Category Archives: Federal Theology

On A Critique of the Pactum Salutis and its Inherent Social [subordinationist] Trinitarianism

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Karl Barth operated with his own reformulated Christologically conditioned Covenantal theology. For Him there is one covenant (of grace), just as sure as there are two covenants, if not three (covenant of works, covenant of grace, pactum salutis i.e., covenant of redemption) that the Federal or classically covenantal theologians such as Cocceius, Ursinus, Olevianus, Bullinger et al. articulated. Barth was a strident critic of Federal or classical Covenantal theology, insofar that he detected a primacy of the Law as the antecedent ground upon which the conditions of the covenant of grace are ultimately fulfilled in the coming of Christ for the elect. That is to say, when Christ comes, as the decree of God prescribes, according to Federal theology, Jesus actively obeys all of the commands of the covenant of works (Law) thereby fulfilling the conditions required for a full justification, again, for the elect, to obtain. This fulfillment, per the federal structure, as decretally determined by God before the foundations of the world (e.g., decretum absolutum), is what the “Feds” identify as the covenant of grace. And within this schema, many of the federalists, also place what is often referred to as the pactum salutis (pact or contract of salvation), into the mix of the economic outworking of the covenant of works/grace within the type of Heilsgeschichte (‘salvation history’) they envision.

Conversely, we have a theological incoherency; or so I will suggest, and Barth will identify in the passage I share from him shortly. Ultimately, the incoherency present within the schema presented by Federal theology affects a proper doctrine of God. What I will suggest, after Barth’s passage is shared, and in concert with his critique of the pactum salutis, is that Federal theology, inadvertently, suffers from a subordinationist, even an eternal functional subordination of the Son (EFS), insofar that the Son is understood to be a distinct center of conscious, indeed, organ of God in obediently carrying out the decree of God (and a decree that is abstract and decoupled from the triune personage of the Monarchia [‘Godhead’]. Here is what Barth has to communicate with reference to the errancy of the Pactum:

[5] The riddle posed by the older Federal theology at this its strongest point appears to be insoluble. But perhaps we shall find the solution if we examine rather more closely how it understood the eternal basis of the covenant of grace. As we have seen, it was taken to consist in an intertrinitarian decision, in a freely accepted but legally binding mutual obligation between God the Father and God the Son. Now there are three doubtful features in this conception.

For God to be gracious to sinful man, was there any need of a special decree to establish the unity of the righteousness and mercy of God in relation to man, of a special intertrinitarian arrangement and contract which can be distinguished from the being of God? If there was need of such a decree, then the question arises at once of a form of the will of God in which this arrangement has not yet been made and is not yet valid. We have to reckon with the existence of a God who is righteous in abstracto and not free to be gracious from the very first, who has to bind to the fulfilment of His promise the fulfilment of certain conditions by man, and punish their non-fulfilment. It is only with the conclusion of this contract with Himself that He ceases to be a righteous God in abstracto and becomes the God who in His righteousness is also merciful and therefore able to exercise grace. In this case it is not impossible or illegitimate to believe that properly, in some inner depth of His being behind the covenant of grace, He might not be able to do this. It is only on the historical level that the theologoumena of the foedus naturae or operum [covenant of nature or works] can be explained by the compact of the Federal theology with contemporary humanism. In fact it derives from anxiety lest there might be an essence in God in which, in spite of that contract, His righteousness and His mercy are secretly and at bottom two separate things. And this anxiety derives from the fact that the thought of that intertrinitarian contract obviously cannot have any binding and therefore consoling and assuring force. This anxiety and therefore this proposition of a covenant of works could obviously never have arisen if there had been a loyal hearing of the Gospel and a strict looking to Jesus Christ as the full and final revelation of the being of God. In the eternal decree of God revealed in Jesus Christ the being of God would have been seen as righteous mercy and merciful righteousness from the very first. It would have been quite impossible therefore to conceive of any special plan of a God who is righteous in abstracto, and the whole idea of an original covenant of works would have fallen to the ground.[1]

Briefly, points of response. Firstly, Barth argues: there is no point in constructing a covenant of works to begin with. He argues that this ultimately is really a matter of adding a hermeneutical exemplum where God’s Self-revelation, attested to in Holy Scripture, never prescribed the need for one; at least not beyond what the text of Scripture itself is premised upon in regard to its reality in Jesus Christ. If our first encounter with God in Christ is Genesis 1:1, “in the beginning God created,” then it becomes artificial to construct a latterly construed beginning point with God that is based upon an ad hoc construct wherein God first relates to us on some aspect of Law (e.g., covenant of works). Secondly, for Barth, to posit this type of negative or abstract starting point for a God-human relationship, ends up relying on the speculative machinations of the philosophers and theologians rather than the positive affections provided for by God first encountering us in the face of Jesus Christ (in the grace of creation by God’s Word cf. John 1:1). Thirdly, for Barth, when this type of competitive relationship between God and humanity, based on an abstract notion of Law, is introduced into the eternal life of God, we end up with two distinct concepts of righteousness within the Godhead; i.e., wherein the Son, subordinately, submits whatever His sense of righteousness might be to that of the Father’s sense of righteousness. This is where I would argue the pactum salutis inherently lends itself to a social trinitarianism of the type where the Son can be understood as eternally subordinate to the Father. Fourthly, as inferred from Barth’s reasoning, we end up with a ’God behind the back of the covenantal schema’ in Federal theology, which entails the notion that we can never be quite sure if His ostensible revealed will is eternally in correspondence with His eternal or hidden will insofar there is no necessary relationship between His eternal and triune person and His work in salvation in the lineaments of a historical history.

Alternatively, and rightly, Barth simply scrubs the whole framework posited by a federal theology in favor of building his covenantal schema on the direct and immediate Self-revelation of God; indeed, without additions. Barth’s approach, I would argue, fits Occam’s Razor much better than Federal theology does, insofar that Barth doesn’t need to add unnecessary accretions to what God has already and intelligibly revealed in regard to the Gospel. That is, that rather than constructing a salvation-framework that adds more to the Gospel understanding, ostensibly, that Barth is biblically comfortable with working from the person and work of God in Christ as if the whole revelation of God without adumbration. When accretions are added, we end up with the heterodox and heretical liminalities that Barth has correctly highlighted for us in his critique of the pactum salutis in particular, and Federal theology in general. In other words, for Barth (and TFT and John the theologian): ‘when we see Jesus we see the Father’ without hesitation.

