IN OTHER WORDS, If left to LIBERTY and wisdom, how can it be mandated? Maybe I missed your point here. I guess it just seems strange to argue that it CAN be required of certain congregations and not others.

It is has the feel of the old, Independent Baptists, who always said, “Be there when the doors are open!” I don’t know, perhaps on that count, they were right!

Michael

“Therefore, we see a two-fold aspect to the single event of the atonement—just as there is a two-fold aspect to the problem of sin (guilt and corruption) …”

Though I’m no doubt talking to myself at this point, I would point out that the atonement does more than free us from the guilt and corruption of sin. It also merits the heavenly inheritance, which is an additional forensic aspect. So even granting that sin has a two-fold profile of guilt and corruption (which I’m happy to do), and that therefore the atonement must obtain for us a two-fold deliverance (which I also have no problem with), it still seems that we need to reckon with what the atonement does beyond freeing us from the guilt and corruption of sin, namely its meriting of the heavenly inheritance. Hence, even granting the two-fold profile of both sin and our deliverance from it in the historia salutis, the atonement is still weighted more heavily in the direction of the forensic.

By His death, [Christ] freed Himself from the guilt of our sins imputed to Him, and from all that innocent weakness of His human nature which He had borne for a time for our sakes. And, by freeing Himself, He prepared a freedom for us, from our whole natural condition, which is both weak as He was, and also polluted without guilt and sinful corruption. Thus the corrupt natural estate, which is called in Scripture the old man, was crucified together with Christ, that the body of sin might be destroyed. And it is destroyed in us, not by any wounds that we ourselves can give to it, but by our partaking of that freedom from it, and death to it, that is already wrought out for us by the death of Christ; as is signified by our baptism, in which we are buried with Christ by the application of His death to us (Rom. 6:2-4, 10, 11). ‘God, in sending His own Son in the likeness of sinful flesh and to be a sacrifice for sin, condemned sin in the flesh, in order that the righteous demand of the law should be fulfilled in us, who walk not according to the flesh but according to the Spirit’ (Rom. 8:3, 4). Observe here that, though Christ died that we might be justified by the righteousness of God and of faith, not by our own righteousness, which is of the law (Rom. 10:4-6; Phil. 3:9), yet He died also, that the righteousness of the law might be fulfilled in us, and that by walking after His Spirit, as those that are in Christ (Rom. 8:4). He is resembled in His death to a corn of wheat dying in the earth, that it may propagate its own nature, by bringing forth much fruit (John 12:24); to the Passover that was slain, that a feast might be kept on it; and to bread broken, that it may be nourishment to those that eat it (1 Cor. 5:7, 8; 11:24); to the rock smitten, that water may gush out of it for us to drink (1 Cor. 10:4). He died that He might make of Jew and Gentile one new man in Himself (Eph. 2:15 ), and that He might see His seed, that is, such as derive their holy nature from Him (Isa. 53:10). Let these Scriptures be well observed, and they will sufficiently evidence that Christ died, not that we might be able to form a holy nature in ourselves, but that we might receive one ready prepared and formed in Christ for us, by union and fellowship with Him.

I hear you and I appreciate the continued interaction. I’ll continue to ponder the evidence you cited in the WLC. I don’t really have the time to scour the theologians either … though often I find myself doing it anyway, no doubt sometimes at the expense of other stuff I ought to be doing.

How would you answer the question I posed with the Flavel quote? Is it improper to speak in terms of Christ meriting the entirety of our salvation, including our sanctification?

Understood. But the point’s that it is there. The demand was for *any* evidence. I provided it. So it’d be nice to have it be at least acknowledged that such elements are present in the Reformed tradition, even if not over-abundantly. More citations from private authors could be multiplied (there’s much in Calvin and other 16th c. Reformed). I just brought the WLC quotes to the table because, of course, confessional documents hold most weight, and also because, as a pastor and church planter, I don’t have the time that’d be necessary to go scouring through Calvin, Bucer, Vermigli, Zanchi, et al, for the relevant quotes. I did, however, give one from Calvin above.

“It is impossible to read that and reasonably come away with any other conclusion than that Vos, at least when he wrote The Alleged Legalism, was convinced that the doctrine of justification was ‘the center of Paul’s teaching.’”