What do the Federal Vision folk mean when they speak of 'Covenantal Faithfulness'? Rich in the other thread said some interesting things about what the FV position is, how anyone is elect 'in a sense' who is in the Visible Church, but only those who are 'Covenantally faithful' will be saved. What does this mean?

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Andrew C.
IFB
LBCF 1689

Practically speaking, it is much the same thing as the New Perspective on Paul's (especially Sanders's view) of getting in by grace, staying in by works. Staying in the covenant is dependent on works. This goes back to their view of the covenant, which, properly speaking, is not made with the elect (acc. to the FV). Rather, covenant is, properly speaking, broader than election, including more people (acc to them).

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Rev. Lane Keister
Teaching Elder, PCA, North Dakota (working out of bounds in a CRC and an RCA church)
http://greenbaggins.wordpress.com
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Thank you Rev. Lane. That helps a lot. One more question though; What works are required to remain covenantally faithful? Giving tithes? Hollowing the Sabbath? I wonder where the line is drawn? Is the person who remains moderately godly but battles alcoholism being covenantally faithful? I guess I'm asking specifically for the standard they use to determine whether or not someone is 'covenantally faithful'.

Isn't it pretty close to what the NPP folks mean by "a life well lived"? After all, wasn't Paul a covenantal nomist? - NOT!

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Dennis E. McFadden, Ex Mainline Baptist (in Remission)
Atherton Baptist Homes, CEO
First Baptist Church of Alhambra, Member, Transformation Ministries (CA)

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In one sense we are all to be faithful to the covenant, we are to live in obedience to God and his law not to earn salvation but because it is our bounden duty and great joy. Our lives are to be marked by faith, repentance and piety. In reading Dunn, the Jew demonstrated he was faithful to the covenant by living in accordance with the torah, i.e. covenantal nomism.

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Richard
CofE
UK

Rich Lusk notes that covenant defines election, if you are baptised you are in covenant with God and therefore elect. This "elect status" is what you retain through living a holy life. In one sense they are correct, all who are baptised are elect (nationally like "Israel"). Yet not all who are baptised and a part of the elect nation are elect to salvation "true Israel". The FV seem to merge the two categories of election, so if you are baptised you are elect so you have the benefits of Christ's death minus perseverence. It seems rather confused.

So, faith is the "work" that keeps us covenantally faithful? Is that correct according to the FV?

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Daniel Franzen
Church Creek Presbyterian (PCA)
Charleston, SC

Most FV'ers would probably agree that faith is a work, although that would probably need closer definition. The covenantal faithfulness is all obedience to the moral law. If someone is living in gross sin, the FV would advocate church discipline. However, the only way you can tell if you are still in is if you are a member in good standing. That is supposedly objective and stamp-able. The problem comes when you start noticing that some people can remain covenantally faithful their whole lives (at least by appearance), and are yet unregenerated. FV responses to this problem vary. Wilson would say that such a "covenantally faithful" person who is actually unregenerate would go straight to hell. Others are in a quandary over the point, and do not have a good explanation for this.

Yes, although some FV'ers would distance themselves more from the NPP than others would (compare Wilson and Schlissel, for instance).

James Dunn held to the covenantal nomism ascribed above. Tom Wright, if I remember his exegeses correctly, does not. He does hold to a future justification of some sorts (though it is more of an anticipation of a future judgment rather than seeing how many merit points I can score) but that is not identical to covenantal nomism, per se.

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J. B. Atken
John Knox PCA
Layman, M.A. student at Louisiana College

Yes, but, N.T. Wright believes that the final justification and acquittal is made on the basis of the life lived. That is his language, anyway, in WSPRS.

The current White Horse Inn has a great discussion on the NPP (as Lane noted this is not identical to FV, but there are some interesting overlaps).

