Читать книгу The Christian’s Highest Good - Douglas Vickers - Страница 6

Nothing, in the context of cultural critique, impresses the mind more firmly than what is observable as the crippled search for meaning and authority. Criteria of knowledge, belief, and behavior are fractured. A half-millennium of comfortable confidence in the competence of human reason has dissipated. Its once assured modernity has transmuted into a postmodernism that is unsure of its direction, its internal coherence, and its capacity for the projection of truth. For the reality is that the ethos of the age has bogged us in a directionless individualism. There are no absolutes now, apart, perhaps, from the recognition of the trick that logic plays on us; the only absolute that has any currency and permits no denial is that there are no absolutes. That is the pointlessness of our time. What, therefore, it is urgent to ask, has the Christian church, or Christian men who have been called into the church, to say to the world at large? Is any meaning yet to be culled from the old pages of divine revelation, or are the claims that the church might once have made no longer accessible to recapture, recognition, or relevance?

We may ask a different question. What does it mean to be a Christian in our time? And how do the claims of Christianity stand against the contemporary complex of thought? Our answers will insist on the continued relevance of the classic Christian confession and will contemplate what our title has envisaged as the Christian’s highest good. But in order to cast our discussion in adequate light it is necessary to reflect on two primary issues. First, what is to be said of the emergence in the history of thought of the virtually pervasive assumption of the competence and sovereignty of reason in the search for meaning; and how, if at all, has that influenced or infected the church’s theology and doctrine? In other words, how has the elevation of the assumed competence of human reason and will diminished the biblical declaration of divine grace? Second, in what ways, as a result, have errant theologies advanced their claims and competed for attention and in doing so influenced the pulpit and troubled the pew?

Our objective in this chapter is to sketch briefly, first, some principal philosophic trends, and secondly their theological influence, that have brought us to our present malaise. We aim thereby to establish reference points against which the meaning of the Christian life and the place of the Christian in the world can be more readily established.

Reason and Autonomy

Philosophy has surrendered its search for answers to big questions, God is no longer a presupposition that orders investigative inquiry, and the smallness of our thought has sprung from the same assumption that Protagoras, the early Greek philosopher, advanced in his dictum that “Man is the measure of all things.”1 Alexander Pope, the eighteenth century poet, took up the strain in his philosophic poem, Essay on Man, where he concludes with the proposition: “Presume not God to scan; the proper study of mankind is man.”2 The absorption of thought with the preeminence of man, with the ultimate explanatory significance of man, had, of course, an earlier revival. At the beginning of what is generally referred to as modern philosophy, Descartes had shunted thought onto an anthropocentric track in the conclusion of his search for a “clear and distinct idea.” He found that clarity in his awareness of his own identity and cognitive capacity. That, for him, was encapsulated in his familiar conclusion that “I think, therefore I am.”3 On the basis of that, and in “the innate knowledge of Descartes . . . based on the idea of the autonomy of man,”4 the assumption of the ultimate explanatory competence of man was firmly established. Van Til summed up the outcome in his observation that “the essence of the non-Christian position is that man is assumed to be ultimate or autonomous. Man is thought to be the final reference point in predication.”5

In the seventeenth century, after the long medieval struggles and the seeming somnolence under ecclesiastical authority, after the partial release from the intellectual and cultural imperatives of the church that came with the Renaissance, and after the Reformation rediscovery of the sovereignty of God and the reality of the Creator-creature distinction, a remarkable twofold development occurred. On the one hand there was a consolidation in British and European thought of the systematic statement of biblical doctrine that the new breath of Christianity bequeathed; and on the other hand the century witnessed the birth, as has been said, of a new trend in an anthropocentric orientation of thought.

