Monday, February 07, 2011

Trueman against revisons of the doctrine of justification

I am reading through the book edited by Anthony T. Selvaggio entitled The Faith Once Delivered: Essays in Honor of Dr. Wayne R. Spear (Phillipsburg, NJ: P&R publishing, 2007). In this book, Carl Trueman has an interesting essay on justification, or rather a person in church history, James Buchanan, regarding the doctrine of justification.

Here is an interesting excerpt from his essay in the book, which is entitled A Tract for the Times: James Buchanan's The Doctrine of Justification:

... I offer in closing these final comments as a historian's passing shot across the bows of modern theologians—systematic, biblical, and all points in between—who pursue their calling with ne'er a glance at history: if they wish to avoid the tragi-farcial options either of reinventing the wheel or of privileging their own narrow interpretative horizons over those of the church throughout the centuries as reflected primarily in her creeds and confessions, they might do well to mediate on the fact that current controversies on justification are reminiscent in so many ways of the issues raised relative to this doctrine through the centuries, not least by the [Oxford] Tracterians [e.g. John Henry Newman] of the nineteenth century. This applied, for example, to attempts to recast the Reformation as based on a misunderstanding, and to the identification by some of the Pauline "works of the law" exclusively with Jewish ceremonial distinctives. ...

Most applicable to the New Perspective and Federal Vision.

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