Check it out - The White Horse Inn: Know What You Believe & Why You Believe It

But, as I understand NTW, this is no different than what is taught by Christ in Matthew 25:31-46:

"When the Son of man shall come in his glory, and all the holy angels with him, then shall he sit upon the throne of his glory: And before him shall be gathered all nations: and he shall separate them one from another, as a shepherd divideth his sheep from the goats: And he shall set the sheep on his right hand, but the goats on the left. Then shall the King say unto them on his right hand, Come, ye blessed of my Father, inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world: For I was an hungred, and ye gave me meat: I was thirsty, and ye gave me drink: I was a stranger, and ye took me in: Naked, and ye clothed me: I was sick, and ye visited me: I was in prison, and ye came unto me. Then shall the righteous answer him, saying, Lord, when saw we thee an hungred, and fed thee? or thirsty, and gave thee drink? When saw we thee a stranger, and took thee in? or naked, and clothed thee? Or when saw we thee sick, or in prison, and came unto thee? And the King shall answer and say unto them, Verily I say unto you, Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me. Then shall he say also unto them on the left hand, Depart from me, ye cursed, into everlasting fire, prepared for the devil and his angels: For I was an hungred, and ye gave me no meat: I was thirsty, and ye gave me no drink: I was a stranger, and ye took me not in: naked, and ye clothed me not: sick, and in prison, and ye visited me not. Then shall they also answer him, saying, Lord, when saw we thee an hungred, or athirst, or a stranger, or naked, or sick, or in prison, and did not minister unto thee? Then shall he answer them, saying, Verily I say unto you, Inasmuch as ye did it not to one of the least of these, ye did it not to me. And these shall go away into everlasting punishment: but the righteous into life eternal."

He explains his view in New Perspectives on Paul:

3. Final Judgment According to Works

The third point is remarkably controversial, seeing how well founded it is at several points in Paul. Indeed, listening to yesterday’s papers, it seems that there has been a massive conspiracy of silence on something which was quite clear for Paul (as indeed for Jesus). Paul, in company with mainstream second-Temple Judaism, affirms that God’s final judgment will be in accordance with the entirety of a life led – in accordance, in other words, with works. He says this clearly and unambiguously in Romans 14.10–12 and 2 Corinthians 5.10. He affirms it in that terrifying passage about church-builders in 1 Corinthians 3. But the main passage in question is of course Romans 2.1–16.

This passage has often been read differently. We heard yesterday that Augustine had problems with it (perhaps the only thing in common between Augustine and E. P. Sanders). That is hardly surprising; here is the first statement about justification in Romans, and lo and behold it affirms justification according to works! The doers of the law, he says, will be justified (2.13). Shock, horror; Paul cannot (so many have thought) have really meant it. So the passage has been treated as a hypothetical position which Paul then undermines by showing that nobody can actually achieve it; or, by Sanders for instance, as a piece of unassimilated Jewish preaching which Paul allows to stand even though it conflicts with other things he says. But all such theories are undermined by exegesis itself, not least by observing the many small but significant threads that stitch Romans 2 into the fabric of the letter as a whole. Paul means what he says. Granted, he redefines what ‘doing the law’ really means; he does this in chapter 8, and again in chapter 10, with a codicil in chapter 13. But he makes the point most compactly in Philippians 1.6: he who began a good work in you will bring it to completion on the day of Christ Jesus. The ‘works’ in accordance with which the Christian will be vindicated on the last day are not the unaided works of the self-help moralist. Nor are they the performance of the ethnically distinctive Jewish boundary-markers (sabbath, food-laws and circumcision). They are the things which show, rather, that one is in Christ; the things which are produced in one’s life as a result of the Spirit’s indwelling and operation. In this way, Romans 8.1–17 provides the real answer to Romans 2.1–16. Why is there now ‘no condemnation’? Because, on the one hand, God has condemned sin in the flesh of Christ (let no-one say, as some have done, that this theme is absent in my work; it was and remains central in my thinking and my spirituality); and, on the other hand, because the Spirit is at work to do, within believers, what the Law could not do – ultimately, to give life, but a life that begins in the present with the putting to death of the deeds of the body and the obedient submission to the leading of the Spirit.

