Avoiding Monotheologia

Dale Coulter’s blog on The Westminster Captivity of Evangelicalism continues to intrigue me.  After all, how could Westminster Theological Seminary in suburban Philadelphia, founded J. Gresham Machen, forced out of the Mainline Presbyterian Church in the 1920s by a combination of liberals and evangelicals, now function as the intellectual leader of evangelicalism?  On closer review, Coulter’s nemesis is not WTS but its one-time affiliate, Westminster Seminary California.  (If it’s Presbyterian, chances are it has “Westminster,” “Knox,” or “covenant” somewhere in its name.)

Coulter’s complaints about “Westminster” focuses on its perceived over-emphasis on the change in the legal relationship wrought by Christ’s atoning work.  That some folks like Daryl Hart make the forensic aspect of Christ’s work the entirety of the atonement can’t be denied.  However, as Hart complains, WTS was the home for many years of John Murray whose Redemption Accomplished and Applied (1955) has long stood as the most complete and well-balanced (and even short!) statement of the Reformed, Presbyterian understanding of Christ’s atoning work.  Murray understood the New Testament to place union with Christ at the center his priestly work.  This mystical union of the believer with the risen Christ results in justification, sanctification, and ultimately glorification of the individual.  But, for Murray, justification remained forensic--grace imputed--while sanctification represented grace infused.  Neither can exist in the life of a Christian apart from the other, however, because both are grounded in the fundamental union of the believer with Christ.

Murray influenced one of my RTS professors, Roger Nicole.  I learned a lot from Roger’s seminar named, appropriately enough, Atonement.  My only regret is that I took it my first semester; I would have appreciated it more had I taken systematic theology beforehand.  Nicole’s analysis of the New Testament’s six-fold perspective on the atonement (adoption/reconciliation, propitiation, sacrifice/expiation, marketplace (purchase/redemption), legal, and battlefield) has helped me a great deal.  I particularly appreciated Roger‘s use of the historical method, having us review the works of the leading theologians of church history, as the framework for exegesis.  In short, a forensic perspective on the atonement can share a place with others without being subsumed into a subjective “inner light” of renewal.  And church history can inform theology without putting it into a straitjacket.