In 1864, Folliott S. Pierpoint (1835–1917) published his hymn “The Sacrifice of Praise” for the celebration of the Lord’s Supper or eucharist (from the Greek eucharistia for “thanksgiving”). It would become the quintessential Thanksgiving Day hymn, known best under the title drawn from its opening phrase, “For the Beauty of the Earth.”[1]

As the story goes, the beauty of the English countryside captivated Pierpoint as he walked along the Avon River near his hometown of Bath. Its beauty was before him not as the work of his own hands but as a pure gift wrapped by another’s power and in another’s glory. Even his ability to take it in with sight and sound was a gift. And like any gift, these could only truly be received and enjoyed in one way and one way only—with thanksgiving. For what could he give in return for such gifts beyond his earning or exerting? All he could do, and all that these gifts were meant to lead him to do, was to “raise” a “hymn of grateful praise” to him who fashioned and freely gave them, to the “Lord of all” (verses’ refrain), from whom, through whom, and to whom are all things (Rom. 11:36).

Pierpoint had opened before him God’s “beautiful book in which all creatures, great and small, are as letters to make us ponder the invisible things of God” (Belgic Confession 2). The brimming beauty of this single page led Pierpoint to read on so that he became gratefully aware of the untold gifts that come to him and all people every day from the Lord of all. Whether things seen, like “the glories of the skies,” or things unseen, like “the love which from our birth, over and around us lies” (v. 1), we are ever anew recipients of the goodness of God. For he is “the overflowing source of all good” (Belgic Confession 1).

Whether “hill and vale, and tree and flow’r” or “sun and moon and stars of light” (v. 2), or “the joy of ear and eye” or “the heart and mind’s delight” (v. 3), or “the joy of human love, brother, sister, parent, child, friends on earth and friends above” (v. 4), all are the Lord’s and at his disposal to freely give. They are not the products of our own hands but gifts of inestimable worth that can only truly be received and enjoyed with thanksgiving. So, like Pierpoint, all we can do, and all that these gifts are meant to lead us to do, is to raise a hymn of grateful praise to him who freely gave them, to the Lord of all.

But how can we sing such a hymn from the heart? In Adam, mankind became implacably and hideously ungrateful. Fallen man ceased to honor God as God or to give him thanks (Rom. 1:21). In his sin and rebellion, man made the gifts of God ends in themselves, refusing to ever raise a hymn of grateful praise.

But the good news is that Jesus Christ came for such ungrateful people, as we once were. He bore all our ugly ingratitude on the cross and was raised on the third day to enter through the gates of righteousness with thanksgiving for us (Ps. 118:19). Whoever believes in him is united to him by the power of the Holy Spirit in his death and resurrection.

In Christ, we are filled with his Spirit of thanksgiving by whose strength a hymn of grateful praise can again be sung to the praise and glory of God. “Let the word of Christ dwell in you richly, teaching and admonishing one another in all wisdom, singing psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, with thankfulness in your hearts to God” (Col. 3:16). And in Christ, the gifts of God are restored to their proper use, no longer ends in themselves but means to thanksgiving. “For everything created by God is good, and nothing is to be rejected if it is received with thanksgiving, for it is made holy by the word of God and prayer” (1 Tim. 4:4–5).

Pierpoint leads us in this new and better way of gratitude by beginning each stanza with the preposition for. With this little, yet powerful word, each stanza begins with a subordinate clause that awaits the chorus for a sense of rest. The for awaits a to. The gifts await the Giver. “For the beauty of the earth . . . Lord of all, to thee we raise this our hymn of grateful praise” (emphasis added). Pierpoint subordinates all the good gifts of God as means to an even higher end. By them we are sped along the highways to Zion that in Christ, the truly thankful one, we may “enter his gates with thanksgiving, and his courts with praise!” (Ps. 100:4). Gratitude could not drive us elsewhere but there. For more than his gifts of beauty, glory, joy, and love, the Lord of all has given us himself, “best gift divine” (v. 5), indeed.

This is the deeper Protestant conception of the Christian life: new obedience motivated by gratitude in the deepest depth of our heart because the Lord is our God, and we are his people by his grace alone. “The person who receives this grace owes and gives eternal thanks to God alone” (Canons of Dort III/IV.15).

[1] Hymn #249, Trinity Psalter Hymnal (Trinity Psalter Hymnal Venture, 2018).

In 1936, at the first General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church of America—later renamed the Orthodox Presbyterian Church (OPC)—official greetings were received from the Synod of the Christian Reformed Church (CRC). These greetings were a boon for the fledgling church in her struggle against modernism. Cornelius Van Til recounts, “The Synod of the Christian Reformed Church of America immediately sent a telegram to the renewed and revived Presbyterian church wishing them God’s blessing. That was heartening to the brothers. Much opposition is being encountered. Just as it was during the Doleantie, the synods are doing everything they can to oppose the new movement.”[1] The Doleantie was a secessionist movement in the Dutch Reformed Church led by Abraham Kuyper in 1886, postdating an earlier secession in 1834 known as the Afscheiding. Van Til recognizes that the purpose for the secession in the Netherlands was basically the same as for the Presbyterian Church of America: not to fall away into modernism but to preserve a truly Christian witness in the world.

It was Van Til who initiated contact with the Synod of the CRC. In the Acts of Synod 1936 of the Christian Reformed Church, we learn that Van Til and R. B. Kuiper sent the following telegram to the Synod: “Presbyterian Church of America, organized yesterday as true spiritual succession of Presbyterian Church U. S. A. General Assembly meeting now. Will conclude its sessions tomorrow. Machen is Moderator. Our Synod could strengthen hands of brethren by sending greetings.”[2] The Synod received the telegram and sent the following reply:

The Synod of the Christian Reformed Church, in session at Grand Rapids, Mich., conscious of the tie that binds us in the propagation and defence of our common Reformed faith, and convinced of the uncompromising devotion to that faith which has led to your organization, extends its Christian greetings and commends you, together with all who stand with you, to the guidance and blessing of the King of the Church. May He lead you as leaders and those who follow with you by His Spirit, strengthen you, and increase your numbers, and gird you on in the battle against our common foes of apostasy and unbelief in these critical times. Synod officially invites a fraternal delegate to attend its sessions next week.[3]

J. Gresham Machen comments,

One of the most joyful moments at the recent first General Assembly of The Presbyterian Church of America was the moment when we received the official greetings of the Synod of the Christian Reformed Church. From no ecclesiastical body in the whole world could greetings have been more welcome, both because of the deep debt of gratitude that we already owe to the Christian Reformed Church—I need only mention the fact that that church has given to Westminster Seminary R. B. Kuiper, Cornelius Van Til and N. B. Stonehouse—and also because of the noble testimony which that church has carried on in the defense and propagation of the Reformed Faith.[4]

Machen proceeds to list five things about the life of the CRC at that time “which have kept it from falling away into the dominant Modernism and have been instruments in preserving its truly Christian witness.”[5] These things remain vital for the church and her witness in the world today. Modernism falsifies religion by situating autonomous man at the center of all things so that even God exists for his sake. But what follows are helps for the church in preserving her truly Christian witness that God is at the center of all things and that man exists for his sake. (The words in quotes in each heading are taken directly from Machen.)

1. “Separation for the Sake of Faithfulness” or Do Not Drink the Cup of Demons

Questions about the legitimacy and necessity of ecclesiastical separation have been around since at least the Reformation. According to Machen, to separate from a compromising association or denomination is not schism but the avoidance of schism. It is the compromising association that is guilty of schism, having separated itself from the true church of Jesus Christ in its doctrine and life. To separate from a compromising association is not to separate from the true church but to return to it. “It is separation undertaken not in the interests of schism but in the interests of the true unity and purity of the Church,” writes Machen.[6] In other words, it is separation for the glory of God and for the sake of faithfulness, even if it costs influence, numbers, and financial security. This was the story of the Afscheiding and Doleantie in the Netherlands and then of the Presbyterian Church of America. It was also for this reason that a group of churches found it necessary to separate from the CRC in the 1990s to form the United Reformed Churches in North America (URCNA), as the continuation of the church that Machen once commended.[7]

2. “Theological Consistency” or Do Not Be Merely Christian

“The Christian Reformed Church,” observes Machen, “has never been content with being vaguely ‘evangelical’ or ‘conservative’ or ‘fundamentalist,’ but has always endeavored to be truly ‘Reformed.’”[8] The church that is content with mere Christianity or lowest-common-denominator Christianity will inevitably lose its footing and fall away into modernism. It is like a person crossing a river by leaping from one small rock to another instead of by walking across a sturdy bridge—he is bound to land on a slippery rock and lose his footing. It is the church that holds firmly “to that glorious system of revealed truth which is summarized in the great Reformed confessions of faith” that preserves a truly Christian witness in the world.[9] Our Reformed confessions guard the church against gaps and inconsistencies in her theology that would otherwise weaken her walls against the bombardments of modernism.

3. “Indoctrination by the Pastors” or Do Not Teach in a Desultory Way

The practice in the CRC was for the pastor to preach one sermon every Sunday from the Heidelberg Catechism moving consecutively through its three parts of sin, salvation, and service under the theme of our only comfort in life and in death. The catechism was divided into fifty-two Lord’s Days so that it could be taught throughout the year and repeated the next and the next and so on. This resulted in the congregation being “soundly and systematically indoctrinated.”[10] But this orderly method of catechetical preaching contrasts with the popular desultory method that jumps and skips around from one idea to another. The latter method assumes that our theology ought not to be an organized system but a jumble of disconnected ideas. The danger is that it is much easier to smuggle an enemy into a crowded store with people bustling in every direction than into a battalion of soldiers marching in perfect sync. The systematic orderliness of the marching lines reveals when someone is out of place.

4. “Church Discipline” or Do Not Join the Church to the World

The aim of church discipline is the opposite of modernism’s. Modernism aims to join the church to the world. Church discipline aims to separate the church from the world. The holiness and purity of the church can only be maintained when church discipline is properly exercised in accordance with the Word of God. While Machen commends the CRC for exercising church discipline, he still warns that modernism knocks at the door of every church no matter how pure. “Pray God that the door may be kept locked to such an enemy as that!”[11]

5. “Christian Schools” or Do Not Give Covenant Children a Non-Christian Education

The necessity of a thoroughly Christian education for covenant children was ingrained in the mind of the CRC. Machen writes, “In an overwhelmingly predominate way . . . , [the Christian Schools] are conducted and supported by the people of the Christian Reformed Church. . . . . They love God and love their children too much to allow Christian instruction to be tagged on one day in seven as a kind of excrescence upon an education fundamentally non-Christian. They have tried to make the education of their children Christian throughout.”[12] It was often the case that wherever a CRC was planted a Christian school soon followed. While many good things vied for their time, it was for good reason that Van Til, Machen, and others devoted much of their efforts to the promotion and furtherance of Christian education. It honored the God of the covenant whose promises are for us and our children.

Conclusion

Machen recognized that on account of these five things—separation for the sake of faithfulness, theological consistency, indoctrination by the pastors, church discipline, and Christian schools—God had wonderfully blessed the efforts of the CRC. God continues to bless the efforts of those churches today whose ecclesiastical lives are characterized by the same. By them, they are prevented from falling away into modernism and preserve a truly Christian witness in the world for God’s glory.

[1] Cornelius Van Til, “The Presbyterian Church of America,” De Reformatie vol 16, no 46 (14 Aug 1936): 392, my translation.

[2] The Acts of Synod 1936 of the Christian Reformed Church, 19: https://library.calvin.edu/ld.php?content_id=71769097.

[3] The Acts of Synod 1936 of the Christian Reformed Church, 19–20. According to the Minutes from the First General Assembly, “The telegram extended an invitation to the Assembly to send a fraternal delegate to the meetings of the Synod of the Christian Reformed Church.” Van Til was appointed as that fraternal delegate.

[4] J. Gresham Machen, “The Christian Reformed Church,” The Presbyterian Guardian 2, no. 8 (20 July 1936): 170.

[5] Machen, “The Christian Reformed Church,” 170.

[6] Machen, “The Christian Reformed Church,” 170.

[7] This is not to say there were no faithful churches that remained in the CRC to continue the struggle, but the denomination began to teach doctrines that contradicted its own confessional standards—that is, the Three Forms of Unity. It moved away from the inspiration and authority of Scripture and taught the Arminian view of the love of God. Some held that women could hold ecclesiastical office, advocated evolution, and denied some parts of Scripture as the Word of God. This led to thirty-six churches forming a federative unity. In 1996, these churches held their first Synod and adopted the name The United Reformed Churches in North America (URCNA).

[8] Machen, “The Christian Reformed Church,” 170.

[9] Machen, “The Christian Reformed Church,” 170.

[10] Machen, “The Christian Reformed Church,” 170.

[11] Machen, “The Christian Reformed Church,” 170.

[12] Machen, “The Christian Reformed Church,” 170.

Geerhardus Vos mounted a heavenly vantage point from which he surveyed the world and all its happenings. From the high tower of God’s Word, he saw with eagle-eye clarity the beauty and majesty of the Lord in nature and history, creation and providence. “The whole earth is full of his glory!” was his theme (Isa. 6:3). With his heart brimming with seraphic wonder, he addressed his verses to the King (Ps. 45:1).

In Vos’ nature poems, he saw the mystery of the gospel reflected in creation as in a mirror. To highlight this, he entitled one volume of his nature poetry Spiegel der Natuur (Mirror of Nature). In the mirror of nature, through the spectacles of Scripture, Vos saw that death never had the final say. He saw that the path of life was the path of the cross. He saw evil deeds ironically reversed to bring about good by the providence of God. He saw the truth of Heidelberg Catechism Q&A 42 that he had learned as a child:

Q. Since Christ has died for us, why do we still have to die?
A. Our death is not a payment for our sins, but only a dying to sins and an entering into eternal life.

In sum, he saw the glory of Jesus Christ, who is the resurrection and the life (John 11:25).

Vos shares with us a glimpse in his poem “Ex Arbore Navis.” In this poem, he finds the hope of resurrection life in Christ reflected in a tree torn from the earth’s embrace but made into a beautiful ship for the open seas of eternity. Isaiah, the “salvation-poet,” as Vos called him, had once prophesied,

For the coastlands shall hope for me,
the ships of Tarshish first,
to bring your children from afar,
their silver and gold with them,
for the name of the LORD your God,
and for the Holy One of Israel,
because he has made you beautiful (Isa. 60:9).

EX ARBORE NAVIS[1]

Bound is the tree in all his growing;
Sprouting and his flowers showing,
His evening and his morning glowing,

His winter sleeping, summer waking,
His silence and the sounds he’s making.

Still grounded in his mother’s place,
Confined within a tiny space;

Until one day a tragedy,
An axman swings with cruelty.

His market value lights his face,
And tears him from the earth’s embrace.

A woeful groan he then raises,
A fit of death through him races,
Down to his roots it abases.

But behold! the cry he utters,
From the pain of death he shudders,
Finished, it forever severs,

Makes for him, a state to hope in,
A wondrous new world to open.

In the woods a hidden pillar,
Now he journeys to the miller,

Who from the thickness, round and broad,
Of his large trunk cuts plank unflawed,

And for the beams of higher estate,
The right measure he must calculate.

Then onward from the miller’s yard,
Coastward goes he to the shipyard;

There the fragrant wood, like a vow,
Is built for keel and hull and bow.

Secured from wind and weather far,
Sealed with wax, baptized with tar.

The master sees him with delight,
Glide down the slope now to alight,

Like a bird over ocean blue
To his new element he flew.

Longing for the wonders at sea,
Ready to sail, restless lies he,

Tighter and tighter pulling on
The anchor that he might be gone.

It came at last the hour set,
By tugboat pulled to an outlet,

With flag and pennants high he’s free
To sail into the open sea;

Bedecked in white, his bridegroom sail,
On crested billows rides his tail,
Like were his own currents and gale;

Like every droplet in the slough
Of despond was his servant low;

Freer than the sea from bonds and bands,
Up rivers rushes he to distant lands.

You say this is a poetic device,
In real life groundless, it cannot suffice.

Believe me I know of what I sing,
A ship is also a living thing.

Lord, when death soon draws itself near,
Through trunk and branch goes his shear,

Freed from this narrow earthly space,
Let me go to a wider place;

After the escape, make of me,
A ship for Yourself graciously,

Assembled and made beautifully,
For the grand sail of eternity.

Reflected in this poem is that what the axman meant for evil, God meant for good (Gen. 50:20). Vos personifies the tree in the same way trees are found clapping their hands and singing for joy in Scripture (Ps. 96:12; Isa. 55:12). But here the tree is mercilessly torn from the nurturing arms of the earth. He groans and convulses in death. But death is not his destiny.

But behold! the cry he utters,
From the pain of death he shudders,
Finished, it forever severs,
Makes for him, a state to hope in,
A wondrous new world to open.

A kind of resurrection is reflected in the master shipbuilder raising the tree to new life as he forms and fashions him into a beautiful ship. Now the tree, once bound and confined, is loosed upon the open seas. Through a kind of death, his previous narrow existence has now opened into a broader existence of boundless currents of joy.

For Vos, this is more than a mere poetic device. It touches reality. It is the lifepath of the believer in Christ reflected as in a mirror. So, with the seaways to Zion in his heart (Ps. 84:5), he prays to the Lord in the final eight lines. He asks him that when he is torn from the earth by death’s cruel blow,

After the escape, make of me,
A ship for Yourself graciously,
Assembled and made beautifully
For the grand sail of eternity.

It is the true Master, the Lord Jesus Christ, who will raise his people from the dead to a more beautiful, more glorious existence. “[O]ur citizenship is in heaven, and from it we await a Savior, the Lord Jesus Christ, who will transform our lowly body to be like his glorious body, by the power that enables him even to subject all things to himself” (Phil. 3:20–21). Glimmering in Vos’ prayer is the good news that though we die, yet we shall live, that by grace alone we will be resurrected “at the hour set” to glorify and enjoy our Lord forever in the boundless joys of heaven—joys which earth cannot afford and none but Zion’s children know. The sea of crystal is forever before us. On its still, clear waters glisten the eternal glory of the gospel of Christ, the firstborn from the dead. With this end in mind, Vos encourages us in his sermon “Heavenly-Mindedness,” saying,

Being the sum and substance of all the positive gifts of God to us in their highest form, heaven is of itself able to evoke in our hearts positive love, such absorbing love as can render us at times forgetful of the earthly strife. In such moments the transcendent beauty of the other shore and the irresistible current of our deepest life lift us above every regard of wind or wave. We know that through weather fair or foul our ship is bound straight for its eternal port.[2]

Carried along by heavenly winds, even the Spirit of Christ in our sails, we pray: “In accord with Your covenant promise, O Lord, make of me a ship for Yourself.” Those last two words reach the apex of the religious longing of our hearts. For God, we were constituted as his image bearers in creation. From God, we fell in the sin of the first Adam. To God, we are restored and perfected by our union with the resurrected Christ in redemption. In Christ, we confess by his Spirit that even the glory of the escape of death is outshone by our God who has made us beautiful in his Son “for the grand sail of eternity.”

[1] Geerhardus Vos, Spiegel der Natuur en Lyrica Anglica (Princeton, NJ: Geerhardus Vos, 1927), 33–34. The translation is my own. I attempted to maintain the meter and rhyme scheme of the original.

[2] Geerhardus Vos, “Heavenly-Mindedness,” in Grace and Glory: Sermons Preached at Princeton Seminary (Carlisle, PA: The Banner of Truth Trust, 2020), 120–21, emphasis mine.

Christmas wonderfully brings into focus the first advent of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ into the world. Long ago, in the little town of Bethlehem of Judea, the eternal Son of God, conceived by the Holy Spirit, was born of the virgin Mary. He who is the radiance of the glory of God was wrapped in swaddling cloths. He who upholds the universe by the word of his power was lying in a manger. Wonder of wonders, in the incarnation, the Son of God truly took to his divine person a real human nature, so that, as the God-man, he might save his people from their sins (Matt. 1:21).

While his coming was like a warm winter fire for a world frozen under the icy reign of sin, it nonetheless marked for him his entrance into his estate of humiliation (cf. Westminster Larger Catechism Q&A 46). As the surety of God’s covenant of grace, he freely subjected himself in his assumed human nature to the curse and demand of the law in the stead of his people to fulfill all passive and active obedience. He came for this very reason. He “did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped,” explains the apostle Paul, “but emptied himself, by taking the form of a servant, being born in the likeness of men. And being found in human form, he humbled himself by becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross” (Phil. 2:6–8). From the moment of his conception on, his life would violently cascade in ever-deepening humility until he finally crashed against the jagged rocks of crucifixion, death, and burial.

For such was the end toward which we were falling headlong in our sin. But he came to raise the sons of earth. In his poem “Nativity,” Geerhardus Vos captures this gospel truth of Christ’s suffering,

His smallness laden with our sin;
Born that his birth-cries might begin
Full thirty years of tragedy,
Each step a step toward Calvary.¹

In his estate of humiliation, the true nature of Jesus’ person and work was hidden by his Father, Lord of heaven and earth, from the wise and understanding (Matt. 11:25). It was veiled behind weakness, poverty, and outward insignificance, which kept those bent on possessing the kingdoms of the world and their glory (4:8) who trusted in their own righteousness before God and loved the praise of men from coming to any true knowledge of him. “Seeing they do not see” (13:13). Yet, Jesus’ true identity was revealed by his Father to little children who thereby came to know both him and his Father unto eternal life (11:25; 13:10; 16:17). Humbling oneself like a child is a prerequisite not only to know and enjoy the truth of Christmas, the humble birth of heaven’s high king, but also, relatedly, to enter his kingdom of heaven (18:3, 4). Who can be proud when the heavens are humble?

In other words, special revelation is necessary not only for finding the entrance into the kingdom of heaven but also perceiving rightly the crown prince of heaven in his humble estate from Christmas to Good Friday and beyond, until he comes again in the full splendor of his glory. The apostle Matthew underlines this necessity of special revelation by telling the marvelous story of Jesus’ birth through the eyes of Joseph. Not being told beforehand but only after the fact, Joseph would have to humble himself like a little child to receive God’s special revelation regarding the child in Mary’s womb. Only in so doing could he rightly perceive that the child in Mary’s womb was not to her shame but to her honor, even to the highest honor ever bestowed upon any woman.

So, the story begins, “When his mother Mary had been betrothed to Joseph, before they came together she was found to be with child from the Holy Spirit” (1:18). That this child was “from the Holy Spirit” was not immediately evident to Joseph. So, “being a just man and unwilling to put her to shame, [he] resolved to divorce her quietly” (1:19; cf. Deut. 22:23–24; Matt. 5:31–32). “At once we see that Mary’s great honor was likely to be regarded as her shame,” notes Herman Ridderbos.² He then draws this insight,

Christ’s birth already contains a hint of the offense of the Cross. The miracle that stood behind it was hidden and unprovable, and it could be recognized only by the light of special revelation. To one who was not thus enlightened, the Son of God seemed an illegitimate child. Mary had to suffer the consequences of this. The sword that would pierce her soul (Luke 2:35) began to wound her deeply already before Jesus’ birth.³

What Paul wrote in 1 Corinthians 1:18 is applicable by extension to the miracle of Christmas: “For the word of the cross is folly to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God.” Not only the obscurity of his birth but also the appearance of illegitimacy, indeed, contains a hint of the offense of the cross. As Adam needed special revelation to know that the fruit of a particular tree that appeared good for food would bring about his certain death (Gen. 2:17), so too, positively, in redemption, special revelation is needed to know that the Savior who appeared powerless to save could bring about a certain new life.

We see this, for example, in the answer to the following question: What brought about the change of Joseph’s determination to divorce Mary and instead to adopt this child as his own with all the inheritance rights of a son of David? It came about by means of a special revelation from God gifted to Joseph in the wrapping of a dream by an angel of the Lord. Matthew writes, “But as [Joseph] considered these things, behold, an angel of the Lord appeared to him in a dream, saying, ‘Joseph, son of David, do not fear to take Mary as your wife, for that which is conceived in her is from the Holy Spirit. She will bear a son, and you shall call his name Jesus, for he will save his people from their sins’” (1:20–21). Ridderbos comments, “The angel’s revelation to Joseph also had deeper consequences for him, however. To his surprise once God had told him the truth, the shame that Mary had had in his eyes was turned into the highest honor.”⁴

Joseph, humbling himself like a little child in full obedience to this special revelation from God, rightly perceived and so received the miraculous child in Mary’s virgin womb as indeed the promised Son of David, who would save him, Mary, and all God’s people from their sins and restore them to true knowledge, righteousness, and holiness in fellowship with God in his kingdom forever (28:19). The Christmas miracle is not only unto the cross but beyond it through resurrection into the new creation for all who believe.⁵

Matthew specifically describes Joseph as a “just” man in terms of his willingness to do what God’s word required of him from the heart, at first to divorce his betrothed in fear, but then to receive the child in her womb as his very own (1:19). This being just is the kind of righteousness that Jesus came to fulfill, a righteousness that exceeds that of the scribes and Pharisees, who for the sake of their traditions made void the word of God (5:20; 15:6). In this we see the connection between Jesus’ requirements of righteousness (5:20), doing the will of his Father (7:21), and humbling oneself like a child (18:3–4) to enter the kingdom of heaven. These, while required, are ultimately gracious gifts from Christ himself, the king of heaven and earth.⁶

Christ can only be received and rested in by faith. The Belgic Confession states, “We believe that for us to acquire the true knowledge of this great mystery the Holy Spirit kindles in our hearts a true faith that embraces Jesus Christ, with all his merits, and makes him its own, and no longer looks for anything apart from him” (Article 22). Joseph believed God’s special revelation concerning the child in Mary’s womb and so received and rested in him as his own. Now risen from the dead and seated at the right hand of the Father in heaven, Christ as God’s special revelation must be believed so that those who humble themselves like little children might also receive and rest in him as their own. Christmas is for little children who in the kingdoms of earth may be disregarded but in the kingdom of heaven are, indeed, the greatest.

“Yes, it is well that we should celebrate the Christmas season,” says J. Gresham Machen, “and may God ever give us a childlike heart that we may celebrate it aright.”⁷

Notes

1. Geerhardus Vos, Western Rhymes (Santa Ana, CA: Geerhardus Vos, 1933), 1.
2. Herman Ridderbos, Matthew, Bible Student’s Commentary (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 1987), 26.
3. Ridderbos, Matthew, 26, emphasis mine.
4. Ridderbos, Matthew, 27.
5. Matthew links Jesus’ genesis with Genesis.
6. The debate over whether righteousness in Matthew is a requirement or a gift or both is resolved by Vos who observes that the basis for the crowning structure of Paul’s doctrine of righteousness—as something wrought out in Christ and transferred to us by imputation—was laid by Jesus. See Geerhardus Vos, Grace and Glory: Sermons Preached in the Chapel of Princeton Theological Seminary (Grand Rapids, MI: The Reformed Press, 1922), 43.
7. J. Gresham Machen, God Transcendent (Carlisle, PA: Banner of Truth, 2002), 203.

The Dutch Reformed thinker and poet Willem Bilderdijk recalls in a letter to a friend in 1822 what his former teacher once said: “When examining the truth of Christianity, you must be as much a heathen as a Christian in order to judge freely.”^[1] This troubled Bilderdijk for the simple reasons that it failed to honor Christ, first and foremost, and to account for the antithesis between believers and unbelievers. He writes,

This beautiful sounding precept, which then dismayed me, is indeed of the evil one and seduces whoever accepts it: because it contains [1] unfaithfulness to God and the Savior to whom we are sanctified in baptism and [2] a fundamental apostacy. — No, we must cling with all of our soul to the Savior, value and hold fast with our heart the Grace that has called us, and fight Unbelief in God’s might and not under the Banner of Reason.

By the “Banner of Reason,” Bilderdijk has in mind not reason in itself but reason understood specifically as an autonomous source of knowledge that can function independent of God and his revelation. And so, he recognized that if believer and unbeliever alike fight under the Banner of Reason, then (autonomous) reason must triumph in the end. For the believer to raise the Banner of Reason is for him to desert his Commander; it is “a fundamental apostacy.” Bilderdijk continues,

Then it will not be difficult to see the falsity of the feigned refutations [of God]. They gleam in the eye, but one must not let himself be moved into the standpoint of those who cannot see the light of truth from their standpoint. I must not close my eyes with the blind man in order to debate with him whether or not the sun shines. If someone denies that I have a good library or a well-stocked cellar, I must not shut up the room or cellar, but bring him in there with me. Or, if he is too crippled to go up and down the stairs with me, then let him talk, and I will enjoy my privilege in gratitude toward God who gives me these refreshments for soul and body. — If I can refute the unfortunate by the communication from there, so much the better; but to set aside my possession and consciousness of it in order to refute his arguments from those arguments themselves would be folly.

Believers and unbelievers view all things from different “standpoints” or “worldviews,” as Bilderdijk speaks of elsewhere. For the believer to adopt the unbeliever’s mode and position of seeing in order to debate with him would be as foolish as someone debating a blind person as to whether or not the sun is shining by closing his own eyes. He deprives himself of that which alone can recognize the thing in question. The Christian must not set aside his “possession,” graciously given to him by God, in order to refute the arguments of unbelievers by the unbeliever’s own arguments. Is it not telling that it is typically those fighting for the faith who are lured under the “Banner of Reason” and not the other way around? Neutrality is a myth.

Bilderdijk realized that someone could object to this as simply begging the question (petitio principii). He responds,

All feeling is petitio principii and cannot be disproved or proved by reason. And so it is with the Feeling of Grace [Genadegevoel], that is, with Religion. It is of God, it is the working of God’s Spirit in our heart, and the mind must receive it from our heart. Without this, intellectual Religion is a mere Historical or Philosophical view, nothing more, and does not prove Christianity but Paganism.

This Romantic version of “faith seeking understanding” is basic to the Reformed theology that Bilderdijk sought to defend and promote. A test case is the believer’s reception of the Bible’s sixty-six books as holy and canonical and his undoubted belief in all things contained in them. The Belgic Confession, which Bilderdijk affirmed, states that the believer receives these books and believes all things in them “above all because the Holy Spirit testifies in our hearts that they are from God” (article 5). As Bilderdijk said, “[I]t is the working of God’s Spirit in our heart, and the mind must receive it from our heart.” The mind is not independent, but dependent upon the heart and the Spirit.

In apologetics, the believer must not set aside “his possession and his consciousness of it” in order to argue from the unbeliever’s resources. Rather, “we must cling with all of our soul to the Savior, value and hold fast with our heart the Grace that has called us, and fight Unbelief in God’s might and not under the Banner of Reason.”

And so Bilderdijk did. As Herman Bavinck writes of him, “Against the Revolution, he raised the banner of the Gospel.”^[2]

^[1] Willem Bilderdijk, “Aan Mr. Samuel Iperuszoon Wiselius,” in Brieven 3 (Amsterdam, 1837). All quotations in this article are taken from here. All translations are my own.

^[2] Herman Bavinck, Bilderdijk als denker en dichter (Kampen: J. H. Kok, 1906), 216, my translation.

Jesus Christ is our eternal king who governs us by his Word and Spirit (Heidelberg Catechism LD 12). In the Reformation, this twofold formula guarded against, on the one hand, the objectivism of Roman Catholic sacramentalism and, on the other hand, the subjectivism of Anabaptist mysticism. With this in mind, I was struck afresh when re-reading The Pilgrim’s Progress by the biblical imagery Bunyan uses for these two things—the Candle and the Comforter.

When Christian comes to the Interpreter’s House, which in many ways symbolizes the church, the Interpreter “commands his man to light the candle” before showing him seven rooms that contain many “excellent things” (Ps. 119:18). In proving Spurgeon’s quip about Bunyan, if we prick him at this point in the story, his “Bibline” blood begins to flow. The psalmist, for one, exclaims, “Your word is a lamp to my feet and a light to my path” (119:105). And Peter exhorts us to pay attention to the guiding words of the prophets that have been confirmed by the apostles as to “a lamp shining in a dark place” (2 Pet. 1:19). The candle signifies that the “excellent things” Christian is about to see are things revealed in God’s Word. The path leading to the City is illumined by the light of the Word, the candle of Christ.

As Christian prepares to leave the Interpreter’s House to continue on his journey, the Interpreter speaks to him of the Comforter: “The Comforter be always with thee, good Christian, to guide thee in the way that leads to the City.” Again, Bunyan’s “Bibline” blood flows, for Jesus said, “The Comforter, the Holy Spirit, whom the Father will send in my name, he will teach you all things and bring to your remembrance all that I have said to you” (Jn. 14:26; see 14:16; 15:26; 16:7, 13). The Comforter has an essential role in the teaching of Christ’s people, illuminating their minds and hearts to the truth of God’s revelation.

As our eternal king, Christ governs us by his Word and Spirit, by his Candle and Comforter.

The father of Reformed biblical theology was also a lifelong poet. Vos published eight volumes of poetry brimming with some two hundred poems in total. The controlling principle in his poetry was the same as in his dogmatics and biblical theology: the preeminence of God’s glory in the consideration of all that has been created. His poetic impulse was born in his early Dutch Reformed context, shaped especially by the legacy of the romanticist, Willem Bilderdijk, and his Amsterdam professor, Willem J. Hofdijk. But this impulse took a distinctly religious shape most notably from Vos’s reading of the prophet Isaiah, the “salvation-poet, salvation-herald.”^[1] Vos says regarding Isaiah,

there is always the unmistakable note of sovereign power bespeaking the prophet who is at the same time a poet by the grace of God. Isaiah’s influence on the formal development of sacred poetry has proved as great and lasting as that exercised in his contribution to the body of revealed truth.^[2]

Vos’s own poetry remains an untapped source of insight into his all-encompassing, God-centered mind and heart.

