Editor’s Note: The following is the complete chapter as it appeared in R. Scott Clark, ed., Covenant, Justification, and Pastoral Ministry: Essays by the Faculty of Westminster Seminary California (Phillipsburg: P&R Publishing, 2007), 399-429. In 2021, the publisher returned the publication rights to the copyright holder and the chapter is presented here as a service to the public by the Heidelberg Reformation Association. The material is copyrighted. All Rights Reserved. You are welcome to link to this chapter but you are not entitled to reproduce it in any way without permission of the copyright holder.
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Introduction
As shepherds of Jesus’s flock, pastors wrestle with the wounds and waywardness of the human heart. They counsel the guilty, who are consumed by self-condemnation. They counsel the defensive, who try to deflect God’s heart-piercing word through self-justification and blame-shifting. They counsel those ensnared by deeply ingrained patterns of shameful lust or unbridled rage, trapped souls who derive no pleasure from their sin but despair of finding freedom from it. They counsel the complacent, whose self-absorbed habits of heart sow seeds of dissension into every relationship in home, church, and workplace. Pastoral counseling is, as the older shepherds called it, “the cure of souls,” healing the heart of its deep and complex maladies through the wise application of God’s infection-exposing law and his conscience-cleansing gospel.
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Husband and wife sit glowering at each other, their fires of resentment stoked by years of misunderstanding, offense, and neglect. A middle-aged man reluctantly, despondently unveils the secret shame of his enslavement to impure fantasies. An adolescent hunches over in self-loathing and insecurity, hating her appearance, wounded by the scorn of peers, and terrorized by the prospect of a lifetime without love. Such hurting souls need relief from their inner torment; but the shepherd knows they need more than this. They need to see themselves, their situation, and their God in a fresh way,1 to glimpse a glimmer of hope that change is possible, and to be gripped with a motive sweet, strong, and enduring enough to overpower the inertia of the status quo and to quicken their pace to “strive for peace with everyone, and for the holiness without which no one will see the Lord” (Heb 12:14 ESV). They need to understand not only the what of godly change but also its why: to recognize the attitudes, values, and behavior that please God, but also to be moved by the overpowering beauty of this goal of delighting their redeemer and king. How can the pastor not only persuade counselees’ minds but also set their wills ablaze with a passion for peace and purity, grounded in the conviction that conformity to Christ is worth the pain and price to be paid, whatever the cost and consequences in the short term?
At first glance, it would appear that the Reformation doctrine that sinful persons are justified, decisively and irreversibly, merely through relying on Jesus’s covenant keeping (active obedience) and covenant curse bearing (passive obedience) alone, would hamstring Christians’ motivation to race toward holiness, thereby depriving the pastoral counselor of much needed leverage to overcome counselees’ internal inertia. After all, if we are assured that we are not only forgiven but vindicated as upright in God’s sight, welcomed as well pleasing to the Father, once for all and irrevocably, why must Christians keep struggling in the uphill battle against our deeply ingrained sin and selfishness? If throughout this life we will be simul iustus et peccator,
1. Note the apt title of David Powlison’s recent Seeing with New Eyes: Counseling and the Human Condition through the Lens of Scripture (Phillipsburg, NJ: P&R, 2003). See also Powlison’s persuasive case for a return to biblical categories in the taxonomy through which personal problems are perceived in “Idols of the Heart and ‘Vanity Fair,’” Journal of Biblical Counseling 13 (1995): 35–50.
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“simultaneously righteous [in Jesus’s imputed righteousness] and sinner [in our own subjective imperfection],” does not our forensic status, grounded in extrinsic righteousness, obviate the need for growth in godliness, while our intrinsic unrighteousness nullifies the hope of growth in godliness? By reading Paul as removing Christians’ best efforts at loving God and others from the “justification equation,” have the Reformers removed from the pastor’s arsenal several potent instruments—guilt, fear of divine rejection, a sense of achievement, anticipation of reward and commendation—with which to stimulate and reinforce counselees’ commitment to change?
Of course, pastoral counselors could still appeal to other motives for change. The pastor might encourage people to their duty, to safeguard their self-esteem, or to preserve their reputation. Such appeals to common sense and enlightened self-interest might strike a nerve and convince counselees to give change a chance, or they might not. In any case, there is nothing distinctively Christian about such motives, nor can such motives sustain counselees’ resolution to persevere in new paths of obedience to God.
Scripture and the church’s tested pastoral wisdom point pastors and their counselees to the gospel itself—the good news that this book defends and celebrates, about a mediator who has both obeyed and endured condemnation in our place and who bestows both forgiveness and his own righteousness on those who rest wholly in his achievement—as the foundation and fountain of a God-given, grace-instilled motive that overpowers the appeals of both sin and self-righteousness, producing a freedom to obey for sheer love of the Savior, for God’s glory alone. My working assumption is that effective pastoral counseling is the confluence of four necessary factors:
- an accurate (biblically normed and situationally informed) diagnosis of the problem and its causes
- a wise (biblically normed) prescription regarding changes needed in the counselee
- a strong motivation to follow the difficult and distasteful aspects of the prescription
- a strong hope that changes actually can be made and will yield growth toward holiness and joy in Christ, whatever
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adverse consequences, circumstances, or reactions of other people persist
The diagnosis and prescription have at their core the doctrinal seeds of biblical anthropology, soteriology, and ethics, which mature into pastoral wisdom through months and years of caring for Christ’s sheep, with all their idiosyncrasies. These diagnostic and prescriptive steps are by no means easy, but the challenge of sustaining counselees’ motivation and hope is even more daunting. Here is where the doctrine of justification proves its pastoral worth. Although the assurance that biblical justification imparts may seem, both to legalists and to antinomians, to work at cross-purposes to Scripture’s summons to strenuously pursue holiness, in fact only this assurance can produce a holiness that springs from love for God rather than an exploitation of God for our own ends. In other words, only when our obedience flows from a justification-secured assurance of the Father’s approval of us for his Son’s sake is our obedience an expression of love for God above all, rather than an attempt to obligate through our efforts.
The Scriptural Relation between Justification and the Cure
The power of the gospel of once-for-all justification to motivate passionate pursuit of holiness will be illustrated first in two New Testament case studies in counseling. Then the conclusions drawn from these texts may be compared with the wisdom of representative Reformed pastor-theologians of the six centuries. Finally, a gospel-driven, justification-grounded approach to pastoral care will be applied to the three contemporary case studies described above.
Case Study 1: The Upright versus the Down-and-Out (Luke 7:36–50)
In the home of Simon the Pharisee Jesus ministered to two counselees who appeared to have radically different needs. Simon, Jesus’s host, was respectable, affiliated with the sect within Judaism that was rec-
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ognized for observing God’s commands and evidently conscientious in his avoidance of ethically compromising situations. Perhaps he was somewhat judgmental toward others’ flaws; but then, who does not disapprove of people who deserve disapproval? He might possibly be charged with breaches of ancient etiquette for failing to attend to the welcome and comfort of his guests, although New Testament scholars debate whether foot washing, a ceremonial kiss, and the anointing of guests’ hair were absolute obligations of ancient Near Eastern hosts.2 Apart from these minor defects, Simon’s need for personal change seemed minimal, at least to himself.
The woman who slipped into this semipublic banquet, on the other hand, was notorious for a pattern of behavior that violated God’s holy law. She was obviously emotionally overwrought (sobbing, it seems, uncontrollably), oblivious to societal expectations and decorum (releasing her hair in the presence of men), and probably economically imprudent (if her alabaster flask of ointment even approached the value of Mary’s in John 12:3). She was, however, en route to a new life. What made the difference in the life of this “woman . . . who was a sinner”?
