“And so when the reformation kicks off there’s this debate about how could you be called righteous if you’re not in fact righteous. So if as a human being you are, you know menstrual rags as Isaiah says, and as the reformers said then how could God call you righteous without being a liar? What enters in is nominalism and nominalism is able to say, ‘ah because things don’t have actually have essences they just have names and so if God calls you that you are that legally even though in actual fact you are not.'”
Jay Dyer
Eastern Orthodox Fanboy
Tucker Carlson Interview
1.) This is the complaint again of the Reformed view of Justification being a “legal fiction.” The Papists and the EO dust bunnies throw the charge at the descendants of the Reformed incessantly. It has been explained away so many times you’d think the accusation would cease being hurled.
2.) Dyer hasn’t taken into account Romans 11:6
“In the same way, at the present time there is a remnant chosen by grace. 6And if it is by grace, then it is no longer by works. Otherwise, grace would no longer be grace.”
Since Dyer is shutting the door to monergistic salvation, he is only left with synergistic salvation wherein man co-operates with God to the end of finally becoming just so that God can declare him just. Yet, per Romans 11:6 this is to transform grace into not grace.
Dyer wants salvation to be completely anchored in the transformative work of the Holy Spirit within us but even the Apostle Paul, towards the end of his life could say he remained “the chief of sinners.” We cannot be saved by the transformative work of the Spirit absent the juridical declaration of righteousness based upon the finished work of Christ on our behalf as our substitute. This is due to the fact that even with Union with Christ / regeneration we remain at the same time sinners. It is true that because of union with Christ we increasingly conform to the image of Christ, yet, as the Heidelberg catechism teaches it is only death that puts an end to our sinning.
Q. Since Christ has died for us, why do we still have to
die?
A. Our death does not pay the debt of our sins.1
Rather, it puts an end to our sinning
and is our entrance into eternal life.2
1 Psalm 49:7.
2 John 5:24; Philippians. 1:21–23; 1 Thessalonians 5:9, 10.
Since it is only death that puts an end to our sinning, if we only had the transformative work of the Spirit as the basis of being right with God we would not be right with God and we would be forever lost. The transformative work of the Spirit is a reality for the Christian. We are constantly putting off the old man and putting on the new man. However, the Christian’s assurance of being right with God is the legal declaration of their sins being imputed to Christ and Christ’s righteousness being imputed to them.
3.) Again, this is not a legal fiction in the sense of being God’s arbitrary decree. God is not just saying, “OK, you’re righteous, even though you’re clearly not.” That would be legal fiction.” All of this is not “legal fiction” because God has legally imputed the non-fiction righteousness of Jesus Christ to the account of His elect. There is no fiction here though there are legal declarations. Dyer simply doesn’t like the Scripture’s teaching that “Christ died, the just for the unjust.” Dyer doesn’t like the idea of Christ as our substitute. We know this because of his complaint against penal substitutionary atonement. Dyer doesn’t like legal categories like atonement, justification, condemnation, propitiation, expiation, reconciliation, sacrifice, adoption, and redemption. However, there is no understanding the whole of Scripture without these juridical categories. So, yes, our righteousness is a legal declaration that we are righteous with the righteousness of Jesus Christ but that righteousness is not a fiction any more than it would be fiction if a Magistrate pardoned a criminal on the basis that a third party Surety was paying the fine for the guilty party. Again, there is no fiction in the accusation of “legal fiction.”
4.) The whole of salvation is a two pronged reality. Our justification is extra nos (outside of us), “Christ for us, the hope of glory.” Our sanctification is the Holy Spirit working within us to renew us to increasingly become what we have been freely declared to be in our justification. Justification is a legal declaration. Sanctification is the transformative work based upon our Union with Christ. Both Justification and sanctification are guaranteed because the elect have been objectively united with Christ from eternity.
Eph. 1:4 For he chose us in him before the creation of the world to be holy and blameless in his sight.
5.) Nominalism is a real philosophical category. However, the fact is, is that Luther was more of a Tauler/Eckhart mystic than he was a nominalist. Secondly, on this score Luther excoriated the Scholastics with their dependence on Aristotelian categories and yet Luther was a realist enough to embrace consubstantiation, a biblical understanding of Natural Law, as well as a realist embrace of marriage. The claim that Luther was a pure nominalist just doesn’t hold water.
