The Death of Christ (versus?) the Active Obedience

...Notes taken from Norman Shepherd's article, The Imputation of Active Obedience, in the book edited by Andrew Sandlin, A FaithThat is Never Alone, in which Shepherd offers a critical assessment of R. Scott Clark's view on the doctrine found in the book, Covenant, Justification and Pastoral Ministry....

The active obedience doctrine is built on the covenant of works doctrine, an idea that in order to satisfy divine justice, two things must happen: obedience and punishment. According to Clark, this is not an "either/or" but rather a "both/and" approach to justification, and how a sinner is made right with God.

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The covenant of works doctrine supposes that in the Garden of Eden, Adam in his state of innocence (prelapsarian fall), still had to earn the right to eternal life. By his obedience to not eating of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, Adam would merit the reward from God, and live forever. So, from the start, Adam is in a relationship with God based entirely on justice: he obeys--he earns; he disobeys--he is punished.

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The covenant of works failed, but God promises his Son to fulfill this covenant on Adam's and his posterity's behalf. Christ, in fulfilling the covenant of works as the second Adam, earns the "unmerited merit" of Adam he failed to accomplish in the Garden. This law-keeping and whole life of Jesus is then imputed to the believer as righteousness (total goodness and law-keeping obedience); this fulfills the requirement of divine justice as far as the obedience aspect goes. This is not sufficient, however, in order for us to have the right to eternal life.

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Secondly, the punishment for sin must occur. Jesus' death for us on the cross is the fulfillment of this secondary aspect of fulfilling divine justice, and therefore called his passive obedience. (The resurrection of Jesus is included in this scheme as well).

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Shepherd has a number of problems with this theological construction, and the main one is that such a construction lacks scriptural warrant, in that it is simply not delineated in the pages of the Bible. Rather, the Apostle Paul says plainly in Romans 4:25 that Jesus was "put to death for our transgressions (sins) and raised to life for our justification." And Jesus says in Mark 10:45 that he gives his life "as a ransom for many." The Bible over and over talks about the "foolishness of the cross" (1 Corinthians 1:18), and Jesus himself says about his death: "Just as Moses lifted up the snake in the desert, so the Son of Man must be lifted up, that everyone who believes in him may have eternal life," (John 3:14).

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Lastly, Paul says, "and are justified by his grace as a gift, through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus, whom God put forward as a propitiation by his blood, to be received by faith," (Romans 3: 24-25).


More on this "active obedience for the imputation of righteousness to the believer" some other time...

Conceptual and Ontological Necessity of the Trinity

Christian philosopher Michael Butler affirms in his article that conceptual necessity does not guarantee ontological necessity. In other words, we basically need more than a "conceptual scheme" to provide knowledge; we need an "actual" (ontological) scheme as well. Reformed apologists espousing the Transcendental Argument for God's existence (TAG) employ the idea that the Christian God as well as his revelation, the Bible, are the preconditions necessary for knowledge.

TAG tries to prove Christianity indirectly by the "impossibility of the contrary" by showing the absurdity of the non-christian worldview (religion, or or theory of life), and showing how only the Christian worldview can make sense of science, logic, and morality, and indeed--all of life. Too much is to be written to defend TAG at this juncture, for the criticisms abound against this argument both within the Christian world and without it (the "classical" arguments for God's existence also have this 'back-and forth' in common with TAG i.e. the cosmological, teleological, and ontological arguments).

Often proponents of TAG show how it is conceptually necessary to have a personal, triune God who controls the universe, gives uniformity to nature (metaphysics), holds comprehensive knowledge and shares portions of it (epistemology) and serves as moral law-giver, standard and judge of morality (ethics); where they sometimes fail is to show how this concept is ontologically necessary. In other words, the unbeliever may finally 'cry uncle' and admit his worldview does not support absolutes, because he espouses a relativistic concept of morality, and he may admit that morals only make sense if there is a personal God (an actual Person) who gives moral commands to humans and serves as a transcendent, ultimate authority and standard. So, the concept is the only one acceptable, the unbeliever admits. However, does this mean the Christian has convinced the unbeliever of the ontological necessity of of Christianity?