In one volume of Vos’s poems, Spiegel der natuur (Mirror of Nature), is found a short poem inspired by a particular Sunday when the foretaste of the heavenly and eschatological rest was noticeably strong and nourishing. The poem is entitled, “Dies Solis” (“Sunday”).

This is a Sunday which can well be called a sun day;
I have bathed both body and soul in a sea of light,
have washed off my everyday doing and knowing,
have of heavenly wine tasted and wedding food eaten,
and blessedly sat listening by the way,
along which the singing holy procession goes.^[3]

Vos employs a wordplay on the Dutch zondag (Sunday) and zonnedag (solar day or sun day). The name of the day contains in itself a symbol of what is heavenly. The heavenly nourishes not only his soul, but also gives his body rest. The poem concludes with a pilgrim theme, with him seated on the way, for there remains a Sabbath rest for the people of God. This poem is the overflow of a heart in which are the highways to Zion.

_{[1] This is part of Vos’s description of Isaiah in his poem, “Jesaja,” in Spiegel der Genade (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1922), 33: “Heildichter, heilheraut…”
[2] “Some Doctrinal Features of the Early Prophecies of Isaiah,” in The Shorter Writings of Geerhardus Vos: Redemptive History and Biblical Interpretation, ed. Richard B. Gaffin, Jr. (NJ: P&R Publishing, 1980), 272.
[3] My translation. The original Dutch reads:
Dit is een zondag die wel zonnedag mag heeten;
Ik heb én lijf én ziel in zee van licht gebaad,
Heb afgespoeld mijn aldaags-doen en weten,
Van hemelwijn geproefd en bruiloftskost gegeten,
En zalig luistrend bij den weg gezeten,
Waarlangs de zingende hoogtijprocessie gaat.}

The Synod of Dort (1618–19) not only produced the famous Canons of Dort and a church order, but also the first translation of the Bible into Dutch from the original languages, known as the Statenvertaling. Along with this translation, marginal notes (kanttekeningen) were added to aid in the study of God’s Word. You could say it was one of the earliest “Study Bibles,” though the Genevan (1560) has historical priority.

Why are these notes significant? First, while no office bearer in the church was required to subscribe to these marginal notes, like as to the Three Forms of Unity, they still provide a window into the biblical interpretation of the architects of the Canons of Dort.

Second, these notes soon gained international recognition in keeping with the international nature of the synod. In 1645 the Westminster Assembly commissioned Theodore Hank to translate them into English, which he later published in 1657. An English translation of the annotations can be found here.[1] The notes on Colossians 2:8 briefly distinguish between a true and false philosophy and posit the proper use of philosophy as an instrument to better understand or explain God’s Word.

Kolossensen 2:8

Colossians 2:8 reads,

Ziet toe, dat niemand u als een roof vervoere door de filosofie, en ijdele verleiding, naar de overlevering der mensen, naar de eerste beginselen der wereld, en niet naar Christus

Beware lest any man carry you off as spoil through philosophy and vain deceit, after the tradition of men, after the first principles of the world, and not after Christ.

Marginal Note on Ziet toe (“See to it”)

Hier begint de apostel het verhaal der dwalingen, waar hij hen tegen waarschuwt, namelijk wijsbegeerte, menselijke inzettingen, en vermengingen van de wet der ceremoniën, die hij de een voor, de andere na, wederspreekt.

Here the apostle begins the account of the errors against which he warns them, namely, philosophy, human ordinances and mingling of the ceremonial law, which he, the one first, the other after, opposes.

Marginal Note on als een roof (“as spoil”)

… namelijk van Christus en Zijne waarheid tot andere leringen of middelen ter zaligheid buiten Christus; ene gelijkenis, genomen van rovers, die niet alleen de goederen, maar ook de mensen zelf tot een roof wegvoerden, om hen tot slaven … te maken. Zie een voorbeeld, 1 Sam. 30.

… namely, from Christ and His truth unto other doctrines or means of salvation outside of Christ. A similitude taken from such robbers, who used to carry away not only goods, but also the persons themselves for a prey, to make them slaves …. See an example, 1 Samuel 30.

Marginal note on de filosofie (“philosophy”)

Hierdoor wordt de rechte filosofie niet verstaan, die ene gave Gods is, en zelfs een instrument of middel is, dienstig om Gods Woord beter te verstaan en te verklaren; maar de sophisterij of bedriegelijke schijnwijsheid van enige heidense filosofen, gelijk de volgende woorden ijdele verleiding verklaren, en gelijk Paulus hiervan spreekt, Rom. 1:21, 22, welke filosofen in deze hunne schijnwijsheid enige dingen van God en van den weg tot het opperste goed hadden voorgesteld, die deze leraars met het Evangelie wilden vermengen, gelijk ook de scholastieke leraars in het Pausdom doen, waardoor de eenvoudigheid en oprechtheid der zaligmakende leer van het Evangelie merkelijk is verduisterd en vervalst.

Hereby is not understood the true philosophy, which is a gift of God and is even an instrument or means useful for the better understanding and explaining of the Word of God, but the sophistry or specious discourses of some pagan philosophers, as the following words vain deceit declare, and as Paul speaks hereof in Rom. 1:21, 22, which philosophers in this their apparent wisdom had propounded some things concerning God, and concerning the way to the highest good, which these teachers wanted to mingle with the Gospel, as the scholastic teachers also do amongst the Papists, whereby the simplicity and sincerity of the saving doctrine of the Gospel is notably obscured and falsified.

Revelation and Philosophy according to Groen van Prinsterer

Groen van Prinsterer cites this marginal note in his Proeve over de middelen waardoor de waarheid wordt gekend en gestaafd (1834) in support of his claim: “Revelation alone is the foundation of a complete philosophy; it contains the highest, the only true philosophy.”[2] This statement comes in the context of a larger discussion on Christianity and philosophy:

Man is related to the spiritual and the material world. No human reasoning teaches how spirit and matter are united in him; the philosopher has preferably devoted himself to one or the other component, so that one has either spiritualized the dust or materialized the spirit. Spiritualism and materialism emerged.[3]

For man, if he does not know the first cause of universal corruption, then there is no more enigmatic being than he himself. He feels a pull toward a higher existence; but he also feels that he is at every turn led by inclinations and impulses in the opposite direction.  How great and also how miserable; how earthly, and also how heavenly![4]

Christianity solves the riddles that cannot be solved by philosophy, insofar as this is necessary for wisdom about life [levenswijsheid] and eternal happiness. By faith, the harmony of feeling and reason is restored. Revelation teaches how the self-consciousness of greatness and misery can be explained. She gives firmness to principles while she allows freedom of opinions. She gives what philosophy promised.[5]

Christian philosophy … contains the life principle [levensbeginsel] of knowledge and science. She is the sun, which spreads over the field of human investigation brightness, warmth, and life. Every science, properly practiced, bears witness to the truth of revelation; not properly practiced, they glorify, by deviations and misunderstandings, the highest truth nolens volens. Accurate study leads back to the universal source of light and life.[6]

1. Thank you to Slabbert Le Cornu for bringing this English translation to my attention. May the Lord bless your efforts in translating these notes into Afrikaans.
2. De Openbaring alleen is de grondslag eener volledige wijsbegeerte; zij bevat de hoogste, de alleen ware filozofie.
3. De mensch is aan de geestelijke en aan de stofflijke wereld verwant. Geen menschelijke redenering leert hoe geest en stof vereenigd in hem zijn; de wijsgeer heeft zich bij voorkeur aan het eene of aan het andere bestanddeel gehecht, zoodat men óf het stof vergeestelijkt, óf den geest verstoffelijkt heeft. 
4. Voor den mensch, zoo hij de eerste oorzaak der algemeene verbastering niet kent, is geen raadselachtiger wezen dan hij zelf. Hij gevoelt een trek naar hooger bestaan; doch gevoelt ook dat hij telkens door neigingen en driften in tegenovergestelden zin wordt geleid. Hoe groot en tevens hoe ellendig; hoe aardsch, en tevens hoe hemelschgezind!
5. Het Christendom lost de voor de wijsbegeerte onoplosbare raadselen, voor zoo ver dit tot levenswijsheid en eeuwig geluk noodig is, op. Door het geloof wordt de harmonie van gevoel en rede hersteld. De Openbaring leert hoe de zelfbewustheid van grootheid en ellende kan worden verklaard. Zij geeft vastheid van beginsels terwijl ze vrijheid van meeningen laat. Zij geeft wat de wijsbegeerte belooft.
6. De christelijke wijsbegeerte … bevat het levensbeginsel van kennis en wetenschap. Zij is de zon, die op het veld van menschelijk onderzoek helderheid, warmte en leven verspreidt. Elke wetenschap, wel beoefend, legt van de waarheid der Openbaring getuigenis af; niet wel beoefend, verheerlijkt zij, door afwijking en wanbegrip, de hoogste waarheid tegen wil en dank. Naauwkeurige studie brengt naar de algemeene bron van licht en leven terug. 

If the ease of being illustrated were a touchstone of the truth, then Augustine’s well known adage has been proven ten times over: “The new is in the old concealed; the old is in the new revealed.”

John Calvin (1509–1564) employed the shadow-form (σκια-εικων) imagery of Hebrews 10:1 to speak of the Old Testament Law as a sketch that the New Testament Gospel colors in. He writes, “Under the Law was shadowed forth only in rude and imperfect lines what is under the Gospel set forth in living colors and graphically distinct.”

B. B. Warfield (1851–1921), with particular reference to the revelation of the doctrine of the Trinity, likened the Old Testament to “a chamber richly furnished but dimly lighted.” The New Testament, by introducing more light, “brings into it nothing which was not in it before.” Rather, “it brings out into clearer view much of what is in it, but was only dimly or even not at all perceived before.” This image has been echoed by many, including Geerhardus Vos, who wrote in his Compendium with respect to the doctrine of the Trinity, “We can read much in the O.T. by the light of the N.T. that the O.T. saints could not find there” (Wij kunnen veel in het O.T. lezen bij het licht van het N.T., dat de O.T. heiligen er niet vinden konden).

Herman Bavinck (1854–1921) wrote that the relationship between the Old and New Testaments “is like that of pedestal and statue, lock and key, shadow and body.”

Geerhardus Vos (1862–1949) emphasized the organic progression of God’s revelation in Scripture over against evolutionary models by speaking of it as a seed that grows into a tree.

Robert Knudsen (1924–2000) captured the necessary yet fading nature of the old in relation to the new: “[The old] is on the order of the chrysalis of a butterfly which must be cast aside when the butterfly emerges; nevertheless, like a chrysalis, the old bears the new.”

A lesser known illustration may be found in the work of the Dutch-Reformed politician and historian, Guillaume Groen van Prinsterer (1801–1876), entitled, Proeve over de middelen waardoor de waarheid wordt gekend en gestaafd. He quotes the German theologian, Philipp Marheinecke (1780–1846):

Der … dunkle Mond des Alten Testaments hat sein Licht allein von der Gnadensonne des Evangeliums.

The dark moon of the Old Testament has its light only from the sun of grace of the Gospel.

Groen comments,

De Israëliet zag op den Heiland die komen zou; de Christen ziet op den Heiland die gekomen is en wederkomen zal.

The Israelite looked on the Savior who was to come; the Christian looks on the Savior who has come and will come again.

In the words of Christ himself in John 5:39,

You search the Scriptures because you think that in them you have eternal life; and it is they that bear witness about me.

Epicurus sought blessedness either in external and carnal delights, or in inner tranquility of soul, or in both at once; Muhammad sought it in all sorts of external delights; and neither of the two sought it in the possession, communion, enjoyment, and glorification of God. By that fact neither acknowledges that God is sufficient to make him blessed, nor consequently that God himself is blessed.

Petrus van Mastricht, Theoretical-Practical Theology, 2:491

The Modern Messiah: Minimalism

Consumerism “is perhaps the most powerful religious movement at work in the West today.”^[1] Coursing through its veins is the lifeblood of globalization and postmodernity. The production of unprecedented wealth in the West has been wedded to a rejection of an overarching story or worldview that gives meaning to our lives. Consumerism is their offspring. It has been borne to the high places from where it reigns supreme, decreeing a culture of consumption—nothing is off-limits, everything is desirable, all are on the hunt for more.

But the never-ending hunt of consumerism has, for tired souls, given way to the simple house-cleaning of minimalism that prioritizes control and seeks inner tranquility.

YouTube (verb) “minimalism” and begin scrolling. But be warned: it doesn’t end. It’s a dismal descent, deeper and deeper into that virtual black hole—you will not escape its gravitational pull until it’s 3 a.m. and, like Nebuchadnezzar driven from among men, your reason finally returns to you. Ironic, though, how minimalist sages have maximized on YouTube’s algorithm, and the very same secular prophets who decry consumerism for its financial obsession have come away with a nice profit of their own. 

Netflix even features a film, “Minimalism: A Documentary About the Important Things.” The trailer opens with these words: “We spend so much time on the hunt, but nothing ever quite does it for us. And we get so wrapped up in the hunt that it kind of makes us miserable.” Barbaric Black Friday footage ensues—consumerism unhinged—climaxing with insight that nails consumerism’s coffin shut, “You’re not going to get happier by consuming more.” How should we then live? Cue the messiah who will save us from our consumerism: minimalism.

Note, it’s not consumerism in principle that minimalism combats, but consumerism in its failed state: it promised happiness, but never delivered. “It makes us miserable” and “You’re not going to get happier” bookend the perceived plight of consumerism. Minimalism, therefore, is heralded, proclaimed, even preached as the messiah who will make good on consumerism’s unfulfilled promise to make us happy. The titles of these videos with hundreds of thousands of views tell the story: “5 Ways Minimalism Improves Our Happiness,” “A Minimalist Lifestyle Will Make You Happier,” “Why More Stuff Won’t Make You Happy,” and “Less stuff, more happiness.”

Blaise Pascal is again vindicated when he wrote,

All men seek happiness. This is without exception. Whatever different means they employ, they all tend to this end. The cause of some going to war, and of others avoiding it, is the same desire in both, attended with different views. The will never takes the least step but to this object. This is the motive of every action of every man, even of those who hang themselves.

So too the Dutch-Reformed theologian, Petrus van Mastricht:

[T]here is no one who does not desire his own blessedness. … [N]othing is desirable apart from blessedness; indeed, nothing is desirable except for the sake of blessedness. For why do people desire wealth, honors, pleasures, and so forth, except for the sake of blessedness? And likewise, why do we turn from and avoid every adversity, except that they impede and disturb our blessedness?

Theoretical-Practical Theology, 2:493-94

The pendulum has swung from external delight to internal tranquility, from consumerism to minimalism in hopes of finding peace and contentment, blessedness and happiness, satisfaction and fulfillment. The hunt has been exchanged for the hammock. 

But is minimalism our liberator or the same captor in a new guise?

Before scorching minimalism by placing it before the true Savior whose eyes are like a flame of fire (Rev. 1:14), there is much to commend about it—not, of course, as a modern messiah who can secure our blessedness, but as encapsulating some biblical wisdom according to God’s common grace.

Commandeering Minimalism

In what ways can we commandeer minimalism as Christians to aid us in our service to King Jesus and pursuit of God’s glory in all things? Here are a minimum of six ways.

1. An Apologetic against Consumerism, Confirming Job and Ecclesiastes. Minimalism exposes the futility, emptiness, and deception of consumerism. Consuming more of what already doesn’t make you happy will not make you happy—just ask Solomon in Ecclesiastes. “Vanity of vanities! All is vanity.” But if consumerism face-plants against the wisdom of Ecclesiastes, then minimalism does the same with the wisdom of Job. The point of Ecclesiastes and Job is the same from opposite ends: God alone is my blessedness whether I have everything or I have nothing—in him I rest satisfied (Ps. 16:11; 73:25).

2. Imitates God’s Simplicity. Minimalism even imitates—on a finite, creaturely level—the simplicity of God. The following quote may prove Mastricht (1630-1706) a minimalist long before it became trendy:

The divine simplicity teaches us to acquiesce to our lot, however simple it may be. For the more simple anything is, the more constant it is, and durable, whereas the more composite, likewise the more dissoluble and corruptible. Thus, God is most immutable because he is most simple…. When it comes to our lot, the exact same is true: the more simple, the more solid, and the more variegated from compositions by wealth, honors, friends, the more mutable, and the more you are distracted by so many objects, the more you are liable to cares and anxieties (Luke 10:41), for the more you possess, the more you can lose. It is thus on this account that we should, in godly self-sufficiency, accustom our soul to simplicity, and should substitute, for the variety of things, the one God who is most sufficient in every way for all things (Gen. 17:1), who is accordingly for us the one thing necessary (Luke 10:42). So then let us possess him as our lot, with a simple acquiescence, and other things as corollaries (Matt. 6:33), looking to the apostle, who urges this contentment (1 Tim. 6:6) and lights our way in it with his own example (Phil. 4:11-12).

Theoretical-Practical Theology, 2:152

3. Glorifies God’s All-Sufficiency for Himself and Us. Not filling our lives with distractions upon distractions, even being willing to forgo good things and comforts for the sake of the gospel and Christian love, magnifies God as our sufficiency. Pascal observed that we fill our lives with diversions and distractions to console ourselves from our miseries, and yet this is the greatest of our miseries. “I have often said that the sole cause of man’s unhappiness is that he does not know how to stay quietly in his room.” But the person who has been reconciled to God in Christ draws near to the throne of grace with their once-guilty conscience now cleansed by the once-for-all shed blood of Christ. His blood has also obtained for us the right to eat from the heavenly altar and so have our hearts strengthened by grace. “For here we have no lasting city, but we seek the city that is to come” (Heb. 13:14).

4. Fits a Pilgrim Lifestyle. The letter to the Hebrews situates the church in the wilderness between redemption and consummation. The wilderness is marked by want and lack, barrenness and emptiness—a perfect place for God to test the faith of his people. But while the wilderness makes us acutely aware of what we do not have, the author of Hebrews reminds us of what we do have. Note the verb “to have” (ἔχω) bookends the rich theological core of the letter that expounds the heavenly high priesthood of Jesus Christ (4:14–10:25). That we have Jesus Christ as our high priest is the indicative (statement of fact) from which the imperatives (statement of command) arise. “We have … therefore, let us…” is the basic gospel pattern of the letter.^[2] As we reckon with our present redemptive-historical situation as pilgrims in the wilderness who are seeking a city that is to come, even as strangers and exiles on earth who are seeking a homeland and desiring a better country, that is, a heavenly one, we draw strength from knowing that we already possess Jesus Christ as our high priest who bears our names on his heart in heaven before the Father, unashamed to call us his brothers. Though I may not have many comforts or much security and my possessions and freedom may even be taken from me (Heb. 10:32ff.), I have him, and because I have him, I can persevere and will one day arrive on the shores of that longed-for heavenly country where he is. If minimalism may be understood as foregoing earthly pleasures for heavenly rewards, a kind of transcending of the temporal sphere, then Moses would be a minimalist: “By faith Moses, when he was grown up, refused to be called the son of Pharaoh’s daughter, choosing rather to be mistreated with the people of God than to enjoy the fleeting pleasures of sin” (11:24-25). This kind of minimalism fits our identity as a pilgrim people. 

5. Promotes Prayer. Luke reminds us that Jesus frequently withdrew to the wilderness to pray (5:16) and Mark tells us that Jesus rose early in the morning, while it was still dark, left the house and went off to a solitary place to pray (1:35). While there is much more to this, we can at least see that removing distractions and quieting ourselves before God promotes and prioritizes prayer in our lives—something all-too elusive in our distracted age.

6. Boosts Productivity, Improves Organization and Reduces Stress. Practically, minimalism will make you more productive, which is good and desirable as a means to honor God in the stewardship of your time. As a matter of fact, a clean, organized desk that is used not as an additional bookshelf but as a workstation will probably speed up your sermon prep, keep your mind focused on the task at-hand so you can think more deeply about it, and make your study overall more efficient. Check out Matt Perman’s How to Set Up Your Desk: A Guide to Fixing a (Surprisingly) Overlooked Productivity Problem.

Unmasking Minimalism

So minimalism has its benefits, but as a messiah who will make us blessed, it must be wholeheartedly cast into the fire. Minimalism is the same captor as consumerism, but in a different guise. Both enslave us to ourselves. Both make self-realization the path of happiness. Both seek fulfillment in the creation apart from the Creator. Neither can deal with the source of our misery: our sin that has alienated us from the God who is forever blessed and the source of all blessedness. External delights or internal tranquility is proclaimed as that which will make you happy and blessed, but neither can make you right with God who created you for himself. 

Furthermore, minimalism cannot be absolute since it can only thrive in the wake of the exhaustion of consumerism. Minimalism presents itself as our savior from consumerism. The hammock allures the man exhausted from the hunt. Minimalism realizes the misery that possessing and pursuing more things brings, but instead of turning to the one thing that can satisfy and give you rest, God himself, it turns to an abstract principle of renunciation. It addresses the symptoms, but not the disease; in fact, it has no intention of ever healing you. 

The True Messiah: Mastricht contra Minimalism

Neither consumerism nor minimalism can make us happy. When either is raised to messianic proportions, their disciples are left dry and doomed. But there is a tertium quid (a third option) that only the Christian can see. Mastricht is again our guide:

Epicurus sought blessedness either in external and carnal delights, or in inner tranquility of soul, or in both at once; Muhammad sought it in all sorts of external delights; and neither of the two sought it in the possession, communion, enjoyment, and glorification of God. By that fact neither acknowledges that God is sufficient to make him blessed, nor consequently that God himself is blessed.

Theoretical-Practical Theology, 2:491

There is nothing new under the sun. Minimalism is as ancient a lifestyle as any, and God himself always remains the answer. Consumerists and minimalists will always be restless until they rest in God. Blessedness, happiness, satisfaction, fullness are to the world as mythical as Atlantis or the Holy Grail or the fountain of youth, for they are not found on earth, but with God. Although the distance between God and us is infinite, we can enjoy him as our blessedness and reward because he has voluntarily condescended to us by way of covenant (WCF 7.1). “I will be your God and you will be my people” is the joyful chorus of Scripture.

“Blessed are the people whose God is the LORD!”

Psalm 144:15

Furthermore, as Mastricht observes, “[The blessedness of God] convinces us that the blessedness of the rational creature is possible, because not only is God most blessed, and thus able to communicate his blessedness, but he has also endued rational creatures with an appetite for blessedness, and certainly he did not do so in vain (Ps. 4:6)” (Theoretical-Practical Theology, 2:493). Whether we possess everything according to the wisdom of consumerism or nothing according to the wisdom of minimalism, we will always feel our extreme misery as long as we are destitute of God and are the enemies of him who is the source of all joy (Isa. 59:2; Eph. 2:12). 

Where, then, can I find true happiness? Mastricht steers us in the right direction: 

(a) in union or possession of the most blessed one (Ps. 73:25; 16:5; 33:12; 144:15);

(b) in communion with God (1 John 1:3; 2 Cor. 13:14), by which he is with us, in us, for us, and, as our God, devotes himself and all his attributes to us and to our blessing (Rom. 8:32);

(c) in the enjoyment of God, which embraces, first, the perfect knowledge (and as it were the vision) of God (John 17:3; 1 Cor. 13:12; Job 19:26-27), and of our blessedness as well, in union and communion with God (2 Cor. 3:18; 4:6), and second, a perfect repose and joy arising from this union and communion, together with our knowledge of it, that is, a perfect fulness of joys and pleasures with God’s face, and at his right hand (Ps. 16:11; 1 Cor. 2:9; Ps. 84:11);

(d) in the sweetest glorification of God (Isa. 6:3; Rev. 4:8, 10-11; 5:9ff.). 

Theoretical-Practical Theology, 2:493

If that is where true happiness is found, then how do I make it my own? Mastricht opens up God’s Word and exhorts us to… 

Pursue reconciliation with God with all our effort, through faith in the blood of the Mediator (2 Cor. 5:19-20; Col. 1:20), that we may be freed from all evil, which is the first part of blessedness.

Strive for union with Christ, that at the same time we may be united with God, in which is the foundation of blessedness for all, for blessedness comes through faith (Phil. 3:9; John 14:6).

Strive with all our effort for uniformity with God and with his will (Rev. 2:6; Ps. 40:8), which best procures his friendship.

Yield ourselves in covenant with God by receiving the conditions of the covenant offered to us, that namely God should become our God (Gen. 17:1), in which every point of our blessedness consists (Ps. 33:12).

Walk with God in the light, and thus we will have communion with him (1 John 1:3, 6-7).

Zealously employ those means by which we are brought closer to God: faith, hope, love, repentance, prayers, and the duties of public and private worship (James 4:8).

Theoretical-Practical Theology, 2:494

God has promised in his covenant of grace, “I will be your God and you will be my people.” He has fulfilled his promise in his Son, our Lord Jesus Christ. When God is our God, when he is our chosen portion and cup, then out of the overflow of our heart, our mouth speaks, “The lines have fallen for me in pleasant places; indeed, I have a beautiful inheritance” (Ps. 16:6).

Whether I have much or whether I have little, I rest in him. The one who rests in God and walks in his ways “is like a tree planted by streams of water that yields its fruit in its season, and its leaf does not wither” (Ps. 1:3).

Now come diseases, come poverty, persecution, death, and any great evil, they will say, “If God be for us, who can be against us?” (Rom. 8:31). Those things may take away the verdure and the foliage of blessedness (which [we] possess in hope and in some way in reality), yet they will never rip out root and trunk. [We] will exult in triumph with the apostle, “Who shall separate us from the love of Christ? … I am persuaded that neither death, nor life, nor anything, shall separate us from the love of God which is in Christ Jesus our Lord” (Rom. 8:35, 38-39).

Theoretical-Practical Theology, 2:495

Only the Christian can taunt disease, poverty, persecution and death—powers before which consumerism and minimalism cower—because only the Christian has Christ. By grace alone his perfect satisfaction, righteousness, and holiness has been credited to me as if I had never sinned nor been a sinner, and as if I had been as perfectly obedient as Christ was obedient for me (Heidelberg Catechism 60).

The source of our misery has been fully dealt with in Christ our Savior. He alone brings us into God’s presence where there is fullness of joy, even to a place of sonship at his right hand where there are pleasures forevermore.

^[1] Michael W. Goheen, A Light to the Nations: The Missional Church and the Biblical Story (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2011), 14.

^[2] The middle section of Hebrews begins with 4:14-16, “Since then we have a great high priest who has passed through the heavens, Jesus, the Son of God, let us hold fast our confession. For we do not have a high priest who is unable to sympathize with our weaknesses, but [we do have] one who in every respect has been tempted as we are, yet without sin. Let us then with confidence draw near to the throne of grace, that we may receive mercy and find grace to help in time of need.” The main point of the section is summarized in 8:1-2, “Now the point in what we are saying is this: we have such a high priest, one who is seated at the right hand of the throne of the Majesty in heaven, a minister in the holy places, in the true tent that the Lord set up, not man.” And the section ends with 10:19-25, “Therefore, brothers, since we have confidence to enter the holy places by the blood of Jesus, by the new and living way that he opened for us through the curtain, that is, through his flesh, and since we have a great priest over the house of God, let us draw near with a true heart in full assurance of faith, with our hearts sprinkled clean from an evil conscience and our bodies washed with pure water. Let ushold fast the confession of our hope without wavering, for he who promised is faithful. And let us consider how to stir up one another to love and good works, not neglecting to meet together, as is the habit of some, but encouraging one another, and all the more as you see the Day drawing near.”

Alan D. Strange, Imputation of the Active Obedience of Christ in the Westminster Standards. Explorations in Reformed Confessional Theology. Grand Rapids, MI: Reformation Heritage Books, 2019. Pp. xviii + 154. $10.00 (paperback).

The rush of books, articles, reviews, and even a hymnal that has flowed from the pen (or, more likely, keyboard) of Dr. Alan D. Strange has been a most appreciated and welcomed gift to the church. His latest work is no exception as it takes up the vital gospel issue of the imputation of the active obedience of Christ—“no hope without it,” voiced the dying Machen. Strange’s focus is primarily historical, investigating the Westminster Assembly and the Westminster Standards, but this does not keep him from skillfully integrating this history with precise dogmatic formulations, warm pastoral exhortations, penetrating polemical argumentations, and judicious ecclesiastical implications—a truly masterful feat that is both academic and devotional, for both the classroom and the coffeehouse.

Strange’s stated aim is to advance the argument that “while the Assembly may never have explicitly affirmed active obedience in what it finally adopted, nonetheless, the Westminster documents, taken as a whole, tend to affirm it” (2). He seeks to accomplish this by carefully considering both the original intent of the framers of the Westminster Assembly and the animus imponentis, that is, the way in which subsequent ecclesiastical assemblies have understood the Standards (128-29). In his own words:

It is my contention, however, that a few lacunae remain which, when examined, will fill in the picture and permit us to see more clearly that the Assembly affirmed active obedience when it specifically addressed the issue. Although the final language of the Assembly’s documents may not have reflected it as some other formulations do (such as the Savoy Declaration of 1658), they reflect a two-covenant structure that affirms (indeed, that entails and requires…) the doctrine of active obedience. Furthermore, I will argue that the original intent of the Westminster divines favors active obedience, as does the interpretation and application of those standards over the years of those churches that have adopted them (in other words, the animus imponentis favors such an affirmation). Moreover, the Assembly’s constitution as a body to give advice to Parliament rather than as a ruling body of the church materially affected how it did its work; consideration of this is relevant in a variety of controversies, including the question of whether the Assembly affirmed active obedience. (3)

But before arriving in Westminster Abbey in the 17th century, Strange excavates the ancient and medieval church to find seeds of the doctrine of Christ’s active obedience. While some (like Norman Shepherd) have denied any such antecedents, Strange demonstrates that such denial is wrongheaded. In the early church, Irenaeus’s recapitulation theory, anticipated by Justin Martyr, included Christ obeying where Adam disobeyed, and Athanasius’s reasoning for the incarnation expressed the positive need for Christ to fulfill the law “that stood in danger of never being fulfilled because of the sin of Adam and his progeny” (22). In the medieval church, theologians such as Hugh, Lombard, Alexander of Hales, Aquinas, Duns Scotus, and Biel contended that Christ had no need to merit anything for himself, which implies that what he did merit, he merited for us. 

Strange further observes that any historical survey of the doctrine of active obedience must consider not only the doctrine of Christ, but also the doctrine of the Holy Spirit. In fact, it was when the Westminster divines were addressing the latter at the Assembly that the debate about active obedience commenced. The doctrine of the Holy Spirit did not come into its own until the Reformation—most notably with Calvin, whom Warfield knighted “the theologian of the Holy Spirit.” This explains why “the imputation of the active obedience of Christ, which is distinctly the work of the Holy Spirit, received comparatively little attention until the Reformation”: the church had yet to enjoy the proper categories by which to understand the doctrine more robustly (29-30).

In the Reformation, the seeds of active obedience are found in Luther and Melanchthon, which eventually bloomed in their successors, like Martin Chemnitz, and in the Formula of Concord (3.14-15). Calvin may not have clearly distinguished the active from the passive obedience of Christ, but there is considerable evidence that he “does teach a doctrine of the imputation of Christ’s righteousness that includes what later writers distinguished into Christ’s active and passive obedience” (35). This would be stated more explicitly by his successor, Theodore Beza, as well as in the Heidelberg Catechism 60-61 and the Belgic Confession article 22. Johannes Piscator “became the first, particularly in response to the affirmation of Beza, to argue that the imputation of Christ’s righteousness was restricted to His obedience in making satisfaction for the sins of His people” (38). But many Reformed theologians rose to oppose him and affirm active obedience, including the international French Reformed synods of Privas (1612) and Tonneins (1614). Lastly, the Irish Articles of 1615, the most immediate antecedent to Westminster, explicitly affirmed Christ’s active obedience in articles 30, 34, and 35.

This brings us to the heart of Strange’s book in which the debate over active obedience at the Westminster Assembly in 1643 is carefully documented and analyzed within its historical, political, and ecclesiastical context. The Assembly’s original task was not to draft a new confession of faith, but to revise the Thirty-Nine Articles, in which only a single article, article 11, treated justification. This article “had to bear the entire weight of all the major aspects of the doctrine of justification.” The divines, therefore, had relatively brief space, putting precision at a premium (51-52). In this context, the word whole (to qualify Christ’s obedience) carried significant weight as short hand for affirming active obedience.

A heated and drawn-out debate ensued over that weighty word, whole, but when it finally came to a vote, only three or four men out of fifty voted against affirming active obedience. Furthermore, their reasons for opposing it were not owing in the least to a desire “to introduce any element of human merit or works (as a part of our faithfulness) into the equation of our justification” (61). Rather, the minority opposition was mainly owing to fear of antinomianism, “the main theological error among Protestants” at that time (56-57). Yet, despite the potential misuse of the affirmation of active obedience, the Assembly affirmed it anyway, for they believed such “to be at the heart of the gospel” (58).

