Backbone of the Bible: Covenant in Contemporary Perspective

P. Andrew Sandlin, ed. Backbone of the Bible: Covenant in Contemporary Perspective. Nacogdoches, Tex.: Covenant Media, 2004. xix + 148 pp. $12.99.

Here is a book destined to inflict great harm upon the Reformed church at the very depths of her identity as a Reformed-Protestant confessional body, a near fatal strike at the theological core of her doctrine and life fleshed out over the last six centuries of ongoing polemical debate and contention for the biblical faith. Among the various writings assembled here, pride of place is given to Norman Shepherd, leading spokesman for the New Covenant Theology. Shepherd was dismissed from the faculty of Westminster Seminary in 1982 for views found to be contrary to Scripture and the Reformed confessions. To be accurate, the co-fathers of the modern movement (or deconstruction) within contemporary Reformed theology are Shepherd and his former seminary colleague, Richard Gaffin, who obtained his doctorate at Westminster under Shepherd in 1969. (My doctoral studies in the late 1970s were likewise pursued under Shepherd, up to the time he requested to be released from our teacher-student relationship. Parting was sorrowful, but the wisest course of action.)

Four convictions propel the argument of the book. First, the claim is made that these writers represent the teachings of genuine Calvinism. Those on the other side of the controversy have, they say, distorted Calvin's doctrine of law and grace. Parenthetically, the Shepherd-New Covenant School reads Calvin in the light of the Barthian doctrine of law in grace, a wholly divergent theology of grace from that found in Calvin and the Protestant reformers (on that there was unqualified consensus). The point is made more than once that there is a world of difference between biblical terminology (the exact words and terms employed by the biblical writers) and theological terminology (the invention of systematicians, i.e., scholastic "dogmatists"). Corollary is the idea that Scripture, at critical and controversial points in post-canonical theological debate, actually favors ambiguity over precision. second, attempts are made at every opportunity - this publication being one of them -to ridicule and castigate opponents of Shepherd. John Frame here is at his best. The publisher's inclusion of Frame's "Addendum," what amounts to a weak attempt at apology to his readers, only adds fuel to the fire. Third is the effort by these reformulators to set forth what Frame calls "third alternatives" (p. viii), that by way of the distinctive methodological approach conceived by Frame (multiperspectivalism). Fourth, and last, the central plank in the New Covenant Theology is the repudiation of what Shepherd calls the Reformed-Protestant "works/merit paradigm," in favor of a "faith/grace paradigm." Regarding the merit concept, Andrew Sandlin interjects: "It is simply a fiction" (p. 70).

More than anything else, this volume is a promotion and defense of Shepherd's theology. Having renounced the classic Protestant law/gospel antithesis in no uncertain terms, the need for a radical reformulation of "Calvinist" doctrine, one driven by the dictates of a Barthian understanding of the relationship between law and grace, arises. The reader is led to believe that Shepherd better understands the gospel than all who have proceeded in the history of Christian doctrine. Frame pontificates: The formulation of his good friend and former colleague "is clearly a Biblical, evangelical, and Reformed understanding of the gospel and nothing else" (p. xi).

Shepherd's first of two essays begins by taking to task the views of R. C. Sproul laid out in his book Getting the Gospel Right (1999). Representative of scholastic Reformed federalism, the doctrine advanced by such modern-day theologians as John Dick, Charles Hodge, and Meredith Kline (all of whom are opposed by contributors in this collected writings), Sproul's theology of justification and the covenants is found by Shepherd to be one that bypasses the death of Christ, resulting in a deviant, unscriptural view, a view that substitutes human, autonomous, legal (i.e., meritorious) obedience for the righteousness of Christ. According to Shepherd, the righteousness of Christ imputed to believers is the death and resurrection of Christ, excluding his life of active, meritorious obedience. Shepherd insists that there is no concept of meritorious obedience ("works" opposed to "grace") to be found anywhere in the Bible (except by way of a Judaistic perversion of God's call to grace). In denying the imputation of the active obedience of Christ, Shepherd maintains that the ground of life and salvation is the atoning death of Christ, what Reformed theologians have spoken of as the passive, in distinction from the active, obedience of Christ. Is this dispute over one (for some, narrow) point of doctrine pedantic? Not for Shepherd, and not for his critics. The heart of Reformation doctrine is at stake here. Key to Shepherd's theology is the repudiation of the Reformed doctrine of meritorious accomplishment associated with a covenant of works, the covenant which Scripture and Reformed theology teach was made with the First and second Adams in their federal (representative) capacities. Shepherd's allegation that the faith/grace paradigm is the proper intention of the early reformers and creeds is pure fabrication. Frame, who surely represents the view of all the contributors, says he is awaiting a new consensus on the core doctrines of the Reformation: for him, the old consensus no longer bears weight (p. xi).

More appropriately, this volume might well be viewed as a kind of festsmft honoring Shepherd who lost out on the real thing. But like Shepherd's The Call of Grace (Phillipsburg: P&R, 2000), this collection of writings lacks gravitas and requisite scholarship. It is all the more surprising that publications like these should cause such widespread disruption in the churches and find so welcome a reception by many today. Clearly, Reformed churches and schools have failed somewhere along the line. In the final analysis, the explanation for the success of these promoters of New Covenant Theology is due to a convergence of several factors in contemporary theology, most notably, the rise of the New Perspective on Paul in biblical studies and recent evangelical reassessment and appropriation of the theology of Karl Barth, one now hailed by many as an evangelical rather than a modernist (contra the reading of earlier critics like Carl Henry and Cornelius Van Til). This book will only serve to spread the fans of fire, with the added potential of consuming many of the uninformed. For more on the history of the Shepherd controversy, see my Gospel Grace: The Modem-day Controversy (Eugene, Ore.: Wipf and Stock, 2003), which includes numerous references to relevant documents and writings by other participants in this dispute.

Mark W. Karlberg

Warminster, Pennsylvania

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