll (gospel promise of righteousness in Christ) is demanded of him. Upon failure to produce it, he is whisked away to the gates of hell. Like the rich young ruler who self righteously boasts of his own rightness obedience, Ignorance fails to see that trust in the One that would provide the perfect righteousness, which both Ignorance and the rich young ruler lack, are the only way to be justified before God. Jesus is the narrow way, He is the narrow way, the only way to the Father. Matt. 7:13-14 Sadly, the FV, like so many other false teachers have failed to find it.
Angela,
Well said. And excellent parallel from Bunyan’s work. Now I feel like I should have included it in the article!