Wow, Charles Hodge sure disagrees with Pipa that variations on the "how" of transmission of original sin constitute contradictions of the confession

our Confession teaches the doctrine of original sin. That doctrine is essential to the Reformed or Calvinistic system. Any man who denies that doctrine, thereby rejects the system taught in our Confession, and cannot with a good conscience say that he adopts it. Original sin, however, is one thing; the way in which it is accounted for, is another. The doctrine is, that such is the relation between Adam and his posterity, that all mankind, descending from him by ordinary generation, are born in a state of sin and condemnation. Any man who admits this, holds the doctrine. But there are at least three ways of accounting for this fact. The scriptural explanation as given in our Standards is, that "the covenant being made with Adam, not only for himself, but for his posterity, all mankind, descending from him by ordinary generation, sinned in him, and fell with him, in his first transgression." The fact that mankind fell into that estate of sin and misery in which they are born, is accounted for on the principle of representation. Adam was constituted our head and representative, so that his sin is the judicial ground of our condemnation and of the consequent loss of the divine image, and of the state of spiritual death in which all men come into the world. This, as it is the scriptural, so it is the Church view of the subject. It is the view held in the Latin and the Lutheran, as well as in the Reformed Church, and therefore belongs to the Church catholic. Still it is not essential to the doctrine. Realists admit the doctrine, but, unsatisfied with the principle of representative responsibility, assume that humanity as a generic life acted and sinned in Adam; and, therefore, that his sin is the act, with its demerit and consequences, of every man in whom that generic life is individualized. Others, accepting neither of these solutions, assert that the fact of original sin (i.e., the sinfulness and condemnation of man at birth) is to be accounted for in the general law of propagation. Like begets like. Adam became sinful, and hence all his posterity are born in the state of sin, or with a sinful nature. Although these views are not equally scriptural, or equally in harmony with our Confession, nevertheless they leave the doctrine intact, and do not work a rejection of the system of which it is an essential part.

Clearly Hodge goes on to define certain matters now in dispute (certain formulations of the Covenant of Works) as also essential to the confession, but I find it intersting to have Hodge supporting diversity on the matter of the means of the imputation of Adam's sin.

Here's a sermon by Joseph Pipa on justification and controversies surrounding it. I don't think most of what he says about what the Auburn Avenue position is factual. He claims that "they don't want to say that justifcation is by faith alone" because allegedly the matter of infant salvation, where faith "as we understand it" can't possibly be in view. Pipa merely states that this matter is a great mystery and we shouldn't try to do theological definitions when presented with a mystery.

I find that a hard line to take. What of "good and *necessary* consequence"?

If we state the following two premises

1. Justification is by faith alone
2. Elect Infants dying in infancy are justified

Doesn't formal logic necessitate either saying that elect infants have saving faith, or that premise 1 is not always true (and is therefore false as stated.)

I also wonder where the citation is that any of the Federal Vision supporters will agree "they don't want to say that justifcation is by faith alone". I'd think that would be easy to demonstate such an extreme claim.

Sometimes I think "surely there is more that unites the 'federal vision' and those that are opposed than divides them." But then I read what some who are opposed think are the problems of the FV

[T]he re-casting of the normal orthodox understanding of certain vital aspects of Biblical and Reformed theology (cf. the Westminster Standards) raises far more serious problems in the end, than the ones which the Federal Visionists claim to have solved.

For instance, there is an attempt...to read Biblical history as "The Story" involving primarily personal relationships between God and His people (rather than a depository for doctrinal propositions)

Oh, yes, that's right. Much better to regard the Bible as a depository of doctrinal propositions than a "story" of God and his people.

If this be the FVs crime, let them wear it as a badge of honor.

Let all and sundry know that the Federal Vision denies Westminster Shorter Catechism question THREE "The Scriptures principally teach what man is to believe concerning God, and what duty God requires of man." because they claim that the form of those teachings is a story.

Critics of the FV would do well to criticize some of the other critics, I think.

