There is a open move to rehabilitate Shepherd’s doctrine by revising the history of what Shepherd said and what the issues were. As I say, the moralists never go away. Many Christians are more comfortable with Jesus as a facilitator of justification and salvation rather than as the Savior. Like Shepherd, they want to blur the line between the Christ and his Christians by making Jesus the first Christian, by blurring the line between his faith and ours, between his obedience and ours.

Way back in 2009, when the Federal Vision controversy was still going the claim was made by a proponent of the Federal Vision that there is not a single, agreed doctrine of justification by grace alone, through faith alone but rather there were a number a doctrines of justification adopted by the Reformed. I respondedthen as I respond now: That claim is patent nonsense. That this claim, which is so easily disproven, continues to arise (and in surprising places I might add) supports my contention that the moralists will never quit—which I wrote even before the controversy had fully ended. I say that because the historical pattern is clear. Confessional Protestants (i.e., those who actually belief, preach, and teach what the Protestant churches confessed on justification in the 16th and 17th centuries) articulate the doctrine of justification. That unequivocal announcement of God’s favor to sinners, while they are yet sinners (Rom 5:8).

There is a reaction from moralists who fear that a clear, unequivocal declaration of God’s grace to sinners will encourage people to sin that grace may abound (Rom 6:1) reply either by openly contradicting the Protestant doctrine (Richard Baxter) or by subtly subverting it by implying that though faith has its place our Spirit-wrought works also have their place in the doctrine of justification (Norman Shepherd).

Sometimes this is done openly, as Shepherd did in 1974–75 when he taught justification by grace, through “faith and works.” That language was later modified to “faithfulness.” After all, who can contest that Christians ought to be faithful? Of course the question has never been whether Christians ought to be faithful. The question has always been to what end? The doctrine of the Reformed churches has always been that good works are the fruit of justification and not the ground or instrument of justification. Belgic Confession Art. 24 says:

We believe that this true faith, produced in man by the hearing of God’s Word and by the work of the Holy Spirit, regenerates him and makes him a “new man,” causing him to live the “new life” and freeing him from the slavery of sin.

Therefore, far from making people cold toward living in a pious and holy way, this justifying faith, quite to the contrary, so works within them that apart from it they will never do a thing out of love for God but only out of love for themselves and fear of being condemned. So then, it is impossible for this holy faith to be unfruitful in a human being, seeing that we do not speak of an empty faith but of what Scripture calls “faith working through love,” which leads a man to do by himself the works that God has commanded in his Word.

These works, proceeding from the good root of faith, are good and acceptable to God, since they are all sanctified by his grace. Yet they do not count toward our justification—for by faith in Christ we are justified, even before we do good works. Otherwise they could not be good, any more than the fruit of a tree could be good if the tree is not good in the first place.

To say or even to imply that Christians must be faithful in order to accepted by God is nothing less than an attack on the finished work of Christ and the denial of the gospel of Jesus Christ. Any preacher who says or even implies such thing should be repudiated in the same way the Apostle Paul repudiated the Apostle Peter as a denier of the gospel. Paul wasn’t kidding when he said that if anyone, himself included, even an angel should say anything different about the gospel, “let him be anathema” (Gal 1:8).

There is a open move to rehabilitate Shepherd’s doctrine by revising the history of what Shepherd said and what the issues were. As I say, the moralists never go away. Many Christians are more comfortable with Jesus as a facilitator of justification and salvation rather than as the Savior. Like Shepherd, they want to blur the line between the Christ and his Christians by making Jesus the first Christian, by blurring the line between his faith and ours, between his obedience and ours.

There is also, apparently, a more subtle attempt being made now to make room for Shepherd and his followers. In this instance one finds them talking about justification “by grace” and justification “by faith” but an absolutely essential qualifier is missing: alone (sola).

Read More