Seeing Christ in all of Scripture means seeing Scripture as Christ teaches you to. In Luke 24:25–27, Jesus appears to his disciples after his resurrection, and he tells them that they have been slow to understand and foolish in heart. And then he opens their minds and beginning with Moses, teaches them of all the things in the Scriptures of the Old Testament concerning his suffering and glory. And then further, in Luke 24:45–49, he teaches them of the things in the Law, in the Prophets, and in the Wisdom Literature concerning himself.

And so, those things involve, among other topics, the suffering of the Messiah and the glory of the Messiah. Jesus himself told the Pharisees in John 5:39–40 that you search the Scriptures, thinking in them that you have eternal life, but those Scriptures testify to me. This is Jesus telling us that the Old Testament, on its own terms, is a witness to him. He says down later in 5:46 that Moses wrote of me, yet you refused to come to me. He says in John 8:56 that Abraham saw my day and rejoiced.

He says in John 12 that Isaiah spoke of me and my suffering. So that Jesus himself is not only the Lord who produces the Scripture, he’s the Savior who forges its central redemptive subject matter. And as the resurrected Lord, he teaches all who would come to the Scriptures that from Genesis 3 forward until the end of the Book of Revelation, the Scriptures have not only their central redemptive subject matter but their climactic fulfillment and telos in Jesus Christ, crucified, raised, ascended, interceding and returning in glory to gather his people to Himself and bring them to beatitude and to judge the wicked and cast them from his presence forever. We see Christ in all of Scripture because our Lord has opened our eyes and taught us all things in Scripture concerning himself, from Genesis to Revelation.

Adapted from a transcript of the video.

The Westminster Larger Catechism, 65 through 69, describes, in part, union with Jesus Christ. And John Calvin in Book Three of Institutes of the Christian Religion describes union with Christ, among other things, as a spiritual union. And that union between Christ and the Christian is effected by the secret energy or power—the work of the Holy Spirit. So, in biblical texts like Ephesians 3:16–17—the Spirit dwells in you, Christ dwells in your heart the spirit joins Christ to the Christian and the Christian to Christ—that’s true individually and then corporately as the body of Christ. But not only is union with Christ in life experience affected by the Spirit, it’s affected by the Spirit as the Spirit grants or produces faith in the Christian. So that union with Christ has the Spirit as its bond from the divine side; union with Christ has Spirit-produced faith as the bond of union from the human side.

That faith is a gift from God (Eph. 2:8). It is not by works. It does not have its origin in the creature. It has its origin as a gift from God. And Philippians 1:6 says that the one who began this good work of Spirit-generated faith will carry it on to completion until the day of Jesus Christ. Now that faith, union with Christ by the Spirit, can further be qualified most basically as a union with Christ, the person, so it’s a spiritual union. It’s a union by faith, and it’s a union with the person of Jesus Christ, crucified and raised. Paul can say that in Christ the church has every spiritual blessing in heavenly places. There are more things we could say about union with Christ but present personal union with Christ is a union that is produced by the Spirit, through faith, with the person of the crucified and ascended Christ. And it consists in a bond of vital, reciprocal, never-ending, always ascending fellowship with Jesus Christ in grace in this age and in glory in the age to come.

Adapted from a transcript of the video.

It was most likely between 1888 and 1890, during his time at the Theological School in Grand Rapids, that Geerhardus Vos both delivered his Natural Theology lectures and wrote his Reformed Dogmatics. Together those works present a comprehensive doctrinal system of confessionally Reformed theology and therefore ought to be interpreted in light of one another. 

In Reformed Dogmatics, Vos incisively leverages the Reformed doctrines of the image of God, the covenant of works, and original sin against “the externalist character of Roman Catholic religion”¹ that “has in principle appropriated the Pelagian conception of the will as liberum arbitrium.”² According to Vos, the nature-grace externalism of medieval Roman Catholicism stands in sharp contrast to the “deeper Protestant conception”³ of the image of God and the “deeper conception of original sin”⁴ entailed by it. 

