Perfect Obedience: What Sort of Condition?
Alastair @ 40 Bicycles pointed me to Tim Gallant’s article over at the Biblical Study Center. And, as always, my brain was stretched and my faith muscle strengthened as Tim made some very insightful points regarding the fact that Adam’s ” perfect obedience may simply be identified as a necessary condition of the Adamic covenant. On this view, Adam would not have gained the promised blessing apart from perfect obedience – but that perfect obedience would not have been the ground of the inheritance.”
In other words Adam was to be holy – but being holy was not what ‘saved’ him. Sound familiar? It always amazes me that we read in Genesis the one command given to Adam by God – and this is called the covenant of works, Yet the New Testament is full of commands to be holy, that our salvation is dependent on our ‘working out our salvation’ yet these we ignore because we are in a covenant of grace!
When I read Tim’s inheritance analogy (below) I finally was able to get my mind around the idea – we are ‘saved’ not by anything we ourselves do, but nevertheless there is much we must do.
Think of a son who is promised an inheritance when he arrives at maturity. He cannot earn that inheritance. It is something that is freely promised and given to him by his father. Thus there is no merit involved. However, this does not preclude the possibility of demerit – a fundamental betrayal of loyalty to his father, such that his father disinherits him. Thus the son’s loyalty to his father is a necessary condition to his reception of the inheritance. He will not inherit on the basis of that loyalty, but he will not inherit without that loyalty either.
So it was with Adam. He could not have merited the eschatological blessing (for convenience, let us call this “glorification”). But he was given one sacramental test of loyalty: do not eat of the tree of knowledge of good and evil. Eating of that tree would constitute a fundamental breach of loyalty against God – in short, apostasy. In this way, with his transgression, Adam lost not only the inheritance that he would have ultimately received (glorification), he lost what he already had (original righteousness; i.e. a received standing of sonship to God).
That is a very interesting argument, that Adam, in sinning, was actually breaking faith with God. That the act of disobedience was really an act of unbelief – of failure to trust – failure to trust God that he would mature. Instead Adam wanted knowledge, and he wanted it now! Adam sounds a lot like me :)
Interestingly, I came across this article on my own a few days ago, and I’ve decided that I don’t buy the monocovenantal argument. I do not grant the argument about Christ’s merit replacing Adam’s demerit. Denying that God made a covenant with Adam based on his works then makes Christ’s work much fuzzier. There is no longer the legal contract in place; the language becomes more relational and you begin opening cans of worms as regarding justification. If Adam was saved by faith all along, with obedience as simply a “necessary part” of that salvation, why did Christ need perfect works? What covenant was Christ satisfying through His perfect obedience? Why could He also be saved by this faith? The result is that by tweaking the understanding of the Adamic covenant, you pull a little thread that starts unraveling a right understanding of a lot of other things, including the Trinity and what Christ’s suffering was for. Christ no longer needed to suffer to satisfy a legal requirement if salvation was purely by faith all along. If perfect works really are required for salvation, and you argue (rightly) that we therefore need Christ’s perfect righteousness imputed to us, then all the monocovenantal talk of works being “just a necessary part” of a covenant is only so much dancing around the bush and playing word games.
Another issue I have is what believing in monocovenantalism gets us. What are the benefits? A more unified covenant structure, more unified system of God’s dealings with man over the ages? But that’s in exchange for throwing out the neat and clean legal aspects of the covenant, with Christ stepping in to fulfill what we could not. I fear that monocovenantalism is an overreaction, a pendulum swinging too far away from dispensationalism and arriving at the opposite extreme.
My two cents, but I borrowed even those from people smarter than me.
Comment by Matt Winckler — April 16, 2005 @ 11:04 am
Uh, Matt… my article argues against monocoventalism, as the subtitle clearly indicates.
But I don’t think you are arguing logically here. If Adam needed perfect works, then certainly Christ did. I have never denied the Adam-Christ connection.
Nor do I find it particularly helpful to pit “legal” vs. “relational.” Sonship is a legal reality. Heck, marriage is a legal bond.
Comment by Tim G — April 16, 2005 @ 11:06 pm