Getting back to my roots, probably not any less controversial than my political posts, let us revisit the Evangelical Calvinist critique of Federal or Westminster theology. The Evangelical Calvinist aim is to re-present people with a concept of God that is grounded in His eternal reality as triune love. The contention is that classical Calvinism or Covenantal (Federal) theology gives the world a conception of God that is drenched in a legal or juridical frame; such that their conception of God requires that the elect meet certain legal requirements prior to becoming loved by God. In other words, for the Federal theologian, the ‘penalty of sin’ (which resulted when Adam and Eve broke the covenant of works in Gen 3) came to stand in the way of God loving humanity since God’s love for humanity was contingent upon them keeping His commandments. Once they broke his commandment (the inner constitution of the so called covenant of works) God could no longer love them, and had to broker a framework wherein He could once again love them in keeping with the legal conditions set out by Him in the covenant of works. To accomplish this effort God, according to the Federal theologians, decreed a covenant of grace wherein the Son agreed (pactum salutis ‘covenant of redemption’) to become human (in the Incarnation), die for those God arbitrarily and individually elected, and provide the space for God to once again love a ‘set’ amount of humanity. As you can see, if my sketching is correct, in the Federal frame, God’s relationship to humanity is contingent upon a legal frame rather than a loving relational one; which has direct corollary with how God is, and more importantly Who God is.

Thomas Torrance was highly critical of Federal theology, and the antecedent theology it was founded within in the Aristotelian/Thomist frame as that was bequeathed to her from her Roman Catholic heritage. Paul Molnar, a Roman Catholic, ironically, helpfully summarizes Torrance’s thinking on this:

Torrance’s objections to aspects of the “Westminster theology” should be seen together with his objection to “Federal Theology”. His main objection to Federal theology is to the ideas that Christ died only for the elect and not for the whole human race and that salvation is conditional on our observance of the law. The ultimate difficulty here that one could “trace the ultimate ground of belief back to eternal divine decrees behind the back of the Incarnation of God’s beloved Son, as in a federal concept ofpre-destination, [and this] tended to foster a hidden Nestorian dualism between the divine and human natures in the one Person of Jesus Christ, and thus even to provide ground for a dangerous form of Arian and Socinian heresy in which the atoning work of Christ regarded as an organ of God’s activity was separated from the intrinsic nature and character of God as Love” (Scottish Theology, p. 133). This then allowed people to read back into “God’s saving purpose” the idea that “in the end some people will not actually be saved”, thus limiting the scope of God’s grace (p. 134). And Torrance believed they reached their conclusions precisely because they allowed the law rather than the Gospel to shape their thinking about our covenant relations with God fulfilled in Christ’s atonement. Torrance noted that the framework of Westminster theology “derived from seventeenth-century federal theology formulated in sharp contrast to the highly rationalised conception of a sacramental universe of Roman theology, but combined with a similar way of thinking in terms of primary and secondary causes (reached through various stages of grace leading to union with Christ), which reversed the teaching of Calvin that it is through union with Christ first that we participate in all his benefits” (Scottish Theology, p. 128). This gave the Westminster Confession and Catechisms “a very legalistic and constitutional character in which theological statements were formalised at times with ‘almost frigidly logical definiton’” (pp. 128-9). Torrance’s main objection to the federal view of the covenant was that it allowed its theology to be dictated on grounds other than the grace of God attested in Scripture and was then allowed to dictate in a legalistic way God’s actions in his Word and Spirit, thus undermining ultimately the freedom of grace and the assurance of salvation that could only be had by seeing that our regenerated lives were hidden with Christ in God. Torrance thought of the Federal theologians as embracing a kind of “biblical nominalism” because “biblical sentences tend to be adduced out of their context and to be interpreted arbitrarily and singly in detachment from the spiritual ground and theological intention and content” (p. 129). Most importantly, they tended to give biblical statements, understood in this way, priority over “fundamental doctrines of the Gospel” with the result that “Westminster theology treats biblical statements as definitive propositions from which deductions are to be made, so that in their expression doctrines thus logically derived are given a categorical or canonical character” (p. 129). For Torrance, these statements should have been treated, as in the Scots Confession, in an “open-structured” way, “pointing away from themselves to divine truth which by its nature cannot be contained in finite forms of speech and thought, although it may be mediated through them” (pp. 129-30). Among other things, Torrance believed that the Westminster approach led them to weaken the importance of the Doctrine of the Trinity because their concept of God fored without reference to who God is in revelation led them ultimately to a different God than the God of classical Nicene theology (p. 131). For Barth’s assessment of Federal theology, which is quite similar to Torrance’s in a number of ways, see CD IV/1, pp. 54-66.[1]

This is the basic critique Evangelical Calvinists have towards Federal theology in particular, and much of classical theistic[2] soteriology in general. It presents the world with a God who does not first love us because of who He is, but instead only loves some of us (effectually) insofar that we meet His legal requirements as set out in His decree (decretum absolutum). The Evangelical Calvinist can genuinely affirm with the “epistolero” that ‘God first loved us that we might love Him’ (I Jn 4.19). My contention remains that the Covenant theologian, insofar  that they affirm the juridical framework for thinking God, cannot genuinely affirm the sentiment of John’s epistle; and if they attempt to, which they must, they can only do so with heavy qualification. In brief: The Evangelical Calvinist rejects the idea that God’s wrath must first be appeased before God can or will genuinely love a certain people. The Evangelical Calvinist affirms that because of who God is eternally as Father of the Son in the bond of the Holy Spirit, that out of this reality God so loved the world that whosoever believes in Him will not perish but have everlasting life.

[1] Paul D. Molnar, Thomas F. Torrance: Theologian of the Trinity, 181-2, fn. 165.

[2] Particularly of the sort developed in Thomas’ and post-Thomist Roma.