Category Archives: 5 Point Calvinism

On a James Whitean and Leighton Flowersian Naked Reading of the Bible

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Thumbnail created originally by Leighton Flowers (Caleb)

I was listening to James White live today on his Dividing Line vlogcast, and what he reinforces over and over is that he is what some are calling a ‘biblicist,’ or what I would identify as a solo Scriptura or nuda Scriptura proponent, as far as the way that he approaches Scripture. In this way, James White and his archnemeses, Leighton Flowers, ironically affirm the same bibliology and its attending hermeneutic. It is both modern, postEnlightenment, and Lockean (i.e., tabula rasa) in orientation. That is, it sees Scripture and its reception in a historicist frame of reference. This frame leaves the history of interpretation (i.e., creeds, confessions, catechisms etc.) in the dust, in regard to how White and Flowers receive Scripture. This ironically lends itself to a modernist-naturalist appropriation of and engagement with Holy Scripture, insofar that the Bible, in such a frame, seems to be a ‘white-slate’ wherein the interpreter has some type of objectivist angle into its exegesis.

The aforementioned is problematic for a variety of reasons. One prominent reason is that it ends up working from a petitio principii (circular reasoning). That is to say, it presumes: 1) My interpretation just is the objective reading of the Bible, 2) my interpretation of the Bible is a five-point Calvinist reading of the Bible, 3) therefore the objective reading of the Bible just is a five-point Calvinist reading (or just replace five-point Calvinist with Provisionist reading in Flowers’ case). What this approach fails to appreciate, for one, is that nobody approaches Scripture as a presuppositionless blank-slate; human agents are subjects, and as such we bring a variety of preunderstandings and unchecked a priori commitments to theological paradigms as we read Scripture. We could call this the “hermeneutical dilemma.” Neither James White nor his compadre, Leighton Flowers, acknowledge this. And thus, all that they are left to do in their respective debates and correspondences is to sling Scripture right past each other; never critically identifying or checking their theological a prioris at the frontend of their respective readings of Scripture.

But like I was noting, James White, today, as he was talking, in this case about Catholicism, made an absolute distinction between reading Scripture and the history of interpretation of Scripture; as if they inhabit two distinct silos. But they don’t inhabit two distinct silos, instead the history and the biblical exegesis are mutually implicating realities; insofar that human agents are subjectively reading and receiving the text of Holy Scripture. Until White and Flowers can admit this, and until all of their acolytes can come to grasp this, this whole “debate” between them, on five-point Calvinism versus Provisionism, will remain a futile endeavor. Unfortunately, they have many followers, respectively, who they are doing a disservice to. They are teaching young and biologically old, in some cases, Christian hearts and minds to read Scripture rationalistically rather than confessionally (and thus Christologically and Trinitarianly).

In closing, let me refer us to Matthew Levering’s sketch on the Whitean and Flowersian reading of Scripture (viz., what he writes indirectly critiques the Whitean-Flowersian combine of biblical interpretation); as far as its intellectual development and background go. Here Levering also offers an alternative approach that is participatorily grounded in a genuinely christologically and trinitarianly conditioned reading of Holy Scripture.

What happens, then, when Scripture is seen primarily as a linear-historical record of dates and places rather than as a providentially governed (revelatory) conversation with God in which the reader, within the doctrinal and sacramental matrix of the Church, is situated? John Webster points to the disjunction that appears between “history” and “theology” and remarks on the “complex legacy of dualism and nominalism in Western Christian theology, through which the sensible and intelligible relams, history and eternity, were thrust away from each other, and creaturely forms (language, action, institutions) denied any capacity to indicate the presence and activity of the transcendent God.” Similary, Lamb contrasts the signs or concepts that can be grasped by modern exegetical methods with the moral and intellectual virtues that are required for a true participatory knowledge and love the realities expressed by the signs or concepts. Lacking the framework of participatory knowledge and love, biblical exegesis is reduced to what Lamb calls “a ‘comparative textology’ à la Spinoza.” Only participatory knowledge and love, which both ground and flow from the reading practices of the Church, can really attain the biblical realities. As Joseph Ratzinger thus observes, the meaning of Scripture is constituted when

the human word and God’s word work together in the singularity of historical events and the eternity of the everlasting Word which is contemporary in every age. The biblical word comes from a real past. It comes not only from the past, however, but at the same time from the eternity of God and it leads us into God’s eternity, but again along the way through time, to which the past, the present and the future belong.

This Christological theology of history, which depends on a metaphysics of participation inscribed in creation, provides the necessary frame for apprehending the true meaning of biblical texts.

In short, for the patristic-medieval tradition and for those attuned to it today, history (inclusive of the work of historiography) is an individual and communal conversation with the triune God who creates and redeems history—and the Bible situates us in history thus understood. (Levering, 23)

Pierre Maury Contra the ‘Horrible Decree’ of Predestination in the classical Calvinists

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Pierre Maury was Karl Barth’s ‘French connection’ and friend. Without Maury’s thinking and writing on a reformulated Reformed doctrine of predestination, Barth’s turn, and own treatment of predestination (as exemplified in his Church Dogmatics II/2) may never have happened; at least not in the shape that it did. Here is Maury on a critique of the classical Augustinian inspired doctrine of election/reprobation (especially as that developed within what came to be called Post Reformed orthodox Dogmatics in the 16th and 17th centuries, respectively):

Before we proceed further, there is an important point which must be made clear. If what we have said is true, it is obvious that the decree of election—call it predestination here, if you will—is not, as classic theology has maintained, from Augustine to Luther Calvin and the orthodox dogmatic theologians of the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries, the obscure and impenetrable decision of a divinity who does not, on this point, reveal his designs. It was because they asserted that the absolute decree of the Creator, anterior to any creation—and even to any fall, as the Supralapsarians held—was the unknowable secret of an absolute power, that predestination frightened even those who defended it with the most unflagging ardour. There was Calvin, for instance, whom the ‘labyrinths’ of this mystery filled with a kind of holy terror. How can it be otherwise, if we know and can know nothing of the motives which lie behind God’s creative activity, if the liberty with which he loves us is replaced by the arbitrary decision of pure omnipotence? How can such a God of the covenant, appear in that eternity (and so in time, in which his purposes are worked out) as anything but a capricious tyrant; not the God of grace but the wielder of a crushing power who is worshipped only in terror? How is one to be sure that it his will to save the lost?

Of course I do not wish for a moment to detract from the mystery of God’s sovereign liberty. He wills to act only in accordance with his good pleasure (Phil. 2.13), but is a good pleasure. His entire revelation tells us so, tirelessly. There is nothing higher than his goodness, nor anterior to it. God loves always, from all eternity. And his purpose, before which, and outside which, there is none other, is to ally his life with the life of men in mutual love. Often, moved by their adoration of the divine majesty, the great predestinarian doctors—especially Calvin—have exalted the mystery of the absolute decree. But why have they turned it into a mystery as impenetrable as night, the secret of an opaque God? God does not live and act in the obscurity of eternal darkness, but in light—‘unapproachable’, yes, but light! Darkness and night are, in the Bible, the abode of the Devil, in which he plans and prepares his ‘works of darkness’. If there is any tyrannical power that would victimize man, it is he, not the Father ‘who hath delivered us from the power of darkness’ (Col. 1.13), and ‘hath called [us] out of darkness into his marvellous light’ (I Peter 2.9).

If it is necessary, then, to maintain the mystery of election—and it is absolutely necessary, for God’s freedom is the sovereign liberty of the Creator, which our liberty may neither dispute nor judge: ‘O man, who art thou that repliest against God?’ (Rom. 9.20)—it is only on the basis of knowing and preaching that this mystery is none other than the peace that passes understanding. It is unfathomable because the love of God is unfathomable. And the only act of adoration God expects of us is our wonder at a purpose that overwhelms us.[1]

If the reader is aware of Barth’s own reformulation of a Reformed doctrine of predestination, what we just read from Maury should ring familiar to you.