That latter trend reached definitive articulation in the philosophy of Immanuel Kant at the end of the so-called eighteenth-century Enlightenment, which advanced a new conception on the level of epistemology or the theories of knowledge or of what and how we know. In that, Kant stood definitively for the autonomy of man. Or to put it differently, he stood for the autonomy of theoretical thought. That followed from the way in which, combining elements of the rationalism that Descartes had fathered and the empiricism of Locke and the British philosophers that preceded him, he reached the conclusion that the individual was autonomous and sovereign in the search for knowledge. That was because what was knowable was not, as Kant understood it, objective reality as such (Kant’s ding an sich), but the perceptions of that reality as they were interpretable by certain “categories” existent in the individual human mind. In effect, that is, each individual knower constructed his or her own reality by the manner in which those individual categories of mind brought their interpretative influence to bear on external objects of knowledge. The categories inherent in the human mind, then, impress meaning on external reality.6 Leaving aside Kant’s more detailed argument, it had then become imperative philosophic dicta that man was autonomous and sovereign in knowledge. In essence, that was the meaning of what Kant advanced as his “Copernican revolution” in the theory of knowledge.

It became all too true that so far as assumedly cultured thought was concerned, “all roads lead to Kant.” The shadow of Kant has been cast very long and has had determinative influence on theological thought ever since and up to the present day. It is true that at the so-called beginning of modern theology at the hands of Schleiermacher in the early nineteenth century, an attempt was made to rebel against the intellectual strictures of the Kantian system of thought. But Schleiermacher simply proposed the autonomy and sovereignty of man in a different guise. For him, Christian theology was properly characterized by a new subjectivism, thereby again orienting its thought on the assumed autonomy of man, in the development of what became referred to as man’s feeling of absolute dependence on God.7 At that time, consistent with the impulse to thought that the new subjectivism bequeathed, the grand objectivities of the Christian revelation, the being and will and purposes of God, the reality of human sin, and the categories of redemption by the coming into the world of the Second Person of the Godhead in the Person of Jesus Christ, were submerged. Again the individual person was sovereign and autonomous.

But because the escape from Kant was ineffective and abortive, Kantian conclusions have been determinative in Christian thought in a further damaging respect. For Kant, as we have observed, what was knowable in the world of fact was what it was, or what it became, by reason of the interpretation of it by the sovereignty of the human mind, by the so-called categories of mind. But that was not all that was implied. For Kant, the only objects of knowledge were what was observable, or more particularly the impressions or perceptions of what was observable, in the actual world of empirical fact. That world, Kant denominated the “phenomenal realm,” and only what existed in the phenomenal realm was, in the sense that has been indicated, knowable. Objects of knowledge were confined to the empirical realm. Beyond the phenomena thus observable, things and entities as they were in themselves (the ding an sich) were beyond the reach of knowledge. Only the impressions that they generated were knowable. But further, beyond Kant’s phenomenal realm there existed what he referred to as the “noumenal realm” in which objects may exist but were not in themselves knowable.

In that important connection, it is sufficient for our present purposes to observe that for Kant, God was consigned to the noumenal realm and was therefore unknowable. God may exist. Or he may not. Kant insisted that no adequate proof of the existence of God could be stated, and he somewhat gallantly concluded that while, then, it could not be definitively stated that God existed, by the same token it could not be definitively stated that he did not exist. There was no way to know. For Kant, God was not an element of the knowable, or a subject of what he called “pure reason,” but an assumption of “practical reason.”8 Kant said that he “abolished knowledge to make room for faith.”9 But his “faith,” of course, had no correspondence at all with the faith that the sovereign grace of God imparts to an individual and which stands, as a result, as the instrumental cause of salvation.10 We shall return to the point.

It is not necessary for our present purposes to follow all the ways in which the assumption of human autonomy and the elevation to primary determinative status of the introspective individual worked out their effects in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. We observe that in doing so they further infected Christian theology. Nineteenth-century positivism, early twentieth-century existentialism, the negativism in thought that gave birth to the later “God is dead” theology that revived the thought of the nineteenth-century philosopher Nietzsche, and the now somewhat aborted postmodernism, all exerted their influences.11 But above it all, the upshot of the on-going influence of the Kantian consolidation of the postulate of human autonomy remained. The result was that the fact and the doctrine of the being and sovereignty of God, the revealed attributes and character of God, the declared salvific purposes of his will, and the true standing of man before and in the sight of God, have been substantially evacuated from theological thought.