Thus, the Assembly in its initial debate overwhelmingly affirmed active obedience. Why then is the precise language of whole obedience absent from the Standards they later drafted? Strange answers,

[A]ctive obedience was affirmed in the revision of article 11 in 1643, and there is no reason to suppose that it was not also affirmed in WCF 11 and in the other relevant chapters of the WCF, even though the specific wording of revised article 11 never again appears. It is my contention that it did not need to appear in that form because the wording of WCF 11.3 and 8.5 did everything that the revision of article 11 by the addition of the word whole was intended to do (and arguably more). (67)

Strange supports his thesis with a survey of the Westminster Standards to demonstrate the ubiquitous presence of active obedience, despite the absence of the exact wording of whole obedience. Furthermore, he provides a global perspective of the Standards in terms of its covenant theology, showing how the system of doctrine contained therein falls apart when active obedience is denied. He correctly points out that those who deny active obedience today will “not stop at a mere denial of active obedience; they would likely have problems with the whole theological scheme of Westminster, of which active obedience is merely an important plank” (136). In other words, active obedience is not something one can reject without doing substantial damage to the whole system, and those who do “are wanting as Reformed theologians” (136-37).

The bulk of the book has been concerned with the original intent of the framers of the Westminster Assembly, but Strange concludes with an important consideration of the animus imponentis in the final chapter. To give just a cursory overview: both the PCA and OPC have had committees address the broader question of justification in which active obedience was affirmed. This is on par with judicatories in both denominations requiring the affirmation of limited atonement, despite the original intent being unclear. “Similarly,” says Strange, “the recent reports of committees erected by such bodies also testify that an animus has developed in the church that reads our standards to require the affirmation of active obedience, even as they routinely require the affirmation of the doctrine of limited atonement” (134). A similar animus is also evidenced in the PCA, OPC, RCUS, OCRC, URCNA, and RPCNA who have received committee reports that “have either condemned FV [Federal Vision] and NPP [New Perspective on Paul] errors or have adopted statements that reaffirm and highlight confessional statements that militate against positions of at least some of their supporters” and affirm active obedience (137n10).

The compact size of this book would be a false indication of its massive achievement in historical and confessional theology. In a word, it punches well above its weight-class, especially in contemporary debates concerning justification, like Federal Vision. Strange’s thesis that the Westminster Assembly and Standards affirm the imputation of the active obedience of Christ is carefully and persuasively argued. This volume will be of great service to the church in her task to guard the good deposit of the gospel.

Dr. Alan D. Strange has graced Christ the Center on numerous occasions, including an interview on the book reviewed above:

• The Imputation of Active Obedience in the Westminster Standards
• History and the Life of the Church
• The Spirituality of the Church in the Ecclesiology of Charles Hodge
• Charles Hodge and the Spirituality of the Church
• Confessional Subscription and the Animus Imponentis

David F. Wells. The Courage to Be Protestant: Reformation Faith in Today’s World. Second Edition. Grand Rapids, MI. William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2017. Pp. xiv + 218. $22.00. In The Courage to Be Protestant, David F. Wells exposes the postmodern project as built upon the shifting sand of the autonomous self. He issues a clarion call for the evangelical church to stand against (certainly not upon) this foundation and instead build its house upon the only lasting foundation: the rock of the revelation of God in Scripture. This would require the church to recover the doctrines of the Reformation, which, far from being irrelevant, concretely answer the postmodern problem. Wells further observes that the emergence of the autonomous self paralleled a perceived cosmological change: man no longer viewed himself as existing in a moral world in which he found an objective reference and standard outside of himself, but in a psychological or therapeutic world in which subjectivity reigns and the self is liberated from all external constraints, whether God, the past, or religious authority. The evangelical movement has not remained unaffected by the spirit of the age, but has in many ways submitted itself to its dictates under the false guise of relevancy and reaching the culture. So what is the church to do? “It is time for us to recover our lost universe. What we need to do is to think, once again, with an entirely different set of connections. The connections are not primarily in reference to self, but to God. The connections that have to be reforged in the moral world we actually inhabit rather than the artificial world of appearances we have manufactured. It is about making connections into the world of reality that endures rather than the one that does not” (134). Herein is the comfort of the true gospel: no matter how disillusioned the world becomes in its therapeutic world and no matter how forceful the world pushes the autonomous self, it will always be, at bottom, a fantasy that will never correspond with reality. Man cannot refashion after his own imaginings the world God has created. The church must call postmoderns back to reality, to turn from self to God in faith and repentance. This is nothing less than the Great Commission: Go therefore and make disciples of all nations. In the opening chapter, Wells surveys the history of the evangelical movement from the end of the Second World War to the present. The major weakness that has eroded evangelicalism over the span of seven generations has been “the decline in the role that biblical doctrine once played” (3). This decline, he argues, arose from a “diminished interest in the Word of God in the life of the church” (4). This is evident not so much in the forthright rejection of the Word, but deafness to its call not to be conformed to this world. The Word came to be heard not as challenging, but as “endorsing our way of life today, our cultural expectations, and our priorities” (4). Scripture was smuggled out of the moral world and into the new psychological world so that Christianity became “increasingly reduced to private, internal, therapeutic experience” (15). Consequently, the doctrinal foundation of postwar evangelicalism—which had agreed upon the essentials of the authority of inspired Scripture and the centrality and necessity of Christ’s substitutionary atonement—was compromised and soon crumbled. Out of the debris arose new experiments in how to “do church,” such as the marketing movement made infamous by Willow Creek that capitulated to consumerist modernity and the subsequent emergent movement that sought to recover the personal and relational dimensions in a postmodern form that elevated experience at the expense of objective doctrinal truth. Both were built upon sand and their collapse was inevitable. “Once the truth of Scripture lost its hold on the practice of evangelical faith, that faith lost its direction in the culture” (19). Wells calls the church away from the binding authority of culture (sola cultura) to that of the Word of God (sola Scriptura). Wells concludes the chapter by noting the parallel between the needed repairs today and what Protestant Reformers faced five hundred years ago. He begins with four differences. First, Luther inhabited a religious world, while today secularism has expelled religion from the public sphere and confined it to private life. Second, in the sixteenth century the reality of sin, which belongs to a moral world, was not in dispute as it is in today’s psychological world. In the past there was right and wrong, but today “we are comfortable or not, psychologically healthy or not, dysfunctional or not, but we are never sinners” (25). Third, the concept of salvation has migrated out of the religious world and into the therapeutic world. “It is no longer about right standing with God. Now it is about right standing with ourselves. And that is all it is about. It is about self-fulfillment, self-esteem, self-realization, and self-expression” (25). Fourth, Luther was able to identify his enemy as the power and teaching of the Catholic Church, but today the enemy is illusive and amorphous. The factors that shape the present culture are constantly changing: massive urbanization that creates anonymous cities, globalization that spawns profound relativism, capitalism that encourages a consumer mentality, technology that expands our natural powers but evacuates God from the world, and rationalization that idealizes human techniques. There are also substantial similarities. First, there is no confidence that Scripture is sufficient in and of itself to direct and sustain the Christian life. The Catholic Church supplemented Scripture with tradition and a magisterium, while postmoderns look to “psychology, cultural savvy, and business techniques to do the same kind of thing for us” (29). Second, while the Catholic church reduced the effect of sin to a sickness and postmoderns have gone further in rejecting any and all moral absolutes, neither conforms to Scripture, which teaches that man is dead in his sins. “[T]hen as now, dead people had to be given life. … God’s grace accomplished this transition then, and the same grace is accomplishing it today” (31). Third, the sufficiency of the death and resurrection of Christ had to be recovered in the Reformation as it does today. For neither Rome nor postmoderns can say with the apostle Paul, “There is therefore now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus” (Rom. 8:1). In chapter 2, Wells excavates the foundation of postmodernity: the autonomous self. This is the wholly free self severed from the outside world and loosed from all external constraints. It is embodied in the person who “rejects all orthodoxies on principle, and for whom the sole purpose in life is realizing the full potential of their individual sense. All morality, mystery, and meaning are to be found in the self, not in God” (35). One problem with this is that “in the absence of what is [objectively] true, all that remains are power and manipulation” (64). Chapter 3 explores two contrasting ways of thinking about God. “The one comes from Scripture and the other comes from our culture” (67). All people have an internal sense that God exists and a moral sense written on the fabric of their nature. For this reason, they are always in need of a center. We cannot change the center, but we can lose the “ability to see it, to recognize it, to bow before it, to reorder our lives in light of it, to do what we should do as people who live in the presence of this center, this Other, this triune, holy-loving God of the Bible” (69). In his sin, man as sought all of these things around a different center: the self. Yet the self has not thrived as the center. In fact, the consequence of this humanism has been the disintegration of the self. Why? “The self that has been made to bear the weight of being the center of all reality, the source of all our meaning, mystery, and morality, inevitably becomes empty and fragile. When God dies to us, we die to ourselves” (84). In addition, the constantly changing postmodern culture demands a constantly changing self—it is perpetually uprooted and homeless. Postmodern man remakes and projects himself a million times over as he seeks to answer the question, Who am I? “This question lies behind the many answers that we hear in contemporary anthropologies today: ‘I am my genes,’ ‘I am my past,’ ‘I am my sexual orientation,’ ‘I am my body,’ ‘I am what I do,’ ‘I am what I have,’ ‘I am what I know,’ and many others likes these. The emptiness of the self is signaled in every one of these identifications” (86). The way forward is to recover a Reformed worldview that believes in what Wells refers to as the “outside God.” Evangelicalism has fashioned faith in terms of the “inside God” who aids man in his private life in terms of self-realization and self-esteem. The church must find again the outside God who has revealed himself in Scripture and tells man who he is as made in his image. This “will reach into our lives, wrench them around, lift our vision, fill our hearts, makes us courageous for what is right, and over time leave behind its beautiful residue of Christ-like character” (103). In chapter 4 Wells argues that “what has made the psychological developments that have come into bloom in the self movement so powerful is that they have coincided with some deep cultural shifts that are outside the self. Indeed, the self movement has been the internal counterpart to the external changes that were happening as the world modernized. “Our internal life, with its disconnects, loss of roots, moral ambivalence, and psychological confusion, is really just a mirror of the external world we inhabit with all its change, anonymity, ruthless competition, and loss of transcendence” (111). The transition from a moral world to a psychological world has brought about four fundamental changes, which together tell the story of the emergence of the autonomous self. The first shift is from virtues, which are objective norms in a moral world that are enduring for all people, in all places, and in all times, to values, which represent the moral talk of a relativistic world. The second shift is from character, which is good or bad, to personality, which is attractive, forceful, or magnetic. “Here was a move out of the older moral world, where internal moral intentions are important, to a different world. This is a psychological world. This often entails a shift from what is important in itselfto what is important only as it appears to others” (117). The third shift is from nature, which is something common to all human beings (e.g., the image of God), to self, which is unique to each individual. One effect of this was the rise in personal rights and the decline in personal responsibility. “As we left behind the moral world, as we entered the world of the individual self, rights proliferated and responsibilities disappeared. … Private choice has a privileged position, and anything that limits that choice is a violation of individual freedom. It becomes an act of self-violation, an assault, a mutilation. These personal rights are then often hitched up to the language of the civil rights movement” (128). The fourth and final shift is from guilt, which is what we are in a moral world before God on a vertical level, to shame, which is what we feel subjectively in a psychological world before other people on a horizontal level. Accordingly, salvation has to do with becoming (or feeling) entirely shameless. Sin is no longer a moral breach, but a disease or emotional deficit, and the self is believed to contain its own healing mechanisms. In light of these shifts, Wells argues that the church needs to recover the forgotten moral world. “We live in the postmodern world not just as postmoderns, consumed by the present age, but as those who are of eternity and whose eyes are on the ‘age to come.’ We live not simply as those born again, but as those who belong in God’s world, those who are learning to think their thoughts after him” (142). In the fifth chapter, Wells observes that the West has brought upon itself a strange contradiction, which he labels the “American paradox.” On the one hand, it has “built an outward world of great magnificence.” On the other hand, this new world is “inhospitable to the human spirit.” He continues, “[I]n this world, this artificial world, we have all become psychological vagrants. We are the homeless. We have no place to stay” (145). It is this paradox that Wells credits for the rise of spirituality in the West, which he explores in this chapter along with its biblical alternative. Postmodern spirituality is “private, not public, individualistic, not absolute. It is about what I perceive, about what works for me, not about what anyone else should believe” (152). What is needed is a proper spirituality that this from above, not one that begins from below. “One starts with God and reaches into sinful life whereas the other starts in human consciousness and tries to reach ‘above’ to make connections in the divine” (145). The spirituality from “above” lives in a moral world, while the spirituality from “below” lives in a psychological world. The latter is “lethal to biblical Christianity. That is why the biggest enigma we face today is the fact that its chief enablers are evangelical churches, especially those who are seeker-sensitive or emergent who, for different reasons, are selling spirituality disconnected from biblical truth” (147). True spirituality in which heaven juts into the life of the believer, a life that is hidden with Christ in God, has been lost to the inner voice that is impotent and deceptive. “In the earthly kind of spirituality, we speak because there is no one who has spoken to us. … In the biblical spirituality, by contrast, there is address. We are summoned by the Word of God. We stand before the God of that Word. He speaks” (160-61). Having begun the book with a brief historical survey of the evangelical movement, the final chapter is a wake-up call to return to its doctrinal roots in the Protestant Reformation. The church is irrelevant unless it stands against the culture and people find in it something different than businessmen and psychologists. “Churches that actually do influence the culture—here is the paradox—are those that distance themselves from it in their internal life. … If the church is to be truly successful, it must be unlike anything else we find in life” (191). Such a church will bear three marks: the Word of God is preached, the sacraments are rightly administered, and discipline is practiced. Preaching, for one, must demonstrate the sufficiency of Scripture for God’s redemptive work and for our life in this world. The biblical text must be rightly divided and the people need to be addressed in their world and needs. “What we really need is a way to understand our lives. We need to understand how to live in God’s world on his terms. We need not only comfort but also a worldview. … It ought to be a preacher’s goal to be able, bit by bit, Sunday by Sunday, to show what it means to have God’s Word in this world” (199). In many ways this book will aid preachers to do just that. This is a timely volume for our day in which objective truth has been eviscerated and all we have been left with are autonomous selves vying for power and control in a therapeutic world. May the church, built upon the foundation of the apostles and prophets, Christ Jesus himself being the cornerstone, be found faithful in carrying out its prophetic mission to the world, calling all people everywhere to repent and believe. May the church not be found shaking hands with the spirit of the age, but wrestling against it in the whole armor of God. The gates of hell shall not prevail. Semper reformanda.

J. H. Bavinck. The Riddle of Life.Translated by Bert Hielema. Grand Rapids, MI. William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company. 2016. Pp. 94. $20.00. For fallen man, life is a riddle that was, and that is, and that will continue to be. A few brief notes on the history of Western thought demonstrate this point. The self-proclaimed autonomous man of the Enlightenment sought to employ either his reason (rationalism) or his sense experience (empiricism) to interpret a supposedly open, un-interpreted universe that included himself. However, unable to ground the law of cause-and-effect or even the most basic notion of a subject-object correspondence, David Hume buried the autonomous man. On his gravestone he wrote: a relativist, a skeptic, an unsolved riddle. Eventually a shift occurred. After repeatedly arriving at the absurd and irrational as a conclusion, the absurd instead became a self-given, the assumed starting-point. This was particularly the case for consciousness and existentialist thinkers. For example, Albert Camus, in his work The Myth of Sisyphus, assumes from the outset that the life of man is akin to that of Sisyphus who was condemned to ceaselessly rolling a stone to the top of a mountain, which would only roll back down of its own weight. Yet, Sisyphus is not to be pitied, but imagined to be happy. “Sisyphus is the absurd hero,” writes Camus, “He is, as much through his passions as through his torture. His scorn of the gods, his hatred of death, and his passion for life won him that unspeakable penalty in which the whole being is exerted toward accomplishing nothing” (The Myth of Sisyphus, 120). From nothing man came, to nothing man is fated, and everything in between is absurd—if only he will embrace this, he will live. Out of the absurdity that is life or existence, others called forth monstrous beings, like Nietzsche’s Übermensch who would reject the hopes of another world as pitiable escapism, declare the death of God, fully embrace his irrational existence, and forge for himself value and meaning. Thus, the testimony to the futility of fallen thought is manifold: man is no more able to create meaning and purpose than he is able to give life to the dead or call into existence the things that do not exist. Man and his world remain an unsolved riddle, an impenetrable mystery. Yet, we are not to despair. There is, in fact, a clear way forward as J. H. Bavinck demonstrates in his book The Riddle of Life. In a simple, understandable, and persuasive manner, he presses in to answer the big questions that have riddled life: What do we know? Who are we? Why are we here? Where do we come from? What is our destiny? How should we live? His basic point is that if we begin with the self-attesting man of the Enlightenment, then we are doomed to irrationality and absurdity. But if we begin with the self-attesting Christ of Scripture then and only then can we move forward to find the answers to the mysteries of life. Accordingly, Bavinck argues for the necessity of a revelatory epistemology, that is, a theory of knowledge that arises from the revelation of God in Scripture. The only silk thread that leads us out of the labyrinth of life is that which God has let down from heaven: his Word. Bavinck writes, “God has spoken. The eternal mystery of the ultimate basis of everything that exists has been revealed. In Jesus Christ the Light has come, the Light that bans all darkness from our hearts and instills in us the unspeakable joy of having found and having been found” (5). Bavinck further clarifies this point by affirming that the only way to arrive at any knowledge is “to believethat we are part of a rational universe,” which can only be maintained if “we confessthat an almighty and all-wise God has created the world and the human race in mutual dependence” (16). From this revelatory foundation, Bavinck proceeds to answer the mysteries of life in the light of Scripture. For example, in order to answer the question, “Where do we come from?” we must know whether or not God exists. Bavinck lists the various classical proofs for the existence of God that have been given, but concludes that they are “in themselves … not totally convincing” (24). The reason for this is that we are always biased in our conclusions, which means our intellect and logic “cannot possibly be the final arbiter” (25). In contrast, “the Christian faith, realizing this truth, strongly stresses the confession: I believe in God, the Father, creator of heaven and earth. That is not a scientific conclusion, not a well-rounded statement, but it rests on faith in God’s Word. When I, in this world, amidst an untold number of mysteries, ponder the question of ‘Where do I originate?’ I only can trust that the whole of this rational and yet so mysterious universe has been wrought by a superior Reason, by an all-wise Maker who is also our Father” (25). Another question that Bavinck takes up is: “What is the meaning of life?” His answer opens with a helpful illustration. Imagine you come across the words: the silver moonlight radiated businessmen across the water. The obvious point is that within that sentence “businessmen” has no real meaning. Why? Because it is out of place there and does not fit in. “So when does a word make sense? It makes sense when it can seamlessly melt away in the context, when it fits in the totality. When does the life of a human make sense? It only makes sense when it has harmoniously inserted itself into the greater meaningful totality, when it is part of an overall world concept” (33). Man is not capable of forming the totality for himself because he is finite and limited. Rather, this totality is only found in Jesus Christ who repeatedly has told us that “the ultimate meaning of human life is the kingdom of God. … Measured by that criterion everything makes sense, every human act contains something of value” (34). In keeping with this revelatory base, Bavinck utilizes the threefold scheme of man found in Scripture. Man is rational, moral, and spiritual, which corresponds to knowledge, righteousness, and holiness as well as his office as prophet, priest, and king (see Heidelberg Catechism Lord’s Day 12). This scheme proves very useful for Bavinck in explaining the full-orbed nature of man’s original design and purpose, the effects of sin on him, the redemption he needs, and the person and work of Jesus Christ. Bavinck also utilizes this scheme to expose the inadequacy of the other world religions: Buddhism and Islam. Common to both is the belief that deliverance is solely a matter of knowledge, so all that is needed is a prophet. The prophet, whether Buddha or Mohammed, preaches the truth and so offers the possibility of salvation. It then becomes a matter of self-redemption: we must apply the truth to ourselves in order to be saved. The problem is that this does not penetrate to the deepest parts of man. Man’s misery is not singular, but threefold. “We lack the knowledge, the insight into the truth. We also lack the peace, the true justice, the harmonious attitude to God. Finally we also lack the holiness, the will to do good. To be truly free we must surrender the entire structure of our existence: our redemption must be threefold, just as our misery is threefold” (71). Herein is the peculiarity of Christianity. Jesus Christ, the Redeemer, answers to the threefold plight of man. He is the Prophet who reveals true knowledge of God and man, the Priest who offers peace by his sacrifice on the cross, and the King who offers holiness by eradicating the desire for sin and fills us with life eternal. These three benefits are represented in what Jesus calls the “kingdom of God,” which “is composed of all that life contains, the world and all that it is” (80). It is only those who repent and believe who find entrance into this kingdom (83). The final question that Bavinck asks has to do with the completion of life: “What is behind that strange, mysterious curtain that we usually call death?” (90). The Gospel, according to Bavinck, teaches that all men either face death alone or with Jesus Christ (92). The person who enters death apart from Christ belongs to the kingdom of darkness doomed to eternal destruction. But the person who enters death “in Christ” will have it proved “the great revelation” (93). He explains, “As soon as we see the reflection of God’s presence in the distance, then an infinite joy will be born in us. … With inexpressible rapture I will flee to him and embrace him as my all, as my salvation. And observing him, the pure sight of him and his glory, I will go from joy to greater joy, from light to greater light. In the joyfulness I will then experience lies the hallmark of eternity, because God is eternal” (94). While the book is to be recommended on the basis of the previous analysis, especially its commitment to a revelatory epistemology, there are still a few areas that warrant critique. First, Bavinck states that the essence of humanity is that they are “children of God” (27). This language, however, does not seem helpful because of the salvific connotations of it in Scripture (e.g., Rom. 8:16-17) and the more clear description found in Genesis of man being made in the “image of God.” It is true that Adam is entitled the “son of God” in Scripture, as well as Israel and David’s kingly sons, but this phrase has covenantal and eschatological implications that Bavinck seems to overlook. Furthermore, it does not allow for the adoption that takes place in Christ, so that those who were once “children of wrath” are made “children of God” (Rom. 8:14-17; Eph. 2:1-10; 2 Pet. 2:14). Second, Bavinck speaks about the “law of service,” which he observes is evident in the various levels of creation from the inorganic to the organic to humanity, as the fundamental law of creation and the “overarching purpose for every being” (18). Bavinck seems to arrive at this law by way of natural observation and so deviates from the revelatory foundation he argued for earlier. Because of this his conclusion from nature can be labeled naïve since while the creation is seen to serve each other at some level, it is also seen to devour one another at an even higher level. The fact that creation is not in harmony with itself is not self-evident, but only properly understood on the basis of the biblical doctrine of sin. Likewise, the law of service must be drawn from God’s revelation to man. In addition, Bavinck construes this law with a predominately horizontal focus, while the chief end of man is to glorify God and enjoy him forever. Third, in a couple of places Bavinck seems to deny the historicity of Adam and the fall, though this may not have been his intention. Regarding the former, he writes, “We are Adam … God’s children” (30). This suggests that Adam was a mere symbol of every person, rather than the historical federal head of humanity, in whom all died when he sinned (Rom. 5:12ff.). Regarding the latter, Bavinck says, “The Good News shows us that the history of the world, from its very inception, is dominated by two factors” (88, emphasis mine). The two factors that he identifies are sin and grace. But in Scripture neither sin nor grace (understood redemptively) dominated until the historical fall of man in Genesis 3. Furthermore, Bavinck says that these two factors “will give us some insight into the meaning of the world, and why we are here” (88). On one level this is true, but it is also problematic because it makes the soteriological absolute, rather than the eschatological. Scripture is clear that there is an absolute end posited for humanity and the world beforeand apart fromsin. To this pre-redemptive eschatology is added a soteric force on account of the historical entrance of sin into the world, but this addition does not eclipse or eliminate man’s original destiny, a destiny that is fulfilled in Christ (Ps. 8; Heb. 2:5-9). Overall, this book would benefit believers by helping them better understand the worldview implications of the doctrines of God, man, sin, and redemption and by equipping them to better share the gospel with their neighbor. It would also be useful to give directly to unbelievers who will find in it a concise and clear commendation of the Christian faith as the only sound and coherent way of viewing oneself and the world. It demonstrates that Christianity is not a conglomerate of abstract propositions designed for esoteric cloud-gazers and irrelevant spiritualists, but draws its life source from the concrete acts and words of God that have entered our world and our history, preeminently in Jesus Christ, who forms its organic center from which the whole world will one day be consummated a new creation.

“And though this world with devils filled, should threaten to undo us…”—so penned Luther in his famous hymn A Mighty Fortress is Our God. But on what epistemological basis could Luther (and the whole Christian church for that matter) affirm the existence of devils and spirits in this world? Was it rational to believe that spirits could interact with material bodies so that they could even be deemed a real threat to undo the church? The claim of the existence of the supernatural and the working of the supernatural upon the natural world, including men, was not a self-given, nor a datum of sense experience, but ultimately founded upon the simple teaching of Scripture. There, in the revelation of the triune God, the real struggle between the kingdom of God and the kingdom of darkness is made known, in which heaven and earth, the spiritual and the material, angels and men are shown to be in a dynamic relationship with one another, all according to the wisdom and providence of God. It should come as no surprise, then, that as submission to God’s revelation in Scripture was replaced with the autonomy of man (whether in the form of rationalism or empiricism, as happened with the Enlightenment), the reality of Satan, spirits, and the supernatural would be, at first, doubted and, eventually, rejected in favor of either a dualistic or purely naturalistic conception of reality. This occurred not only in the realm of secular philosophy, but unfortunately also within the church as Cartesian philosophy began to infiltrate and theologians attempted to synthesize it with their theological systems. One such figure within the church, Balthasar Bekker (1634–1698), a Dutch Reformed preacher, came under the “spell” of the new philosophy dominating the age and so deemed it his life mission to “disenchant the world.” And he pursued this in the most dangerous fashion: under the guise of Reformed language and concepts. He received heavy opposition, however, from those within the Reformed church who saw behind his façade, most notably from Petrus van Mastricht (1630–1706). Mastricht responded to Bekker’s internationally influential work, Betoverde Weereld (The World Bewitched), in a treatise presented to Classis Amsterdam, entitled, Ad Verum Clariss. D. Balthasaren Beckerum, S. S. Theol. Doct. Epanorthosis gratulatoria.[1] Mastricht recognized that Bekker’s teaching ultimately compromised the basic Reformed principle of the authority of Scripture by subordinating it to an alien philosophy. Yet, there was more than just the relationship of Scripture and philosophy at the (pastoral) heart of Mastricht’s polemic against Bekker. Mastricht also perceived that by not beginning with Scripture as his principium cognoscendi, Bekker had removed the only foundation for true religion, which prohibited him entirely from building a practical superstructure of doxology and worship. In other words, Mastricht’s polemic against Bekker included the fact that by not beginning with Scripture, his theology did not and could not end with worship. Thus, it was not merely a matter of whose principium was correct, but who worshiped the one true God in spirit and truth. The teleological end (worship) of doctrine and theology was directly dependent upon its protological beginning (Scripture) in the mind of Mastricht. Herein we are given a view into the wedding of doctrine and life, theology and piety in the Post-Reformation Reformed thought of Mastricht, which recent scholarship has been beginning to notice in this time period in general. Mastricht does not formulate his doctrine in a rigid, cold way, but in correlation with the exegesis of Scripture and a deep concern for right praxis, a true living to God. This article will first place Mastricht’s work within its historical context, with special attention given to Balthasar Bekker and his controversial four-volume work, Betoverde Weereld. It will then proceed to consider the main arguments of Mastricht’s treatise, noting his fourfold approach that incorporates exegesis, doctrine, elenctics, and praxis.

1. Philosophical Context in General: Cartesianism and Spinozism

Cartesianism in the Netherlands

Descartes moved to the Netherlands in 1628 since he realized that the intellectual atmosphere in Paris was not conducive or tolerant of his new ideas. As a result, his rationalism would come to be a mighty force in the Netherlands that the Reformed church would have to reckon with. In these early stages, Voetius would fend off the influence of Descartes on the Dutch Reformed church from his academic post at Utrecht, always with an eye on the well-being of the church.[20] Cartesianism, however, would develop in a much more variegated way than any kind of strict allegiance to Descartes—resulting in a true Descartes vs. the Cartesians. While it goes beyond the scope of this paper to trace out these differences, it can be noted that “the Dutch Cartesians shared a common viewpoint, a common openness to the New Science, and a common hostility to the Voetian Counter-Reformation.”[21] McGahagan goes on to describe the philosophical climate as follows:

Both early and later Cartesians were also equally insistent on the separation of philosophy and religion. Even the alliance of later Cartesianism with Cocceianism rested on the fact that Cocceianism seemed to offer a theological legitimation of this separation. This separation was not derived from Descartes, who indeed distinguished philosophy from theology, but who also grounded the possibility of an a priori physics in the doctrine of God’s free creation of eternal truths. Rather, the Dutch Cartesian separation of faith and reason can only be understood in the context of their opposition to the Voetian Counter-Reformation.[22]

This would no less be the case with regard to Mastricht’s contention with Bekker in his consideration of the relationship of Scripture and philosophy as well as the proper use of reason as a handmaiden of theology.

Spirits and Spinozism

Jonathan Israel observes, “During the last third of the seventeenth century, the scene was set for a vast triangular contest in Europe between intellectual conservatives, moderates, and radicals overthe status of the supernatural in human life and the reality of the Devil, demons, spirits, and magic.”[23] It was Naude and Hobbes who led the charge in “injecting a measure of scepticism about diabolical power and the reality of spirits.”[24] This eventually led to a full-force campaign that sought to extinguish belief in Satan, spirits and supernatural forces altogether “in complete defiance of received ideas.”[25] This is the expected result when a revelatory epistemology is replaced with a Cartesian rationalism and thorough going philosophical Naturalism that attributes an autonomous existence to the mind of man. Accordingly, nothing beyond man’s rational capacities or immediate sense experiences can be permitted to have any real existence—a case of whatever my net cannot catch, is not fish. Israel notes that this philosophical move was not irreligious, but “part of a broader conceptual attack on authority, tradition, and Revelation.”[26] He continues,

The new philosophy, however, could not totally repudiate the existence of the supernatural. While the Scientific Revolution, the rise of the mechanical world-view, and Lockean empiricism all helped erode the foundations on which older notions about magic, wonder-working, and the supernatural rested, neither Cartesianism with its dichotomy of substances, nor Locke’s epistemology, nor any mainstream trend of the Early Enlightenment provided a rationale for total repudiation of belief in spirits and magic.[27]

The debate over the supernatural was the surface level concern of a deeper and more foundational issue regarding the epistemological significance (or insignificance) of God’s revelation in Scripture. Was Scripture, which spoke of spirits and Satan, authoritative? Or must Scripture submit to the scientific advancements of man and the natural limitations of his mind? The goal of the Reformed and traditional proponents was not to maintain the supernatural for the supernatural’s sake, but to maintain the worldview of Scripture in submission to the Creator of all things. Furthermore, as we will see in Mastricht’s polemic against Bekker, this debate over the supernatural had direct bearing upon man’s knowledge of God and the proper worship and enjoyment of him—the supremely practical concern that wedded doctrine and piety, theology and life in Mastricht’s polemic. Spinoza was one of the strongest protagonists of the campaign against diabolical power and magic. He argued against the existence of devils and spirits in his Korte Verhandeling and was pronounced by Bayle to be the pre-eminent modern adversary of credence in spirits and the supernatural. Bekker was primarily accused of Spinozism by Reformed theologians, most notably Jacobus Koelman,[28] and was specifically criticized for his utilization of a hermeneutic that approximated Spinoza’s, especially with respect to the doctrine of accommodation,[29] and his similar position to Spinoza on the activities of spirits.[30] Bekker, however, criticized Spinoza outright, though his opponents, such as Koelman, objected that this was not genuine but only a guise to cover his heretical ideas.[31] Bekker accused Spinoza of “violating the Dutch Cartesian principle of the separation of religion from philosophy by making philosophy the ‘master of things of belief.’”[32] In addition, he called Spinoza’s philosophy “absurd” and listed as his chief “errors” the following ideas:

1) That there is not substance, that is, independent entity, outside God; and that creatures are but modes, that is ways of God’s existence. 2) That this one substance has two essential characteristics: extension and thought. And there are infinite others that we do not know about. 3) That all depends on an infinite number of causes, following each other in an infinite order and in infinite ways. 4) That no thing or deed is in itself good or bad. 5) That the Holy Scripture was not originally from God and that the holy writers erred in much. 6) That miracles are caused by and can be explained by natural causes.[33]

Andrew Fix, in his evaluation of Bekker’s relation to Spinoza, notes that “although he did not go as far as Spinoza, he did use Spinoza’s exegetical methods for his own attack on spirit belief.”[34] Similarly Jonathan Israel notes, “Spinoza’s influence … clearly underlies Bekker’s claims that philosophical reason is the only valid criterion when investigating ‘natural things,’ and that Scripture is not intended to teach truly about worldly phenomena, but provides explanations adapted to the understanding of ordinary folks so as to help instill obedience to God’s commandments.”[35] The basic issue here is that by utilizing Spinoza’s methodology, which was essentially non-Christian, Bekker’s system itself could not be considered Christian, even if it utilized Christian, even Reformed, language and concepts, as it trended toward skepticism and atheism.