Jesus’s story within a story, disarming in its simplicity and self-evident logic, unveiled the secret that propels radical life change. He introduces one creditor and two borrowers, one owing ten times as much as the other. In a burst of incredible largesse, the creditor erases both debts. The sheer economic imprudence of this action signals that story is really about a different (nonfinancial) category of debt relief
2. Among those interpreting Simon’s omissions as serious breaches of expected hospitality etiquette are Kenneth Bailey, Through Peasant Eyes: More Lucan Parables, Their Culture, and Style (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1980), 5; and Alfred Plummer, A Critical and Exegetical Commentary on the Gospel according to St. Luke (International Critical Commentary; Edinburgh: Clark, 1901), 213, who likewise writes of the Pharisee’s “lack of courtesy.” Most recent commentators, however, are hesitant to conclude that foot washing, the kiss of greeting, or the anointing of a guest’s head were so customary in first-century Judaism that their omission would be construed as insulting. See, e.g., I. Howard Marshall, The Gospel of Luke: A Commentary on the Greek Text (New International Greek Testament Commentary; Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1978), 311–12, citing H. Schürmann, Das Lukasevangelium (Freiberg: Herder, 1969); Joseph A. Fitzmyer, The Gospel according to Luke (i–ix) (Anchor Bible 28; Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1981), 691; John Nolland, Luke 1–9:20 (Word Biblical Commentary 35A; Dallas: Word, 1989), 357; Robert H. Stein, Luke (New American Commentary; Nashville: Broadman, 1992), 237; and Darrell L. Bock, Luke 1:1–9:50 (Baker Exegetical Commentary on the New Testament 3A; Grand Rapids: Baker, 1994), 701–2.
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altogether.3 Jesus invites his upright host to draw the inference: “Which of them, then, will love him more?” Simon cautiously grasps the logic: “I suppose,” he ventures, “the man forgiven the greater debt.”
Even if we missed the hint in the creditor’s inexplicable generosity that the topic is not a debt of denarii, but rather guilty humanity before God the judge, Jesus’s mention of love reveals his real frame of reference. He asks not “Who will be more relieved?” nor even “Who will be more grateful?”4 The question is: “Who will love his creditor-turned-benefactor more?” In the spiritual reality to which Jesus’s simple story points, reckless grace binds beneficiary to benefactor with a bond stronger than debt or duty. What now moves the once-indebted recipient of grace is not a lingering sense of obligation, compelling efforts to repay, at least in part, so great a gift—as though the debt still stood on the books. The debt is canceled. No deficit remains to be repaid because the one to whom the debt was owed has fully absorbed the loss. The motive that such grace evokes is spontaneous, uncoerced love—a love that serves the beloved forgiver with a free abandon that neither guilt nor duty could engender.5
3. Joachim Jeremias, The Parables of Jesus (trans. S. H. Hooke; 2nd ed.; New York: Scribner, 1972), 145: “Surely a rara avis among creditors! Where may such a one be found? Clearly Jesus was speaking about God, of his inconceivable goodness.”
4. Jeremias, ibid., 126–27, contends that Jesus’s choice of the verb love was dictated by the absence of a word meaning (strictly) “thank, be grateful” in the Semitic languages spoken in first-century Palestine. Jeremias acknowledges, however, that in some contexts other Semitic verbs—“bless,” for example—implied the emotion of gratitude. The selection of the deeply emotive “love” in the parable is primarily explained by the woman’s un-selfconscious display of affection and adoration, which Jesus will characterize as great “love” in Luke 7:47.
5. John Piper, Future Grace (Sisters, OR: Multnomah, 1995), 31–39, critiques preachers’ common appeal to gratitude for past grace as a motive for the pursuit of holiness. He contends that such a backward-looking focus too often produces a “debtor’s ethic,” in which believers are laden anew with a sense of obligation to “repay” God for his mercy. He makes the provocative (and in my judgment unpersuasive) claim: “The Bible rarely, if ever, explicitly makes gratitude the impulse of moral behavior, or ingratitude the explanation of immorality” (34). Texts such as Matt 18:21–35; 1 John 4:19; Rom 1:21; and Luke 7:36–50 spring to mind as counterevidence against this claim. Nevertheless, Piper rightly critiques those appeals to gratitude that turn reminders of past grace into implements of guilt and duty in order to compel believers’ obedience. The genuine gratitude that flows from grace is not a duty or debt that we owe God (like writing thank-you notes for Christmas gifts to unknown great-aunts under our mother’s watchful eye). Rather, when we discover Christ’s startling mercy lavished on us, our hearts (like the sinful woman’s) cannot help but brim over with love for the merciful one (and for others,
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Of course Jesus, who knows humanity through and through, had no illusions about our capacity to respond wrongly to grace. Elsewhere he challenged the desire to curtail one’s obligation to forgive others, telling a parable that exposes our schizophrenic capacity to cling to grievances against others’ offenses even when we have received divine mercy beyond our comprehension (Matt 18:21–35). First-century listeners would have realized immediately the absurdity of the unforgiving servant’s request for more time to repay his debt of tens of thousands of talents (18:26). Such an enormous debt would have taken many lifetimes to repay on a servant’s (or even a satrap’s) wages.6 Even before the story describes his harsh severity toward his fellow servant, the source of his ruthless justice is revealed: the servant represents those who devalue their “debt” toward God until it seems manageable. As a consequence, they are unfazed by divine grace on the one hand, and on the other hand they are disinclined to extend mercy to fellow servants who are in their debt.
When, however, we see grace to be as gracious as it actually is, our hearts’ reflex will be (not merely ought to be but will be) self-abandoning love. This is what dazzles us in the woman’s treatment of Jesus. Jesus reasons back from visible effects to invisible cause.7
for his sake). Piper endorses true gratitude, in which “there is such a delight in the worth of God’s past grace, that we are driven on to experience more and more of it in the future” (39). In his later work, Counted Righteous in Christ (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2002), Piper argues exegetically and pastorally that the assurance of God’s approval, grounded in Christ’s imputed righteousness, is the only and indispensable starting point that can stimulate and sustain holy living, motivated by love and hope.
6. Craig S. Keener, A Commentary on the Gospel of Matthew (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1999), 458, estimates that ten thousand talents would have represented “30–100 million days’ wages for an average peasant—no small amount of labor” and comments on “the impossibly unrealistic character of the debt and the characters’ absurd folly.” Robert H. Gundry, Matthew: A Commentary on His Literary and Theological Art (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1982), 373, notes that even if the servant is portrayed as a king’s satrap and the debt as taxes due his sovereign, the parable employs “the indefinite plural of the highest number used in reckoning” and therefore “cannot be calculated,” like the American expression zillions.
7. Calvin says: “By these words [in Luke 7:47] . . . he does not make her love the cause, but the proof, of forgiveness of sins. For they are taken from the comparison of that debtor who was forgiven five hundred denarii; to him he did not say that they were forgiven because he loved much, but that he loved much because they were forgiven. . . . Her love, by which she gives thanks for his benefit, ought to have convinced you of the forgiveness of her sins” (Institutes 3.4.37). Contemporary Roman Catholic commentator Fitzmyer, Luke, 686–87,
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Where one sees great love for Jesus, one can be sure that behind it—the root from which it springs, the fountain from which it flows—is great forgiveness, great grace. Jesus’s parable suggests that the crucial act in the drama being played out at Simon’s banquet has already occurred off stage.8 The woman’s tears are not tears of grief, guilt, shame, or despair. They are tears of sheer joy, tears of love for grace already received, forgiveness already granted, justification bestowed by Messiah, assuring her of God’s welcome, her shameful past notwithstanding. Her exorbitant gift of ointment likewise expresses an uncoerced, unconstrained love evoked by God’s sheer grace in Jesus.
By contrast, Simon’s behavior toward Jesus and his attitude toward the woman exhibit no sense of having needed or received forgiveness of a debt of any serious magnitude. Of course Pharisees, like other Jews, were well aware that Scripture and experience indict all of sin, at least those inadvertent missteps for which the law provided sacrificial and cleansing rituals. Whether Simon’s omissions at the start of the banquet—no water, no kiss, no oil—were rude or merely indifferent, they showed that, to Simon, Jesus was not worth the effort. And why, after all, should he consider Jesus worth the effort? Simon saw in himself no great need, no insurmountable debt that only Jesus could erase.
Yet the wonderful counselor promised through Isaiah 9:6–7 (MT 9:5–6) would not write off the Pharisee, any more than a welcoming father would refuse to go out to persuade a self-righteous older son who resented undeserved mercy and rejected the joy over the finding of the lost (Luke 15:28–32). The remedy for Simon’s subtle idolatry is identical to the cure of the woman’s flagrant lawlessness: only the discovery of profound guilt forgiven by utter grace can evoke
though acknowledging the antiquity of the interpretation that understands the woman’s love as the condition of her pardon, concurs with Calvin’s reasoning: “Consequently, it should rather be understood that the sinful woman comes to Jesus as one already forgiven by God and seeking to pour out signs of love and gratitude (tears, kisses, perfume); in this understanding, the love of v. 47b is the consequence of forgiveness, and v. 47c integrates the parable with the narrative.”
