This is the fourth and final in a series of blog articles responding to Harrison Perkins’ November 30 article on The Heidelblog that misrepresents my published essay, “Covenantal Life with God from Eden to Holy City.” My last blog entry focuses on God’s use of cautions and warnings as integral to the gospel. I succinctly express it this way: “The gospel message bears within itself obligations—repent and believe the good news as it is in Jesus Christ. The call of the gospel is integral to and indivisible from the gospel message. Refusal to repent and believe the gospel has consequences, eternal perdition.”
This blog article directly counters Harrison Perkins’ unsubstantiated and unguarded assertion: “In the end, Caneday does promote a salvation by works.” Perkins claims the following supports his allegation that I advocate for a doctrine of human-meriting of God’s favor.
Warnings do not call for retrospective review of faith’s authenticity but for prospective laying hold of the inheritance of salvation in Christ. They warn lest we follow a course that irrevocably leads to perdition. They urgently juxtapose salvation as the assured blessing for heeding the gospel’s warning antithetically to perdition as the unalterable curse for ignoring the gospel’s threat. (pg. 113)
Immediately following this citation, Perkins explains, “In other words, warnings do not ask us to examine if our faith is genuine, since genuine faith is assumed. Rather, biblical warnings call us to ask if we have been faithful enough to avoid hell.”
First, briefly but straight to Perkins’ claim, his is a remarkable allegation given my unequivocal denials and explicit affirmations of the opposite. Consider this unambiguous statement made early in the essay.
Imperatival or conditional stipulations do not imperil fulfillment of God’s covenants concerning either jurisdiction over covenant members or their eschatological purposes. God’s unfolding purpose administered through covenants that entail conditional stipulations is not jeopardized, thwarted, rendered meritorious, or based on human obedience (103).
More similarly explicit statements will be presented in the remainder of this blog entry.
Second, it is unsurprising that Perkins construes the above citation as support for his claim that I “promote a salvation by works.” This is because he conceives of salvation in Christ retrospectively rather than prospectively. Hence, for him, warnings are not really warnings to be heeded concerning how we run the race in the arena of faith. Rather, they turn us around, calling on us to contemplate and evaluate how we have run thus far, whether our faith is authentic, whether we have truly been converted. Stated succinctly, Perkins reads Scripture’s numerous admonitions and warnings through his understanding of 2 Corinthians 13:5—“Examine yourselves to see whether you are in the faith; test yourselves. Do you not realize that Christ Jesus is in you—unless, of course, you fail the test?” (NIV). In truth, this is a unique appeal not only in the Apostle Paul’s letters but in the whole New Testament. The overwhelming majority of the gospel’s calls and warnings to persevere in faithfulness to Christ Jesus are not retrospective nor introspective but Christ-focused and prospective, pointing to the Last Day. They are future-oriented, as Tom Schreiner and I repeatedly point out in The Race Set Before Us (16, 33, 34, 39, 44, 45, 145, 152, 154, 163, 175, 191, 192, 198, 199, 215, 306). Nonetheless, many Calvinists, such as Harrison Perkins and R. Scott Clark, disagree with how the Classic Reformed confessions speak of the gospel’s cautions and warnings as found in the Canons of Dort, which succinctly states:
And, just as it has pleased God to begin this work of grace in us by the proclamation of the gospel, so he preserves, continues, and completes his work by the hearing and reading of the gospel, by meditation on it, by its exhortations, threats, and promises, and also by the use of the sacraments (Fifth Head of Doctrine—Article 14: God’s Use of Means in Perseverance).
This citation from the Canons of Dort expressly mentioned in my essay (106, note 16), which can also be found among R. Scott Clark’s resources, endorses what I affirm: (1) that exhortations and threats are as integral to the gospel message as promises are; (2) that the gospel regularly juxtaposes salvation as the assured blessing for persevering faith and eternal perdition as God’s irrevocable condemnation for refusing to heed the gospel’s threats, and (3) that gospel admonitions and warnings do not reduce perseverance in faithfulness to Christ Jesus to a meritorious system of “salvation by works.” Thankfully, the drafters of the Canons of Dort did not subscribe to “the Law-Gospel hermeneutic” Perkins and Clark embrace.