Whether reading Barth, Torrance, Maury et al. the theme remains the same: for them, respectively, to think a doctrine of predestination (election/reprobation) in abstraction from a purposeful ground in Jesus Christ, is to not think a genuinely Christian, and thus biblical doctrine of predestination. This is the crux of it all: i.e., how someone arrives at their relative conclusions in regard to a doctrine of predestination, have directly to do with the theory of revelation (and authority) they affirm. If they are committed to a principled revelational understanding of knowing God, they will look something like Maury on a doctrine of predestination. If not, and they hold to a principled speculative and negative understanding of knowing God, they will look something like Thomas Aquinas, and his respective heirs in the Post Reformed orthodox development.

The issue, ultimately, comes down to a very practical and spiritual one. The way we think God determines all subsequent doctrinal developments. If we think God’s will toward us remains hidden in some sort of ‘horrible decree’ of election/reprobation, then we will have good reason to live in an unhealthy fear of Him. If we believe that God has fully Self-revealed Himself for us in the face of Jesus Christ, in a filial relationship of triune love, then we will have a healthy fear and love of the Father. This will latterly shape the way we engage with and treat others; both within the Church and world.

For further reading on Pierre Maury and his theology, especially as that relates to Barth’s own developing theology, see: Simon Hattrell’s exquisite book:  Election, Barth, and the French Connection, 2nd Edition: How Pierre Maury Gave a “Decisive Impetus” to Karl Barth’s Doctrine of Election.

[1] Pierre Maury, Predestination and Other Papers (Richmond, Virginia: John Knox Press, 1960), 35–6.

Against the God of classical Calvinism and Arminianism From the For-ness of God for the World in Christ

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The God of classical Calvinism and Arminianism is the same God, in the sense that their respective doctrines of God find resource in what Richard Muller identifies as ‘Christian Aristotelianism.’ How the Christian thinks of God will determine all else following, theologically. Since the actus purus (‘pure being’) god of Aristotle stands structurally and materially behind the way that Calvinism and Arminianism generally conceive of a God-world relation, what happens is that they must construct a system wherein this God remains untouched by said creation/world. In this effort, said systems have come to think of this God-world relation through a mechanism of decrees; what Barth, TFT et al. identify as the decretum absolutum (i.e., an Augustinian/Thomist inspired doctrine of predestination). Behind this conception of godness, i.e., the ‘unmoved mover,’ the ‘actual infinite,’ stands the notion that God is essentially monadic, singular, and impersonal. The only way this pure being god becomes “converted to Christianity” is by way of massaging said ‘godness categories’ into some form of commensurability with the triune God disclosed in Holy Scripture. This was Thomas Aquinas’ project, by and large; that is, to synthesize Aristotelian categories with Christian theology—which is why Richard Muller identifies the whole of the Post Reformation Reformed orthodox development, again, as Christian Aristotelianism (which is also inclusive of the Arminian way, as that follows Jacobus Arminius; himself, a bright scholastic Protestant thinker). In the end, what gets produced for the masses of Protestants who have come after such developments is to think God in a rather nomist (“law-ist”) way; as if God, in Himself, is first and foremost metaphysically defined by forensic categories. And so, we end up with things like Federal or Covenantal theology; or, the Canons of Dort (what has popularly been identified as the 5 Points of Calvinism; or, the Remonstrant or Arminian version of this with a soteriological focus on human agency vis-à-vis God [a system that rationalistically remains contingent upon the individual’s ‘free choice’ to be for God or against Him—and this choice, in juridical ways, can be reversed, based on the individual choosers of God]). At core, these systems, which unfortunately make up much of the conservative Protestant Christian ethos today, are grounded, as this sketch has been iterating, in a basic belief that God is first a singularity, and thus relates to the world in a detached impersonal way; that is, through decrees. Even if evangelicals are unaware of this background to the way they think God, salvation, so on and so forth, nevertheless, these remain the facts.

As is typical though in the usual binary thinking that funds the profane mind, in particular, when people start to get an inkling about this background to their respective theories of God and salvation, they will often swing the pendulum to an opposite extreme. They will go something like this: “okay, since I was taught to believe that God was really impersonal, related to me through law-like ways, even though glossed over by pietistic language, I will construct a notion of God by way of negation. I will construct a generous, winsome God who is simply the opposite of the law-ist (maybe legalistic) God I have been taught to believe in.” This is binary thinking: it’s a way of thought that is characterized by thinking in negative, even speculative terms. If one system of thought thinks God one way, and I hypothetically come to think God in an alternative way, the alternative way must entail negating this God. As a result, the binary thinker will negate the law-like features of God they have been taught, and assert, just as abstractly construed, a God who is defined by love (typically defined by socio-cultural mores rather than based on God’s Self-revelation). And so, when this happens, we end up with the classically liberal god, or the god of progressive and/or exvangelical atheology. In this frame, God is thought of, similarly, by way of appeal to speculation; it is just that an abstract notion of God’s law is displaced by an equally abstract notion of God’s love. Both approaches are fueled by appeal to profane thinking, whether that be supplied by classical Greek philosophers and/or 20th century existentialists and postmodern thinkers (to oversimplify).

There is a better way. And that is what I have been seeking to promote here at the blog (not to mention our books) for years now. It isn’t rooted in an abstract speculation about godness, and its ways. Instead, it is conditioned by being fully Christ concentrated; that is to say, by being fully triunely focused on the living God as Self-revealed and exegeted (see Jn 1.18) in Jesus Christ. This is not a tertium quid, but in fact an alternative, yet biblical way, to think God through the ‘logic of Grace’ (cf. TF Torrance) as, again, Self-revealed in the novum of His life for the world in Jesus Christ. To think God this way is to de jure rest upon the foundation which has been laid already in Christ alone for us. It is to think God from a concrete center in Himself for us, in Jesus Christ. It is to understand that our capacity to think God under these pressures is based purely in revealed categories and emphases, rather than in speculative constructs based upon the naked wits of a “natural humanity.” When we think God this way we think of Him, truly, as triune Love; as the One who by inner Self-definition, is engaged in a Self-givenness for the other in the inner-perichoretic frame of His divine and eternal life. And this then becomes the antecedent reality of a God-world relation. That is, God pre-destines Himself for us, as He freely elects Himself for us in the humanity of the eternal Son, to be God for, with, and in us forevermore. This type of predestination brings with it (Him) a new affectivity, a new rationality, a heavenly logic whose foundations are not of this world. This doctrine of God envelopes humanity in such a way that has always already been the free choice of God to be the Lamb of God slain before the foundations of the world. That is to say, this way of thinking God is based in a unilateralism of God, such that there is nothing Pelagianly present; there is nothing that we in an abstract or natural capacity have brought to God prior to encountering God in the concrete of His flowing and living blood for us in the veins of Immanuel. This is a different, not binary way to think God. We are ‘beggars all,’ as Luther rightly understood.

Hopefully, once again, this brief off the top sketch, will help to demonstrate just how different Evangelical Calvinism or Athanasian Reformed theology is juxtaposed with its competing, and underdeveloped counterparts (on the theological plane) as deposited in the annals of both classical Calvinist and Arminian theologies, respectively. I invite you to abandon these other ways, for the positive way (via positiva) I am seeking to promote here. amen amen

Recognizing and Repudiating False Gospels: With Reference to JMac Et Al.