In the recently published Natural Theology, Vos rejects the “semi-Pelagianism of the Roman Catholic church”⁵ and identifies a cast of Roman Catholic “scholastics”⁶ who do not view the “human race” after the fall “as entirely corrupt.”⁷ He sets this semi-Pelagianism of the medieval Roman Catholic church over against “Augustine’s doctrine of human corruption” that was “revived during the Reformation.”⁸ He specifically highlights the classically Reformed rejection of the semi-Pelagianism imbedded in traditional Roman Catholic doctrine that sinners can “rely on their own powers for their knowledge of God”⁹—a view that Vos contends flows directly from a “weakened” conception of original sin.¹⁰

Reading Vos’ Natural Theology in light of Reformed Dogmatics illumines his critique of the traditional Thomistic nature-grace anthropology and the semi-Pelagianism that flows from it. Vos’ work from Reformed Dogmatics finds explicit and sweeping application in Natural Theology. Allowing the two works to interpret one another shines the spotlight from Reformed Dogmatics onto Vos’ recurring claim in Natural Theology that the Reformed explicitly rejected traditional Roman Catholic natural theology and forged in its place a distinctively Reformed alternative.

John Fesko fails to understand this central point in his “Introduction” to Vos’ Natural Theology, asserting that “Vos and Aquinas might seem like an ill-matched pair, but the two actually do belong together”¹¹ in their approaches to natural theology. Put a bit differently, Fesko thinks that Aquinas expresses a natural theology that is congenial to Vos’ in the quest for the “retrieval of a Reformed natural theology.”¹² While many might view Aquinas and Vos as “oil and water,”¹³ Fesko argues that such is not the case. According to Fesko, Thomas Aquinas, the Westminster Confession of Faith, and Vos fit coherently within “general patterns of patristic, medieval, and Reformation expressions, that is, in terms of God’s two books, nature and Scripture.”¹⁴ Fesko makes these claims about Aquinas and Vos, even though Vos nowhere cites Aquinas in Natural Theology. Nonetheless, Vos does offer a sweeping and penetrating critique of the medieval Roman Catholic nature-grace model of explicit Thomistic provenance. 

In what follows I will propose a reading of Vos’ Natural Theology in light of his Reformed Dogmatics that will challenge Fesko’s interpretations of Vos and Aquinas and will enable a comprehensive engagement with and critique of traditional Roman Catholic natural theology.