8. Jeremias, Parables of Jesus, 126–27, infers, perhaps rightly, that Jesus would have preached at the banquet given in his honor by the Pharisee (a meritorious act performed for a distinguished teacher-prophet) and that the woman’s faith in the forgiveness of her many sins had been evoked by Jesus’s preaching.
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extravagant, self-forgetful love for Jesus and love for others for Jesus’s sake, as our second case study shows.
Case Study 2: Congregations in Conflict (Galatians)
The apostle Paul wrote his earthshaking epistle to the Galatians to address deeply conflicted congregations in central Asia Minor. He observed in the Galatian Christians a host of symptoms indicative of competitive rivalry and interpersonal hostility: they were “biting and devouring each other” (Gal 5:15 NIV), becoming “conceited, provoking and envying each other” (5:26 NIV).9 Between these two statements the apostle contrasts the deeds and desires of the flesh (5:19–21) to the Spirit’s desires and fruit (5:22–23). Competition bred by pride is the dominant motif in Paul’s list of the “deeds of the flesh.”10 The list opens and closes with blatantly sensual and pagan vices, overt violations of the law’s commandments: “impurity, debauchery, idolatry and witchcraft . . . drunkenness, orgies, and the like.” These are the usual suspects, the sins that Paul’s Judaizing opponents would expect to see in an inventory of Gentile depravity. At the core of the list, however, perhaps to the Judaizers’ discomfort and to the Galatian believers’ surprise, is an even longer series of attitudes expressive of competitive rivalry and hostility—“enmities, strife, jealousy, fits of rage, contention, dissensions, factions, envy”—those less visible but more corrosive habits of the heart that were disintegrating interpersonal relationships throughout the Galatian congregations. All such fleshly deeds, whether of body, speech, or thought processes, disqualify those characterized by them from inheritance in God’s kingdom, from the blessing promised to Abraham’s children (5:21; cf. 3:9, 14, 29; 4:30).
9. In sharp contrast to the aggressive behaviors indicted in Gal 5:15–26 is the apostle’s instruction, immediately thereafter, that a person caught in sin should be restored “in a spirit of gentleness,” with a humble awareness of one’s own vulnerability to temptation (6:1 ESV). He goes on to insist that assessment of one’s progress in holiness must be vis-à-vis oneself, rather than by comparison with others (6:4–5).
10. In the church at Corinth, where the spirit of rivalry manifested itself in allegiance to particular human leaders, Paul identified jealousy and discord as symptoms of “fleshliness” (1 Cor 3:1–3).
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As master diagnostician, Paul recognized the spiritual disease by its symptoms: under the influence of teachers who claimed that law observance could complete the Gentiles’ incorporation as Abraham’s heirs (an incorporation begun through belief in the gospel), these believers were inadvertently shifting the weight of their reliance and basis of their boasting from Jesus back to themselves. Through the life-giving work of God’s Spirit they had entered into covenant with the living God “by hearing with faith,” when Jesus Christ was displayed as crucified in Paul’s preaching (3:2 ESV). Having begun in the Spirit by relying on Christ, however, they subsequently succumbed to the plausible lie that their completion as Abraham’s heirs could be achieved only by the flesh—by their own performance in adhering to God’s commands (3:3). Paul could express only bewilderment at their “bewitchment” (3:1).
Paul’s exegetical-theological argument in Galatians sharply contrasts alternative paths to justification and resurrection life: the path characterized by faith in God’s promise and the dynamic of the Spirit over against the path characterized by doing “all things written in the Book of the Law” in reliance on the flesh (3:10 ESV). The former secures not only vindication and life, but also the status of sons and heirs as Abraham’s promised seed; and it does so for believers of all nationalities, without distinction (3:6–9, 13–14, 26–29). The latter produces curse and death (3:10–12) because the law, though revealing God’s holy character and the corresponding obligation of his servants, lacks the power to reverse our spiritual death and enable our compliance with its requirements: “For if a law had been given that could give life, then righteousness would indeed be by the law” (3:21 ESV).
Paul makes two shocking hermeneutical moves to dramatize how alien to the gospel of Christ is a soteriology that shifts the ground of assurance as believers move from the initiation of life in Christ by faith in God’s promise to maturation by means of compliance to commandments. First, he identifies the law’s commands with the enslaving obligations that the Gentiles have experienced in pagan idolatry, referring to both within a few sentences of each other as “elementary principles” (στοιχεῖα) that enslave (4:3, 9). This term is rare in the Pauline corpus (also in Col 2:8, 20) and the New Testament (Heb 5:12; 2 Pet 3:10, 12). In Galatians 4 Paul applies it first to the law and soon
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thereafter to the nongods that the Galatians had served prior to faith in order to draw these two religious systems, apparently so different from each other, together under a single categorization. It is common in recent New Testament studies to interpret Paul’s use of στοιχεῖα as referring to malevolent spiritual beings and to support this identification by noting Paul’s declaration in Colossians 2:15 (between the two occurrences of στοιχεῖα in that epistle) that Christ’s death both erased the legal charges against us and disarmed the “rulers and authorities.”11 Even in the context of Colossians, however, the immediate contexts of στοιχεῖα suggest that it refers to human traditions (παράδοσιν τῶν ἀνθρώπων) (2:8) and regulations (δογματίζεσθε) (2:20) rather than to superhuman spirits. In Galatians the law’s custodial role in the history of redemption until the arrival of Christ, the object of faith (Gal 3:23), is explained by analogy to the tutors and managers who control an heir as long as he is a minor, making his daily experience like slavery (4:1–2). In this connection Paul describes the law’s commands as “elemental principles,” that is, controls appropriate to the heir’s minority rather than the epoch of maturity and investiture.12 Now that Messiah has arrived—and with him the era of the heir’s liberation—to seek spiritual security in commandment keeping is tantamount to returning to the idols whom the Galatians once sought to placate by their own performance.
Certainly as to their ethical content Paul would never equate the law given by God at Sinai (“holy and righteous and good”; Rom 7:12 ESV) with the Galatians’ pre-Christian pagan practices, when they were “enslaved to those that by nature are not gods” (Gal 4:8 ESV). Yet he daringly implies that the Galatians’ submission to circumcision (and consequent obligation to keep the whole law; 5:3) as the condition of continuing in covenantal status would entail a “return” to the “weak and worthless” elements that they had left when they turned from idols to Christ Jesus. Since the law was never designed by its
11. See, e.g., the brief discussion in Timothy George, Galatians (New American Commentary; Nashville: Broadman & Holman, 1994), 298–99.
12. F. F. Bruce, The Epistle to the Galatians: A Commentary on the Greek Text (New International Greek Testament Commentary; Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1982), 193: “Whatever else may be said of these στοιχεῖα, they plainly include the law, in the sense of 3:23 (which refers to the same situation): ‘Before faith came, we were guarded ὑπὸ νόμον.’”
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giver to impart life to fallen human beings, to try to use it as a means of justification is to distort it into an implement of idolatry—to deify one’s own obedience as a rival redeemer and justifier in competition to God’s provision in the Messiah.
Paul’s second move is equally daring: he identifies law reliance with Ishmael, the rejected son born of Abraham’s flesh-bound union with the concubine Hagar (Gal 4:21–31). Paul’s symbolic interpretation of Genesis 16 and Genesis 21 links Ishmael, the slave woman’s son, with Sinai and “the present Jerusalem,” capital of the Jewish establishment that had spurned the Messiah Jesus in favor of Torah, temple, and tradition (Gal 4:25). Ishmael was the son born of “flesh” not because sexual intercourse produced his conception (Sarah would conceive in the same way), but because he represents the way of attaining God’s promise through efforts within human capacity and control rather than through utter reliance upon God’s power to confer his promised blessing, which lies utterly beyond human resources, strategies, and efforts. By contrast, Isaac is aptly described as the product of divine promise and the Spirit (who, Paul notes in Rom 4:17, 19, imparts resurrection life to the reproductively dead Abraham and Sarah). Like Isaac, Christian believers are born by Spirit-wrought faith in God’s promise and are the free sons13 who inherit the fullness of covenant blessing promised to Abraham (Gal 4:28–31). The Ishmael/Isaac, flesh/Spirit contrast lays the foundation upon which Paul distinguishes the flesh’s divisive deeds from the Spirit’s graceful fruit in Galatians 5:16–24.
