It would be a gross and unconscionable mistake, of course, to suggest or conclude that the evangel that the church has historically held in true biblical proportion nowhere comes to expression at the present time. Quite to the contrary, instances of Reformed-evangelical Christianity in true biblical character are readily identifiable. Institutions of sound Reformed theological education have come into existence and continue to bear biblical witness. Heavy volumes of biblical exposition and helpful treatises on theological loci and the progressive Christian life have appeared, to the undoubted benefit of the church and the Christian believer. The republication of highly valuable works from older times has added weight to the confession of the church and the culture of Christian confessors. Valuable monographs on aspects of Christian doctrine have appeared.
Our task at present is in no sense to diminish the considerable value of the considerable good that exists for the searching in the contemporary church, its agencies, and its centers of scholarship. But therein lies the problem that motivates our present concern. In too many instances, there is reason to conclude, the influence of the philosophico-intellectual issues and forces we have already identified have appeared to tarnish both the scholarship and the witness of the church. Our task in what follows is not that of providing an extensive critique of the sources and influences of theological problems that have infected the well-being and doctrines of the church. We write in a much more modest vein. But at the risk of incompleteness and insufficient clarification, some of the more prominent deleterious preoccupations of recent Christian theology can be identified.
What is to be said, for example, of the sovereignty, the purposes, and the knowledge of God, and, as a result, of the divine participation in human affairs? What, after all, does God know, and how, if at all, is that knowledge relevant to human history and development? The recently fashionable theology of the so-called Open Theism addresses the question. That system of thought, advanced, no doubt, in sincerity by Christian theologians, denies the omniscience of God in a singularly dangerous respect. In brief, the Open Theism argues that of course God is omniscient. But the meaning imported to omniscience is not that of historic Christianity. It is contained in the statement that God is omniscient in the restrictive sense that he knows all that is available to be known. The significance of that proviso, as it is understood by the Open Theism theology, is that the future has not yet eventuated and is not therefore available to be known, and God, therefore, does not know the future. It is not necessary to argue at length the respects in which such a theology has destroyed the very godness of God, in that it constitutes a flat denial of God’s sovereign will and purpose, his omniscience and omnipotent power by which, as the letter to the Ephesians has it, he “worketh all things after the counsel of his own will” (Eph 1:11).12
To the contrary, a Christian theology that is grounded in God’s self-revelation and in the biblical data that conveys the revelation of his will and purpose holds securely to the eternal necessity of God, meaning that he is in his being not dependent on any cause external to himself, and to the sovereignty of his own will. There is no entity, event, or possibility external to the Godhead on which, or in relation to which, God is, or could have been, dependent. If the contrary were true, God would not be the God of the Scriptures. He would be, in one sense or another, a god made in the image of man’s imagination.
Other thought systems that, in one way or another, have twisted and corrupted the biblical truths on which the Church’s theology has been historically founded have also infected the witness of the church. In more recent times a so-called New Perspective on Paul has argued for a reconstruction of the entire covenantal theology that the church has historically held. The New Perspective argues that the historically received traditions of Pauline theology have misunderstood and misrepresented what the apostle had set out to say. It has proposed a radically different view of the covenantal theology that has traditionally been derived from the Pauline writings. The essential argument proceeds in the following terms. By God’s grace, it is said, a certain people, Israel of old, were assumed to be members of God’s saving covenant, though the grounds on which that assumption came to effect are not clearly stated. But the upshot of the New Perspective system is that once having been assumed into the covenant, individuals maintained their status and remained within the covenant by their observance of, and adherence to, certain so-called identity or boundary markers and their obedience to what they interpreted as the law and commandments of God. Those boundary markers included, for the Jews, circumcision, certain food laws, and Sabbath-keeping. Beyond that, it is argued that the apostle Paul’s problem was that of convincing the Jews that the Gentiles should be admitted to the kingdom without subscription to, and obedience to, those Jewish identity or boundary markers. That, of course, is a far cry from what is to be understood as the Pauline doctrine of justification and its place in the larger conspectus of covenantal theology. We shall return to that in due course.
But other aspects of the New Perspective theology deserve brief notice. It was claimed, for example, that the righteousness of God was to be understood as God’s faithfulness to his covenantal promises. N. T. Wright claims that “For a reader of the Septuagint . . . ‘the righteousness of God’ would have one obvious meaning: God’s own faithfulness to his promises, to the covenant.”13 The faithfulness of God in that respect is, of course, beyond doubt. But when, in the New Perspective’s construction of the meaning and significance of the covenant, such an interpretation is carried over as the sole meaning relevant to Paul’s theology, it avoids and misrepresents completely the meaning of God’s righteousness as portrayed in the Pauline vocabulary and doctrine. At the most elemental level, and beyond addressing what is to be regarded as God’s essential righteousness or the righteousness implicit in the conformity of all of his actions to the dictates of his own essential holiness, the righteousness of God rests in the conveyance of his righteousness to the repentant sinner who comes to him in saving faith. The sinner is thereby made the beneficiary of the imputation to him of the substitutionary forensic righteousness of Christ. The fatal flaw, the rejection of the fact and doctrine of imputation, is clear in Wright’s following argument: “If we use the language of the law court, it makes no sense whatever to say that the judge imputes, imparts, bequeaths, conveys or otherwise transfers his righteousness to either the plaintiff or the defendant. Righteousness is not an object, a substance or a gas which can be passed across the courtroom. . . . To imagine the defendant somehow receiving the judge’s righteousness is simply a category mistake. That is not the way language works.”14
The New Perspective on Paul is a revival of old heresies that are calculated to betray the entire doctrine of the church as that addresses the justification of man in the sight of God. Adequate literature on the highly important controversies that arose from the New Perspective on Paul is readily available.15 Our intention at this point is simply to illustrate that in that errant theological system the biblical theology of the church has again been brought under attack, and to the extent that well-meaning theologians are captured by it, the witness of the church has in recent times been diminished.
The doctrine of the church has been further brought under attack in recent times by the emergence of a so-called Federal Vision theology. A principal issue in this thought system, and a point at which its divergence from historic Christianity is prominent, has to do again with an erroneous interpretation of the meaning of the salvific covenant between God and man. It is sufficient for our present purposes to confine comment to one essential point from among many that are discussed in the literature referred to below. It has to do with what is to be understood as the significance of the church’s sacrament of baptism and its relation to the meaning of God’s covenant.
By the administration of the sacrament of baptism, it is claimed by the Federal Vision theology, one is admitted to covenant membership in the fullest sense and one is thereby joined in union to Christ. Now the high doctrine of the Christian believer’s union with Christ is to be carefully guarded, and that union conveys