The Christian, Christianity, and the Church

Our objective in the chapters that follow is to examine at some length two principal questions, the answers to which throw light on the identity and status of the Christian person, the status and meaning of Christianity in the present social and intellectual complex, and the state, responsibility, current health, and prospects of the church. First, bringing into focus the coming into this world of the Second Person of the Godhead to become Jesus Christ, what is to be understood as the reasons for his coming, taking up in that question the revealed identity of the Lord Jesus Christ himself? And second, what, in the light of that, is to be understood as the privileges that accrue to the Christian person who, by the sovereign grace of God, is called into the body of the church of which Jesus Christ is the head?

Reason exists to believe, it must be confessed at the outset, that the Christian mind, particularly as it reflects on the deposit of truth that has come down from the Reformation rediscovery and rearticulation of biblical doctrine, holds the relevant truths only uncertainly at this time. The Christian church is seemingly unaware of its true identity, and its message and witness to the world is, as a result, muted and indistinct. What, in short, has the church to say to the world and to its decaying twenty-first-century culture? Who speaks for the church, and how does, or should, the church speak to the issues of morality that appear at this time in clear confusion? Is there, in fact, any clear demarcating line between the culture of the church and the culture of the world? Does the church possess a cogent or coherent evangel to announce? And as it follows from such questions, what is to be said of the place of the Christian individual in both the church and the world? And what are the privileges and prospects before him?

It would be a gross and unconscionable mistake, of course, to suggest or conclude that the evangel that the church has historically held in true biblical proportion nowhere comes to expression at the present time. Quite to the contrary, instances of Reformed-evangelical Christianity in true biblical character are readily identifiable. Institutions of sound Reformed theological education have come into existence and continue to bear biblical witness. Heavy volumes of biblical exposition and helpful treatises on theological loci and the progressive Christian life have appeared, to the undoubted benefit of the church and the Christian believer. The republication of highly valuable works from older times has added weight to the confession of the church and the culture of Christian confessors. Valuable monographs on aspects of Christian doctrine have appeared.

Our task at present is in no sense to diminish the considerable value of the considerable good that exists for the searching in the contemporary church, its agencies, and its centers of scholarship. But therein lies the problem that motivates our present concern. In too many instances, there is reason to conclude, the influence of the philosophico-intellectual issues and forces we have already identified have appeared to tarnish both the scholarship and the witness of the church. Our task in what follows is not that of providing an extensive critique of the sources and influences of theological problems that have infected the well-being and doctrines of the church. We write in a much more modest vein. But at the risk of incompleteness and insufficient clarification, some of the more prominent deleterious preoccupations of recent Christian theology can be identified.

What is to be said, for example, of the sovereignty, the purposes, and the knowledge of God, and, as a result, of the divine participation in human affairs? What, after all, does God know, and how, if at all, is that knowledge relevant to human history and development? The recently fashionable theology of the so-called Open Theism addresses the question. That system of thought, advanced, no doubt, in sincerity by Christian theologians, denies the omniscience of God in a singularly dangerous respect. In brief, the Open Theism argues that of course God is omniscient. But the meaning imported to omniscience is not that of historic Christianity. It is contained in the statement that God is omniscient in the restrictive sense that he knows all that is available to be known. The significance of that proviso, as it is understood by the Open Theism theology, is that the future has not yet eventuated and is not therefore available to be known, and God, therefore, does not know the future. It is not necessary to argue at length the respects in which such a theology has destroyed the very godness of God, in that it constitutes a flat denial of God’s sovereign will and purpose, his omniscience and omnipotent power by which, as the letter to the Ephesians has it, he “worketh all things after the counsel of his own will” (Eph 1:11).12

To the contrary, a Christian theology that is grounded in God’s self-revelation and in the biblical data that conveys the revelation of his will and purpose holds securely to the eternal necessity of God, meaning that he is in his being not dependent on any cause external to himself, and to the sovereignty of his own will. There is no entity, event, or possibility external to the Godhead on which, or in relation to which, God is, or could have been, dependent. If the contrary were true, God would not be the God of the Scriptures. He would be, in one sense or another, a god made in the image of man’s imagination.