By making believers’ status and tenure in God’s favor contingent on their own fidelity in covenant keeping (with divine assistance), the Judaizers’ so-called gospel sowed seeds of insecurity or pride or both in Gentile Christians’ hearts; and these seeds inevitably germinated into expressions of competition and rivalry, the very antitheses of “faith working through love” (5:6 ESV). Such manifestations of the flesh, no less than libertine sensuality, disqualify people from God’s kingdom (5:21). A little reflection clarifies why this is so. When one’s assurance of divine approval becomes contingent on one’s own track
13. In Christ male and female share equally in the sonship privilege as heirs of the Abrahamic blessing (Gal 3:26–28).
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record of obedience (even grace-assisted, leniently assessed obedience),14 it is natural to seek reassurance of one’s spiritual standing through comparison and contrast with the perceived maturity and performance of others.
14. Some federal-vision advocates draw a distinction between God’s “strict” justice, which only Christ’s perfection can satisfy, and God’s “fatherly” assessment, which accepts our less-than-perfect obedience, calling it “pleasing” and “good.” Rich Lusk, for example, asserts: “The final declaration God passes over us at the last day will be in accordance with the pattern of life we have lived. There will be a congruence between the life we have lived and the final verdict we receive. Those who have lived lives of faith—meaning lives characterized at their core by loyalty to God—will be justified. . . . The good works believers have done will not merit final justification, but . . . there will be a basic match between the verdict rendered and the life lived”; “Faith, Baptism, and Justification,” http://www.hornes.org/theologia/ content/rich_lusk/faith_baptism_and_justification.htm (accessed August 12, 2004) (emphasis original). In another essay Lusk attempts to soften the daunting prospect of final judgment based on our works: “The Bible nowhere says God will apply absolute justice at the last day. . . . The only places where God enforces strict justice are the cross and hell. For the covenant people, at least, it seems God will use ‘fatherly justice’ in the final judgment, not ‘absolute justice.’ He will judge us the way parents evaluate their child’s art work, or the way a new husband assesses the dinner his beloved wife has made. The standard will be soft and generous because God is merciful”; “Future Justification to the Doers of the Law,” http://www .hornes.org/theologia/content/rich_lusk/future_justification_to_the_doers_of_the_law.htm (accessed August 12, 2004). The problem, however, is that this “soft” paternal “justice,” which cuts us some slack in consideration of our weakness, tames and compromises both justice and grace. This kinder, gentler justice approves us as “righteous” as long as we stay loyal—that is, as long as we do not apostatize by abandoning the visible church, but it also introduces our works (all to God’s glory and even with the Spirit’s assistance, of course!) into the equation that yields our ultimate vindication. Repudiating the word and concept of “merit” as utterly alien to biblical, covenantal thought, federal vision nevertheless insists that believers’ behavior must be “congruent with” a justifying declaration of God. It is, however, precisely the point of Jesus’s parable of the two debtors in Luke 7 that only a lively awareness that our enormous debt, infinitely beyond our capacity to repay, has been forgiven and altogether eliminated can motivate us to serve God out of sheer love, with no ulterior motive (e.g., quelling insecure fears of divine rejection, placing God under obligation by our perseverance in covenant keeping). When the question “why obey?” is approached from the perspective that biblical covenants have two parts, promise and command—one for each party (which is true enough)—or from the angle that covenant blessing is contingent on our fulfilling the “conditions” of the covenant (either making faith the first condition that we must fulfill, to be accompanied by repentance, new obedience, and church membership, or else expanding the definition of faith in such a way that believers are led to rely, in some sense, both on Jesus’s sacrifice and on their own response in repentant obedience and membership), what is obscured is the logic of Jesus’s parable and of the woman’s service: she did not bring her lavish gift or weep over Jesus’s feet out of a sense that these were conditions of the covenant that she needed to keep on fulfilling in order to receive, or even to continue in, the blessing of forgiveness. To speak of conditions to be satisfied misrepresents the whole psychological dynamic that Jesus’s parable exposed: it is precisely when our creditor shows himself so utterly gracious as to absorb our debt himself, fulfilling the conditions of our liberation from indebtedness, that love (and hence obedience and service) is evoked inevitably and spontaneously in the heart of those who discover that they have received such utterly undeserved grace.
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By contrast, Paul asserts an alternative that is counterintuitive to the unbelieving heart (whether legalist or libertine). Legalist and libertine agree with each other that, unless one believes that God’s approval or rejection is contingent on one’s behavior, no plausible motive exists for obeying God’s commands. The legalist hears God’s summons to pursue holiness (law) and reasons that one must obey because God’s acceptance is contingent on one’s own obedience. The libertine hears God’s assurance of forgiveness (gospel) and reasons that, inasmuch as God’s acceptance is not contingent on one’s own obedience, no one needs to obey. Christ’s apostle, however, is privy to a stronger, deeper motive that is hidden from legalist and libertine hearts: spontaneous love, the fruit of the Spirit (Gal 5:22).
The Spirit conveys this response of love to our hearts through the gospel of Christ’s death and resurrection, the message that the Galatians first heard with faith (3:2). As the reality and implications of our union with Christ in his crucifixion and resurrection increasingly control believers’ self-perception, the magnitude of our guilt undercuts the plausibility of our pride: in Paul’s terms, all “boasts” are silenced except boasting in the Lord (Gal 6:14; cf. Rom 3:27; 1 Cor 1:31).
Those who have been “crucified with Christ” (Gal 2:20) know that their most shameful secrets are displayed to public view on his cross. Yet our union with Christ in his cross also overwhelms us with the magnitude of divine grace. The law rightly cursed everyone who failed to keep its every command (Gal 3:10, citing Deut 27:26). Grace shocks us when God’s anointed, the only law keeper, became the cursed one hanged on a tree (Gal 3:13, citing Deut 21:23), particularly when we are told that as he did he redeemed us from the law’s curse and secured for us the blessing of Abraham, the promised Spirit (Gal 3:14). Christ’s cross simultaneously broadcasts that we cannot rely on our “doing” (flawed as it is) and that we need not, for God has provided the surrogate covenant keeper and covenant curse bearer.
It is also believers’ union with Christ in his resurrection that grounds an assurance that silences both our insecurities and our boasts. Although the cross occupies center stage in Galatians, elsewhere in
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the Pauline corpus the “centrality of the resurrection” emerges.15 With respect to Jesus, the resurrection constituted his own “justification” (ἐδικαιώθη) (1 Tim 3:16)—that is, the just judge’s declaration that Jesus, having kept the covenant’s stipulations flawlessly, is qualified to claim the reward of the righteous, the life of the age to come. Whereas Jesus’s violent death under curse was the consequence of his vicarious identification with sinners, his resurrection constituted the Father’s certification of and reward for Jesus’s personal innocence and perfect fidelity to the law of the covenant.
Jesus’s resurrection constituted justification-vindication not only for himself but also for those who are united to him by faith: “Who was handed over [to death] because of our transgressions and was raised because of our justification” (Rom 4:25). In Romans 5 Paul immediately elaborates this compact articulation of the union of Christ with his own, demonstrating why his death has removed our transgressions, and his resurrection—the perpetual witness to his perfect obedience (so Richard Gaffin)16—has secured our justification. The reconciliation with God that Christians already experience through Christ’s death confirms a fortiori our confident expectation of future, eschatological salvation through his life—that is, through the resurrection life into which he has entered and which he imparts preliminarily to believers by the Spirit (5:9–11). Paul then exposes the covenantal basis of his logic in the comparison and contrast that he draws between Adam and Christ (5:12–21). In both cases a specific response to the divine sovereign’s revealed will entails both a legal verdict (guilty or righteous) and a sanction commensurate with the verdict (death or life): just as transgression leads to condemnation (5:16, 18–19) and so to death (5:15, 17), so obedience leads to righteousness (5:16, 18–19) and so to life (5:17–18). Adam’s transgression, his breach of the original covenant, justly warranted the verdict of condemnation and the penalty of death for all for whom he acted.
15. Richard B. Gaffin Jr., The Centrality of the Resurrection: A Study in Paul’s Soteriology (Grand Rapids: Baker, 1978).
