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The implication for the question. If what has been said above is correct, then
the necessary implication for the question at hand is perfectly clear. The unique,
peculiar, and justifying quality or property of faith is not obedience to the law. Faith may
be obedience, but it is obedience to the gospel and to grace as distinguished from the
law.
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Faith may be obedience, but it is not in this character that its unique or justifying
property resides. Faith may result in obedience to the law of God, but it is not at all
because of this that it occupies the place in the doctrine of justification that it does for
Calvin. It is not because of this that it has power to justify or is the instrumental cause of
justification. Faith justifies as and only as the trustful, resting, and reposing response to
gratuitous promise. Faith justifies because by this repose on Christ it joins the soul to
Christ.
Conclusion
For all these reasons we must reach the conclusion that, though faith possesses
the character of obedience for Calvin, it is not as obedience that it justifies. It is rather in
its quality as resting and reposing on the gratuitous promises of the gospel of Christ.
Thus, we reach the same conclusion already reached by W. Stanford Reid in his fine
article, "Justification by Faith according to John Calvin."
In his own day and ever since, those opposed to his doctrine have cited the terms of
Galatians 5:6 "faith working by love" as showing that love plays a part in
justification. While Calvin is prepared to recognize that faith does work by love, he
also insists that "it does not take its power to justify from that working of love.
Indeed, it justifies by no other means than by leading us into fellowship with the
righteousness of Christ. . . . And then that faith is reckoned as righteousness solely
where righteousness is given through a grace not owed." In his commentary on
law. (Cf. Shepherd, The Nature and Function of Faith, 154.) Yet, the effect of Shepherd's treatment is to
obscure or minimize the other side of Calvin's balanced treatment of the subject in which he sees the law as
the antithesis of grace so that the law condemns while the promise of grace justifies.
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Thus, when Daniel Fuller repudiates Calvin's contrast between gospel and law in Gospel &
Law, 66, he raises the question of his commitment to the doctrine of sola fide for which this distinction was
logically indispensable. I do not think that logically Fuller can hold this and hold sola fide. The reason is
that to make justifying faith simultaneously a response to both gospel and law is to say that it justifies
(partially) as obedience to law.