As Tom Schreiner and I demonstrate in The Race Set Before Us, folks such as Perkins and Clark, who advocate what we call “the tests-of-genuineness-view” concerning gospel warnings, unwittingly disrupt the assurance of salvation held out in the gospel because they portray salvation as essentially retrospective rather than primarily prospective (TRSBU, 15, 32, 33, 34, 35, 39, 44, 151, etc.) Tom Schreiner and I demonstrate that Christian assurance of salvation is necessarily prospective. This means that Christian assurance of faith lays hold of God’s justifying verdict of the Last Day that is already announced in the gospel. It is being assured now of God’s acquitting verdict in the Dy of Judgment. Thus, we observe,
[T]he temptation for Christians is to interpret the warning from a framework of an over-realized view of salvation that severs the biblical connection between the already and the not yet—the linkage between persevering and being saved in the end. The result is that warnings lose their prospective orientation and function, taking on both a retrospective focus and introspective function as tests that expose impostors, people who are not true believers (154).
Perkins and other advocates of the tests-of-genuineness-view of warnings fail to realize their truncated understanding of salvation, so they superimpose their interpretation of the Apostle Paul’s tongue-in-cheek appeal of 2 Corinthians 13:5 upon all gospel cautions and warnings. By doing this, they reduce the voluminous future-oriented calls of the gospel into retrospection. They turn the Christian’s proper orientation on receiving “the coming of the salvation that is ready to be revealed in the last time” (1 Peter 1:5, 9) to run backward while assessing one’s progress in holiness since conversion both retrospectively and introspectively. For example, they believe that the Apostle Paul’s prospective admonition in Colossians 1:21-23 prompts believers to review their progress in the faith to assess whether they show evidence that their belief is genuine. Hence, this retrospective and introspective approach to God’s warnings and admonitions undercuts Christian assurance that lays hold of God’s promise of salvation on the Last Day.
Third, the citation that he claims supports his allegation against me, that “There is no emphasis on trusting Christ,” Perkins shamefully disconnects it from a context that expounds the function of the Preacher’s urgent warning against apostasy in Hebrews 10:26-31 that calls for steadfast faith in Christ Jesus who alone can save us. Consider, then, the citation Perkins has pulled out of its context.
The passage warns us lest we apostatize from Christ. The passage is not introspective but Christ-centered, focused on Christ Jesus, the prize to be won (cf. Heb 12:1-3). Warnings do not call for retrospective review of faith’s authenticity but for prospective laying hold of the inheritance of salvation in Christ. They warn lest we follow a course that irrevocably leads to perdition. They urgently juxtapose salvation as the assured blessing for heeding the gospel’s warning antithetically to perdition as the unalterable curse for ignoring the gospel’s threat (113).
Here, “laying hold of” and “heeding the gospel’s warning” are expressions that represent nothing other than “persevering belief in Christ Jesus.” Contrary to Perkins’ notion that my exposition of warnings and admonitions both reduces salvation to a system of works and threatens assurance of salvation, I emphatically affirm:
The five ascending urgent warnings neither call believers to doubt their “confession of hope” nor to question whether “he who has promised is faithful” to secure us unto salvation in the day that is approaching. The Preacher commingles appeals for bold confidence and intense threats, doing so without any hint of contradiction, for both serve the same objective, our loyalty to Christ. He simultaneously proclaims assured confidence in God’s steadfast covenant promise and the urgent imperative to persevere in faithfulness to Christ. For this messianic era, God’s appointed means of preserving believers in faithfulness to Christ entails preaching the gospel that fuses together forceful warnings, lest believers perish by deliberately refusing to heed Jesus Christ, and assurances of God’s steadfast promise of salvation to everyone who believes in his Son (cf. [Hebrews] 6:4-0; 10:19-39). The Preacher more succinctly juxtaposes these two aspects when he proclaims, “Therefore, do not throw away your confidence, which possesses a great reward. For you have a need of perseverance, in order that when you have done the will of God, you may receive what was promised” (10:35-36).
Unfortunately, with R. Scott Clark, Harrison Perkins “supposes that covenant stipulations—‘if . . . then’ or ‘do . . . in order to’—necessarily entail accruements of merits (Romanist) and put believers in jeopardy of perishing (Arminian)” (115). Against this misconstruing of gospel warnings and admonitions, and in concert with Herman Bavinck, Louis Berkhof, William Cunningham, and numerous other Reformed theologians and creeds, including the Canons of Dort, the New Testament
frequently administers gospel warnings expressed by conditionals with real and inviolable consequences. These warnings neither imperil believers nor subject them to meriting God’s favor. Rather, they are an effective means to preserve Christ’s own. The Preacher’s culminating threat directs believers to contemplate the dread Moses felt on the mountain in the Lord’s presence and to ponder how much more dreadful it is to come to Mount Zion, the city of the living God, the heavenly Jerusalem (Heb 12:25) (116).
