Hart, Covenants, and Concerns...

Darryl Hart at his Old Life blog has a new post, Flattening Will Get You Nowhere, that I'm linking to as a follow up on yesterday's Machen, Jones, Quotes, Questions. Below is the lede to his post.

"Mark Jones wonders what is so controversial about the view that the covenant with Adam was gracious:

. . . for the sake of argument, let’s say the Mosaic covenant has a meritorious element. Does that make it a republication of the covenant of works? Not necessarily. After all, you would have to re-define the covenant of works to make it a meritorious covenant. But what if you hold to the uncontroversial view that Adam, in dependence upon the Holy Spirit, lived by faith in the Garden of Eden as he perfectly obeyed God’s law (for a time)? How is Sinai similar to that covenantal context and how is it different?

In other words, Adam was dependent on the work of grace to keep the law in a way comparable to what the Israelites experienced after the Mosaic Covenant. And as I gather from his interview (haven’t read his book yet), Jones also draws comparisons between Christ’s pursuit of holiness and the Christian’s similar endeavor. Lots of flattening in Jones’ reading of the Bible and history, though not much attention to Paul who may have provided a few reasons for not exalting every valley in redemptive history..."

Read Darryl's entire post here.

Machen, Jones, Quotes and Questions...

Pulling quotes is hardly the best way to make comparisons when it comes to evaluating theology. And it certainly can give an inaccurate picture, so I'm open to that criticism on that score. But after reading Mark Jones' book, Antinomianism, I did come away with some concerns as to the template he is operating with when it comes to explaining how redeemed sinners live the Christian life. To what degree and in what way was Jesus Christ's life on earth the template or example for our sanctified living? What parallels are we to draw between Christ's sinless walk as the Lamb of God and ours as miserable offenders who by grace have trusted in him for salvation - an "It-is-finished" salvation secured by his shed blood and perfect obedience under the law for those whom he came to save.  Consider the quote comparisons below as a way to initially highlight some points in need of clarification and further inquiry.

J. Gresham Machen from his book, Christianity & Liberalism:

According to modern liberalism, in other words, Jesus was the Founder of Christianity because He was the first Christian, and Christianity consists in maintenance of the religious life which Jesus instituted. But was Jesus really a Christian? Or, to put the same question in another way, are we able or ought we as Christians to enter in every respect into the experience of Jesus and make Him in every respect our example? Certain difficulties arise with regard to this question…

But there is another difficulty in the way of regarding Jesus as simply the first Christian. This second difficulty concerns the attitude of Jesus toward sin. If Jesus is separated from us by his Messianic consciousness, He is separated from us even more fundamentally by the absence in Him of a sense of sin…

Once affirm that Jesus was sinless and all other men sinful, and you have entered into irreconcilable conflict with the whole modern point of view…

The religious experience of Jesus, as it is recorded in the Gospels, in other words, gives us no information about the way in which sin shall be removed.

Yet in the Gospels Jesus is represented constantly as dealing with the problem of sin. He always assumes that other men are sinful; yet He never finds sin in Himself. A stupendous difference is found here between Jesus’ experience and ours.

Mark Jones from his book, Antinomianism:

Christ is our mediator, our union with him means not only that we must be holy (i.e., necessity), but also that we will be able to be like him (i.e., motive)…

In other words, whatever grace we receive for our holiness first belonged to the Savior (John 1:16)…

How and in what power was Christ made holy? And what relation does his own pattern of holiness have to his people?…

He, like us, relied upon the Holy Spirit for his holiness (Isa. 11:2)….

Since Christ was rewarded for his good works, his people can rejoice that they too will be rewarded for their good works. In this way, the role of good works and rewards finds its Christological basis, which is crucial to any discussion of applied soteriology…