NEW TESTAMENT THEOLOGY

BIBLICAL THEOLOGY 169
"highly exalted" and "given the name above every name" did not follow, temporally,
his "obedience unto death" (Phil 2:8-9), that is, if it is not the case that
the incarnate Christ was for a time in the past, in history, actually exposed to
God's just wrath on the sins of his people, but now, subsequently and permanently,
for all eternity future, is no longer under God's wrath but restored to his
favor under conditions of eschatological life, then, as Van Til tirelessly pointed
out in critiquing Barth's theology, "there is no transition from wrath to grace in
history." 9 But if there is no transition from wrath to grace in history, then there
is no gospel and we are, as the apostle says, in the most pitiable condition of still
being "in our sins" (1 Cor 15:17-19). The gospel, the salvation of sinners,
stands or falls with the historical before and after of Christ's humiliation and
exaltation.
Accordingly, with that before and after, with the historical distinction between
these two states, is given the irreducible distinction between redemption accomplished
and applied, between historia salutis and ordo salutis, where neither one may
be allowed to diminish or eclipse the other. No matter how much we may wish
to be preoccupied with the redemptive-historical dimensions of the gospel as
being cosmic, corporate, socio-political (I write with an eye to the current evangelical
absorption, too often insufficiently critical in my judgment, with the work
of some associated with the New Perspective on Paul), the question of application,
of the ordo salutis in the more general sense, may not be suppressed or otherwise
evaded: How does the then and there of Christ's transition from wrath to
favor relate to the here and now of the sinner's transition from wrath to grace?
How do Christ's death and resurrection, then and there, benefit sinners, here and
now? What are those benefits and what is the pattern (ordo) in which they are
communicated to sinners?
Ill
From Barth I turn to Calvin and for two closely related reasons. Jn an especially
instructive and edifying way, unparalleled in the Reformed tradition as far
as I have seen, he shows the absolute necessity of ordo salutis concerns and at the
9 ' 'The present writer is of the opinion that, for all its verbal similarity to historic Protestantism,
Barth's theology is, in effect, a denial of it. There is, he believes, in Barth's view no 'transition from
wrath to grace' in history. This was the writer's opinion in 1946 when he published The New
Modernism. A careful consideration of Barth's more recent writings has only established him more
firmly in this conviction" (C. Van Til, Christianity and Barthianism [Philadelphia: Presbyterian and
Reformed, 1962], vii). A search of the phrase "transition from wrath to grace" in The Works of
Cornelius Van Til (CD-ROM; New York: Labels Army Co., 1997) indicates 74 occurrences in 59
different books and articles; almost all refer to its denial, and of these the large majority have in view
Barth's theology, either explicitly or implicitly. The phrase itself (as pointed out to me by Robert
Strimple) is taken over from G. C. Berkouwer's similar, though more muted criticism; see his The
Triumph of Grace in the Theology of Karl Barth (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1956), 257 ("... the transition
in history from wrath to grace is obscured"), 380 ("... there is no real place for a transition
from creation to the fall and, in the fallen world, from wrath to grace"); cf. also 234-36, 370.