In his "Response to Wilkins" in The Auburn Avenue Theology, Pros and Cons, Joseph Pipa makes a great many claims about Wilkins "failures", "denials", "failures to affirm", "failures to distinguish", and "failures to define" his theology, ultimately concluding

If I have understood Wilkins in this paper, the Federal Vision is a deviant, unbiblical view of salvation

One failure that Pipa accuses Wilkins of is as follows

Wilkins also neglects to discuss Adam's role as covenant head. He writes "By his sin, Adam also forfeited a holy and happy posterity. All mankind descending from Adam by 'ordinary generation' would come into the world not upright but covenantally dead in sin, cut off from the covenant, strangers to 'life,' and in need of reconciliation and rebirth" He fails to demonstrate how Adam's posterity inherited Adam's sin. By neglecting the formal arrangement of the Covenant of Works, he has no basis for the imputation of that sin to Adam's posterity

In contradiction of this claim, Wilkins explicitly affirms and discusses the role of Adam as covenant head, under the institution of Adam's marriage

Wedlock The covenant defined him as a covenant head or husband. As God's representative in creation, man is to exercise headship under god. In this role, Adam was given a wife to love, protect, and lead, and with whom he could be fruitful by the blessing of God

I fail to see how Wilkins is "failing" to demonstrate how it is that sin adheres to Adam's posterity. Is his answer missing anything from Westminster Larger Catechism 26?

Question 26: How is original sin conveyed from our first parents unto their posterity?

Answer: Original sin is conveyed from our first parents unto their posterity by natural generation, so as all that proceed from them in that way are conceived and born in sin.

Is Wilkins "unclear" with respect to question 22?

Did all mankind fall in that first transgression ?

Answer: The covenant being made with Adam as a public person, not for himself only, but for his posterity, all mankind descending from him by ordinary generation, sinned in him, and fell with him in that first transgression.

Must Wilkins resign as an officer for identifying Adam's role as a "public person" with his role as a husband? Since Eve was the only "public" around, it seems quite fitting for his "public persona" be related to his headship as husband. It is peculiarly Adam's failure to guard his wife from the serpent's temptation that leads to his first transgression. Pipa's desire to so focus on the "symbolic law" that was broken as providing a key (in a covenant of works schema) to the nature of the sin problem visited on his progeny, that Wilkins highlighting of the many features of the whole "estate wherein Adam was created"

the placing him in paradise, appointing him to dress it, giving him liberty to eat of the fruit of the earth; putting the creatures under his dominion, and ordaining marriage for his help; affording him communion with himself; instituting the Sabbath; entering into a covenant of life with him, upon condition of personal, perfect, and perpetual obedience, of which the tree of life was a pledge; and forbidding to eat of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, upon the pain of death.

as covenantal and violated constitutes "failing to do justice to the nature of Adam's sin" and "fail[ing] to define Adam's sin" as breaking the covenant by rebelling against the word concerning the tree.

But is this a problem? Does anyone think Wilkins does not also include the matter of the prohibition? Jordan's essay in The Federal Vision contains many excellent observations on the nature and setting of the prohibition. Maybe Wilkins thought it was so obvious, and so emphasized by everyone, that he was trying to state some often unobserved features of Adam's rebellion. Is it wrong to note that Adam

1. failed to guard a garden he was given charge over
2. refused the liberty he had to eat of every other tree
3. had the serpent under his dominion, but submitted to him
4. violated his marriage
5. rejected the communion of God for communion with the Serpent

as well as violating a commandment? Wilkins has expanded the significance of the creational covenant beyond the prohibition of the tree of knowledge and pledge of the tree of life to every good things that God had tasked and set man to do (worship, marriage, and work) but it hardly would seem that by adding additional details to the covenant that he loses and basis for imputation of sin to Adam's posterity, who remain, in Wilkins' essay, his progeny by natural generation, and he their covenant head and father.

At the very least, Pipa needs to argue this claim, instead of asserting it.

Sherds posts some observations on parenting. Well said.

When Jordan says "death" is not necessarily the result of sin he's not claiming that the death we experience after the fall is not the result of sin (since it is), but that there is, pre-fall, a condition analogous to death that seems to still be a condition of an unfallen world.

Adam's first covenantal maturing (marriage) took place in the "near-death" of "deep sleep". It stands to reason that subsequent maturings would follow at least a similar pattern. But the "deaths" pre- and post-fall bear analogous similarity, not identity. I don't think that is a strange or heretical claim.

