When You Fail to Distinguish Second and Third Use of the Law–A Response to Tullian Tchividjian
Last week, Jen Wilkin wrote a very helpful article on TGC entitled “Failure is not a Virtue.” The purpose of her article was to push back against those who advocate what she calls “celebratory failurism.” She says, “Celebratory failurism asserts that all our attempts to obey will fail, thereby making us the recipients of greater grace. But God does not exhort us to obey just to teach us that we cannot hope to obey.”
Put differently, Jen was concerned about those who view the law only negatively (as a means of exposing failure), and rarely discuss how Christians are empowered to obey it.
Just recently, Tullian Tchividjian has … Continue reading...
The Missing Category of the ‘Righteous Man’–Revisited
A while ago I posted an article entitled, “Is Anyone More Holy Than Anyone Else? The Missing Category of the ‘Righteous Man”. In that article I discussed the downplaying of sanctification and holiness in some Reformed circles today. For whatever set of reasons, certain pastors and theologians are convinced that in order to preserve the doctrine of justification we cannot emphasize that real progress is possible in our sanctification. If we are really about ‘grace’, we are told, then we must focus predominantly on our depravity.
In my prior post, I argued that one of the motivations for this entire approach is a misunderstanding of the doctrine of total … Continue reading...