Other thought systems that, in one way or another, have twisted and corrupted the biblical truths on which the Church’s theology has been historically founded have also infected the witness of the church. In more recent times a so-called New Perspective on Paul has argued for a reconstruction of the entire covenantal theology that the church has historically held. The New Perspective argues that the historically received traditions of Pauline theology have misunderstood and misrepresented what the apostle had set out to say. It has proposed a radically different view of the covenantal theology that has traditionally been derived from the Pauline writings. The essential argument proceeds in the following terms. By God’s grace, it is said, a certain people, Israel of old, were assumed to be members of God’s saving covenant, though the grounds on which that assumption came to effect are not clearly stated. But the upshot of the New Perspective system is that once having been assumed into the covenant, individuals maintained their status and remained within the covenant by their observance of, and adherence to, certain so-called identity or boundary markers and their obedience to what they interpreted as the law and commandments of God. Those boundary markers included, for the Jews, circumcision, certain food laws, and Sabbath-keeping. Beyond that, it is argued that the apostle Paul’s problem was that of convincing the Jews that the Gentiles should be admitted to the kingdom without subscription to, and obedience to, those Jewish identity or boundary markers. That, of course, is a far cry from what is to be understood as the Pauline doctrine of justification and its place in the larger conspectus of covenantal theology. We shall return to that in due course.

But other aspects of the New Perspective theology deserve brief notice. It was claimed, for example, that the righteousness of God was to be understood as God’s faithfulness to his covenantal promises. N. T. Wright claims that “For a reader of the Septuagint . . . ‘the righteousness of God’ would have one obvious meaning: God’s own faithfulness to his promises, to the covenant.”13 The faithfulness of God in that respect is, of course, beyond doubt. But when, in the New Perspective’s construction of the meaning and significance of the covenant, such an interpretation is carried over as the sole meaning relevant to Paul’s theology, it avoids and misrepresents completely the meaning of God’s righteousness as portrayed in the Pauline vocabulary and doctrine. At the most elemental level, and beyond addressing what is to be regarded as God’s essential righteousness or the righteousness implicit in the conformity of all of his actions to the dictates of his own essential holiness, the righteousness of God rests in the conveyance of his righteousness to the repentant sinner who comes to him in saving faith. The sinner is thereby made the beneficiary of the imputation to him of the substitutionary forensic righteousness of Christ. The fatal flaw, the rejection of the fact and doctrine of imputation, is clear in Wright’s following argument: “If we use the language of the law court, it makes no sense whatever to say that the judge imputes, imparts, bequeaths, conveys or otherwise transfers his righteousness to either the plaintiff or the defen­dant. Righteousness is not an object, a substance or a gas which can be passed across the courtroom. . . . To imagine the defendant somehow receiving the judge’s righteousness is simply a category mistake. That is not the way language works.”14

The New Perspective on Paul is a revival of old heresies that are calculated to betray the entire doctrine of the church as that addresses the justification of man in the sight of God. Adequate literature on the highly important controversies that arose from the New Perspective on Paul is readily available.15 Our intention at this point is simply to illustrate that in that errant theological system the biblical theology of the church has again been brought under attack, and to the extent that well-meaning theologians are captured by it, the witness of the church has in recent times been diminished.

The doctrine of the church has been further brought under attack in recent times by the emergence of a so-called Federal Vision theology. A principal issue in this thought system, and a point at which its divergence from historic Christianity is prominent, has to do again with an erroneous interpretation of the meaning of the salvific covenant between God and man. It is sufficient for our present purposes to confine comment to one essential point from among many that are discussed in the literature referred to below. It has to do with what is to be understood as the significance of the church’s sacrament of baptism and its relation to the meaning of God’s covenant.

By the administration of the sacrament of baptism, it is claimed by the Federal Vision theology, one is admitted to covenant membership in the fullest sense and one is thereby joined in union to Christ. Now the high doctrine of the Christian believer’s union with Christ is to be carefully guarded, and that union conveys to the Christian the highest privilege that admission to the kingdom of God implies. It provides the foundation, the entry point, to the fellowship with the Father of which the apostle John, for example, speaks at great length in his first epistle. But it is precisely at that point that the Federal Vision theology has had a seriously corrupting influence.

