The Law & Sanctification — A Conversation

It is true that the first use of the law is still applicable to the Christian. The Christians hears the law and realizes his need for Christ and realizing that Christ is his only hope for what the law requires he rises in gratitude that Christ has given him a salvation that not be can improved upon to live an increasingly, though a never perfectly obedient life. The believer, living in the Spirit, walks in the Spirit, as they take heed to what God requires of His people as it comes to us via the third use of the law. We must never give up either the first use or the third use of the law for the Christian. To give up the first use would make us legalists trusting in our own performance instead of Christ’s performance for us. To give up the third use would make us antinomian, denying that we’ve been called to be a Holy people.

Bud Powell objects,

Did you read what I wrote, Bret? The law has the same relation to sanctification as it has to justification, by it is the knowledge of sin. But the thermometer does not cure the fever. Only Christ can cure. Moses points to Christ; Christ does not point to Moses, for when we have come to Him, we have come to the fullness of God.

A good work is one done in faith, according to the law of God, and for the glory of God as the HC says. But what has this to do with the heart? Until you can show me that good works sanctify and melt the hard heart, I will not subscribe to the idea that grace justifies and the law sanctifies.

But as I said before, good luck with this idea. It has been tried before with the same results. The flesh always produces the same fruit. I put on Christ and put off Adam; I don’t put off Adam so I can put on Moses.”

Bret responds,

Bud,

No one is saying that the law is a cure for sin in the life of the redeemed sinner. Obviously that will never do. What is being said is that the grace filled Christians, overflowing w/ gratitude for the redeeming work of Christ move out in Holy Spirit given grace to increasingly become all that they have freely been declared to be. As they increasingly become all that they have freely been declared to be the Spirit, through the preaching of the third use of the law brings to their consciousness how it is that can live in such a way as to please Him, who never ceases to be pleased w/ them for the sake of Christ. Grace and law are not in absolute antithesis for the redeemed believer. It is the work of grace to bring to the believer the law so that he may increasingly conform to Christ and it is the work of grace to cause the believer to understand that his increasingly and never adequate obedience is the consequence of grace and not the cause of grace.

Grace and law are not in absolute antithesis for the believer.

By the way Bud, what do you think of this quote from Westminster Divine Samuel Bolton?

The law sends us to the Gospel that we may be justified; and the Gospel sends us to the law again to inquire what is our duty as those who are justified.

Bud Powell continues the conversation,

But how does Hodge differ from what I said? By the law is the knowledge of sin. But Rushdoony put an antithesis between grace and law, saying that justification is by grace and purpose, sanctification is by law. That is flat wrong, for the law is necessary for justification to bring the knowledge and conviction of sin, and faith and grace is necessary for sanctification. We can no more be sanctified by law-keeping than we can be justified. It confuses cause and effect. Even the holiest of men have only a small beginning in obedience [HC]

Predestination is to be conformed to the image of Christ; is this not sanctification, and is not all of predestination by grace through faith and the renewal of the Holy Ghost? It is the dichotomy in Rush’s words that permeated theonomy that I object to and did years ago.

It is being joined to Christ though HIs Spirit, signified in the broken bread and cup of the Lord Supper, that nourishes my soul to life eternal; that’s why Paul could glory in the Cross of Christ by which he was crucified unto the world and the world unto him [sanctification]. The diagnostic tool is not the cure. The law is diagnostic, bit is the blood of Christ which cleanses us from all sin as we confess. [1John 1–sanctification]

Galatians is emphatically not about an error justification, but an error in sanctification. Are you made perfect by the law? having begun in Christ.

Bret responds,

Bud I think you are not accurate here.

You will have to show me where Rushdoony says that sanctification is by law apart from grace. Peter gives one sentence above but to suggest by this one sentence RJR believed in sanctification by a law that has nothing to do w/ grace is to read to much into one sentence.

Here is one example from Rushdoony that counters your assertion that Rushdoony believed that sanctification was by law apart from grace.

Man’s salvation and sanctification [the process of becoming holy] are acts of God’s grace, not human effort” (Leviticus, p. 54).