I am fascinated by the way in which some of those most conscious of their reformation heritage shy away from Paul’s clear statements about future judgment according to works. It is not often enough remarked upon, for instance, that in the Thessalonian letters, and in Philippians, he looks ahead to the coming day of judgment and sees God’s favourable verdict not on the basis of the merits and death of Christ, not because like Lord Hailsham he simply casts himself on the mercy of the judge, but on the basis of his apostolic work. ‘What is our hope and joy and crown of boasting before our Lord Jesus Christ at his royal appearing? Is it not you? For you are our glory and our joy.’ (1 Thess. 3.19f.; cp. Phil. 2.16f.) I suspect that if you or I were to say such a thing, we could expect a swift rebuke of ‘nothing in my hand I bring, simply to thy cross I cling’. The fact that Paul does not feel obliged at every point to say this shows, I think, that he is not as concerned as we are about the danger of speaking of the things he himself has done – though sometimes, to be sure, he adds a rider, which proves my point, that it is not his own energy but that which God gives and inspires within him (1 Cor. 15.10; Col. 1.29). But he is still clear that the things he does in the present, by moral and physical effort, will count to his credit on the last day, precisely because they are the effective signs that the Spirit of the living Christ has been at work in him. We are embarrassed about saying this kind of thing; Paul clearly is not. What on earth can have happened to a sola scriptura theology that it should find itself forced to screen out such emphatic, indeed celebratory, statements?

The future verdict, when it is positive, can be denoted by the verb ‘justify’. This carries its full forensic sense, rooted in the ancient Jewish belief that the God of Israel, being the creator of the world and also the God of justice, would finally put the world to rights, in other words, that he would conduct a final Assize. On that day there will be ‘glory, honour, immortality and the life of the age to come’ for all who do right (Romans 2.7); in other words (verse 13) they will be justified, declared to be in the right. This ought to have highlighted long ago something which I believe has played too little part in discussions of Paul: justification by faith, to which I shall come in a moment, is the anticipation in the present of the justification which will occur in the future, and gains its meaning from that anticipation. What Augustine lacked, what Luther and Calvin lacked, what Regensburg lacked as a way of putting together the two things it tried to hold on to, was Paul’s eschatological perspective, filled out by the biblical fusion of covenantal and forensic categories. But before we get there I want to address a question which Paul seldom touches explicitly but about which we can reconstruct his thought quite accurately. This is just as well because it has played an important role in protestant discussions of soteriology and lies, I think, at the heart of today’s controversies about justification.

Yes, I agree that that is what NT Wright thinks. But his exegesis is way off. The works function as the evidence in the courtroom, not as the basis of acquittal. This distinction is what Wright does not take into account. The way it goes is like this: God and the world disagree as to the status of God's people. God knows that His people are innocent, whereas the world believes they are guilty hypocrites. On Judgment Day, God will trot out all the works that His people have done, and show those deeds to the world, as much as to say, "I told you so." At best, Wright is ambiguous about this, and at worst, he uses the language "basis of" in his understanding of acquittal. The basis of acquittal is Christ's righteousness imputed, not our own works. That Wright does not believe this is quite clearly indicated by the fact that he makes the specious distinction between the "self-help moralist's works" and the "Spirit-wrought" works.

From my reading of NTW I am not 100% convinced that he would deny this, hence he writes,
"What then about the ‘imputed righteousness’ about which we are to hear an entire paper this afternoon? This is fine as it stands; God does indeed ‘reckon righteousness’ to those who believe. But this is not, for Paul, the righteousness either of God or of Christ, except in a very specialised sense to which I shall return."

I know he is a bit wobbly on imputed righteousness however I think he gets there by arguing that we are placed into Christ. Instead of the paint being transfered from the tin to the clay pot, the pot is plunged into the tin of paint, so it gets what is in the tin just not how it has been done or explained in the past (if you follow what I am getting at).

Ultimately, I understand him to be saying that those ‘works’ with which the Christian will be vindicated on the last day are the fruit of the Spirit working within us thus providing evidence that one is in Christ. I don't get the impression that he is arguing the works are meritorious but are rather demonstrative or evidentiary.

I think that I must confuse things. I read Wilson and enjoy him but have yet to see that he would say what is being noted above. I know that he would agree that works show that someone is being 'faithful to the covenant' but I think he would qualify that those works come from Christ working through you.

Who on here would disagree that someone who has a regenerated heart shows his love for Christ through his works? Not as a means of justification, but as a means of being faithful and obedient.

I am likely in way over my head on this though. Have not read enough.

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Travis Graham | Member | Christ The King (PCA) | Houston, TX

"The world will bow,
and knees will be broken,
for those who don't know how"
- Woven Hand

Would it be correct to say that we are saved unto law keeping or "covenant faithfulness", in view of this scripture?