[1] Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics IV/1 §57 [065] The Doctrine of Reconciliation: Study Edition (London: T&T Clark, 2010), 61–2.

The ‘Father-Son’ Theory of the Atonement V PSA as the Frame

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Penal Substitution Atonement (PSA) theory has been in the news again lately (online/social media). As an Evangelical Calvinist (see V1&V2 of our Evangelical Calvinism books, and my articles-mini-essays on the topic) I have pressed what TF Torrance refers to as the ‘ontological theory of the atonement.’ Many evangelicals and Reformed folks think that PSA in fact is the Gospel simplicter. And so, to deny PSA would be to deny the Gospel itself. But as I have demonstrated over and again at the blog, the background to PSA theory isn’t as prima facie biblical as its proponents make it sound. The ‘theological’ framework that fomented what we think of as PSA today is largely rooted in the Federal (Covenantal) theology of the early Reformed theologians. It has humanity placed into a relationship with God that is necessarily framed by a forensic premise (i.e., the covenant of works). This forensic premise, or covenant of works, according to Federal theology, is ultimately fulfilled for the elect of God, when Jesus comes and meets the conditions of the covenant of works (that Adam and Eve) broke, thus restoring the legal connection to God that heretofore had been lost to humanity since after Eden. And it is this Federal (Covenantal) relationship that is given metaphysical orientation by the scholasticism Reformed commitment to what Richard Muller identifies as a Christian Aristotelianism. Suffice it to say, in nuce, PSA represents a theory of the atonement wherein humanity is genetically related to God based on a metaphysics of a Divine-Law-World relation; indeed, which requires that in order for fallen humanity, and the elect therein (think decretum absolutum ‘absolute decree of election-reprobation’), to be justified by God, that the Son of Man must become man, die on the cross, extinguishing the wrath of God, paying the legal penalty for sin, and allowing the elect humanity to come into a right and legal standing relationship with the triune God; particularly, the Father (whom the PSA proponents emphasize as the ‘Law-giver,’ per their juridical system).

Alternatively to that, one of the Fathers of us Evangelical Calvinists, John McLeod Campbell, a Scottish theologian of the 19th century, kicked back against the premise of the PSA position vis-à-vis the nature of the atonement, and against the Westminster theology that had codified the theological framework that funds the PSA position, particularly as that was being pushed in his context in the Church of Scotland (before he was excommunicated), as he gives us re-framing of atonement theory where the relationship between God and humanity ought to be framed first as thinking of God as Father rather than Law-giver. It was this re-framing that ended up getting Campbell kicked out of his beloved Church of Scotland, and which led him to minister elsewhere, as an independent of sorts. When you see what his view was, in a nutshell, as we will visit that now, as George Tuttle recounts that for us, you might be shocked to think that this would have the type of doctrinal gravitas required to get someone officially banned from their own denominational and local church. Tuttle writes of Campbell’s framing on the atonement:

Herein lies one of Campbell’s major objections to founding a view of atonement on the concept of justice —whether distributive or rectoral. Both systems visualize what he calls purely legal atonements, that is atonements, the whole character of which is determined by our relation to divine law. The real problem of atonement, however, is not merely to discover a way in which we may stand reconciled to God as a law-giver. The question contemplated in scripture and to which the Gospel is an answer is not how we can be pardoned and receive mercy, but how it could come to pass that the estranged can be reconciled. God’s intention is, as St. Paul declared, ‘to redeem those who were under the law, so that we might receive adoption as sons.’ (Gal. 4:5). The relation between a judge or a governor and the accused subjects is vastly different from that of a parent to erring children. To distinguish the former from the latter is to move from an artificial atmosphere of impersonal display of benevolence to a warm and living relationship of love, Campbell therefore could not rest in any conception of the atonement which involved, as he says, ‘the substitution of a legal standing for a filial standing as the gift of God to men in Christ.’ This is not to say that Campbell denies the truth of a legal standing any more than he denies the inexorable demands of divine justice. Just as justice is brought with the concept of God as love, so the validity of a legal standing is brought within that of a loving relationship. Justice has its ultimate source in the love of God. When the loving God is honoured, justice is honoured also.

                The atonement is thus revealed retrospectively as God’s way of putting right the past, and prospectively as introducing us to a life marked by a filial relation to God eternally. Both are celebrated by believers, both must be included in their thought concerning the nature of the atonement.[1]

One might think this ought to be unremarkable. And yet in the face of meddling with the Westminster God of consensus, the Aristotelian-formed God who relates to the world through a metaphysic of a decree of law (e.g., covenant of works etc.); who must remain the ‘unmoved mover’ of monadic adoration; it is this very meddling, even if all the theologian is doing is attempting to shift the mind’s eye to the fact that God is first Father of the Son before He is ever a Law-giver/Creator, that will get you canned like Campbell was.

Some might imagine that the Campbell thesis was a minority report. In his particular environ it was at his time. But outside of his particular ecclesial and geographical environ (and even amongst it, among some other key theologians and pastors like himself), his view became a dominate one. Even overcoming many of the places and people who were initially against his alternative and kerygmatic reading of Holy Scripture. Even so, today, by the retrieval of many in the evangelical and Reformed sphere, we are only getting the Westminsterian Report. This simply wasn’t the case, even historically (which I have demonstrated elsewhere).

In the end what matters, though, isn’t whether this or that doctrinal position was the majority or minority report in the history. What matters for the Protestant Christian, is whether or not a position corresponds more proximate with the witness of Scripture. I would contend, and have done so vociferously over the years, that the Campbellian theory of the ‘Father-Son-Atonement’ framing is indeed the most biblically correlative and theologically resplendent view presented. If you don’t to hold it: repent!

[1] George M. Tuttle, So Rich a Soil: John McLeod Campbell On Christian Atonement (Edinburgh: Handsel Press, 1986), 82-3.

