In his farewell letter to the PCA, Jason Stellman says that he has concluded that “the teaching that sinners are justified by a once-for-all declaration of acquittal on God’s part, based upon the imputation of Christ’s righteousness received by faith alone, is not reflective of the teaching of the New Testament as a whole.”

Instead, he thinks that “a much more biblical paradigm for understanding the gospel” is this: “the New Covenant work of the Spirit, procured through the sacrifice and resurrection of Christ, [is] internally inscribing God’s law and enabling believers to exhibit love of God and neighbor, thereby fulfilling the law in order to gain their eternal inheritance (Rom. 8:1-4). While this is all accomplished entirely by God’s grace through the merits of Jesus’ life, death, and resurrection, it is at the same time not something that occurs through the imputation of an external and alien righteousness received through faith alone. Rather, as Paul says, God’s people are justified by a faith that works through love—itself the fruit of the Spirit—and with God’s law inscribed on our hearts and minds we sow to the Spirit and reap everlasting life.”

A few observations.

First, Jason moves from saying that he has come to doubt the Protestant doctrine of justification to talking a paradigm for the “gospel.” To my ear, he’s changed the subject, because the gospel is not “you shall be justified by a once-for-all acquittal based on the imputation of Christ’s righteousness.” That is, I believe, an accurate formulation of the biblical teaching regarding justification (better, it’s an accurate formulation of part of the biblical teaching - I’ve argued elsewhere that the biblical teaching on justification has more to it), but the gospel isn’t simply the announcement that God justifies sinners by imputation. Jason is hardly to be faulted for this confusion. One of his Westminster West teachers, Scott Clark, has written: “the Heidelberg Catechism defines the gospel solely [his emphasis] in terms of God’s gracious provision of Christ’s active and passive obedience, which satisfies the justice for God for all who believe.” Again, “The good news is about justification earned for us by Christ who kept the covenants of works and redemption, and offered freely to us (Rom. 10:4) in the covenant of grace.”

Even if I grant that Clark’s theology here is correct, it’s not what Paul means by “gospel.” When Paul summarizes the gospel, he sums up the story of Jesus. The “gospel of God” is the fulfillment of what God “promised beforehand through the prophets in the holy Scriptures concerning His Son, who was born of a seed of David according to the flesh, who was declared the Son of God with power by the resurrection of the dead, according to the spirit of holiness, Jesus Christ our Lord” (Romans 1:1-4). the gospel he preached is “that Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures, and that He was buried, and that He was raised on the third day according to the Scriptures, and that He appeared to Cephas . . . .” (1 Corinthians 15:1-11). Not a word about justification, imputation, active or passive obedience. Justification is an essential dimension of Paul’s gospel; it is not the sum total of it. The good news is the announcement of the kingdom; it is, as NT Wright has put it, the story of “how God became King.”

Someone who has been taught taught that the gospel simply is justification by imputation of active/passive obedience is set up for a surprise when he engages deeply with the New Testament.

Second, Jason says that the biblical paradigm of the gospel emphasizes the work of the Spirit who inscribes the law of God on human hearts so that believers fulfill the requirement of the law and by doing good in the power of the Spirit inherit eternal life. The faith that justifies is a faith that works through love. I find Stellman’s brief summary of Paul quite accurate, but I think he’s wrong to conclude that his views on this issue have put himself outside the Reformed faith. Why can’t he say this: We are justified by the imputation of Christ’s righteousness, and also the Spirit inscribes the law on our hearts so that we reap everlasting life? Or, following Richard Gaffin, why can’t we say that God’s reckoning us righteous and the Spirit’s work of putting the law in our hearts are both fruits of the reality of union with Christ? Why can’t we say: The “external and alien righteousness” by which we are justified is Jesus Christ Himself, the Righteous One, to whom are are united by faith? And then why can’t we say: Jesus Christ the Righteous is no inert resident of my heart, but active and powerful by His Spirit?

Much of Reformed theology has seen no need to polarize the way Jason does. On Galatians 5:6, Calvin writes: “It is not our doctrine that the faith which justifies is alone; we maintain that it is invariably accompanied by good works; only we contend that faith alone is sufficient for justification . . . . Paul enters into no dispute whether love cooperates with faith in justification; but, in order to avoid the appearance of representing Christians as idle and as resembling blocks of wood, he points out what are the true exercises of believers.” The Westminster Confession of Faith itself (11.2) makes the same point: “Faith, thus receiving and resting on Christ and his righteousness, is the alone instrument of justification; yet is it not alone in the person justified, but is ever accompanied with all other saving graces, and is no dead faith, but worketh by love .” The Westminster Confession (33.1) says that at the final judgment each will “receive according to what they have done in the body, whether good or evil.” The Westminster Confession (16.2) connects good works to our inheritance of eternal life in much the same way Jason does: “These good works, done in obedience to God’s commandments, are the fruits and evidences of a true and lively faith: and by them believers manifest their thankfulness, strengthen their assurance, edify their brethren, adorn the profession of the gospel, stop the mouths of the adversaries, and glorify God, whose workmanship they are, created in Christ Jesus thereunto, that, having their fruit unto holiness, they may have the end, eternal life .”

Jason’s soteriology may actually be out of accord with the Confession, but his published statement of his positive doesn’t come close to proving it; nothing in his positive statement of his views contradicts sola fide, rightly or Confessionally understood. He sees himself in conflict with the Reformed tradition only because he has been convinced that Reformed soteriology is only about what Jesus has done and not at all about what the Spirit does in us, only about justification now by faith and not about final justification according to works. He is out of accord with one specific version of Reformed theology that has convinced him and many others that it is Reformed theology.

If Jason is right that he has to resign from the PCA to teach Galatians 5:6 and Romans 8:1-4 without apology, or to take Romans 2:1-10 as something more than a hypothetical, that bodes very ill for the future of the PCA. But I think Jason’s resignation says more about the particular brand of Reformed theology he was trained in and espouses than about the PCA as a whole. That thread of Reformed theology leaves people vulnerable to Catholic appeals. When they insist that faith works through love and em phasize the Spirit’s writing on the heart, Catholics sound more Pauline than some Reformed teachers because, well, because they are . Under those conditions, a move to Rome looks like a move closer to the New Testament.

I ask again as I’s asked before: Who’s pushing the gateway drug?