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I’ve been thinking a lot, once again, on how many in the evangelical and Reformed churches have constructed a Gospel that emphasizes law-keeping and performance as the means by which a so-called genuine Gospel reception has obtained in a person’s life. In other words, I have been thinking about how the Law (which is really culturally conditioned categories on a sliding scale) has sublimated the Gospel, such that it isn’t possible to distinguish the two any longer. People like John MacArthur, John Piper, Paul Washer, Steven Lawson, and that whole ilk have presented an ethos in the Church, when it comes to the Gospel, wherein the only way someone can supposedly really know that they are saved is if they have some modicum of a transformed life. And yet, they never indicate what in fact the ‘bar of transformation’ is in order for the seeker to know whether or not they have experienced a genuine salvation or not. Note John MacArthur:

. . . They’ve been told [Christians in the typical evangelical church in the West] that the only criterion for salvation is knowing and believing some basic facts about Christ. They hear from the beginning that obedience is optional. It follows logically, then, that a person’s one-time profession of faith is more valid than the ongoing testimony of his life-style in determining whether to embrace him as a true-believer. The character of the visible church reveals the detestable consequence of this theology. As a pastor I have rebaptized countless people who once “made a decision,” were baptized, yet experienced no change. They came later to true conversion and sought baptism again as an expression of genuine salvation.[1]

This is contrariwise to the actual Gospel. What it takes to be genuinely saved, according to Scripture, is to simply believe on the name of the Lord Jesus Christ and you will be saved. That’s it, period.

There is a history to JMac’s et al. Gospel, it can be found in precisianist Puritan origins (on the Protestant side), and back further, of course, in medieval nominalism and even in many of the Church Fathers. Here Theodore Dwight Bozeman comments on the ‘precisianist’ background to the frame that people like JMac are thinking from (even if he/they don’t know that):

English penitential teaching expressly echoed and bolstered moral priorities. In contrast, again, to Luther, whose penitential teaching stressed the rueful sinner’s attainment of peace through acknowledgment of fault and trust in unconditional pardon, several of the English included a moment of moral renewal. In harmony with Reformed tendencies on the Continent and in unmistakable continuity with historic Catholic doctrine that tied “contrition, by definition, to the intention to amend,” they required an actual change in penitent. For them, a renewal of moral resolve was integral to the penitential experience, and a few included the manifest alteration of behavior. They agreed that moral will or effort cannot merit forgiveness, yet rang variations on the theme that repentance is “an inward . . . sorrow . . . whereunto is also added a . . . desire . . . to frame our life in all points according to the holy will of God expressed in the divine scriptures.” However qualified by reference to the divine initiative and by denial of efficacy to human works, such teaching underscored moral responsibility; it also adumbrated Puritan penitential and preparationist teaching of later decades.[2]

This teaching is so far removed from the simple Gospel message found in Scripture that it should not be entertained as a genuinely in-formed Gospel teaching. The sin of Pelagianism is never far from the human heart. We always want to have a part in our ‘salvation,’ even if we attribute ‘our part’ to the work of Jesus. We want to have a sense of self-sanctification by our natural human nature, but this is anathema. We need to recognize and quickly repudiate such Law based nomist Gospels, and simply repose in the fullness of God’s all-pervasive graciousness that He has provided for Himself, for us, in the grace of His life for us, in Jesus Christ. Rest and worship.

[1] John MacArthur, The Gospel According to Jesus,  17 [brackets mine].

[2] Theodore Dwight Bozeman, The Precisianist Strain,  20-21 [italics mine].

A Critique of John MacArthur’s ‘Word Faith Theology’: On the Relationship Between Five Point Calvinism and Human Psychology

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I work the graveyard shift at work. I have a work vehicle I drive around in all night. And so, I often will listen to Christian radio. The lineup of pastors they have preaching throughout the night includes John MacArthur’s Grace To You broadcast. The broadcast for January 6th, 2023 was a sermon MacArthur originally delivered back in 1989. The sermon title is: Spiritual Stability, Part 3: Humility and Faith—Phil. 4:5-6a. So, he’s clearly going to be discussing anxiety, and its cure by trusting and resting in Christ. And absolutely, the Lord, as we humbly and boldly come to His throne room of grace, is always ready and present to be with us, especially as we walk through the fire and deep waters of life; after all, the Christian God is the cruciform God. Because of this MacArthur, rightly, is critical of secular humanism, and an aspect of its religion: i.e., psychology. What he would be referring to is the type of therapeutic self-helpism that our ‘secular age’ has turned to as its way of coping with life; a way that isn’t a turn out to Jesus Christ, but a way that is corollary with the fallen self: the homo incurvatus in se. I agree, generally speaking, that many of the anxieties people deal with are self-generated, and end up being because the person only pushes deeper into themselves rather than flying higher out of themselves as they look to Christ, and receive, ecstatically, His life as theirs, moment-by-moment.

And yet, MacArthur is sloppy. He lumps “behavioral” generated anxieties in with anxiety in general. He engages in a sweeping generalization in his discussion on anxiety and depression (and other ailments). He doesn’t account for the physiological processes, the biological lacuna that might be present in some individuals. In other words, he doesn’t leave space for certain psychological issues to be related to actual medical deficiencies a person is born with; and this, indeed, because of the fallen bodies we inherit as a fallen humanity. That is to say, he doesn’t seem to recognize that there are people who lack the capacity to release adequate levels of serotonin in their brains, which, by God’s design, allows people to more readily operate at a ‘normal’ or base level of biological and human functionality. There are masses of people, Christian people included, who suffer with what is called MTHFR (I am one of them); this condition contributes to an inability to biologically produce the levels of serotonin the brain needs to function at a normal level. It is no different than someone who, say, suffers from an overly active histamine production in their bodies (I am also one of them). As a result, in order to quench the over-active histamine production some of us have to take not just anti-histamines, but also histamine-blockers, in order to avoid constant sinus and other respiratory infections and disorders. As corollary, people who suffer from MTHFR (this is just one example), or other biological and physiological lacunas, might need medical support in order to allow the brain to operate at a normal baseline level. Without this type of intervention, the consequences can be dire; as dire as suicide, or simply living with overwhelming anxiety and panic attacks (along with depression). I have lived with an ‘anxiety disorder’ for at least thirty years. The Lord has been gracious to me, and brought me through untold terror and misery; I don’t even understand how. And yet, He never ‘cured’ me of the physiological source standing behind all of this. And so, I have had seasons, over the years, of various anxiety and panic attacks that can be debilitating (almost). In light of that, here’s part of the transcript of MacArthur’s sermon noted above:

Now, let me tell you something, folks.  The Lord is near and this is the Lord who is near, the capable God of the Scripture, and if you will delight yourself in Him and if you will meditate on His law day and night, on His Word day and night, you will then know the God that He is, and you will know how He acts, and that will be the source of your own confidence.

Now, what is the result of knowing the Lord is near?  “Be anxious for” – what? – “nothing.”  What am I going to be worrying about?  Something God can’t handle?  Wait a minute, that’s blasphemy.  If you fret, worry, are in trauma, are unstable, if you launch off into everything from anorexia to schizophrenia and all kinds of things, you are really saying, “I can’t cope with life.  I can’t handle life.”  And if you – whatever mechanism you use to manifest that inability, the real demonstration – and I want to say this with love and graciousness – the real underlying demonstration is you really don’t trust whom?  God.

That’s a form of blasphemy.  Two ways.  One, if you imagine that God can’t help you, then you have created a god other than the true God, and that’s blasphemy.  You have created a god who is not God.  Two, if you believe that God could help you but won’t, that’s blasphemy, too, because you’re questioning not His character but His integrity and His Word.  So the key to a stable, firmly planted life – back to Psalm 1 – is to be delighting in the Lord – I delight in who He is – and meditating on His law, I become very familiar with how He acts.  And as I understand who He is and how He acts, I can look at my life and say, “That’s the one who’s near, this is who He is, this is how He acts; I’m not going to worry.”  And again I go back to what I said:  The great weakness of the Christian church today is a lack of understanding about who God is and how God acts.  They do not understand the majesty of His wonderful attributes, and that is why we have such wholesale instability.  Because we do not know God, we do not trust God to act consistently with His revealed character and His revealed history of acts.