2. Theological Context

Locating Mastricht within Post-Reformation Reformed Orthodoxy

According to the periods proposed by Richard Muller, Mastricht is located within the era of high orthodoxy (ca. 1640–1685–1725). Muller notes that now the “architectonic clarity of early orthodoxy is replaced to a certain extent or at least put to the service of a more broadly developed and even discursive system.”[36] There is an expansion of polemical argumentation and the creative phase of early orthodoxy gives way to a phase of elaboration, refinement, and modification, which is evident in such prominent theologians as Voetius, Turretin, and Mastricht. Muller goes on to describe the posture towards philosophy during this time:

Among the major transitions that took place as Reformed theology passed from early orthodoxy into the high orthodox era was the transition from a philosophical development focused on the reception, assessment, and critical appropriation of the various trajectories of Christian Aristotelianism and of the late Renaissance developments … to the encounter of these older, highly nuanced approach with the new rationalists of the seventeenth century. … [T]he high orthodox, ca. 1640, were beginning to feel the impact of Cartesian thought. Just as the early orthodox era manifests not a monolithic appropriation of the older Aristotelian philosophies, but the reception of elements of various trajectories, so does the high orthodox era manifest varied receptions of the newer rationalism among the Reformed, and, indeed, the continuance of themes and issues from the older trajectories, now modified and altered by the changed philosophical context. Specifically, elements of the older Thomism, Scotism, and nominalism can still be detected as mediated through and modified by philosophical currents in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries—and elements of Cartesian thought and its modifications can also be found both debated and appropriated by various individual Reformed thinkers.[37]

Theological Context in General: Reformed Opponents Embracing Cartesianism

The negative influence of Cartesian rationalism was felt by Reformed theologians on numerous fronts. Old enemies were embracing Cartesian thought, which augmented Reformed skepticism toward and rejection of the new philosophy. For one, the Remonstrants—with whom the Reformed already had to contend with, culminating in the pronouncements against them at the Synod of Dort (1618-1619)—continued to veer further and further away from Reformed theology as it embraced Cartesian thought. Muller observes, “[T]he Remonstrant theology posed a major threat to the Reformed and called forth new argumentation, since it was, in its beginning, an offshoot of the Reformed system and, in its development, a highly rationalistic structure allied with Cartesian and eventually with Lockean thought.”[38] Likewise the Socinians more and more embraced the rationalism of Cartesianism that was dominating the age:

The increasingly rationalistic biblicism of the Socinian movement in its seventeenth-century forms posed an even more intense problem for the Reformed orthodox. … [T]he Socinians opposed the balance of revelation and reason advocated by the Reformed and claimed a fundamental biblical basis for their doctrine and repudiated natural theology—at the same time that they argued against the simplicity and infinity of God, denied the Trinity and the two natures of Christ, and proposed an alternative view of the work of Christ. From the Reformed perspective, all of these doctrines appeared to be at the same time the result of a new rationalism and a radically deviant exegesis.[39]

While not as radical as the Remonstrants or the Socinians, Cocceians were also embracing Cartesian philosophy to greater or lesser degrees:

Cocceius himself did not take part in the controversy over Cartesianism – he did not advocate any particular philosophy as a basis for or intellectual partner with theology, but maintained a somewhat eclectic attitude, viewing all philosophy, whether Platonic or Aristotelian, Ramist or Cartesian, as at best a handmaid to theology.[40]

Cocceius’ associate, Heidanus, however, “overtly approved of Cartesian philosophy. … His definition of God as ‘an uncreated, independent, thinking substance’ is clearly Cartesian, as is his discussion of the body and soul in man in terms of thought and extension.”[41] Bekker himself writes concerning Cocceius’ separation of the natural and supernatural: “He held the same course as Descartes, although he sailed in another fairway: wishing all prejudices abolished, and supernatural knowledge sought from Scripture alone; just as the other built natural science exclusively on nature and sound reason.”[42] It should be noted that the Reformed, and particularly Voetius and Mastricht, did not reject Cartesianism simply because its enemies embraced it—as if a friend of my enemy is by necessity my enemy too. Rather, the differing responses to Cartesianism simply manifested previous points of contention between these theological parties. It was the most basic and fundamental Reformed principle of Scripture as authoritative and the sole principium cognoscendi, which neither the Remonstrants nor Socinians consistently embraced in the formulation of their own theological systems, that raised Reformed suspicion against the new philosophy. In other words, this issue only brought to light earlier principial commitments that had surfaced before with respect to other theological loci, but now having an acute bearing on their prolegomena. These theological camps were, therefore, forced to show their cards as to the foundation upon which their systems were built. This is the bottom-line reason for the contention of Mastricht and other Dutch Reformed theologians against the new philosophy of Descartes, Spinoza, and their followers, including Bekker.

3. Balthasar Bekker

His Life and Work in General

Jonathan Israel echoes Luis Antonio Verney as to the four strongest protagonists against diabolical power and magic of the seventeenth century: Anthonie Van Dale, Fontenelle, Christian Thomasius, and Balthasar Bekker.[43] “Of the four, moreover, it was unquestionably Bekker who raised the greatest storm and became the prime focus of controversy.”[44] Israel deems him as “indisputably one of the foremost figures of the European Early Enlightenment.”[45] The severity of this danger was exponentially increased by the fact that Bekker worked under the guise of a Reformed preached and true Christian. Bekker believed that the new philosophy could provide positive support for Reformed theology.[46]This meant that his teaching was not explicitly anti-Christian, yet it was undermining the true faith and led down the path of atheism and skepticism, as Koelman, Mastricht and others would point out. He was ultimately declared an agent of Spinozism and ‘atheism,’ and lumped in with the other novelty theologies that deviated from orthodox belief.[47] Bekker began his studies at Groningen in the early 1650s when the conflict between Cartesianism and anti-Cartesianism first began to shake the university. Israel notes that Bekker desired to be seen by others as a cutting-edge intellectual, which made Cartesianism very attractive for him. He would soon become a fervent Cartesian, even while he began his career as a preacher in the Reformed church.[48] However, he encountered heavy opposition from his ecclesiastical colleagues in Friesland and so transferred to a rural church in Holland in 1674. During this time he recounts a long discussion that he had with Spinoza. “This encounter,” writes Israel, “reflected no liking for Spinoza’s philosophy but rather intellectual commitment and a desire to be at the forefront.”[49] Though as we noted earlier, while Bekker formally rejected the influence of Spinoza on his own thought, this was more of a façade. In 1679 he moved to Amsterdam and began his campaign against the empire of Satan, which would be the defining project of the rest of his life. There he jumped into the controversy over whether comets could be supernatural portents, which he, of course, rejected. Bekker distinguished himself as one eager to “accommodate to theology the latest findings in philosophy and science,” though he was always more willing to sacrifice the former to the later.[50] His real life “mission was to disenchant the world.”[51]

Betoverde Weereld

Bekker began his magnum opus, the Betoverde Weereld (The World Bewitched) in the late 1680s. It consisted of four volumes and would have a major influence not only in the Netherlands, but internationally.[52] The material issue was that of the relationship between spirits and corporal bodies and the doctrine of Satan, whether he was real or merely symbolic. But underlying all of this was the more foundational issue of the relationship between Scripture and philosophy, and whether philosophy must submit to Scripture or Scripture to philosophy. Book I provides an historical survey of views on the supernatural, including spirits and demons. Bekker argues that the Jews, early Christians, and Church Fathers commandeered the distinctly pagan notion of magic and spirits, which was otherwise foreign to Christianity. He then observes that this paganism was exponentially worsened by the Medieval church, which led to deep-rooted superstition regarding the devil and witches and speculation over trite matters regarding angels. While Bekker believed the Reformation restored some sanity to the church in these matters, it did not, in his view, fully exorcise the basically pagan infiltration of the supernatural into Christianity.[53] In Books II-IV he “expounds his philosophical and Scriptural objections to received ideas about magic, Satan, spirits, and witchcraft.”[54]While he claimed to believe whatever is stated clearly in Scripture, his exegetical method indebted to Spinoza and his Cartesian presuppositions, lead him to distinct conclusions that were really opposed to Scripture, as Mastricht will demonstrate.

What he denied was the near universal conviction that Satan, demons, or any spirits can, through spells, possession, bewitchment, or any magical device, alter the normal workings of nature’s laws and influence men’s lives. Sticking rigidly to Descartes’ dichotomy of ‘thought’ and ‘extension,’ he claims their being distinct substances precludes all interaction between the two, so that evil spirits, the essence of which is ‘thought,’ can no more influence bodies than bodies can spirits. Contact between disembodied spirits and humans is completely impossible.[55]

Bekker did believe that God was able to change the course of nature and effect the lives of men, being neither thought (spirit) nor extension (body), for he preceded and transcended all substance. In Book II he disproves various interpretations of Scripture passages that have been garnered in support of the notion that Satan can influence men. His basic exegetical approach was to demonstrate that every such passage that speaks of the intervention of the devil in the lives of men in Scripture was “purely figurative.”[56] Satan, according to Bekker, could not have become a serpent to tempt Eve, nor appear in the wilderness to tempt Christ. Bekker goes on to argue that Satan has actually been chained by God in hell so that he remains completely powerless to effect anything on earth. These passages will be addressed by Mastricht in his treatise against Bekker. In Book III he denies the possibility of men making deals with the devil, which would then exclude all witchcraft, spells, exorcisms, or magic of any kind. The supernatural wonders worked by Pharaoh’s magicians in Scripture accordingly became purely figurative—the common hermeneutic principle utilized to rid Scripture of any teaching on the real interaction of spirits and bodies, the Devil and men. In the final book, Book IV, he “examines a vast catalogue of supposedly attested cases of witchcraft, possession, exorcism, haunted places, soothsaying, and apparitions, showing mankind’s inherent proneness to attribute exceptional events for which a natural explanation is lacking to supernatural forces, and the unfortunate consequences of our doing so.”[57] He then states that it is the Christian duty of the Churches, schools, and courts to insure that men no longer believe magic exists, that the world be disenchanted.

4. Petrus van Mastricht, Ad Verum Clariss. D. Balthasaren Beckerum

Overview of Mastricht’s Fourfold Approach to Theology: Exegesis, Doctrine, Elenctics, Praxis 

Neele observes that in each of the loci of his Theoretica-practica theologia, Mastricht organizes his thoughts into four parts: exegesis, doctrine, elenctics, and ‘pars practica.’[58] This same approach is found in his Ad Verum Clariss. D. Balthasaren Beckerum. While his work addressing Bekker is primarily polemical in nature, this fourfold approach to theology structures the document. In sections XX–XXIX, Mastricht expounds and vindicates Scripture passages that teach the real and historical operation of Satan and spirits in the world and upon man. He also addresses the proper relation of Scripture and Philosophy. In sections XXX–XXXVII, the doctrine of Satan is stated in contrast to Bekker’s formulation. This then leads to a lengthy polemical section, in which the doctrine is defended against possible objections and apparent contradictions with other doctrines (XXXVIII–LVIII). Mastricht then turns to the offense to show the contradictions of Bekker’s position (LIX–LXVII). He finally concludes with a practical concern for the church, addressing the matter of worship and piety (LXVIII–XCV).

Scripture and Exegesis (XIX–XXIX)

As was observed earlier, Bekker, in Book II of Betoverde Weereld, looks to undermine various passages of Scripture which have been used to affirm the interaction and influence of the Devil on men by understanding them as purely figurative. Mastricht makes direct mention of this book and its underlying problem in section XIX. Before looking at specific passages, Mastricht states, Interim tibi plurima objucis Scripturae testimonia, utriusque Instrumenti, quibus, Angelis verae operationes asseruntur. He then notes the positive activity of the angels in announcing to Abraham the future birth of his son, Isaac (Gen. 18:10) and to Mary the birth of Jesus (Luke 1). Scripture also records angels announcing the birth of Christ to the shepherds (Luke 2:8-14) and his resurrection to the disciples at the end of each gospel, as well as his ascension (Acts 1:10-11). Mastricht notes the positive role of the angels in rescuing Lot from the destruction of Sodom (Gen. 19), Daniel from the lion’s den (Dan. 5), and the apostles from prison (Acts 5:19; 12:7). Angels are also said to accompany Christ when he comes again (Matt 25:31; 1 Thess. 4:16; 2 Thess. 1:7; Heb. 1:14). So, says, Mastricht, et quae sunt hujus generis fexcenta alia. If spirits are mere thoughts, as Bekker proposed, then how can they have this influence upon the world, as Scripture ascribes to them: quia, ceu spiritus, non sint nisi merae cogitationes, quibus non competant operationes ad extra.[59] These cannot be mere figments of man’s imagination, as Bekker argued.[60] Mastricht will next take up more specific passages in order to vindicate them against Bekker who would read them as purely symbolic or figurative.

 Vindication of Scripture Passages

The main question of section XX is whether evil spirits, after the primal temptation, still work in humans? Bekker, Mastricht notes, has consigned every evil spirit to chains in hell so that they can no longer be at work in the world. Whereas Bekker has no place in Scripture to maintain this position, Mastricht claims many (infinita) places for his position. He then appeals to the Classis on the basis that Bekker ultimately makes God out to be a liar who would fool the common person by accommodating his revelation to their error and false ideas. He writes,

Dic tibi quaeso Clariss. per tuam conscientiam si daremus quod non facimus Deum in negotiis naturalibus levioris momenti se quandoque componere ad erroneam vulgi opinionem num tibi persuadere possis ad unum omnes Prophetas, Apostolos, ipsumque Servatorem circa errorem tanti momenti per quem tibi Scriptura non potest esse verbum Dei per quem tibi Scriptura non potest non potest esse nec Jehova Deus nec Christus Messias…

Following this general critique, he takes up in section XII, 2 Peter 2:4, which Bekker appeals to in order to affirm that the devils and evil spirits are currently chained in hell and so incapable of being at work in men. Mastricht affirms that the devils are damned to eternal prison, but he denies that they should no more deceive at present because their sentence at present does not limit them to a specific place since they wander in chains (velut in catenis vagetur). However, it is true that they cannot escape their sentence to aeternae condemnationi. Next in section XXII Mastricht considers the temptation narrative in Genesis 3 to vindicate it against Bekker who does not read it as historical. He makes the point that Scripture does not say that Satan deceived through or by means of a serpent, but that the serpent who deceived esse satanamunder the providence of God. Mastricht utilizes the Reformed principle of Scripture interpreting Scripture and appeals to Revelation 12:9 to support this reading of Genesis 3, as well as contrasting it with the account of Balaam’s donkey. Mastricht concludes that Bekker’s interpretation has two main problems: (1) it destroys the factuality of the temptation and (2) paves the way for skepticism and atheism. He makes a similar argument in the vindication of the historical nature of Christ’s temptation by the devil in the wilderness (Matt. 4:1-12; Mark. 1:12-13; Luke 4:1-14) in section XXIII. Mastricht argues that if you say the devil truly tempted Christ, then you must be able to say that he was also at work in the first temptation. But Bekker says that they are not to be understood as literal (non omnia inquis ad literam hic sunt intelligendae). Again, Mastricht charges this interpretation as leading to skepticism and atheism: Quo tandem ista sese exoneraunt, nisi in Scepticismum & Atheismum? In section XXIV Mastricht seeks to vindicate Jude 9 from Bekker’s interpretation that does violence to the text. He does not see a problem with this passage if one simply learned to, first, believe the Scriptures, second, overturn ratiocinations& omnem sublimitatem,and third, have their mind captive to the obedience of Christ. He refers to 2 Cor. 10:4-5, “For the weapons of our warfare are not of the flesh but have divine power to destroy strongholds. We destroy arguments and every lofty opinion raised against the knowledge of God, and take every thought captive to obey Christ…” In section XXV he considers the account of Satan inciting David to take a census, which was punished by the Lord, in 1 Chronicles 21:1. How does this relate, he asks, to 2 Samuel 24:1 where it is said that not Satan, but the Lord incited David? Mastricht answers this apparent contradiction by stating the simple point that the way in which God and Satan cause the same even can differ. God is the efficient cause and wisely permits it, while Satan is the perpetrator (idem diverso sensu possee tribui, & Deo & satanae: Deo, ut causae efficaciter & sapientissime permittentidirigentique; & satanae, ut pessime perpetranti). He then takes up the vindication of Job 1:11 in section XXVI. He sees a good argument for evil spirits conversing with men in 1 Samuel 28 and Acts 16:16. He then takes up Bekker’s objection to Satan being granted permission by the Lord to inflict Job with dirissmus calamitatibus and for Job to have been declared by the Lord to be in Satan’s hand (Job 1:12; 2:6). His basic argument again uses Scripture to interpret Scripture, appealing to Psalm 37:37. He also appeals to the analogia vel fidei and the context (vel contextus), and utilizes the original languages. He again notes how this passage does not coincide with Bekker’s point that Satan is chained in hell so that he cannot roam the earth. Mastricht affirms that while Satan does not operate outside the power, knowledge, and providence of God, he does still in fact operate nonetheless. So far Mastricht has shown that Scripture clearly teaches the activity of Satan and evil spirits in the world after the first temptation. He summarizes: hactenus sinfulis militavimus Scripturae testimoniis, & expugnavimus, satanam vere seduxisse Protoplaftos, tentasse Christum, dimicasse cum Michaele, incitasse Davidem, ut Israelem numeraret, Jobum exagitasse, confestis in eum calamitatibus; dimicasse exagitasse congestis in eum. In section XXVII, he adds to this the manifold teaching of Scripture about Satan and devils, including their nature (indole) in 2 Cor. 11:3; Rev. 11:24; John 8:44; strength or power (viribus) in Acts 26:18; and business or activities (negotio). The third is described in general in 2 Thess. 2:9. In addition, Satan is said to take away the word in Mark 4:15. In 2 Cor. 7:5; 1 Cor 2:10; Rev. 12:9, 10 he is said to accuse. There is also his activity mentioned in Luke 22:31; 22:3; John 13:17; Acts 5:3; 1 Thess. 2:18; Rev. 2:9, 13. Scripture also includes Satan’s mode of agency (agendi modo) in 2 Cor. 11:14 as he disguises himself as an angel of light. He is also presently captured (captivus) in Rev. 20:7 and nearing his destruction (de appropinquante ejus exitio) according to Luke 11:18; Rom. 16:20; Matt. 25:41; Rev. 20:10. Having considered all those passages of Scripture that have now been vindicated, Mastricht says that we are to be convinced that Satan continues to operate in humans and that we must acknowledge snakes and witches (Pythonibus & Pythonissis), the angel Satan (Angelis satanae), the possessed (de energumenis), evil spirits (malignis spiritibus), demonic apparitions (apparitionibus daemoniorum), the kingdom of Satan (regno satanae), kingdom of darkness (regno tenebrarum), that he is the god of this world (Deus sit hujus seculi), the prince of this world (princeps hujus mundi), emperor of the dead (imperium mortis habeat), lord of the air (in aere dominetur), etc. Thus, argues Mastricht, Scripture attributes much to Satan and therefore all Christians (universali Christianismo) receive this doctrine of Satan. And for those who reject it, si Deus juvet.

Scripture and Philosophy

In section XXIX, Mastricht guards against the abuse of philosophy (cavendum ab abusu Philosophiae) that would otherwise do violence to the Scriptures and theology. He rhetorically asks, if there is no passage in Scripture that affirms Satan is no longer active with men after the primal temptation, and if the common consensus of all Christians is that he is still at work, then what can possibly be Bekker’s objection against it? In short, his objection cannot be based on Scripture or the analogia fidei. Bekker is opposed to the totality of Scripture (adversus totam Scriptram) and not only the general knowledge of the Church, but also the sense of the world (mundi sensum). So Van Mastricht asks, Cum igitur Scriptura, sicut demonstravimus, non potuerit; quid potuit, si non Philosophia? The objection does not arise from Scripture, but from an a priori commitment to alien philosophical system. In other words, his theological conclusions are formed by a more basic philosophy, not revelation. Quae doceat, spiritum non operari extra se? Van Mastricht points out that Bekker says in the preface to his first book that he rejects the operation of spirits in humans ex Philosophia agnosceres. Van Mastricht points out that in most controversial heads, Scripture is said to err because his thought is governed by philosophy. He finds support for this in chapter 25, paragraph 15 and chapter 9, paragraph 6, and the preface to book one, as Bekker writes, te omnium minime satisfacturum his, qui Cartesii fundamenta rejiciunt, juxta quae, spiritum & corpus distinguas. Van Mastricht follows Paul in warning and guarding against deceptive teaching and philosophy that would overturn the wisdom and revelation of God in Scripture, as he cites 2 Cor. 11:1ff.; 1 Tim. 6:20; Col. 2:8; 1 Cor. 1:20; 2:4; 2 Cor. 1:12. This was true long ago with Paul and continues to be the case (quae tot olim praecipites dedit, & etiamnun dat). This knowledge is not pleasing to God that exalts itself against the knowledge of Christ (extollit adversus cognitionem Christi). He concludes by asking whether Scripture must give way or concede (cedat) to philosophy or philosophy to Scripture? “Mastricht argued that Bekker placed philosophy above Scripture and that theology was being relinquished to the axiom ‘philosophy is the infallible interpreter of Scripture.’”[61]

Scripture and his Fourfold Approach

It is telling that Mastricht begins his polemic against Bekker with the vindication of Scripture since it is for him the principium cognoscendi of his theology. With that being said, this means that his Scriptural exegesis cannot be isolated from the subsequent sections that deal with doctrine, elenctics, and praxis. As Neele observes, “Mastricht’s exegesis cannot be evaluated without reading of his doctrinal, elenctical, and practical reflections on the theological subject in which consists the interconnectedness of his fourfold approach arising from the text of Scripture a parallel approach integrally present in Calvin’s Scripture commentary.”[62]

Doctrine (XXX–XXXVII)

Mastricht next looks at the reasons Bekker proposes for why spirits cannot interact with the body. He reproduces Bekker’s logic: If the devil is a spirit, and spirit is only thought, and thought does not have contact with the body, then (working backwards), the spirit does not act on the body, and if the spirit does not act on the body, then neither does the devil who is spirit. Mastricht goes on to affirm that the devil is spirit, but he rejects the proposition that there is no communion or interaction between spirit and body and instead proposes in section XXXV that spirits can operate in and on bodies. He rejects Bekker on the basis that his proposition is owing to a Cartesian dualism that assumes that spirit is thought and body is extension. Mastricht, on the other hand, affirms the operation of spirits on bodies on the basis of Scripture. While Cartesianism cannot find a unity within creation to bring together spirit and body, the spiritual and material, and so end up with a hard dualism, Mastricht locates the unity of the two with God who ultimately brings them together.

Elenctics (XXXVIII–LXVII)

Having affirmed the doctrine that Satan can operate on and influence men even after the primal temptation in the Garden, Mastricht proceeds to defend this claim against possible objections, before going on the offense against Bekker’s teaching.

Defense (XXXVIII–LVIII)

He argues that the monarchy of God is not annulled by this teaching, nor the oneness of God denied—that is, the affirmation of the Devil does not require ditheism or Manicheanism. Furthermore, the doctrine of Satan does not impede the kingdom of Christ, nor does violence to the deity of the Son and the Spirit. It does not do harm to the authority of Scripture or to the Christian religion. The operation of Satan, states Mastricht, does not tear down the authority of Scripture. Neither does this doctrine take away from the fear of the Lord, detract from the holiness of God, harm the truthfulness or goodness of God, nor the honor of angels, nor love towards one’s neighbor. It does not teach that sins or crimes are derived from the temptation of Satan, which would relinquish man of his responsibility, nor does it lead to any sins against God or other men.

Offense (LIX–LXVII)

The teaching of Bekker, on the other hand, subverts the authority of Scripture and, on account of that, the whole Christian religion (see esp. sections LX and LXII). Bekker’s teaching also defaces the fear and reverence of God and leads to positioning people in morally dangerous positions as it encourages disregard for guarding against the temptations of the evil one. It also leads to the neglect of love toward one’s neighbor.

Summary: Doctrine Measured by Love

Overall, Mastricht’s polemic against Bekker considers whether the doctrine lends itself to love for God and for neighbor. In other words, along with its goal in worship, as will be demonstrated in the following section, there is also the practical working out of faith in love that fuels Mastricht’s thought. The affirmation of Satan is required for a true love for God and neighbor in fulfillment of the law of God.

Praxis (LXVIII–XCV)

In section LXVIII, Mastricht states that the doctrine of the devil is efficacious to the worship of God, that is, to true piety (efficax esse ad pietatem). This is so because it emphasizes or illustrates the majesty and glory of God as it sets up a diametrical contrast of him with Satan, who is opposed to every good thing. This doctrine also explains the misery of those who are under the power of the devil and, therefore, again by contrast, the joy of those who have come under the reign and rule of Christ. This doctrine further warns that the convocation of sin is demonic, which keeps God’s people from indulging themselves. It also incites God’s people to shrink back from the image of Satan and to desire conformity to the image of Christ and fellowship with the Son of God. It forbids fellowship with all evil and sin, and makes God’s people strong and resilient through trials and temptations. Finally, it provides comfort from the assaults of the devil against God’s people and his church, since they know that Satan is under the power and knowledge of God and must serve his ultimate purposes.

5. Comparing Mastricht and Bekker

Having now considered the historical context and teaching of Bekker in Betoverde Weereld, as well as the correlation of exegesis, doctrine, elenctics, and praxis in Mastricht’s polemic against him, we now turn to a comparison of the two on a couple key issues. First, as to the subject of the relationship between Scripture and philosophy, Bekker sought to subordinate Scripture to his Cartesian philosophy. This was especially evident in his exegetical and hermeneutical method that sought to conform the clear and simple teaching of Scripture on Satan and evil spirits to the dualistic spirit/body schema of Descartes. Accordingly, spirits as thought and bodies as extension could not have any interaction. This meant for Bekker that every passage in Scripture that seemed to teach their interaction must be written off as purely symbolic or figurative. Mastricht, on the other hand, subordinated philosophy to Scripture as its servant and handmaiden. Philosophy was helpful insofar as it aided in the explanation of Scripture, but was to be rejected wherever it contradicted its clear teaching. Thus, because Scripture affirms the interaction of spirits and bodies, Satan and men, so did Mastricht. Exegetically Mastricht avoids the elaborate and circus-like playing with the text that was required by Bekker to fit Scripture into his philosophy. Instead, Mastricht drew out the clear meaning and intention of the Scripture text, used Scripture to interpret Scripture as was common in the Reformed tradition, and appealed to the analogia fidei and the Reformed catechism as a catholic-Reformed Christian. We also recognize that while Bekker was playing games with philosophy under the guise of theology, Mastricht refused to join him by pitting Aristotelianism (or any other philosophy) against Bekker’s Cartesianism. Mastricht, instead, was a Reformed theologian of the highest order who was faithful to the only foundation of the true, Christian religion: the self-revelation of God in Scripture. Finally, Mastricht exhibits a heart for true piety, which is absent from the intellectualizing of Bekker. Mastricht saw that the rejection of this doctrine of Satan not only revealed a deeper epistemological issue as to the autonomous princpium cognoscendi in Bekker’s thought, but also a corrupting of piety and the true worship of God. Whereas Mastricht aimed at living to God in true piety, Bekker sought dying to man in philosophical inquisitiveness.

Conclusion

Mastricht has yet to fully penetrate the English world, which makes him ripe for further study. While past scholarship has only noted his epistemological concern with Bekker who was subordinating Scripture to philosophy, this article has attempted to draw out his equally crucial concern for piety in his polemic. All doctrine, including the doctrine of Satan and spirits, has a doxological purpose and is efficacious towards the true worship of God. Mastricht demonstrates this by wedding Scriptural exegesis, doctrine and praxis as a threefold polemical response against Bekker. The foundational error of Bekker, which stemmed from the improper formulation of the relationship between Scripture and philosophy, led to the teleological error of compromised (and, therefore, false) worship of God. Thus, far from a mere desire to maintain rigid, cold doctrinal standards, the placement of his doctrine and elenctics between Scripture and doxology in this polemical work is telling. Doctrine was not an isolated discipline for Mastrict. Rather, for him it had its beginning in the proper exegesis of Scripture—as to its simple meaning and in accordance with the analogia fidei and the Reformed confessions—and served the worship of God as its ultimate end. Theology and piety, doctrine and life were woven together in the polemical concerns of Mastricht who began with Scripture and ended with worship.

[1]Petrus van Mastricht, Ad Verum Clariss. D. Balthasaren Beckerum, S. S. Theol. Doct. Epanorthosis gratulatoria. Occasione Articulorum, quos Venerandae Classi Amstelodamensi exhibuit. die XXII Janu. 1692. Exarata a Petro van Mastrioht(Anthenium Schouten, 1692). [2]Ernst Bizer, “Reformed Orthodoxy and Cartesianism,” in Journal for Theology and the Church, vol. 2, Translating Theology into the Modern Age, ed., Robert Funk (New York, 1965); orig. “Die reformierte Orthodoxie und der Cartesianismus,” Zeitschrift für Theologie und Kirche 55 (1958). [3]Ernst Bizer, “Die reformierte Orthodoxie und der Cartesianimus,” in Zeitschrift für Theologie und Kirche55 (1958), cited by Adriaan C. Neele, Petrus van Mastricht(1630-1706), Reformed Orthodoxy: Method and Piety, Brill’s Series in Church History vol. 35 (Leiden, the Netherlands: Brill, 2009), 7. [4]Aza Goudriaan, Reformed Orthodoxy and Philosophy, 1625-1750: Gisbertus Voetius, Petrus Van Mastricht, and Anthonius Driessen, Brill’s Series in Church History vol. 26 (Leiden, the Netherlands: Brill, 2006). [5]Ibid.,2. [6]Ibid., 5. [7]Ibid., 331. [8]Adriaan C. Neele, Petrus van Mastricht(1630-1706), Reformed Orthodoxy: Method and Piety, Brill’s Series in Church History vol. 35 (Leiden, the Netherlands: Brill, 2009). This study arises from his earlier doctoral dissertation The Art of Living to God: A Study of Method and Piety in the Theoretica-practica theologia of Petrus van Mastricht(1630-1706)(Th.D. thesis, University of Utrecht, 2005: Pretoria: Pretoria University Pres, 2005). [9]Ibid., 1. [10]Ibid., 1. [11]Also observed by Richard A. Muller, Post-Reformation Reformed Dogmatics, vol. 1: Prolegomena to Theology(Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2003), 1:62. [12]Neele, Petrus van Mastricht, 285. [13]See Neele, Petrust van Mastricht, 54-55; 103; 285. [14]Neele, Petrus van Mastricht, 55. “Mastricht’s concern was, in a broader context, whether Scripture yielded to philosophy or the latter to the former. Either Scripture is the eternal, true, and authentic Word of God, held Mastricht, or the world will be overrun by philosophy, skepticism, and atheism” (ibid., 103). [15]“Accommodation—Orthodox, Socinian, and Contemporary,” Westminster Theological Journal 75 (2013): 335-48. [16]Lee cites Mastricht’sVindiciae veritatis et authoritatis Sacrae Scripturae in rebus philosophicis(Utrecht: Jonhannis Waesberge, 1655). [17]Andrew Fix, “Bekker and Spinoza,” in Disguised and Overt Spinozism Around 1700: Papers Presented at the International Colloquium, Held at Rotterdam, 5-8 October, Brill’s Studies in Intellectual History vol. 69 (Brill, 1996), 29. [18]Balthasar Bekker, De philosophia cartesiana admonitio candida et sincera(Wesel: Andrea Hoogenhuysen, 1668), 10, cited by Lee, “Accommodation,” 337. See also Bekker, De Betoverde Weereld(Deventer, 1739.) 2:143-79. [19]Lee, “Accommodation,” 337. [20]For a study on Voetius and Descartes’ interactions, see Thomas Arthur McGahagan, Cartesianism in the Netherlands, 1639-1676: The New Science and the Calvinist Counter-Reformation(Diss., University of Pennsylvania, 1976). His study primarily deals with Voetius and makes only a brief comment about Mastricht that he “maintained the anti-Cartesian campaign after 1676,” which goes beyond the focus of his study (p. 53). The same historical limitation is found in Theo Verbeek’s work Descartes and the Dutch: Early Reactions to Cartesian Philosophy 1637-1650(Cardondale and Edwardville: Southern Illinois University Press, 1992), who accordingly makes no mention of Mastricht. For more on Voetius and Descartes, see Von Erst Bizer, “Die reformierte Orthodoxie und der Cartesianismus,” 307-29; B. Hoon Woo, “The Understanding of Gisbertus Voetius and Rene Descartes on the Relationship of Faith and Reason, and Theology and Philosophy,” Westminster Theological Journal75, no. 1 (Spr 2013): 45-63; Andreas J. Beck, Gisbertus Voetius (1589-1676): Sein Theologieverständnis und seine Gotteslehre(Germany: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2007). [21]McGahagan, Cartesianism in the Netherlands, 106. [22]Ibid.,109. [23]Jonathan Israel, Radical Enlightenment: Philosophy and the Making of Modernity 1650–1750(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 375. [24]Ibid. [25]Ibid. [26]Ibid., 376. [27]Ibid. [28]Jacobus Koelman, Wederlegging van Balthasar Bekker’s Bestoverde Wereld(Amsterdam, 1692), 118. [29]Wiep van Bunge, “Balthasar Bekker’s Cartesian Hermeneutics and the Challenge of Spinozism,” The British Journal for the History of Philosophy1 (1993): 55-79. [30]Fix, “Bekker and Spinoza,” 23. [31]Ibid., 23. [32]Ibid., 24. [33]Kort Begryp del Aldemeine Kerkelyke Historien, Zedert het Jaar 1666 daar Hornius eindigt, tot den Jare 1684 (Amsterdam, 1739), 38, cited by Fix, “Bekker and Spinoza, 24. [34]Fix, “Bekker and Spinoza,” 35. [35]Israel, Radical Enlightenment, 384. [36]Muller, Post-Reformation Reformed Dogmatics, 1:73. [37]Ibid., 1:74. [38]Ibid., 1:75. [39]Ibid. [40]Ibid., 1:77; see also Willem J. van Asselt, The Federal Theology of Johannes Cocceius (1603-1669)(Netherlands: Brill, 2001), 81-89. [41]Muller, PPRD, 1:78. [42]Bekker, Kort begrijp, cited by McGahagan, 386. For more on the relationship of Cocceianism and Cartesianism, see McGahagan, Cartesianism in the Netherlands, 365-67. [43]Israel, Radical Enlightenment, 378. [44]Ibid. [45]Ibid., 405. [46]McGahagan, Cartesianism in the Netherlands, 11. [47]Israel, Radical Enlightenment, 378. [48]Ibid. [49]Ibid. [50]Ibid. [51]Ibid., 379. [52]See Israel,Radical Reformation, 392-405; Andrew Fix, “What Happened to Balthasar Bekker in England? A Mysery in the History of Publishing,” CHRC90.4 (2010): 609-31. [53]Israel, Radical Enlightenment, 379. [54]Ibid., 380. [55]Ibid. [56]Ibid. [57]Ibid., 381. [58]Neele, Petrus van Mastricht, 139. [59]He also writes, Quantum assequor, non aliud, quam quod, ex placitis Philosophiae, spiritui, ceu merae cogitationi, non possint competere vires, quibus operetur extra se, id quod suo loco, ex prosesso discutiemus. [60]Existimant, pleraque Scripturis narrata, de Angelorum operationibus, tibi non esse nisi figmenta & imaginationes, quibus nihil minus intendatur, quam quod verba sonant. [61]Neele, Petrus van Mastricht, 55. “Mastricht’s concern was, in a broader context, whether Scripture yielded to philosophy or the latter to the former. Either Scripture is the eternal, true, and authentic Word of God, held Mastricht, or the world will be overrun by philosophy, skepticism, and atheism” (p. 103). [62]Neele, “The Reception of John Calvin’s Work by Petrus van Mastricht,” Church History and Religious Culture, 91, no. 1-2 (2011): 163.

