In order to unpack this, let’s try a kind of thought experiment. Imagine that the covenant made with Adam at creation was not a covenant of works at all, but a covenant infused with grace. Imagine further that all that our first father needed to do was to try his hardest and do his best, and once that was done, God would mingle His grace with Adam’s works in order to render them acceptable. If such were the case, then some serious christological and soteriological implications would follow (seriously bad ones, I mean). For example, if Christ is the second Adam as Paul says He is (Rom. 5:12–21; 1 Cor. 15:20–28, 45), and if Christ’s role is to recapitulate and retell the Adamic story, then it would necessarily follow that Christ, just like His covenant predecessor, was not called to “perfectly and personally” obey His Father’s law, but only to do His very best, after which the Father would mingle His grace with the Son’s best efforts and, if everything sufficed in the end, He would then accept Jesus’ offering on our behalf.

via Creed Code Cult: The Dangers of Mixing Law and Gospel.

How can anyone with an orthodox anthropology claim that Adam could ” try his hardest and do his best” and yet fail to “‘perfectly and personally’ obey” God?

How can anyone with an orthodox christology claim that Jesus could “try his hardest and do his best” and yet fail to “perfectly and personally’ obey His Father’s law”?

How could one calling be short of the other?

And how can this man claim to know anything about the people he criticizes? Does he even understand what his words mean? “God would mingle His grace with Adam’s works in order to render them acceptable”? Grace is not a substance. It is an attitude. “the Father would mingle His grace with the Son’s best efforts” This is all ontologically confused.

And in any case, since the Bible says Jesus grew in grace I think we’d better believe the Bible rather than a confused and incoherent chain of assertions.

“And the child grew and became strong, filled with wisdom. And the grace of God was upon him.”

“Therefore God has highly exalted him and graced him with the name that is above every name.”

And of course, every Reformed exegete has insisted that Adam was in a gracious covenant with God. It is not like this is an obscure fact. So why is not only the Bible, but Reformed Theology, being trashed?

The overwhelming Reformed consensus is this: that God’s covenant with Adam was one of grace and that the principle condition of that covenant was that Adam trust God for all his blessedness–a trust which could only result in perfect perpetual obedience for Adam as an unfallen creature. This is what historic Reformed orthodoxy has always affirmed:

We believe that man was created pure and perfect in the image of God, and that by his own guilt he fell from the grace which he received, and is thus alienated from God, the fountain of justice and of all good, so that his nature is totally corrupt (The French Confession, Article 9; emphasis added).

The French Confession was approved by John Calvin who himself taught the same thing. In 1536 he wrote in his first edition of the Institutes of the Christian Religion,

In order for us to come to a sure knowledge of ourselves, we must first grasp that Adam, parent of us all, was created in the image and likeness of God. That is, he was endowed with wisdom, righteousness, holiness, and was so clinging by these gifts of grace to God that he could have lived forever in Him, if he had stood fast in the uprightness God had given him. But when Adam slipped into sin, this image and likeness of God was cancelled and effaced, that is, he lost all the benefits of divine grace, by which he could have been led back into the way of life (emphasis added).

Twenty-four years later, Calvin still taught the same thing in his final version of the Institutes,

If man had no title to glory in himself, when, by the kindness of his Maker, he was distinguished by the noblest ornaments, how much ought he to be humbled now, when his ingratitude has thrust him down from the highest glory to extreme ignominy? At the time when he was raised to the highest pinnacle of honor, all which Scripture attributes to him is, that he was created in the image of God, thereby intimating that the blessings in which his happiness consisted were not his own, but derived by divine communication. What remains, therefore, now that man is stripped of all his glory, than to acknowledge the God for whose kindness he failed to be grateful, when he was loaded with the riches of his grace? Not having glorified him by the acknowledgment of his blessings, now, at least, he ought to glorify him by the confession of his poverty (2.2.1; italics added).

Indeed, it is a matter of Confessional orthodoxy for those in the continental Reformed tradition to affirm that upright, sinless creatures only live by the grace of God:

He also created the angels good, to be His messengers and to serve His elect; some of whom are fallen from that excellency in which God created them into everlasting perdition, and the others have by the grace of God remained steadfast and continued in their first state (The Belgic Confession, Article 12).

If even sinless angels are preserved by the grace of God for eternal life, why should Adam be any different? It is one thing to disagree with the Belgic Confession here, but it is altogether different to claim that it is a heretical compromise of the Gospel.

