Paul's Passing Thoughts

“The false gospel of the new birth” imagines that the new birth refers primarily to what happens in the believer and that this is the greatest news in the world. This is classical Roman Catholicism. It teaches that a good thing is the best thing, that the work of the Spirit is greater than that of the Son. It takes the fruit of the gospel and elevates it over the root, which is the gospel. It confuses the effect of the gospel with the gospel itself.

~Geoffrey Paxton: Present Truth; The false Gospel of the New Birth Volume Thirty-Seven — Article 4

How can my life, my doing, be fruit and not root? The fruit of the tree of justification and not the root of justification? The fruit of God being on my side rather than the root of making God be on my side? How can it be the fruit of the Holy Spirit so that I’m acting in the power of another and not in my own power?

~John Piper: http://marshill.com/media/guests/be-killing-sin-or-sin-will-be-killing-you

Bultmann’s existential gospel led him inevitably to a negative view of the Old Testament. And the new-birth oriented “Jesus-in-my-heart” gospel of evangelicals has destroyed the Old Testament just as effectively as has nineteenth-century liberalism.1 [Goldsworthy’s footnote #1] (1 See Geoffrey J. Paxton, “The False Gospel of the New Birth,” Present Truth Magazine 7, no.3 (June 1978): 17-22).

~Graeme Goldsworth: Present Truth; Obituary for the Old Testament Volume Forty-One — Article 2

This meant the reversal of the relationship of sanctification to justification. Infused grace, beginning with baptismal regeneration, internalized the Gospel and made sanctification the basis of justification. This is an upside down Gospel.

When the ground of justification moves from Christ outside of us to the work of Christ inside of us, the gospel (and the human soul) is imperiled. It is an upside down gospel.

In it [Goldsworthy’s lecture at Southern] it gave one of the clearest statements of why the Reformation was needed and what the problem was in the way the Roman Catholic church had conceived of the gospel….I would add that this ‘upside down’ gospel has not gone away—neither from Catholicism nor from Protestants.

~John Piper: Desiring God blog, June 25, 2009 Goldsworthy on Why the Reformation Was Necessary.

Visual illustration of how Piper and the Forum fuse justification and sanctification to exclude the New Birth because that enables the believer apart from justification:

Orthodoxy: Sanctification is NOT “justification in action.” Justification is a finished work. Sanctification is powered by regeneration, not justification.

Regeneration: New Birth enables the believer to work with the Holy Spirit. Justification is a finished work apart from sanctification.

Sanctification is cooperative. There are two partners involved in the work. I must work and God will work. If ever the extra-biblical maxim, “God helps those who help themselves,” had any truth, it is at this point. We are not called to sit back and let God do all the work. We are called to work, and to work hard. To work something out with fear and trembling is to work with devout and conscientious rigor. It is to work with care, with a profound concern with the end result.

~RC Sproul: Pleasing God p. 227

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