‘The older Protestant theology was right to treat Aristotle as an adversary’

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There has been a resurgence, among Protestants, either towards affirming the classical theism of Thomas Aquinas (i.e., Christian-Catholic theology synthesized with Aristotelian categories) or rejecting it.[1] But even those, in the broader Reformed world who ostensibly reject it, still affirm it; insofar, that they operate with the philosophical-theological categories provided for by said Thomistic synthesis. I have, for decades now, been calling this Thomistic-Aristotelian mode of Reformed theology out. And yet, that machine will never really bust. It has tentacles reaching into the far reaches of the Christian world at this point. In the West, in particular, it has publishing houses, online warriors, pamphleteers, jargoneers, so on and so forth; which makes it exceedingly difficult to be critical of for the masses. Even so, I remain stalwart in my mission to bear witness to the world that there is only one “decree” of God, and his name is: Jesus Christ (and all that entails)! That is to say, rather than thinking God before meeting God in the face of Jesus Christ—as the reformed scholastics and their lesser descendants found in and among the Baptists and other 5 point environs—it is better to only think God after God has spoken, after God has first introduced Himself to us, for us, and with us in the prosopon (face) of Jesus Christ. For some reason, and I have many theories on this, this Reformed (and this isn’t just limited to the Reformed, there are also Lutheran iterations of this same mode) nut simply will not crack. I’d argue, primarily, that this is the case more for sociological rather than theological reasons. But that case will have to be developed at a later date.

Following, we will hear from none other than Reformed theologian par excellence, that heretic of old, Karl Barth. What did Barth, that theological charlatan, think of Aristotle, and how that impacted the array of theological developments following the Thomist synthesis. Here, here he is:

The more perspicacious of the older Protestant polemicists like A. Heidanus (l. c., p. 350f.) thought it right to mark off themselves no less from the theology and cosmology of Aristotle. For him the world is eternal and there can thus be no question of a creation. What then is his deity, his prime mover which is itself unmoved, his immaterial form, his actuality unburdened with potentiality, his reason which thinks itself (and therefore the best)? Does this πρώτον κινοῦν [first mover] move otherwise than as the principle and exemplary model of all other movement? Does it move otherwise than as the good and goal which has no other goal beyond itself, towards which everything else strives in virtue of the attraction which everything loved (and this unconditionally as the perfect and the imperfectly loved) exercises on that which loves, on which therefore everything depends and towards which everything must move? Does it even more, asks Heidanus, as a captain moves his ship, a conductor his choir or a field-marshal his troops? Is this prime mover of all things more and other than the law, the eternal prius, of their movement? That in which alone the Aristotelian world-principle would resemble the God of the Christian doctrine of providence is obviously the freedom of will and movement, the sovereignty and above all the inner self-determination of a God who confronts the world as its Creator and can thus approach its movement independently and determine it from without. But since the Aristotelian mover of all things is not their Creator, it is necessarily too exalted (or from the standpoint of the Christian doctrine of providence too poverty-stricken) to be capable of this movement in relation to the really distinct from it. The Aristotelian cosmos has a kind of god ordering it, unlike the Epicurean. But since this god is not the Creator of his cosmos, since he is not above but in it (thus finally resembling the Epicurean gods), the Aristotelian cosmos is also in fact one which is abandoned by God. The older Protestant theology was right to treat Aristotle as an adversary in this respect, and we can only wish that it had freed itself more basically and radically and generally from the spirit of this picture of god and the world, and the argumentations dictated by it.[2]

If you have followed my work (along with Myk Habets’) on Evangelical Calvinism over the years, the above should find lots of resonance with the themes put forward and developed vis-à-vis our critique of Aristotelian formed Reformed (and Lutheran) theologies, respectively. It is unnecessary, even within the history and development of Reformed theology and ideas, to presume that its only expression and iteration is under the unmoved mover offered by Aristotle and his theological tribe; even as Barth rightly notes in the above passage.

At the end of the day, dividing and “conquering” various theologies is not that difficult. Some might fear that my suggestion runs afoul of an untoward reductionism, but I would protest. Theologies done after Deus dixit (God has spoken) definitively and copiously without remainder in the vocal cords of Jesus Christ, in-breathed by the Holy Spirit, are diametrically different than theologies done prior to hearing that voice. Theologies based on hearing from the philosophers, about “godness,” prior to actually encountering God in Jesus Christ, will deleteriously suffer from offering and speaking of a god who looks and sounds like the god[s] of the Greeks rather than the God of the Man from Nazareth. This is surely a theological methodological issue, but one that shouldn’t come prior to God’s theology for us (so in that sense, a tautology) in Jesus Christ. I would aggressively argue that if a Christian is genuinely going to do Christian theology that it will only be as they dialogue and cohabitate, through the mediating and vicarious humanity of Jesus Christ, with the triune and living God. A genuine Christian theologian will first be a child of God, rather than a thinker for God. We must get this order right. We must first gestate in the bosom of the Father, with the Son for us, prior to maturating into thinkers and speakers and witnessers for God, if we are going to actually be thinking and speaking and witnessing for the true God. But alas, our egos would rather imagine that we have a place in this world, by virtue of just “showing up” in this world, to the point that humans come fully and naturally equipped with the antennae to think, speak, and witness for God on our own profanely imagined terms, rather than upon those provided first for us in the heart of the living and triune God.

These are stark and even deep matters; I hope that hasn’t thrown the reader off the scent of what matters. At the end of the day the Christian either is in point of contact with the real and living God or not. Ironically, those who have presumed the title ‘theologian,’ even for the millennia, often are the furthest away from representing the true and living God found attested to, purely and simply in the Bible. May God have mercy on us all!

[1] As an aside: I take it that anyone who affirms, at the basest level of Reformed theology, the 5 points of Calvinism up to and including Federal-Covenantal theology, to be appropriating the Thomist-Aristotelian synthesis; categorically, that is. Decretal theology (theology based on the so-called decretum absolutum [absolute decree of predestination, election-reprobation], in its classically Reformed iteration, necessarily is reposing in the theological lagoon provided for it by the Thomist-Aristotelian synthesis, to one degree or the other).

[2] Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics III/3 §48 [011] The Doctrine of Creation: Study Edition (London: T&T Clark, 2010), 10 [emphasis mine].