16. Ibid., 122: “Consequently, the eradication of death in his resurrection is nothing less than the removal of the verdict of condemnation and the effective affirmation of his (adamic) righteousness. His resurrected state is the reward and seal which testifies perpetually to his perfect obedience.”
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Because a parallel covenantal-representative relationship binds Christ with those for whom he acts, Christ’s obedience warranted the verdict of justification and the commensurate blessing (“reward,” as Gaffin aptly calls it) of life—the resurrection life of the age to come. The juxtaposition of death to life throughout this paragraph demonstrates that by the word life Paul refers to nothing less than resurrection life. The alternative outcomes announced by Moses—“I have set before you life and death, blessings and curses” (Deut 30:19 NIV)—have been raised to eschatological dimensions. Paul’s compact description of the outcome of Christ’s righteous action at the end of Romans 5:18, “[leading] to justification of life” (εἰς δικαίωσιν ζωῆς), should therefore be understood as commentary on “he was raised because of our justification [διὰ τῆν δικαίωσιν ἡμῶν]” (4:25). For Paul, Christ’s resurrection constitutes the Father’s declaration that he had perfectly fulfilled the covenant servant’s obligation to express comprehensive loyalty to the sovereign in immaculate obedience to the stipulations of the covenant. Moreover, Christ’s resurrection constitutes the Father’s declaration that in Christ’s obedience on our behalf we too have fulfilled the stipulations of the covenant and are thereby entitled (for Jesus’s sake) to vindication in resurrection.17
17. The conjunctions drawn by Paul between disobedience, condemnation, and death on the one hand and obedience, justification, and resurrection life on the other should be noted particularly because some who now challenge the classic Reformation understanding of justification as including the imputation of Christ’s righteousness to believers contend that for Paul Christ’s death and resurrection, rather than Christ’s death and active obedience to the obligations enjoined by the law, constitute the ground of Christians’ justification. Norman Shepherd, for example, pointedly contrasts the Reformed emphasis on Christ’s active obedience in justification to Paul’s statement in Rom 4:25, contending that for Paul justification consists only in the forgiveness of sins; “Justification by Faith in Pauline Theology,” in Backbone of the Bible: Covenant in Contemporary Perspective (ed. P. Andrew Sandlin; Nacogdoches, TX: Covenant Media, 2004), 86. Shepherd consequently reduces the role of Christ’s resurrection in our justification (Rom 4:25) to God’s certification “that the penalty for sin has been paid in full and that therefore the justice of God has been satisfied” (88). “His resurrection on the third day testifies to the efficacy of this atoning sacrifice” (89). Consistent with this exclusive focus of justification on forgiveness, Shepherd contends that in Rom 5:18–19 Christ’s obedience, set in contrast to Adam’s disobedience, consists only of his atoning sacrifice (88). Paul, however, sees Christ as doing far more for his own than removing from them the condemnation and curse earned by Adam, restoring us to the legal status of Adam in innocence. Despite the parallelism in the structure of covenantal representation, Paul insists that God’s gift far surpasses the effects of Adam’s trespass. The Adam/Christ contrast in Rom 5 shows that, just as Adam’s transgression constituted the ground of the negative verdict (condemnation) and the penalty (death) that has fallen on those he represented, so Christ’s obedience (not only as
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How, then, does such assurance grounded wholly in Christ’s work (in Galatians, preeminently in the cross) work its way out in application to the conflicts that threaten to tear apart the Galatian churches? Paul’s gospel does not breed passivity or quietism. Rather, he appeals to believers’ new, grace-given identity in order to spur them on toward attitudes and actions consistent with who they are in Christ, by grace and through faith. Because believers have been crucified with Christ (Gal 2:20), they have crucified the flesh with its passions and desires—preeminently, in this context, its passion and desire for superiority over others (5:24; cf. 6:14). Because they are children born, like Isaac, of Spirit rather than flesh (4:21–31), they must march along with (στοιχῶμεν) the Spirit rather than return to reliance on the flesh to commend themselves to the Father (5:25). In fact, only the Spirit’s sovereign power to enliven and transform keeps the assurance that flows from justification from degenerating into complacency and license, for apart from the Spirit’s work we would remain ungrateful even in the face of overwhelming grace. As our hearts, however, are saturated with the gospel of grace, the Spirit bears his sweet fruit (5:22–23) in our lives, not by inducing us to a nervous (or overconfident) attempt to fulfill the conditions of the covenant but by deepening our faith, which operates in love (5:6).
Paul’s counsel regarding the attitude and approach to be adopted when a fellow believer is caught in sin illustrates the difference that gospel-grounded assurance makes in our relationships with others (6:1–5). Paul addresses “you the spiritual ones” (ὑμεῖς οἱ πνευματικοί ) not to distinguish a mature subgroup from others in the Galatian churches but rather to call all believers to recognize their identity as those born of the Spirit (4:28–29), living by the Spirit and walking with the Spirit (5:25). Secure in the Father’s favor, they need not and must not see another’s sin as an occasion for comparison or boasting over the fallen (6:4). Humbled by the cross’s exposure of their sin, they will recognize their own vulnerability to be tempted, either by the sin that ensnared their brother or by the pride that sees itself as impregnable against temptation (6:1, 3). Instead of keeping their dis-
curse bearer but also as obedient covenant keeper) constitutes the ground of both the justifying verdict and the resurrection life that rewards righteousness, both for Jesus and—by amazingly gracious imputation—also for his people.
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tance in individualistic isolation, “the spiritual ones” will be so moved by the Savior who gave himself to redeem them that they shoulder the burden that crushes the sinner (6:2), fulfilling Christ’s law: “You shall love your neighbor as yourself” (5:14). Instead of standing apart in indifference or standing over in judgmentalism, they will reach down to restore in the Spirit of gentleness (ἐν πνεύματι πραΰτητος),18 as their master was gentle (Matt 11:29), not breaking bruised reeds or snuffing out flickering wicks (12:20).19
Historic Wisdom on the Cure of Souls Grounded in Justification
The investigations of Luke 7 and the epistle to the Galatians offered above seek to trace a connection between justification and the Christian’s motivation to pursue change toward holiness. That relation, however, is counterintuitive: Can we really be stirred to strive against sin and for purity by being assured that our acceptance before God is not contingent on such striving or succeeding? Such a paradoxical claim may seem unrealistic to those who confront sin’s intransigence. Some may think that the classic doctrine breeds antinomianism and thereby obstructs rather than supporting the pastor’s task to shepherd people toward Christ-like holiness. The Reformed tradition provides answers to this reservation.
John Calvin (1509–64)
By the middle of the sixteen century the Council of Trent (1546–63) had pronounced its anathema on anyone who says “that by faith alone the impious is justified; in such wise as to mean that nothing else is required to cooperate in order to the obtaining of the grace of justi-
18. English versions generally imply that Paul enjoins simply an attitude (“spirit”) of gentleness, but Paul’s original readers would understand this expression in light of the immediately preceding verses: “The fruit of the Spirit is . . . gentleness [πραΰτης]” (Gal 5:22–23) and the implicit reference to the Spirit in “the spiritual ones” (οἱ πνευματικοί) in the same sentence (6:1).
19. Paul’s “burden bearing” metaphor parallels—and may intentionally echo—Jesus’s metaphor of burdens and the yoke in Matt 11:28–29.
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fication, and that it is not in any way necessary that he be prepared and disposed by the movement of his own will” (session 6, canon 9) and on anyone who says “that men are justified, either by the sole imputation of the justice of Christ or by the sole remission of sins, to the exclusion of the grace and the charity that is poured forth in their hearts by the Holy Ghost and is inherent in them, or even that the grace, whereby we are justified, is only the favour of God” (session 6, canon 11).20 Rome thus insisted that justification should be considered contingent not only on Christ’s sacrifice and obedience on behalf of the believer but also on the Spirit’s work of subjective transformation within the believer. Only by including the Christian’s grace-wrought works in the justification transaction could antinomianism be avoided and could ongoing effort in sanctification be motivated.