Had Adam lawfully eaten of the Tree of Knowledge, he would die, but God would have raised him to a more glorious life

This is a reflection on the precise words of what God says to Adam. He says that "all trees may be eaten" and then says "don't eat of the tree of KoGaE" [implied "yet", as many commentators have argued: it was a temporary probation] or you will "die" in the day you eat of it.

God doesn't say "if you eat without permission you will die", he says "if you eat, you will die", which implies that even if given permission to eat, Adam would still "die" in some sense.

Judith Warner had an online chat about her article an hour ago.
This interchange makes no sense, though, in terms of her claims in the article

Germantown, MD: As a stay-at-home mom with two small (and currently sick) boys, I am amazed almost daily when grilled by other mothers about what nursery school I am enrolling my eldest (age 2) in or if I've started researching the best schools. I get equally amazed looks in response when I say that my husband and I agree that it's a bit early for all that. Are we wrong? Why the out-of-the-womb rat race? From where does this pressue stem? And how I can I avoid feeling the pressure to compete or the guilt that I may be shorting my son?

Judith Warner: Honestly, I think that the pressure is coming from inside you. I imagine that the women around you are simply dealing with the pressures of trying to set up their lives in the way that will work best for themselves and their families and figure that the more input they have from other mothers, the better informed they'll be. Are you uncomfortable with your decision not to send your children to nursery school? You may be projecting the "pressure to compete" onto others. I think we do it all the time.

Huh? Other moms are on her case, and she's projecting?

UPDATE: The Diane Rhem show had Warner on, balanced with Mary Eberstadt. The link has an audio stream.

I don't think this is Thai Princess Somsawalee Kitiyakara's best side.

Maybe she can have the photographer beheaded or something.

I had seen Lileks partial fisking of the Newsweek cover story on moms who, oddly enough, feel like their inability to meet their own outrageously perfectionist standards of childrearing is causing them distress. The author's answer?

She blames "society".

Lileks is himself a stay-at-home dad, so he has a bit more cred than the average dad to criticize the moms who obsess about color-coordinated placesettings for school parties and then obsess about lying awake at night worrying about it.

Of course "criticism" from other parents is flagged as part of the problem

There was something new, too: the tendency many women had to feel threatened by other women and to judge them harshly?nowhere more evident than on Urbanbaby and other, similarly "supportive" web sites. Can I take my 17-month-old to the Winnie the Pooh movie?, one mom queried recently. "WAY tooooo young," came one response.

Yeah, the fact that if you go for childrearing advice from anonymous people on the internet that they might use an all-capped "WAY" and a stretched out "toooo" for emphasis certainly is a sign of the imminent decline of civility. Methinks the author doesn't quite "get" what you can get from the internet.

The real root issue here *is* the competitive and overly wealthy nature of contemporary American society. While the accompanying pictures speak of a broader spectrum, the essays complaint is aimed at the "girls who had it all" and their terrible life of choices all of which they feel they need to provide to their child, only all the best.

Methinks targeted tax incentives aren't really going to do much to change that.

As Lileks pointed out, the accompanying web article Meet the slacker mom i think offers some valid help to the moms who might still be or feel beleaguered by all this.

Y'know I've never watched the Hanna-Barbera bible story cartoons in our church library, but this article's criticims make me a bit leery of them.

Warner Brothers destroys childhood. I think the loony toon babies were both more creative and more palatable than this.

Reading Mark Horne's recent complaint about his opponents

who seem to prefer political solutions to dealing with those who don't conform to their will, over against persuasion within the bounds of their vows to uphold the peace and purity of the Church

I recalled the justification for his concern. At least two recent comments about those attracted to the NPP, or liturgical and sacramental worship certainly fall outside of the bounds of "persuasion". One is the following description of some who are evangelicals to the New Perspective on Paul

Second, there are evangelicals who are social conservatives but who are bent on Christianity expressing itself societally. Among these are theonomists, reconstructionists, "ex-theonomists and reconstructionists" and other miscreants

Further, there was this description of Leithart, Horne, and Garver's attempts at articulating a more sacramentally focused worship

However, Mathison's tone and treatment of the subject are significantly different from the works I mention in footnotes below. His work, though I take issue with it at numerous points, is both substantial and pious, and thus deserves sympathetic interaction in a way that much of the material I will cite herein as examples of current mistakes does not.