Athanasius as an Antidote to Federal Theology

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I often speak of T. F. Torrance’s view of the atonement as the ontological view, which is inextricably related, for Torrance to the Incarnation (which is why his most recent posthumously published books Incarnation & Atonement came in the order that they did — there is a theo-logical and even, dare I say it, necessary relation between the two). Well I just wanted to quote Athanasius directly, so that folks won’t think that Torrance fabricated such things out of whole cloth. Here’s Athanasius discussing the apparent dilemma God has set before Him given the reality of the “Fall” (and the non-existence or non-being that it brought humanity separated from Him), and the fact that not just a “legal” kind of relation had been violated between God and man through the “Fall,” but in fact an actual corruption of man Himself and the loss of grace as an intricate aspect of man’s relation to God had occurred — man’s very “nature” and even “heart” had been broken to the point of death (non-being and separation from God). Athanasius is sketching the only way the only dénouement possible for God to remain consistent with Himself as the Creator of man in His image; he writes:

. . . Yet, true though this is, it is not the whole matter. As we have already noted, it was unthinkable that God, the Father of Truth, should go back upon His word regarding death in order to ensure our continued existence. He could not falsify Himself; what, then, was God to do? Was He to demand repentance from men for their transgression? You might say that that was worthy of God, and argue further that, as through the Transgression they became subject to corruption, so through repentance they might return to incorruption again. But repentance would not guard the Divine consistency, for, if death did not hold dominion over men, God would still remain untrue. Nor does repentance recall men from what is according to their nature; all that it does is to make them cease from sinning. Had it been a case of a trespass only, and not of a subsequent corruption, repentance would have been well enough; but when once transgression had begun men came under the power of the corruption proper to their nature and were bereft of the grace which belonged to them as creatures in the Image of God. No, repentance could not meet the case. What — or rather Who was it that was needed for such grace and such recall as we required? Who, save the Word of God Himself, Who also in the beginning had made all things out of nothing? His part it was, and His alone, both to bring again the corruptible to incorruption and to maintain for the Father His consistency of character with all. For He alone, being Word of the Father and above all, was in consequence both able to recreate all, and worthy to suffer on behalf of all and to be an ambassador for all with the Father. [Athanasius, On The Incarnation, §7, 32-3]

Rich stuff. Now if you’re into the “kind” of Covenantal/Reformed/Federal Theology that Michael Horton & co. (who seems quite popular now-a-days, see here) articulates, then you might as well throw Athanasius’ insights, just quoted, in the burn pile. Here’s why. Horton style Covenant theology offers a “Juridically-Forensically” based view of the atonement — the kind that would actually fit into the “repentance-only” model that Athanasius says NO to — that frames what takes place on the cross as a Divine transaction between the Son and the Father. The “Law” (eating of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil cf. Hos. 6.7) has been broken (Covenant of Works), and the Father-Son agree to a pact (Pactum Salutis or Covenant of Redemption) wherein the Son will become a man, die on the cross for particular people (elect), “pay” their penalty (or fee), and give them back to God (Covenant of Grace). On the face that might sound good, but let’s think with Athanasius. All that has occurred in the Hortonian view of salvation is essentially to deal with an “external” issue and payment (which is akin to Athanasius’ point on repentance). The fundamental problem with this approach, as Athanasius so keenly points out, is that the issue isn’t primarily an external issue wherein a legal repentance will do; the issue is an issue of nature. Man’s nature was thoroughly corrupted and even lost. The only remedy is for the image of the Father (the Son) to literally become humanity; penetrate into the depths of our sinful souls through His redemptive grace; take that corrupted nature/heart from the manger to the cross to the grave; and resurrect/recreate it into the image of the Father which can only be realized as we are vicarious participants in Christ. The issue is not primarily an issue of a broken “Law;” the issue is that we have broken “Hearts,” and only God’s grace in Christ in the Incarnation can reach down into those depths and recreate us in Him. Horton’s approach to salvation does not allow for such thinking. It doesn’t deal with the heart, and thus we are left in our sins non-being.

**repost, originally posted on February 14, 2011.

What is Federal or Covenantal Theology? Per Caspar Olevianus

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The following is a blog post I first posted in September 18th, 2009. I posted this at another blog of mine from back in the day. I think what is really important to understand is that if the student doesn’t understand the entailments of classical Federal or Covenantal theology, they won’t grasp the weight of what we are offering as an alternative and counterweight in Evangelical Calvinism. Evangelical Calvinism isn’t actually a counter to five point Calvinism, per se; but instead, it is a counterweight to the thicker theology behind five point Calvinism as that developed in the Post Reformed orthodox theology of the Federal theologians. In order to assuage this lacuna, for some, I offer the following description of a Federal theology from one of its earliest “founders.”

Here is Lyle Bierma on Caspar Olevianus (1536-1587), one of the first developers of Federal Theology (according to Bierma, the first, but this is disputable). Bierma here is describing how Olevianus understood the Covenant of Grace vis-a’-vis the Covenant of Works:

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 th 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 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. (Lyle D. Bierma, German Calvinism in the Confessional Age: The Covenant Theology of Caspar Olevianus, 64-68)

I wanted to provide this because there has been recent discussion by some of us on this very issue; what is “Federal Theology?” The charge went, that I misunderstood the premise of Federal Theology, and thus the rest of my critique of it, was amiss. The assertion further went that what I was presenting was akin to the Federal Vision (the red-headed step child of “Federal theologians”).

What this quote demonstrates, beyond a doubt, is that Federal theology is exactly what I originally summarized it to entail. Primary of which, is its conditional nature; and thus its penchant to force people to look to themselves before they look to Christ — an anthropocentric problem.

Further, I fear that even after folks read this, they will say that this just cannot be what contemporary ‘Federal Theologians’ advocate. Well, this is wrong, none other than R. Scott Clark, faculty member at Westminster Theological Seminary–California (bastion of contemporary Federal Theology), clearly defends and advocates for this kind of “bilateralism” that we see in the ‘Federal Theology’ of Olevianus. Here is a piece Clark has on this at his blog.

I realize much of this requires further commentary, but I’m just going to put this out there for future reference. I want folks to know that I’m not engaging a ‘paper-cut’ theology when I critique Federal Theology vis-a’-vis Evangelical Calvinism.

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).