Calvin’s response to the Roman critics was not to declare the subjective transformation of believers unnecessary. In fact, Calvin began his discussion of “the way in which we receive the grace of Christ” by insisting that “as long as Christ remains outside of us, and we are separated from him, all that he has suffered and done for the salvation of the human race remains useless and of no value to us” (Institutes 3.1.1). He went on to affirm that the faith by which God justifies us
embraces Christ, as offered to us by the Father—that is, since he is offered not only for righteousness, forgiveness of sins, and peace, but also for sanctification and the fountain of the water of life—without a doubt, no one can duly know him without at the same time apprehending the sanctification of the Spirit. . . . Christ cannot be known apart from the sanctification of his Spirit. It follows that faith can in no wise be separated from a devout disposition. (Institutes 3.2.8)
He also wrote:
Now, both repentance and forgiveness of sins—that is, newness of life and free reconciliation—are conferred on us by Christ, and both
20. Dogmatic Canons and Decrees: Authorized Translations of the Council of Trent, the Decree on the Immaculate Conception, the Syllabus of Pope Pius IX, and the Decrees of the Vatican Council (1912; repr. Rockford, IL: Tan, 1977), 51–52 (session 6 in 1547).
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are attained by us through faith. . . . Man is justified by faith alone, and simple pardon; nevertheless actual holiness of life, so to speak, is not separated from free imputation of righteousness. (Institutes 3.3.1)21
For Calvin, Rome’s error lay not in insisting that justification and holiness of life are inseparable, but rather in Rome’s reversing of the biblical order and logic of the application of Christ’s benefits: “For the teaching of the Schoolmen, that love is prior to faith and hope, is mere madness; for it is faith alone that first engenders love in us” (Institutes 3.2.41).22 It is the “taste” of God’s goodness that kindles love for God in return: “For truly, that abundant sweetness which God has stored up for those who fear him cannot be known without at the same time powerfully moving us. And once anyone has been moved by it, it utterly ravishes him and draws him to itself” (3.2.41).23 God’s justifying declaration coincides temporally with the initiation of our sanctification as the Spirit unites us to Christ by faith, but justification’s logical priority is essential for believers’ assurance and thus for our hope and motivation in the lifelong process of mortification (to sin) and vivification (to God): “The Lord freely justifies his own in order that he may at the same time restore them to true righteousness by sanctification of his Spirit” (3.3.19, emphasis added).
Calvin applied the faith-to-love, justification-to-sanctification order of the gospel to the challenge of sustaining motivation as we pursue holiness in the Christian life (Institutes 3.6.3). Specifically in response to the objection that justification by faith alone stifles zeal
21. Cf. Institutes 3.11.2: “Therefore, we explain justification simply as the acceptance with which God receives us into his own favor as righteous men. And we say that it consists in the remission of sins and the imputation of Christ’s righteousness.” Regarding the role of faith (versus our love, which in other contexts Paul ranks over faith; 1 Cor 13:13; Col 3:14) in justification, Calvin observes (Institutes 3.18.8): “The power of justifying, which faith possesses, does not lie in any worth of works. Our justification rests upon God’s mercy alone and Christ’s merit, and faith, when it lays hold of justification, is said to justify. . . . We say that faith justifies, not because it merits righteousness for us by its own worth, but because it is an instrument whereby we obtain free the righteousness of Christ.”
22. Cf. Trent’s decree on justification (session 6, canons 5–6); Dogmatic Canons and Decrees, 26–29.
23. Note also Calvin’s interpretation (Institutes 3.4.37) of the causal order—forgiveness to love—in the woman of Luke 7, cited above.
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for good works, Calvin alleged that no “sharper spurs” can be found to arouse Christians to holy living “than those derived from the end of our redemption and calling,” alluding to various biblical passages in which believers are summoned to lives of love and purity by such inducements as the love of him “who first loved us,” the cleansing of our consciences by Christ’s blood, our deliverance from our enemies, our union with Christ in his death and resurrection, and so on (3.16.2). Calvin summarized: “All the apostles are full of exhortations, urgings, and reproofs with which to instruct the man of God in every good work, and that without mention of merit. Rather, they derive their most powerful exhortations from the thought that our salvation stands upon no merit of ours but solely upon God’s mercy” (3.16.3). Pastoral counseling in the mold of the apostles builds its rationale for repentance and renewed obedience on the foundation of faith’s assurance in God’s freely granted and irreversible gift of righteousness, for Jesus’s sake.
Guido de Brès (1522–67) and the Belgic Confession (1561)
Two years after the publication of the final Latin edition of Calvin’s Institutes of the Christian Religion, Guido de Brès published the Belgic Confession on behalf of persecuted Protestants in the Low Countries of Western Europe (now Belgium and the Netherlands). Among its purposes was to affirm to the Roman Catholic monarch Philip II these churches’ political submission and also their strong commitment to biblical orthodoxy as defined in their confession. Six years later de Brès himself would be among those who laid down their lives for the sake of the Reformed articulation of the gospel.
Belgic Confession 24, “The Sanctification of Sinners,” immediately follows its articles on the righteousness of faith (22) and on justification (23). Article 22 states that saving faith “embraces Jesus Christ, with all his merits, and no longer looks for anything apart from him,” emphasizing that reliance on anything within ourselves to commend us to God implies the insufficiency of Christ and his redeeming work. Article 24 therefore pointedly addresses the objection that the Reformed understanding of faith and justification, by excluding the believer’s inherent love and good deeds from the trans-
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action, vitiates the motivation to resist sin and pursue conformity to Christ. Like Calvin, the Belgic Confession insists that saving faith is life transforming:
We believe that this true faith, produced in man by the hearing of God’s Word and by the work of the Holy Spirit, regenerates him and makes him a “new man,” causing him to live the “new life,” and freeing him from the slavery of sin. Therefore, far from making people cold toward living in a pious and holy way, this justifying faith, quite to the contrary, so works within them that apart from it they will never do a thing out of love for God but only out of love for themselves and fear of being condemned. So then, it is impossible for this holy faith to be unfruitful in a human being, seeing that we do not speak of an empty faith but of what Scripture calls “faith working through love,” which leads a man to do by himself the works that God has commanded in his Word.
The Belgic Confession implies that Rome’s soteriology, by making the individual’s justification partially contingent on his own (admittedly grace-assisted) efforts, excludes the only motivation that could ever make a human deed good: love for God. As long as the prospect of divine approval for obedience and divine condemnation for disobedience remain in the picture, self-love and fear remain the driving forces that compel a form of compliance to God’s will. Only the purely gracious justification (both atonement of sins and imputation of righteousness) that removes one’s personal performance as a condition for divine approval produces a genuinely theocentric motive for keeping God’s commands (grateful love) through the life-producing Spirit of God, God’s gift to those who are justified once for all in his Son:
So then, we do good works but not for merit—for what would we merit? Rather, we are indebted to God for the good works we do, and not he to us, since it is he who “works in us both to will and do according to his good pleasure”—thus keeping in mind what is written: “When you have done all that is commanded you, then you shall say, “We are unworthy servants; we have done what it was our duty to do.” . . .
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Moreover, although we do good works we do not base our salvation on them; for we cannot do any work that is not defiled by our flesh and also worthy of punishment. And even if we could point to one, memory of a single sin is enough for God to reject that work. So we would always be in doubt, tossed back and forth without any certainty, and our poor consciences would be tormented constantly if they did not rest on the merit of the suffering and death of our Savior.24
Both the awareness that genuinely good works (which spring from trust in Christ and express gratitude to him) are themselves gifts of God’s Spirit and the awareness that our best works still bear the stain of our fallenness preclude any reliance on our performance before God’s tribunal. Nevertheless, both the insecure apprehension of rejection and the self-confident expectation of reward have been replaced by a new, stronger, and infinitely better motive: love that obeys God for God’s sake, not for ours.
The Marrow of Modern Divinity (1627–55)
Emphasis on the freeness of divine grace was misunderstood by some in the seventeenth century as license for antinomian indulgence, which in turn provoked a strongly legalistic reaction from others—although it was a legalism expressed in language heavily laced with grace (as Trent had articulated Rome’s position a century before).
