The Relevance of Buchanan’s Justification: Part Three

Theological

Undoubtedly, the most significant contribution of Buchanan’s Justification, is his theological clarity, finesse, and comprehensiveness. His arguments are as relevant today in light of the NPP as they were in the 19^th century. We saw above that the NPP has supplanted the forensic and judicial with the participationistic and transformative. Buchanan furnishes three arguments for why Scripture requires the forensic or judicial sense of the term justification and righteousness. He calls these the antithetic, correlative, and equivalent arguments (229-233).

What is more, Buchanan shows the inextricability of the doctrine of justification to the doctrine of God, his holiness and justice, the spirituality and inflexibility of the moral law, the grand and crucial doctrine of Christ’s satisfactory and propitiatory atonement, and the sovereignty of grace. Each one of these doctrines is worthy of careful treatment, and is connected to the others, and the doctrine of justification, so that if any falls, so do the others, especially, the doctrine of justification. Allow one quote from Buchanan to suffice:

If they [the Reformers] held that God’s justice requires the punishment of disobedience for the vindication of His law and the manifestation of His glory, — that men are universally chargeable with the guilt of original and actual sin, — that they are alike unwilling to be subject to God’s law, and unable to yield perfect obedience to it, — that for them and their salvation, the Son of God became incarnate, and acted as Mediator between God and man, — that He executed the office of a Priest in offering Himself up as a sacrifice for sin, –that His sufferings were strictly penal, and properly vicarious, — and that they were both appointed and accepted by God as sufficient to render it consistent with His justice to extend mercy to the guilt, and to grant a full and free remission of their sins, — then, holding these views, they could hardly fail to believe that Christ’s work is the meritorious procuring cause, and the only, but all-sufficient, ground of a sinner’s justification (164).

It is here that Buchanan shows the NPP for what it truly is. It requires a different view of God, a different view of the law, a different view of the atonement, and a different view of grace and faith. The interconnectedness of these Scriptural doctrines with the Reformed understanding of justification is so entire, that the smallest reformulation of justification entails a thoroughly altered view of religion.