Thomas Aquinas’ semi-Pelagianism; Augustine of Hippo’s Relationalism; and Evangelical Calvinism’s Reception of Latin Theology

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There is a lot of talk these days in certain (Baptist) sectors about retrieving the theology of Thomas Aquinas. The focus of discussion is typically on his Prima Pars—of his Summa Theologiae—and less on the full scope of Thomas’ theology. But what in fact is being retrieved, if in fact the ultimate desire is to recover Aquinas’ theology in a total way? What about Thomas’ theological anthropology, and as corollary, doctrine of sin; are these foci fulgently available for the Protestants to recover as well? If we look back into the 16th and 17th centuries of what is called the Post Reformed Orthodox development of Reformed (or Calvinist) theology what we find is an affirmative in regard to recovering more than just a doctrine of God from Thomas Aquinas. And so, Thomas’ theology, at least if we move beyond the 21st century Baptists, with an eye towards the Post Reformed Orthodox theologians (like William Perkins et al.), is indeed intent on bringing many of Thomas’ theological themes into the development of their own respective projects as Federally Protestant theologians. In order to gain a better understanding on Thomas’ (and Anselm’s, as the case may be) doctrine of sin let us turn to RN Frost’s treatment of that in his book Richard Sibbes: God’s Spreading Goodness. Frost writes (at length):

Aquinas on privative sin

The first major proponent of privative sin in the medieval period is Anselm whose pioneering work was followed and developed by Aquinas. In a matter crucial to the development of the nomist tradition, Anselm based his doctrine on Augustine’s early doctrine of privatio rather than his post-Pelagian view. The implication picked up by Pelagius—that salvation requires a free act of the volition in choosing God—was assimilated roughly a century later by Aquinas.

Aquinas, as a student of Augustine, was apparently alert to Augustine’s shift on the issue of privatio: he attributed privatio to Anselm and a positive definition (sin as habitus) to Augustine. Aquinas, in fact, sought to synthesize the views of Augustine and Anselm through an analogy much like Augustine’s lost-food solution: “As in a bodily illness there is privation, in that the balance of health is upset, yet also something positive, the disturbed bodily humours, so also in original sin there is privation [privatione], the lack of original justice, yet along with this there are the disturbed powers of the soul.” In this explanation, however, he failed to adopt Augustine’s solution that grace is God’s presence in the elect by the Spirit. This followed Aquinas’s premise that human nature and divine being are wholly incommensurate—a topic taken up in the next chapter. Significantly, Aquinas believed that Adam’s original state of righteousness was not something natural to his humanity but a gift of supernatural grace (donum gratiæ):

Original righteousness [justitia originalis] was a definite gift of grace [donum gratiæ] divinely bestowed upon all human nature in the first parent, which, indeed, the first parent lost in the first sin. Hence even as that original righteousness would have been transmitted along with human nature to the offspring of the first parents, so the opposite disorder is in fact transmitted.”

Thus, subsequent sin in humanity resulted from an incapacity, the loss of Adam’s original righteousness that the donum gratiæ had maintained. Adam had squandered humanity’s golden opportunity by failing to guard his original righteousness.

Aquinas, in these discussions, located privatio within nature, viewing sin as the loss of a created quality. The symmetrical cure for sin, with sin defined as a privatio gratiæ, is a resupply of grace. To this end, Aquinas held that grace has dual aspects, one created and the other uncreated. This doublet allowed him to resolve the tension between original sin and actual sin. When Adam fell he lost the created grace of original righteousness. The implicit ground for his fall was an absence of uncreated grace that was needed because of his human mutability.

This two-stage arrangement assumed that morality is defined by the use of a free will to choose either good or evil. Thus it was God’s purpose to generate a vulnerability in Adam in order to test and affirm his morality. His failure was then transmitted to his progeny by the absence of original righteousness. Privatio, in this arrangement, was twofold: a lack of uncreated grace that led to, but did not compel, Adam’s fall; and a subsequent lack of created grace after the fall due to Adam’s loss of original righteousness. Adam was therefore culpable because of his own initiative in the fall. After the fall Adam’s progeny now lack the grace, both created and uncreated, necessary for righteousness. We are therefore helpless and God’s twin resources of grace are needed for salvation.

Among the Puritans these were points of conversation. Perkins adopted the Thomistic solution with its reliance on a duality of grace. He believed it offered the most coherent solution to the problem of sin when sin is defined as privatio. Sibbes, however, came to see sin as self-love even though he first held Perkins’ view. And with that he also took up Augustine’s view of grace as God’s relational bond to the elect.[1]

We can see the way Frost is arguing in regard to making a distinction between two Puritans, William Perkins and Richard Sibbes, respectively. For our purposes what stands out in this treatment is the development of Aquinas’ doctrine of sin (and grace), as Frost identifies an Anselmian (and Aristotelian, not explicitly referenced in this context) background to said doctrine. What is significant, to my mind, is how Aquinas, if Frost’s treatment is accurate, thought of grace to begin with. What was needed, in his frame, for salvation to obtain in an individual person, was created grace. But this notion, even while funded by the broader reality of an ‘uncreated’ grace, was thought of in qualitative or substantial terms. And so we end up with a necessary separation between the work of God in salvation, and the person of God. This occurs, in the Thomist sense, insofar that grace is not in fact the act of God’s person for the world in Jesus Christ. And that the person of Christ by the Spirit is not understood, then, as the basis of what grace is in itself (ontologically). So grace becomes, in a Thomist sense, something that the elect must manage or cooperate with in order to appropriate God’s salvation for them. And it can become a ‘thing’ that is dispensed through the Catholic mass, as the Eucharistic body is given to the faithful. Frost will argue that the Federal theology of someone like William Perkins retrieved this Thomist frame for thinking grace, and built it into his own style of Federal (Covenantal) theology. That this frame, indeed, funds the theology of the Westminster Confession of Faith in general.