The great Dutch theologian of the Nadere Reformatie, Petrus van Mastricht (1630-1706), has only recently been introduced to the English-speaking world with the publication of his Theoretica-practica theologia (Theoretical and Practical Theology). In this article we will survey past scholarship on Mastricht, anticipating that further studies will emerge in the light of this new translation.

Jonathan Edwards: Better than Turretin

In 1747, Jonathan Edwards wrote the following to Joseph Bellamy:

As to the books you speak of: Mastricht is sometimes in one volume, a very large thick quarto, sometimes in two quarto volumes. I believe it could not be had new under 8 or 10 pounds. Turretin is in three volumes in quarto, and would probably be about the same price. They are both excellent. Turretin is on polemical divinity, on the 5 points & all other controversial points, & is much larger in these than Mastricht, & is better for one that desires only to be thoroughly versed in controversies. But take Mastricht for divinity in general, doctrine, practice & controversy, or as an universal system of divinity; & it is much better than Turretin or any other book in the world, excepting the Bible, in my opinion.

Richard Muller: Locating Mastricht

In his Post-Reformation Reformed Dogmatics, Richard Muller locates Mastricht within the era of high orthodoxy (ca. 1640–1685–1725). Muller notes that at this time the “architectonic clarity of early orthodoxy is replaced to a certain extent or at least put to the service of a more broadly developed and even discursive system.”[1] There is an expansion of polemical argumentation and the creative phase of early orthodoxy gives way to a phase of elaboration, refinement, and modification, which is evident in such prominent theologians as Voetius, Turretin, and Mastricht. Muller goes on to describe the posture towards philosophy during this time as Reformed theology now encountered the new ideas of autonomy introduced by the Enlightenment:

Among the major transitions that took place as Reformed theology passed from early orthodoxy into the high orthodox era was the transition from a philosophical development focused on the reception, assessment, and critical appropriation of the various trajectories of Christian Aristotelianism and of the late Renaissance developments … to the encounter of these older, highly nuanced approach with the new rationalists of the seventeenth century. … [T]he high orthodox, ca. 1640, were beginning to feel the impact of Cartesian thought. Just as the early orthodox era manifests not a monolithic appropriation of the older Aristotelian philosophies, but the reception of elements of various trajectories, so does the high orthodox era manifest varied receptions of the newer rationalism among the Reformed, and, indeed, the continuance of themes and issues from the older trajectories, now modified and altered by the changed philosophical context. Specifically, elements of the older Thomism, Scotism, and nominalism can still be detected as mediated through and modified by philosophical currents in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries—and elements of Cartesian thought and its modifications can also be found both debated and appropriated by various individual Reformed thinkers.[2]

Gisbertus Voetius (1589-1676) had waged a strong polemic against the encroachment of Cartesianism upon the church and theology, which sought to subvert the authority of Scripture to an alien philosophy and special revelation to autonomous human reasoning. This mantle of maintaining the basic Reformation principle of sola Scriptura would be taken up by Mastricht at the University of Utrecht. In a future article we will consider Mastricht’s polemic against Cartesianism.

Ernst Bizer: Mastricht First Introduced into the English World

The Reformed scholastics in the Netherlands, including Mastricht, were first introduced into the English world with Ernst Bizer’s essay that was translated from the German in 1965.[3] This was the primary source at the time in English on conservative Calvinism in the Dutch Republic. He purports a pro-Cartesian interpretation of the Dutch Reformed theologians and argues that while Mastricht and others opposed Cartesianism, they were nevertheless “bound to confuse their outmoded worldview with their faith [and] their concept of truth was closer to the ‘new philosophy’ than is suspect.”[4] This view, however, has been challenged by more recent scholarship.

Aza Goudriaan: The Relationship between Philosophy and Scripture

Aza Goudriaan, in his volume, Reformed Orthodoxy and Philosophy, 1625–1750, focuses on the relationship of theology and philosophy as formulated in the thought of three key Dutch Reformed theologians: Gisbertus Voetius (1589–1676), Petrus van Mastricht (1630–1706), and Anthonius Driessen (1684–1748).[5] All three were at the forefront of the philosophical debates that swirled in the Dutch Republic in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, especially instigated by the arrival of Renee Descartes (1596–1650) in the Netherlands in 1628. “If it is true,” Goudriaan writes, “that orthodox Protestant theologians made more extensive use of philosophy than the Reformation itself, the question can be posed how they actually used philosophy. Or it can be asked what theological positions they held in areas that philosophers could also reckon to their territory.”[6] By studying these three theologians, Goudriaan “seeks to understand better how Dutch Reformed theology integrated and responded to philosophical views in the period from 1625 through 1750.”[7] Voetius, professor of theology at the University of Utrecht, was initially the premier defender against the Cartesian encroachment upon the Dutch Reformed Church that sought to undermine both her theology and piety. This mantle would be taken up by his successor at the university, Petrus van Mastricht. As might be expected, Goudriaan demonstrates that Voetius and Mastricht were in essential agreement with one another in their theology and polemic against Cartesianism as they engaged it from distinctly Reformed premises and commitments. Goudriaan deals successively with specific loci where the relationship between theology and philosophy was acutely tried and tested, including: reason and revelation; creation and the physical world; the providential rule of God over the world; anthropological issues of the relationship between the soul and the body; and divine and natural law. He notes that both Voetius and Mastricht had aligned themselves with the older Aristotelian philosophy against the newer Enlightenment philosophy, yet the debate was not waged over whose philosophical system was correct. This in itself would have been a losing concession, for it was precisely their aim that Reformed theology not be corrupted by alien philosophical concepts or categories that ultimately undermined Scriptural authority and teaching. Philosophy was instead viewed by them as an instrument or servant of the most basic Reformed principle, namely, the authority of Scripture as their principium cognoscendi. For them Scripture was not subordinated to philosophy, but philosophy to Scripture. This starting point alone accounted for the full-orbed nature of creation with its rich diversity, including spirits and bodies, heaven and earth, which Cartesian dualism could not account for or bring into any real, dynamic relation. Because of this common commitment to the Reformed principle of Scripture’s authority, Goudriaan observes, “the theological development from Voetius to Driessen supports the broader claim that biblical Christianity outlives the philosophical and conceptual apparatus with whose help it is explained.”[8] To put it another way, philosophy was not the indispensable lord of theology, but its disposable handmaiden—it would, therefore, continue even when philosophies changed or failed. Goudriaan’s conclusions are consistent with what we see in Mastricht’s Ad Verum Clariss. D. Balthasaren Beckerum. He does not utilize Aristotelianism to combat Bekker’s Cartesian and Spinozistic intention of disenchanting the world by casting doubt on the existence of spirits, including the devil, and rejecting any interaction between spirits and bodies. Rather, he formulates his argument on the basis of Scripture as its starting point and the true worship of God as its goal, thus wedding theology and piety.

Adriaan Neele: Doctrine and Piety

The only book-length treatment devoted wholly to Mastricht in English is Adriaan Neele’s Petrus van Mastricht (1630–1706), Reformed Orthodoxy: Method and Piety.[9] In this work Neele “deals with the post-Reformation Reformed concern for right doctrine and piety.”[10] He addresses a misunderstanding of past scholarship that has essentially separated the two. Neele describes the situation as follows:

In respect to [doctrine], scholarship has tended to appraise the theology of the seventeenth-century Reformed orthodox era, which includes the Nadere Reformatie, Puritanism and Pietism, as rigid and polemic; i.e., an abstract doctrine with little or no regard for practical significance. Consequently, the concern for orthodox doctrine has been seen as stalling the biblical exegesis of that era. In particular such exegesis has been critiqued for serving only to proof-text dogmatic and polemic works. Furthermore, the concern for doctrine has been regarded as leading to the relapse to Scholasticism and the neglect of the vitality of the Reformer’s humanism. … In respect to piety or praxis pietatis, which is a distinct feature of the seventeenth-century Reformed thought, scholarship has often negatively appraised its subjectivism, mysticism, and pietism, which deviated from Scripture. In addition, piety usually is described in opposition of the post-Reformation Reformed (Scholastic) orthodoxy. Contrary to these two emerging perspectives, more recent scholarship recognizes that piety is a working out of the theology of the seventeenth-century Reformed orthodoxy, which includes methodological aspects of scholasticism and Renaissance humanism.[11]

Neele redresses these issues by demonstrating the way in which Mastricht wedded doctrine and piety, theology and life, and correlated Scripture, doctrine, and praxis in his Theoretico-practica theologia, with particular focus on his Doctrine of God.[12] As this was Mastricht’s magnum opus, Neele has laid a substantial foundation for the direction of future Mastricht studies. The aim of his study, however, was not exhaustive, even as he invites “further study on Mastrich’s life and work, so that a fuller portrait may emerge and more completeness may be achieved in respect to the content of his publications.”[13] This invitation Theoretical and Practical Theology now available from Reformation Heritage Books.

[1] Muller, Post-Reformation Reformed Dogmatics, 1:73. [2] Ibid., 1:74. [3] Ernst Bizer, “Reformed Orthodoxy and Cartesianism,” in Journal for Theology and the Church, vol. 2, Translating Theology into the Modern Age, ed., Robert Funk (New York, 1965); orig. “Die reformierte Orthodoxie und der Cartesianismus,” Zeitschrift für Theologie und Kirche 55 (1958). [4] Ernst Bizer, “Die reformierte Orthodoxie und der Cartesianimus,” in Zeitschrift für Theologie und Kirche55 (1958), cited by Adriaan C. Neele, Petrus van Mastricht(1630-1706), Reformed Orthodoxy: Method and Piety, Brill’s Series in Church History vol. 35 (Leiden, the Netherlands: Brill, 2009), 7. [5] Aza Goudriaan, Reformed Orthodoxy and Philosophy, 1625-1750: Gisbertus Voetius, Petrus Van Mastricht, and Anthonius Driessen, Brill’s Series in Church History vol. 26 (Leiden, the Netherlands: Brill, 2006). [6] Ibid.,2. [7] Ibid., 5. [8] Ibid., 331. [9] Adriaan C. Neele, Petrus van Mastricht (1630-1706), Reformed Orthodoxy: Method and Piety, Brill’s Series in Church History vol. 35 (Leiden, the Netherlands: Brill, 2009). This study arises from his earlier doctoral dissertation The Art of Living to God: A Study of Method and Piety in the Theoretica-practica theologia of Petrus van Mastricht (1630-1706) (Th.D. thesis, University of Utrecht, 2005: Pretoria: Pretoria University Pres, 2005). [10] Ibid., 1. [11] Ibid. [12] Also observed by Richard A. Muller, Post-Reformation Reformed Dogmatics, vol. 1: Prolegomena to Theology (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2003), 1:62. [13] Neele, Petrus van Mastricht, 285.

As we read about in Matthew 3, John the Baptist breathed in an “atmosphere surcharged with the thought of the end.”[1] In his mind his baptism was the final opportunity before “water” would be eschatologically outmoded by “the Holy Spirit and fire.” He thought that the time for repentance would reach its terminus with the appearance of the Christ—then water would be superseded by the Holy Spirit and fire, no longer for repentance but for final salvation and judgment.[2] Jesus, however, steps onto the scene and rather than enacting a redemptive-historical transition to his eschatological baptism, he comes to be baptized by John. But John protests. Now his protest was not for them to reverse roles as if Jesus was simply to administer John’s own baptism of water. Rather, John believes that it was now time for his baptism to be superseded by the eschatological baptism of Christ.[3] In John’s eyes, the appearance of the Messiah alone was enough to transition redemptive-history into the eschatological era of the Messiah. His protest reveals he was ignorant of what must first be fulfilled in order for this to happen. This confusion over the timing and nature of Christ’s coming will persist with John and his disciples (9:9-13; 11:2-6). In order to correct John’s redemptive-historical misunderstanding (or mistiming), Jesus responds, “Let it be so now, for thus it is fitting for us to fulfill all righteousness (Ἄφες ἄρτι, οὕτως γὰρ πρέπον ἐστὶνἡμῖν πληρῶσαι πᾶσαν δικαιοσύνην, 3:15). The first clause (“Let is be so now”) affirms that John was correct to expect a redemptive-historical transition, but it was not yet time—more than just the appearance of the Christ was necessary. It was thus fitting for Jesus to be baptized now (ἄρτι) because he and John had not yet fulfilled “all righteousness” (πᾶσαν δικαιοσύνην). If Jesus’ words are responding to this larger redemptive-historical timing issue, then it would seem natural to understand “all righteousness” here as including, but also going beyond his baptism to encompass all that he accomplishes in his life, death and resurrection. For it is only after these accomplishments that the transition John anticipated takes place and Christ commissions his disciples to baptize the nations in the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit (28:19).[4] Jesus, therefore, does not submit himself to John’s baptist as a mere example to be followed, but to propel redemptive-history forward in himself as the true Israel who repents not for his own sins, but for the sins of his people whom he came to save (1:21). It is important to keep in mind that John does not administer a different baptism to Jesus; it is still a baptism with water for repentance on account of sin. Already the presence and problem of sin has been elucidated and deliverance from it has been tied to the mission of Jesus, the son of Abraham, the son of David (1:1). In Matt. 1:21 the people are understood not in the abstract, but specifically as those who belong to Jesus (“his people,” τὸν λαὸν αὐτοῦ) and who personally possess their own sins (“their sins,” τῶν ἁμαρτιῶν αὐτῶν). How is someone saved from their sin? Forgiveness (see 9:2, 5, 6; 12:31). And how is someone forgiven? By the poured out blood of Jesus Christ (see 26:28). Therefore, the death of Christ was a necessary redemptive-historical accomplishment for John’s preparatory ministry and the eschatological shift that he anticipated (16:21; 17:22-23; 20:17-19)—much more than the mere appearance of the Messiah was necessary. In Matt. 3:6 we read of people confessing (ἐξομολογέω) their sins as they are baptized by John. In relation to Christ and his work, sin is forgiven by him and on account of him. In relation to people, sin is confessed. The confession (or repentance) cannot be isolated from its Christological basis, the death and resurrection of Jesus, that makes it effectual for salvation. But we may be able to say more than this, for Jesus himself undergoes John’s baptism with water for repentance. As the true Israel (cf. 2:15), he makes a true confession of sins, not for his own sins, but vicariously for the sake of his people he came to save. In fulfilling all righteousness, “[Jesus] had no other calling than to comply with the demands that God had imposed on every Israelite. … [So Matthew] brings out Jesus’ solidarity with the human race and, indeed, with sinners.”[5]

[1] Geerhardus Vos, Biblical Theology, 318. [2] On the Holy Spirit and fire pertaining to salvation and judgment, respectively, see Herman Ridderbos, Matthew, 54. The same juxtaposition can be found in Ezek. 36:26-32; Joel 2:28-31; Zech. 12:9-10. [3] Herman Ridderbos, Matthew, 57. [4] It seems this is the same eschatological baptism expected by John, but now expanded to include the Father and the Son, possibly corresponding with the revelation of the Son by the Father and the Father by the Son (so 11:25-27). [5] Herman Ridderbos, Matthew, 58-59.

Matthias Konradt, Israel, Church, and the Gentiles in the Gospel of Matthew. Translated by Kathleen Ess. Waco, TX: Baylor University Press, 2014. Pp. xii + 485. $79.95 (hardcover). Konradt provides a stimulating reconsideration of the gospel of Matthew in order to determine the correct motive for the transition from Jesus’ exclusive ministry to Israel in 10:5-6 to the nations in 28:19. He challenges the traditional “rejection in Israel—turn to the nations” schema in favor of a more positive theological conception that is founded on Matthew’s gradually unfolding narratival Christology. The shift, he argues, is not a hard “break” from Israel to the nations as a consequence of Israel’s rejection, but an organic and “integral aspect of the narrative concept in which Matthew unfolds his Christology” (14). It is not a matter of replacement or supersession, but supplementation and expansion (86-87). In fact, the very opening statement of the gospel—prior to the rejection of the Christ by some within Israel—already has the nations as its ultimate goal and aim, linking the gospel with the universal promises still unfulfilled in redemptive-history. Thus, the opening up of salvation to the nations was not because of a failure on the part of Israel, for they had not yet failed within the story, but because of the nature and identity of Jesus Christ as the son of David, the son of Abraham (1:1). Konradt will specifically uncover the Christological foundation of this transition to be Matthew’s integration of Jesus’ identity as the Davidic-Messianic shepherd of Israel and the Son of God. Yet, the rejection of Jesus is not negligible, but significant to the narrative. In order to integrate both the positive Christological construction of the transition and the negative rejection of the Christ by the religious authorities and Jerusalem, Konradt makes a couple of helpful distinctions that seem to be inherent to the gospel itself. First, he distinguishes between the “nations” and the “church”—two separate entities that are often conflated or thought of as interchangeable. By distinguishing them it becomes apparent that the relationship between Israel and the nations is not the same as the relationship between Israel and the church. Second, he differentiates within Israel between the Jewish crowds, who respond positively to Jesus’ ministry as the one sent to the lost sheep of Israel, and the religious leaders who outright reject and oppose him at every point, even persuading Jerusalem (itself a character in the story distinguished from the crowds of Galilee and not to be confused with Israel as a whole) to have him crucified in the end. This guards against a collective view of Israel’s rejection of the Christ and helps to show how the church was initially formed within Israel by the replacement of the religious authorities with Jesus’ own disciples, which organically leads to salvation extending to the nations. Konradt develops his thesis in three steps: “Jesus mission to Israel, Israel’s reaction, and the possible consequence of a negative reaction” (14). The first step is taken in chapter 2, in which he argues that Matthew “systematically sculpted the orientation toward Israel, formulated programmatically in the mission logion in 15.24, as an essential feature of Jesus’ earthly ministry” (85). This is evident in the “altering of geographical details (4.23-25; 15.29-31)” and the editing of texts in which Jesus’ ministry towards various Gentiles (8:5-13, 28-34; 15:21-28) is presented as “exceptions” to the pre-Easter situation (74, 85), for the καιρός when salvation would extend to the nations had not yet come and would only come post-Easter. The central reason, however, for Jesus’ Israel-oriented ministry was Christological, that is, it was founded upon his identity as the Davidic-Messianic shepherd of Israel. This title integrates both the healing and teaching aspects of his ministry, and its positive connotation reveals that he carried it out not for the sake of justifying his denunciation and rejection of Israel, but positively to fulfill Israel’s promises of salvation (86). In chapter 3, Konradt highlights the differentiated reaction to Jesus in Israel, which he believes Matthew intentionally draws out by distinguishing the authorities and the crowds from one another (135). Maintaining his Christological focus, he notes that the conflict revolved around his authority as the Davidic Messiah, which the crowds recognized in his healings, but the religious leaders directly opposed. Likewise his teaching on the proper understanding of God’s will, i.e., the Law and the Prophets, also proved a dividing line. “To speak of healing and teaching is to speak summarily of the central aspects of Jesus’ ministry (cf. 4.23; 9.35; and 21.14 + 21.32a), and so the opposition against Jesus directed itself against his ministry as a whole” (136). In short, the division between the crowds and authorities was Christological. And this division remained a reality throughout Jesus’ passion, including 27:25. So, argues Konradt, Matthew does not have in view a collective rejection of Jesus in Israel; instead, Jerusalem is now included in the battle lines, which was anticipated in 2:3 and in Jesus foretelling his death (16:21; 17:22-23; 20:17-19). It was not Israel as a whole, but the authorities and the people of Jerusalem who decided against their Messiah (27:25). In chapter 4, Konradt looks at the same issue of differentiation now with regard to Jesus’ pronouncements against Israel—are they also to be distinguished? Konradt argues against the popular notion that Jesus rejected Israel wholesale and defends this against interpretations of various passages that have been used to support “the thesis that Israel as a collective entity will be punished or has forfeited her position” (263). When Jesus climactically declares that the kingdom will be taken from them and given to a people producing its fruit (21:43), Konradt sees this as fulfilled in the replacement of the current religious authorities with his disciples, not the replacement of Israel with the Gentile nations (352). The pronouncements against this generation (11:16-19; 12:38-45; 23:34-36), the destruction of Jerusalem (22:7; 23:37-39), and the parable trilogy all confirm a differentiation that takes place within Israel. This is in keeping with Konradt’s thesis that the transition is founded on positive Christological grounds. While the religious authorities are rejected, those within Israel replace them and are enabled for the task by the authoritative and true teaching of Jesus. Chapter 5 unfolds how the above conclusions relate to “the inclusion of the nations in salvation and the formation of the ecclesia” (264). The turn towards the nations cannot be owing to “the (collective) rejection of Jesus in Israel, the failure of his mission to Israel, or Israel’s guilt and condemnation” (265). The universal intention of salvation is evident from the beginning of the gospel and is founded upon a Christological foundation, anticipated in 1:1 and made a reality following the endowment of the resurrected Christ with universal authority. “In this the ministry of salvation to the nations presumes the ministry to Israel. It is the salvation made known to Israel in which the nations participate” (324). According to Konradt, this corresponds with Matthew’s integration of Jesus’ dual identity as the Davidic Messiah (Israel-specific) and the Son of God(universal). Having confirmed the organic and supplemental nature of the transition from 10:5-6 to 28:19, Konradt takes up the relationship between Israel and the church in chapter 6. Since there is a positive Christological conception that motivates the transition, it is incorrect to associate the church with the nations as if it replaced Israel. The church is not conceived by Matthew to be “the new or true people of God, as opposed to Israel” (352). Rather, the church is first formed within Israel as Jesus replaces the religious authorities with his disciples, who have been entrusted by him with the true teaching of Israel. The church, then, is the “community of salvation that has emerged (and is still emerging) from Israel and the (other) nations” (353). This community is commissioned to incorporate the nations, of which Israel is now a part. In chapter 7, Konradt concludes by noting that past socio-historical approaches have been essentially guesswork and have been unable to integrate all of the elements and motifs present in Matthew’s gospel. This approach, therefore, should be considered subordinate to the theological approach that Konradt has undertaken, which, in turn, may provide constructive lines for the socio-historical approach to follow. Konradt’s work exhibits numerous strengths that make his basic thesis of grounding the transition from 10:5-6 to 28:19 upon a positive Christological foundation compelling. First, his historical-critical exegesis allows for a truly constructive interpretation that builds on the text, rather than a source-critical or socio-historical methodology that aims at mere reconstructive purposes that only (subjectively) arrive at the text (see esp. 10n35). While some of Konradt’s conclusions are based on the assumption of Matthew editing or redacting Mark and Q, his methodology leads him to integrate major elements and motifs in the gospel, to see the uniqueness of Matthew’s gospel, and to engage in careful and critical exegesis. Second, he makes a compelling case for a positive Christological foundation which corresponds with other Matthean studies that have focused on the narratival unfolding of Jesus’ identity as a central goal of the gospel. He consistently and clearly relates each chapter to this basic point of his thesis. Third, he reads the events of the gospel not as abstract soteriological datums or general moralistic axioms, but redemptive-historically. This enables him to see the universality of God’s intentions in Christ as inherent from the beginning since he comes to fulfill promises that have already been given to Abraham and to David. “Matthew anchors the extension of the ministry of salvation to the nations in Israel’s history of salvation by indicating that God’s history with Israel was aimed toward this goal from the very beginning” (307). He is also able to make historical distinctions within the gospel itself between pre- and post-Easter, which illumines the eschatological significance of Jesus’ death and resurrection. Fourth, he makes a host of helpful distinctions where the tendency in the past has been to conflate or confuse. This is especially the case with his distinction between the nations and the church, which seems obvious, but is often not made. This allows for a more nuanced understanding of the relationship between Israel and the church and Israel and the nations. This work can also be critiqued or improved upon in a few places. First, while Konradt tries to integrate Jesus’ son of David and son of God titles in a way that provides a Christological foundation for an organic transition from Israel to the nations, he seems to maintain too strong a distinction between them prior to this integration. For example, he writes, “While the focus on Israel in Jesus’ earthly ministry correlates with the emphasis on his Davidic messiahship, the extension of salvation to the nations is connected with the salvific death, resurrection, and exaltation of the Son of God” (310; also 324). This is problematic because universal, eschatological dimensions are inherent to the Davidic title (2 Sam. 7) as well as to Jesus’ title as the son of Abraham (Matt. 1:1; Gen. 17:4-6; Rom. 4:13). In addition, the son of God title has Davidic Messianic connotations (e.g., Ps. 2). It seems it would be better to formulate Jesus’ identity as the Eternal Son and as the Messianic Son in an archetype-ectype schema in which the ontological is the ground and source of the redemptive-historical. It may, however, be countered that this would be more of a theological rather than narratival construction. Second, in arguing for a positive Christological motivation for the transition, Konradt downplays the significance of Israel’s ignorance of Jesus’ true identity. This takes away from Matthew’s concern to show that Israel must be reconstituted in Christ (e.g., Matt. 2:15). The continuity between Israel and the nations is not found in some of Israel not rejecting him, but in Christ alone as he gathers a people around himself. The children of Abraham have always been those of faith. Finally, it would have be interesting if Konradt had interacted directly with dispensational formulations of the Israel-nations relation. This, however, is not a fault of the book since it was not necessarily the focus of the study. Overall, I would recommend this book to pastors and scholars who plan on preaching or teaching through the gospel of Matthew. Whether you agree with all of Konradt’s conclusions or not (I, for one, did not), he forces you to wrestle with what exactly is the unifying theme and purpose of Matthew’s gospel as well as its driving theological motivation. This will prevent piecemeal interpretations that analyze only the trees, but miss the forest of the gospel.

The eschatological life of the believer requires the legal restitution of sin’s guilt by means of an imputed righteousness for justification—a kingdom benefit received only in union with Christ by his Spirit through faith. While Paul spoke of the death of Christ in Romans 1:3-4 and its application for salvation to all who believe in 1:16-17, now in 5:1-11 he expounds its substitutionary nature, having just declared Abraham justified before God on account of the righteousness he received not by works of the law, but through faith. Christ did not die for his own sin, but for us while we were helpless (v. 6), sinners (v. 8), and enemies (v. 10). The death of Christ established peace with God (5:1) for by it we were reconciled to God (5:10)—both forensic terms in keeping with justification. Vos, commenting on Romans 5:9-11, states, “The objective reconciliation took place in the death of Christ; its subjective result is justification. … The two are entirely equivalent. … [Reconciliation] consisted in the removal of objective legal obstacles…. According to Romans … the two transactions of reconciliation and justification are in substance identical. They both rest on the death, or the blood, of Christ.”[1] Ridderbos gets at the eschatological thrust of reconciliation by defining it as “the work of redemption going out from God in Christ to the world, for the removal of ‘enmity,’ for the restoration of ‘peace.’ … [I]t is primarily a matter of removing that which stands in the way of the right relationship between God and (in the most comprehensive sense of the word) the world; in other words, of the eschatological restoration of all things.”[2] Of particular interest for understanding the eschatological aspect of Paul’s conception of life is his statement in 5:10, “For if while we were enemies we were reconciled to God by the death of his Son, much more, now that we are reconciled, shall we be saved by [ἐν] his life.”[3] The reference to the “life” of the Son[4] comes after mention of his “death,” which leads us to understand it not as his earthly life, but specifically as his resurrection life in the power of the Spirit (1:4). John Murray observes,

It is not simply the resurrection as an event that is in view, however. Paul does not say, we shall be saved by his resurrection, but ‘by his life,’ and therefore it is the exalted life of the Redeemer that is intended. The resurrection is in the background as conditioning the exaltation life.[5]

In what sense, then, are we saved by the resurrection life of the Son? To answer that we need to first point out that the salvation envisioned here appears to be eschatological, which is evident from the reference to the wrath of God in v. 9. Therefore, it seems Paul has in mind the firstfruits or firstborn concept, which he develops elsewhere (see Rom. 8:29; 1 Cor. 15:20-24). The preposition ἐν could be translated as “in” instead of “by”—we are saved in his life. The resurrection life of Christ is the guarantee of the resurrection life of all united to him in the same way the full harvest is united to the firstfruits. The life of Christ consisting in his royal eschatological enthronement beyond the reach of the grave in the incorruptibility of the Spirit guarantees the kingdom life of all believers who will share in his reign (5:17) and inheritance (8:17). Murray drives the point home well:

The a fortiori argument of the apostle is thus apparent. It is to the effect that if, when we were in a state of alienation from God, God showed his love to such an extent that he reconciled us to himself and instated us in his favour through the death of his own Son, how much more, when this alienation is removed and we are instated in his favour, shall the exaltation life of Christ insure our being saved to the uttermost. … This argument also shows the indissoluble connection that there is between the death and resurrection of Christ and that since these may never be disassociated so the benefits accruing from the one may never be severed from those accruing from the other. … Hence those who are the beneficiaries of Jesus’ death must also be the beneficiaries of all that is entailed in his resurrection life.[6]

The eschatological life of the believer can never be separated from the resurrection life of Christ. This royal life of the Son in the incorruptible power and glory of the Spirit is the guarantee of the full possession of life for all who believe. Furthermore, as Paul will go on to demonstrate, the only other alternative to life in Christ is death in Adam (5:12-20)—in these two public persons is the whole of humanity subsumed. The path of life from the mode of the flesh, which is subject to death, to the mode of the Spirit, which is characterized by power, glory, and life, is exclusively found in the resurrection life of Jesus Christ our Lord. The gospel, of which the death and resurrection of the Son is the central subject matter (1:3), is the power of the risen Lord to bring all who receive it by faith into this kingdom life. Lastly, Paul’s connection between reconciliation and life in this passage highlights the God-centered nature of this life, which has been evident since the beginning. There is no life post-fall apart from reconciliation between God and the sinner. This life in Christ can only be considered true life if it is enjoyed in the presence of the living God with all elements of enmity and separation caused by sin blotted out, removed as far as the east is from the west, cast forevermore into the depths of the sea—here legally, as to justification, and later as to sin’s power in sanctification (Rom. 6).[7]

[1] Geerhardus Vos, “The Pauline Conception of Reconciliation,” in Redemptive History and Biblical Interpretation, 363-64 [2] Herman Ridderbos, Paul: An Outline of His Theology, 183. [3] This is the same sequence as 1:3-4. In other words, the life-experience of Christ is repeated in those united to him by the Spirit through faith. [4] This is the first time the title “Son” has been used since the prologue. [5] John Murray, The Epistle to the Romans, 1:174. [6] Murray, The Epistle to the Romans, 1:175. [7] Both justification and sanctification are kingdom benefits with neither being the source of the other, but both being conferred in union with Christ (which is to be transferred into his kingdom) by the Spirit through faith.