So what do we do?  In the church, we’ve got all these unstable people with all their problems.  Instead of giving them God and His character and His attributes and the history of how He functions and how He acts and the amazing integrity of all of His acts, we try to give clever human solutions to the instability, which in the long run projects that instability into a way of life and gives no solution at all.

In the last generation, A. W. Pink in his book Gleanings in the Godhead wrote, “The God of this century no more resembles the sovereign of holy writ than does the dim flickering of a candle resemble the glory of the mid-day sun.  The God who is talked about in the average pulpit, spoken of in the ordinary Sunday school class, and mentioned in so much of the religious literature of the day and preached in most of the so-called Bible conferences, is a figment of human imagination and invention of maudlin sentimentality,” end quote.

We aren’t even giving people a knowledge of the true God in His character and His works.  As a result, there is a tremendous lack of confidence in Him.  No wonder people have guilt, fear, and anxiety, have an inadequate knowledge of God and an inadequate trust in God – both are blasphemous.  If you imagine God to be other than He is, that’s an idol, that’s blasphemy.  If you imagine God to do other than what is consistent with His own character and promise to His people, that, too, is blasphemy; it questions His integrity.  And instead of teaching God and getting people into the Word of God, most churches are trying to patch up the unstable by giving them human solutions and worst of all, psychology, of which even psychologists say it has no answers.[1]

In general, do I believe that knowing who God is, more accurately, meditating on Scripture, deeply, can assuage the most anxious minds and hearts of deep anxiety and depression? Absolutely! But that said, this does not account for the actual medical/physiological aspects that we as a fallen people are often strapped with, by no choice of our own. I have seen the Lord intervene on my behalf a thousand times over, over the last thirty years and more! But He hasn’t ‘healed me,’ per se, of the underlying physiological source that stands behind so much of the angst and hell I’ve walked through. He has formed and shaped me in certain distinct ways through the forging fires of many deep waters, but He hasn’t healed me. More recently I have been confronted with another season of deep anxiety and panic, of an irrational sort (the fear behind it). It has been as if this time the Lord has said it’s enough, and has led me to seeking a medical support (one I should’ve done thirty years ago, but the Christian subculture, along with the secular, had so stigmatized that type of medical support, that it didn’t seem like a viable option). This time, it is as if the Lord is saying it is time to deal with this in a different way, so I can work through you in a different way. Just as with my terminal cancer diagnosis back in 2009. The Lord ultimately, and miraculously healed me, but not till after going through a hellish medical protocol that literally almost killed me multiple times. He could have foregone that, and simply healed me miraculously from the get-go. Instead He chose that I walk through a fire, that He would see me through; and He decided that He would work through the medical route, with the scars and trauma to the body in tow. Similarly, it seems this time He is using a medical route to finally provide the support I have needed for decades, in regard to helping with my MTHFR and the physiological lack that has produced in regard to a balanced brain functionality. For me, my anxiety and panic hasn’t been a matter of not knowing who God is, not meditating on Scripture (which I’ve read through fifty times, memorized books of, prayed through, so on and so forth); for me it has been a physiological issue, that indeed becomes a hook for a spiritual attack, which the Enemy will exploit, and attempt to use, in order to destroy me (and those with similar physical makeup). And so, this time the Lord has seen fit to bring me to the point of recognizing that it is time to make a medical move.

I share part of my story only to illustrate how MacArthur’s sermon fails to be sensitive to the general population out there. All anxiety and panic, and other ailments, aren’t simply a matter of not trusting the Lord enough. The ironic implication of this, if MacArthur followed his logic through, would land MacArthur in the Word Faith tribe. This is ironic because MacArthur is a vocal critic (as he should be) of such “theology.” And yet that is exactly the implication of what he is saying: i.e., that if you have enough faith you’re going to necessarily be a stable well-balanced individual. Ironically, again, this thinking pushes the person deeper into introspection, and thus deeper into the abyss God in Christ came to save the person from.

MacArthur’s approach is corollary with his prior theological commitments, and ironically, his respective doctrine of God. He broadly receives what in Puritan times was known as experimental predestinarianism. This doctrine is adjunct to a doctrine of predestination, election/reprobation, wherein God decrees that a certain number of individuals are elect, and the others are reprobate (whether actively or passively). In order for the elect to know they are elect, subsequent to God’s absolute decree (decretum absolutum), the person engages in a lifetime of ‘experimentation’ to see if they have enough good works, or enough fruit of the Spirit to determine whether or not they are indeed one of the elect of God, or maybe they only appear to be that, and end up having a ‘temporary faith’; thus being one of the reprobate. This thrusts the person into a mode and lifestyle of performance and introspection that could cause the deepest types of anxieties and depressions. Indeed, someone who lived under this teaching in the Puritan days, a man named, Humphrey Mills, wrote of his despair, that is until he was relieved of this teaching through the correction pastor and theologian, Richard Sibbes brought to him:

I was for three years together wounded for sins, and under a sense of my corruptions, which were many; and I followed sermons, pursuing the means, and was constant in duties and doing: looking for Heaven that way. And then I was so precise for outward formalities, that I censured all to be reprobates, that wore their hair anything long, and not short above the ears; or that wore great ruffs, and gorgets, or fashions, and follies. But yet I was distracted in my mind, wounded in conscience, and wept often and bitterly, and prayed earnestly, but yet had no comfort, till I heard that sweet saint . . . Doctor Sibbs, by whose means and ministry I was brought to peace and joy in my spirit. His sweet soul-melting Gospel-sermons won my heart and refreshed me much, for by him I saw and had muchof God and was confident in Christ, and could overlook the world . . . My heart held firm and resolved and my desires all heaven-ward.[2]

MacArthur’s soteriology is of a species with the type that Humphrey Mills languished under for years; that is until he was presented with a more accurate way of the Gospel by Richard Sibbes. It is a performance based, highly introspective ‘Gospel’ wherein a person becomes swamped by their own failures and bruises, such that the abstract subject becomes overwhelmed by their own inadequacies and “traumas.” The irony of this, again, is that MacArthur et al. push people into a “self-help” type of the Gospel precisely because of their inadequate doctrine of God.

The genuine Gospel does not push a person to introspection and performance based living, wherein a contract is achieved (as in Federal theology). The genuine Gospel recognizes that all of humanity is born in a helpless status, and always already inhabits that status, every day they inhabit the fallen bodies of death they were born with (cf. Rom. 7). As such, our only hope is to look to God in Christ, and His performance therein, moment-by-moment, and understand that He alone, Grace as He is, is the one who vicariously stands in our stead, lives our life for us, as He is the ground and reality of all human life in His archetypal humanity. This is our hope! And it is a dynamic organic hope that is ongoing. It isn’t some static thing of the past (MacArthur’s doctrine) that the human person is supposed to somehow emulate through self-performance and exemplar modulation. No, the Gospel is living and active, and is currently grounded by the One seated at the Right Hand of the Father, where He continuously makes intercession for each and every one of us; those of us united to Him spiritually by the Holy Spirit.

MacArthur, if anything, is consistent with his commitment to an abstract notion of a God-world relation. Not only does this impact his soteriology, but it equally implicates his thinking on matters like we have been touching upon throughout this article. At base, if your idea of a God-world relation is grounded in the idea that God relates to the world, as a matter of structure, through an abstract decree, rather than in the concrete of His life for us in Jesus Christ, then you will end up with a performance-based Christianity, through and through, which will affect the way you not only exegete Scripture, but culture at large. This article is intended to be an example of how a bad doctrine of God (such as MacArthur’s) leads to other bad fruit in regard to the way things get generalized, and thus communicated to the body of Christ writ large. The consequences of this can literally be deadly; not just eternally, but here and now. A baby Christian, who struggles say with MTHFR, who comes into MacArthur’s church, and hears the above the sermon, might think they are in sin for taking an SSRI (or whatever is suited for the particular brain deficiency to function more properly), stop taking it, be thrust into a world of overwhelming fear and anxiety (because of a physiological problem), and commit suicide. This is the type of dire consequences MacArthur’s theology could potentially have in the life of those who might be the most bruised among us. And this is why I am writing this post, as a censure, once again, of the type of bad theology MacArthur et al. promote.