A prominent proponent, Rich Lusk, crystallizes the issue in his summary statement that “In baptism we are brought covenantally and publicly out of union with Adam and into union with Christ. When this occurs, one is ‘born again,’ not in the sense we have come to speak of regeneration . . . but in the covenantal sense of being brought out of Adam’s family into God’s family. . . . In this relationship, one has, in principle, all the blessings in the heavenly places delivered over to him as he is ‘in Christ.’”16 That formulation, and the confusion regarding the covenant that it carries with it, might appear to be rescued by the words “not in the sense we have come to speak of regeneration.” But what Lusk has done is to point up the very difficulties of the Federal Vision theology at that point. For on the one hand the Federal Vision theology argues that by baptism one is joined to Christ in the fullest sense and meaning of that privilege, and at the same time it is said that one may subsequently fall away from and surrender the benefits and privileges that were previously enjoyed. Lusk himself goes on to make the point. He says that “these blessings [are] considered from the standpoint of the covenant rather than the eternal decree, [and] are mutable.”17 But what is thereby proposed is that what is “mutable” are, in fact, the highest benefits that baptism at first conferred, namely nothing less than union with Christ. The theological problem thereby brought to the surface is the attempt to draw a distinction between, as Lusk has stated it, the grace of regeneration on the one hand and the reality of union with Christ within the terms of the covenant of grace on the other. For union with Christ, in the full sense that the Federal Vision theology in one breath claims, and “all the blessings in the heavenly places delivered over to him as he is ‘in Christ’” are, as the Scriptures present it, precisely what is conferred by the conveyance to an individual of the Holy Spirit’s grace of regeneration.

More extensive reference to Federal Vision texts confirms that in similar ways baptism is understood to confer on the one who is the subject of the ordinance the highest reality of union with Christ. But at the same time, the Federal Vision theology envisages one’s possible apostasy from that high position. Douglas Wilson, for example, expands the confusion when he raises the question of what he refers to as “reprobate” individuals who have received the benefits of baptism: “Baptism is covenantally efficacious. It brings every person baptized into an objective and living covenant relationship with Christ, whether the baptized person is elect or reprobate. Baptism is always to be taken by the one baptized as a sign and seal of his ingrafting into Christ. If the person is reprobate, he will be cut out of the vine . . .”18 The doctrinal problem in Wilson’s argument is highly significant. It is recognizable on two levels. First, that highly questionable teaching claims that the “seal” implicit in baptism has been understood to have been conveyed to the reprobate person. Second, when, at a later time, the reprobate person has been “cut out of the vine,” it is from that high status of having been “sealed” into “living relationship with Christ,” sealed not merely into a notional relationship but, as Wilson claims, a “living” relationship, that the “cutting out of the vine” occurs.19

Errant theologies beyond those to which we have drawn attention trouble the church and call in question the integrity of its evangel. It is argued by some that Christian subscription automatically, but in respects that cannot be clearly defined, endows the believer with material prosperity. The spirituality of the kingdom of Christ is diminished, and the world with its persuasions and predilections is invited into the church and given, it would seem, gaping accommodation. In newly emerging churches new fashions of thought and worship are more readily identifiable with contemporary postmodern culture than with the historic gospel.20 In short, in more instances and in more ecclesiastical communions than need to be identified at length, the reduction of the biblical gospel is due to the fact that the view of Christ and his redemptive accomplishment is too low because the view of man is too high.

There is substantial reason to conclude that the new theologies being proposed to the church would take it far outside the limits of its classic and historic confessional standards. In doing so, those theologies are aimed to puncture the church’s confessional reliance on the biblical revelation on which its stance has hitherto been based. It is therefore extremely difficult to understand the manner in which certain confessionally Reformed churches have at the present time permitted to remain within their credentialed communities those whose professed alliance is with one or the other of the errant theologies we have briefly noted.