But there is a better way to think grace, even as that is understood in an Augustinian key (as Frost also argues). Personally, I think the best way to think grace in a relational frame is to do so in an Athanasian key; that is, to think it as distinctively relational and personal. What is interesting about Frost’s work is that he develops that possibility from Augustine himself. TF Torrance believes that Augustine is guilty of what TFT calls the ‘Latin Heresy.’ That is a type of nascent dualism as Augustine thinks the work of God vis-à-vis the person of God. But this might be too hasty of a characterization by TFT. If Frost is right about Augustine, in regard to his relational and ‘affective’ understanding of grace, then what we have in Augustine, while still neo-Platonic (thus TF’s charge that Augustine is engaging in the ‘Latin heresy’), is the very type of personalist and ontological understanding of grace that TFT attributes exclusively to Athanasius (and the Nicene trad). In other words, maybe there was more availability in Augustine’s theology, in regard to an ontological and relational understanding of grace, than TFT gave Augustine credit for. Based on Frost’s work it would appear, in certain ways, that TFT may have been reading Augustine through the Thomist and Westminster reception rather than reading Augustine himself. If so, this would open the door for an Evangelical Calvinism to have a good basis for working not just with Athanasian themes, but also with Augustinian ones as well. An Evangelical Calvinism is more concerned with recovering the ‘reverend teaching’ than it is with the genealogy of said teaching, per se.

Either way, Thomas’ doctrine of sin, based on an Anselmian theme, is not commensurate with an Evangelical Calvinism. And so, we must continue to eschew a Thomism, a Federal or Westminster Calvinism, a classical Arminianism so on and so forth. Evangelical Calvinists are focused, along with Frost’s Augustine, with understanding God from God as immediately Self-revealed by the Holy Spirit in Jesus Christ. An Evangelical Calvinist thus cannot endorse a Thomist doctrine of sin, nor any other receptions of that as that is developed in juridical and commercial ways as primarily observed in the theology of the Post Reformed Orthodox Protestants.

[1] RN Frost, Richard Sibbes: God’s Spreading Goodness (Vancouver, WA: Cor Deo Press, 2012), 124-26 (based on Frost’s PhD dissertation written at King’s College, University of London, 1996).

Why Thomas Aquinas is Not the Protestant’s Savior: On His Doctrina of Grace

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Thomas Aquinas, the Angelic Doctor of the Roman Catholic church, is a Doctor of Theology located in the 13th century. When this is appreciated, things go better. If we could look at him, purely historically, this would be a better way. But instead, people, in particular, Protestant theologians are attempting to retrieve Aquinas’ theology, and the broader Thomist mantle in general, for what they see as a necessary corrective for the evangelical turn into heterodox and heretical positions in regard to doctrine and its subsequent praxis as it is applied to the daily lives of its adherents. But is Aquinas really the salve the evangelical Protestant churches need? Do we need to imbibe the theology of a Roman Catholic theologian with all of his thinking on nature/grace in tow? Just because certain Post Reformed orthodox theologians received Thomas’ theology, to varying degrees, in the ways they did, does this mean that evangelical Protestants ought to do this now?

My response to the above questions, of course, is a resounding and loud: No! Let me offer one reason, among many, why a Protestant Christian shouldn’t retrieve Thomas Aquinas’ theology in a positive way. Here we will hover, briefly, over Aquinas’ doctrine of grace, as that has been received in its Protestant Reformed orthodox dress (which, of course, is how many of the current Protestant theologians of retrieval are attempting to recover Aquinas’ broader lineaments for the churches). Richard Muller provides us with a good definition of this type of scholastic grace:

gratia: grace; in Greek, χάρις;  the gracious or benevolent disposition of God toward sinful mankind and, therefore, the divine operation by which the sinful heart and mind are regenerated and the continuing divine power or operation that cleanses, strengthens, and sanctifies the regenerate. The Protestant scholastics distinguish five actus gratiae,or actualizations of grace. (1) Gratia praeveniens, or prevenient grace, is the grace of the Holy Spirit bestowed upon sinners in and through the Word; it must precede repentance. (2) Gratia praeparens is the preparing grace, according to which the Spirit instills in the repentant sinner a full knowledge of his inability and also his desire to accept the promises of the gospel. This is the stage of the life of the sinners that can be termed the praeparatio ad conversionem (q.v.) and that the Lutheran orthodox characterize as a time of terrores conscientiae (q.v.). Both this preparation for conversion and the terrors of conscience draw directly upon the second use of the law, the usus paedagogicus (see usus legis). (3) Gratia operans, or operating grace, is the effective grace of conversion, according to which the Spirit regenerates the will, illuminates the mind, and imparts faith. Operating grace is, therefore, the grace of justification insofar as it creates in man the means, or medium, faith, through which we are justified by grace…. (4) Gratia cooperans, or cooperating grace, is the continuing grace of the Spirit, also termed gratia inhabitans, indwelling grace, which cooperates with and reinforces the regenerate will and intellect in sanctification. Gratia cooperans is the ground of all works and, insofar as it is a new capacity in the believer for the good, it can be called the habitus gratiae, or disposition of grace. Finally, some of the scholastics make a distinction between gratia cooperans and (5) gratia conservans, or conserving, preserving grace, according to which the Spirit enables the believer to persevere in faith. This latter distinction arises most probably out of the distinction between sanctificatio (q.v.) and perseverantia (q.v.) in the scholastic ordo salutis (q.v.), or order of salvation.[1]

In the above definition it is gratia operans which serves instructive for our purposes. Here, we have Thomas’ doctrine of ‘created grace,’ which is, as he writes: “Strictly speaking, a supervening quality is not so much in existence itself, as a way in which something else exists; and so grace is not created, but men are created in it, established in a new existence out of nothing, without earning it: Created in Christ Jesus in good works.”[2] For Aquinas there is an interconnectedness occurring in reality. Thus, what he attempts to say is that, analogically, grace is not a created quality because Christ is still the first cause from whom this grace comes. The new existence is equivalent (i.e. for Thomas) to the accident, while the “out of nothing” is equal to the “exist” (i.e. or essence) of man. As such, in the final analysis, grace ends up being a created quality which is externally implanted into humanity. In other words, for Aquinas, grace is not an essential aspect of what it means to be human, and as such is thought of in terms of a created quality, albeit one that comes through Christ, and which becomes, in its reception, our gratia operans, or ‘operating grace,’ by which the elect cooperates with God in the attainment of their salvation. It is this type of thinking that gets modulated by the Federal theologians, and incorporated into their covenantal schemata of salvation, as this is functional in their Covenant of Works/Grace framework.