Notes

1. Geerhardus Vos, Reformed Dogmatics, ed. Richard B. Gaffin Jr., trans. Richard B. Gaffin Jr., vol. 2 (Bellingham, WA: Lexham Press, 2012–2016),12. “Externalist” captures Vos’ comprehensive argument regarding the traditional Roman Catholic conception of religion. By “externalist” Vos alludes to what traditional Roman Catholic theology understands and sees as extrinsically and supernaturally added to the nature of Adam as the image of God. According to Vos, the traditional Roman Catholic conception of nature (imago) demands the ontological and ethical supplement of externally infused grace (similitudo) that enables a religious relation to God. Thus, Adam was not in his created nature in a religious relation to God and therefore needed an externally supplied infusion of grace to achieve such a religious relation. This is what Vos has in mind when he speaks of “the externalist character of Roman Catholic religion.”
2. Ibid., 2:13. Liberum arbitrium means “liberty of the will,” which, in the Pelagian conception, holds that the will is determined neither by natural causality nor by the decree of God.
3.  Ibid. This phrase captures Vos’ comprehensive argument regarding the “internalist” character of religion in classical Reformed theology. According to Vos, the deeper Protestant conception of the image of God yields a natural religious fellowship with God under the covenant of works with no need for a donum superadditum. This natural religious internalism of Reformed covenant theology presents a sharp contrast to Rome’s supernatural religious externalism. This contrast explains Vos’ rejection in Natural Theology of the semi-Pelagianism at the heart of the medieval Roman Catholic natural theology.
4. Ibid., 2:14.
5. Geerhardus Vos, Natural Theology (Grand Rapids, MI: Reformation Heritage Books, 2022), 8.
6. Ibid.
7. Ibid.
8. Ibid., 10.
9. Ibid.
10. Vos, Reformed Dogmatics, 2:13.
11. John Fesko, introduction to Natural Theology, (Grand Rapids, MI: Reformation Heritage Books, 2022), xvii.
12.  Ibid.
13.  Ibid.
14. To substantiate this claim, Fesko speaks of “general patterns of patristic, medieval, and Reformation expressions, that is, in terms of God’s two books, nature and Scripture.” (“Introduction,” xxix). He then cites from Thomas Aquinas and alludes to the Westminster Assembly’s comments on Romans 1:19–20. His appeal to “general patterns” and citations of common texts are urged to support his initial argument that Vos and Aquinas “actually do belong together” within a general history of natural theology that affirms the two books of Scripture and nature. Fesko’s claim that a common commitment to “God’s two books, nature and Scripture” supplies continuity between the classical Reformed and traditional Roman Catholic approaches fails to appreciate at least two factors. First, the commitment to underproportioned nature that requires the supernatural grace resident in the donum unites Trent (1563), Vatican I (1870), and Vatican II (1965). Second, this explains why Vatican II’s emphasis on “experience” does not alter the fundamental teaching of traditional Roman Catholic theology regarding nature and grace. In Roman Catholic theology in all eras, Scripture, reason, tradition, and experience, as interpreted by the magisterium, carries authority. These observations, along with Vos’ own treatment of medieval Roman Catholic natural theology in Natural Theology and in Reformed Dogmatics, neutralize whatever unity Fesko might propose exists when it comes to how the Reformation and Rome interpret “God’s two books, nature and Scripture.”

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Westminster Confession 7.1 enshrines some of the most beautiful covenant theology in the history of the church. And that text teaches that God made Adam in a natural religious relation to himself, but Adam could not have God as his blessedness and reward on the basis of that natural relation alone. Why?

To expand, Adam owed God everything, and God owed Adam nothing in terms of that natural relation. The creature can lay no claim on the sovereign self-contained Creator. But God, by a special act of providence that is temporally simultaneous to that work of special creation, condescended in a covenant and promised Adam advancement of estate for perfect and personal obedience, and the fruition of his obedience—the substance of his inheritance—would be God himself.

The beauty of the Confession of Faith is that Adam’s inheritance is nothing creaturely, but it instead is God himself. This lays the groundwork for what the Psalmist says in Psalm 73:25, “Whom do I have in heaven but you? And there is nothing on earth that I desire in heaven besides you” and Paul’s language in Romans 8:17, that in Christ, we are heirs of God— inheritors of the living and true, self-contained, triune God in union with Christ.

All of that is entailed by this wonderful presentation of Westminster Confession 7.1—that says, by a special providential act of covenantal condescension, temporally synchronous with Adam’s special creation, God offered himself to Adam as Adam’s fruition, blessedness, and reward, and by extension, to his natural posterity. In Jesus Christ, the second and last Adam, the church inherits this God as joint heirs of Christ, Romans 8:17.

Adapted from a transcription of the video.

You can contrast the deeper Modernist conception of Karl Barth to the deeper Protestant conception of Vos and the deeper Catholic conception of Aquinas. For Vos, Adam comes from God, wholly inclined toward God and in natural religious fellowship with God, standing in no need of grace. According to the deeper Catholic conception, Adam comes from God riddled with concupiscence and in need of ontologically re-proportioning and ethically re-proportioning grace.

For Barth in the deeper Modernist conception, when Adam is created, he is instantly the first sinner. This is concupiscence radicalized. Adam does not stand in need of a covenant according to the deeper Protestant conception, nor does he stand in need of ontologically infused and elevating grace according to the deeper Catholic conception, Adam stands in need of the Christ event.