This is why Butler and others (Bahnsen, Van Til, Frame, Schaeffer--sort of) in the reformed apologetic school of presuppositionalism assert that not only is revelation from God necessary as a concept but also necessary ontologically. This ontology, this "actuality" is found in the Bible itself. Butler, in his article is trying to refute the idea that the Christian apologist has done his service by only showing the concept of Christian theism as being necessary for knowledge, morals, and science. Rather, said apologist must assert the Bible--as special revelation--as the "proof in the pudding," the ontological answer to our queries concerning the aforementioned fields in philosophy.

I was thinking about this needed congruence between conceptual and ontological necessity the other day while digging up rocks in the front yard because the landscaper didn't give us enough(any?) topsoil when he planted the grass. I remember my physics teacher in high school teaching that for sound to occur, there have to be three aspects present: source, medium, receiver. This made me think of the Trinity, as it has a lot to do with TAG in the area of epistemology, metaphysics, and ethics. Such natural triads, in this case, concerning the necessary preconditions for noise to occur, are found throughout our natural world: water is solid, liquid or gas; education has the trivium (grammar, dialectic, rhetoric); the human body is broken down to bone, tissue, liquid. (There are many other triads listed in John Frame's Doctrine of God).... So, I wondered about the significance between the necessity of the three requirements for sound as it relates to the three persons of the Trinity. In the redemptive work of God, the Father initiates, the Son accomplishes, and the Holy Spirit applies salvation to people.

But does that mean that sound, or thought required the ontological Trinity? If there were only two persons in the Trinity, eternal counsel could still be had because there would be a source and receiver, while the medium would be space. But, if God is the creator of everything, then he is the creator of space as well. It could be argued that space did not exist as a medium until it was actually created. Furthermore, in the Christian concept of Trinity, God is three persons in one God, not two separate gods. The concept of the Trinity as three-in-one lays the perfect foundation for not only unity and diversity in the community of the Trinity (Ravi Zacharias), but also as a paradigm for us to view the natural realm, in this case, that of the necessary elements required for sound to occur. In the Trinity and the eternal counsel of God, their is indeed a source, medium and receiver. However, the "lack of space" argument may not work, as God is a spirit, and requires not space. If it is argued that God does not require space, then a two-person Godhead may suffice to explain discourse. Even so, I think Frame is right by saying the triads in the natural realm do not prove the Trinity as ontologically necessary, but rather reflect the glory and design of the Triune God. The trick here is that this type of information usually only 'clicks' with people who already affirm belief in the Trinity. I don't know if triads in the natural realm show the preconditions of the ontological Trinity as necessary to make sense out of human experience as much as they reveal what God has done. And, not everyone believes the Christian God has done anything. But, I was just picking rocks when I thought of this, so I'll have to hash it out some more...

Nevertheless, the idea that a concept can be required without an ontology to go with it is repudiated by Butler. This is most likely because, not only such an idea fails to prove TAG with any emphatic scope, but rather because it is possible that concepts in and of themselves may not exist apart from an ontological reality. A similar problem may be the "mind/body problem," but the real objection here is that merely proving Christianity as the precondition for the intelligibility of human experience as a concept does not force the unbeliever to accept Christianity ontologically--as the actual truth in existential terms.

The Moral Argument for God's Existence & the OT Genocides

I could have made the title to this post longer, "The Moral Argument for God's Existence Submitted According to Presuppositional Transcendentalism in Light of the Old Testament Genocides: Is Arbitrariness a Contingency Factor in Determining Ethics?"

Right. Why not just pound that out like a sheet of malleable metal and submit it as the thesis sentence? But what I'm asking here has to do with all of the above: when using the Transcendental Argument for God's existence (TAG) in the moral phase of it, good questions are often asked regarding how morals are determined, even if God is necessary for us to make sense out of them.

TAG and other moral arguments for God's existence attempt to show that, unless there is a God who gives us a moral law, then there is no justification for moral precepts at all. In fact, Fyodor Dostoevsky said the same thing in The Brothers Karamazov, which I posted about earlier. So, taking for granted that it is true that we need a transcendent, moral law in order to justify our morals, the question remains as to how those morals are obtained. Can God change his mind arbitrarily regarding what is moral? Is something moral because God commands it, or does God command it because it is moral?

There is a difference in answering these questions between the standard Moral Argument and TAG. The standard MA gives a general idea of a transcendent need for a moral lawgiver, while TAG aims to assert the particularity of the Christian God as the necessary precondition for morality. In other words, the MA will say, "If there is no God, there are no morals," whereas TAG will say, "The Christian God, and only the Christian God, is the necessary precondition for morality." MA is general, while TAG is particular.