The opposite of not submitting to God's law thus displeasing God, and being in the flesh is what?

Perhaps loving God and keeping his commandments because of (by the power of) the Holy Spirit.

In this light, is there anything wrong with loving God and keeping his commandments being called "covenant faithfulness?"

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Shawn
Orthodox Presbyterian
Denver, Colorado

Open my eyes Lord, that I may behold wondrous things out of your law. Psalm 119:18

Definitely not, Shawn. I like the term, I just don't like the meaning attached to it by FV proponents. If they are saying that we maintain our salvation by loving God and keeping his commandments, that's bad. But if they say that we evidence our salvation by covenantal faithfullness, that's good.

But...What if they say we maintain the evidence of our salvation by covenantal faitfulness? ..

Well, I don't have a problem with that, I think.

Not sure how much different that is from what I've said though.

2 Peter 1:2-11 "Grace and peace be multiplied unto you through the knowledge of God, and of Jesus our Lord,According as his divine power hath given unto us all things that pertain unto life and godliness, through the knowledge of him that hath called us to glory and virtue: Whereby are given unto us exceeding great and precious promises: that by these ye might be partakers of the divine nature, having escaped the corruption that is in the world through lust. And beside this, giving all diligence, add to your faith virtue; and to virtue knowledge; And to knowledge temperance; and to temperance patience; and to patience godliness; And to godliness brotherly kindness; and to brotherly kindness charity. For if these things be in you, and abound, they make you that ye shall neither be barren nor unfruitful in the knowledge of our Lord Jesus Christ. But he that lacketh these things is blind, and cannot see afar off, and hath forgotten that he was purged from his old sins. Wherefore the rather, brethren, give diligence to make your calling and election sure: for if ye do these things, ye shall never fall: For so an entrance shall be ministered unto you abundantly into the everlasting kingdom of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ."

I think what Rev Keister is getting at is that works are not that 'with which' we have been vindicated, but the 'evidence' that we have been aquitted through Christ's righteousness.

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It is also important to know, per Rev Wright's views on final justification, that he also denies merit. So he isn't saying that if we score enough merit points, we should be okay.

NTW's point (IMO) is that there is a future judgement in which our works (fruit of the Spirit) are the 'evidence' that we are in Christ. That is, we will be vindicated upon the basis of our works as per Matthew 25:31-46.

They might say "we don't believe in merit" but if someone's good works are the ultimate grounds of their justification then they do believe in merit.

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Daniel Ritchie
Saintfield, Northern Ireland - Queen's University, Belfast:History/Politics
Member of Dromara Reformed Presbyterian Church of Ireland (Covenanter)

Good works from an FV viewpoint are not merely the evidence of our justification, instead they are the basis for us remaining justified. If the FV saw good works as being the evidence that we are justified by Christ alone, then there would be no problem. But this is not what they believe.

I think he would deny that claim as well. Problem is we read him to say such and such through a particular lens. In his lectures on Romans and Calvin College, he denied he wanted to teach justification by works. And in his commentary his main point is that God's justice (dikaousyne) is vindicated on the final day. Whether it is or isn't, he isn't meaning to teach Romanism.

Does NT Wright deny the imputation of Christ's righteousness to the believer?

See #15 above

"What then about the ‘imputed righteousness’ about which we are to hear an entire paper this afternoon? This is fine as it stands; God does indeed ‘reckon righteousness’ to those who believe."

Well does he believe that the active obedience of Christ is imputed to the believer?

Yes, although he would not call it that. He would set it up somewhat like this: Christ is the faithful Israelite who succeeded where Israel failed and kept the torah. We are put into him. We are therefore enclothed with Christ's righteousness.

So he says that the person does not first have Christ's benefits imputed to him in order to be grafted into Christ, but receives the benefits because he is grafted into Christ?

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Davidius
Husband of Emily
Member of All Saints Anglican Church - Chapel Hill (AMiA / Anglican Church of North America)
Student: University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, German and Classics

Does that righteousness guarantee us eternal life?