What makes the deeper Modernist conception so distinctive is that Jesus Christ is not a promised future redeemer. He does not come in terms of redemptive history, coming out of heaven in the fullness of time to take to himself a true body and a reasonable soul, die for sin, and rise and ascend to heaven. For Barth, the Christ event is at the very beginning the alpha point of God’s relation to Creation in geschichte in a supra-temporal dimension, wholly hidden from history.

According to Barth, the Christ event has always been occurring. And when Adam was created, he was so defective and stained in sin, he needed that supra-temporal indirect Christ event. Barth has the lowest of all views of Adam as a creature and the most deviant of all views of Jesus Christ, because there is no history of special revelation of which Christ is the consummation. There is merely an abstract positive supernal Christ event to which man in history never has any direct access. It is the polar opposite of Vos’s deeper Protestant conception.

Adapted from a transcript of the video.

The deeper Catholic conception, or traditional Roman Catholic conception, is a concept in conjunction with and in contrast to the deeper Protestant conception. The deeper Catholic conception is the notion that when Adam was created as the image of God, he was made like God, in that he had intellect and will, but he was ontologically and ethically under-proportioned to participate in the essence of God.

In addition to God creating him in the image of God and giving him the natural gifts of reason, freedom, and will, God also infused supernatural qualities in a donum superadditum, a super-added grace. That super-added grace begins the process of ontologically and ethically re-proportioning Adam to an ascending participation in the essence of God, the end of which is no longer, Adam knowing God indirectly, through created media but participating in and seeing directly with his intellect, the essence of God.

That deeper Catholic conception—at least in part—is what Westminster Confession of Faith 26:3 forbids. It says that we have union and communion with the person of Christ but in no wise partake of the divine substance. That is a blasphemous and impious idea.

That deeper Catholic conception is the programmatic, eschatological alternative to the deeper Protestant conception. The two are comprehensively distinct accounts of the God-world relation, what the creature needs in creation, and what the end of the creature is given in beatitude.

For the deeper Protestant conception, it is union and communion with Trinitarian persons after the fall in union with Christ. For the deeper Catholic conception, it is being ontologically re-proportioned and elevated above human nature to see directly and participate in the essence of God. Bavinck calls that deeper Catholic conception “a melting union.” This is partly why the antithesis is so sharp between the deeper Protestant and the deeper Catholic conception.

In Reformed Dogmatics 2:13–15, Geerhardus Vos coined a phrase for the image of God, entitled “the deeper Protestant conception.” When God formed Adam from the dust of the earth in Genesis 2:7, he breathed into him the breath of life, and Adam was formed in natural religious fellowship with God. Original righteousness, holiness, and knowledge were implanted in him. That served his communion with God. He was wholly inclined toward God in natural religious fellowship that expressed itself in worship.

At the same time that God created Adam in this natural religious fellowship, at the exact same time, God condescended to him in an act of special providence and gave him the covenant of works. That special act of providence is the means by which that natural religious fellowship could reach its consummation if Adam obeyed perfectly, personally, exactly, and entirely. It would have occasioned a transition from his earthly probation at Eden into Sabbath rest in the heavenly places, the new heavens and new earth.

That deeper Protestant conception lays the creational background for the Christ-centered character of the gospel and union and communion with Christ, who, as the second and last Adam, not only has perfect fellowship with God in his earthly ministry climaxing on the cross but rises from the dead three days after dying, ascends into heaven, sits at the right hand of God, and receives the fullness of that fellowship with the Father in the power of the Spirit, and confers it on his church. That, in a thumbnail sketch, is the substance of what Vos termed “the deeper Protestant conception.” It is the produce of classical Reformed confessional theology.

Mutualism or correlativism are virtual synonyms. Cornelius Van Til, a prominent twentieth-century Reformed theologian, apologist, Orthodox Presbyterian, and founding member of Westminster Theological Seminary, taught that God and the creature at no point share in a common mode of development or becoming. He said that there is no point of correlativity—of mutual sharing and being or knowledge between the Creator and the creature. Even in the relation God remains unchanged and self-contained, and the creature remains the creature, dependent and derived. There is no correlativism or “mutualism,” is a more contemporary synonym.