[1] John MacArthur, Spiritual Stability, Part 3: Humility and Faith—Phil. 4:5-6a, accessed 01-07-2023.

[2] Ron Frost, The Devoted Life: An Invitation to the Puritan Classics, citing, John Rogers, Ohel or Bethshemesh, A Tabernacle for the Sun (London, n.p., 1653).

‘The 5 Points of Arminianism’ and How Evangelical Calvinists are Neither classical Calvinist or Arminian

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We hear a lot about the so called 5 points of Calvinism, but rarely, if ever do we hear of the 5 points of the Remonstrants or Arminianism. This is ironic, since the 5 canons or points of Calvinism were in response to the points of Arminianism; this is why the Calvinists had 5 points at all. The Calvinist points were developed at the internationally shaped Council of Dort, held in the Netherlands. The Calvinists felt compelled to respond because the Remonstrants (or Arminians) were gaining too much theological and political ground, and so the Calvinists knew they needed to offer a united front in response. What is interesting about the 5 points of the Remonstrants, is that when you read them what the reader might be surprised by is just how “Calvinist” many of the points sound. For those aware, this makes sense, since historically, Arminius, and his followers were situated in the same sort of theological milieu as their Reformed counterparts. Arminius himself had an elevated view of John Calvin’s Institutes, and in many ways reflects many of the themes, that Calvin developed, in his own work. Further, the Remonstrants, were couched in the scholastic Reformed world, or what has now come to be called Post Reformation Reformed Orthodoxy. As such, the Arminians, as far as their grammatical soundings and theological material and method, will sound and look a lot like the scholastics Reformed. Of course, the Remonstrant theology veers rather dramatically away from Calvinist theology; particularly when it comes to the doctrine of predestination and election. Let’s read what the 5 points of Arminianism entail, and then reflect a bit further on the other side of that:

  1. In the decree of election, God has purposed to save those whom He foreknows will believe and persevere in faith to the end.
  2. Christ by His death has purchased salvation equally for all, but this salvation is enjoyed only through faith.
  3. Fallen human beings are enslaved to sin, and have no innate power to think, will, or do anything spiritually good, unless they are first regenerated by the Holy Spirit.
  4. Divine grace alone enables fallen sinners to think, will, or do anything good; yet this grace is always able to be resisted. The difference between the righteous and the unrighteous is that the former cooperate with grace, but the latter resist it.
  5. Believers are given all the help of grace to persevere to the end; but whether a true believer can reject this grace, return to his sin, and be for ever lost, is a question requiring further investigation from Scripture.[1]

If the reader is interested in reading Arminius’s theological developments in these areas, as those stand behind the 5 points, I would recommend they read his Declaration of Sentiments. It becomes clear why Calvinists would reject these points out of hand; as the TULIP (a 20th century acronym used to make the 5 canons of Dort more memorable) makes unmistakably clear.

As an Evangelical Calvinist I reject the Remonstrant points as they ostensibly make God’s election contingent upon the ‘seen’ faith of people who will believe and persevere; I think this does indeed collapse God’s will into the human will much too closely. Of interest, though, is point 3: it is here that the Calvinists and Arminians can hold hands with great affection. Often Arminians are charged with being Pelagian, or that they grant neutrality to the human will in regard to its capacity to be for God or against Him. As point 3 ought to clarify, this couldn’t be further from the truth. The problem that Calvinists have with the Remonstrants though, on this particular point, is how the Arminians develop that in point 4. The idea that someone could resist God’s grace when offered to them is intolerable to the Calvinist. The Calvinist has a heavy emphasis on God’s brute power as that is given form, in a God-world relation, in the so called decretum absolutum. If a person can thwart God’s will in salvation, which the Calvinist believes point 4 above entails, then the conception of God as almighty and sovereign is undercut; according to the Calvinist. This, of course, is why, in the 5 points of Calvinism (TULIP), we get the “I” of Irresistible Grace.

Some people have charged Evangelical Calvinism, as we have described that, as being more Arminian than Calvinist. They make this claim, because like the Arminian we affirm a universal atonement. They also seem to think that we can be construed as Arminian-like (so Kevin Vanhoozer’s critique of us) because we reject the absolute decree (decretum absolutum) of election and reprobation, at least as those are understood in the Reformed orthodox tradition. Vanhoozer, in particular, maintains that since we have the concept of universal atonement operative in our ‘system’ that this necessarily leads to the idea that either all people will ultimately be ‘saved.’ Since we reject universalism, Vanhoozer and Roger Olson, believe that we operate with an irrationalism in regard to election; since, for Vanhoozer, we don’t have a coherent strategy for understanding why not all will end up repenting, and on the other hand, for Olson, because we likewise do not ostensibly have a limiting factor in regard to who will end up turning to Christ. In other words, because Vanhoozer reads these things through his metaphysic of primary and secondary causation (and Aristotelian frame), he believes that if we affirm a universal atonement, that it only makes sense that all will end up turning to Christ; since there is a one-for-one causal relationship between God’s will in atonement, and God’s will in regard to whom the atonement is for. I.e. If God in Christ dies for all, eo ipso all MUST repent and receive Christ; or, God’s sovereignty has been thwarted and defeated by His creation.

But Evangelical Calvinists evade Vanhoozer’s critique, in particular, and the classical Calvinist critique, in general, insofar that we repudiate the ‘logico-causal necessitarian’ theory of causation that they operate from. In other words, we think it is artificial to think that God must operate from an Aristotelian or Newtonian, or mechanical understanding of a God-world relation. This is not required by Scripture’s disclosure, and more significantly, the Self-revelation of God in Christ of the triune relationship of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit ought to indicate to the theologian that God’s relationship to the world, as His relationship has eternally been in se, is a filial and personal one. As such, if we are going to strictly follow the implications of God’s Self-revelation as the only means by which we might come to know God’s way in Himself and for us, we ought to reject the metaphysic that Vanhoozer and the rest of the classical Calvinists (along with the classical Arminians) operate with; viz. the theory of causation that thinks in the mechanistic terms we have already alluded to. Because Evangelical Calvinists reject the so called ‘classical metaphysic’ of the Great Tradition, and opt for a reified conception of that as that is understood within a so-called ‘Chalcedonian Pattern,’ we elide, indeed, the logico-causal critique against us as if we are Arminian. We might affirm similar things in regard to the extent of the atonement, but that is only a semantic connection, not a material one.

Truth told: classical Calvinists and Arminians have more in common with each other than we do with either Calvinism or Arminianism. Since they both operate from the same intellectual heritage, and seemingly have become stuck in the web of 13th century through 17th century theological metaphysics, they are unable to adequately read the Bible’s reality for all its worth. Thomas Torrance, patron saint of us Evangelical Calvinists, has charted a better way forward, in regard to constructively appropriating modern metaphysical insight towards the reification of theological concepts. In other words, as Torrance notes, we do not live under a Ptolemaic or Newtonian mechanical system; we have arrived at an Einsteinian moment wherein the theory of relativity has undone the way we think about the time-space continuum. Ah, this leads us into another blog post for another time.

[1] Nick Needham, 2000 Years Of Christ’s Power: Volume 4: The Age Of Religious Conflict (Scotland, UK: Christian Focus Publication, 2017), 134.