Can these statements sustain the claim that

Second, we continue to esteem and love our brothers, whether they view the theologies of the NPP, NTW, NS and the AAT/FV as benign and useful, or have been influenced by their teachings.... There are many in our midst with deep love for and fraternal bonds with ministers and elders associated with the FV and these other theological tendencies.

Is that consistent with describing FV/NPP advocates as 'miscreants' and implying their works lack piety?

An article on Warhammer miniatures from the New York Times

This game requires mental ferocity and a certain delicacy. The players - some overweight, some string beans, clean-cut and tattooed, boys and men - toted their miniature warriors as carefully as little princesses carting collections of fragile dollies.

Finally finished Gene Wolfe's The Knight, and will start on The Wizard. The Knight seemed a bit less "puzzle filled" than other Wolfe books, but maybe I'm to dense to know there are puzzles. Or maybe Wolfe is being more direct (right, sure.) I liked The Knight very much, the writing was excellent. I kept expecting the issue of why the kid was transported to this "other world" to be more of an issue in terms of plot, but so far it hasn't.

I've also updated my right column with my current readings and playings.

Hey, look, a new blog!

very cool.

More searchengine hit fun!

downplayed legal forensic

Never! who would want to do that

biblical cartoon characters

I'm not into biblical cartoons much. Prince of Egypt was good

pancreitis

My dad is finally home after his pancreatitis (actual spelling it seems) and gall bladder surgery. Please pray for him and my mom as they adjust to the extra care needed.

Oh, and those links came from MSN search, which is terrible. MSN makes my site the NUMBER 2 hit on that topic, and doesn't suggest you may have misspelled the term.

wave 3 heroscape expansion sets

Looks like a fun game, that i don't have (yet)

homeschooling montreal

I'm homeschooling, but have not been to montreal

"ayn rand" and "john robbins"

Yikes!

Duggan AND Garver

Two great tastes that taste great together.

sandman merovingian

good comic book. I don't remember it dealing with the Merovingian dynasty though

"And on the third day, God created the Remington Bolt-Action rifle so that man could fight the dinosaurs"

a funny line from Mean Girls

furry bedspreads

double yikes, no matter how you take it

Mark Horne's essay defending Shepherd (Justifying faith) looks like it should refute the claim that

NS does not understand the phrase "faith alone" to carry only the sense of receptivity, "Response To A Special Report of the Faculty to the Board on the Discussion of Faith and Justification," 9. He stresses that the obedience yielded by faith, provided that it not be intended as the ground or cause of one's justification (this would be to make it a "work of the law") is nevertheless gracious and may be properly contemplated in the grace of justification, "The Relation of Good Works," 34, 35.

Whatever Shepherd may have said in the referenced documents (which I have no access to unfortunately), his more recent statement attribute only receptivity to faith in Justification.

But this faith which alone concurs to the act of justification is not, in fact, alone. It is not solitary. A solitary faith is not a true and living faith and therefore cannot be a justifying faith. Turretin does not deny the coexistence of love with faith; for faith without love would be dead faith just as love without faith would be dead works. But he does deny the coefficiency of love with faith in justification. Turretin is here insisting that although justifying faith must be true and living - otherwise it could not justifiy - the ground or cause of justification is in no sense to be found in the believer himself . The ground or cause of justification is Jesus Christ and his righteousness. To be justified, one must abandon all personal resources and lean wholly upon Christ. This is what is done in faith. Faith is wholehearted truts in Christ and by this faith the believer receives, accepts and rests upon the imputed righteousness of Jesus Christ alone for justification.

Faith looks neither to itself nor to its own working for justification. Faith lays hold of Jesus Christ and his righteousness and the righteousness of Jesus Christ is imputed to the one who believes. This is the distinctive function of faith in justification, which it shares with no other grace or virtue. [bold emphasis added]

What is ineffectual calling?
A. Ineffectual calling is the work of God’s almighty power and common grace, whereby (out of his free and general love to his creatures, and from nothing in them moving him thereunto) he doth, in his accepted time, invite and draw them to Jesus Christ, by his Word and Spirit; enlightening their minds, renewing and powerfully determining their wills, so as they (although in themselves dead in sin) are hereby made willing and able freely to answer his call, and to accept and embrace the grace offered and conveyed therein.