Who has denied that faith and grace are necessary for sanctification? Will you deny that sincere though inadequate obedience to God’s law is part of sanctification? We are to put off the old man and put on the new man. Being dead to sin we are not longer to live in sin. The HC does say we have only a small beginning in obedience (but we do begin) but then it goes on to say ‘nevertheless, with earnest purpose Christians do begin to live not only according to some but to all the commandments of God.” Did you forget the second sentence Bud? Sanctification includes the grace to increasingly obey God’s law, and we can’t increasingly obedient if the law is not our standard informing us as to what obedience looks like.

Yes all of predestination is by grace through faith as by the Spirits gracious renewing work within us we increasingly conform to God’s law realizing all the while that even our best obedience must have the righteousness of Christ imputed to it in order to be acceptable before the Father. Your objection is misplaced Bud and your explanations seemingly lead to antinomianism.

Once again in this note you put a antithesis between the work of Christ for me that is outside of me and the work of the Spirit of Christ within me renewing me. The Spirit takes me to Christ to remind me of the unlimited free Grace won for me in His finished work on the Cross and Christ takes me back to the gracious law so as to know how to live for His glory. Christ nourishes my soul to life eternal and being nourished I work out my salvation with fear and trembling by learning what pleases God by meditating on His law both day and night.

Galatians is emphatically an error in justification. If they had believed that they were made perfect by Christ (justification) they would not have tried to be made perfect by the law.

I plead w/ you to re-think your theology. Shall we go on sinning that grace might increase?

Dispensationalism Possesses Congresswoman Bachmann

“I am convinced in my heart and in my mind that if the United States fails to stand with Israel, that is the end of the United States . . . [W]e have to show that we are inextricably entwined, that as a nation we have been blessed because of our relationship with Israel, and if we reject Israel, then there is a curse that comes into play. And my husband and I are both Christians, and we believe very strongly the verse from Genesis [Genesis 12:3], we believe very strongly that nations also receive blessings as they bless Israel. It is a strong and beautiful principle.”

Michelle Bachmann
US Congressional Representative From the Third US District of Dispenistan
Speech to Republican Jewish Coalition

1.) Somebody needs to tell Michelle that God divorced Israel when they crucified Jesus. If God rejected Israel in AD 70 isn’t it acceptable to reject Israel in 2010 if and when they pursue policy that is not in our best interest?

2.) Israel didn’t become a nation until 1948. Were we not blessed as a nation until Israel became a nation?

3.) Genesis 12:3, wherein God makes the promise that in you (Abraham) all the families of the earth shall be blessed is a promise that refers to all the nations being blessed through Jesus Christ, whom, by the way, the Jewish people hate.

4.) When Christ haters come upon quotes like this you can hardly blame them for thinking Christianity is comprised of various fruit loops and assorted nuts. I’m not a Christ hater but I have to agree w/ the left when it mocks this kind of insane talk.

5.) There is no curse that comes into play for rejecting Israel anymore then there is a cures that comes into play for rejecting Scandinavia. The curse comes into play for rejecting Christ.

6.) The intellectual and theological havoc that dispensationalism has played with Western Christianity leaves me just this side of having to be committed to a rubber room. That this comic book theology can be taken serious by significant players in the political realm is a profound embarrassment to the cause of Christ.

7.) Think about this for a second. Do your really want this woman making political policy given her dispenstionalism? Will she try to pass legislation to make sure planes can fly w/o pilots that disappear in the rapture? Is she convinced that Russian must be resisted simply because they are the Gog and Magog crew?

News Items Of Interest

Economic Fascism — The Mega State is in bed with Mega Corporate America. The only things these people argue about is who gets to be on top.

http://www.thinkbigworksmall.com/mypage/player/tbws/23088/1157575

Government Looking to hire retarded lawyers as a way to fill quota system.

Please no jokes on how looking for retarded lawyers is redundant.

http://rawstory.com/2010/02/justice-department-seeks-applicants-mental-retardation/

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Zia-zoANZw

Keep in mind as you watch the above that the woman that Obama is speaking about was 41 when she died of breast cancer. Then keep in mind that the Obama Administration has clearly stated that women under 50 do not need breast exams.

http://www.abc2news.com/content/square_off/default.aspx

John Lofton stands against buggers pushing their …. er, um … agenda on the US Military.

Reciprocal Rotting

“There is not a single instance in history, in which civil liberty was lost, and religious liberty preserved entire. If therefore we yield up our temporal property, we at the same time deliver the conscience into bondage.”