I think it fairer to say we have Christ's righteouness accounted as our own (imputed to us) by means of our being grafted into Christ. Here is the man himself:

Abraham’s true family, the single ‘seed’ which God promised him, is summed up in the Messiah, whose role precisely as Messiah is not least to draw together the identity of the whole of God’s people so that what is true of him is true of them and vice versa. Here we arrive at one of the great truths of the gospel, which is that the accomplishment of Jesus Christ is reckoned to all those who are ‘in him’. This is the truth which has been expressed within the Reformed tradition in terms of ‘imputed righteousness’, often stated in terms of Jesus Christ having fulfilled the moral law and thus having accumulated a ‘righteous’ status which can be shared with all his people. As with some other theological problems, I regard this as saying a substantially right thing in a substantially wrong way, and the trouble when you do that is that things on both sides of the equation, and the passages which are invoked to support them, become distorted. The central passage is in fact Romans 6, and I think it is because much post-reformation theology has tended to fight shy of taking seriously Paul’s realistic theology of baptism that it has sought to achieve what Paul describes in that chapter and elsewhere by another route. The Messiah died to sin; we are in the Messiah through baptism and faith; therefore we have died to sin. The Messiah rose again and is now ‘alive to God’; we are in the Messiah through baptism and faith; therefore we have risen again and are now ‘alive to God’. This is what Paul means in Galatians 3 when he says that as many as have been baptised in to the Messiah have put on the Messiah, and that if we thus belong to the Messiah we are Abraham’s seed, heirs according to the promise. There is indeed a status which is reckoned to all God’s people, all those in Christ; and this status is that of dikaiosune, ‘righteousness’, ‘covenant membership’; and this covenant membership, in order to be covenant membership, must be a covenant membership in which the members have died and been raised, because until that has happened they would still be in their sins. ‘I through the law died to the law, that I might live to God; I have been crucified with the Messiah; nevertheless I live; and the life I now live in the flesh I live by the faith of the Son of God who loved me and gave himself for me’. If this is what you are trying to get at by the phrase ‘imputed righteousness’, then I not only have no quarrel with the substance of it but rather insist on it as a central and vital part of Paul’s theology. What I do object to is calling this truth by a name which, within the world of thought where it is common coin, is bound to be heard to say that Jesus has himself earned something called ‘righteousness’, and that he then reckons this to be true of his people (as in the phrase ‘the merits of Christ’), whereas on my reading of Paul the ‘righteousness’ of Jesus is that which results from God’s vindication of him as Messiah in the resurrection; and, particularly, that this is what Paul means when he speaks of ‘God’s righteousness’, as though that phrase denoted the righteous status which God’s people have in virtue of justification, whereas in fact the phrase, always and everywhere else from the Psalms and Isaiah onwards, refers to God’s own righteousness as the creator and covenant God; and, underneath all of this, I object to the misreading of several key Pauline texts that results, and the marginalisation in consequence of themes which have major importance for Paul but which this theology manages to ignore. The mistake, as I see it, arises from the combination of the Reformers’ proper sense of something being accomplished in Christ Jesus which is then reckoned to us, allied with their overemphasis on the category of iustitia as the catch-all, their consequent underemphasis on Paul’s frequently repeated theology of our participation in the Messiah’s death and resurrection, and their failure to locate Paul’s soteriology itself on the larger map of God’s plan for the whole creation. A proper re-emphasis on ‘God’s righteousness’ as God’s own righteousness should set all this straight. (Paul in Different Perspectives by N.T. Wright)

Now that I cannot say, I have not seen him deal with that question.

Agreed, or maybe something like "given the fact we are united to Christ, we participate/share in such and such blessings."

To me, that is where the rubber hits the road. Thanks for the interaction.

It is not the same thing as the Reformed doctrine of the imputed righteousness of Christ. Union is not identical with imputation, nor does union automatically include imputation. Roman Catholics believe that we are united to Christ...and receive Christ's righteousness by infusion. This demonstrates that saying "union with Christ" simply is not enough. I freely grant the point that union with Christ ensures that His righteousness being imputed to us cannot be called a legal fiction. Union with Christ does not settle the point at all as to whether Christ's righteousness is infused into us or imputed to us. Of course, it is both: imputed righteousness for justification, and infused righteousness for sanctification. But these are distinct (though inseperable).

Is it not the case though that, for Wright, imputation is by means of union. Whether this is how the Reformed have taught it being irrelevant. NTW is open that he rejects a specific Reformed view of how it all works, all I am saying is that he gets to the same place but by means of a different route.

