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Covenantal history and participatory metaphysics: formulating a Reformed response to the charge of legal fiction
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 06 December 2018
Abstract
To combat the charges raised by Radical Orthodoxy and others, which allege that Protestant soteriologies amount to a legal fiction, Bruce McCormack and Michael Horton suggest that Reformed theology embrace a covenantal ontology, which aims to overcome legal fiction objections without sacrificing Reformational insights or making recourse to medieval participatory metaphysics. For both theologians, covenantal history and participatory metaphysics are treated as rival paradigms. I suggest that their proposals display serious weaknesses and propose an alternative approach, inspired by the retrieval of Reformed scholastic insights, which treats covenant and participatory metaphysics as complementary motifs rather than rival paradigms, and is thereby able to overcome the legal fiction objection while maintaining Protestant distinctives.
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References
1 Milbank, John, ‘Alternative Protestantism’, in Smith, James K. A. and Olthuis, James H. (eds), Radical Orthodoxy and the Reformed Tradition: Creation, Covenant and Participation (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2005), pp. 32–3Google Scholar.
2 ‘Scotist and later nominalist accounts . . . only permit the legal transfer through grace of Christ's divine benefits to his human nature. In this way, the peculiar errors of Protestantism are already rendered possible: Christ in his incarnation and atonement becomes a “mere” substitute for our deficiencies, in the sense that he extrinsically makes good, without real, inward reworking of our nature.’ Milbank, John, Beyond Secular Order: The Representation of Being and the Representation of the People (Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2013), p. 79CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
3 Étienne Gilson, The Spirit of Mediæval Philosophy, tr. Alfred Howard Campbell Downes (London: Sheed & Ward, 1936), p. 421.
4 Milbank, ‘Alternative Protestantism’, p. 33.
5 Cf. Adrinne Dengerink Chaplin, Michael Horton and James K. A. Smith's chapters in Radical Orthodoxy and the Reformed Tradition.
6 Michael Horton, ‘Participation, Analogy, and Covenant’, in Radical Orthodoxy and the Reformed Tradition, pp. 108–9.
7 McCormack, Bruce, ‘What's at Stake in Current Debates over Justification?’, in Husbands, Mark and Treier, Daniel J. (eds), Justification: What's at Stake in the Current Debates (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2004), p. 84Google Scholar.
8 Ibid.
9 Ibid., p. 113.
10 Horton, Michael, Covenant and Salvation (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2007), pp. 180, 2.Google Scholar
11 McCormack, ‘What's at Stake?’, p. 106.
12 For the centrality of consolation in the Reformation and post-Reformation periods, see: Rittgers, Ronald K., ‘The Age of Reform as an Age of Consolation’, Church History 86 (2017), pp. 607–42CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
13 Neither Charnock or Witsius solely affirms soteriological participation. For Witisus’ account of creational participatory metaphysics, see Herman Witsius, Sacred Dissertations, tr. Donald Fraser (Edinburgh: A. Fullerton & Co., 1823), V.15, pp. 111–12; idem, The Oeconomy of the Covenants, between God and Man (New York: George Foreman for Lee Stokes, 1798), I.3.8, p. 77. Cf. Stephen Charnock, The Complete Works of Stephen Charnock (henceforth CW) (Edinburgh: James Nichol, James Nisbet & Co., 1864), 1.133, 2.111, 2.286, 2.294, 5.522.
14 In principle, I appreciate McCormack and Horton's impulse to think with and beyond the insights of the Reformers and Reformed scholastics. Therefore, I am not arguing that their approach is insufficiently consistent with the Reformed tradition. I seek to raise dogmatic rather than historical objections.
