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Justified in Christ

God's plan for us in justification

Above our heads

JUSTIFIED IN CHRIST
God’s plan for us in justification
Edited by K.Scott Oliphint
Christian Focus/Mentor. 336 pages. £11.99
ISBN 978-1-84550-246-1

Justified in Christ is a collection of eight essays on the doctrine of justification written against the background of the New Perspective. As members of the faculty of Westminster Theological Seminary, the authors write in the Reformed tradition as they examine the subject from the angle of their own specialities of Scripture, church history, apologetics and pastoral studies. The final third of the book reproduces John Murray’s classic study on The Imputation of Adam’s Sin.

Sinclair Ferguson’s introductory sketch of the history behind the current crisis gets the book off to a good start. He traces how it is that, in spite of the strength of evangelical scholarship, new positions have emerged within evangelicalism which are damaging to its health. He points out that the central theme of the person and work of Christ has been largely neglected and replaced by a new evangelical agenda on ‘How to’ deal with our problems — an agenda which bears disturbing similarities to Schleiermacher’s ‘seeker sensitive’ liberal theology which sought to make the gospel relevant to his contemporaries. His brief history of the New Perspective will also be useful to those who are new to the subject.

The essay on the pastoral implications of the doctrine of justification is also relevant and helpful, addressing the tendency to revert to a works-based salvation in living the Christian life. J. Stafford Carson calls us to appropriate the doctrine of justification by faith through grace not just at the beginning of the Christian life but in the day-to-day of our existence. Only by preaching the gospel every day to ourselves as well as to those under our care will we deal with the self-righteous Pharisee and guilt-laden sinner in our hearts.

In his stimulating essay on apologetics William Edgar claims that when people reject Christ’s atonement they will turn to devilish counterfeits and human attempts at mass-level atonements. He sees the French Revolution, lynchings in the American South and the Nazi Holocaust as examples of this. The connection is difficult to prove but nevertheless intriguing.

Unfortunately though, these are highlights in a book that in the main fails to bridge the gap between the scholarly and popular contexts. Although Ferguson argues that the two are intimately related, ironically this collection struggles to deliver. Some of the content — not least the essays on justification in church history — are simply too specialised to be of much interest outside the academy and are unlikely to make the journey from academy to pulpit to pew. The largely esoteric works listed in the bibliography for further reading reinforce the impression that this is a book for the academy. The style of the writing is also unnecessarily involved and technical. The final sentence of John Murray’s study — ‘On the foregoing analysis culpa is exhibited in solidaric pravity’ — gives a flavour of the style that his successors at Westminster seem to have emulated. The Mentor series are written for ‘Bible college and seminary students, pastors and other serious readers’, but unfortunately I suspect this book will not gain a wide readership beyond the first two categories.

Marcus Nodder,
senior pastor of St. Peter’s Barge, Canary Wharf — London’s Floating Church