This is a pretty interesting article. If you decide to buy the book (which you should) and read my essay (which you might want to do after you read the others), you might compare my take on Turretin to the one found in the article. You will find, I think, a sizable divergence from the same source.
(I also found it odd that he used a Clarkian as a guide to doctrine without warning readers of the problems involved, or that he relied on dust cover blurbs rather than Reformed academic reviews to decide on quality.)
[Note: I’m having second comments on how I phrased my worries below, be sure to read the comments.]
One more serious problem , however: the article actually attempts to lead the careful reader away from the reformed consensus by suggesting that it “helps to avoid considerable confusion over the precise relationship between justification and faith” if we make “objective justification” actually precede faith rather than be instrumentally received by faith:
That justification which takes place objectively within the tribunal of God (active justification) logically precedes faith. This is the basis for passive justification in the heart or conscience of the sinner which logically follows faith. The latter is the normal referent of the Scriptural terminology of justification. This important distinction, absent from Lutheran thought, helps to avoid considerable confusion over the precise relationship between justification and faith. It also helps to explain the difference between the objective fact of justification coram deo (before God) and the subjective and imperfect feeling of grace in the heart of the believer; and to enable a distinction to be made in the application of redemption to adults and children.
I suppose Reymond may have taught this (though I will think better of him until I see it for myself), but I doubt the rest of the writer’s references support his claim. It is, in any case, not the theology of the Westminster Confession of Faith, which affirms one justification, not two, and says this justification before God is by faith. It is, I think, quite significant, that Westminster sets out an easily-understandable explanation for how we receive justification by faith, so they don’t have to, in effect, deny the doctrine.
I’m sure the author is a great pastor and I am not going to make an opinion of him on the basis of one essay. But I have to say what seems self-evident: If you don’t affirm justification by faith then you don’t affirm justification by faith alone. I think the writer needs to put back together what he is separating here.
A Faith That Is Never Alone: A Response to Westminster Seminary California
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I thought Lutherans tried to make the *same* distinction, positing objective justification taking place at the cross/ressurection.
Or is the key element that Reformed OJ is not temporally separated?
The WCF guard against eternal and cross-justification, but I wonder if cross-justification isn’t warded against the problems of eternal justification to a sufficient extent.
We only ever know of the acts of God’s tribunal in the resurrection anyway. It really frustrates me the way we keep emphasizing that the “trick of thought” in God’s mind is the most important thing for us, instead of God’s acts.
Leithart referred to that section of Berkhof
http://www.leithart.com/archives/001040.php
OJ has to precede faith logically because we confess we “believe” in the forgiveness of sins:
“justification logically precedes faith and passive justification. We believe the forgiveness of sins”
But shouldn’t the object of our faith in forgiveness rest in the work of Christ? The only grounds we have for believing our sins are forgiven is the testimony of Christ’s works of death for us and resurrection.
Alister McGrath says the same thing in Iustitia Dei; the language of avoiding Lutheran confusion is acutally McGrath’s. I may have misread Ursinus, but I think that’s what he’s getting at in this quotation:
‘our application of the righteousness of Christ is from God; for he first imputes it unto us, and then works faith in us, by which we apply unto ourselves that which is imputed; from which it appears that the application of God precedes that which we make, (which is of faith) and is the cause of it, although it is not without ours’. (Commentary on the Heidelberg Catechism, 330).
I also think the distinction is there in Turretin and also in Witsius. It doesn’t make the distinction correct, nor does it mean that it is, in itself, part of the Reformed consensus, but it does mean we should be careful in asserting that it will lead people away from the Reformed consensus.
Very much looking forward to getting my hands on the book, and reading your chapter.
Thanks so much for pointing people to my article on the Reformed doctrine of justification. I am gratified that you would do this, since I have so admired and enjoyed your own writing on various subjects for many years, and was inspired by “Theologia” when first getting into the internet journal world myself with “The Theologian” (www.theologian.org.uk). So thank you for all you’ve contributed to my understanding over the years. I really do appreciate your ministry.
That being said, I confess I’m a bit disappointed with some of the tone in your review of my article. But the main thing is that I don’t think you’ve quite read it as carefully as I would have liked. Perhaps I wasn’t as clear as I might have been, for which I apologise, and I don’t claim to be as expert on these things as you are. I was intending to write a descriptive piece about what a group of Reformed theologians thought on the issue of justification. This was a preamble to my work on James Dunn (an article called ‘Justified Hesitation’ which can be found at http://www.theologian.org.uk/doctrine/hesitation.html) who attacks that doctrine. On the points you take me to task for, I have provided proper references: to McGrath’s classic study in ‘Iustitia Dei’, to Turretin, Berkof, and Hodge who all discuss the very distinction at issue. I suppose I am a bit baffled, then, by your comments because I thought I had done a reasonably good job of summarising what those people say. Can you help me by showing me how I have read those primary sources incorrectly please? Because it seems to me that they do make this very clear distinction between active and passive justification. I’m sure you must have checked my references before contradicting my conclusion, so can you correct my reading of them, so I don’t make the same mistake again please?
The one person I don’t cite in this regard is Robert Reymond, which is obviously a good thing since you don’t seem to like him! But Matthew has added a comment to your piece (above) saying that the distinction is also found in Witsius and Ursinus. I believe it may also be found in other theologians with similarly impeccable ‘Reformed’ credentials. But not, as I said (citing McGrath), in Lutheran thought. Could it be that I have in fact read the Reformed tradition accurately and you have possibly been reading it through more Lutheran lenses, perhaps? I don’t know. But I am puzzled, so I hope you can put me straight on that.
Obviously, as other comments have stressed, even if this distinction is classically “Reformed” that does not make it correct biblically. We all agree that what the Bible says must be our rule – not the secondary musings of theologians, however great. In the part of my article you quoted I made it clear that the biblical terminology is not precisely the same as the terminology of later theology, though there is an overlap (acknowledged by the theologians I cite). I do think Hodge, Turretin, Berkof, Witsius, Ursinus and friends believed (as I myself most emphatically do!) in justification by faith alone. And the careful distinctions they make in their works shows that they have thought very carefully about how to do that in a biblically accurate and doctrinally sophisticated way. I think we owe it to them to read them carefully, even if we don’t agree with them, so that we hear what they are actually saying rather than what we would like them to say.
Thanks for the kind words at the end of your piece about me personally as a pastor. I hope that I can live up to them. I look forward to even more thought-provoking and stimulating things from your website and hope you will find some of the other things on The Theologian “pretty interesting” too.
Lee Gatiss
Lee, I should have included more positive about the article itself as well. Sorry. I’m still processing the Ursinus quote, which I somehow–I am embarrassed to admit–completely missed up to now.
Apparently, I may have missed much more. Sorry to disappoint. I’m disappointed with myself as well. I figured the comments that corrected me would also correct readers. But, I just added a note in the text of the post. to make sure of that