Theopedia

Samuel E. Waldron

Overview

Samuel E. Waldron is a Reformed Baptist pastor-theologian best known for A Modern Exposition of the 1689 Baptist Confession of Faith, a chapter-by-chapter exposition of the confession, and for A Reformed Baptist Manifesto: The New Covenant Constitution of the Church, co-authored with Richard C. Barcellos, which defends 1689 federalism as a covenantal position distinct from both dispensationalism and New Covenant Theology.1 His 2005 doctoral dissertation at The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, later published as Faith, Obedience, and Justification: Current Evangelical Departures from Sola Fide, argues that several influential evangelical theologians have blurred the historic Reformation distinction between justifying faith and evangelical obedience.2 On church government he represents plural-elder congregationalism, the position that a local church is ruled by a plurality of elders holding equal office and authority, against both single-pastor and presbyterian models.3

Life and Ministry

By his own account in the preface to his dissertation, Waldron spent almost twenty-four years in pastoral ministry before beginning doctoral study.4 He completed a Ph.D. at The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Kentucky, in May 2005, during Albert Mohler’s presidency of the seminary, writing under committee members Mark Seifrid and David Puckett with Stephen Wellum as supervisor.4 While pursuing his doctorate he and his wife, Charlene, married for almost thirty years by 2005, were members of Heritage Baptist Church.4

Theological Contribution

Justification and departures from sola fide

Waldron’s dissertation surveys the Reformation’s own confessions and catechisms and concludes that, despite real differences of emphasis among them, “there is substantial unity in the Reformation tradition” on three points: justifying faith is defined passively, as receiving Christ rather than as an act of obedience; justifying faith is distinguished from evangelical obedience even though the two are never separated in the believer; and a dichotomy between law and gospel runs through the whole tradition.2 Against that standard, he argues that Daniel Fuller, Norman Shepherd, and Don Garlington, three “evangelical theologians” teaching at seminaries in the Reformed orbit, have each in different ways made evangelical obedience part of the ground or condition of justification rather than keeping it strictly distinct from justifying faith, so that their own professions of holding sola fide are “misleading as to the true character of their views.”2

Of the three, Waldron gives the most extended attention to Norman Shepherd’s account of repentance. Shepherd holds that repentance, which he defines as including “a turning from sin with a purpose and endeavor to walk with the Lord in all the ways of his commandments,” is necessary for the forgiveness of sins, and Waldron traces the inference: “If justification includes forgiveness, and if repentance is necessary for forgiveness, then repentance is necessary for justification.”5 Waldron judges that this “embeds faith in the process of sanctification” and so “obscures the distinction between justifying faith and evangelical obedience essential to the meaning of sola fide in the Reformation.”5 He traces a comparable move in Fuller’s organizing category of “the obedience of faith,” drawn from Karl Barth’s reversal of the traditional law-gospel order and from Oscar Cullmann’s salvation-historical hermeneutic, and in Don Garlington’s application of “the obedience of faith” to Romans along what Garlington himself calls “the Sanders-Dunn trajectory,” the “new perspective on Paul” approach associated with E. P. Sanders and James Dunn.6 7

Covenant theology and 1689 federalism

With Richard C. Barcellos, Waldron co-authored A Reformed Baptist Manifesto: The New Covenant Constitution of the Church (2004), which sets out 1689 federalism, a covenant-theological account built around the Second London Baptist Confession’s own chapters on the covenants, as a third position distinct from both dispensationalism and New Covenant Theology.1 In his own earlier commentary on the confession, cited in his dissertation, Waldron addresses a puzzle in the 1689 Baptist Confession’s covenant theology directly: the confession removes several references to a covenant of works that stood in the Westminster Confession and the Savoy Declaration, yet retains such references in its own chapters 19 and 20, a combination he argues requires explanation rather than reflecting confusion or discomfort with the concept.8

Church government and cessationism

Contributing “A Plural-Elder Congregationalist’s Response” to Who Runs the Church? Four Views on Church Government (2004), Waldron argues from the New Testament’s own vocabulary that no elder holds an office or title the others lack: “there is no terminological or official distinction of any kind to be found in the New Testament in which one of the elders is given a title or said to possess an office that the others do not,” so that “all hold the same office and have equal authority.”3 Waldron has also defended cessationism, the view that the miraculous spiritual gifts of prophecy, tongues, and healing ceased with the apostolic age, in To Be Continued?: Are the Miraculous Gifts for Today?9