The MVP report would also be improved if it didn't traffic in unspecified innuendo about shenanigans perpetrated by those it criticizes. If someone did something unlawful or unbecoming of a minister, is it proper to perjoratively characterize the actions in a general report where no disciplinary action is even underway, much less completed?

The MVP report thinks that by avoiding "naming names" that what they charge will avoid bringing in particular personalities. But at the same time they are spreading charges abroad in a internet context where it becomes trivially easy to discover the specific situation. In that instance, the sinister characterization of the behavior of the FV sympathetic pastor is itself part of the problem.

When the MVP report was first released, I criticized its claim that

FV proponents also define the covenant as essentially a vital relationship between God and the covenant member. Downplayed are the legal and forensic dimensions of the covenant.

in an sarcastic fashion to the effect that you wouldn't want to make these guys play up the legal aspects of the covenant, because like the Hulk, you wouldn't like them very much if they did.

Which means that the MVP report would be improved if it would recognize that in their exploration of covenant, many of the figures associated with the Federal Vision are coming out of and reacting to certain tendencies in Christian Reconstruction, which in Rushdoony's formulations, plays up the legal aspects of the covenant with a vengeance. Seeing the covenant as an expression of divine love and relationship is an advance over Rushdoony's intimations that love is merely defined as adherence to the stipulations of the mosaic code, no more no less.

Its certainly also unclear from the report what a proper "playing up" of the legal and forensic dimensions of the covenant would look like. Shall we just take the inverse of the presumably damning quotes in the FV precis footnote 6

"Covenant is just a thing, a thing you can analyze. Its not ineffable like a relationship. Insofar as it is a relationship, its a legal, ordered and formally binding relationship. It's primarily legal; it's not by and large a personal relationship. Some people present the covenant as if it were something somewhat warm and personal, like an ideal marriage,"

"The covenant is a formal legal agreement, not so much a relationship between persons. That relationship has conditions, stipulations, and promises. Put another way, there is such a thing as a personless or abstract covenant. Put yet another way, a covenant mainly consists of a list of names, without actually touching on relations between persons,"

Wilkins has categorically denied that covenant as "a real relationship, consisting of real communion with the Triune God through union with Christ", asserting rather that it's a "forensic relationship instead, consisting merely in legal declarations from the Triune God through wholely extrinsic imputation of merits conceived as bookkeeping entities being transfered in a cosmic ledger."

"Covenant business is a business best served cold" (Klingon Proverb)

"[T]he covenant is a impersonal structural bond which stipulates conditions under which man may be construed to be legally related to the three persons of God in a community of legal obligation"

Not only has the last chapter of how internet communications will affect theology and the church not been written, chapters two through three were sent back to the author as unusable.

I find it remarkable that the MVP committee, in summarizing what is distinctive of the Federal Vision regarded as worthy of public declamation the contents of a single weblog posting, characterized the tentative nature of the explorations in the posting as the "setting forth of arguments", "claims", and "teachings". Leithart introduces an idea with a "But it may also be", and is lambasted for his hypothesis as a "preferred method of explanation".

Granted, the Federal Vision folks have magnified their ability to be heard through the medium of internet communications. But when committees are formed to raise warnings about aberrant theology in the church, and the most inflammatory evidence is that which appears in a tentative blog posting that the committee admits is itself contradicted by other blog postings something would appear to be amiss.

Blogging makes it easier to be more sarcastic than one should. I was perturbed by several aspects of the introduction to the MVP report that seem to transparently be included not because they further an understating of the actual issues, but to posture the MVPs position with respect to its eminence and avoidance of controversy.

One such aspect (another is referenced above) is the list of "leading pastor-theologians", and "most trusted churchmen and scholars" who have reservations about the AAPC. I am sincerely pleased to see my former associate pastor's name listed among these scholars, but since I question the motivation of the introductory comments, the list struck me as questionably inclusive of names that might not fully qualify as described.

[This is a replacement for the unsanctified way I tried to make the same point in an earlier version. I hereby repent of it.]

Much to chew on here.