We have Christ's righteouness accounted as our own (imputed to us) by means of our being grafted into Christ.

Here is the man himself:

Abraham’s true family, the single ‘seed’ which God promised him, is summed up in the Messiah, whose role precisely as Messiah is not least to draw together the identity of the whole of God’s people so that what is true of him is true of them and vice versa. Here we arrive at one of the great truths of the gospel, which is that the accomplishment of Jesus Christ is reckoned to all those who are ‘in him’. This is the truth which has been expressed within the Reformed tradition in terms of ‘imputed righteousness’, often stated in terms of Jesus Christ having fulfilled the moral law and thus having accumulated a ‘righteous’ status which can be shared with all his people. As with some other theological problems, I regard this as saying a substantially right thing in a substantially wrong way, and the trouble when you do that is that things on both sides of the equation, and the passages which are invoked to support them, become distorted. The central passage is in fact Romans 6, and I think it is because much post-reformation theology has tended to fight shy of taking seriously Paul’s realistic theology of baptism that it has sought to achieve what Paul describes in that chapter and elsewhere by another route. The Messiah died to sin; we are in the Messiah through baptism and faith; therefore we have died to sin. The Messiah rose again and is now ‘alive to God’; we are in the Messiah through baptism and faith; therefore we have risen again and are now ‘alive to God’. This is what Paul means in Galatians 3 when he says that as many as have been baptised in to the Messiah have put on the Messiah, and that if we thus belong to the Messiah we are Abraham’s seed, heirs according to the promise. There is indeed a status which is reckoned to all God’s people, all those in Christ; and this status is that of dikaiosune, ‘righteousness’, ‘covenant membership’; and this covenant membership, in order to be covenant membership, must be a covenant membership in which the members have died and been raised, because until that has happened they would still be in their sins. ‘I through the law died to the law, that I might live to God; I have been crucified with the Messiah; nevertheless I live; and the life I now live in the flesh I live by the faith of the Son of God who loved me and gave himself for me’. If this is what you are trying to get at by the phrase ‘imputed righteousness’, then I not only have no quarrel with the substance of it but rather insist on it as a central and vital part of Paul’s theology. What I do object to is calling this truth by a name which, within the world of thought where it is common coin, is bound to be heard to say that Jesus has himself earned something called ‘righteousness’, and that he then reckons this to be true of his people (as in the phrase ‘the merits of Christ’), whereas on my reading of Paul the ‘righteousness’ of Jesus is that which results from God’s vindication of him as Messiah in the resurrection; and, particularly, that this is what Paul means when he speaks of ‘God’s righteousness’, as though that phrase denoted the righteous status which God’s people have in virtue of justification, whereas in fact the phrase, always and everywhere else from the Psalms and Isaiah onwards, refers to God’s own righteousness as the creator and covenant God; and, underneath all of this, I object to the misreading of several key Pauline texts that results, and the marginalisation in consequence of themes which have major importance for Paul but which this theology manages to ignore. The mistake, as I see it, arises from the combination of the Reformers’ proper sense of something being accomplished in Christ Jesus which is then reckoned to us, allied with their overemphasis on the category of iustitia as the catch-all, their consequent underemphasis on Paul’s frequently repeated theology of our participation in the Messiah’s death and resurrection, and their failure to locate Paul’s soteriology itself on the larger map of God’s plan for the whole creation. A proper re-emphasis on ‘God’s righteousness’ as God’s own righteousness should set all this straight. (Paul in Different Perspectives by N.T. Wright)

I reject utterly the idea that Wright gets to the same place, only by a different route. He rejects the idea that Christ has earned a righteousness which is then reckoned to us. He says it himself in the very same quotation you gave. Furthermore, there is this quotation from WSPRS:

Of course, Wright is talking about the Father's righteousness. However, in doing so, he also rules out imputation of the Son's righteousness, when he comments that righteousness cannot be transferred. Piper deals with this exact question in chapter 8 of his critique of N.T. Wright (pp. 117-132). The question here is not whether we share in Christ's vindication. The question is how do we share in Christ's vindication. There is nothing in Wright's formulation with which a Roman Catholic would take exception. Out of curiosity, why are you seeming to defend him?