COVER & OVERVIEW  ·  FIVE STUDIES

Walking in Newness of Life

Five Reformed Voices on Sanctification — A Reader’s Companion

The Anchor Text  ·  Romans 6:4 (ESV)

We were buried therefore with him by baptism into death, in order that, just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, we too might walk in newness of life.

Key terms: περιπατήσωμεν (peripatēsōmen, “we might walk,” aorist active subjunctive, hortatory) and ἐν καινότητι ζωῆς (en kainotēti zōēs, “in newness of life”). καινότης (kainotēs) denotes newness of kind — a new order of existence, lived out as a manner of walking.

CENTRAL TRUTH

These five studies say one thing five ways: the believer does not climb into the new life by effort but lives out of a death and resurrection already his in union with Christ. Sanctification is the outworking of the gospel, not an addendum to it.

SECTION 01

The Question

Romans 6:4 sets a task and supplies its ground in a single breath: because we have been buried and raised with Christ, we “walk in newness of life.” The question this set addresses is the perennial pastoral one — how does that walk actually work? How does the accomplished work of Christ become the daily experience of the Christian, without collapsing into either antinomian presumption (“grace covers it, so it does not matter how I live”) or legal striving (“I must generate holiness from my own resources”)? Five Reformed voices, spanning the seventeenth century to the present, answer that question from complementary angles.

SECTION 02

The Unifying Logic

One structure runs through all five: the indicative grounds the imperative. Romans 6 first declares what God has done (6:1–10 — you have died to sin, you have been raised), and only then commands what the believer is to do (6:11–23 — reckon, present, obey). The hinge is union with Christ; the engine is faith reckoning the accomplished facts to be true.

Read together, the five voices map cleanly onto that structure. Murray supplies the exegetical foundation — the definitive, once-for-all breach with sin in union with Christ. Marshall supplies the indicative-to-imperative engine — holiness received by faith before it is worked out. Owen supplies the daily negative discipline — the Spirit-wrought mortification by which the breach is applied. Lloyd-Jones supplies the preached reckoning — pressing the believer to know and count true what is already so. Ferguson supplies the contemporary pastoral synthesis — holiness as devotion flowing from union, set within the renewing of the mind.

SECTION 03

The Five Studies