But there is more: William Ames writes in his Marrow of Theology of God’s covenant with Adam that, “In this covenant the moral deed of the intelligent creature lead either to happiness as a reward or to unhappiness as a punishment. The latter is deserved; the former is not” (1.10.11).

Or consider Fisher’s Catechism in questions and answers 30-32:

Was there any proportion between Adam’s obedience, though sinless, and the life that was promised?
There can be no proportion between the obedience of a finite creature, however perfect, and the enjoyment of the infinite God…Why could not Adam’s perfect obedience be meritorious of eternal life?
Because perfect obedience was no more than what he was bound to, by virtue of his natural dependence on God, as a reasonable creature made after his image.

Could he have claimed the reward as a debt, in case he had continued in his obedience?
He could have claimed it only as a pactional debt, in virtue of the covenant promise, by which God became debtor to his own faithfulness, but not in virtue of any intrinsic merit of his obedience, Luke 17:10.

Note here the promissory nature of Adam’s relationship to God. Only by believing God’s promises and threats rather than Satan’s lies would Adam inherit eternal unmerited glory. Adam needed no forgiveness but he still lived by faith in God. He was disinherited for unbelief. Likewise, Zacharias Ursinus teaches in his Commentary on the Heidelberg Catechism that,

even if our works were perfectly good, yet they could not merit eternal life, inasmuch as they are due from us. A reward is due to evil works according to the order of justice; but not unto good works, because we are bound to do them as the creatures of God; but no one can bind God, on the other hand, by any works or means to confer any benefit upon him. Evil works, again, in their very design oppose and injure God, whilst good works add nothing to his felicity (p. 335).

Francis Turretin agrees with this overwhelming testimony. In the first place he defines “merit” in a way that rules out the possibility that a creature could merit anything from the Creator:

To be true merit, then, these five conditions are demanded: (1) that the “work be undue”–for no one merits by paying what he owes (Luke 17.10), he only satisfies; (2) that it be ours–for no one can be said to merit from another; (3) that it be absolutely perfect and free from all taint–for where sin is there merit cannot be; (4) that it be equal and proportioned to the reward and pay; otherwise it would be a gift, not merit. (5) that the reward be due to such a work from justice—whence an “undue work” is commonly defined to be one that “makes a reward due in the order of justice.” (17.5.4; p. 712).

This would lead one to expect that Turretin would deny that sinless “legal obedience” could ever be meritorious in God’s sight. Turretin explicitly meets this expectation. Even if sinless, “there is no merit properly so called of man before God” (Ibid). “Thus, Adam himself, if he had persevered, would not have merited life in strict justice” (Ibid). And, for a sinless being “the legal condition has the relation of a meritorious cause (at least congruously and improperly)” (12.3.6; p. 186; emphasis added). In other words it was emphatically not “merit properly so called.” Joel Garver summarizes:

Having been educated at several prominent Reformed institutions on the Continent, Turretin returned to Geneva where he remained a professor of theology from 1653 onward. While there he published his greatest work, Institutio theologiae elenctiae from 1679-1685. Regarding prelapsarian grace in general, he writes that Adam’s “original righteousness can properly be called ‘grace’ or a ‘gratuitous gift’ (and so not due on the part of God, just as the nature itself also, created by him)” (Institutes 5.11.16).

Regarding the gratuitous promise of life held forth in the prelapsarian covenant of nature, Turretin argues that God promises not only bodily immortality, but also a transformed heavenly life. Had Adam persevered in obedience, the immortality of his body would only have been “through the dignity of original righteousness and the power of God’s special grace” (5.12.9). Moreover, Adam’s elevation to heavenly life would not have been a matter of mere justice, but also “the goodness of God” who is “plenteous in mercy” and by whom Adam would “be gifted” with heavenly life (8.6.6, 8).

For Turretin, not only was grace involved in Adam’s creation, in God’s promise, and in its reward, but Adam was also given “sufficient grace” by which to remain obedient to that first covenant, a grace that Turretin describes as “habitual and internal” (9.7.14-17).

Turretin’s nephew, Benedict Pictet, reiterated this Reformed Orthodox position. His Christian Theology was translated by Frederick Reyroux and it was published by the Presbyterian Board of Publication in Philadelphia before January of 1846. At that time, the issue of the Princeton Review announced the publication and declared,

In this small but compact volume, we have a comprehensive epitome of Theology; from the pen of one of the most distinguished theologians of Geneva. The great excellence of Pictet, is simplicity and perspicuity. He is, even in his large work, much less scholastic, than his predecessors, and less disposed perhaps to press his statements beyond the limits of certain knowledge. We are glad to see so sound and readable a book placed within the reach of all classes of readers (vol 18, issue 1, “Short Notices,” p. 180).

