Beckwith

Christianity Today recently interviewed Francis Beckwith, the former president of the Evangelical Theological Society who resigned because of his re-entrance into the Roman church. Here's a snippet of the interview: "The Catholic Church frames the Christian life as one in which you must exercise virtue—not because virtue saves you, but because that's the way God's grace gets manifested. As an evangelical, even when I talked about sanctification and wanted to practice it, it seemed as if I didn't have a good enough incentive to do so. Now there's a kind of theological framework, and it doesn't say my salvation depends on me, but it says my virtue counts for something."

This is disturbing to me on several levels. Firstly, I find it troubling that Beckwith's first mention of "grace" is in connection with "virtue" rather than "redemption." Protestants have traditionally had little problem with speaking of grace in connection with sanctification and conformity to Christ, but in our best moments we have clearly established that grace in this respect is impossible unless we are first clothed with the righteousness of Christ. In other words, before grace works "inside" it comes as a gift from the "outside" - that is, through Christ's life, death, and resurrection which doesn't just start the process of redemption but actually accomplishes it.

This leads to the second point, where Beckwith says that "as an evangelical, even when I talked about sanctification and wanted to practice it, it seemed as if I didn't have a good enough incentive to do so." My response: does the gospel of justification by grace alone through faith alone not provide enough incentive to pursue holiness, that we have to substitute it with another gospel of faith plus works? Put simply, what about the incentive of "I have been crucified with Christ, and it is no longer I who live but Christ who lives in me" or "We were buried with him by baptism into death, in order that, just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, we too might walk in newness of life?" It is extremely vexing to me why one would want to exchange the death and resurrection as our incentive for sanctification for something else, which is inevitably a form of self-justification.

Which takes us to the last point, where Beckwith says "Now there's a kind of theological fraemwork, and it doesn't say my salvation depends on me, but it says my virtue counts for something." It seems to me that the underlying text here is, "Now I can finally contribute something to my salvation." In the Protestant scheme, our virtue does indeed count for something: it "adorns the doctrine of God our Savior" (Titus 2:10). What our virtue does not do is "count" before God as earned credit with the heavenly bank. We have two choices when all is said and done: the righteousness that is from the Law or righteousness that is by faith in Christ (Phil 3:9) -seeking my righteousness or receiving the righteousness of another.

Hopefully the fact that the president of the ETS has run away from the true apostolic and catholic Church does not mean others will follow.

Chronicles

The Chronicler's adherence to a 'theology of immediate retribution' provides his dominant compositional technique, particularly formative in his reshaping of the history of Judah after the schism. 'Retribution theology' refers to the author's apparent conviction that reward and punishment are not deferred, but rather follow on the heels of the precipitating events. For the Chronicler sin always brings judgment and disaster, while obedience and righteousness yield the fruit of peace and prosperity.

- R. Dillard "Reward and Punishment in Chronicles" WTJ 46