Monday, March 30, 2020

Answering an Apologetic for Sola Fide Based on Abraham's Good Works



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)