COVENANT AND COMMANDMENT
Works, obedience and faithfulness in the
Christian life
By Bradley G. Green
IVP Apollos. 185 pages. £12.99
ISBN 978 1 783 591 664
God freely justifies sinners, accounting Christ’s obedience to all who place their trust in him.
How is this truth to be related to the teaching that those who have been justified are to live lives characterised by obedience, good works and faithfulness? Covenant and Commandment seeks to answer this question. The essence of Green’s thesis is crystallised by a quotation from Richard Gaffin on p.101: ‘a faith that rests on God the Savior [sic] is a faith that is restless to do his will’.
In addition to establishing the truth expressed in the quotation from Gaffin, this book addresses many issues of perennial concern along the way. These include the following: whether God entered into a covenant of works with Adam; the way in which the Old Testament and the New Testament relate to each other; the relationship between law and gospel and between grace and commandments; Christ’s righteousness and ours and the nature of the righteousness which is imputed to us; union with Christ; justification and future judgment. He interacts extensively with theological giants of the past, such as John Calvin, John Owen, Jonathan Edwards and Geerhardus Vos, as well as engaging in fruitful conversation with contemporary scholars and theologians such as Greg Beale, Henri Blocher, Richard Gaffin, Michael Horton and Andrew McGowan. En route to his final conclusion he launches a graciously written critique – but a critique nonetheless – of some of the views of N.T. Wright.
Important but technical
While the subject of the book makes it eminently suitable reading for all Christians, its substance is such that only those familiar with the cluster of issues identified in the previous paragraph are likely to benefit from it. Being a volume in the excellent series of New Studies in Biblical Theology, edited by Don Carson, this is not a book for the hard-pressed person with little time for extra reading, but is for those who are wrestling with issues of biblical and systematic theology and how they are to relate to Christian life and witness.
Regrettably, the style of the book is not easy. This, of course, is a highly subjective assessment, and other readers may think otherwise: I hope so. In fairness to the author, he does grapple with very big issues and he engages in necessarily complex argumentation, so the substance may, therefore, have dictated the style. These points notwithstanding, I lost count of the times that the phrase ‘works, obedience and faithfulness’ was repeated. By the time I reached the end I found this to be quite tedious. But the need to stay focused while reading can be a blessing in disguise; and in a day of ‘easy-to-read’ Christian books which often skate over weighty issues, I am glad to add to my shelves a book which covers so much ground in so few pages.
