8. In his Critique of Practical Reason, 109, Kant stated that “It is morally necessary to assume the existence of God. . . . This moral necessity is subjective . . . and not objective.” That followed from his earlier Critique of Pure Reason, 306–7, where Kant had concluded that “These remarks will have made it evident . . . that the ideal of the Supreme Being, far from being an enouncement of the existence of a being in itself necessary, is nothing more than a regulative principle of reason. . . . It exists merely in my own mind, as the formal condition of thought, but not as a material and hypostatic condition of existence.”
9. Greene refers to “Kant’s sharp distinction between knowledge and faith” in “The Historical Context and Religious Significance of Kant’s Religion” in “Introduction” to Kant, Religion, lxxv.
10. Van Til observes: “Kant made room for ‘faith’ but not for biblical faith,” Christian Theory of Knowledge, 58.
11. The reference to the work of Nietzsche is of interest on several counts. McLean observes on Nietzsche’s reaction to the eighteenth-century so-called Enlightenment: “Nietzsche critiqued the use of human rationality as the sole measure by which truth is validated. . . . Rationality has, de facto, taken the place of the concept of ‘God’ as the ultimate foundation of truth. This substitution of human rationality for God is what Nietzsche’s madman meant by his famous announcement of the ‘death of God.’: ‘Whither is God?’ he cried; ‘I will tell you. We have killed him—you and I. All of us are his murderers’,” Biblical Interpretation, 64. See Nietzsche, “The Gay Science,” in The Portable Nietzsche, 95.
12. For expansive evaluations of the Open theism theology see R. K. Wright, No Place for Sovereignty and Frame, No Other God. See also the valuable reference to Open Theism and a reference to the work of Frame in Oliphint, God With Us, 11–12.
13. N. T. Wright, What Saint Paul Really Said. 96.
14. Ibid., 98. For a critical evaluation of recent debates on the doctrine of justification, including a survey of doctrinal development and a response to the arguments of Wright and others, see Dunson, “Do Bible Words have Bible Meaning?” 239–60.
15. See Waters, Justification and Eveson, The Great Exchange, 110–57.
16. Lusk, “Do I Believe in Baptismal Regeneration?” cited in Waters, Federal Vision, 226–27. See also ibid., 359.
17. Ibid., 227.
18. Cited in Waters, Federal Vision, 209–10.
19. For a full discussion see Waters, Federal Vision, and for an introduction to some origins of the Federal Vision theology see Shepherd, The Call of Grace.
20. The literature on the Emergent Church and its theological reconstructions is now extensive. Minimum reference might be made to McLaren, A New Kind of Christianity and the same author’s A New Kind of Christian, and Carson, Becoming Conversant with the Emerging Church.
21. For a valuable discussion of Arminianism and its defects and the contrary doctrines of God’s electing and saving grace, see Packer’s “Introductory Essay” in Owen, The Death of Death, 1–25.
22. Blamires, Recovering the Christian Mind, 77–78.
23. Ibid., 78.
24. Idem.
25. Ibid., 83.
26. Ibid., 78.
27. Ibid., 89.
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The Identity and Offices of Christ
The gospel of the grace of God in the redemption of sinners emanates from the council of the Godhead before the foundation of the world. Its design is grounded in the redemptive offices of the Persons of the Godhead as declared in the eternal Covenant of Redemption. That covenant implies that no more ultimate explanation of the course of human affairs exists than that of the sovereign will and decree of God, executed in his works of creation, providence, and redemption. And no more ultimate explanation spans human history than that of which the coming and the redemptive accomplishment of Christ is the watershed. At the turning point of the history of the church the apostle Peter stated to the incredulous crowd that it was “by the determinate counsel and foreknowledge of God” that the remarkable events they had witnessed had occurred (Acts 2:23). And when the newly assembled people of God raised their prayer for the disciples, Peter and John, who had been falsely arrested, they acknowledged that the authorities in their malevolence had done “whatsoever thy hand and thy counsel determined before to be done” (Acts 4:28). At the heart of the gospel stands the declaration that God “worketh all things after the counsel of his own will” (Eph 1:11).
But the covenantal structure of Christian thought and the sovereignty of God in salvation have been substantially betrayed in our time. While that is so, it is true, of course, that a serious and prominent examination of historic covenantal theology has been maintained in the context of Reformed theological witness. Among the most recent offerings, K. Scott Oliphint’s Covenantal Apologetics has set out to make a significant advance on the level of apologetic witness.28 Theologians Bryan D. Estelle, F. V. Fesko, and David VanDrunen have forced a new examination of the respects in which the Mosaic covenant, while it is to be understood as a form of administration of the covenant of grace, exhibits a works principle and, indeed, has been referred to by a long line of Reformed theologians as partaking of elements of the covenant of works.29 But in the contemporary evangelical-theological context, the church’s doctrinal formation finds its determinative nexus too often in its focus on man and his supposed capacities, intellectual and ethical, to the neglect of the biblical explanation of his fallen condition. For that reason, the objective realities of God’s implementation of his covenantal purposes in the salvation of the elect people he gave to his Son to redeem (John 17:6, 9) have not found a ready place or served as the orientation of thought. The biblical data that state that we are all the fallen children of Adam are only lightly handled. While the imputation to us of the guilt of Adam’s sin extends its disastrous deposit to the fact that we come into the world with a fallen nature, that fact does not find a ready place in the most common evangelical expressions.
Any