The Implication Is Not the Man

On charging people with conclusions they deny

I want to write about a habit that has cost the household of faith more fellowship than almost any false doctrine ever has. It is not a doctrine. It is a move. And nearly all of us have made it, myself included, which is why I am writing this for myself as much as for anyone.

Here is the move. A man states what he believes. You hear it, and you run it forward to where you think it leads. You arrive somewhere ugly. And then you turn around and hang the ugly place on the man, as though he had said it himself.

Let me give you my own neck to put under the blade first.

I believe Christ was made sin. Not that He was merely reckoned guilty by a courtroom transaction at a legal distance, but that He truly bore it, the wrath and the shame, in His own body and soul on the tree. I will say it plainly. It was more than imputation. He was made sin.

Now a brother reads that. And he runs it forward. If Christ was made sin, then Christ became a sinner. And there it is, the ugly place. So he says it out loud to others: Brandan teaches that Christ became a sinner. He has heard me say one thing and charged me with another, and the other is a thing I deny with everything in me.

And here is where it gets sneaky, because I can do the very same thing right back to him. He says it was imputation only. So I run that forward. If it was only a legal reckoning, then the suffering was a kind of fiction, a transaction on paper, and he is making light of what my Savior actually endured. So I turn around and say it about him: he teaches a legal fiction, he makes light of the cross. And now we have two men, each charging the other with the place the other man's doctrine supposedly leads, and neither one of us has actually listened to what the other one said he believes.

The same thing happens with the providence of God. I teach that God created evil. Isaiah said it before I did. I make peace, and create evil; I the LORD do all these things (Isaiah 45:7). A brother runs that forward. If God created evil, then God is evil. The ugly place again. So he charges me with it. And I turn around and run his position forward, the one where God merely permits and does not ordain, and I land at he does not really believe God is sovereign. And I charge him with that.

Do you see it? Two men, four accusations, and not one of the four was actually confessed by the man it was hung on. We were both billed for a premise neither of us holds.

Where the ugly place actually comes from

Here is the thing I want us to see, because once you see it you cannot un-see it.

An implication is not a confession. An implication is a conclusion. And a conclusion does not come from one premise. It comes from two. You take what the man said, and you add a second premise of your own, and only then do you arrive somewhere.

Watch it work. "Christ was made sin" does not get you to "Christ became a sinner" by itself. You have to add a bridge: to be made sin is to become corrupt in your nature. That bridge is the second premise. And that bridge is exactly the thing I deny. That is the whole reason I do not hold your conclusion. I confess that He took the weight. I deny that He took the corruption. He bore the consequence of sin without ever becoming the thing He bore. For he hath made him to be sin for us, who knew no sin (2 Corinthians 5:21). The verse holds both halves in one breath. Made sin, and yet knew no sin. If you want to charge Paul with teaching that Christ became a sinner, you are going to have to take a pair of scissors to the second half of his own sentence first.

"God created evil" does not get you to "God is evil" by itself either. You have to add a bridge: whoever authors a thing must himself be that thing. But that bridge is false on its face, and you already know it is. The author of a murder mystery book is not a murderer. The playwright who writes in  a betrayer has betrayed no one. The God who ordained the cross is not guilty of the cross. The bridge is yours, not mine. I never laid it down. So when you walk across it and arrive at "God is evil," you have arrived at the end of your premise, and you are sending me the bill.

That is the whole trick, laid bare. The implication you find so visible, so obvious, so clearly there, is only there because you carried in the plank that made the crossing possible. The implication belongs to your premise. It does not belong to me.

The reason the symmetry matters

Now here is why I keep turning the knife back on myself in this article. Because the symmetry is the proof.

If charging a man with the implications of his doctrine were a fair thing to do, then every one of us is a heretic, and we are all finished. There is no doctrine under heaven that does not have an ugly downstream place if an opponent is willing to supply the missing premise. The Calvinist can be run forward to "God is a sinner." The Arminian can be run forward to "man saves himself." The man who teaches eternal security can be run forward to "so go ahead and sin." The man who teaches you can fall away can be run forward to "Christ's blood was not enough." Every single one of us can be marched to a cliff if the other man gets to carry the second premise.

So the move cannot be valid. It proves too much. A weapon that kills everyone in the room is not a weapon, it is the plague.

