“The controversy simmered below the surface until the late 90s, when he retired from the ministry and began speaking at conferences on covenant and justification, where he advanced the same views that he had argued in the first phase of the controversy. In 2000 he published The Call of Grace (see this review and response) and thereafter aligned himself with the movement that was coalescing around his teaching and around the Auburn Avenue conferences.”

On this date in 1546 Martin Luther completed his Christian pilgrimage on this earth. This year we are celebrating the 500th anniversary of the Reformation (October 31, 1517). It’s appropriate then, that confessional Protestants do in our time what Luther did in his: continually recover the gospel from the hands of the moralists.

Among the more remarkable facts of the modern history of conservative and confessional Presbyterian and Reformed (P&R) church life over the last 50 years is that during most of this last half century the P&R world has been persistently roiled over the doctrine that J. H. Alsted (1588–1638) called “article of the standing or falling of the church.” Judging by the orthodox Reformed theologians of the 16th and 17th centuries, such a controversy would seem unlikely. There was remarkable consistency among them on this point. Polity (episcopal, presbyterian, or congregational) varied. The vocabulary they used to describe the biblical covenants varied and developed during the period (though one sees much substantial continuity). Indeed, despite the sharp disagreements that existed between the Lutheran and Reformed theologians over the implications of (what the Reformed numbered as) the second commandment, the principle of worship, the two natures of Christ, baptism, and the Supper, among other things, the Reformed believed they were confessing the same same doctrine of justification confessed in Augsburg Confession art. 4 (1530).

Whatever formal diversity existed within the most significant Reformed voices, during the classical period of Reformed theology, we may be sure of the substantial agreement among the Reformed churches since the all the Reformed confessions confess the very same doctrine of justification, i.e., the free declaration by God that sinners are regarded as righteous only for the sake of Christ’s righteousness, his condign merits imputed to believers received only through faith, trusting, resting, and receiving in Christ and in his finished work. This is the doctrine of the Reformed confessions, e.g., the Genevan Confession (1536), the Belgic Confession (1560), the Scots Confession (1560), the Heidelberg Catechism (1563), Second Helvetic Confession (1566), the Canons of Dort (1619), and the Westminster Standards (1648).

Nevertheless, as I noted in Covenant, Justification, and Pastoral Ministry there has been, since almost the beginning of the Reformation, a dissonant sound in the Protestant orchestra whenever the gospel is played: moralism. Almost from the beginning there were those who feared that the good news of free acceptance, indeed, of free salvation (justification, sanctification, and glorification) would lead to carelessness in the Christian life and even antinomianism. There were some who did take the opportunity of the recovery of the gospel to promote the antinomian heresy. Of course, Luther and the Reformed rejected antinomianism in all its forms as an offense to the law and an abuse of the gospel. Should we sin that grace may abound? May it never be! (Rom 6:1).

Nevertheless, despite the clarity of the Reformed theologians and churches on this essential (sine qua non) doctrine, despite their clarity on the moral and logical necessity of progressive (if only partial in this life) sanctification as the natural fruit of justification (e.g., Belgic Confession art. 24) there have always been those who have sought to corrupt the Reformed doctrine of justification either by changing the ground (Christ’s perfect righteousness for us) or by changing the instrument (faith trusting, resting in, and receiving Christ) of justification. Richard Baxter (1615–91) is perhaps the greatest example of such and yet he is regularly hailed among Reformed (and Reformed-ish) types as a “model pastor.” Whatever one might learn from Baxter’s diligence in catechesis and visitation, it was all vitiated by his flat denial of the gospel. That his congregation is today Unitarian stands as a warning to those who would follow in his footsteps. Rationalism is a totalitarian mistress. There are no half-measures with her.

In our own time we have our own Baxter: Norman Shepherd, a theologian who taught in a confessional Reformed seminary for decades and who still regarded by some influential Reformed theologians as a model theologian. In the academic year 1974–75, in his systematic theology course on the application of redemption, he proposed that sinners are justified through faith and works. That was the language he used and defended in white papers to the faculty. Later, under criticism, he modified his language to speak of justification through “faithfulness,” but to the same effect. Further, he argued that baptism confers upon each baptized person the benefits of Christ (see also, Baptism, Election, and the Covenant of Grace). Thus, he argued, we should consider a baptized person “covenantally” (temporarily, conditionally) elect, justified, adopted, etc. These benefits, he argued, were conferred provisionally in baptism and retained by grace and cooperation with grace.

If the reader is aware of the history of theology he might recognize this approach as remarkably close to the medieval theology rejected heartily by the Reformation and essentially that of the Remonstrants in the 17th century. It is covenantal Arminianism. Like the Arminians in 1610, Shepherd suggested that a believer could fall away. His use of covenant as a way to revolutionize the Reformed doctrine of salvation was immediately rejected by a minority of the faculty and eventually rejected by a majority of the board and he was dismissed from the seminary. Shepherd was tried in the Philadelphia Presbytery of the OPC but quite remarkably presbytery was unable to see how his doctrine contradicted God’s Word as confessed in the Westminster Standards. He was dismissed to the Christian Reformed Church before charges could be laid against him again.

The controversy simmered below the surface until the late 90s, when he retired from the ministry and began speaking at conferences on covenant and justification, where he advanced the same views that he had argued in the first phase of the controversy. In 2000 he published The Call of Grace (see this review and response) and thereafter aligned himself with the movement that was coalescing around his teaching and around the Auburn Avenue conferences. We know this movement as the (self-described) Federal Vision movement. In a series of publications in the years after he continued to develop the same ideas making explicit what had been implicit in the 1970s, e.g., his denial of the imputation of the active obedience of Christ.

The Federal Vision theology is Norman Shepherd’s theology and Norman Shepherd’s theology is the Federal Vision theology. In all phases of the controversy over the past 43 years his defenders have tried to position him as a defender of orthodoxy. E.g., one OPC minister wrote a poem lauding him as “The Last Reformed Theologian.” Another argued to me that Shepherd had been “railroaded” by “broad evangelicals” bent on introducing antinomianism and “easy-believism” into P & R churches. Anyone who knows Shepherd’s opponents will see the falsity of this characterization. It was confessionalists who have opposed him most ardently. Advocates of “easy-believism” or “cheap grace,” to the degree they exist in the confessional P & R world, have been, if anything, indifferent to Shepherd and the FV theology. Another defense of Shepherd has been to say that he only arguing that good works are the necessary consequence of justification. Were that the question there would have been no controversy. The necessity of good works as the fruit of justification was never in question.

Read More