A Preliminary Summing Up

The preceding discussion has established two reference points whose significance will throw their light on what follows. First, it becomes clear from even a less than complete survey of the history of opinion that the assumption of the autonomy of man, the assumption of the explanatory competence of unaided human reason, has been accorded determining status in the explanation of affairs and conditions in the world. And further, that assumption of autonomy has affected and infected the theology of the church. Second, the struggle for the preservation of the church’s theology is not only set against the thought forms and pressures of the world in the respects just implied, but also against tendencies to errant doctrinal formulation within the church itself. The negative influence of the assumption of human autonomy and the impact, as a result, on the church’s theology can be illustrated in a respect in which the testimony of the church has been severely tarnished in the present time.

Consider, for the moment, the respect in which that assumption of human autonomy, or, again, the postulate of the primacy of the human intellect, has come to expression in the doctrines of the church. Reflect, that is, on the competence of the mind as it exists in the human state characterized by the post-Adamic and fallen condition. An important debate directed to precisely that condition occurred in the fourth century between the great Augustine and a Celtic monk named Pelagius. The outcome of the Augustinian-Pelagian controversy determined important aspects of subsequent orthodox theological doctrine relating to sin and salvation. Pelagius, in short, argued that Adam’s fall did not convey to his posterity any disability in the faculties of soul, and that after the fall men were in precisely the same state as to their competence of will as they had enjoyed in their initial created state. The will was free to turn to God or not to turn to God at any time, it was claimed. It was the duty of man to obey God, and he was both obliged and free to do so. He should obey God, and if he chose to do so he could.

The Roman Catholic doctrine took up and consolidated the essence of the Pelagian scheme. But it can be said to be “Semi-Pelagian” in the following respect. Pelagius had said, in effect, that as to the faculties of soul, man in his postlapsarian state was perfectly healthy. The medieval theology that followed him said, to the contrary, not that man was completely healthy but that he was sick and in need of assistance. Man, that is, needed the assistance of the grace of God in his move towards repentance and faith, but he was well enough to cooperate with divine grace as it was made available to him. Grace, that is, was congruent with man’s own effort and merit. The Reformers, to the complete contrary, argued not that man was sick and in need of the help of the grace of God, but that, as the Scriptures declare, as to his faculties of soul and his competence to know God he was dead; he was “dead in trespasses and sins” (Eph 2:1). His renewal unto life was therefore due completely and sovereignly to the unmerited grace of God.

It is worthy of note that the debate between Pelagius and Augustine, where the latter stood for the biblical orthodoxy, was repeated in the sixteenth century in a corresponding argument between Calvin, the great systematizing theologian and exegete of the Reformation, and a Roman Catholic scholar named Albert Pighius. It was repeated again at the Synod of Dort in the early seventeenth century when the Remonstrant theology of Arminius and his followers, which had arisen in a semi-Pelagian form, was rejected.21 On the level of evangelism it recurred again in the eighteenth century when the Reformed theology of George Whitefield was set against the semi-Pelagianism of John Wesley and the Methodist movement he founded. And it is unfortunately true that semi-Pelagianism has been formative of much of the theology of the present-day evangelical church.

The matter of the sovereignty of the grace of God in salvation can be put in other terms. Salvation, we may say, is not an autosoterism, nor a synergism, but to the glory of the grace of God it is a divine monergism. We define the terms briefly as follows. “Autosoterism” means essentially “self-salvation,” or salvation that is achieved by one’s completely unaided efforts, by one’s own design and implementation. It means that in one way or another man saves himself. If one were to hold to the pure Pelagian theory and if, therefore, he insisted that he needed no outside help at all towards salvation, he would be claiming the complete efficiency and effectiveness of a system of autosoterism. “Synergism,” on the other hand, means that a cooperation of some form of outside help is necessary to salvation. Semi-Pelagianism, with its notion of congruent grace, is a form of synergism. To the extent that the present-day evangelical church holds to forms of cooperation between man and God in salvation, it propagates some form or other of synergism. That most usually comes to expression in contemporary evangelicalism through its insistence, against biblical argument to the contrary, on the freedom of human will. The relevant doctrinal issues will be discussed more fully in the following chapters.