Pictet wrote regarding God’s covenant with Adam that it involved both promise and warning. The warning involves a rather straightforward exposition of the text of Genesis. Proving that a promise was also involved, however, requires some extrapolation, because the future reward is not stated in the text. Pictet reasons from God’s character saying:

With regard to the promise of the covenant, though it is not expressly laid down, it is sufficiently clear from the threatening of death, which is opposed to it; for although God owes nothing to his creature, yet as the whole scripture sets him forth to us as slow to anger and abundant in mercy, it is not at all probable, that God denounced upon man the threat of eternal punishment, and at the same time gave him no promise (p. 141).

Pictet also deals with the principle of the possibility of meritorious works later in his book. In dealing with the good works of a believer, and proving “the necessity of good works,” he goes on to point out that such necessary good works are not meritorious before God. In doing so he gives four reasons (pp 332, 333). At least two of these would apply to all creatures regardless of sin or innocence. First “a meritorious work must be one that is not due, for no one can have any merit in paying what he owes; but good works are due; ‘When ye shall have done all those things which are commanded you, say, We are unprofitable servants: we have done that which it was out duty to do’ (Luke 17.10).” Second, there must be a “proportion” between “the good work and the promised reward; but there is no proportion between the two in the present case; not even when the good work is martyrdom, the most excellent of all. For (all) ‘the sufferings of this present time are not worthy to be compared with the glory which shall be revealed,’ (Romans 8.18).”

But Pictet not only speaks of good works in general, but specifically addresses the issue of how good works would have related to Adam’s vindication and glorification if he had continued in faith and obedience rather than falling into unbelief and disobedience. He writes that “if the first man had persevered in innocence, he would have been justified by the fulfillment of the natural law which God had engraven on his heart, and of the other commandments which God might have enjoined on him; in short, by perfectly loving God and his neighbor” (p. 312). Thus, if Adam had persevered he would have been declared righteous and “acquired a right to eternal glory, not indeed as if he had properly merited it, for the creature can merit nothing from the Creator, but according to the free promise and Covenant of God” (Ibid.).

As can be seen by the fact that Pictet was translated, American theologians did not reject Turrettin’s faithful summary of the Reformed heritage; far less did they condemn it as a subversion of the Gospel. As Joel Garver writes in his essay, “The Covenant of Works in the Reformed Tradition,” of, A. A. Hodge’s Outlines of Theology, published in 1860.

In it he writes of the covenant of works, “It was also essentially a gracious covenant, because although every creature is, as such, bound to serve the Creator to the full extent of his powers, the Creator cannot be bound as a mere matter of justice to grace the creature fellowship with himself.” In his posthumously published Evangelical Theology: A Course of Popular Lectures (1890), Hodge similarly states, “God offered to man in this gracious Covenant of Works the opportunity of accepting his grace and receiving his covenant gift of a confirmed holy character” (167).

I will cut short my discussion list of evidence here, though it could be much much longer. Readers are directed to Joel Garver’s much more detailed and better-organized essay (http://www.joelgarver.com/writ/theo/covwor.htm) for more evidence, though it too could be much longer.

But according to Table Talk this is all wrong.

Of course it is dangerous to confuse law and Gospel, by the way. That is precisely why such careless reasoning is so dangerous. It won’t hold up. It isn’t what Paul was talking about. It isn’t consistent with the Reformed Tradition. It leaves the real meaning and danger unexplained.

Defining law the way the writer does, it is dangerous because (as the quotations above show) it is blasphemy. No creature can merit anything from God. Only Jesus merited vindication from God for us and that was because he graciously became incarnate. (Notice though that this merit does not need to be played off against God’s gracious attitude as we see in Luke and Philippians).

The comparison between the two Adams is between Adam’s demerit and Christ’s merit. That is exactly what Romans 5 shows us. If Adam had obeyed the possibility of sin would have been eliminated from creation. His sons and daughters would have been perfectly righteous before God and had no need of some meritorious ground to compensate for any sin. There would have been no need for an “alien imputation” of Adam’s righteousness, meritorious or not.

These things were necessary and were given due to the imputation of Adam’s disobedience and the corruption of human nature along with the sins that resulted.