The pseudonymous Marrow of Modern Divinity, published the same year as the Westminster Confession of Faith, is structured as a four-way conversation among Neophytus (a new Christian), Nomista (a legalist), Antinomista (an antinomian), and Evangelista (a minister of the true gospel).25 This cast of characters reveals the Marrow’s purpose to distinguish the biblical gospel from antinomianism on the one hand and from legalism on the other, as well as its pastoral concern
24. Ecumenical Creeds and Reformed Confessions (Grand Rapids: CRC, 1987), 101–2.
25. The Marrow of Modern Divinity, with notes by Thomas Boston (1726; repr. Swengel, PA: Reiner, 1978).
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to guard young believers from the spiritual dangers associated with either extreme.26
The Marrow was intended to clarify the relationship between saving faith, justification, and obedience to God’s commands as the Christian’s responsibility in sanctification. Most relevant to the topic at hand is the recurring theme that the only source capable of evoking a genuinely loving obedience to God is confidence in God’s promise of forgiveness and right standing, secured by Christ’s work and freely given by faith in Christ alone. In answer to Nomista’s insistence that repentance (understood as reformation of life) must precede faith, the Marrow argued that “the repentant sinner first believes” that God will keep his promise, then after that “cometh alteration of life.”27 Repentance is not an “antecedent of faith,” but rather a “consequent.” Only believers love God, and it is God’s love that “constrains him in Christ.”28
When Antinomista attempts to excuse himself from obedience to God’s commands by observing that the good deeds of many people are self-deceiving, Evangelista concurs that the danger of self-deception is real but insists that Christians will not deceive themselves if they always evaluate their obedience in relation to Christ. A Christian reckons that his sanctity flows “from the habits of grace within him,” which in turn flow from his justification, and that from faith “given and embracing Jesus Christ.”29
Despite the attempt of the Marrow to show how the biblical gospel is to be distinguished both from legalism and from antinomian-
26. One example of the pastoral wisdom of the Marrow is Nomista’s monologue narrating his progressively deepening understanding of the law’s demands, from focusing on consistency in devotional practices and visible behavioral reform; to focusing on fervent inward devotion, rigorous self-examination, and confession of sin; to discovering deeper flaws in his obedience as well as the self-centeredness of his motivation. Yet at every stage Nomista reports that ministers reassured him that his accomplishment was sufficient and should satisfy his conscience. The last minister he consulted responded, “Do not fear; for the best of Christians have their failings and no man keepeth the law of God perfectly; and therefore go on, and do as you have done, in striving to keep the law perfectly; and in what you cannot do, God will accept the will for the deed; and wherein you come short, Christ will help you out.” Yet such counselors could not quiet the legalist’s uneasy conscience (Marrow of Modern Divinity, 87–91).
27. Ibid., 145–46.
28. Ibid., 150.
29. Ibid., 187–88.
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ism,30 unease and tension persisted in the English-speaking churches descended from the Reformation.31
Thomas Chalmers (1780–1847)
Early in the nineteenth century the preaching of Church of Scotland pastor Thomas Chalmers (later professor of theology at Edinburgh University) stimulated the congregation of St. George’s Tron in Glasgow to apply their Christian faith to the growing urban problems being created by the Industrial Revolution and the rampant commercialization of society. His summons to culture-permeating reform, unlike that of the American social gospel in the same century, was grounded in the grace of the gospel—specifically, in the assurance
30. A recent articulation of how the gospel stands over against both legalism and antinomianism is found in one of the foundational statements of Redeemer Presbyterian Church in New York City. Timothy J. Keller explores the implications of the Pauline expression live “in line with the truth of the gospel” (Gal 2:14 NIV), arguing and illustrating that “the Christian life is a process of renewing every dimension of our life—spiritual, psychological, corporate, social—by thinking, hoping, and living out the ‘lines’ or ramifications of the gospel. The gospel is to be applied to every area of thinking, feeling, relating, working and behaving. . . . All of us, to some degree, live around the truth of the gospel but do not ‘get’ it. So the key to continual and deeper spiritual renewal and revival is the continual re-discovery of the gospel.” Keller proceeds to contrast the gospel with two rivals: religion (moralism, legalism) and irreligion (hedonism, relativism). Both of the rivals are “ways to avoid Jesus as Savior and keep control of their lives,” either through strenuous effort to establish one’s own moral superiority (religion/moralism) or through a dismissal of the normativity of God’s standards and the consequent elimination of one’s need for the gospel’s radical solution to human guilt (irreligion/relativism). See Timothy J. Keller, “The Centrality of the Gospel,” http://www.redeemer2.com/resources/papers/centrality. pdf (accessed January 17, 2005).
31. From the late seventeenth century, in the context of the moralism of Latitudinarian preaching after the restoration of the English monarchy, comes Walter Marshall’s The Gospel Mystery of Sanctification (1692; repr. Lafayette, IN: Sovereign Grace, 2001), a little-known but powerful restatement of the power of justification-based assurance to motivate growth in sanctification. Marshall’s classic has been paraphrased into modern English by Bruce H. McRae under the title The Gospel Mystery of Sanctification: Growing in Holiness by Living in Union with Christ (Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock, 2005). Taking account of the apprehension of some that salvation “by free grace without works” would dampen zeal and promote carelessness in religion (40), Marshall contended that to make any progress toward holiness one must be “well persuaded of our reconciliation with God. . . . And in this I include the great benefit of justification, as the means by which we are reconciled to God, which is described in Scripture, either by forgiving our sins, or by the imputation of righteousness to us (Rom 4:5–7); because both are contained in one and the same justifying act” (14). On the tension between evangelical and legalistic emphases in sanctification as it continued into the eighteenth century in the Church of Scotland, see David C. Lachman, The Marrow Controversy, 1718–1723: An Historical and Theological Analysis (Edinburgh: Rutherford, 1988).
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of God’s gracious acceptance and approval—and based wholly on Christ’s redemptive work and received only by faith.
Among Chalmers’s most well-known sermons is “The Expulsive Power of a New Affection,” which he opens by positing two contrasting strategies for turning people away from sinful desires. The first strategy, that of demonstrating that “the world’s” attractions are deceitful and destructive of those who set their hearts on them, can never effect lasting change for the simple reason that it does nothing more than create an affection vacuum in the human heart. To be told, even persuaded, that clinging to a particular pattern of sin or self-righteousness is futile and self-destructive will not, in itself, free the heart from that pattern’s allure and control, as both pastors and their counselees can sadly attest.
Only the second strategy, which replaces affection for sin with a new and stronger affection for an infinitely more delightful object, can supply the motivation that sustains ongoing pursuit of holiness. The overwhelming beauty of a “new affection,” the discovery of a manifestly more attractive object of desire and occasion of delight, easily displaces the inferior appeal of sin. The transformation of desire that leads to a new course of life, which the law’s warnings and prohibitions could not effect, is produced by God’s Spirit through the sweetness of the gospel’s promise and the assurance of the Father’s welcome for Jesus’s sake:
The best way of casting out an impure affection is to admit a pure one; and by the love of what is good to expel the love of what is evil. Thus it is, that the freer gospel, the more sanctifying is the gospel; and the more it is received as a doctrine of grace, the more will it be felt as a doctrine according to godliness. . . . It is only when, as in the gospel, acceptance is bestowed as a present, without money and without price, that the security which man feels in God is placed beyond the reach of disturbance, or that he can repose in Him as one friend reposes in another, . . . the one party rejoicing over the other to do him good, the other finding that the truest gladness of his heart lies in the impulse of a gratitude by which it is awakened to the charms of a new moral existence. Salvation by grace—salvation by free grace—salvation not of works, but according to the mercy of God, salvation on such a footing is not more indispensable to
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the deliverance of our persons from the hand of justice than it is to the deliverance of our hearts from the chill and the weight of ungodliness.32
The same utterly gracious grace that erases our guilt, silencing our accusing consciences as it satisfies divine justice, sets our hearts free to pursue joyful holiness in fearless love for the God who has lavished love on us.33
Conclusion
Daunting challenges confront pastors in their care for God’s people. What does the pastor say to defuse the pent-up resentment that separates a husband and a wife who once vowed to be one throughout
32. Thomas Chalmers, “The Expulsive Power of a New Affection,” in The Selected Works of Thomas Chalmers (New York: Carter, 1848), 4.271–78.