Some theologians and commentators who have held to the necessity of the grace of God in the movement of the soul to salvation have in several ways, and in semi-Pelagian form, oriented their argument on the concept of the cooperation of man with divine grace. The following example will illustrate the kinds of difficulties involved in such doctrinal formation. There has occurred an “emphasis upon both the initiating power of God’s grace and the need for willing cooperation with it.”22 As to the efficiency of the human will in its fallen state, it is said that while “our own wills [do not] contribute anything towards the attainment of eternal life . . . they have a kind of negative veto which can obstruct the work of salvation.”23 The concept of that negative veto is to be recognized carefully. For it is said in such theologies that “our only capacity for making a contribution to our spiritual renewal is the capacity to say yes or no to what is divinely initiated.”24 There is a “malaise of the fallen human condition” for which there is “no non-Christian remedy.”25 But it appears, in the semi-Pelagian schemes we are currently noting, that the best to be said about the human contribution to righting the condition of things is that “disciplines have to be imposed on the appetites and desires” leading the individual astray, such that the grace of God is inhibited from intervening in the soul in a manner necessary to salvation.26 In something of an apparent contradiction, the author whose conclusion we have just referred to also observes that “Whatever else being saved may involve, it can never possibly put you in the position of being able to tell God his business.”27 But the damage has already been done. For the previously claimed ability of the will to say yes or no to the grace of God has already “told God his business.”

All such theological inventions as these deny in one way or another the sovereignty and the irresistibility of the grace of God. If, however, it is held, consistently with the expansive testimony of the Scriptures, that salvation is by the grace of God alone, then it is held that salvation is a divine monergism. “Monergism” means that only one efficient cause is operative in, and solely capable of bringing to effect, the objective of salvation. The doctrine of salvation that came down to us from the theology of the Reformation is unambiguously monergistic. The argument as to why that is so will be seen to lie at the heart of the scriptural statement of the status of man in his fallen and sinful state and the remedy in the substitutionary work of Christ that God has addressed to it.

The Way Ahead

The testimony of the church to the world at large rests essentially in the gospel of salvation. That gospel states that in the predeterminate council of the Godhead before the foundation of the world a Covenant of Redemption was formed, the substance of which was that redemptive offices were assumed by the respective Persons of the Godhead. The Second Person of the Godhead would come into the world to become Jesus Christ, taking a true human nature in body and soul, with all the faculties of human soul, into union with his divine nature. In that human nature he would, by his sinless life and substitutionary death, redeem those whom the Father had given to him for that purpose. The Holy Spirit undertook to call to Christ and apply to those for whom Christ died the gifts and benefits he purchased for them, to complete within them the sanctification to which they were designed by eternal decree, and to conduct them to glory. To bring to full effect the designs and objectives of that Covenant of Redemption a Covenant of Grace that guaranteed the fulfillment of God’s promise of redemption was formed and instituted, the parties to which were God on the one hand and his chosen people as represented by Christ on the other. The more expansive meaning and implications of the gospel of God’s grace will engage us in the chapters that follow. The essence of what remains to be addressed has to do with the ways in which, in the providence of God, the terms of his eternal decrees have been worked out in historic fact. That calls for a discussion of the consequent relations between God and man, having regard to the true status and competence or otherwise of man, and the realization and full expression of the benefits that Christian salvation implies and involves.

In short, if the biblical integrity of the gospel is to be preserved and maintained in the witness of the church, the critical questions that demand answer are “Who, in fact, was Jesus Christ?” and “Why did Jesus Christ come into the world?” Then if those who are the beneficiaries of the redemptive acts of Christ are in fact joined in union to him, what are the highest blessings and privileges that union carries with it?

We turn immediately in the following chapter to the first of those questions.

1. Protagoras’s (480–410 BC) statement has been understood as “indicative of his relativism which ultimately rests upon his theory of perception according to which we know only what we perceive but not the thing perceived,” Fishler, in Runes, Dictionary of Philosophy, 257. To that extent, Protagoras stands as an anticipator of the epistemological theory of Immanuel Kant to which we shall refer below, particularly the latter’s claim that no knowledge of the ding an sich, the thing itself, is possible, that having been consigned by Kant to his so-called noumenal realm.

2. Pope, Essay on Man, 770.

3. Descartes, Discourse on Method. His “cogito, ergo sum,” “I think, therefore I am,” appears in Part IV of the Discourse.

