The Castle Church Door

Some of you might possibly be interested in an interview on the Federal Vision I recently did with Christ the Center group. I think we did get at a basic primer on the Federal Vision, what it is, and what are its dangers.

Mark Horne has “responded” to my post here. The scare quotes are necessary, because Mark took a small sliver of the argument, reacted to that, and leaves it at that, plainly implying that no further argument is necessary. He has been doing this ever since I was on the Wrightsaid group. There is no acknowledgment that I have understood one word of his writing. There is also no ...

In this post I aim to take up Mark Horne’s essay in the book A Faith That Is Never Alone. The article is entitled “Reformed Covenant Theology and Its Discontents.” This article is a response to Michael Horton’s essay “Which Covenant Theology?” in Covenant, Justification, and Pastoral Ministry. I aim to address Mark’s article in three parts, corresponding roughly to the sections on Ursinus, Turretin, and the more ...

Continuing on in the first article of Norman Shepherd in A Faith That Is Never Alone (and finishing that article), we come to this question: when Paul is talking about faith versus works, is Paul excluding all works from justification, or only some works? From Norman Shepherd’s own pen, we can see that his definition of faith does not exclude faith itself as being a work. He approves ...

Continuing on in the first article of Norman Shepherd in A Faith That Is Never Alone (and finishing that article), we come to this question: when Paul is talking about faith versus works, is Paul excluding all works from justification, or only some works? From Norman Shepherd’s own pen, we can see that his definition of faith does not exclude faith itself as being a work. He approves ...

I have gone through the entire Joint Federal Vision Profession (hereafter abbreviated JFVP). An index to the entirety of the discussion can be found here (second paragraph of links). For those who are incredibly lazy, the previous discussion of the Preface can be found here. And the JFVP itself can be found here. That should be enough preliminary, prefatory, introductory, forwardary links to get on with (and I even ...

Now we come to the phrase “living and active faith.” The argument occurs over whether or not this phrase should be used with regard to the doctrine of justification. All sides agree (contra what some might say) that we are not justified by a dead faith. The question arises over whether faith’s livingness and aliveness is integral in justification. Norman Shepherd takes issue with the OPC report’s handling of ...

The subject of this post is again the relationship of faith and works. It is important here to get the relevant Calvin quotes out in the open. First up is 3.11.1: The theme of justification was therefore more lightly touched upon because it was more to the point to understand first how little devoid of good works is the faith, through which alone we obtain free righteousness by the ...