33. The same insistence on gospel-driven, grace-drawn sanctification was articulated by one of Chalmers’s Edinburgh theology students, Horatius Bonar (1809–99), who served as a pastor in the Church of Scotland and a founder of the Free Church in the Great Disruption of 1843. Bonar not only authored well-known hymns extolling divine grace (“Not What These Hands Have Done,” “Thy Works, Not Mine, O Christ”) but also produced a pair of slender pastoral defenses of the Reformation teaching on justification and sanctification. In the second, God’s Way of Holiness (1864; repr, Ross-Shire: Christian Focus, 1999), 56, Bonar wrote: “Forgiveness of sins, in believing God’s testimony to the finished propitiation of the cross, is not simply indispensable to a holy life, in the way of removing terror and liberating the soul from the pressure of guilt, but of imparting an impulse, and a motive, and a power which nothing else could do. Forgiveness at the end or in the middle; a partial forgiveness, or an uncertain forgiveness, or a grudging forgiveness, would be of no avail; it would only tantalize and mock; but a complete forgiveness, presented in such a way as to carry its own certainty along with it to every one who will take it at the hands of God; this is a power in the earth, a power against self, a power against sin, a power over the flesh, a power for holiness, such as no amount of suspense or terror could create” (emphasis original). Bonar went on to argue against those who object that offering assurance of God’s forgiveness too freely will lull hearers into complacency in their sin: “A forgiven man is the true worker, the true law keeper. He can, he will, he must work for God. He has come into contact with that part of God’s character which warms his cold heart. Forgiving love constrains him. He cannot but work for him who has removed his sins from him as far as the east is from the west. . . . Forgiveness received freely from the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ acts as a spring, an impulse, a stimulus of divine potency. It is more irresistible than law, or terror, or threat. A half forgiveness, an uncertain justification, a changeable peace, may lead to careless living and more careless working; may slacken the energy and freeze up the springs of action (for it shuts out that aspect of God’s character which gladdens and quickens); but a complete and assured pardon can have no such effect. . . . Its tendencies towards holiness and consistency of life are marvellous in their power and certainty” (58, emphasis original; see also 148–54n6).
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life? How can the captive of shameful lust be captured by an even stronger hunger for holiness and catch a taste of hope that freedom is possible? And what cure can address the tangle of self-contempt, resentment, and fear that tyrannizes the insecure teenager?
Obviously each counselee and situation have distinctive features that call for great pastoral wisdom, sensitivity, flexibility, and boldness, in humble dependence on the Spirit of Christ to apply the word of Christ to the deep recesses of the heart. No single formula or script can guarantee the desired outcome in the healing of relationships and the cure of souls. (If we pastors thought that our skills or insights could secure the results we seek, we would be succumbing to yet one more expression of works-righteousness and self-justification.) Nevertheless the practical usefulness of the biblical doctrine of justification can be illustrated by suggesting how justification would motivate each of these hurting and hurtful people to pursue the aspects of sanctification that are most needed in view of their distinctive life-dominating problems (both as sinners and as those sinned against).
The battling couple may well need to be shown and held accountable for establishing new patterns of communication: listening before speaking, refusing to resurrect past slights, asking questions before jumping to conclusions, avoiding inflammatory absolutes (“you never . . . ,” “you always . . .”). None of these valuable skills will be maintained, however, unless and until the grace of God in the gospel breaks through the hardness of their hearts at new and deeper levels. Their bitterness toward each other may result from unrealistic expectations and hopes shattered by the spouse’s failure, from the effort to justify oneself by magnifying the spouse’s culpability, from the fear that forgiveness will be misconstrued as a license to perpetuate harmful behavior, or from some combination of these and other factors. Each needs to see the true magnitude of his or her own debt of offense toward God, the abundance of God’s mercy in erasing that debt through the cross of Christ, and the invincible assurance of God’s approval, grounded on the imputed righteousness of Jesus. As these truths grip their hearts (which often results not from an instantaneous change but from a prolonged struggle), defenses can fall, sins can be confessed (genuinely, not merely as a step in a required formula), forgiveness can flow, and hope can rekindle. John Piper writes:
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What makes marriage almost impossible at times is that both partners feel so self-justified in their expectations that are not being fulfilled. . . . The cycle of self-justified self-pity and anger seems unbreakable. But what if one or both of the partners becomes overwhelmed with the truth of justification by faith alone, and with the particular truth that in Christ Jesus God credits me, for Christ’s sake, as fulfilling all his expectations? What would happen if this doctrine so mastered our souls that we began to bend it from the vertical to the horizontal? What if we applied it to our marriages? In our own imperfect efforts in this regard, there have been breakthroughs that seemed at times impossible.34
The man unwillingly (yet, in another sense, willingly) enslaved by impure fantasies desperately needs “the expulsive power of a new affection,” which only the gospel of God’s free grace—“the freer the better,” as Chalmers said—can impart. He is painfully familiar with the adverse psychological consequences of his addiction, but has experienced the accuracy of Chalmers’s analysis: the merely negative persuasion that sinful pleasure is ephemeral and ultimately self-destructive lacks the strength in itself to break sin’s grip on the heart. The pastor will need to probe sensitively but frankly from what stresses or trials of life this man is seeking refuge in thoughts and actions cloaked in shame and then to show him from the gospel that Christ’s grace and holiness alone can satisfy his deepest longings. Only as he is ravished by the sacrificial love of Christ and assured of the Father’s delighted approval for Jesus’s sake will the attractiveness of old lusts lose their luster. This man needs not only a deep redirection of his desires. He also needs strong hope and much reassurance that his seemingly unbreakable cycle of shame and failure cannot withstand the forgiving, justifying, transforming grace of God in Christ Jesus. Piper observes:
Sin creates a real guilt that makes a person feel despairing and hopeless. That despair and hopelessness is one of the most powerful bondages to sinning there is. You ask such people if they know that the sin’s lure is a lie, and they will, amazingly, agree with you
34. Piper, Counted Righteous in Christ, 27.
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that it is a lie. But they feel hopeless and therefore say, “It doesn’t matter, there’s no hope anyway; I am beyond forgiveness.” This is a very deep bondage to actual sinning rooted in the despair of guilt. I would argue that this kind of bondage is precisely what [Rom 6] verse 7 can overcome—and is probably designed to overcome. Justification—legal acquittal from and declaration of our righteousness before God—grounds the possibility of liberation from slavery to sin. In wakening hope for acceptance with God by faith alone, it creates the very possibility and foundation for fighting against the bondage of sin that enslaves us.35
With the beauty of Christ portrayed before him, the assurance of the Father’s welcome for Jesus’s sake ringing in his ears and heart, and hope in the Spirit’s relentless work to conform God’s justified children eventually to the holiness of the Son, this once-defeated sinner can be guided to practical strategies (avoiding occasions of temptation, establishing accountability, etc.) for resisting sin and embracing purity with joy.
Wisdom dictates that the pastor enlist a mature woman who has learned to live “in line with the truth of the gospel” (Gal 2:14 NIV) to participate in counseling to apply the gospel tenderly to the adolescent’s deep emotional anguish. This young woman needs to have her heart redirected from false sources and criteria of justification by means within human resources (beauty, cleverness, style, intelligence, personality, popularity). All such systems of justification by works, whether conceived theologically in relation to God or socially in relation to others (whose opinions are valued more highly than God’s), ultimately fail not only those whom they condemn but also those whom they seem, for a time, to vindicate. She must be shown the Savior who knows her inmost thoughts and apprehensions yet laid down his life to make her his own beloved. She must be led to rest both her hope for approval and her longing for love in the heavenly bridegroom who loved her and gave himself for her and who by sheer grace clothes her, a member of his church-bride, with his own robes of righteousness (Eph 5:25; Rev 19:8; Isa 61:10).
35. Ibid., 78–79.
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Glimpsing, as pastors do, the complexity of the human heart—our resourceful capacity for self-defense and self-contempt, for self-inflated pride and self-absorbed despair—who of us would dare attempt to shepherd others without “the power of God for salvation to everyone who believes” (Rom 1:16–17 ESV), the good news that God sets us right with himself, forgiven and approved forever, by faith alone in Christ alone?
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Dennis Johnson
Dennis E. Johnson (PhD, Fuller Theological Seminary) is professor emeritus of practical theology at Westminster Seminary California and assistant pastor of Westminster Presbyterian Church (PCA), Dayton, TN. He is the author of The Message of Acts in the History of Redemption, Let’s Study Acts, Philippians (Reformed Expository Commentary), Hebrews (ESV Expository Commentary), Triumph of the Lamb, Him We Proclaim, Walking with Jesus through His Word, and Journeys with Jesus.
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