[Calvinism] has at once placed to the front the great principle that there is a particular grace which works Salvation, and also a common grace by which God, maintaining the life of the world, relaxes the curse which rests upon it, arrests its process of corruption, and thus allows the untrammeled development of our life in which to glorify Himself as Creator.#
God’s freedom in election is not capricious but aims at a definite global purpose – “to make known the riches of his glory for vessels of mercy, which he has prepared beforehand for glory.”#
The Aristotelian and Thomistic concepts of virtue and the humanistic understanding of it as the cultivation of innate goodness were undercut by the Reformation insistence that human effort could not add to human merit for the purposes of salvation.#
No one will be justified by “works of the law,” according to Paul, not because there has never been an arrangement in which that was possible (i.e. creation), but because since the fall (which the history of Israel recapitulates), all of humanity (including Israel) is now “in Adam.” The direct problem is not being under the law, but being found “in Adam,” a transgressor of the law.#
Law and gospel are not in opposition unless we seek to find satisfaction before God. But they are always distinguished at every point.#
Recalling the fig tree that withered at Jesus’ curse, symbolizing the pronouncement of woes and the parables of the kingdom, the picture is of an Israel that, despite its national judgement as a covenant-breaker, is nevertheless kept alive by extensive pruning and grafting at the level of individual salvation through Christ.#
While the basis of the covenant of grace is God’s unconditional, electing, and redeeming grace (no confusion of law and gospel), there are clearly, in its administration, both commands and promises.#
What the Scriptures labor to demonstrate is not that there are no normative laws for Christians, but that there is no way that we, being who we are, can become heirs of God’s kingdom by keeping them.#
God will save his elect, overcoming every obstacle in his way, including us.#
To say that certain things have to happen before we are justified is not to say that any of these things are instruments in our justification. Conditions are not instruments.#