In The Hands of a Loving God: A Riff on The Babylon Bee’s Angry Calvinist God

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The Christian satire site, The Babylon Bee, recently shared this about Calvinists:

BOISE, ID—Local Calvinist Evan Rollins loudly announced Sunday afternoon his increased level of discomfort and wariness with Pastor Frank after the minister preached a passionate sermon angrygodon the love of God, witnesses confirmed Wednesday.

According to Rollins, he first began to feel uncomfortable with the message when the pastor quoted John 3:16 and pleaded with his hearers to believe the gospel, with his doubts and fears seemingly being confirmed as Pastor Frank reminded his audience that “God is love.”

 “I’m just not sure about Pastor Frank anymore, with all the love and grace talk,” Rollins told a friend at a local microbrewery after service. “I’m not saying he’s a heretic—or worse, an Arminian—but just that we should have our guard up from here on out. I’m seeing a lot of red flags.”

“Did you catch that bit about God’s love reaching to the heavens? Wow,” he added.

At publishing time, Rollins had begun searching for another church “where we’re really exhorted to rest in God’s wrath and judgment from the pulpit.”[1]

The irony of this, and why it’s satirical, is because there’s some relative truth to this. In a general sense classical Calvinists have emphasized God’s relationship to His creatures through a legal/juridic framework of mediating decrees (think of the theology that undergirds the Covenant of Works/Grace).

I once tried to distinguish evangelical Calvinism from classical Calvinism at another blog I once had (i.e. The Evangelical Calvinist in Plain Language). I don’t think Evan Rollins would like us too much either. Here’s what I wrote (I was trying to make it is as simplistic as I possibly could):

The way, when in person with someone, that I have tried to describe what evangelical Calvinism is, is to contrast it with what most people think of Calvinism today (as represented by The Gospel Coalition, or more explicitly by the acronym TULIP or 5 point Calvinism). So that is the way I will engage to flesh that out with you as well.

In general evangelical Calvinism emphasizes and starts from the idea that God is love! We know this to be the case because He has revealed that to us in and through His Son, Jesus. One of my (still) favorite Bible verses is:

“For God so loved the world, that He gave His only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in Him will not perish, but have everlasting life.” John 3:16

Or,

“Dear friends, let us love one another, for love comes from God. Everyone who loves has been born of God and knows God. Whoever does not love does not know God, because God is love. This is how God showed his love among us: He sent his one and only Son into the world that we might live through him. This is love: not that we loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son as an atoning sacrifice for our sins. Dear friends, since God so loved us, we also ought to love one another.  No one has ever seen God; but if we love one another, God lives in us and his love is made complete in us.” I John 4:7-12

So we know that God is a personal God who does what He does because of who He is, He is love. And we, as evangelical Calvinists, use this belief to shape everything else that we articulate in regard to how we think of the way that God relates to us.

This means that we do not think that God primarily relates to us through Law, or us keeping the Law (which is the basic underlying premises upon which 5 point Calvinism is based on); we believe that God has always related to us, first, because He simply loves us (because that is who He is). And within that relationship He has provided expectations that He knew we couldn’t even uphold; so because He is love, He did that for us too, through Christ (Christ thus has become the end of the Law for all who believe Romans 9:5).

I would submit that the imagery and reality of marriage is the better way to think of our relationship to God in Christ (that’s what the Apostle Paul thought in Ephesians 5, and this is a common theme throughout all of Scripture, especially in Revelation). We don’t relate, humanly speaking, to our spouses through a set of codes and laws (even though there are expectations within the relationship); no, ideally, our relationship is based upon love (or self-giveness for the other). I think this is the better metaphor (and reality/our union with Christ) to think of our relationship with God through. Richard Sibbes, a Puritan thought so, as did Martin Luther.

So in general, then, evangelical Calvinism holds that God is Love and thus dynamic and personal. This is in contrast to Classical Calvinism’s and Arminianism’s belief that God relates to us through impersonal decrees and laws.

[1] The Babylon Bee

The Covenant of Works, The Covenant of Grace; What Are They? The evangelical Calvinists Respond

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As evangelical Calvinists we stand within an alternative stream from classical Calvinism, or Federal/Covenantal theology; the type of Calvinism that stands as orthodoxy for Calvinists today in most parts of North America and the Western world in general. The blurb on the back of our book Evangelical Calvinism: Essays Resourcing the Continuing Reformation of the Church makes this distinction clear when it states:

In this exciting volume new and emerging voices join senior Reformed scholars in presenting a coherent and impassioned articulation of Calvinism for today’s world. Evangelical Calvinism represents a mood within current Reformed theology. The various contributors are in different ways articulating that mood, of which their very diversity is a significant element. In attempting to outline features of an Evangelical Calvinism a number of the contributors compare and contrast this approach with that of the Federal Calvinism that is currently dominant in North American Reformed theology, challenging the assumption that Federal Calvinism is the only possible expression of orthodox Reformed theology. This book does not, however, represent the arrival of a “new-Calvinism” or even a “neo-Calvinism,” if by those terms are meant a novel reading of the Reformed faith. An Evangelical Calvinism highlights a Calvinistic tradition that has developed particularly within Scotland, but is not unique to the Scots. The editors have picked up the baton passed on by John Calvin, Karl Barth, Thomas Torrance, and others, in order to offer the family of Reformed theologies a reinvigorated theological and spiritual ethos. This volume promises to set the agenda for Reformed-Calvinist discussion for some time to come.

A question rarely, if ever addressed online in the theological blogosphere, and other online social media outlets, is a description of what Covenant theology actually entails. Many, if acquainted at all with Reformed theology, have heard of the Covenant of Works, Covenant of Grace, and Covenant of Redemption (pactum salutis); but I’m not really sure how many of these same people actually understand what that framework entails—maybe they do, and just don’t talk about it much.

In an effort to highlight the lineaments of Federal theology I thought it might be instructive to hear how Lyle Bierma describes it in one of its seminal formulator’s theology, Caspar Olevianus. So we will hear from Bierma on Olevianus, and then we will offer a word of rejoinder to this theology from Thomas Torrance’s theology summarized for us by Paul Molnar; and then further, a word contra Federal theology from Karl Barth as described by Rinse Reeling Brouwer. Here is Bierma:

When did God make such a pledge? [Referring to the ‘Covenant of Grace’] We will be looking at this question in some detail in Chapter IV, but it should be mentioned here that for Olevianus this covenant of grace or gospel of forgiveness and life was proclaimed to the Old Testament fathers from the beginning; to Adam after the fall (“The seed of the woman shall crush [Satan’s] head”); to Abraham and his descendents (“In your seed shall all nations of the earth be blessed”); to the remnant of Israel in Jeremiah 31 (“I will put my laws in their minds . . . and will remember their sins no more”); and still to hearers of the Word today. To be sure, this oath or testament was not confirmed until the suffering and death of Christ. Christ was still the only way to Seligkeit, since it was only through His sacrifices that the blessing promised to Abraham could be applied to us and the forgiveness and renewal promised through Jeremiah made possible. Nevertheless, even before ratification it was still a covenant — a declaration of God’s will awaiting its final fulfillment.

In some contexts, however, Olevianus understands the covenant of grace in a broader sense than as God’s unilateral promise of reconciliation ratified in Jesus Christ. He employs some of the same terms as before — Bund, Gnadenbund, foedus, foedus gratiae, and foedus gratuitum — but this time to mean a bilateral commitment between God and believers. The covenant so understood is more than a promise of reconciliation; it is the  realization of that promise — reconciliation itself — through a mutual coming to terms. Not only does God bind Himself to us in a pledge that He will be our Father; we also bind ourselves to Him in a pledge of acceptance of His paternal beneficence. Not only does God promise that He will blot out all memory of our sins; we in turn promise that we will walk uprightly before Him. The covenant in this sense includes both God’s promissio and our repromissio.