15 McCormack, ‘What's at Stake?’, pp. 81–3; Horton, Covenant and Salvation, p. 1.
16 Horton, Covenant and Salvation, p. 3.
17 McCormack, ‘What's at Stake?’, p. 84.
18 Ibid., pp. 101–2.
19 Horton, Covenant and Salvation, pp. 143, 147.
20 McCormack, ‘What's at Stake?’, p. 83; cf. pp. 106, 110.
21 Ibid., p. 107.
22 Ibid., p. 115.
23 McCormack, ‘What's at Stake?’, p. 114.
24 Horton, Covenant and Salvation, p. 198.
25 Ibid., p. 201.
26 Ibid.
27 McCormack, ‘Justitia aliena: Karl Barth in Conversation with the Evangelical Doctrine of Imputed Righteousness’, in McCormack, Bruce (ed.), Justification in Perspective: Historical Developments and Contemporary Challenges (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2006), p. 170Google Scholar.
28 McCormack critiques Hans Küng for wrongly reading Barth in this way in ‘Justitia aliena’, p. 179.
29 Ibid.
30 McCormack, ‘What's at Stake?’, p. 107.
31 McCormack, ‘Justitia aliena’, p. 193.
32 McCormack, ‘What's at Stake?’, p. 107.
33 Ibid.
34 Ibid., p. 117.
35 Horton, Covenant and Salvation, pp. 7, 190–203.
36 Ibid., p. 139.
37 Ibid., p. 197. McCormack, ‘What's at Stake?’, pp. 100–2.
38 Horton, Covenant and Salvation, pp. 202–3; cf. p. 261.
39 In Horton's systematic theology, although the logical priority of union with Christ is at times registered, because of Horton's continuing employment of a covenantal ontology rooted in the forensic declaration of justification, the same ambiguities result; see Horton, Michael, The Christian Faith (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2011), pp. 610–11Google Scholar, 710. Union with Christ takes ‘root in the forensic soil of justification’, and ‘justification has to do with a Covenant Lord pronouncing upon the servant a courtroom verdict that issues in a completely new ontological, ethical, and eschatological orientation’ (Horton, The Christian Faith, pp. 597, 612). Or again: ‘it is precisely by overcoming the ethical enmity that results from being law breakers that a new relationship of intimate and organic union can emerge. In other words, justification establishes the legal basis without which our relationship with God would have to remain merely ethically and legally defined as under the curse of the law’ (Horton, The Christian Faith, p. 708). In Horton's covenantal ontology, the forensic is the ontological. If this is the case, the extra nos basis of forensic justification will always remain under threat, for justification is asked not merely to secure our acquittal on the basis of Christ's extra nos righteousness, but likewise to affect our intrinsic transformation.
40 Lane Tipton raises a similar concern with Louis Berkhof's account of justification. Tipton, Lane G., ‘Biblical Theology and the Westminster Standards Revisited: Union with Christ and Justification Sola Fide’, Westminster Theological Journal 75/1 (2013), pp. 8–10Google Scholar.
41 Todd Billings, J., Calvin, Participation, and the Gift (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), pp. 57–8CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Billings likewise responds to some of Milbank's objections. J. Todd Billings, ‘John Milbank's Theology of the “Gift” and Calvin's Theology of Grace: A Critical Comparison’, Modern Theology 21/1 (Jan. 2005), pp. 87–105.
42 Calvin, John, Institutes of the Christian Religion, ed. McNeill, John Thomas, tr. Ford Lewis Battles (Philadelphia: Westminster John Knox, 2001)Google Scholar, 3.6.2. Calvin, John, Commentaries on the Epistle of Paul the Apostle to the Romans (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans, 1950)Google Scholar, Rom 6:5.
43 Calvin, Institutes, 3.16.1.
44 Billings, Calvin, Participation, and the Gift, p. 194.
45 One ‘participates’ in a covenantal relation as well, but justification involves a legal participation in the merits of a covenant head or public person which are credited to the believer while remaining extrinsic, whereas sanctification involves an ontologically transformative, intrinsic participation in Christ's moral perfection.