Historical Significance

Waldron’s dissertation has itself become a source later scholarship engages directly. Carol Man Fen Chen’s 2019 Southern Baptist Theological Seminary dissertation on covenant theology cites it as a direct response to John Piper’s proposal on the imputation of Christ’s righteousness,10 and Martin Salter’s 2015 Themelios article on the Abrahamic covenant cites A Reformed Baptist Manifesto on the scope of the new covenant’s membership.11 Alexander Strauch’s widely used Biblical Eldership quotes Waldron’s ecclesiology at length as representative of the case for a plurality of co-equal elders.3

Related Doctrines

References

  1. Samuel E. Waldron and Richard C. Barcellos, A Reformed Baptist Manifesto: The New Covenant Constitution of the Church (Palmdale, CA: Reformed Baptist Academic Press, 2004), 71-77, cited in Martin Salter, “The Abrahamic Covenant in Reformed Baptist Perspective,” Themelios 40, no. 1 (2015): 35-49. ↩ ↩2

  2. Samuel Eldon Waldron, Faith, Obedience, and Justification: Current Evangelical Departures from Sola Fide (PhD diss., The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, 2005), 3-4, 234-236: “The thesis of this study is that influential theologians who are regarded as evangelicals have adopted views and made statements regarding the relation of faith, obedience, and justification…that are in substantial conflict with the consistent, historic, Reformation doctrine of justification sola fide. Having departed from the historic Reformation doctrine, their claims to hold…justification sola fide are misleading as to the true character of their views.” Later published under the same title (Palmdale, CA: Reformed Baptist Academic Press, 2006). ↩ ↩2 ↩3

  3. Samuel Waldron, “A Plural-Elder Congregationalist’s Response,” in Who Runs the Church? Four Views on Church Government, ed. Steven B. Cowan (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2004), 172, 175, quoted in Alexander Strauch, Biblical Eldership: Restoring the Eldership to Its Rightful Place in the Local Church, 4th ed. (Littleton, CO: Lewis and Roth Publishers, 2017), chap. 3, “Shared Leadership,” 43-60. ↩ ↩2 ↩3

  4. Waldron, Faith, Obedience, and Justification, vi-ix (preface). ↩ ↩2 ↩3

  5. Samuel Eldon Waldron, “Sola Fide in Norman Shepherd,” in Faith, Obedience, and Justification (PhD diss., The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, 2005), 163-194, at 179-180, quoting Norman Shepherd, The Call of Grace: How the Covenant Illuminates Salvation and Evangelism (Phillipsburg, NJ: Presbyterian and Reformed Publishing Co., 2000), chap. 15. ↩ ↩2

  6. Samuel Eldon Waldron, “Sola Fide in Daniel Fuller,” in Faith, Obedience, and Justification (PhD diss., The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, 2005), 132-162, at 132-134. ↩

  7. Samuel Eldon Waldron, “Sola Fide in Don Garlington,” in Faith, Obedience, and Justification (PhD diss., The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, 2005), 195-233, at 195-197. ↩

  8. Samuel Waldron, A Modern Exposition of the 1689 Baptist Confession of Faith (Darlington, England: Evangelical Press, 1999), 95-96, cited in Waldron, “Sola Fide in the Reformation Confessions,” in Faith, Obedience, and Justification (PhD diss., The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, 2005), 76-131, n. 150. ↩

  9. Samuel E. Waldron, To Be Continued?: Are the Miraculous Gifts for Today? (Merrick, NY: Calvary Press, 2005). ↩

  10. Carol Man Fen Chen, “A Historical, Biblical, and Theological Interpretation of Covenants: Unconditionality and Conditionality in Relation to Justification and Sanctification” (PhD diss., The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, 2019), 317-351, citing Samuel E. Waldron, Faith, Obedience, and Justification: Current Evangelical Departures from Sola Fide (Palmdale, CA: Reformed Baptist Academic Press, 2006). ↩

  11. Martin Salter, “The Abrahamic Covenant in Reformed Baptist Perspective,” Themelios 40, no. 1 (2015): 35-49, citing Samuel E. Waldron and Richard C. Barcellos, A Reformed Baptist Manifesto: The New Covenant Constitution of the Church (Palmdale, CA: Reformed Baptist Academic Press, 2004), 71-77. ↩