This semantical shift from a unilateral to a bilateral promise is most clearly seen in two passages in Olevanius’s writings where he compares the covenant of grace to a human Bund. In Vester Grundt, as we have seen, he portrays the covenant strictly as a divine pledge. While we were yet sinners, God bound Himself to us with an oath and a promise that through His Son He would repair the broken relationship. It was expected, of course, that we accept the Son (whether promised or already sent) in faith, but Olevianus here does not treat this response as part of the covenant. The emphasis is on what God would do because of what we could not do.

In a similar passage in the Expositio, however, Olevianus not only identifies the covenant with reconciliation itself but describes it as a mutual agreement (mutuus assensus) between the estranged parties. Here God binds Himself not to us “who were yet sinners” but to us “who repent and believe,” to us who in turn are bound to Him in faith and worship. This “covenant of grace or union between God and us” is not established at just one point in history; it is ratified personally with each believer. Christ the Bridegroom enters into “covenant or fellowship” with the Church His Bride by the ministry of the Word and sacraments and through the Holy Spirit seals the promises of reconciliation in the hearts of the faithful. But this is also a covenant into which we enter, a “covenant of faith.” As full partners in the arrangement we become not merely God’s children but His Bundgesnossen, His confoederati.

When he discusses the covenant of grace in this broader sense, i.e., as a bilateral commitment between God and us, Olevianus does not hesitate t use the term conditio [conditional]. We see already in the establishment of the covenant with Abraham that the covenant of grace has not one but two parts: not merely God’s promissio [promise] to be the God of Abraham and his seed, but that promise on the condition (qua conditione) of Abraham’s (and our) repromissio [repromising] to walk before Him and be perfect. Simply put, God’s covenantal blessings are contingent upon our faith and obedience. It is to those who repent, believe, and are baptized that He reconciles Himself and binds Himself in covenant.[1]

What we see in Olevianus’s theology, according to Bierma, is a schema of salvation that is contingent upon the elect’s doing their part, as it were. In other words, what binds salvation together in the Federal scheme is not only the act of God, but the act of the elect; an act that is ensured to be acted upon by the absolute decree (absolutum decretum). The ground of salvation involves, then, God’s act and humanity’s response; the objective (or de jure) side is God’s, the subjective (or de facto) side is the elect’s—a quid pro quo framework for understanding salvation. What this inevitability leads to, especially when getting into issues of assurance of salvation, is for the elect to turn inward to themselves as the subjective side of salvation is contingent upon their ‘faith and obedience.’

Thomas F. Torrance, patron saint of evangelical Calvinists like me, rightly objects to this type of juridical and transactional and/or bilateral understanding of salvation. Paul Molnar, TF Torrance scholar par excellence, describes Torrance’s rejection of Federal theology this way and for these reasons:

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 of pre-destination, [and this] tended to foster a hidden Nestorian Torrance between the divine and human natures in the on 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 theScots 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.[2]

And here is how Brouwer describes Barth’s feeling on Federal theology, with particular reference to another founder of Federal theology, Johannes Cocceius. Brouwer writes of Barth:

Barth writes ‘For the rest you shall enjoy Heppe’ s Locus xiii only with caution. He has left too much room for the leaven of federal theology. It was not good, when the foedus naturae was also called a foedus operum’. In Barth’ s eyes, the notion of a relationship between God and Adam as two contractual partners in which man promises to fulfil the law and God promises him life eternal in return, is a Pelagian one that should not even be applied to the homo paradisiacus. Therefore,

one has to speak of the foedus naturae in such a way that one has nothing to be ashamed of when one speaks of the foedus gratiae later on, and, conversely, that one does not have to go to the historians of religion, but rather in such a way that one can say the same things in a more detailed and powerful way in the new context of the foedus gratiae, which is determined by the contrast between sin and grace. For there is re vera only one covenant, as there is only one God. The fact that Cocceius and his followers could not and would not say this is where we should not follow them – not in the older form, and even less in the modern form.

 In this way paragraph ends as it began: the demarcation of sound theology from federal theology in its Cocceian shape is as sharp as it was before. Nevertheless, the attentive reader will notice that the category of the covenant itself is ‘rescued’ for Barth’ s own dogmatic thinking.[3]

For Barth, as for Torrance, as for me, the problem with Federal theology is that it assumes upon various wills of God at work at various levels determined by the absolute decree. The primary theological problem with this, as the stuff we read from Torrance highlights, is that it ruptures the person and work of God in Christ from Christ; i.e. it sees Jesus, the eternal Logos, as merely an instrument, not necessarily related to the Father, who carries out the will of God on behalf of the elect in fulfilling the conditions of the covenant of works ratifying the covenant of grace. Yet, even in this establishment of the Federal framework, salvation is still not accomplished for the elect; it is contingent upon the faith and obedience of those who will receive salvation, which finally brings to completion the loop of salvation in the Federal schema.

These are serious issues, that require sober reflection; more so than we will be able to do in a little blog post. At the very least I am hopeful that what we have sketched from various angles will be sufficient to underscore what’s at stake in these types of depth theological issues, and how indeed theology, like Federal theology offers, can impact someone’s Christian spirituality if in fact said theology is grasped and internalized; i.e. it is understood beyond academic reflection, and understood existentially as it impacts the psychology and well being of human beings coram Deo.

 

[1] Lyle D. Bierma, German Calvinism in the Confessional Age: The Covenant Theology of Caspar Olevianus, 64-68.

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

[3] Rinse H Reeling Brouwer, Karl Barth and Post-Reformation Orthodoxy (Farnham: Ashgate Publishing Limited, 2015), 112-13.

“More Gospel-Centered than the Bible?” Good Works in Salvation

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Kevin DeYoung tweeted earlier today:

Let’s not be more “gospel-centered” than the Bible. The Bible is not afraid of words like striving, fighting, effort, and work.

What I am inferring from this is that he is referring to people who are into excessive “grace”, or what Bonhoeffer might call cheap grace. In Puritan times DeYoung might be challenging what was known as anti-nomianism, and what today, more popularly might be referred to as the ragamuffin gospel. Essentially DeYoung, as I read him is referring to the idea that it is okay and even necessary to “work” out one’s salvation; and I wouldn’t fully disagree. Of course the reason I am writing this quick post is because I do ultimately disagree with DeYoung; it’s his informing theology that concerns me. 

DeYoung is a Young, Restless, and Reformed pastor/theologian who thinks about work, effort, striving, fighting, etc. from a certain perspective; at least when it is in reference to someone’s personal salvation. It is this informing theology, of DeYoung’s that I, of course, see as the problem. Because DeYoung believes that Jesus unconditionally elected certain people for salvation; because he believes that Jesus only died for these chosen few; and because he believes that a sign of people’s election is persevering in good works, when he calls for folks to not be more “gospel-centered” than the Bible, he is calling for them to essentially prove their election. It is from striving and working out one’s salvation that these elect individuals can assure themselves that they are one of the elect for whom Christ died. In the olden Puritan days they would call this experimental predestinarianism, because it was an experiment proven emperically through works which could demonstrate if an individual was truly one of the elect. 

Of course the problem with attempting to prove one’s salvation was that it turned the person inward to themselves. This corrective that DeYoung is calling for comes from a certain theological vantage point. But is it really in alignment with a gospel of grace? 

A genuine gospel of grace doesn’t ground one’s assurance of election or salvation in what they do. Instead the ground of salvation in a genuine gospel of grace is in the vicarious humanity of Christ and what he has done for us. It does not tell people to do things from a ground in an abstract decree of election, but instead it challenges them to look directly and immediately to Jesus Christ. It encourages the bruised reeds out there to understand that strife, effort, work, etc. have all been carried out for them in what Jesus has done for them in his humanity. It calls people to a life of participation and gratitude, and to live obediently to the Gospel of grace only in and from the life of Christ through union with him. There is no call to prove one’s election through perseverance in good works and striving. But this is what stands behind DeYoung’s statement. 