6.) Finally, all non-Reformed views (such as Dyer holds) fail in understanding the Holiness of God and the sinfulness of man in combination with a failure to understand the Creator-creature distinction. Nobody who has come face to face with the Holiness of God and the sinfulness of man will ever think that the Creator-creature distinction can be bridged by the transformative effect of theosis. Any doctrine of “partaking in the divine nature,” that eliminates the distinction between the Creator-creature is nonsense. Any doctrine of “partaking in the divine nature” that finds man being able to say that God accepts man on the basis of the process of transformation into divinity has not come to terms with the sinfulness of man or the Holiness of God. The juridical/legal categories are taught explicitly in Scripture and any denial of these results in a Christianity that is no Christianity at all.
Results in a Christianity that is an illegal fiction.
Author: jetbrane
I am a Pastor of a small Church in Mid-Michigan who delights in my family, my congregation and my calling. I am postmillennial in my eschatology. Paedo-Calvinist Covenantal in my Christianity Reformed in my Soteriology Presuppositional in my apologetics Familialist in my family theology Agrarian in my regional community social order belief Christianity creates culture and so Christendom in my national social order belief Mythic-Poetic / Grammatical Historical in my Hermeneutic Pre-modern, Medieval, & Feudal before Enlightenment, modernity, & postmodern Reconstructionist / Theonomic in my Worldview One part paleo-conservative / one part micro Libertarian in my politics Systematic and Biblical theology need one another but Systematics has pride of place Some of my favorite authors, Augustine, Turretin, Calvin, Tolkien, Chesterton, Nock, Tozer, Dabney, Bavinck, Wodehouse, Rushdoony, Bahnsen, Schaeffer, C. Van Til, H. Van Til, G. H. Clark, C. Dawson, H. Berman, R. Nash, C. G. Singer, R. Kipling, G. North, J. Edwards, S. Foote, F. Hayek, O. Guiness, J. Witte, M. Rothbard, Clyde Wilson, Mencken, Lasch, Postman, Gatto, T. Boston, Thomas Brooks, Terry Brooks, C. Hodge, J. Calhoun, Llyod-Jones, T. Sowell, A. McClaren, M. Muggeridge, C. F. H. Henry, F. Swarz, M. Henry, G. Marten, P. Schaff, T. S. Elliott, K. Van Hoozer, K. Gentry, etc. My passion is to write in such a way that the Lord Christ might be pleased. It is my hope that people will be challenged to reconsider what are considered the givens of the current culture. Your biggest help to me dear reader will be to often remind me that God is Sovereign and that all that is, is because it pleases him. View all posts by jetbrane
One tactic that Protestants can use is playing the RCs and EOs off against other, so that they cancel each other out with their traditions.
First, we can use the existence of Eastern Orthodoxy to wither the Popish illusion of Rome having always had acknowledged universal control over the Christian world. That is an obvious tactic for Prods. But we can also learn something from the arguments that RC polemicists have used against the EO “schismatics,” to prove that their traditions, too, are not quite so old and prestigious as they think.
For example, Adrian Fortescue noted in the Catholic Encyclopedia that the patriarch of Constantinople, the supposed top dog of the EO system, was a nobody before the 4th century (just like EO polemicists note that the bishops of Rome were quite insignificant people in the first centuries after Christ):
https://www.newadvent.org/cathen/13535a.htm
“This being so, we must remember how entirely unwarrantable, novel, and uncanonical the advance of Constantinople was. The see was not Apostolic, had no glorious traditions, no reason whatever for its usurpation of the first place in the East, but an accident of secular politics. The first historical Bishop of Byzantium was Metrophanes (315-25); he was not even a metropolitan, he was the lowest in rank a diocesan bishop could be, a suffragan of Heraclea. That is all his successors ever would have been, they would have had no power to influence anyone, had not Constantine chosen their city for his capital. All through their progress they made no pretense of founding their claims on anything but the fact that they were now bishops of the political capital. It was as the emperor’s bishops, as functionaries of the imperial Court, that they rose to the second place in Christendom. The legend of St. Andrew founding their see was a late afterthought; it is now abandoned by all scholars. The claim of Constantinople was always frankly the purely Erastian one that as Caesar could establish his capital where he liked, so could he, the civil governor, give ecclesiastical rank in the hierarchy to any see he liked.
…
Let it be always remembered that the rise of Constantinople, its jealousy of Rome, its unhappy influence over all the East is a pure piece of Erastianism, a shameless surrender of the things of God to Caesar. And nothing can be less stable than to establish ecclesiastical rights on the basis of secular politics. The Turks in 1453 cut away the foundation of Byzantine ambition. There is now no emperor and no Court to justify the oecumenical patriarch’s position. If we were to apply logically the principle on which he rests, he would sink back to the lowest place and the patriarchs of Christendom would reign at Paris, London, New York.”