I've not been privy to presbytery examinations before, so I don't know if the inquisitors manual at the end of the document is par for the course, but the phrasing of some of the questions and their explanations strike me as particularly jarring

(8) How do faith and justification relate?
(rationale: N[orman] S[hepherd] refuses to affirm that the act of justification contemplates faith in its receptive capacity alone. Justification, NS contends, always contemplates faith + the works of faith)

That's some major passive voice going on. Can an "act" contemplate anything? The passive voice here is obscuring something: in justification, GOD contemplates the faith of the person. But since God is all-knowing, why would we need to strangely restrict what God is contemplating in his act of justifying? Or is the contemplator in this statement supposed to be the theologian? That he should contemplate nothing other than the faith of the person to be justified in his predication?

Leaving aside what it mean for the "act" to "contemplate" it would seem to me that a charitable reading of Shepherds 25th thesis

The Reformed doctrine of justification by faith alone does not mean that faith in isolation or abstraction from good works justifies, but that the way of faith (faith working by love), as opposed to the "works of the law" or any other conceivable method or justification, is the only way of justification. (John Calvin, Institutes, III, 11, 20. "Indeed, we confess with Paul that no other faith justifies 'but faith working through love' [Gal. 5:6]. But it does not take its power to justify from that working of love. Indeed, it justifies in no other way but in that it leads us into fellowship with the righteousness of Christ.").

in that it says that faith has no power to justify from its working of love, though for it to be a living faith that will justify it must be a faith that will work in love. If the loving works of faith have no power to justify, how can Shepherd be construed to teach that the works of love are contemplated in justification?

Yummy

You have to look really closely at it though.

There are instructions.

So we're off to Brooklyn tomorrow morning to the church pastored by Steve Schlissel. My new newphew is getting baptised, maybe even regenerated in the 16th century sense

Or so I've been duped by this fellow

Pastor Ryken continues his series on Luke this Sunday. Maybe he will go a bit out of sequence and preach on Luke 17:37

SQL Server 2000 should come with a warning:

Warning: Contains XML EXPLICIT

Finally a breakthrough with my brain on this today.

Helped by some Alternative Rock (a station I enjoyed listening to on a drive through baltimore recently; I recalled it was available on the web so I've been listening this afternoon)

I've gone through long periods listening to no pop music.

Hoobastank's The Reason is interesting. More on it later maybe.

So General Mattis said this

"Actually it's quite fun to fight 'em, you know. It's a hell of a hoot. It's fun to shoot some people. I'll be right up front with you, I like brawling," said Mattis.
"You go into Afghanistan, you got guys who slap women around for five years because they didn't wear a veil," Mattis said during a panel discussion. "You know, guys like that ain't got no manhood left anyway. So it's a hell of a lot of fun to shoot them."

One the one hand, this makes me blanch. Which is good.

On the other hand, I know that the Psalmist says "The righteous shall rejoice when he seeth the vengeance: he shall wash his feet in the blood of the wicked."

Unless we want to say pacifism is the only Christian position, then some Christians will be called to be soldiers. Is there anything wring with those who are called to kill enemies rejoicing to use their God-given abilities in the execution of justice?

The Holy Spirit empowered Samson to slaughter Philistines. I dare say, he gave every evidence that he enjoyed it. Judges 3:2 says God gives us enemies to "teach us war".

Or we can just say the Bible is full of contradictions

If the sacraments (sign and things signfied) are not the work of the triune God himself, but instead are merely human works, then the Donatists were right, and their legitimacy would depend on the quality of the human officiating the rite.

One of our local athletic teams has preformed well in its annual championship and is competing in some kinf of "ultimate match" with another well-performing team.

As a Sabbatarian, I will not be observing this competition.

May the best sabbath-breaker win!

Irate Nate draws my attention to some iPod competitors, the Zen Micro from Creatvie, and the Karma, from Rio.

How do buddhists and hindus feel about their theological tems gracing products? [I guess the buddhists feel detachment - ed]

Looking for a Diatheke spell-checker or an Atonement all-in-one device.

This (Brain immaturity can be deadly) is interesting

By most physical measures, teenagers should be the world's best drivers. Their muscles are supple, their reflexes quick, their senses at a lifetime peak. Yet car crashes kill more of them than any other cause -- a problem, some researchers believe, that is rooted in the adolescent brain.

it fits with my claim that expensive sportscars purchaced by those in mid-life are not a sign pointing to recaptured youth, but a sign pointing to the mature and well-trained driver.