In
his recent book defending sola fide, Chris Bruno wrote:
When James reads the story of Abraham, he
does not sip past Abraham’s faith in God’s promises or ignore the status that
God granted Abraham through his faith. Abraham really did believe that God’s
promises were true and God really did count Abraham as righteous and therefore
a part of His covenant people (Gen 15:6). The moment he believed God’s
promises, Abraham’s status before God was “righteous.” But this righteous status had to be “fulfilled.” If Abraham claimed
to believe God but failed to obey Him, then he would have proven that his faith
was fake and that his justification was a scam. (Chris Bruno, Paul vs James: What We've Been Missing in
the Faith and Works Debate [Chicago: Moody Publishers, 2019], 105)
The problem
with this attempted reconciliation of Reformed theology with the Bible’s
teachings about Abraham and his justification is that it is utter nonsense.
Responding to a similar apologetic by R.C. Sproul, Robert Sungenis wrote the
following devastating refutation of this argument:
First,
we must object that appealing to God’s omniscience is not the way the Scripture
argues the case for a specific individual’s justification. Although it
undergirds its handling of justification from a general predestinarian
perspective (cf. Rm 8:29-30), Scripture argues its case with
regard to named individuals, e.g., Abraham, preponderantly and specifically in
temporal terms. In other words, Scripture is not in the habit of naming
individuals who are predestined
to
justification, let alone attempt to secure that justification by an appeal to
what God already knows the individual will do. Second, if we follow Sproul’s
argumentation to its logical conclusion, it simply proves too much, and ends up
nullifying his hypothesis. For example, taking the argument back one step we
could say that it was not really necessary for God to draw out even the faith of Abraham in Genesis 15:6, since by his
omniscience God would have known all along that Abraham was going to have true faith.
If Sproul can use divine omniscience to explain why it was not necessary for
Abraham to perform works for God, then, to be fair, Sproul should allow the use
of divine omniscience to explain why God really doesn’t need to draw out the
faith from Abraham in Genesis 15:6. In the end, argumentation appealing to
God’s omniscience is a double-edged sword and does nothing to advance the
discussion. If the omniscience argument is used, everything about Abraham,
including his act of faith, is superfluous. We all accept that from the very
beginning God already foreknows how things will turn out, but that is not the
basis from which Paul and James defend their respective doctrines of justification.
Neither Paul nor James appeals to divine omniscience to argue his case, rather,
they confine themselves to the temporal and chronological account of the
Genesis record. Granted, Paul’s argument in Romans 4 hinges on Abraham’s having
true faith prior to his circumcision (Romans 4:10-11). The text, however, is
absolutely silent about how we know it was true faith other than its appeal to
the spiritual disposition of Abraham himself. It does not appeal to God’s omniscience
prior to the event. In fact, Scripture often makes a concerted effort to avoid
appealing to divine omniscience to explain the actions of God or man (E.g., Gn 6:6; Ex 32:9-14; 33:3-5, Jh 3:10, et al.)
In the
end, Sproul’s argumentation destroys itself. It not only makes Abraham’s works superfluous, it also makes his faith superfluous since Sproul must admit it was
inevitable that Abraham would manifest both faith and works in his life. We
must insist that theologians not appeal to the incomprehensible attributes of
God in an effort to explain the enigmas of their theology, especially when Scripture
chooses to explain them in very ordinary ways. Scripture explains Abraham’s
faith and works on a purely phenomenological level. Genesis 22:12 makes this
clear when it describes Abraham as ready and willing to plunge the knife into
his son Isaac. The angel of the Lord, speaking for God, says: “Do not do
anything to the child. Now I know that
you fear God because you have not withheld from me your son, your only son.”
The angel’s temporal analysis of this event is clear and unambiguous. It is
only when Abraham actually performs the act of raising the knife that God makes
absolute his knowledge of Abraham’s intentions. The necessity in Gn 22:10 of
Abraham’s raising the knife is just as absolute as the necessity in Genesis
15:6 of Abraham’s believing. In fact, Gn 15:6 comes back to haunt Sproul in another
way. For if God sees in Abraham’s heart the faith he exhibited in Gn 15:6, and
from this knows that Abraham is a firm believer, why should God have to peer
again into Abraham’s heart in Genesis 22? Hence we must insist that while God
certainly maintains the divine prerogative of foreknowledge, he nevertheless in
creating a temporal world has also determined to shape the course of history
coincident with the events occurring in the temporal world (This area of theology touches upon what is
known as “secondary” or “contingent” causality in the realm of God’s dealing
with men). Though
this is a mystery, we cannot side with one dimension of God’s attributes at the
expense of others to give ourselves a palatable answer to anomalies in our
theology or in Scripture. The point in fact is that James, when speaking of
Abraham, uses the same word, justification, that Paul uses. Appealing to God’s
omniscience to allow oneself to change the definition of justification between
Paul and James is something Scripture never does and never even remotely
teaches us to do. Scripture presents and understands doctrinal propositions
concerning justification at face value, and thus that is the way we should analyse
and teach them.
Another problem, and probably the most dangerous
one, with appealing to God’s omniscience in such cases is that the reciprocal
of that appeal leads the individual to think that it may not be necessary for
him to do good works because “God knows my heart.” If we conclude that
Abraham’s works were not really necessary because God knew he was already
faithful and that he would have done the works in any case, the temptation is
very great to view ourselves in the same light. It is exactly this kind of
thinking, however, that James warns us against. We cannot “think” we have faith
and then ignore a brother or sister in desperate need (Jm 2:15), claiming that
“God already knows my heart.” Within that context, James specifies the necessity
for Abraham to act on his faith, as well as the necessity for God to be a
witness to that act. Nowhere does James entertain the notion that it was not
really necessary for Abraham to perform his act in front of God, nor does
Abraham, or any other biblical character, ever appeal to God’s foreknowledge of
his heart in an effort to spare himself the necessity of work. No example of
this is more profound than that of the Lord Jesus himself, who prayed at Gethsemane
that the cup of God’s wrath might pass from him. Jesus did not appeal to God’s
omniscience of his faithful heart. He understood that he had to accomplish the
work of the atonement and without it there would have been no salvation. The
Scripture treats the works of Abraham in the same way — without them there
could have been no justification. The works have a specific causal and
ontological necessity in regard to justification. In fact, God knows that we
know that he knows our heart, yet insists that we perform the deed that he
desires. (Robert A. Sungenis, Not By
Faith Alone: The Biblical Evidence for the Catholic Doctrine of Justification [2d
ed.; Catholic Apologetics International Publishing Inc., 2009], 212-15)