Paul already lived this

I take great comfort in the fact that the Apostle Paul stood exactly where I am standing, and he named the move for what it is.

Paul preached that where sin abounded, grace did much more abound. And his opponents ran it forward. If grace increases where sin increases, then let us sin so grace may increase. The ugly place. And they hung it on him. Listen to how he answers them: And not rather, (as we be slanderously reported, and as some affirm that we say,) Let us do evil, that good may come? whose damnation is just (Romans 3:8).

Slanderously reported. As some affirm that we say. Paul is telling us that men were going around affirming that he taught a thing he never taught, a thing they had derived by running his doctrine forward across a premise he rejected. And he does not call it a misunderstanding. He calls it slander, and he says their condemnation is just.

That is strong. But it is right. Because to ascribe to a man a belief he openly denies, and then to spread it as though it were his confession, is to bear false witness against your neighbor (Exodus 20:16). It does not stop being a lie just because you sincerely believe his doctrine ought to lead there. The ninth commandment is not suspended for theology. Even the old confessions our critics love to quote understood this. The Larger Catechism lists among the sins forbidden in the ninth commandment the misconstructing of intentions, words, and actions, and it requires of us a charitable esteem of our neighbours and an unwillingness to admit of an evil report. The men who play the implication game are breaking the very catechism they confess.

And our Lord Himself walked through this every day of His ministry. He forgave sins, and they ran it forward to this man blasphemeth. He ate with publicans, and they ran it forward to a friend of publicans and sinners, meaning a man who endorses their sin. He said He was the Son of God, and they ran it forward to he maketh himself equal with God,and they took up stones. He was never short of men who could see exactly where His words led, and who were dead wrong about it, because the place they saw was built on a plank they brought themselves.

When you actually may hold a man to it

Now let me be honest, because there is a real version of this, and I do not want to hand anyone a license to escape every hard question by crying foul.

There are times you may hold a man to an implication. But there is a test, and the test is clean.

You may press an implication when it flows from premises the man himself holds. That is what a true reductio is. You take only his planks, not yours, you lay none of your own, and you show him that his own boards lead off a cliff. That is fair. That is good. That is how iron sharpens iron. If I can get to the ugly place using nothing but lumber the man brought to the site, then the problem is his, and he has to deal with it.

And there is a second half to the test, and it is the one that settles everything. When you show him the place his doctrine leads, does he own it, or does he deny it?

Because the denial is decisive. If you show a man where you think his teaching goes, and he says, "No, I reject that, and here is the premise of yours I do not share," then the implication was never his. It was yours all along, riding on your plank. You have your answer. Drop it.

But if you show him the place, and he looks at it and says, "Yes, that is exactly what I mean, and I will stand on it," then now, and only now, may you hold him to it. Because he has owned it. A man is responsible for what he will confess. He is not responsible for what you can construct.

That is the whole rule, and it is short enough to keep. Judge a man by what he affirms and what he denies, not by the conclusions you can reach by importing premises he rejects. When you are not sure where he stands, the old commandment still holds: do not bear false witness. Ask him. Let him tell you. And believe him when he does.

And this is how I preach to myself

I said at the top that I am writing this for myself, and I meant it. Because the hardest part of this for me is not when it is done to me. I have made my peace with the barking. The hardest part is the day I catch myself doing it to a Mike, or to a John, or to a man I think is wrong about the cross. The day I run his doctrine forward and hang the ugly place around his neck and feel that little flush of being right. That is the pride monster, and he eats well on the implication game.

So I am laying it down, and I am asking my brethren to lay it down with me. Charge me with what I confess. I will charge you with what you confess. When my doctrine seems to you to lead somewhere terrible, come and ask me if I go there, and I will tell you, and you will believe me, and I will do the same for you. And the things we genuinely own, we will own, and we will answer for those like men.

Christ was made sin, and He knew no sin. God created evil, and God is not evil. I will hold both halves, because Scripture holds both halves, and I will not let any man cut my sentence in two and bill me for the part I never wrote.

He took the weight. He did not take the corruption. And He bore the false witness too, all the way to a cross, charged with every ugly place His enemies could run Him forward to, the friend of sinners who saved us by being numbered with the transgressors He was never one of.

Grace and Peace,
Brandan