I offer this up as one example of a serious problem for those, especially of Baptistic orientation, who would attempt to recover the theology of Thomas Aquinas as if a salve for the evangelical churches. Aquinas is a Roman Catholic theologian, and as such, his total program, as that follows from his theology proper, will be corollary with Roman Catholic dogma and what they consider to be sacra doctrina. These Protestants who are recovering Aquinas as a boon, have seemingly strayed from their commitment to the historically Protestant ‘Scripture Principle.’ Their only response to that charge is to claim that Thomas’ theology is corollary with the teachings of Holy Scripture. But then this begs the question: in what way is Thomas’ teaching on a doctrine of grace, in our example, corollary with the teachings of Holy Scripture (particularly as Protestant’s read it)?

 

[1] Richard A. Muller, Dictionary of Latin and Greek Theological Terms: Drawn Principally from Protestant Scholastics Theology (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Baker Book House, 1985), 129-30. [emboldening mine]

[2] St. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae A Concise Translation, ed. Timothy McDermott (Westiminster: Christian Classics, 1989), 313.

The Sermon on the Mount as the Postscript of the Covenant of Grace

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Covenant theology in confessional Reformational theology is its hermeneutical key. Karl Barth, a Reformed theologian, doesn’t stray from this key, but as is typical with Barth he reformulates Covenant (or Federal) theology such that Jesus Christ becomes the key, the regulative ground and condition of the covenant itself. Indeed, rather than operating with two aspects of the covenant—i.e., the covenant of works, covenant of grace—as classical Covenantal theology does, Barth retextualizes this framework by reducing the two covenants into one; viz. the covenant of grace. For Barth, the covenant of grace is the supralapsarian (before/above creation)/fall) basis, the inner reality of creation’s concrete expression, as God in pre-temporal reality pre-destined Himself to be for and with us in His election of our fallen humanity for Himself; and thus, as corollary, in this election we also, as humans, in Christ’s elect humanity, come to experience the exalted status of what it means to be human before God in the resurrection of Jesus Christ. This is God’s covenant of grace, His free election to be God with us, rather than against us; it is this election that has consequences not just for us, but as we have been called to be priests of creation from Christ’s priesthood, it has consequences for all of creation’s redemption and re-creation (cf. Rom. 8:18ff). But it is this framework that Barth reifies, this covenantal framework, and it becomes one conditioned not by a naked heilsgeschichte (‘salvation-history’) shaped by the abstract decretum abosolutum (absolute decree of predestination), but by the concrete reality of God’s inner-triune life that has freely been given for the world in Christ.

It is the aforementioned framing that Barth takes up in discussion on the Sermon on the Mount vis-à-vis the covenant of grace. There is a biblical specificity to the way Barth attempts to explicate theological reality, and the following is an example of that. It isn’t polemical, but a constructive way to think about the implications of the Incarnation and how that impacts the way we think all things biblical. If nothing else this ought to illustrate how Christological Interpretation of Scripture (CIS) looks, particularly as that gets fleshed out in a foundational way in regard to the way that Barth sees the promise/fulfillment motif in Jesus Christ as the grundaxiom of biblical and Christian reality. He writes:

The Sermon on the Mount, too, is primarily and decisively a notification, a proclamation, a description and a programme. Its imperatives, too, have primarily and decisively the character of indicating a position and laying a foundation. The position indicated and the foundation laid are the kingdom, Jesus, the new man. And these are not three things, but one and the same. The kingdom is the new man in Jesus. Jesus Himself is the kingdom of the new humanity. The new Adam is Jesus the Bringer and Herald of the kingdom. Proclaiming this threefold unity, the Sermon on the Mount proclaims the consummation of the covenant of grace, and therefore the telos of the Law and the Ten Commandments. It proclaims the position which in the Ten Commandments was determined and promised to Israel, but only determined and promised and not given. The Sermon on the Mount, like the New Testament as a whole, defines and describes it as something now given. If the Ten Commandments state where man may and should stand before and with God, the Sermon on the Mount declares that he has been really placed there by God’s own deed. If the Ten Commandments are a preface, the Sermon on the Mount is in a sense a postscript. The history of the covenant of grace has reached its goal and end. It does not continue in the history of the Church at whose beginning there stands the declarations of the Sermon on the Mount. For time does not continue after the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. It can only move away from this its centre—moving to its already appointed end. For its end is determined by the fact that it has been given this centre. The Church is the community of God in this time which moves away from this centre to its appointed and already invisible end. The covenant of grace as such has no further history in this time. The only question now is whether the Church will live or not live in the fulness of life already granted to it, in recognition or non-recognition, gratitude or ingratitude, in face of what God has finally and once for all accomplished for man, in the freedom which God has decisively accorded to man, or the bondage from which he has been finally and conclusively released, and which has now become a complete anachronism. The Sermon on the Mount, as a postscript, as a document of the completed covenant of grace and its concluded history, defines and describes the freedom which is given to the people of God in its new form as the Church, and which is to be proclaimed by the Church to the whole world.[1]

For Barth (and I’d suggest for the Apostle Paul) Christ is the new creation (cf. II Cor. 5:17). This isn’t an abstract notion we have been called simply to affirm, but a concrete reality to be understood and lived from. This is what we see Barth explicating in his exegesis of the Sermon on the Mount. Here Barth is engaging in a canonical exegesis, he is using the Pauline motif of new creation, within a Christological frame, to interpret the dominical teaching of Jesus deposited in the Sermon on the Mount. When Barth refers to the Sermon on the Mount as a postscript, he, in context is referring to the promise of the protoevangelium (Gen. 3:15). He is thinking in terms of his teaching on new time, in corollary with Christ in His humanity as the new creation. It is God’s choice, prior to the foundation of the world, to be for and with us in Christ, as the inner reality of all reality, that is finally consummated for Barth in the death, burial, resurrection and ascension of Jesus Christ. As such insofar that creation has Christ as its telos (purpose), as its res, all time has been brought to its end; that is in the sense that it has finally come into its glorified intention. For Barth, eternity and time are not in competition, but in fact the former, in God’s election in Christ, is the latter’s basis. It is this basis, the new time founded in the new creation of Christ’s resurrection and ascension that God’s community of people, the Church, finds their reality. As such we no longer are scrapping out an existence under the old strictures, only looking forward to the kingdom of God coming, instead we are now living in the reality that the kingdom has indeed already come, and yet will finally come in consummate form. But it is this consummate form that Barth wants us to press into and live from as if it is already the reality; this is the new time of the kingdom, and the center of all reality, as such. The Sermon on the Mount is the postscript insofar that its reality, as a summary of all the Law and Prophets as now fulfilled in Jesus Christ, is indeed indicating the finality of Kingdom Come!  

