JUSTIFIED - Monergism Books

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INTRODUCTION simply come to believe that there should be a different emphasis in evangelical media on personal and social renewal, or on the transformative aspect of salvation—namely, sanctification—rather than the declarative aspect—God’s justification of the ungodly. Being reckoned righteous in Christ is for many a mere preface to the central message of the need to become more Christ-like, a trend moving in the direction of spirituality and discipleship. And finally, there are self-identified evangelicals who have never even heard of the “solas” of the Reformation, much less the imputation of Christ’s righteousness that is the crux of justification. Whether rejected outright, neglected, or simply unknown, it is evident that the gospel as traditionally understood has fallen on hard times. Over the past thirty years debates over the doctrine of justification, though quieter than other controversies, have nonetheless been many and varied. There is no one history to which Modern Reformation can draw your attention. Suffice it to say, Wright, James Dunn, and E. P. Sanders (representative of the New Perspective on Paul) are not the cause of the present controversy. Rather, they represent at best a contemporaneous phenomenon that has in some ways galvanized evangelicals who were already conflicted over how to understand both the big-picture interpretation of the Bible, otherwise called biblical theology, as well as crucial exegetical details—in particular the scriptural teaching on law, justification, righteousness, faith, and the nature of God’s interaction with his people in the time of Abraham and Moses. In the end, it matters little if we can pinpoint whether the slow rise of justification debates occurred before or at the same time as the New Perspective. The point is that similar debates have been playing out among Christian college Bible faculties, on evangelical seminary campuses, in some of the more purportedly “doctrinaire” denominations, and even at meetings (past and present) of the Evangelical Theological Society, mostly without reference to Wright or the disparate group of scholars working on Second Temple Judaism and the interpretation of the New Testament. It is therefore important to gain a proper perspective on our current situation. In these selections from Modern Reformation, a combination of new and classic articles, we want to present a few catalyzing arguments that have the potential to move forward what we think is a stalled debate in evangelicalism and the wider world of New Testament studies. Leaving Dispensationalism Behind There is a great deal of complexity to the history of evangelical theology, more than can possibly be summed up in a brief introduction. Among the various factors we could call to mind, the emergence of a post-dispensationalist evangelical academy is one that is not typically acknowledged. Classic premillennial dispensationalism, as many will know, had a unique way of carving up the biblical narrative from Genesis to Revelation, and is still without question a very popular way of interpreting the Bible among laity. But with the flourishing of “neo-evangelical” institutions such as Christian colleges, seminaries, and publishing companies over the past thirty years, dispensationalism has slowly retreated from dominance among the teachers and scholars who labor to train the next gener- 4
GETTING PERSPECTIVE ation of leaders. In its place, there has been an emphasis on the unity of the biblical story. This effort amounted to an attempt to flatten the contours of redemptive history and shave off the rough edges of the starkly delimited covenant “dispensations” known to previous generations. Without necessarily revising evangelical eschatology or end-times views, evangelicals now predominantly identify one story of “grace” from beginning to end. One is tempted to explain this shift in terms of “lumping” and “splitting,” general categories that are sometimes helpful in getting one’s bearings. For better or worse, the overcoming of dispensationalism’s exegetical “splitting” or compartmentalizing of redemptive history into seven relatively discrete and non-overlapping covenants has given way to a new “lumping” mentality, or what some of the authors in this volume will refer to as “mono-” or “one-covenantalism,” which essentially groups together God’s successive redemptive acts into one large, reductionist covenant. Where the old dispensational consensus identified difference in a transition from law to grace, post-dispensational evangelicals recognize mostly (and sometimes exclusively) unity in a movement of uninterrupted grace. In this evangelical shift, several crucial Reformation themes—some of which never sat very well with dispensationalists either—have become more and more controversial. If the accent in evangelical biblical theology is no longer on the contrast between works and grace, old and new, as understood by various Reformation Protestants, then traditional distinctions between law and gospel, faithfulness and faith, and Moses and Abraham have also fallen by the wayside. Because of the predominance of evangelical mono-covenantalism of various kinds, Reformation perspectives are now at the periphery of the most recent justification debate, and even defenders of justification neglect the full range of the early Protestant tradition’s biblical-theological resources. Two general points are worth elaboration before introducing the contributions of this volume. The In-House Debate The current debate has every appearance of being centered on those scholars working from a post-dispensationalist set of presuppositions. In fact, one is tempted to construe the in-house evangelical debate over justification as a conflict between those who are working to hash out the details of this move to highlight the unity of the Bible. Here one thinks especially of the legacy of Daniel P. Fuller, son of the cofounder of Fuller Seminary, former professor of the same from 1953 to 1993, and teacher of several generations of biblical scholars who now work at a variety of evangelical institutions. Others could be cited and influence is difficult to trace, but there is widespread agreement among Fuller’s “students,” loosely understood, on a number of key issues. 1) It is assumed that the Reformation distinction between law and gospel somehow smacks of older dispensationalism and therefore cannot (and should not) be reconciled with a post-dispensationalist narrative of “grace” and continuity. 2) It follows that the Reformation understanding of grace must surely have been slightly antinomian or insufficiently concerned with the need to obey the law or pursue sanctification and holy living; 5
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Page 3 and 4: Contents UNION AND PEACE WITH GOD 1
Page 5: INTRODUCTION Getting Perspective RY
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Page 11 and 12: GETTING PERSPECTIVE Union and Peace
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