Righteous by Design: Covenantal Merit and Adam’s Original Integrity (Perkins)

Description

How Might We Obtain Everlasting Life?

Although Protestants ought to have a ready answer about faith in Jesus Christ, the reasons explaining that answer run much deeper and relate to our status as God’s image bearers.

Important historical issues inform how we understand the precise relationship of work and grace. Throughout much of the medieval period and into modern Roman Catholicism, many believed that because original righteousness was superadded to our nature, personal righteousness could be restored by grace after the fall, allowing us to merit everlasting life by our own works. By contrast, the Reformation tradition has held that sin has damaged our nature so thoroughly that we could never merit salvation and must receive everlasting life by grace alone.

Righteous by Design is, on one hand, a thorough historical investigation of medieval and counter–Reformation theology, exploring sources that have seldomly if at all been treated in Reformed literature. At the same time, it is also a theological case that original righteousness was natural to Adam before the Fall and that Adam could have merited everlasting life according to the covenant of works. The payoff of this effort in theological retrieval is to underscore the majesty of grace in that sinners are right with God only on the basis of Christ’s merits. Thus, this book mounts a case for the Protestant law–gospel distinction through the lens of the imago Dei to highlight the sufficiency of Christ and his work.

Content

Series Preface
Foreword
Preface and Acknowledgments

CHAPTER ONE
Introduction: Getting Oriented toward Nature and Grace

CHAPTER TWO
Covenantal Merit in the Reformed Tradition

CHAPTER THREE
Medieval Discussions about Adam’s Original Righteousness

CHAPTER FOUR
The Road to (Modern) Rome

CHAPTER FIVE
An Ongoing Reformed Conversation

CHAPTER SIX
Covenant, God’s Image, and the Nature/Grace Question

CHAPTER SEVEN
Merit in the Covenant of Works

CONCLUSION
Pastoral Reflections on Covenant Theology for Communion with God

Bibliography
Subject Index
Scripture Index

Endorsements

The value of this book is found in its close engagement with primary and secondary sources arguing in favor of and alongside the Reformed confessional heritage since the sixteenth century on such topics as the covenant of works and the covenant of grace …. It is worth our time as pastors, theologians, and students to engage with this book and its concepts.
—Todd Rester
Associate Professor of Church History, Westminster Theological Seminary, Philadelphia

… Harrison Perkins tackles some difficult and nuanced questions over law and gospel, merit and mercy, and nature and grace. … Particularly, his painstaking attention to nuances in medieval views on righteousness and merit, with their lasting implications, represents ground rarely covered by Reformed Protestants.
—Ryan M. McGraw
Morton H. Smith Professor of Systematic Theology, Greenville Presbyterian Theological Seminary, Greenville, South Carolina

About the Author

Harrison Perkins (PhD, Queen’s University Belfast) is pastor at Oakland Hills Community Church (OPC), Senior Research Fellow at the Craig Center for the Study of the Westminster Standards, online faculty in church history at Westminster Theological Seminary, visiting lecturer in systematic theology at Edinburgh Theological Seminary, and author of Reformed Covenant Theology: A Systematic Introduction.