[1] Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics II/2 §36-39 [688] The Doctrine of God: Study Edition (London: T&T Clark, 2009), 175.

The Depersonalization of God’s Grace by the Thomists Reformed and others

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What they aren’t telling you is that when you receive Aristotelian Christianity, when you recover Thomist theology, particularly in the Protestant Reformed scholastic flavor, for our purposes, you’re getting a doctrine of grace, and thus God, that thinks grace as a quality, a substance. Grace is depersonalized in this frame, as such the person of Christ is ruptured from the work of Christ allowing for a ‘natural’ space to obtain within a God-world relation. This is the combine of ‘grace perfecting nature’ ‘revelation perfecting reason.’ This is what the scholastic Reformed are pushing onto the “unbeknowing” masses, particularly the younger crowd out there (millennial and younger). I see this all day and all night long on theological social media. Young guys (mostly) and gals eating the doctors’ stuff up on the retrieval of Post Reformed orthodox theology, it is “Thomist,” it is unabashedly Aristotelian by way of formal and material categorization; in other words, it isn’t inherently or even incidentally ‘biblical’ in its offering—it is intentionally philosophical and speculative instead, exactly in contraposition from revelational reality. In this frame, God is a monad, actus purus (pure being), an unmoved substance who relates to the world through an impersonal decretum absolutum (absolute decree) within a substance metaphysical frame. When God is separated from His work in a God-world relation, when grace is no longer inherently God for the world in Christ, but a created quality, a created grace detached from God and located in the humanity’s ‘accidental’ life, whereby their ‘partially fallen’ bodies are ‘enabled’ to cooperate with God through this created grace, through this new habitus (disposition) ‘to be able’ to be for God, this does horrific things to a Christology (which I’ve written of elsewhere). Here is what Helmut Thielicke has to say on these matters:

We would turn now to the process of depersonalization which is initiated the moment grace is ontically separated from God, in order to set it forth with utter precision n the following propositions. In the first place, the grace of God in the Roman Catholic view is impersonal, not merely because as an effectus it has certain autonomy in respect of its author, and not only because as the bearer of a human or material habitus it can become the attribute of an entity which is not God, but primarily because in the theological system as a whole—we are thinking here of Thomas [Aquinas]—it is conceived as being in a measure present even “prior” to God. For the system of nature and supernature derives ultimately from the fact that Aristotelian ontology has taken over. Its antithesis between form and matter (εἶδος and ὕλη) precedes all Christian content. Indeed it provides the framework into which the Christian content is fitted. One might even say, it is discovered to be the most suitable container for that Christian content.

Only thus can we explain how it is possible to enunciate a doctrine of nature and supernature in the form of an ontological construction almost without making any reference to the fall. For it nature and supernature are already there as given factors, the fall can at most be only a disruption in the “inner workings” of this system. It can involve only a “dislocation,” a dislocation in the form of subtraction comparable to the dislocation in the form of addition which we noted in connection with redemption. With these given factors presupposed, theological thinking can never be constitutively determined by “events,” by the contingent historicity of the fall and of redemption in Jesus Christ. It can never be determined by events which, by virtue of their contingency, must always transcend any system we may devise for trying to grasp them. If the system itself is to some extent already given, then the events must be fitted into it. They can only be, as it were, illustrations of an ontic order, and of a history of the world, of salvation, and of judgment which is constituted by this ontic order, a history which may thus in its basic tendencies be understood a priori, in the manner in which the “pagan” Aristotle understood it.

Personalistic thinking rests on contingency. For it relates to personal “events,” eg, to man’s decision at the fall, or to God’s decision to give his only Son (John 3:16). Resolves of this kind are matters of the will. They cannot be postulated. They can be known only a posteriori. They can only be attested. Ontological thinking, on the contrary, rests on regularity, a regularity which is supposed to include personal events. This regularity, e.g., the mutual flowing together of pure form and matter which underlies Aristotelian ontology, is understandable a priori. This is why there has to be, and in fact is, a proof of God in Roman Catholic theology. A clear example of this ability to postulate is the typical ontological attempt of Anselm to answer with logical stringency the question: Cur Deus homo?1

I have been banging this same drum, the material engaged with in this post through Thielicke, since I started theoblogging in 2005. It has NEVER been engaged with in the literature, by those who have interacted with our books, or online in the theoblogosphere, or elsewhere. The only response, beyond crickets, that I have received is by way of assertion: i.e. “Post Reformed orthodoxy IS NOT based in an impersonal substance metaphysics.” The problem is that it is, and demonstrably so as Thielicke, Barth, Torrance[s], Ron Frost, myself and others have now shown over and over again! But we are up against a theological Deus ex machina known as Post Reformed orthodoxy. Its proponents keep reassuring its would-be elect that it represents the orthodox and genuine iteration of catholic Christianity; that it isn’t a variant, or even a duplication of Roman Catholic theology, that it is in fact the “golden chaine” of post-Nicene theological development.

But if God isn’t personally grace for us in Jesus Christ, and for the Thomists He is not, then there is ultimately no hope! Under this framework wherein grace is ruptured from God, Jesus enters the world under the conditions of a decree framed by a doctrine of grace that is definitionally disconnected from the giver of grace; as such, in the incarnation the Logos ensarkos the Son of God becomes a predicate of creation, and insofar that Chalcedonian Christology affirms the inseparably between God and humanity (without admixture) in the singular person of Jesus Christ, insofar as the an/ -enhypostasis is the case in regard to the personhood of Jesus, God becomes a predicate of His own creation in the incarnation. The decretum absolutum makes God’s life contingent upon His own creation even whilst it is attempting to keep Him ‘Simple’ and untouched by His creation; this is quite the conundrum!

 

1 Helmut Thielicke, Theological Ethics: Foundations (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1966), 242-43.