Paul was a redemptive-historical preacher of the highest order. His theology was founded not on timeless or idealistic truths, but concrete historical events in accordance with their order, progression, and organic character. This is demonstrated, for one, in Romans 4. In order to support his previous argument about the righteousness of God being manifest in the cross of Christ apart from the Law (3:21ff.), Paul makes a redemptive-historical downshift behind Moses to the time of Abraham in order to demonstrate that Abraham was counted righteous historically prior to his law-obedience of circumcision; therefore, his later circumcision did not obtain for him righteousness, but sacramentally sealed the righteousness he already possessed by faith (4:9-11a). The purpose of this was to make him the father of all who believe, whether circumcised or uncircumcised (4:11b-12). In other words, the historical timing of Abraham being first justified and then circumcised had a vital and determining effect on the nature of the community of faith, making room from its conception for all people who believe, whether Jew or Gentile. This also determined the way in which the promise to Abraham and his offspring—that he would be heir of the world (κοσμος, v. 13), ultimately an eschatological kingdom reality (cf. 8:17)—would be fulfilled. The promise was given to Abraham when he possessed righteousness through faith and not through the law. This is significant because the promise was not given to Abraham in the abstract, but within a redemptive-historical context in which death had already entered the κοσμος Abraham was to inherit and was reigning over it (5:12-14).[1] Here is the major point: the Law could not effect that which only God himself could effect. The Law was powerless to bring life from the dead, to effect resurrection—whether typologically or eschatologically. The promise, therefore, would have to rest entirely on grace, not meticulous law-keeping (4:16). It is not the adherents of the Law who are the heirs, but those who share in the faith of Abraham, a faith that believes in the God “who gives life to the dead” (v. 17), a faith that hopes against hope (v. 18). The redemptive-historical situation Abraham found himself in when he was given the promise of inheriting the κοσμος ruled by death means that the fulfillment of this promise will require the overthrowing of death’s reign by resurrection. This draws us back to the prologue (1:3-4) in which the pattern of death to life (i.e., resurrection) was typologically seen in King David and eschatologically fulfilled in Jesus Christ our Lord. Paul now sees another earlier typological fulfillment of the promise in Abraham when the Lord brings life from his body, “which was as good as dead,” and “the deadness of Sarah’s womb” (4:19). It was not Abraham’s doing that would bring forth life—such would be impossible for him as one residing under death’s influence—but believing in God alone who could do it. This episode in Abraham’s life demonstrates typologically that the promise rests on grace, that is, God doing what he had promised apart from the contributive works of those for whom he is doing it. Notice what Paul writes with his emphasis on faith and God bringing forth life from the dead:

… in the presence of the God in whom [Abraham] believed, who gives life to the dead and calls into existence the things that do not exist. In hope he believed against hope, that he should become the father of many nations, as he had been told, “So shall your offspring be.” He did not weaken in faith when he considered his own body, which was as good as dead [νεκρόω] (since he was about a hundred years old), or when he considered the deadness [νέκρωσις] of Sarah’s womb. No unbelief made him waver concerning the promise of God, but he grew strong in his faith as he gave glory to God, fully convinced that God was able to do what he had promised. That is why his faith was “counted to him as righteousness (4:17-22)

The problem is that Abraham eventually closed his eyes and entered the grave, as did his child of promise, Isaac, and all of his descendants after him, including all the Levitical priests and Davidic kings.[2] Therefore, the bringing forth of life from the as-good-as-dead body of Abraham typified what God would accomplish in his greater offspring in whom the promise would be fulfilled on an eschatological level, namely, Jesus Christ. It is important to recognize also that the kingly elements we noted of Adam as the vice-gerent of the Lord in Genesis 1-3 and of Christ as David’s greater Son in Romans 1:3-4 are not absent from Abraham and his offspring. Abraham himself is promised in connection with inheriting the nations that kings will come from him (Gen. 17:6, 16). This promise is repeated to Jacob (Gen. 35:11) and Israel as a nation is designated a kingdom of priests (Exod. 19:6). On this basis, we can say that the resurrection life of Abraham was one of reigning over the κοσμος—the κοσμος God created (1:20) and judges (3:6) and which is accountable to him (3:19). In other words, Abraham was not to inherit the κοσμος in isolation from God, but so as to share in God’s rule over it. God does not relinquish possession of the κοσμος, nor transfer it from himself to Abraham, but brings Abraham to share in his rule over it by grace. The eschatological king that would come from the loins of Abraham would go beyond returning to the protological situation of Adam sharing in God’s reign; he would propel it to the eschatological heights of an everlasting inheritance beyond the possibility of Sin and Death ever again entering. In short, the inheritance obtained in the resurrection of Christ is not to be thought of apart from God who both promises it, accomplishes it, and consummates it in communion with his people by grace alone. Romans 1:3-4 proclaims that the king who was to come from Abraham has indeed come in the person of Jesus Christ our Lord. Having been enthroned over the eschatological kingdom, he administers his kingdom along with his inheritance (8:12-17) by means of his Gospel Word and Spirit. This gospel is his kingdom power in which the righteousness of God is manifest apart from the Law. And as was the case with Abraham, so it is to be received by faith as the power of God for salvation, so that “the righteous shall live by faith” (Rom. 1:17). The declaration in Scripture of Abraham’s possession of righteousness through faith, therefore, was “not written for his sake alone, but for ours also” (4:24). Paul continues, “It will be counted to us who believe in him who raised from the dead Jesus our Lord, who was delivered up for our trespasses and raised for our justification” (4:25). In this way, the kingdom life of those united to Christ by the Spirit through faith rests entirely on grace alone, on God doing what he promised he would do in bringing life from the dead.

[1] This is significantly different from Adam’s pre-redemptive historical context when the promise of life had been originally given in the covenant of works. It would be through Adam’s disobedience that death would begin to reign over the world. [2] The same problem of death is true of the Davidic kings who are promised an everlasting throne and eternal kingdom (2 Sam. 7:16) and the Levitical priesthood as the book of Hebrews makes apparent (Heb. 7:23). This is because they all existed in the mode of the flesh, which was subject to death. Eschatological fulfillment required the attainment of incorruptible life in the power of the Spirit, as “Jesus Christ our Lord” obtained (Rom. 1:3-4).

The garden was a kingdom that the Lord fashioned by divine fiat in which he would reign in life with his holy people. Within the garden-kingdom of God, Adam, the image bearer of God, was appointed to be the Lord’s royal representative or vice-gerent.[1] Therefore, protological life of covenantal communion with God can be understood more precisely as a kind of royal living or kingdom life. It was Adam sharing in the reign of God as an expression of his solidarity with God and the face-to-face fellowship he enjoyed with him in the reciprocal giving of one’s self to the other. Van Groningen speaks of this as God bringing humanity into “his royal family.”[2] He continues, “[God endowed] them with the privilege and responsibility to be co-workers with Him in the regal tasks to be carried out in creation.”[3] God does not bestow life by bringing people into his presence to be peasants or slaves, but to sit with him on his throne to share in the glory of his kingdom. This point will prove significant when Paul speaks of believers who will “reign in life through the one man Jesus Christ” (Rom. 5:17). Adam was a public figure, that is, the royal mediator of the covenant of works and as such through his obedience or disobedience would lead all of humanity in him either to reign in life or to be put in bondage to death. Through his disobedience sin entered into the world and its dominion of death spread over all humanity. The restoration and consummation of life, then, would take place in a second and last Adam, a new royal mediator who would triumph over sin and pass beyond the possibility of death, and in doing so bring his people to reign with him in life over the consummated kingdom of glory forever (Rom. 5:17). The Heidelberg Catechism expounds the significance of Jesus being called the “Christ,” meaning “Anointed,” in terms of his threefold office of prophet, priest, and king:

We are called “Christians” because we are members of Christ by faith and so share in his threefold anointing, filled with his Spirit of royal glory.

I am anointed [as a prophet] to confess his name, [as a priest] to present myself to him as a living sacrifice of thanks, and [as a king] to strive with a good conscience against sin and the devil in this life, and afterward to reign with Christ over all creation for all eternity (Q. 32).

Or in the words of Paul,

The Spirit himself bears witness with our spirit that we are children of God, and if children, then heirs—heirs of God and fellow heirs with Christ, provided we suffer with him in order that we may also be glorified with him (Rom. 8:16-17).

All who believe in the risen Lord Jesus Christ have the shackles of the first Adam broken and the royal promise that God himself will place upon their head the crown of life (James 1:12; Rev. 2:10).

[1] Adam was not only king, but also prophet and priest in the garden-kingdom. [2] Van Groningen, From Creation to Consummation, 1:64. [3] Van Groningen, From Creation to Consummation, 1:64; see also T. Desmond Alexander, From Paradise to the Promised Land: An Introduction to the Pentateuch (3^rd ed.; Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2012), 119-33; idem., From Eden to the New Jerusalem: An Introduction to Biblical Theology (Grand Rapids, MI: Kregel Publications, 2008), 76-79: “to be made in the ‘image of God’ is to be given regal status” (77).

True life is the enjoyment of the covenant communion bond in face-to-face fellowship with God in his holy kingdom. This is no invention on man’s part, but the God-given reality from the very beginning (Gen. 1-3). In a previous post we drew this out by considering the garden of God. From this bird’s-eye view we now zoom in to the central feature in the midst of the garden: the tree of life (Gen. 2:9). We’ll first consider the eschatological import of the tree (as it pointed to an escalated future reality) and then demonstrate how it reveals true life to consist in having God himself as your eschatological reward and kingdom inheritance (Rom. 8:17). While man possessed life since the beginning when God breathed the breath of life into him and placed him in his garden-kingdom for life-giving fellowship, the tree of life was a symbol or token of a higher form of life that was offered to him.[1] As we noted in our previous post, life was not a fixed or static concept for Adam, but a redemptive-historical one that was to organically progress from its protological beginnings to an eschatological consummation of union and communion with God in perfect fullness and permanency. As Vos puts it, “The universe, as created, was only a beginning, the meaning of which was not perpetuation, but attainment.”[2] In order to attain this eschatological blessing of escalated life and glory Adam was required to render unto the Lord perfect and personal obedience to his command, “You may surely eat of every tree of the garden, but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat of it you shall surely die” (Gen. 2:16-17; WCF 7.2). The protological life of original communion with God in the garden-kingdom was not incorruptible, but corruptible; it was not irrevocable, but susceptible to removal in death. Herman Bavinck captures well the character of this probationary stage that Adam found himself tested in:

Adam … stood at the beginning of his ‘career,’ not at the end. His condition was provisional and temporary and could not remain as it was. It either had to pass on to higher glory or to sin and death. The penalty of transgressing the command was death; the reward for keeping it, by contrast, was life, eternal life. Our common conscience already testifies that in keeping God’s commands there is great reward, and that the violation of these commands brings punishment, and Holy Scripture also expresses this truth over and over. It sums up all the blessedness associated with the doing of God’s commandments in the word “life,” eternal life. Both in the covenant of works and that of grace, Scripture knows but one ideal for a human being, and that is eternal life (Lev. 18:5; Ezek. 20:11; Ps. 9:13; Matt. 19:17; Luke 10:28; Gal. 3:12). Hence, Adam still stood at the beginning. As yet he did not have this reward of eternal life but still had to acquire it; he could still err, sin, fall, and die. His relation to God was such that he could gradually increase in fellowship with God but could also still fall from it.[3]

The possibility of eschatological life (the consummation of the covenant communion bond with God) and death (separation from God) was symbolized in the two trees: (1) the tree of life and (2) the tree of the knowledge of good and evil to which certain death was appended (Gen. 2:17). Here we are first introduced to the polar forces of life and death as the two possible destinies of humanity. This life-death antithesis from here onward will run throughout redemptive-history and the apostle Paul will pick it up with full eschatological might (see Rom. 4:1-25; Rom. 5:1-11). Life, as the enjoyment of the covenant communion bond, was not to continue in perpetuation, but would either be corrupted in death on account of disobedience or advance to a higher state of life beyond probation on account of obedience.[4] Vos affirms the “disclosure of the principles of a process of probation by which man was to be raised to a state of religion and goodness, higher, by reason of its unchangeableness, than what he already possessed.”[5] The higher state of life consisted of an unchangeable rectitude, being confirmed in holiness forever, and rising beyond the possibility of death in eternal life—all of this was to serve the communion bond with God. As we have been saying, the tree of life was a sacrament through which God would convey eschatological life that was permanent and forever (Gen. 3:22). It is absolutely crucial to recognize that this promised reward of eternal life is not to be understood at any point apart from God himself, who is the comprehensive source of all life. The tree symbolized his life-giving presence.[6] More pointedly, the reward offered in the tree of life was nothing less than God conferring himself in a consummated communion bond in face-to-face fellowship with a holy people in his holy kingdom. True life, therefore, does not only have its source in God, but also its goal. As Vos puts it, “As it is strongly bound to God in its production, so it has a telic character directing it to God as its solitary goal.”[7] God himself is the eschatological reward of his people (see Gen. 15:1; Ps. 16:5; 119:57; 142:5; Rom. 8:17). Our analysis thus far confirms the above point. Creaturely life has its archetype, source, and goal in the absolutely personal life of God, so that life can never be conceived of apart from him.[8] It is further confirmed when through a wider canonical lens the location of the tree of life is considered. The Genesis account informs us that it took root “in the midst of the Garden” (Gen. 2:9). In Revelation 2:7, the original tree reemerges in the paradise of God, that is, the restored and consummated kingdom of glory.[9] Then in Revelation 22:1-2 the tree of life is brought into the closest proximity with the throne of God and of the Lamb. It is from the throne that eschatological life is decreed in its consummate fullness, “Behold, the dwelling place of God is with man. He will dwell with them, and they will be his people, and God himself will be with them as their God” (21:3). In the same way the tree of life stood in close relationship to God, so the river that flowed out of Eden and divided into four rivers to water the garden (Gen. 2:10-14) will come to be referred to as the streams or waters of life. The waters are said to flow from God’s mountain dwelling place and also from the throne of God in the New Jerusalem with the tree of life on both sides (Rev. 22:1-2). In light of this, Vos’s comment is apt:

It will be observed that here the two symbolisms of the tree of life and the waters of life are interwoven. … The truth is thus clearly set forth that life comes from God, that for man it consists in nearness to God, that is the central concern of God’s fellowship with man to impart this.[10]

Both the tree of life and the waters of life point to the One who is the source and goal of life. The eschatological reward of life promised to Adam was nothing less than God promising to confer himself in a consummate communion bond of face-to-face fellowship to his holy people in his glorious kingdom. This conception of life is inherent to the Genesis account itself and enhanced with the clarifying light of later biblical revelation. So Vos can rightly state about the apostle Paul,

The tree of life and the other tree and the primeval paradise and the fall and death and the expulsion from the garden on account of the sin committed, all these are present in the scriptural narrative, and a single glance at Rom. v is sufficient to convince of the fact, that in the most fundamental manner they support (qua history) the entire eschatology of Paul. And the Apostles’ eyes were centrally focused on life and death in their forever interacting force.[11]

[1] On the nature of symbols and tokens see Vos, Biblical Theology, 27: “It is largely symbolical, that is, not expressed in words so much as in tokens; and these tokens partake of the general character of Biblical symbolism in that, besides being means of instruction, they are also typical, that is, sacramental, prefigurations conveying assurance concerning the future realization of the things symbolized. The symbolism, however, does not lie in the account as a literary form, which would involve denial of the historical reality of the transactions. It is a real symbolism embodied in the actual things.” On the tree of life as a sacrament see Francis Turretin, Institutes of Elenctic Theology, trans. George Musgrave Giger, ed. James T. Dennison, Jr. (Phillipsburg, NJ: P&R Publishing, 1992), 1:580-82; Wilhelmus à Brakel, The Christian’s Reasonable Service, vol. 1: God, Man, and Christ, trans. Bartel Elshout, ed. Joel R. Beeke (Grand Rapids, MI: Reformation Heritage Books, 2011), 1:259, 362-63. [2] Geerhardus Vos, The Eschatology of the Old Testament, ed. James T. Dennison, Jr. (Phillipsburg, NJ: P&R Publishing, 2001), 73. [3] Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics, 2:564-65. [4] Meredith Kline speaks of the tree of life as a symbolic “reproduction of the theophanic Glory-Spirit” and the “sacramental seal of man’s participation in the glory of immortality” (Kingdom Prologue, 93). [5] Vos, Biblical Theology, 27. See Vos, Eschatology of the Old Testament, 73; Collins, Genesis 1-4, 115. [6] This point is especially clear with the reemergence of the tree of life in Rev. 2:9 and 22:1-4. See G. K. Beale, The Book of Revelation, NIGTC (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1999), 235. [7] Vos, Pauline Eschatology, 309. Vos notes an organic consistency in biblical revelation on the concept of life: “What lends confirmation to thus joining the earlier and later is the emphasis placed upon the divine favor as an indispensable concomitant of the eschatological life. The concept of life would never have obtained in the Old Testament its comprehensive and pregnant significance, had it not from the outset been wedded to the profoundly-religious thought of prospering in the favor of God” (307). [8] Death also can never be conceived of apart from God as it is nothing less than separation from God. [9] See Kline, Kingdom Prologue, 94. [10] Vos, Biblical Theology, 28. [11] Vos, Pauline Eschatology, 304.

The Lord does not breathe into man the breath of life for him to exist in the abstract, nor for him to struggle to find purpose through some existential crisis; rather, the life that God imparts to man is to be understood concretely within the covenantal realm of the garden-kingdom where personal fellowship with God was to be experienced.[1] The Lord put the man he formed in the garden he planted, so that man’s life with God—a covenant communion bond exercised in the reciprocal giving of one’s whole self to the other—would be concretized in a holy realm. Immediately following God’s conferral of life upon man, he puts him in his personally cultivated garden-kingdom:

[T]hen the LORD God formed the man of dust from the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a living creature. And the LORD God planted a garden in Eden, in the east, and there he put the man whom he had formed (Gen. 2:7-8).

Life cannot be possessed in the abstract, but only in relation to the source of life himself. As Kline writes,

Eternal life properly so called, the life signified by the tree of life, is life as confirmed and ultimately perfected in man’s glory-likeness to God, life in the fellowship of God’s Presence. Access to the tree of life and its fruit is only in the holy place where the Glory-Spirit dwells; to be driven from there is to be placed under judgment of death.[2]

This is the consistent testimony of Scripture. Life is invigorated within a holy kingdom filled with the knowledge of the glory of the Lord as the waters cover the sea (Hab. 2:14). The true path of life leads into a realm maximally charged with the presence of God where there is fullness of joy (Ps. 16:11). Life is found there, where God receives unto himself a people to be his special possession and he gives himself to them as their God (Exod. 6:7; Lev. 26:12). True life is nothing less than to possess God himself as one’s inheritance (Ps. 73:26; Rom. 8:17). This concrete conception of life as a covenantal communion bond with God is evident from at least two elements contained in Genesis 1-3: (1) the garden of God and (2) the tree of life. We’ll consider the first in this article. That the garden-kingdom was a theocentric realm where God placed man in personal relationship with himself is seen in that it was a garden he personally planted and was called the garden of God (Gen. 2:8; Ezek. 28:13; 31:8, 9). The garden, according to Vos, was “not in the first instance an abode for man as such, but specifically a place of reception of man into fellowship with God in God’s own dwelling-place.”[3] The garden was a created holy realm or kingdom that facilitated life, that is, union and communion with God.[4] It was the place where God walked with man in life-giving fellowship (Gen. 3:8). The same point can also be argued by way of contrast. Death, as the opposite of life, is banishment from the kingdom where God’s presence abides and so to have the communion bond with the source of life severed.

In the Bible, death is the reverse of life—it is not the reverse of existence. To die does not mean to cease to be, but in biblical terms it means ‘cut off from the land of the living,; henceforth unable to act, and to enter another condition.[5]

Collins notes that מות can refer to a kind of “spiritual death,” that is “estrangement from a life-giving relationship with God.”[6] This sense is found in Prov. 12:28, “In the path of righteousness is life, and in its pathway there is no death” (see also Prov. 23:13-14). More pointedly, Vos writes,

It was intimated that death carried with it separation from God, since sin issued both in death and in the exclusion from the garden. If life consisted in communion with God, then, on the principle of opposites, death may have been interpretable as separation from God.[7]

So in carrying out the judgment of death in response to Adam’s disobedience, God drove man out of the garden of God, that is, out of his kingdom and so away from his life-giving presence (Gen. 3:24).[8] For this reason, the later exile of Israel from the promised land, in which the typological kingdom of God was established, was understood as a kind of death from which the nation would need to be resurrected like dry bones to new life (Ezek. 37:1-14).

[1] For an extensive argument for the garden as God’s covenant-kingdom see Meredith Kline, Kingdom Prologue: Genesis Foundations for a Covenantal Worldview, 22-61. See also G. K. Beale, New Testament Biblical Theology: The Unfolding of the Old Testament in the New, 617-22. [2] Kline, Kingdom Prologue, 94-95. [3] Vos, Biblical Theology, 27. [4] See Van Groningen, From Creation to Consummation, 1:71-72: “Eden … was the place of life.” [5] Henri Blocher, In the Beginning: The Opening Chapters of Genesis, 171. [6] Collins, Genesis 1-4, 117. [7] Vos, Biblical Theology, 40. [8] Those who are sentenced to eschatological death in Revelation are found outside the gates of the city (Rev. 22:15), having no right of access to the tree of life (22:14).

Life—understood biblically as the enjoyment of the covenant communion bond with God in a holy kingdom—is brought into close association with God’s word from the beginning. It was Adam’s response to the word of God (in either obedience or disobedience) that characterized his probation: obedience to it would entail eschatological life as symbolized in the tree of life, while disobedience would incur death away from the life-giving presence of God. Even in the pre-redemptive state, God’s word was to regulate the communion bond of life into which Adam was brought. The covenant relationship was not a joint-venture between God and Adam, but the sovereign imposition of God by which he brought man into personal fellowship with himself to be graciously and lovingly ruled by his word and so with him find fullness of life. Adam was to live in accordance with God’s interpretation of himself and his surroundings, not his own autonomous interpretation. Adam, for one, could not have intuited from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil that it was forbidden and would lead to death without a special word revelation from God. Vern Poythress writes,

Verbal communication was one aspect of personal communion between God and man. Through his Words God also gave guidance and direction in both general [Gen. 1:28] and specific [Gen. 2:17] ways. … When he created man, God never intended that man should find his way in the world just by using his mind and observing the trees and the soil around him. God spoke. God instructed. And because it was God who spoke, he spoke with absolute authority, the authority of the Creator. This speech was designed to govern everything else in human life.[1]

From the beginning man was not to live by bread alone, but by every word that comes from the mouth of the Lord (see Deut. 8:3; Matt. 4:4; Jn. 4:34). This principle will run throughout redemptive-history as the communion bond between God and his people is established, maintained, and consummated by the power of his revealed word, which is to be life (even resurrection life) for them.[2]

[Y]ou have been born again, not of perishable seed but of imperishable, through the living and abiding word of God; for: “All flesh is like grass and all its glory like the flower of grass. The grass withers, and the flower falls, but the word of the Lord remains forever.” And this word is the good news that was preached to you. (1 Peter 1:23-25).

In contrast to the life-giving word of God, the twisted words of the serpent stood in opposition as death stood in opposition to life. The words of the serpent sought to compromise and ultimately destroy the very communion bond that was Adam’s life by injecting into it suspicion and doubt as to the good and gracious character and purpose of God. Sinclair Ferguson captures this well,

In Eden the Serpent persuaded Eve and Adam that God was possessed of a narrow and restrictive spirit bordering on the malign. … [The serpent’s temptation] was intended to dislodge Eve from the clarity of God’s word. … But it was more. It was an attack on God’s character. … The Serpent’s tactic was to lead her into seeing and interpreting the world through her eyes (what she saw when she looked at the tree) rather than through her ears (what God had said about it). … In both mind and affections God’s law was now divorced from God’s gracious person. Now she thought God wanted nothing for her. Everything was myopic, distorted ‘now.’ … [W]hat the Serpent accomplished in Eve’s mind, affections, and will was a divorce between God’s revealed will and his gracious, generous character. Trust in him was transformed into suspicion of him by looking at ‘naked law’ rather than hearing ‘law from the gracious lips of the heavenly Father.’ God thus became to her “He-whose-favor-has-to-be-earned.”[3]

The Serpent’s words were a targeted attack aimed at severing the wholesome life-giving fellowship of union and communion that Adam enjoyed with God. For Adam to submit to the word of God meant life, but for him to submit to the word of the serpent meant death. So because of his silence before the forbidden tree, Adam failed to counter the serpent’s venomous lies with the truth of God and so incurred death away from the life-giving presence of God. Rather than experiencing joy in the presence of God, a lethal fear entered his heart, a fear of the source of life, God himself (3:10). Into this situation the grace and mercy of God resounds in the words of curse pronounced upon the serpent, “I will put enmity between you and the woman, and between your offspring and her offspring; he shall bruise your head, and you shall bruise his heel.” The dark communion bond between the woman and the serpent is severed by the interjection of enmity and ultimate triumph over the serpent is promised. The communion bond of life with God is restored and consummated in the resurrection of Jesus Christ whose Gospel Word and Spirit are now the power of life for all who are united to him by faith.

[1] From the forward to John Frame, Apologetics: A Justification of Christian Belief, ed. Joseph E. Torres (2^nd ed.; Phillipsburg, NJ: P&R Publishing, 2015), xix. For more on this see Vern S. Poythress, In the Beginning Was the Word: Language: A God-Centered Approach (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2009). See also Cornelius Van Til, An Introduction to Systematic Theology: Prolegomena and the Doctrines of Revelation, Scripture, and God, ed. William Edgar (2^nd ed.; Phillipsburg, NJ: P&R Publishing, 2007), 125-26. [2] For a concise biblical theology of the centrality of the word of God in human living, see Vern S. Poythress’s forward to John Frame, Apologetics: A Justification of Christian Belief, xviii-xxii. [3] Sinclair Ferguson, The Whole Christ: Legalism, Antinomianism, & Gospel Assurance—Why the Marrow Controversy Still Matters (Wheaten, IL: Crossway, 2016), 80, 81, 82.

The word “life” (ζωή) or “eternal life” (ζωή αἰώνιος) is no general term for Paul to describe all people with beating hearts on earth, but the “most frequent mould into which the content of the coming age is cast” (Vos, The Pauline Eschatology, 303). Eschatology leavens Paul’s conception of “life,” so that the eternal state is a comprehensive realm of life, a realm reigned over in life (Rom. 5:17). So what led Paul to this eschatological conception of “life”? According to Vos, Paul drew from “the ancient antithesis in which life stands opposite to death since the very beginnings of the race” (The Pauline Eschatology, 304). In Genesis 2 we are introduced to two trees of destiny in which the polar forces of life and death clash: the tree of life and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil (Gen. 2:9). The consequence for eating of the second tree was certain death (Gen. 2:17). When the Lord formed man he breathed the breath of life [נִשְׁמַ֣ת חַיִּ֑ים] into him, yet a higher state of life was offered to him sacramentally in the tree of life. This sacrament is properly understood within the context of the covenant of works “wherein life was promised to Adam; and in him to his posterity upon condition of perfect and personal obedience” (WCF 7.2). This future blessedness held out to Adam “emerges as ‘the life’ par excellence” (The Pauline Eschatology, 305). Adam, however, fails to render unto the Lord perfect and personal obedience and so becomes “incapable of life by that covenant.” Nevertheless, the Lord was pleased to make a second covenant, the covenant of grace “wherein he freely offereth unto sinners life and salvation by Jesus Christ” (WCF 7.3). Notice it is the same eschatological promise of “life” offered in the second covenant as was offered in the first, but now it is offered unto “sinners.” The eschatological aspect of life has always been present from the beginning, but now a new soteriological aspect is required. Because eschatology precedes soteriology

the original goal remains regulative for the redemptive development of eschatology by aiming to rectify the results of sin (remedial) and uphold, in connection with this, the realization of the original goal as that which transcends the state of rectitude (i.e., rising beyond the possibility of death in life eternal) (Vos, The Eschatology of the Old Testament, 74).

The eschatological and the soteriological aspects are both fulfilled in the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ and enjoyed by all who are united to him by faith in the power of the Holy Spirit.

We were buried therefore with him by baptism into death, in order that, just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, we too might walk in newness of life (Rom. 6:4), But now that you have been set free from sin and have become slaves of God, the fruit you get leads to sanctification and its end, eternal life. For the wages of sin is death, but the free gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord (Rom. 6:22-23).

The Pauline conception of life does not belong to those whose existence is wholly caught up in the present age, over which death reigns, but to those who have been raised with Christ and seated with him in the heavenly places. The believer in union with Christ is today in possession of eschatological life. According to the Heidelberg Catechism, one of the benefits of Christ’s resurrection is that “by his power we too are already now resurrected to a new life” (HC 45). This life is presently hidden with Christ in God, but will one day be manifested in glory when Christ comes again (Col. 3:1-4). “What life is for the hidden side of the eschatological subject, that [glory] is for the outward side in which the higher life comes to revelation” (Vos, The Pauline Eschatology, 314). So today, as we hold fast to the word of life, we can be sure that not even death can separate us from the love God in Christ Jesus our Lord. “Our death does not pay the debt of our sins. Rather, it puts an end to our sinning and is our entrance into eternal life” (HC 42).

God’s sovereignty and man’s freedom are often thought to be in competition with one another in a sort of zero-sum game: either God is sovereign or I am free. This has led to thinking that there are only two basic options on the table from which to choose:

Option #1: God’s sovereignty is limited by man’s freedom. Man’s moral and rational capacities are withdrawn from the eternal decree of God and given an independent and autonomous significance and existence. Option #2: Man’s freedom is eliminated by God’s sovereignty. Man’s moral and rational capacities are wholly determined by the eternal decree of God and cease to have any real significance or existence at all.

The first option is correctly labeled “Arminianism.” The second option is often thought to be the teaching of “Calvinism,” but is actually in fundamental disagreement with Calvinism. It is a kind of fatalism or determinism, which Calvinism has properly rejected full force. Both options fail to maintain the basic Creator-creature distinction, which has led to the assumption that God’s freedom and man’s freedom are qualitatively the same. Hence, the zero-sum game. Accordingly, where one is free the other is not. So while options 1 and 2 seem to affirm totally opposite positions, they are actually both situated on the same rationalistic spectrum, just at opposite ends. Calvinism rejects this rationalistic spectrum entirely and provides us with a third option that is most consistent and faithful to God’s revelation in Scripture.

Option #3: Man’s freedom is established by God’s sovereignty. Man’s moral and rational capacities are created and maintained within the eternal decree of God and therefore have real existence and significance.

Whereas options 1 and 2 begin with man’s reasoning, Calvinism begins with God’s Word. It does not claim to solve the mystery, but properly relates God’s sovereignty and human freedom as friends, not enemies. God’s sovereignty does not eliminate man’s freedom, nor does man’s freedom limit God’s sovereignty, instead God’s sovereignty establishes man’s freedom. This is encapsulated in the Westminster Confession of Faith:

God, from all eternity, did, by the most wise and holy counsel of his own will, freely, and unchangeably ordain whatsoever comes to pass: yet so, as thereby neither is God the author of sin, nor is violence offered to the will of the creatures; nor is the liberty or contingency of second causes taken away, but rather established (3.1).

Herman Bavinck also avoids the rationalism that would set God’s freedom and man’s freedom in opposition to one another, rather than understanding the former to “create” and “maintain” the latter.

“If God and his human creatures can only be conceived as competitors, and if the one can only retain his freedom and independence at the expense of the other, then God has to be increasingly restricted both in knowedge and in will. Pelagianism, accordingly, banishes God from his world. It leads both to Deism and atheism and enthrones human arbitrariness and folly. Therefore, the solution of the problem must be sought in another direction. It must be sought in the fact that God—because he is God and the universe is his creation—by the infinitely majestic activity of his knowing and willing, does not destroy but instead creates and maintains the freedom and independence of his creatures” (Reformed Dogmatics, 2:376-77, emphasis mine). “The fact that things and events, including the sinful thoughts and deeds of men, have been eternally known and fixed in that counsel of God does not rob them of their own character but rather establishes and guarantees them all, each in its own kind and nature and in its own context and circumstances. Included in that counsel of God are sin and punishment, but also freedom and responsibility, sense of duty and conscience, and law and justice” (The Wonderful Works of God, 145).

Geerhardus Vos likewise understands God’s sovereign decree not to destroy or limit but to establish and ground man’s freedom.

“God’s decree grounds the certainty of His free knowledge and likewise the occurring of free actions. Not foreknowledge as such but the decree on which it rests makes free actions certain” (Reformed Dogmatics, 1:20). “…God can realize His decrees with reference to His creatures without needing to limit their freedom in a deterministic manner. Their free acts are not uncertain and the certainty to which these acts are connected is not brought about by God in a materialistic, pantheistic, or rationalistic manner. As the omnipresent and omnipotent One, the personal One, He can so govern man that man can do nothing without His will and permission and still do everything of himself in full freedom. When God sanctifies someone, He is at work in the depths of his being where the issues of life are, and then the sanctified will acts of itself and unconstrained outwardly no less freely than if it never had been under the working of God. The work of God does not destroy the freedom of the creature but is precisely its foundation” (Reformed Dogmatics, 1:90-91, emphasis mine).

Cornelius Van Til employs the archetype-ectype distinction and the Reformed covenantal structure to uphold both God’s freedom and man’s freedom in their proper relation.

“Our view of man as the spiritual production of God points to God as the archetype of all human freedom. Human freedom must be like God’s freedom, since man resembles God, and it must be different from God’s freedom since man is a finite creature. In God, then, lies the archetype of human freedom. … We are fashioned after God and our freedom after God’s freedom. But never ought we to lose sight of the fact that our freedom is distinguished from God’s freedom by reason of our finitude” (“Freedom,” 4). “We found … that the Reformed covenant theology remained nearest to this Biblical position. Other theories of the will go off on either of two byways, namely, that of seeking an unwarranted independence for man, or otherwise of subjecting man to philosophical necessitarianism. Reformed theology attempts to steer clear of both these dangers; avoiding all forms of Pelagianizing and of Pantheizing thought. It thinks to have found in the covenant relation of God with creation the true presentation of the Biblical concept of the relation of God to man. Man is totally dependent upon God and exists with all creation for God. Yet his freedom is not therewith abridged but realized” (“The Will in Its Theological Relations,” 77, emphasis mine).