What I have already cited from my essay should have cautioned Perkins against alleging, “In the end, Caneday does promote a salvation by works.” Besides that, I include a whole section in the essay titled: “Repeated Expressions of God’s Grace, Election, and Covenant Faithfulness.” Here, concerning the law covenant, I emphasize that
Moses explicitly warns the Israelites against putting confidence in the flesh and exhorts them to worship the Lord by obeying him because of his mercy (Deut 8:10-18). Again he emphasizes that the law covenant entails grace, for the Lord goes before them, as promised, to drive out the land’s inhabitants. The Lord acts on their behalf not because of their righteousness but on account of his own promise to dispossess the land’s inhabitants (121).
Finally, concerning the relationship between the law covenant and the new covenant, the following makes it abundantly clear that Perkins’ allegation is 180 degrees wide of the mark.
God designed the law covenant to be subordinate to both the promise it sustained and the new covenant it foreshadowed, which would render it obsolete. Thus God designed the law covenant to command wholehearted obedience that it could not secure (Ps 51:16–17), to require circumcision of hearts that it was powerless to circumcise (Deut 10:6; 30:6), to promise eternal life that it could not deliver (Lev 18:5; Rom 7:10), to demand righteousness that it was not able to impute (Gal 3:21), and to require remission of guilt that it was impotent to accomplish (Heb 10:11).48 Under the law covenant, were there any Israelites whose sins were remitted, who were righteous, who received eternal life, whose hearts were circumcised, who received the Spirit, who obeyed the Lord wholeheartedly? Yes, indeed! But obeying the Lord, receipt of the Spirit, heart circumcision, reception of eternal life, justification, and forgiveness of sins were extrinsic to that covenant of shadows. . . . Rather, the law, functioning typologically, pointed away from itself as it testified to the coming One who alone could offer himself as the effective sacrifice to take away sin and to give the Spirit who would circumcise hearts unto obedience and enliven with eternal life (Rom 3:21) (122-23).
Once again, I offer this statement from the conclusion of my essay to put to flight Perkins’ allegation.
We also need to guard against misconstruing new covenant stipulations as though the imperatives or the various forms of conditionals either raise doubts about our covenant membership in Christ or beguile us to suppose that obedience entails meriting our continued covenantal standing with God (124).
Following this assertion, I offer repeated illustrations from Scripture how unbelief has corrupted humans to misconstrue the Lord God’s covenant stipulations. Thus, I conclude:
Divine revelation makes clear that every human covenantal relationship with God is established and initiated by God’s invariable covenant provision. Only because God unconditionally takes the initiative to bless us with his saving mercies and endow us with the Spirit do we obey his covenant stipulations or conditions. The apostle John succinctly expresses this—“This is love: not that we loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son as an atoning sacrifice for our sins” (1 John 4:10). God’s covenant provision of unconditional love grounds the response he stipulates in order that we might receive the covenant blessing of life. Thus, John states, “Beloved, if God loved us in this manner, we also ought to love one another” and again, “We love because he first loved us” (4:11, 19, my translation). Augustine embraced the Lord’s stipulations rightly when he prayed, “My whole hope is in thy exceeding great mercy and that alone. Give what thou commandest and command what thou wilt.” And so it is that if we obey God’s stipulations proclaimed in and through his new covenant in Christ Jesus, God’s Word assures us that we shall have access to the tree of life in God’s Holy City. But if we do not heed God’s threatening stipulations, we will be cast outside, and our share in the tree of life and in the Holy City will be taken from us (125-26).
Given what I have demonstrated from my essay, “Covenantal Life with God from Eden to Holy City,” it is impossible for anyone to make a credible allegation that my essay “promotes a salvation by works.” However, when someone wears “the law-gospel hermeneutical” glasses, anyone who claims that God’s good news entails commands to obey Christ Jesus will be accused falsely and slanderously, of course, of promoting salvation by works.