John Witherspoon
Presbyterian Minister / Educator / American Founding Father

I lifted this quote from a piece

http://www.americanvision.org/article/i-refuse-to-be-comforted/

written by Bojidar Marinov. It is a piece I wish I would have written and really should be read by all Christians but especially those who use the doctrine of God’s sovereignty to cancel out the doctrine of our responsibility to the commands that issue forth from our High King Jesus Christ. As Bojidar notes, there should be no comfort found by or for a people who try to use God’s sovereignty as blanket to cover the ongoing sin of their refusal to contend for the crown rights of King Jesus.

However as good as that article is — and it is great — I want to take this quote in a slightly different direction. I have, for what seems like an eternity, said that there are two ways for Christian culture to die. These two ways are never mutually exclusive. Christian culture can die both from the inside out or it can die from the outside in. Just as a tree can die both because it has become rotten at its core — only to find that rot move outward — or because the tree has become rotten in its extremities — only to find that rot move inward, so Christian culture can rot from the inside out or from the outside in. This unwavering conviction is one reason why I have struggled so mightily against the dualism of R2Kt for I see it as a rot virus that will kill what remains of our Christian culture (and very little remains) from the outside in.

Christian Cultures that rot from the inside out are cultures where the Theology, from which they draw their life, is untended and neglected. The the character of sin, the absolute necessity of redemption, the doctrines of grace, the Sovereignty, Transcendence, and Immanence of God, the Lordship of Christ, The work of the Spirit in sanctification are ignored and so one form or another of the rot that is Humanistic idolatry where man is large and God is small begins to infect the Church and as the Church is the fountain from which a Christian culture drinks its theology the whole culture begins to share in the rot. God sends a leanness into its soul.

However, Christian cultures can also rot from the outside in. Now keep in mind that I’ve noted that these two are never mutually exclusive. Christian culture that rot from the outside in are those cultures where the the life of the culture (its theology) for some reason isn’t moving out to the extremities in order to nourish them and give them life. On one level the Church is fine because it continues to affirm and care for its theology. However Christian theology at the same time becomes abstracted from everyday life to the point that people in the Church eventually can’t see the application or connection between things like a conscience not in bondage and temporal property, or the connection between religious liberty and civil liberty, or, to give a more fundamental example, the connection between the Lordship of the King Christ and the necessity for limited and decentralized governments. When it is no longer possible for the core of the culture to send its nourishment out to the extremities of the culture because of the inability to make proper application, the extremities begin to whither and that withering eventually begins to move to the core and the whole culture begins to rot. As I have said repeatedly this is the danger of all Christian theologies that want to posit culture and faith as independent and unrelated phenomena. There are Christian theologies that encourage that Christian theology should not bear on the public square. Such theologies ensure rot from the outside in because if the public square (the tree’s extremities) can not be informed by Christian theology it will be informed by some other pagan theology and as that pagan theology gains in strength in the extremities of culture it will eventually work inward to infect the institution that produces the theology that informs the culture so that core of the culture and the extremities of the culture theologically correspond so that both are thoroughly rotted.

This is the kind of rot that Witherspoon is warning against. We cannot find sanctuary in our Churches and leave the cultural extremities to their rot and not expect that eventually the rot will work its way into our sanctuaries. Christian people live and swim in the culture and if that culture in which they are swimming is not spring fed by a Christian theology then what will happen is that Christian people, will, with exceptions, begin to reinterpret the Christian faith in light of the theology that they are constantly drenched in during the week.

Christians must mind their theology. Both in its theory that bolsters the concrete and in its application praxis where the dots are connected between the orthodoxy and the orthopraxy. Currently we are not doing so well either in theory or in praxis and so we are in danger of rotting from both the inside out and the outside in.

Religion & Culture … Entirely Independent Phenomena?

“The liberal thinkers and statesmen who were the makers of the nineteenth century civilization regarded religion and culture as entirely independent phenomena. Religion was entirely a matter for the individual conscience and it had nothing to do with social and economic life. But the resultant secularization of culture which took place throughout Western Europe in the nineteenth century brought its own nemesis. It led to the discredit of a religion that had no power over social life and of a culture that had no spiritual sanctions. It found at once its logical conclusion and its refutation in the yet more radical secularization of life characterized by the Marxian philosophy. While Liberalism had pushed religion on one side, Communism eliminated it altogether and thus prepared the way for the complete re-absorption of the individual in the social organism, while at the same time it transformed the social organism into an economic mechanism.

