CALVIN AND COVENANT THEOLOGY

The guys over at Christ the Center have posted a wonderful interview with Dr. Peter Lillback, Professor of Historical Theology and President at Westminster Theological Seminary, author of The Binding of God: Calvin's Role in the Development of Covenant Theology, and fellow Dallas Theological Seminary alumnus. The questions asked are:

1. How appropriate is it to talk about Calvin as a covenant theologian?
2. Prior to Zwingli, how was the covenant thought of in late medieval society and theology and how did that eventually find its way into the reformation?
3. How did Luther advance [the covenant theological] conception? Did he take any of those themes and develop them prior to Calvin?
4. With regard to this idea of merit in Luther and in Calvin . . . [what have you] discovered especially in Calvin in regard to what is now commonly known as the covenant of works . . . and how merit . . . the idea of merit . . . would play into that? Was it in Calvin? Was it in Luther? I know your book speaks to this, what thoughts do you have for us?
5. How would this conception of Calvin relate to modern developments in federal vision theology?
6. Do you find in Calvin the teaching on paternal and judicial forgiveness . . . the idea that . . . the great struggle there that Christ forgives all of our sins by his death on the cross and his saving work, the historia salutis, and then in how he deals with us as a Father, if we confess our sins he is faithful and just to forgive us? . . . Is that found in Calvin? [Lillback rephrases as: Why do we need a confession of sin on Sunday morning if we are already justified?]
   
7. What do you mean by the subordination of sanctification to justification?
8. [Your] book has received some criticisms . . . some have said that it conflates faith and works . . . sounds like Norman Shepherd . . . would you be able to give a response to these criticisms?

I encourage you to check it out here.

FRIDAY EDWARDS EXCERPT: Good to be Home

Well, we've been living in the village of Twin Oaks, Missouri a week now and are beginning to get somewhat settled in. After five days of back-and-forth on the telephone, the AT&T rep stopped by this morning and fixed our DSL connection. We finally have web access! I'm back in the saddle again.

Things are going great! Andrea and I have been so encouraged by the loving support of our brothers and sisters at Twin Oaks Presbyterian Church. What a joy it is to finally be here! We feel like we've moved home. And it's good to be home. But as good as it is, it is only a shadow of the great homecoming which is our hope in Christ. In other words, this world is but a pointer to an-other world. Christianity is fundamentally an other-worldly religion.

As I was reading John Carrick's new book The Preaching of Jonathan Edwards this morning, I was reminded of the other-worldiness of Edwards's preaching. Carrick writes:

The essentially other-worldy character of the Christian faith has, especially from the latter part of the nineteenth century onwards, been eroded; and it has been replaced by an essentially this-worldly interpretation. Thus the focus in much modern theology falls, increasingly, upon man at the expense of God and upon this life and this world at the expense of the life and the world to come. There is, therefore, in an age of horizontalism in theology, something very refreshing and very salutary about the powerful verticalism of Edwards' theology. He does not, as some of his critics have contended, neglect the horizontal aspects of Christianity; Charity and Its Fruits alone, quite apart from the rest of the sermon corpus, demonstrates this incontestably. But his major emphasis falls, as in the Scriptures, upon the vertical, Godward dimension. There is, in his sermons, a tremendous emphasis upon heaven and hell, upon the life and the world to come, in short, upon eternity. He constantly views life and the world sub specie aeternitatis. Indeed, there is an obvious correlation between his powerful verticalism and his powerful theocentricity:

God is the highest good of the reasonable creature; and the enjoyment of him is the only happiness with which our souls can be satisfied.--To go to heaven, fully to enjoy God, is infinitely better than the most pleasant accommodations here. Fathers and mothers, husbands, wives, or children, or the company of earthly friends, are but shadows; but the enjoyment of God is the substance. These are but scattered beams; but God is the sun. These are but streams; but God is the fountain. These are but drops; but God is the ocean (118-19).

As I set off into pastoral ministry my prayer is that God would cause me to never forget this one truth, indeed the supreme truth. He is the "highest good of the reasonable creature; and the enjoyment of him is the only happiness with which our souls can be satisfied."