4. Van Til, Defense of the Faith, 172. Van Til later referred to his own system of thought as set “over against the man-centered view of men like Plato, Aristotle, Descartes, Locke, Leibnitz, Kant, etc.,” in Geehan, Jerusalem and Athens, 125.

5. Van Til, Christian Theory of Knowledge, 12–13.

6. Among numerous discussions of Kant’s epistemological theory see Windelband, History, 537–50.

7. Schleiermacher, The Christian Faith, 19. See the evaluation of Schleiermacher’s theology in Mackintosh, Types of Modern Theology, 60–100. Mackintosh concludes that “Schleiermacher’s failure to take Revelation seriously . . . gives rise to the natural accusation that for him theology is less concerned with God than with man’s consciousness of God. The shadow of what is known as ‘psychologism’ lies over all his work,” ibid., 94, and “[Schleiermacher] put discovery in place of revelation, the religious consciousness in the place of the Word of God, and the ‘not yet’ of imperfection in the place of sin,” ibid., 100.

8. In his Critique of Practical Reason, 109, Kant stated that “It is morally necessary to assume the existence of God. . . . This moral necessity is subjective . . . and not objective.” That followed from his earlier Critique of Pure Reason, 306–7, where Kant had concluded that “These remarks will have made it evident . . . that the ideal of the Supreme Being, far from being an enouncement of the existence of a being in itself necessary, is nothing more than a regulative principle of reason. . . . It exists merely in my own mind, as the formal condition of thought, but not as a material and hypostatic condition of existence.”

9. Greene refers to “Kant’s sharp distinction between knowledge and faith” in “The Historical Context and Religious Significance of Kant’s Religion” in “Introduction” to Kant, Religion, lxxv.

10. Van Til observes: “Kant made room for ‘faith’ but not for biblical faith,” Christian Theory of Knowledge, 58.

11. The reference to the work of Nietzsche is of interest on several counts. McLean observes on Nietzsche’s reaction to the eighteenth-century so-called Enlightenment: “Nietzsche critiqued the use of human rationality as the sole measure by which truth is validated. . . . Rationality has, de facto, taken the place of the concept of ‘God’ as the ultimate foundation of truth. This substitution of human rationality for God is what Nietzsche’s madman meant by his famous announcement of the ‘death of God.’: ‘Whither is God?’ he cried; ‘I will tell you. We have killed him—you and I. All of us are his murderers’,” Biblical Interpretation, 64. See Nietzsche, “The Gay Science,” in The Portable Nietzsche, 95.

12. For expansive evaluations of the Open theism theology see R. K. Wright, No Place for Sovereignty and Frame, No Other God. See also the valuable reference to Open Theism and a reference to the work of Frame in Oliphint, God With Us, 11–12.

13. N. T. Wright, What Saint Paul Really Said. 96.

14. Ibid., 98. For a critical evaluation of recent debates on the doctrine of justification, including a survey of doctrinal development and a response to the arguments of Wright and others, see Dunson, “Do Bible Words have Bible Meaning?” 239–60.

15. See Waters, Justification and Eveson, The Great Exchange, 110–57.

16. Lusk, “Do I Believe in Baptismal Regeneration?” cited in Waters, Federal Vision, 226–27. See also ibid., 359.

17. Ibid., 227.

18. Cited in Waters, Federal Vision, 209–10.

19. For a full discussion see Waters, Federal Vision, and for an introduction to some origins of the Federal Vision theology see Shepherd, The Call of Grace.

20. The literature on the Emergent Church and its theological reconstructions is now extensive. Minimum reference might be made to McLaren, A New Kind of Christianity and the same author’s A New Kind of Christian, and Carson, Becoming Conversant with the Emerging Church.

21. For a valuable discussion of Arminianism and its defects and the contrary doctrines of God’s electing and saving grace, see Packer’s “Introductory Essay” in Owen, The Death of Death, 1–25.

22. Blamires, Recovering the Christian Mind, 77–78.

23. Ibid., 78.

24. Idem.

25. Ibid., 83.

26. Ibid., 78.

27. Ibid., 89.