To affirm mutualism is to say that in the Creator-creature relation, God and man are submerged in a common process of mutual development through time. “Correlativism” is Van Til’s older way of putting it while “mutualism” is a newer way of putting it. You could even add a third category of “personalism” in which some unorthodox theologians locate change in the Trinitarian persons. In other words, the persons would have un-actualized potential and change in their relation to creation.

Those views—whether relativism, mutualism, personalism, or any other view similar—erode and deny the integrity of the Creator-creature distinction by making God and man participants in a common thing. It’s a third thing that is neither fully God or fully man but something contingent like time, change, process, or history. Orthodox, biblical, creedal, and confessional theology is anti-correlativist, anti-mutualist, and anti-personalist, because it maintains the immutability of God in his freely determined relation to the mutable creature.

In biblical teaching summarized by Reformed theology, the creator-creature distinction brings into view the absolute ontological difference between the Triune God and the creature. The Triune God is infinite, eternal, and unchangeable in His being wisdom, power, holiness, justice, goodness and truth.

And the creature that comes into existence by an act of God’s sovereign will is not eternal, but temporal, not infinite, but finite, not immutable, but mutable. And the distinction between the two remains in the Creator-creature relation. While God is infinite, eternal, and unchangeable apart from His relation to the creature, He remains such in relation to the creature.

If you narrow it down to the doctrine of Adam’s special creation as the image of God, the Creator-creature distinction is summarized so beautifully Westminster Confession 7.1. Though God is infinitely transcendent over the creature, He nonetheless condescended to the image-bearing creature and offered Himself to the creature as the creature’s blessedness and reward. Adam’s reward in relation to God under covenant was God himself. God is his blessedness and reward.

The creator-creature distinction and relation drives you to remember that the final, eternal and unchangeable Triune God is not only the transcendent sovereign over the creature but the one who in creation and in the voluntary condescension of covenant offered Himself to Adam for His blessedness and reward. And after the fall, he comes to be the blessedness and reward of every creature who is redeemed by Jesus Christ as the Last Adam. So that in union with Jesus Christ as the Last Adam the Triune God is the blessedness and reward of the church.

A listener of Christ the Center raised a useful question about Bavinck, noting that he denies the speculative conception of “innate ideas” in Reformed Dogmatics, vol. 2, pp. 69–73 and wondered what such a denial might imply. 

In response to that excellent question, we should grasp that Bavnick clearly denied the philosophically speculative notion of “innate ideas” that leads to mysticism. However, while Bavinck denied the speculative notion of innate ideas found among the philosophers, he endorsed the notion of “implanted knowledge of God” found in Calvin’s theology of the sensus divinitatis. Bavinck says,

At the same time we must speak of the “implanted knowledge of God” in some sense. This means simply that, as in the case of language, human beings possess both the capacity and the inclination to arrive at some firm, certain, and unfailing knowledge of God. We gain this knowledge in the normal course of human development and in the environment in which God gives us the gift of life. From the entire realm of nature, both exterior and interior to us humans, we receive impressions and gain perceptions that foster in us the sense of God. It is God himself who does not leave us without witness.

Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics, 2:54

It is this original capacity and inclination before the fall that received the “impressions” from God in his self-disclosure that was “interior” to Adam as the image of God. In that way, God did not leave created Adam without a witness. This Calvinistic notion of “implanted knowledge of God” differs from the philosophically speculative notion of “innate ideas.” God did not create Adam with abstract “innate ideas” but with a personal “implanted knowledge of God” that underwrote his natural religious fellowship with God—a fellowship that according to Bavinck precludes the need for ontologically reproportioning grace as found in the donum superadditum (see RD 3:576–77). This is Bavinck’s way of stating what Vos termed the “deeper Protestant conception” of the image of God (see Vos’ RD 2:13–14).