Let us take for granted that someone accepts TAG in its uniqueness and responsibility. An external critique has been made, in that all other worldviews have been rejected for the sake of the Christian worldview. Now comes the internal critique. And the internal critique of the Christian view of God can be very challenging. Indeed one of the major objections to the Christian view of God as an internal critique regards some of the things Yahweh commanded the Israelites to do in the Old Testament--in this case, the genocides.

Questions asked are: "Why kill the children, and even the women? Why kill at all? Isn't this a contradiction to the 7th commandment (you shall not kill)? Can the genocides be used to justify action against other nations, people groups, today?" These questions are all important, but I have found the most popular one regards the killing of innocent babies in the Canaanite city. We'll have to answer this later, as I have to sand the mud on the drywall. Time to get to work!

Ok. Taking a break, and brushing off the dust...

The program involved in Israel's history in this instance is that of claiming the promised land. God had rescued the Israelites from slavery in Egypt through many signs and wonders, and now gives them the land God promised to Abraham in Genesis 15: 12-21. The Lord tells Abraham that the "sin of the Amorites has not yet reached its full measure," and that after 400 years of slavery, the Lord would give Abraham's descendants the land of Canaan.

So, now in Joshua's campaign, we have the fulfillment of the promise, and the 400 years is up. 400 years is a long time for the Lord to have patience with a culture steeped in demon worship, child sacrifice and idolatry. In Genesis 19, the Lord destroys Sodom and Gomorrah with burning sulfur after Abraham pleaded with God to not destroy it for the sake of his nephew Lot, and his family, which the Lord did rescue them. We ask, we could not the Lord have done the same with the Canaanites?

Part of the reason I think the Lord uses war in the annihilation of the Canaanites is so that the surrounding nations would fear Israel, and not be tempted to invade them. Furthermore, the Lord would use the surrounding nations to test Israel's faithfulness to God's covenant. But, back to the annihilation of an entire people...

Why not rescue the babies, at least? But then someone could ask, why not rescue the children as well as the babies? And another, why not the women and the children? And, at what age does one qualify as no longer being a child? We can imagine the innocence of the baby in the most vile, evil culture in the world; couldn't it be rescued? Indeed, it could, as Rahab and her family were rescued when the Israelites invaded Jericho. However, no one repented in Canaan. There was no one to represent the innocent children. Moreover, the Lord has the right to create life and to take it away--he is the Lord. He often did save cities, such as Nineveh, which did repent of their sins. Still, it is a hard thing to accept, this annihilation of every living thing. Nevertheless, the Canaanites polluted their land (Numbers 35:34) with their bloodshed. Also, God commanded Israelite soldiers who killed to be cleansed of their bloodshed as well (Numbers35: 33-34).

We can say that the annihilation of every living thing in the Canaanite cities was immoral, but are we justified in doing so? On what grounds do we make such a claim? If there is no God, what is moral? What is immoral? If there is a god, but we don't know this god personally, and this god has not told us what is moral and immoral, we are in the same position: what is moral? what is immoral?

But, if there is a personal God who interacts with history and tells us what is moral from what is not e.g. the Ten Commandments, then we have grounds for our belief. We are then justified in our assertions as to what is moral or not. The internal critique, however, against Yahweh and his alleged immoral act in destroying cities and judging nations for their sin, is not one so much of a logical question as it is an emotional one. (There is a logical "problem of evil," but that problem differs from the topic under discussion). Again, Ivan in The Brothers Karamazov admits that it isn't that I don't believe God exists and created the world, it is that I do not accept the world he has created, nor the actions (or lack thereof) he has taken in it.

This emotional problem is a real one. However, to despise Yahweh for his actions is to make oneself judge of him; this temptation is easy for us, especially as we live so many thousands of years away from what happened according to what is written, and we have a deep sense of justice and mercy in our culture. The Bible teaches that the Lord is merciful, and good. The Bible also teaches that God is holy. God waited 400 years for the Canaanites to repent of their sins of idolatry, child sacrifice, orgies, and the like. They didn't. So, he punished them. He had mercy on them for a while, while the Israelites groaned in Egypt under slavery. Then he punished the Canaanites, in order to show mercy on Israel to give them freedom and blessing.