A Third Riposte to Kevin DeYoung on Assurance of Salvation in I John: An Alternative

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I

This will be my third and final riposte to Kevin DeYoung. As you will recall I have been responding to DeYoung’s two blog posts in regard to a doctrine of assurance of salvation; in particular having to do with jesusthehealerthe way DeYoung understands that doctrine as taught in the epistle of I John.

In the first two ripostes or rejoinders from me, we covered, in suggestive and querying fashion, how the original context of I John might not correlate well with DeYoung’s “straightforward” reading of that text; this was the basic gist of my first post in response. In the second post I tried to get further into the role that the history of interpretation, interpretive tradition, hermeneutic, and metaphysic has; not just in informing DeYoung’s exegesis, but mine (and everyone’s) as well. In this post, I will attempt to introduce an alternative reading of I John that counters DeYoung’s reading of it. As part of this alternative reading, in an inchoate way, I hope to make clear my belief that “assurance of salvation,” as far as I can see, is not actually part of the positive teaching of Scripture as understood from its revealed reality in Jesus Christ.

II

Let’s start with the proposition, first off, that assurance of salvation is not part of the positive teaching of Scripture. Before I attempt to sketch what I mean we will need to have a little context in regard to what we mean by ‘positive.’ In medieval theology (where we get so many of our categories from) there were different via[s] or ways that people used in their respective approaches  to their doing of theology; the ‘positive way’ (via positiva) that I am referring to in this post contrasts with what was known as the ‘negative way’ (via negativa). The positive way (for purposes of brevity) is simply the way of doing theology that focuses on what is revealed (tied into kataphatic) rather than doing theology that is speculative (which is the negative way tied to what is called apophatic), and based upon inferential reasoning, and more than not contemplative and/or philosophical reflection. So when I refer to ‘positive’ in this discussion, this is what I mean.

If we delimit ourselves to the ‘positive way’ assurance of salvation, then, is not something that ever gets addressed. The emphasis in God’s Self-revelation in Christ is always on life eternal; it is not concerned with trying to assuage people about doubts in regard to whether they personally and individually are “saved,” or one of the “elect.” If we have a proper understanding of faith we will realize that it is not something that is self-generated or that is in us (think of Martin Luther’s iustia Christi aliena, ‘the alien righteousness of Christ’); instead we will understand that what faith looks like is that bond that is shared between the Father and the Son for us by the Holy Spirit. And so the focus, by definition, of eternal life and salvation is not something that we get, and thus must hold onto, or demonstrate as something that we possess; instead the focus is always on God’s life in Christ, and participation with him. As I John concludes it gives us this decisive word:

10 The one who believes in the Son of God has the testimony in himself; the one who does not believe God has made Him a liar, because he has not believed in the testimony that God has given concerning His Son.11 And the testimony is this, that God has given us eternal life, and this life is in His Son. 12 He who has the Son has the life; he who does not have the Son of God does not have the life. 13 These things I have written to you who believe in the name of the Son of God, so that you may know that you have eternal life. 14 This is the confidence which we have[l]before Him, that, if we ask anything according to His will, He hears us.[1]

Alongside of this:

23 This is His commandment, that we believe in the name of His Son Jesus Christ, and love one another, just as He commanded us. 24 The one who keeps His commandments abides in Him, and He in him. We know by this that He abides in us, by the Spirit whom He has given us.[2]

The focus in these passages is upon Christ, and not us. The differentiation, in context that John is making between those outside of Christ and those inside of Christ (so to speak) has to do with belief in Christ and keeping ‘His commandment’; which we see, in the context is that ‘we believe in the name of His Son Jesus Christ, and love one another.’ Those who do not believe in Jesus Christ (and that he has come in the ‘flesh’ see chapter 2, which the Gnostics rejected i.e. that Christ was the Son of God come in the flesh), and those who do not genuinely love one another are outside of Christ (in a “saving” kind of way) because they are not of his ‘seed’ and thus not participating in His life. And so we know that we are not of the Gnostics (or any other aberrant understanding of Jesus Christ) because we genuinely know who Jesus is for us by the Holy Spirit. The focus positively is upon who Jesus is, not upon whether I am saved or not, per se. The distinction has to do with the identity of Jesus, the eternal Son; if someone is worshipping a false Jesus they will have to prove their salvation by what they do. The Christian, the one worshipping the eternal Son does not have to generate any type of morality, or anything else, they know they have eternal life based simply upon their relationship to Jesus Christ in and through who He is for them. As a result those of the ‘seed’ believe, and have love; and we understand that this is not something self-generated but God generated through Christ by the Holy Spirit’s testimony. Again, we are not in need of psychological assurance about our eternal destiny at this point; instead we are solely focused upon Christ and the reality of who He is (this seems to be the context of I John).

We only have a context of psychological angst about assurance of salvation issues if we think salvation is about us. The way Kevin DeYoung approaches things through his understanding of election, limited atonement, and individual salvation creates space for anxiety about ‘my’ salvation. It makes me wonder if I am one of the elect for whom Christ died, and thus I will come to passages like those found strewn throughout First John potentially looking for ways that I can be assured of my salvation, of my election; but this is all foreign to the actual context of I John and other texts of Scripture (at a supposition level).

III

As we were working through the section above you may have had a question (or two) still, and you should. Even if the ‘commandment’ is to ‘believe’ and to ‘love one another’ we still have a dilemma, especially if I am claiming that these are not intended to be “proofs” of my personal salvation and relationship to God. In fact, as I was sketching above you probably were thinking: “hmm, well this sounds exactly like what DeYoung has been arguing; that my personal belief and morality are two of three earmarks that are intended to provide me with assurance of salvation.” But as I have been suggesting this is to think errantly, per the context in I John, as well as theologically.

Theologically, if we start with a principled focus on Christ, as I have been contending that I John does, we will think about ‘belief’ and ‘loving one another’ from a theological anthropology generated from Christ; we will understand that the Word indeed has been made flesh, made human for us, and we will think about ‘belief’ and ‘love’ and salvation from this vantage point. If we do this, now our hermeneutic, our “metaphysic” is beginning to take shape; and it is this that we as evangelical Calvinists believe is fundamental to thinking about all of these things. The focus now is on Christ’s vicarious humanity, as such it is his ‘faith’, it is his ‘belief’, it is his ‘love for the other’ that grounds ours; so we believe from him, from his humanity for us by the Holy Spirit. Instead of working from ourselves to God, we understand, in a positive way, that God has worked from Himself to us in Christ. And so the focus, in I John, and elsewhere, is not on my faith, on my morality, on my belief, on my ethics, but on Christ’s for me. The focus is on His participation with us, and then our participation with Him in and through His mediatorial humanity for us. Do you see any focus, from this frame, on assurance of salvation? If Jesus is everything for us; if he is the elect humanity of God for us, do questions about assurance of salvation ever arise?

IV

In closing I think it is safe to conclude, if anything, that through this process we have at least come to see the power of theological commitments relative to biblical interpretation. The realization that we all do theological exegesis should be apparent.

When educating our brothers and sisters about this issue the best thing we can do, if we are having doubts about our salvation, is to reframe the whole discussion; we should not reinforce it the way that DeYoung and that whole tradition has done. If we follow positive theology these questions should never arise, at least not in a critically and objectively understood way. We are all human beings, indeed, part of that condition is weakness and vulnerability, the antidote to that is not to reinforce all of that, but instead it is to point the One who always lives to make intercession for those who will inherit eternal life; the antidote is to point people to their High Priest, and to the ground of their very life and being. The assurance will come when we have hope and confidence in who Jesus is for us, not who we are for Him.

 

[1] I John 5.10-14.

[2] I John 3.23-24.