Christopher Dawson
Enquiries Into Religion & Culture — pg. xviii

1.) It is a myth to think that one can separate religion and culture. However, what the nineteenth century did was to insist that Christianity (this is the religion that Dawson is referring to) could be confined to the individual while culture could get along quite well uninformed by the Christian faith. What actually was happening, was not the secularization of culture, but rather what was happening was the incremental and subtle moving of culture to a different religious foundation besides Christianity. The liberal statesmen and thinkers of whom Dawson mentions — most of whom doubtless were not epistemologically self-conscious about what they were doing — could not have succeeded with their task of positing Western culture on a different faith/religious foundation if they had been explicit about their intentions. Consequently, the justification for the cordoning of Christianity off to a private individual realm that was compartmentalized from culture was advanced in the name of constructing a more equitable public square through the pursuit of secularizing it (i.e. — moving it off its Christian foundation) so that conflicts of faith would be kept out of the public square.

2.) Such an endeavor is ultimately futile. Just as Christian ethics can not be retained over the long haul when the attempt is made to peel those ethics away from the Christian Theology that supports and informs those ethics, so a Christian culture can not be retained over the long haul when the attempt is made to peel a culture away from the religion/theology that informs it. The attempt to both move culture off of its Christian base in the pursuit of “secularization” and to expect the retention of the stability that was characteristic of that culture when it was firmly pinioned on the Christian religion is akin to the attempt to move a water fountain off of a well that gives potable water in the pursuit of a alien polluted well while retaining the expectation that the polluted well will be fine since the water fountain has always previously issued potable water.

3.) When Dawson mentions a degraded culture that has “no spiritual sanctions” it reminds me that cultures are always covenantal. One of the characteristics of covenant is that there are always sanctions for violating the covenant. The culture that resulted from the shift to “secularization” is a culture where the spiritual sanctions have not so much that the spiritual sanctions no longer exist but rather the spiritual sanctions have changed so that the new covenant resulting from the putative secularization are sanctions that just the opposite of what they had previously been. Now, since the sanctions have drastically changed it may look like that the culture no longer has “spiritual sanctions” when looked at with the expectation of the sanctions of the previous culture but one can be sure that some sanctions still exist. As one obvious example of what I am getting at, two generations ago homosexuality in the culture of the West received the spiritual sanction of being ostracized. Two generations later if one expects those same spiritual covenantal sanctions to exist one might say that the culture no longer has spiritual sanctions. However, as I said, the spiritual sanctions haven’t gone away but rather now the spiritual sanctions fall on those who expect spiritual sanctions to fall on homosexuality. Culture is inevitably covenantal. It has spiritual sanctions. When you move the culture from one religion to another religion the covenant changes with that movement and the spiritual sanctions do likewise.

3.) Note that the point that Dawson is making is that nineteenth century liberal thinkers and statesmen were embraced a dualism that divorced religion from culture. It is interesting that the R2Kt proponents w/ their Escondido Hermeneutic contend for the very same dualism as the nineteenth century liberal thinkers and statesmen that Dawson refers to. Likewise both the Escondido Hermeneutic and the doctrine of the nineteenth century liberal thinkers and statesmen insist and insisted on a religion that is and was restricted to the individual conscience that has nothing to do with social and economic life.

4.) Don’t miss the powerful point that Dawson makes when he tells us that the result of creating a dualistic culture where Christianity is grossly privatized what arises is a new theology (Marxism) that will overcome the previous dualism in favor of a religion (some variant of socialism) that will provide a unify integration point that will provide cohesion for all of society and its culture. The danger here of course is that Marxism is a corporate humanism that provides not a unifying but rather a Humanistic Unitarian integration point that allows for no diversity as the Christian faith does. What this means is a savage Borg-like ugly sameness that is impressed upon all individuals in the societal hive. This is the guaranteed eventual result of the dualism that is offered by the Escondido Hermeneutic. If Christianity will not inform all of life then some other pagan belief system will provide the integration point that will inform the totality of a society and culture.