For more on this listen to this episode of Christ the Center in which we dive deeper into this topic with a consideration of Van Til’s representational principle.

Teaching on the eternal state of the world to come may sound from the outset to be speculative and useless for practical living in the present. How can heavenly contemplation help me raise my children or motivate me at work Monday morning or mend my broken relationship with my brother? Yet, Geerhardus Vos was convinced of the very opposite. In fact, he believed that “it becomes the profoundest and most practical of all thought complexes…” (The Pauline Eschatology, 294). He goes on to give a reason for this statement—which may seem at the moment to be an overstatement, but in reality is actually an understatement—but I think before getting there we need to think over a few things he gleaned from the apostle Paul on the eternal state.

Formal Aspects of the Eternal State: Unending and Imperishable

In the final chapter of The Pauline Eschatology, Vos begins his discussion on the eternal state by discussing its two formal aspects: unendingness and imperishableness (pp. 287-92). First, Paul characterizes the eternal state, on the one hand, as precluding any time limitation so that it does not consist of a relative duration as is true of the present age. On the other hand, the inhabitants of the coming eternal age are not deified so that they cease to exist in a mode of duration and time ceases to be divided for them into units of past, present, and future. There continues in the supernal sphere the movement of time and duration. We might then speak of the formal aspect of the eternal state as absolute duration. This stands opposed to the relative duration of the present age, which consummates in what Paul terms the “fullness of time” (Gal. 4:4). Vos understands this phrase not to signify “ripeness,” but “the completion of what was ‘time’ and the succession of it by what is different from time through the mission of the Messiah into the world” (289n3). The eternal state will never arrive at a “fullness of time” as it is perpetual and unending duration. Eternity is not pregnant with other eternities. The second formal aspect pertains to the imperishable nature of the things belonging to the eternal state. “The things which are seen are temporal; but the things which are not seen are eternal” (2 Cor. 4:17). While the things of the present age are transitory and corruptible, the things of the eternal state are permanent and incorruptible. Hellenistic thought understood imperishability to be inherent to whatever was invisible. But Paul essentially distinguished himself from this teaching by way of his two-age scheme. For him, imperishability does not pertain to the invisible as such, but to the world to come that is unseen at the present. In Vos’ words, “[H]e has learned to recognize in the things unseen to the present [age] the enduring things of the world to come, a world already in principle present, the contemplation of which can consequently render solace and support in the affliction of the moment” (292). The world to come will not remain unseen forever. Its present invisibility is a matter of the present redemptive-historical situation of God’s people, for today “we pilgrimage through a land of faith, not of sight” (2 Cor. 5:7). So while today the things of the world to come are both invisible and imperishable, when in Christ we enter the eternal state the same things of the world to come will cease to be invisible, but will continue to be imperishable. Paul does not see imperishability and invisibility as requiring each other as was true in Hellenestic thought; the one can cease (invisibility), while the other remains (imperishability).

Substantial Content of the Eternal State: God Himself

We would be deeply mistaken if we thought that it was merely these formal aspects of the eternal state that excited Paul. If this was the case, Paul’s eschatology would be useless, abstract speculation and provide no vital power for the present life. But what stirred Paul’s eschatological longings at their very core and what gave meaning and value to the unendingness and imperishability of the eternal state was nothing less than its central object and substantial content: the Eternal One, God himself (pp. 292-94). The formal aspects of the eternal state were not ultimate in Paul’s thinking; God was. Unendingness and imperishability serve to express the absoluteness of the acme of religion, communion with him. The present redemptive-historical state does not furnish the believer with a sense of fullness or satisfaction, but with intense longing for God. Our souls long, yes, faint for the courts of the Lord (Ps. 84:2). Because God is eternal

there can be no thorough, no adequate reception of Him into our finite consciousness, unless there by some assurance of the unceasingness of our communion with Him. He is not a God of the dead but of the living. All temporal, partial experience of God inevitably leaves a sense of dissatisfaction behind (293).

The Spirit of Christ bearing witness in our hearts moves us to say, Amen. But God has been and will forever remain the Eternal One, while we remain finite creatures of temporal duration. We long for the One, and only one, who is eternal, while ourselves existing as the very opposite. How can this problem be met? According to Vos, it is met by

God’s imparting a reflection of his unique eternal existence to our life as creatures, through admitting us into the realm of the aionion [eternal]. In this He not merely confers a boon [something beneficial] upon man, but at the same time provides a true satisfaction for Himself. Although in the abstract being self-sufficient as God, He has freely chosen to carry his concern with us to the extreme of eternal mutually appurtenance of which the creature is capable (293).

Although Vos does not use the term here, he has in mind the covenant relationship that God has freely and voluntarily entered into with his people (see WCF 7.1). At the heart of this covenant is the promise of shared life: I will be your God and you will be my people. So not only are we supremely satisfied in having God as our God, but (and this is an amazing thought!) God is truly satisfied in having us as his people. This mutual satisfaction is realized in a heightened, eschatological sense in the eternal state. Paul affirms both of these ideas. On the one hand, God is the only immortal Being (1 Tim. 6:16) and, on the other hand, “He has appointed as the eschatological goal of religious fellowship with Himself, among other things, the prize of an incorruption [Rom 2:7], such as is equivalent to eternal life” (293). Vos, however, does not blur the Creator-creature distinction here as if just as God is eternal, so we become eternal in the exact same way. Note in the above quote that it is an “eternal mutually appurtenance of which the creature is capable.” He goes on to utilize the common theological distinction of an archetype and ectype. He affirms that this attribute of eternality exists in God alone in its archetypical form, but exists in the creature “in an ectypical form.” For both God and for man more than mere endless existence is meant. It also includes a content commensurable with its eternity. Again, the formal aspects of eternity, unendingness and imperishableness, are not abstractly considered as empty concepts, but serve the concrete objects indwelling eternity. For this reason Paul does not use the empty term “immortality,” but “chooses as a larger, deeper receptacle the term ‘life’” (293). (While Paul says mortality puts on immortality in 1 Cor. 15:53-54, Vos notes “the very form in which this is expressed is such that it could never have been applied to God, who is the Only One who has immortality [1 Tim. 6:16].”) “Life” is a concrete term that encapsulates the dynamic relationship between the formal aspects (unendingness and imperishableness) and substantial content (God himself) of the eternal state.

The Practicality of the Eternal State

We began with Vos’ statement that teaching on the eternal state is “the profoundest and most practical of all thought complexes.” We can now appreciate the whole sentence:

We find that the [eternity-concept], thus understood, belongs to the acme of religion, serving to express its absoluteness. Eschatology ceases for those who have learned, and in principle experienced this, to be an abstract speculation: it becomes the profoundest and most practical of all thought-complexes because they, like Paul, live and move and have their redemptively-religious treasures in God (294).

For more check out this article on the book of Hebrew’s teaching on the vital connection the believer already has today with the world to come.

The Reformation restored the holistic nature of faith to include both knowledge and trust in keeping with the organic unity of the whole person and our union with the whole Christ as taught in Scripture. These two elements, however, were again pulled apart more and more under the stress of Enlightenment thinking and criticisms. Faith was positioned on the chopping block of human autonomy which rushed down upon it like a guillotine. Despite attempts to save it, its lifeblood was emptied. True restoration would again be found only in reformation, in renouncing the absolute freedom of man and returning to God’s revelation in Scripture.

A New Dualism: Cold Orthodoxy and Pietism

Herman Bavinck provides a helpful summary of the dichotomy that resulted,

On the one hand, a cold orthodoxy emerged that interpreted faith only in terms of doctrine, and on the other hand, a Pietism that valued devoutness above truth. This dualism in religion, church, and theology was strengthened by a twofold orientation of the newer philosophy, that, after Descartes and Bacon, eventually ended up in dogmatism and empiricism (“Philosophy of Religion (Faith),” 26).

This new dualism sat uncomfortably with many—but was a new reconciliation even possible within the system of Enlightenment thinking? The attempted solution by Immanuel Kant would argue, No. Kant’s epistemology was especially influenced by the criticism of David Hume, so that “he turned his back on dogmatism and became convinced that rationalism in theology and metaphysics was untenable” (27). In turn, he divided reality into two worlds, the noumena and the phenomena. The noumena consisted of things as they are in themselves, while the phenomena, in distinction, included things as they are knowable by the senses. Kant argued that genuine scholarship and science was only possible in the world of the phenomena since it alone is accessible to the human mind. The transcendental and supernatural world of the noumena was inaccessible and all proofs adduced for it end up in an antinomy.

Kant’s (Unsuccessful) Attempt to Save Faith

But Kant did not want to surrender the supernatural, nor the concept of faith, yet he knew neither could rest on cogent reasons and proofs of rationalism. He needed another, firmer foundation, which he discovered in the writings of Rousseau, the father of Romanticism. Rousseau, conscious of the sharp contrast between nature and culture of his time, “became the enthusiastic preacher of the gospel of nature.” Bavinck goes on,

In [Rousseau’s] teaching about society and state, education and religion, he turned from the corrupt culture of his time to the truth and simplicity of nature. In all areas, the historical had to make room for what was originally given, [abandoning] society for innocent nature, positive Christianity for natural religion, the false reasons of the mind for the impulse of feeling. Certainty about the truths of religion was also to be found in feeling. … For him the final certainty of these truths of the faith [including the existence of God] are not to be found in the theoretical but in the practical sphere, in the original and immediate witness of feeling that is deeper and much more reliable than the reasoning mind. Each person is assured in his heart about a supersensory world (27).

This idea would have a tremendous influence on the philosophy of Kant (and the theology of feeling of Schleiermacher among others). Specifically what Kant learned from Rousseau was that “religious truths possess a different certainty for people than truths of the mind or reason, of science or philosophy.” Religion and morality contain their own kind of certainty, that is, a certainty that is distinct from the certainty of natural phenomena. With this being the case, “metaphysics does not need to provide all kinds of proofs for God’s existence, the freedom of the will, and the immortality of the soul. Moreover, science could then freely go its own way and be bound only by its own character and laws” (28). In short, the certainty of the noumena (religion) rests on a different foundation than the certainty of the phenomena (science). Herein is the dualism of Kant’s philosophy: there are two, separate foundations of a two-story reality constructed of the noumena and the phenomena. Kant, however, does not adopt Rousseau’s idea that the foundation of the noumena is feeling; instead, he posits the foundation as “practical reason, the moral nature of man. In his conscience, man feels himself bound to a categorical, unconditional, absolute imperative” (28). The certainty of the world of the noumena rests on the foundation of man’s morality as he finds in himself the “thou shalt” of the moral law, which transcends all other powers in nature. From here, Kant argues, man can find certainty of other noumena realities: the freedom of his will, the immortality of the soul, and the existence of God.

If this moral world order is to be true reality and not an illusion, and if it is to triumph one day over all that is great and strong and mighty in this world, then man must be free in his actions and his soul must be immortal to receive his reward in the hereafter, and God must exist in order to reconcile in eternal harmony the terrible opposites between virtue and luck that exist on earth. These are not conclusions legitimately deduced from preceding scientific premises, but they are postulates put forth by man according to his moral nature. He cannot prove, he cannot demonstrate, that it is all true, but he is subjectively certain of it; he believes and acts as if it were true; he does not know, but he believes, and he has moral grounds for his belief” (28).

The Destruction of Faith in Kant, Schleiermacher and Hegel

At this point, we have come far afield from the Reformation and biblical view of faith as including both knowledge and trust in an organic unity. Kant sought a safer place for faith by relinquishing all elements of knowledge about divine truth and relocating it solely to a supernatural order, but, ironically, in so doing he destroyed it. Schleiermacher will move in a similar direction in theology, having basically the same epistemological commitments as Kant, but instead of a moral/ethical direction, he will move toward the mystical sense of absolute feeling. In distinction from Kant, Schleiermacher “held that willing and acting and knowing do not disclose the supersensible world, because this willing also moves in opposites and never reaches unity. This unity, enjoyed only in feeling, which precedes thinking and willing and is completely independent of absolute power” (29). In the opposite direction of both Kant (ethical) and Schleiermacher (mystical) was the German Idealist, Hegel (speculative/rationalism). He elevated reason to a cosmic principle with the progress of history being the absolute Spirit or Mind realizing itself. Religion, then, is merely a developmental stage in the movement of absolute thought in history.

Van Til’s Critique of Kant

Cornelius Van Til wrote, “If Kant’s position were to be retained, both knowledge and faith would be destroyed.” That is, not only does Kant fail to arrive at any true knowledge in the realm of the noumena by way of practical reason and faith, but equally so he fails to arrive at any true knowledge in the realm of the phenomena by way of theoretical reason. Despite his desire to salvage God, morality, and all else that belongs to the noumena, he makes wreckage of the noumena along with the phenomena. After totaling both realms on the speedway of human autonomy, Kant is left with an irreparable theory of knowledge. The reason for this totalizing failure is his starting point in man, rather than in God’s revelation. Kant imprisoned God to the noumena and made the link between the noumena and phenomena not God’s self-revelation but man’s sense of morality. Accordingly, God is ignorant of the phenomena and man is enthroned over the natural world as an autonomous interpreter of the facts of the phenomena. Both God and the world are man-contained, dependent on him and relative to him. Man does not think God’s thoughts after him, that is, in accordance with and submission to the comprehensive knowledge of God, but comes to the natural world as if it was comprised of uninterpreted, brute facts. Man has therefore replaced God in Kant’s theory as the world’s primary interpreter and definer. Van Til writes,

Knowledge and faith are not contradictories but complementaries. Kant did not make room for faith, because he destroyed the God on whom alone faith is to be fixed. It is true of course, that Kant spoke of a God as possibly existing. This God, however, could not be more than a finite God, since he at least did not have, or did not need to have, original knowledge of the phenomenal world. Kant thought that man could get along without God in the matter of scientific knowledge. It is thus that the representational principle which we saw to be the heart of the Christian theistic theory of knowledge is set aside. If man knows certain facts whether or not God knows these facts, as would be the case if the Kantian position were true, man’s knowledge would be done away with. Whatever sort of God may remain, on Kant’s view, he is not the supreme interpretive category of human experience (A Survey of Christian Epistemology, 109; see esp. pp. 106-13 for his full critique).

No One Can Serve Two Masters

On the basis of God’s self-revelation in Scripture, Bavinck counters the dualism of Kantian philosophy by returning to the central unity in man. He argues that Kant’s ethicisim, Schleiermacher’s mysticism and Hegel’s rationalism suffer from “a significant one-sidedness” and “diminish man’s universal character.” These anti-theistic systems divide man in two and separate what belongs together. The result is that true religion is lost since it is reduced to either moral duty or aesthetic emotion or a philosophic view. “But according to the Christian, confession [sic] religion is other than and higher than all those views; religion must not just be something in one’s life, but everything. Jesus demands that we love God with all our heart, all our soul, and all our strength. In our thinking and living, there can be no division between God and the world, between religion and culture; no one can serve two masters” (29).

The Westminster Larger Catechism defines justifying faith as

a saving grace, wrought in the heart of a sinner by the Spirit and Word of God, whereby he, being convinced of his sin and misery, and of the disability in himself and all other creatures to recover him out of his lost condition, not only assenteth to the truth of the promise of the gospel, but receiveth and resteth upon Christ and his righteousness, therein held forth, for pardon of sin, and for the accepting and accounting of his person righteous in the sight of God for salvation (72).

Faith is not merely the intellectual assent of the mind to the redemptive revelation of God, it is also a receiving and resting upon the person of Christ. By this definition the Reformed go beyond Rome’s demand for nothing more than an historical assent to the truth by including a heartfelt trust of the whole person. This personal and active dimension of faith is evident in the words used throughout the Old Testament to express the concept of believing. We’ll turn to Geerhardus Vos’ survey of these words in the fourth volume of his Reformed Dogmatics on soteriology (the doctrine of salvation) to see this.

אמן (“To Believe”)

The first and most often used word is אמן. Vos notes that in the hiphil form the word is best rendered as “demonstrating faithfulness,” “generating faithfulness,” or “establishing oneself.” It has to do with “an active disposition of the soul, an action that produces change” (72). The word also takes on certain nuances depending on the preposition connected with it. With the preposition לְ (“to”) it generally has to do with holding something to be true. This is seen in Deuteronomy 9:23, which speaks of Israel’s failure to actively believe: “you rebelled against the commandment of the Lord your God and did not believe him…” With the preposition בְּ (“by,” “in”) it usually denotes a trustful resting in a person or in a truth. This is used of Abraham in Genesis 15:6, “And he believed the Lord, and he counted it to him as righteousness.” Now Abraham’s faith was more than just his holding the promise of God to be true. “As this promise was a matter of life for Abraham, so this promise was also a living testimony for him, and his faith was not merely concerned with the truth in the abstract but with the God of the truth. A personal relationship came about between the consciousness of Abraham and God. Thus we may already say in general that [Abraham’s believing here] is the trustful acceptance of the testimony of a person that becomes a basis for certainty for us through the conscious conception of that person” (73).

בטח (“To Trust”)

A second word that is used in the Old Testament is בטח which means “to be sure,” and so with the preposition בְּ (“in”) it means to trust in someone. So Psalm 28:7, “The Lord is my strength and my shield; in him my heart trusts, and I am helped.” Vos comments, “Here, too, the personal relationship comes out. Depending on the testimony is accompanied by and derives its strength from this personal relationship” (74). The imagery of the Lord being the psalmist’s personal shield is a helpful picture of what it means to trust in him.

חסה (“To Take Refuge”)

We find a third word used in Psalm 57:1, “Be merciful to me, O God, be merciful to me, for in you my soul takes refuge; in the shadow of your wings I will take refuge, till the storms of destruction pass by.” The Hebrew word here is חסה, which means “to hide” or “to take refuge in.” This trust of the psalmist’s soul is not a mere intellectual assent to the truth, but an active trusting in God. The intense imagery of taking refuge in the midst of a destructive storm would be incongruous with a mere acceptance of the truth with the mind. The whole trusts in the Lord and so seeks refuge in him.

קוה (“To Wait”)

A fourth, and final, word used is קוה—an intense, active word that can mean “focusing the mind on something.” At times it might carry the sense of “hoping” in the biblical sense that carries certainty and conviction or “an intensive focusing of the intellect that definitely expects the realization of what is desired” (74). It is usually translated as “wait”: “Wait for the Lord; be strong, and let your heart take courage; wait for the Lord!” (Ps. 27:14). “They who wait for the Lord shall renew their strength” (Isa. 40:31). “This waiting … is not a passive state, depleted of all expression of life. Rather, it is an extending and securing of the heart, a reckoning on Jehovah connected with the inner strength of the soul” (74).

Summary and Conclusion

Vos summarizes the various elements that belong to the concept of believing in the Old Testament (pp. 74-75):

1. Faith is an activity of the intellect as it accepts the testimony of another.
2. Faith can be much more than an activity of the intellect. As trust it is that deeply moral action by which, in order to have stability, man, as it were, puts himself into another.
3. As such, faith does not have a passive but an active, dynamic form.
4. As trust, faith is accompanied to a greater or lesser degree by a sense of security. Faith not only seeks certainty but finds it and also produces certainty. It knows itself to be certain and safe and lives in a reality with its conceptions that is not yet present.

Faith is a free gift from God that is kindled in our hearts by the Holy Spirit. All of the benefits we have spoken of are not true of faith in the abstract—our faith is not in faith itself—but because of the concrete object of our faith, namely, Jesus Christ. By faith we are united to him (you might say with Paul we are put in him) as our living and personal Savior, in whom we have died and in whom we have also been raised to new life. Today he not only supplies us with a place of security and rest as we navigate the tempestuous waters of this present age, but also works in us faith by his Spirit so that we do not fail to arrive on the shores of the crystal waters flowing from the throne of God and of the Lamb (Rev. 22:1).

Saving faith is the instrument by which the whole person is united to the whole Christ in the unbreakable bond of the Holy Spirit. I am not my own, confesses the believer, but belong—body and soul, in life and in death—to my faithful Savior Jesus Christ. Faith is not merely an activity of the mind assenting to the truth, nor merely an activity of the heart being assured of God and salvation, but an activity of the whole person. This faith, which the Holy Spirit kindles in our hearts, “embraces Jesus Christ with all His merits, appropriates Him, and seeks nothing more besides Him” (Belgic Confession art. 22). In the same way faith does not embrace half a Savior, as the Belgic Confession goes on to say, so also it is not an activity of half a person. Saving faith is nothing less than the whole self embracing a whole Savior. It is a matter of the heart, in the biblical sense, as that from which proceed all expressions of life in mind, feeling, and will. This is consistent with the way Paul speaks of our union with Christ, which is by faith. He writes to the Colossians, “You have died, and your life is hidden with Christ in God” (Col 3:3). Similarly to the Romans, he writes, “We were buried … with him by baptism into death, in order that, just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, we too might walk in newness of life” (Rom 6:4). And to the Corinthians, “If anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation. The old has passed away; behold, the new has come” (2 Cor 5:17). Paul does not qualify as if only part of you died with Christ; he has in mind a total death. And the same is true of the new life in Christ. By faith our whole self is brought into union with the whole Christ in his death and resurrection. This holistic view of faith is at the basis of true religion, as the means of fellowship with the living God. In creation we learn that man, as the image of God, was to serve and enjoy him with his whole self in true knowledge, righteousness and holiness, that is, as his prophet, priest and king. Likewise, in God’s work of redemption, regeneration is in principle a renewal of the whole person to this once forfeited, but now regained service in Christ. True religion, then, is not something that can be relocated to certain areas of a person’s life, but is the animating principle of all of life. Our view of faith must coincide with this.

The Roman Catholic Captivity of Faith and True Religion

This view of faith was something that was thankfully recovered by the Reformation. The Roman Catholic Church had reduced the full-orbed nature of faith to a mere activity of the mind assenting to revealed divine truth, and in doing so corrupted the true religion. Herman Bavinck, in his excellent essay, “Philosophy of Religion (Faith),” accurately summarizes the Roman Catholic view of faith:

It generally is the acceptance of a witness on the basis of the trustworthiness of the spokesman, and it retains this meaning also in the religious arena. It is true that an operation of the Spirit is necessary to illumine the mind and to bend the will. Still, faith is and remains an activity of the mind. It exists in the acceptance of and agreement with God’s truth as contained in Scripture and tradition, on the basis of the inerrant authority of the church (25-26).

While Roman Catholic theology is far from unified, this summary of Bavinck is consistent, for example, with the Catechism of the Catholic Church. First, for Rome faith is merely the assent of the mind. While they may speak of personal adherence and insert such language as “his whole being,” they never go beyond mere assent. For example, “By faith, man completely submits his intellect and his will to God. With his whole being man gives his assent to God the revealer.'” (143). While the language, “whole being” is used, the action attributed to the “whole being” is only that of assenting. So either the whole being of man is reduced entirely to his mind or his whole being is brought in subordination to his mind. Even when speaking of Mary—in whom Rome venerates “the purest realization of faith”—the catechism only states that she “welcomes the tidings and promise brought by the angel Gabriel, believing that ‘with God nothing will be impossible’ and so giving her assent.” Aquinas is also cited as saying, “Believing is an act of the intellect assenting to the divine truth by command of the will moved by God through grace.” Second, Rome supplants the Holy Spirit with the Church as the source of faith. It is the Church, according to Rome, who teaches the believer to say both “I believe” and “We believe” (167). Furthermore, “It is the Church that believes first, and so bears, nourishes and sustains my faith…” (168). And the Church is considered the believer’s mother because through her “we receive the life of faith” and so “she is also our teacher in the faith” (169). This view of faith severs the unity of the person, embraces rationalism, and injects a heavy dosage of impersonalism, imposing an institutional mediator between the believer and Christ, thus corrupting the true religion of fulsome fellowship with the living triune God.

The Reformation Rescue of Faith and True Religion

In response, “the Reformation,” writes Bavinck, “presented a completely different view of faith. Even though faith could properly be called knowledge, it was, as Calvin said, still more a matter of the heart than of the mind” (26). This is embodied in the great document of the Reformation, the Heidelberg Catechism. After stating in Q/A 20 that salvation is only for those who by true faith are grafted into Christ and accept all his blessings, it expectantly asks, “What is true faith?” The answer encompasses the whole person, mind and heart, intellect and soul, knowledge and assurance. It reads, “True faith is not only a knowledge and conviction that everything God reveals in his Word is true; it is also a deep-rooted assurance, created in me by the Holy Spirit through the gospel, that, out of sheer grace earned for us by Christ, not only others, but I too, have had my sins forgiven, have been made forever right with God, and have been granted salvation” (Q/A 21). In contrast to Roman Catholic theology, “faith thus received from the Reformers a unique, independent, religious meaning. It was distinguished essentially from the faith of which we speak in daily life, and also from historical and temporal faith, or faith in miracles. It was not just an acceptance of divine truth, but it also became the bond of the soul with Christ, the means of fellowship with the living God” (26). In this we have the restoration of true religion.

Following the Reformation we find unfortunate attempts to again sever the unity of the person with either rationalism and cold orthodoxy (reducing faith to the intellect) or pietism, mysticism and ethicism (reducing faith to feelings and morality), along with Immanuel Kant’s failed attempt to unite them once again. We will explore this, along with some of the manifold implications of the Reformation’s proper and wholesome view of faith for Christian living, preaching, evangelism, etc. in future articles. We will also look at some of the insights from Geerhardus Vos on the various words used throughout the Old and New Testaments for “faith,” so as to find biblical confirmation of the Reformed view.

The doctrine of the covenant, in the words of Anthony Hoekema, is “the vertebrate structure which holds all the doctrines of Reformed theology together.”[1] The structural importance of the covenant for Reformed theology has given rise to areas of dispute and controversy. From one viewpoint this is healthy as it reflects the present desire for the refinement and advancement of such a vital doctrine. Some of the most heated questions of our day are case in point: Was Adam in a covenant relationship with God before the fall? Is the Mosaic Law in some sense a republication of the covenant of works? What is the relationship between election and the covenant of grace? How should the recent teachings of Federal Vision on justification and covenant membership be evaluated? These questions have flowed like magma, but Cornelis Venema, with Bavinck-like fairness and sagacity, handles them like cooled off igneous rock in his recent publication, Christ and Covenant Theology: Essays on Election, Republication, and the Covenants (amazon; wtsbooks). Venema is president of Mid-America Reformed Seminary, where he is also professor of doctrinal studies. In this volume he brings his last two decades of study and writing to bear on these crucial issues, demonstrating himself to be a Reformed theologian of the highest order. In fact, Richard B. Gaffin Jr., endorsed the book, saying, “No one today is better qualified to address the perennially important issues of covenant theology than Cornel Venema.”

Christ: The Center of Covenant Theology

Following a helpful forward by Sinclair Ferguson, there is a concise introduction in which the importance of the doctrine of the covenant and its central relationship to Christ is elucidated. “The burden of my argument throughout,” writes Venema, “is that Christ, and Christ alone, is always the One through whom God’s gracious intention to enjoy fellowship with his people finds its beginning and end” (xxiv). This is a consistent note that Venema strikes often and strikes well throughout this work. The covenant is not an abstraction, nor is it an impersonal contract or merely an impetus for divisiveness; rather, it furnishes the possibility of true religion for it has as its substance the personal and real fellowship of man and the triune God. The central, driving promise of the biblical drama, “I will be your God and you will be my people,” is consummated and enjoyed in Christ alone. In him all the promises of God find their Yes and Amen (2 Cor. 1:20). In him we have the sure hope of a new creation in which the eternal dwelling place of God is with man (Rev. 21:3). Following the introduction, the book is divided into three major parts: (1) The Covenant of Works and the Covenant of Grace; (2) Covenant and Election; and (3) Covenant Theology in Recent Discussion. I’ll simply summarize some of Venema’s conclusions with the hope that you will read the book for yourself to get his careful argumentation and exegesis.

Part 1: The Covenant of Works and the Covenant of Grace

Part 1 consists of three essays honing in on the bi-covenantalism codified in the Westminster Confession of Faith. By this time in the historical development of covenant theology, a distinction was formed between a prefall covenant of works and a postfall covenant of grace. Venema then goes on to argue at length that the view that the Mosaic administration of the covenant of grace included a republication of the covenant of works in some sense was a minority position in the orthodox period. He primarily engages the essays found in The Law is Not of Faith, being critical of their conclusions, while also recognizing the diversity and difficulty of the topic (see esp. pp. 139-44). His discussion of the typology in the Mosaic covenant was especially informative as he expounds various insights from Geerhardus Vos, Meredith Kline and O. Palmer Robertson. He writes regarding the obedience required of Israel,

“Consistent with the pattern of biblical typology, the promises and demands of the Mosaic economy are ‘typical’ of the promises and demands of the new covenant economy. The redemption promised in the covenant of grace always requires the response of faith and sincere, albeit imperfect, obedience on the part of the people of the covenant. As it was in the covenant administration of Moses, so it is in the covenant administration of Christ” (129).

Part 2: Covenant and Election

In Part 2 Venema takes up the relationship between covenant and election. It was previously understood that election supplied Reformed theology in the orthodox period with a kind of organizing principle. As such it injected both abstraction and austerity into the entire Reformed system of doctrine. Accordingly, a unilateral (or monopleuric) formulation of the covenant based on election arose, which diminished its mutuality and conditionality. However, another formulation arose which gave greater emphasis to the history and mutuality of the covenant relationship between God and his people. After expounding the covenant theology of Herman Bavinck, Venema concludes, relating the covenant of redemption and the historical covenant of grace,

“Since the covenant of redemption is a pretemporal compact in which the triune God arranges the covenantal means to secure the salvation of the elect, there is an intimate and necessary connection between these doctrines. In broad terms, the covenant is the divinely-appointed instrument whereby the triune God achieves his saving purposes in time and history. If election is the doctrine that describes God’s sovereign and gracious purpose to redeem his people in Christ, then covenant is the doctrine that describes God’s chosen means to accomplish this purpose in time. Just as God displays his mercy and justice in his eternal decree to save the elect in Christ and to leave others in their sins, so God displays his steadfast faithfulness and intra-Trinitarian communion in his covenantal administration of the history of redemption” (182-83).

Venema also considers in Part 2 the pastoral implications of the relationship between covenant and election for parents who lose their child in infancy as it is stated in the Canons of Dort 1.17,

“Since we are to judge of the will of God from His Word, which testifies that the children of believers are holy, not by nature, but in virtue of the covenant of grace, in which they together with the parents are comprehended, godly parents ought not to doubt the election and salvation of their children whom it pleases God to call out of this life in their infancy (Gen. 17:7; Acts 2:39; 1 Cor. 7:14).”

For more on the Canons of Dort, see Venema’s book But For the Grace of God: An Exposition of the Canons of Dort.

Part 3: Covenant Theology in Recent Discussion

In the final part, Venema summarizes and assesses what has come to be termed “Federal Vision.” His assessment focuses on whether or not the views purported by the Federal Vision camp agree with the Three Forms of Unity (i.e., Heidelberg Catechism, Belgic Confession and Canons of Dort). He concludes that Federal Vision is as much at odds with the Three Forms as it is with the Westminster Standards. He also draws out the ways in which this new teaching compromises the doctrine of justification by grace alone through faith alone on the basis of Christ’s work alone, with a particular engagement with N. T. Wright and Romans 5:12-21.

Recommendation

I would especially recommend this book to pastors, scholars, and interested church members because of its relevance for many contemporary issues. However, anyone willing to follow Venema in his deft articulation of the covenant will be the better for it. With clarity and exactness, Venema leads you into the swirling waters of these covenant debates and proves a helpful and trustworthy guide. And while we can get so fixated on the swirls, Venema brings us beyond to enjoy the everlasting ocean of covenantal fellowship in Christ with the triune God in whose presence there is fullness of joy and at whose right hand are pleasures forevermore. You can purchase the book here.

[1] Anthony Hoekema, Herman Bavinck’s Doctrine of the Covenant, 360.

In a previous post, we considered the way in which Geerhardus Vos’ doctrine of Christ impacted his redemptive-historical hermeneutic for reading the Old Testament. In the triune God’s eternal counsel of peace, the Son assumed his role as Mediator and Surety of the covenant of grace. Therefore, the Old Testament revelation that had him as its center and goal was never of him as the Logos in the abstract, but always as the Logos to be incarnate in time. For this reason the Old Testament revelation with its types had to point forward to Christ as the antitype. And not only did it point forward to the fullness of time (Gal. 4:4), but also heavenward. For the prophets, priests and kings were messengers and representatives of the great antitype, the eternal Son of God anointed as Mediator from eternity. “They derived their official authority from the person Himself whom they as office bearers proclaimed in a shadowy fashion” (Vos, Reformed Dogmatics, 3:90). This means that believers under the old covenant were not saved “otherwise than by the official activity of the Messiah” (90). Building on this, we notice a further integration that Vos develops with Christology and Covenant: he grounds the stability and certainty of the covenant of grace in the hypostatic union. By this union we affirm that the divine person (the Logos) assumed a human nature. It was not the union of a divine person and a human person, but the union of the divine nature and a human nature in the divine person of the Logos. In possession of both a true humanity and true divinity, he was fully God and fully man, the God-man. This person, and no other, is the Mediator and Surety of the covenant of grace. The question, then, is what impact does Christ being a divine person, the God-man, have on the covenant of grace? Or, how does the covenant of grace differ from the covenant of works by having Christ as its Mediator? While the church has always affirmed and defended the necessity of Christ being both truly God and truly man (see e.g., Heidelberg Catechism Lord’s Day 6), the implications are sometimes left unturned. Vos will argue that the covenant of grace derives its certainty not in the abstract, but from the person of its Mediator.

