Covenant and Justification: Horton vs. Piper and Wright

I'm currently in Atlanta for the annual meeting of the Evangelical Theological Society, and I'd like to offer a brief synopsis of Michael Horton's paper, "Covenant and Justification: Engaging N.T. Wright and John Piper," which he presented this afternoon to a standing-room only crowd. Keep in mind that I don't have an e-copy of the paper, so I'll just be reproducing the main points from memory (but the paper can be obtained here, and in fuller form here).

Horton's main point is that there are two types of covenants that run concurrently throughout Scripture, one type is that of a suzerainty treaty and the other is a covenant of grant. Into the former category falls the Sinaitic covenant (which in some sense is a republication of the Edenic covenant of works), while the Abrahamic, Davidic, and New covenants fall into the latter category. It is under this rubric that Scripture gives expression to the categories of "law" and "gospel." In other words, the Reformed, following Scripture and Paul in particular, have always couched their law/gospel language and antithesis in the covenantal language of "do this and live" equalling law, and "it is finished" equalling gospel.

These points are strongly supported by the recent findings of ancient near-eastern studies, which have uncovered clear evidence of these two covenant types in antiquity. Horton appealed to two scholars who, he claimed, could hardly be accused of stacking the deck in the Reformation's favor: Rabbi John Levinson and Joseph Ratzinger, now Pope Benedict XVI. Both of these men, at least when doing exegesis, unequivocally affirm the existence in the ancient near east of the two types of covenants that Horton referred to (the suzerain/vassal treaty and the covenant of grant). Moreover, both Levinson and Ratzinger place the Mosaic covenant in the former category and the Abrahamic and Davidic covenants in the latter. But when the discussion moves from exegesis to conclusions, both men fall into the error of subsuming all biblical covenants into the covenant at Sinai, thus allowing the exegetical/historical evidence for two distinct types of covenants to be sacrificed to a monocovenantal dogmatic schema.

In a word, when Moses swallows everyone else, then at the end of the day, the gospel becomes amalgamated with law, producing what Horton has elsewhere dubbed "golawspel."

Therefore while Wright is correct in seeking to situate Paul's doctrine of justification in a broader covenantal context (an approach that Piper rejects), he ultimately fails to do justice to what St. Paul really said (and Horton wondered aloud why Wright, with all his appeals to second temple Judaism, doesn't pay more attention to ancient near-eastern studies).

Meanwhile, Piper often concedes many of Wright's caricatures of Reformed theology (caricatures that are undoubtedly due to the latter's admitted ignorance of the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Reformed covenantal tradition). For example, when Wright rejects the idea that the divine Judge can somehow bestow his own righteousness upon the guilty defendant (an idea that he mistakenly attributes to Reformed theology), Piper responds by insisting that ultimately it is the glory of God that sinful man needs and has failed to live up to. Horton's complaint here is that we need to move beyond the dizzying heights of the divine attributes that God supposedly bequeathes to us (whether his righteousness or his glory) and return to the idea of covenant, according to which it is Christ's representative obedience that is credited to the sinner, not some property of God the Father.

So at the end of the day, both Wright and Piper fail. Piper's failure is due to plucking his TULIP from its native covenant soil and thus planting justification and imputation in mid-air, and Wright's is due to his insistence upon a kind of covenantal nomism which may have faithfully described Israel's typological situation under Moses in the land, but falls woefully short of capturing the believer's situation under the new covenant.

So there you go. I will only be online for short periods over the next couple days, but please feel free to comment away.