A while ago, I asked Jimmy to review Seraphim Hamilton’s debate with TurretinFan on Sola Fide. Here are some of his responses:

This is the silliest move

So big alarm bells right off the bat

He defines justification in terms of new/eternal life

Justification, for him, is being “raised up with Christ”

But that’s already questionable as a red herring

The lingo around justification is forensic. It’s a declaration of righeseous status. It’s a legal concept primarily, not one of resurrection.

He’s so sneaky

Little sneakersneak

He equates condemnation with death but that’s still dubious.

Surely he can’t mean that being condemned for your sins is being dead because of them.

Not all sinners are dead.

All sinners are condemned, except for those who are justified.

He’s very clearly conflating forensic condemnation with applied penology.

You are condemned to be put to death in a court of law.

You aren’t put to death there.

You are declared to be risen with Christ (because you have his righteousness) in the divine courtroom.

You are not actually resurrected upon possession of faith.

He’s opened himself up to a Bahnsen move too.

He starts by agreeing that this shouldn’t be / is not an ontology vs forensic issue. He agrees justification is forensic.

However, then he moves to subjugate all the forensic language to ontological categories. In that way, he has displaced the legal concepts of all that forensic language with resurrection concepts while preserving the outward appearance of legal language.

So he can just be accused of a false dialectic. He has reduced the forensic to the transformational, the legal to the ontological, in meaning if not formally, and so there is no legal reality left for Pauline theology of justification.

This guy is making a lot of good points, but because he’s prooftexting so much, you can’t really check any of the passages as they relate to Turretin’s argument.

Yeah, I’m waiting to see if Turretinfan says it, but so far he’s addressing a second huge blunder that’s bigger than the one I pointed out.

Namely, on Seraphim’s view, justification is a resolution to death, the penalty for sin, not sin itself.

It becomes a get-out-of-jail-free card instead of declaration of innocence.

And this is implosive: how can you be a new life, possess Christ’s life, and so forth, if you were not made innocent of your sins?

A third (interconnected) problem is that the death of Christ in no way comes into play explanatorily here.

We don’t just believe in imputed righteousness – it’s a switcheroo. It’s vicarious. Christ takes my unrighteousness to hell. I get his righteousness from his life.

He’s soooooo quick that it’s hard to catch, but his conflations are very carefully aimed.

In his 1st rebuttal to Turretin fan, he goes – the way we get Christ’s righteousness is because we are risen in Christ / because His life indwells us, which works through us. He probably identifies that with the “new man” reality.

What’s the problem here?

A three way conflation.

1.) Christ’s righteousness

2.) Our legal standing before God

3.) Resurrection

The problem is that somehow we get from 1 through 2 without 3, since none of us are resurrected.

And 3 does not by itself solve 2 (we can’t get from 3 to 2) because resurrection solves death and our current sin stricken anthropology, not our guilt.

So his chain is broken at both ends.

Or rather, there’s two reasons why 3 does not relate to 1 and 2 the way he wants to relate them.

Maybe though he’s saying something closer to regeneration.

Maybe the emphasis is supposed to be indwelling, and not new life.

Oh now I see what you meant by the two selves thing.

Dude, this is so funny.

Because as best I can make it, his two-selves move is just to concede imputation under the guise of different language.

He’s just saying Christ’s life stands in for the believer’s life.

Anything more than that, and we start to have weird Jungian-reminiscent schizophrenic philosophy on Spicy levels

Our Seraphim is a pokemon with three attacks:
Conflate, which he can do quite subtly
Hide disputed content in formally identical language
Distract with texts around the problem texts

The biggest and most overplayed move is the conflation tactic. I mean, I think he’s completely sincere. But wow, that’s a howler.

It really really really showed me how much non-prots are naturalizing evil, intentionally or unwittingly.

Like, Seraphim over and over and over slips up and says that Christ died and rose so that we can have eternal life: his words, “we’ve died to death.”

Funny

It’s almost like you think the natural effects of sin are the problem, not sin.

Dude, this guy is also such a great example of church father theology.

“Here, let me give you this great conclusion that’s Biblical.”

Protestants: wooooo

“But let me add just a little bit of poop in my framing and qualification.”

Proetstants: Huh?

Over and over in this faith alone debate, Seraphim clarifies:
Christ takes on the consequence for sin, not the sin-guilt itself.