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An Open Letter to Thomas C. Oden
from Robert H. Gundry
Dear Tom,
I'll not respond to the ad hominems, thinly disguised under the rubric of "social location," in your piece, "Answering Critics of 'An Evangelical Celebration.'" I'd not respond to the rest of it, either, except for its misrepresentations of my statements, biblical statements, your own earlier statements, "Celebration," and other confessional statements. Let me put my response to these misrepresentations in the form of questions addressed to you.
Why do you now appeal to the statement in "Celebration," "Doctrinal disagreements call for debate," after complaining initially, "We [you and your fellow drafters of 'Celebration'] had hoped that we might be spared this sort of public squabble"? Wasn't it I, not you, who twice appealed to the statement in "Celebration"?
How can you claim, "[W]e have not yet heard from our critics clear affirmations on the nine-tenths or whatever, which would be welcome [to the critics], but only displeasure on the one-tenth or so about which they strongly disagree," when in the very first paragraph of my initial offering I stated, "'Celebration' … contains much that I affirm; and it seems to me that much of what 'Celebration' contains needs reaffirmation in view of currently noticeable tendencies to water down, if not wash down the drain, certain features of the evangelical tradition that are rooted in Scripture"?
Why do you speak of critics' "duty to recognize the irenic and limited purpose" of "Celebration" as though I hadn't written, "I accept Oden's statement that 'the drafters of "Celebration" sought to be as inclusive as possible of major evangelical voices'"?
How can you downgrade the dominance of imputation in "Celebration" when "Celebration" itself refers to its "extended analysis of justification by faith alone through Christ alone," and then yourself turn around to describe "The Salvific Significance of Jesus' Sinless Life" for justificatory imputation as "The Key Issue"?
Why do you say, "He [Gundry] argues that no New Testament author ever speaks of any 'righteousness of Christ,'" despite my pointing out the reference to "the righteousness of our God and Savior Jesus Christ" in 2 Peter 1:1 (though with no connection to imputation)?
In view of my repeatedly declaring, "Certainly evangelicals affirm that Jesus had to live a life of perfect righteousness if he was to qualify as the bearer of our sins," why do you keep saying that "despite ambiguous disclaimers" I regard the life of Christ as "irrelevant" to his sin-bearing death? What is ambiguous about my declaration?
Why, even though in my last offering I pointed out the following misquotation, do you persist in misquoting Romans 5:18 as though it says, "Therefore just as one man's trespass led to condemnation for all, so one man's act of righteousness leads to justification and life for all," when in fact "man's" is missing and the verse refers to "one trespass" and to "one act of righteousness"? In view of your desire to include the whole life of Christ in Paul's statement, does this persistence in misquotation arise out of discomfort with the singularity of Christ's act of righteousness?
When after the foregoing misquotation you do come around to note Christ's "one act of righteousness," you violate the contextual indications that I earlier underlined and define it as "his entire life" as well as "his death" and note the antithetic parallel with "Adam's trespass." That trespass is usually understood as Adam's original sin in the Garden of Eden, yet you immediately go on to reference Adam's "behavioral actions." To help your inclusion of Christ's whole life in his one act of righteousness, does the plural of your phrase, "behavioral actions," imply that Adam's trespass includes his whole life of sinning, all of it being "accredited to others' condemnation"? If so, do you regard that holistic interpretation of Adam's one trespass as an item of "evangelical consensus"?
To solve the problem for your view that God's righteousness but not Christ's is associated with justification, you argue, "Triune teaching prevents us from saying that the New Testament speaks exclusively of 'God's righteousness, not his Son's.'" Would then you also want to say, "Triune teaching prevents us from saying that the New Testament speaks exclusively of Christ's obedience, not of the Father's, too"? Would you really want to say that everything true of one member of the Trinity is always true also of its other members? If not, what happens to your argument from the Trinity?
How can you quote for support the creedal statements of the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association, the National Association of Evangelicals, Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary, and Fuller Theological Seminary, and the Amsterdam 2000 Declaration, when not a single one of your quotations so much as mentions an imputation of Christ's righteousness, much less an inclusion of the whole life of Christ in his imputed righteousness? Don't you understand that without reservation I could sign each of those statements?
Hoping my questions will disperse some of the fog that obscures our disagreements,
Bob Gundry
Copyright © 2001 by the author or Christianity Today International/Books & Culture Magazine.
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May 9, 2001
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