46 They straightforwardly contradict Calvin, so far as I can tell, solely in their acceptance of infused habits.
47 Charnock, CW, 3.15.
48 Ibid., 3.16–32.
49 Ibid., CW, 3.15.
50 Witsius, Oeconomy, I.8.22, p. 112.
51 Charnock, CW, 1.23.
52 On the medieval background and post-Reformation employment of these categories, see Denlinger, Aaron C., Omnes in Adam ex Pacto Dei (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2010)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
53 Witsius, Oeconomy, I.3.12–17, pp. 80–3.
54 Cf. McGrath, Alister E., Iustitia Dei: A History of the Christian Doctrine of Justification, vol. 1 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), pp. 49–50Google Scholar, 146–50. Augustinus Oberman, Heiko, The Harvest of Medieval Theology: Gabriel Biel and Late Medieval Nominalism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1963), pp. 37Google Scholar, 48. Cross, Richard, Duns Scotus (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), pp. 95–6Google Scholar, 108.
55 Charnock, CW, 3.124.
56 Ibid., 3.126.
57 Cf. Witsius, Oeconomy, I.6.7–8, pp. 51–2, 68, I.8.9, p. 106.
58 Horton, Covenant and Salvation, pp. 110, 164, 194. McCormack, ‘What's at Stake?’, pp. 90, 110.
59 Charnock, CW, 3.94.
60 Ibid., 3.92.
61 Ibid.
62 Lindbeck, George A., ‘A Question of Compatibility: A Lutheran Reflects on Trent’, in George Anderson, H., Austin Murphy, T. and Burgess, Joseph A. (eds), Justification by Faith (Minneapolis: Augsburg, 1985), p. 238Google Scholar.
63 Horton, Covenant and Salvation, pp. 146, 185.
64 Charnock, CW, 3.43.
65 Ibid., 3.90.
66 Ibid.
67 Ibid.
68 Witsius, Oeconomy, I.2.10, p. 67.
69 Charnock, CW, 3.45.
70 Witsius, Oeconomy, II.8.37, pp. 120–1.
71 Charnock, CW, 2.339.
72 Horton, Covenant and Salvation, p. 236.
73 Ibid., p. 198.
74 Charnock, CW, 3.43.
75 Calvin, Institutes, 1.11.6.
76 As T. Robert Baylor argues (responding to J. V. Fesko) for John Owen, as well as for Charnock and Witsius we might add, the ‘forensic’ broadly construed has a sort of redemptive priority in that all of salvation history flows from a divine covenant (i.e. the pactum salutis), but within the ordo salutis, the logical priority resides with union with Christ rather than forensic justification. Baylor, T. Robert, ‘“One with Him in Spirit”: Mystical Union and the Humanity of Christ in the Theology of John Owen’, in Thate, Michael J., Vanhoozer, Kevin J. and Campbell, Constantine R. (eds), ‘In Christ’ in Paul (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2014), p. 450Google Scholar.
77 Webster, John, ‘Principles of Systematic Theology’, International Journal of Systematic Theology 11/1 (Jan. 2009), p. 68CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
78 Webster, John, ‘Perfection and Participation’, in White, Thomas Joseph (ed.), The Analogy of Being (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans, 2011), p. 389Google Scholar.
79 Webster, ‘Perfection and Participation’, p. 380.
80 This approach is carried through with single-minded fervour by Robert Jenson. For Jenson, ‘the whole of my systematics is in one aspect an effort of revisionary metaphysics’. Jenson, Robert W., ‘Response to Watson and Hunsinger’, Scottish Journal of Theology 55/2 (May 2002), p. 230CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Likewise, he suggests that if his revisionary metaphysics fails, then his entire systematics ‘is just muddle and is not “brilliant”, etc. If it [fails], it does not need anyone to reassemble its bits into his idea of what I must be saying’ (Jenson, ‘Response’, p. 231). Jenson's ‘take it or leave it’ approach, insisting that one must accept his revisionary metaphysics whole and entire to appreciate his insights, suggests that theologies which reject inherited metaphysical systems and construct new theological ontologies are particularly ripe for overdetermination by metaphysics.
81 Horton, Covenant and Salvation, p. 174.
82 Holcomb, ‘Being Bound to God’, in Radical Orthodoxy and the Reformed Tradition, p. 262.
83 Many thanks to Oliver Crisp, Timothy Baylor and Alden McCray for providing very helpful comments and corrections to an earlier version of this essay.