Only because the divine person is the subject in Christ does His mediatorial work obtain the stability required by an eternal, immutable covenant of grace. We now know, however, that this human nature in itself is an abstraction that did not exist for a moment without personal subsistence in the Logos (48).

Note, first, the careful distinction Vos makes between person and nature. He is not saying that the attribute of immutability that belonged to the divine nature was communicated to the human nature.[1] The divine nature remains divine and the human nature remains human. The unity of the two natures lies solely in the divine person of the Logos (see p. 42).[2] Again, the Logos did not assume a human person but a human nature. On this basis, Vos can write, “[I]n Christ’s human nature there was not a mutable human person but the person of the Son of God. Will or intellect or emotion in the human nature could not have sinned unless the underlying person had fallen from a state of moral rectitude. There can naturally be no thought of the latter for the Mediator, considering the deity of His person” (58). Second, note how Vos understands the covenant of grace as eternal and immutable to require a certain kind of mediatorial work, namely one that is stable. Where does this stability come from? Vos says it comes from the Mediator being a divine person; particularly, from the human nature subsisting in the Logos, the second person of the Trinity. “The human nature of the Mediator did not exist for an instant apart from the person of the Son” (62). In short, the immutable nature of the covenant of grace required the assumption of a human nature by none other than an immutable divine person. So Vos goes on to say,

Thus the person of the Logos with its personality provides His human nature with the steadfastness and immutability by which the covenant of grace is distinguished from the first covenant, the covenant of works. The oneness and the deity of the person are of importance for the affirmation that Christ could not sin (48).

The impeccability of Christ that stabilizes the covenant of grace in its immutability is not owing to the deification of his humanity, but from the fact that his humanity subsists in a divine person. The covenant of works did not possess such stability because it did not have the God-man as its mediator. So while the covenant of works could be broken, the covenant of grace is indestructible. The practical import of all this is that the immutable and guaranteed nature of the covenant of grace is given a concrete and real ground in the person of Christ himself. We do not affirm the certainty of God’s covenant in the abstract, but on the basis of who Christ is as its Mediator and Surety. The promise of God in the covenant of grace to be our God and for us to be his people is as unbreakable as the unity of the two natures in the divine person of the Logos. His two natures would first have to be ripped apart before the threads of God’s promise could be unravelled. The covenant of grace, in which we find the complete forgiveness of ours sins and eschatological fellowship with the triune God forever, is founded upon nothing less than divine omnipotence. So in Christ we can be absolutely sure that all of God’s promises are, in fact, Yes and Amen.

[1] For Vos’ critique of Lutheran Christology with respect to the communication of attributes see pp. 65-74, esp. 70ff. [2] Vos asks, “Is this one subject, this one person in the Mediator, a divine or a human person?” He answers, “This person is divine, and not human or divine-human. In order to be immediately convinced of this, one may take the following into consideration. In the Logos, a divine person, who is immutable, is present from eternity. If now there can be but one person in the Mediator, and the divine person cannot be eradicated or changed, then it is self-evident that this one person is the divine person of the Logos. One can only maintain the immutability of God if one holds to the deity of the person in the Mediator. The choice lies between two persons or one divine person” (42).

I have been working through the third volume of Geerhardus Vos’ Reformed Dogmatics on Christology and have appreciated the implications he draws throughout for properly understanding the Old Testament revelation. This, however, should come as no surprise: our doctrine of Christ should impact our reading of Scripture since it was written about him (Luke 24:44). So, for example, Vos makes some keen observations regarding the various names of the Mediator in chapter two and the three offices of prophet, priest and king on pp. 11, 85, 90, 93, etc. But what I found of particular interest was the implication he drew from the personal unity between the human nature and the Logos. But before disclosing that insight, it will help us to consider briefly what exactly he means by this. Simply understood, the Logos is the divine person (see p. 50). It is the Logos who assumes a human nature into the unity of the person. The hypostatic union is not the union of two persons, one divine and one human, but the union of two natures in one divine person, in the Logos. Appealing to Junius, Thesis 27:16, Vos writes, “The divine assumes, the human is assumed—not so that from these two a sort of third is forged together, but the human nature, at the outset [anhypostasis or impersonal], was assumed by the Logos into the unity of the person, and thus made [enhypostasis or in-personal]” (43). What follows from this union is that “one may no longer separate [Christ’s human nature] from his deity” (48). So when we worship and pray to Christ, we do not abstractly worship and pray to his divine nature, in exclusion of his human nature. Rather, our worship and prayers are directed concretely to his divine person, which has assumed a human nature. In other words, we worship and pray to the Word become flesh, the Logos enfleshed. Christ is venerated as the God-man, “possessing human nature in the unity of the person” (48). So Vos writes,

That Christ the Mediator may no longer be prayed to and worshiped exclusively as God, apart from his humanity. As the Word become flesh, He is the object of our worship. His human nature is personally united to Him; it is taken into his hypostasis; one may no longer separate it from His deity. Just as the Triune Being of God exists only as triune being, and we do not worship an abstract Godhead but the triune God, even so the Logos may not be venerated in His abstract deity but in his concrete personality, which is both God and man (48).

We are now in a position to understand the implication of all this for the Old Testament revelation. Vos goes on to say that “even before his incarnation, it was only possible to believe in Him as the one who would become flesh” (48). This is grounded in the eternal counsel of peace (or covenant of redemption), in which the Son assumed his role as Mediator and Surety of the covenant of grace (see pp. 1-4) “not as the Logos in the abstract, but as the Logos who would become flesh in time. He did this as Logos incarnandus [to be incarnate]…” (84). He was anointed in his person to be Mediator from eternity (p. 90). So the revelation of the Logos in the Old Testament was never speculative or abstract. Instead, it was entirely concrete as it disclosed his person to be incarnate. You could say the Old Testament draws its significance and meaning from what was to come in Christ. (Note it does not obtain a new meaning with the coming of Christ, but always had Christ as its center and goal). Vos makes a similar point earlier in his Reformed Dogmatics regarding the three offices under the old covenant: “Now, we must not derive from their offices what Christ was, but must rather infer from Christ what their offices were. They were anointed because He would be anointed; He was not anointed because they had been” (11; see also p. 90). We can now come to Vos’ implication for understanding the Old Testament:

[O]ne prays directly only to the Son as Mediator, since the humanity assumed in the unity of His person can no longer be separated from his person. It is for that reason that all revelation of the covenant of grace under the old dispensation had to point forward; that [which was] presented was not the Logos qua talis [as such], as Head of the covenant who had secured it from eternity, but always the Logos who over the course of the centuries was to come and was to become flesh (49).

Notice three things. First, the revelation of the old covenant was not concerned with the Logos in the abstract, but concretely in his work of redemption, which he would accomplish in his incarnation. Vos assumes here the redemptive focus of revelation, which is reflected in his mention of the covenant of grace. In his Biblical Theology, he writes, “Revelation is the interpretation of redemption” (6). Second, the shadows of Christ in the Old Testament—such as the offices of prophet, priest and king, Adam and Israel as sons of God, the angel of the Lord, Joshua, Melchizedek, etc.—pointed forward to the Logos who was to become flesh. These old testament types were never to be speculated about, but through them, in action and power, the eternal Logos worked redemption for the people of God, in anticipation of his coming in the flesh to accomplish final, eschatological salvation. Third, and implied from our first two points, the Old Testament revelation had to point forward. The anticipatory nature of the old covenant revelation was founded upon the coming incarnation of the Logos in history to work salvation. Through the types and shadows, the old covenant believers looked forward to the Logos enfleshed, the God-man. In fact, as Vos said earlier, the Christ could not be believed upon except as the One who would become flesh.

There is no event in all the world that you can attend (no matter how expensive or exclusive the tickets are) that compares to the preaching of God’s Word every Sunday. Lectures, sporting events, concerts and plays are like feathers on the scale before the weight of the heralding of the gospel of Jesus Christ. Celebrities may spark social movements to build their kingdoms, but they all crumble by the next generation. A walk-off home run or half-court buzzer beater may provide a flash of glory, but it soon fades. In preaching alone do we hear the voice of Jesus Christ, the King of kings and Lord of lords, whose kingdom is eternal and whose glory is forever. It is from the pulpit, as men set apart for office speak on his behalf, that we learn from and are instructed by the One in whom all authority in heaven and on earth has been invested. I want to consider in this article the implications of our confession that Jesus is the Christ for the way we deliver or listen to sermons. We’ll begin with a brief look at two Reformed catechisms that explain this title.

Heidelberg Catechism Q/A 31

  Geerhardus Vos, in volume three of his Reformed Dogmatics, echoes the Reformed confession that the title “Christ,” meaning, “anointed,” is the designation of an office (p. 10). He goes on to expound the twofold significance of this anointing, which you can see succinctly stated in the opening line of the Heidelberg. First, “he has been ordained by God the Father.” The anointing is a “declarative act” as proof that he is authorized to exercise a certain office. This proof is both for the person himself and for others who are called to submit to his official authority. Christ does not take to himself this threefold office of prophet, priest and king, but is set apart for it by the Father. Jesus as the Christ appears then in the world on behalf of the Father and has received his mission from him. Second, “[he] has been anointed with the Holy Spirit.” It is an “equipping act” whereby the gifts of the office are granted to the anointed person. Vos notes in particular that it was the human nature of Christ that was equipped by the Holy Spirit for the exercise of his office as Mediator of the covenant. The reason for this was that the human nature was weak and frail because of our sins and accordingly was not able in itself to perform his offices.

The Office of Christ and the Authority of Preaching

Vos goes on to make the point that “sovereignty attaches to every office. … Christ as anointed comes to us in each of His offices with authority, and demands submission” (p. 12). Not only as king, but also as prophet and priest, Christ has total authority over us. “In the realm of truth He is king (John 18:37). He teaches as one who has authority and not as the Pharisees and scribes. For everyone who scorns Him as high priest, no other sacrifice remains.” So what are the implications for preaching as a man set apart for the office of ministry speaks on behalf of Christ. Vos aptly writes,

As a consequence of His anointing, Christ cannot appear otherwise than with this sense of office, and the office bearers who speak on His behalf may not be satisfied with anything less. They must not preach a Christ who still has to obtain authority but always such a one who has been ordained by the Father and sent into the world (John 10:36; 6:27: ‘Work for the good … which the Son of Man will give you, for God the Father has sealed Him’). Christ does not come as a philosopher who commends or presses His ideas but as the anointed of the Father. And because all preaching is an official task that is performed in his name, it may never depart from these claims. It may not at any cost deny Christ’s sovereignty of office; and where it nevertheless does, it will soon become evident that it has lost its power (p. 12).

There is advice, opinions and philosophers on every corner or in every tweet and status update, but it is only in the assembly of the people of God every Lord’s Day that we are addressed with total and complete sovereignty. And the marvel of it all is that at the heart and core of gospel preaching is a gracious and merciful King, “who, though he was in the form of God, did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, but emptied himself, by taking the form of a servant, being born in the likeness of men. And being found in human form, he humbled himself by becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross. Therefore God has highly exalted him and bestowed on him the name that is above every name, so that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow, in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father” (Phil. 2:6-11).

[1] Luke 3:21-22; 4:14-19 (Isa. 61:1); Heb. 1:9 (Ps. 45:7) [2] Acts 3:22 (Deut. 18:15)

The Anchor of our Soul

The author of Hebrews speaks of our hope as an anchor that has dug itself deep into heavenly ground behind the curtain where Christ has gone as our forerunner (Heb. 6:19-20). A forerunner, as Geerhardus Vos points out, is not someone who merely leads and opens access, but also anticipates in himself the enjoyment of the access that he mediates to others. In the same way the firstfruits anticipate the full harvest to come, so Christ has entered into heaven anticipating in himself the heavenly existence that awaits his church. The seismic quake of this teaching is of such magnitude for the Christian life as it breaks the richter scale of purely naturalistic thinking. It shakes us to the truth that the Christian faith is unreservedly (and unabashedly so) supernatural, for we are vitally connected in Christ to an unseen world beyond our senses. Just as an anchor descends out of sight into the depths of dark waters during a storm to hold the ship in safety, so our hope ascends out of sight into the everlasting city whose maker and builder is God. Calvin writes in his commentary on Hebrews,

There is this difference, that an anchor is cast down on the sea because there is solid ground at the bottom, but our hope rises and flies aloft because it finds nothing to stand on in this world. It cannot rely on created things, but finds rest in God alone. Just as the cable on which the anchor hangs joins the ship itself to the ground through a long dark gulf, so the truth of God is a chain for binding us to himself, so that no distance of place and no darkness may hinder us from cleaving to him. When we are bound in this way to God, even though we have to contend with continual storms, we are safe from the danger of shipwreck. That is why he says that the anchor is sure and steadfast. It is possible for an anchor to be torn out or for a cable to break or a ship to be broken in pieces by the violence of the waves. That happens on the sea. But the power of God to support us is quite different, as is also the strength of hope and the firmness of his Word.

Biblical hope is not wishful thinking that does nothing more than fuel otherworldly fantasies or provide an unhealthy escape from reality; rather, it is a dynamic link to a real heavenly world from which we draw Spiritual strength and sustenance for the present. It empowers the church not to be sluggish, but imitators of those who through faith and patience inherit the promises (Heb. 6:11-12).

Hope and Faith

Hope and faith, then, are intimately related as the author of Hebrews later makes explicit: “Faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen” (Heb. 11:1). Vos explains in his sermon, Heavenly-Mindedness, “[Faith] is the organ for apprehension of unseen and future realities, giving access to and contact with another world. It is the hand stretched out through the vast distances of space and time, whereby the Christian draws to himself the things far beyond, so that they become actual to him” (Grace and Glory, 104). The great feats we read about in Hebrews 11 were only possible because of faith, through which “the powers of the higher world were placed at the disposal of those whom this world threatened to overwhelm. … The entire description rests on the basis of supernaturalism; these are the annals of grace, magnalia Christi” (Grace and Glory, 107). The apostle Paul will also at times speak of hope and faith in a similar way. “Hope that is seen is not hope. For who hopes for what he sees? But if we hope for what we do not see, we wait for it with patience” (Rom. 8:24-25). “This light momentary affliction is preparing for us an eternal weight of glory beyond all comparison, as we look not to the things that are seen but to the things that are unseen. For the things that are seen are transient, but the things that are unseen are eternal” (2 Cor. 4:17-18). And so “we walk by faith, not by sight” (2 Cor. 5:7).

The Ascension of Christ

The ascension of Christ into heaven as our forerunner establishes our hope, expands our worldview to what is unseen, and lifts our gaze upward to where Christ is seated at the right hand of God in power. The Heidelberg Catechism captures well this dynamic interplay between heaven and earth. In its exposition of the Apostles’ Creed, it asks, “What do we mean by saying ‘He ascended into heaven?'” (Q. 46). Answer: “That Christ, while his disciples watched, was lifted up from the earth to heaven[1] and will be there for our good[2] until he comes again to judge the living and the dead.[3]” In this answer we see reflected, first, the biblical worldview that encompasses both heaven and earth, and, second, the truth we find especially in the letter to the Hebrews that Christ ascended not for himself, but for the interest and benefit of his church. But wouldn’t it actually be better if Christ walked among us in his glorified body on earth? Well, flexing its pedagogical muscles, the Heidelberg Catechism asks the right pastoral question that naturally arises from this concern: “How does Christ’s ascension into heaven benefit us?” (Q. 49). It gives three answers.

Scripture Proofs: [1] Luke 24:50-51; Acts 1:9-11 [2] Rom. 8:34; Eph. 4:8-10; Heb. 7:23-25; 9:24 [3] Acts 1:11 [4] Rom. 8:34; 1 John 2:1 [5] John 14:2; 17:24; Eph. 2:4-6 [6] John 14:16; 2 Cor. 1:21-22; 5:5 [7] Col. 3:1-4

The doctrine of the Trinity is the architectonic principle of the whole theological and apologetic enterprise of Herman Bavinck. While it may be debated as to how consistent he was in the application of this principle with his occasional nod to realism, it cannot be denied that he was self-consciously committed to the triune God of Scripture as the alpha and omega point of his thought. In his chapter on the Holy Trinity, he concludes with a useful section entitled, “The Importance of Trinitarian Dogma,” in which he provides a global comment that warrants this claim. He writes,

The thinking mind situates the doctrine of the Trinity squarely amid the full-orbed life of nature and humanity. A Christian’s confession is not an island in the ocean but a high mountaintop from which the whole creation can be surveyed. And it is the task of Christian theologians to present clearly the connectedness of God’s revelation with, and its significance for, all of life. The Christian mind remains unsatisfied until all of existence is referred back to the triune God, and until the confession of God’s Trinity functions at the center of our thought and life.[1]

This approach avoids the incept nature/grace dualism that has plagued scholasticism with an impassable chasm between the natural and supernatural and the monism of secular philosophy that seeks a common, unifying element at the expense of all diversity. Both will come directly into the crosshairs of Bavinck’s apologetic, which has its epistemological grounds in the self-revelation of the triune God in whom unity and diversity are equally absolute. Bavinck writes, “In God … there is unity in diversity, diversity in unity. Indeed, this order and this harmony is present in him absolutely. … [I]n God both are present: absolute unity as well as absolute diversity.”[2] The point, then, is that the ontology of the creation finds its archetype in its triune Creator-God, in whom absolute unity and absolute diversity are eternally harmonized. The creation, understood according to the basic Creator-creature distinction of Scripture, possesses a relative unity and relative diversity, with neither destroying or canceling out the other. This agrees with what James Eglinton has labeled Bavinck’s “organic motif”: “Trinity ad intra leads to organism ad extra.”[3] He explains, “God as the archetypal (triune) unity-in-diversity is the basis for all subsequent (triniform) ectypal cosmic unity-in-diversity.”[4] The organic motif enables Bavinck to communicate a distinctly trinitarian worldview.[5] Nathaniel Gray Sutanto writes, “Creation displays an organic ontology of diversities in unity precisely because in God there is an archetypal unity and diversity.”[6] More concisely, Eglinton states, “Theological organicism is the creation’s triune shape.”[7] For this reason, any investigation of the creation, whether scientific, historical, sociological, psychological, etc., must expect to encounter and be able to harmonize its ectypal unity and diversity in keeping with its very nature. Herein is the force of Bavinck’s apologetic: it is only by a revelatory epistemology that begins with the triune God, as he has revealed himself in Scripture, that any true knowledge, whether of nature or humanity, can be arrived at without sacrificing its unity for its diversity or its diversity for its unity. Special revelation is necessary for general revelation to be interpreted correctly. Bavinck does not employ the term in the above quote, as he does elsewhere, but the doctrine of the Trinity—derived from special revelation alone—provides this organic link between nature and grace, general revelation and special revelation. This doctrine of special revelation becomes the mountaintop vantage point from which the general revelation of God in creation, which stands before us as a most elegant book, is properly read and interpreted.[8] They are neither isolated from, nor set in opposition to one another, but complement each other in an organic manner, the one requiring the other. “Special revelation should never be separated from its organic connection to history, the world, and humanity.”[9] It is “in the light of Scripture we know it is the Father who by his Word and Spirit also reveals himself in the works of nature and history.”[10] With the glasses of Scripture on, the believer is able to discern the “creation’s triune shape.”[11] Herman Bavinck’s organic ontology, which holds that the archetypal unity-in-diversity of the triune God of Scripture requires an ectypal unity-in-diversity in the creation, provides the theological rationale for his philosophical apologetic.[12] Because the creation is not amorphous, conforming to the subjective and variegated philosophies of man, but has an objective unity-in-diversity ontology, both monism and dualism are unable to account for the full-orbed life of the world and humanity. The former destroys all diversity at the expense of unity and the latter posits a diversity that never arrives at a unity—neither can satisfy both the heart and the mind. Such satisfaction is reserved only for the revelational epistemology of Scripture that takes the doctrine of the Trinity as its alpha and omega point. This is evident in the failure of both pantheism and materialism succumbing to a monism that dissolves all distinctions “in a bath of deadly uniformity.” Bavinck observes,

Pantheism attempts to explain the world dynamically; materialism attempts to do so mechanically. But both strive to see the whole as governed by a single principle. In pantheism the world may be a living organism, of which God is the soul; in materialism it is a mechanism that is brought about by the union and separation of atoms. But in both systems an unconscious blind fate is elevated to the throne of the universe. Both fail to appreciate the richness and diversity of the world; erase the boundaries between heaven and earth, matter and spirit, soul and body, man and animal, intellect and will, time and eternity, Creator and creature, being and nonbeing; and dissolve all distinctions in a bath of deadly uniformity. Both deny the existence of a conscious purpose and cannot point to a cause or a destiny for the existence of the world and its history.[13]

In contrast, only the Christian worldview maintains that in the creation there is “the most profuse diversity and yet, in that diversity, there is also a superlative kind of unity.”[14] Bavinck explicitly locates the foundation of this diversity and unity in God.[15] The world has its beginning in God’s act of creation, its continuation in his governing power and finds its consummation in him as its ultimate goal.

Here is a unity that does not destroy but rather maintains diversity, and a diversity that does not come at the expense of unity, but rather unfolds it in its riches. In virtue of this unity the world can, metaphorically, be called an organism, in which all the parts are connected with each other and influence each other reciprocally. Heaven and earth, man and animal, soul and body, truth and life, art and science, religion and morality, state and church, family and society, and so on, though they are all distinct, are not separated. There is a wide range of connections between them; an organic, or if you will, an ethical bond holds them all together.[16]

For further study check out the address Dr. Jim Cassidy gave at the 2016 Reformed Forum Theology Conference: The Trinity, Image of God, and Apologetics: Bavinck’s Consistently Reformed Defense of the Faith. We also have an interview with Dr. Carlton Wynne reviewing James Eglinton’s book Trinity and Organism and numerous podcast episodes with Nathaniel Gray Sutanto, a PhD Candidate at New College, University of Edinburgh.

[1] Herman Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics, 2:330. [2] Bavinck, RD, 2:331, 332. [3] James Eglinton, Trinity and Organism, 80. [4] Ibid., 54. [5] Nathaniel Gray Sutanto, “Herman Bavinck on the Image of God and Original Sin,” International Journal Of Systematic Theology 18, no. 2 (April 2016): 175. [6] Ibid. [7] James Eglinton, “Bavinck’s Organic Motif: Questions Seeking Answers,” Calvin Theological Journal 45, no. 1: 66. [8] Belgic Confession art. 2 notes the two means by which God is made known to us, which are typically denoted as general and special revelation. With regard to the latter, it reads in part, “First, by the creation, preservation, and government of the universe; which is before our eyes as a most elegant book.” [9] Bavinck, RD, 2:353, emphasis mine. [10] Bavinck, RD, 2:340. [11] Sutanto, “Herman Bavinck on the Image of God and Original Sin,” 174. [12] The phrase “organic ontology” was taken from Sutanto, “Herman Bavinck on the Image of God and Original Sin,” 174. [13] Bavinck, RD, 2:435 [14] Bavinck, RD, 2:435-36. [15] Bavinck, RD, 2:436. [16] Bavinck, RD, 2:436.

The relationship between the kingdom of God and the church, in the words of Geerhardus Vos, is a “delicate and eminently practical question.”[i] In fact, different ecclesiologies have even arisen because of the various ways the church has construed this relationship.[ii] It has implications for the church’s identity and mission (to say the least), which makes it a question well worth wrestling with. Two prominent theologians who have done just this are Herman Ridderbos (1909-2007) and Geerhardus Vos (1862-1949). Ridderbos and Vos wrote in a theological climate in which liberalism and exclusive (or over-realized) eschatology looked to reduce on opposite ends of the spectrum the wholesome picture the Scriptures provide regarding the relationship between the kingdom and the church in their present and future dimensions.[iii] Vos writes in his article, “The Kingdom of God,”

“Did [Jesus] mean by the kingdom a new state of things suddenly to be realized in external forms … or did He mean by it … a spiritual creation gradually realizing itself in invisible ways? For convenience sake these two conceptions may be distinguished as the eschatological and the spiritual-organic conception. … In modern writings both have in turn been pushed to an extreme in which they become exclusive of the other. The tendency at present … is to make [Jesus’] conception of the kingdom largely eschatological. On the other hand … the opposite tendency appears, viz., to eliminate as much as possible the eschatological elements and ascribe to Him the idea of a kingdom entirely spiritual and internal” (Shorter Writings, 307).

Likewise, Ridderbos observes,

“The liberal theology asserted that, as a visible gathering of believers with a certain amount of organization, the church lay entirely outside the field of Jesus’ vision. Jesus was only supposed to be the prophet of the “inner” religion. … According to [the eschatological] interpretation, it is quite out of the question that Jesus took account of an earthly development in which there would be room for the life of a church and for its organization” (The Coming of the Kingdom, 335-36).

While liberalism sought to remove all future aspects to form an exclusively internal heart religion making the organized church unnecessary, exclusive eschatology sought to relegate the kingdom only to the future without any present intrusion of it so that the church and kingdom are unrelated. In either case, the church lost its identity and mission. In liberalism, the church simply became a sociological phenomenon. In the exclusive eschatology camp, the church became the consequence of the failure of the kingdom to come.[iv] Jesus preached the kingdom, but what came instead was the church.[v] Ridderbos and Vos sought to set forth mediating positions that properly took into account the present and future dimensions of the kingdom and church by setting them within an already-not yet paradigm. In a previous article we considered Ridderbos’ formulation, so now we turn to the slightly different approach of Vos, primarily found in his excellent book The Teaching of Jesus Concerning the Kingdom of God and the Church.

The Kingdom and the Church Defined

Vos writes, “The church is a form which the kingdom assumes in result of the new stage upon which the messiahship of Jesus enters with his death and resurrection.” Also, he states, “The church is that new congregation taking the place of the old congregation of Israel, which is formed by Jesus as the Messiah and stands under his Messianic rule.”[vi] This congregation could not begin until Jesus’ death, burial, and resurrection were accomplished and he was subsequently exalted to the Father’s right hand as the Messiah (cf. Acts 2:36). Vos, unlike Ridderbos, does not see the element of community as foreign to the definition of the kingdom. He writes, “The kingdom is indeed a community in which men are knit together by the closest of bonds, and especially in connection with our Lord’s teaching on the church this is brought out.”[vii] He clarifies though that the kingdom is not limited to this; in fact, he recognizes that this aspect of the kingdom receives little emphasis in Jesus’ teaching (cf. Matt. 13:24-30, 47-50). He goes as far to say that this aspect “is not ultimate because not the union of men as such, but that in God which produces and underlies it, is the true kingdom-forming principle.”[viii] The kingdom exists not merely where “God is supreme, for that is true at all times and under all circumstances, but where God supernaturally carries through his supremacy against all opposing powers and brings man to the willing recognition of the same. It is a state of things in which everything converges and tends towards God as the highest good.” Within this sphere of the kingdom is divine power, divine righteousness, and divinely bestowed blessedness. The kingdom reveals itself as power “in the acts by which [it] is established,” as righteousness “in the moral order under which it exists,” and as blessedness “in the spiritual blessings, privileges and delights that are enjoyed in it.”[ix]

The Church and the Keys of the Kingdom in Matthew 16:18-19 and 18:17

Matthew 16:18, according to Vos, deals with the church “for the express purpose of introducing it as something new, of describing its character and defining its relation to the kingdom.” The occasion for this new revelation was Peter’s confession of Jesus being the Christ, which stood in stark contrast to the multitude who abandoned him. “It is this rock-character … that is praised by Jesus, that, when others wavered, he had remained true to his conviction.”[x] The giving of the keys of the kingdom to Peter, “as the foundation of the church, and therefore to the church,” does not mean that he (or the church) “had been given the power in some way or other to open and shut the gates of the heavenly kingdom.” This interpretation would make the church the gatekeeper of the kingdom. “The binding and loosing do not refer to heaven itself, as if heaven were shut or opened, but refer to certain things lying within the sphere of heaven, and not of heaven alone but of earth likewise.” Vos argues that the keys are not to the outer door, but to the entire house. The church is not here referred to as a gatekeeper, but “the house-steward, and therefore symbolize the administration of the affairs of the house in general.”[xi] From this relationship, Vos sees the kingdom of heaven “existing, in part at least, on earth.” The keys are of the kingdom of heaven, but they bind and loose on earth. So what Peter “does in the administration of the kingdom here below will be recognized in heaven.”[xii] Vos sees the two statements of Jesus (“You are Peter, and on this rock I will build my church” [Matt. 16:18] and “I will give you [Peter] the keys of the kingdom of heaven” [Matt. 16:19]) as having the same referent or figure, namely, that of the house. He writes,

First the house is represented as in process of building, Peter as the foundation, then the same house appears completed and Peter as invested with the keys for administering its affairs. It is plainly excluded that the house should mean one thing in the first statement and another in the second. It must be possible, this much we may confidently affirm, to call the church the kingdom.[xiii]

This provides the exegetical ground from which he formulates the relationship between the kingdom and the church as being identical.

The Kingdom and the Church are Identical

Vos argues that Jesus’ view of the kingdom as an organism of men, a church, is found subtly in his earlier teaching. He maintains that “sayings like Matt. 20:25; Mark 9:35; Luke 20:25, at least suggest the idea of the kingdom as a society.” Jesus’ gathering of the disciples, according to Vos, is what the kingdom of God was always intended to be, namely, an aggregate of men. This is supported by the parables of the wheat and the chaff (Matt. 13:24-30, 36-43) and the fishnet (Matt. 13:47-50). “This ‘kingdom of the Son of man’ agrees with the ‘church of Jesus,’ in that both phrases make the kingdom a body of men placed under the Messiah as their ruler.” If such was always the intention of the kingdom, then the church, being external and visible, is clearly an advancement of it since it only previously had been internal and invisible. For this reason, Vos argues that the advance “must be sought in something else than the mere fact of its being a body of disciples.” He puts forth two points concerning this. First, the Old Testament church that rejected the Messiah must be replaced and “therefore receive some form of external organization.”[xiv] Vos continues,

This [viz., external organization] the kingdom had not hitherto possessed. It had been internal and invisible not merely in its essence, but to this essence there had been lacking the outward embodiment. Jesus now in speaking of the house and the keys of the house, of binding and loosing on earth, and of church discipline, makes provision for this.[xv]

Second, Vos contends, “Our Lord gives to understand that the new stage upon which his Messiahship is now about to enter, will bring to the kingdom a new influx of supernatural power and this makes out of it, not only externally but also internally, that new thing which he calls his church.” Vos looks for support of this claim in Jesus’ words regarding the gates of Hades. He posits that the phrase should be translated: “the gates of Hades shall not surpass it.” He understands the gates of Hades as “a figure for the highest conceivable strength, because no one can break through them.”[xvi] So Jesus is saying that the church’s power will excel even that of the highest conceivable strength. For Vos the church’s strength is owing to its being built upon a rock. This new influx of power is also spoken of the kingdom (cf. Matt. 16:28; 26:64; Mark 9:1; 14:62; Luke 9:27; 22:69), hence the church and kingdom are identical.

The Son of Man Coming in His Kingdom (Matt. 16:27-28)

In fact, Jesus’ words to his disciples are emphatic about this: “The Son of Man is going to come with his angels in the glory of his Father, and then he will repay each person according to what he has done. Truly, I say to you, there are some standing here who will not taste death until they see the Son of Man coming in his kingdom” (Matt. 16:27-28). The imagery of angels and the glory of the Father denotes power. But in what sense will the kingdom be seen by Jesus’ disciples prior to their death? Vos believes “we can interpret these sayings of the coming of the kingdom in the church.” Jesus’ statement is so emphatic because the power of the Holy Spirit that was at work in the early church anticipates “in some respects the phenomena that will be observed at the end of the world. … The church actually has within herself the powers of the world to come. She is more than the immanent kingdom as it existed before Jesus’ exaltation. She forms an intermediate link between the present life and the life of eternity.”[xvii]

Conclusion

The above analysis leads to this conclusion: “The church is a form which the kingdom assumes in result of the new stage upon which the Messiahship of Jesus enters with his death and resurrection.” Vos takes it further saying, “Jesus plainly leads us to identify the invisible church and the kingdom.” He appeals to John 3:3-5, which explicitly teaches that to be born again is a requirement for anyone who would see or enter into the kingdom. “The kingdom, therefore, as truly as the invisible church is constituted by the regenerate; the regenerate alone experience in themselves its power, cultivate its righteousness, enjoy its blessings.”[xviii] If the invisible church is equated with the kingdom, then what is the relationship between the visible church and the kingdom? Vos answers, “Our Lord looked upon the visible church as a veritable embodiment of his kingdom. Precisely because the invisible church realizes the kingship of God, the visible church must likewise partake of this character.” The keys of the kingdom bring some sort of visible manifestation to the kingdom. And Jesus by conferring this power acts in the capacity of King over the visible church. Vos further draws the identity of the visible church and the kingdom when he says, “In Matt. 13:41 the kingdom of the Son of Man … is nothing else but the visible church. The visible church is constituted by the enthronement of Christ as the King of glory.” The invisible forces of the kingdom that exist in the invisible sphere “find expression in the kingdom-organism of the visible church.”[xix] In the end, Vos identifies the kingdom with church since for him the church is the externally organized kingdom.

[i] Vos, Geerhardus, The Teaching of Jesus Concerning the Kingdom and the Church. PTR 2:335-336. [ii] Cf. Morgan, Christopher W., and Robert A. Peterson, The Kingdom of God (Wheaton, Ill: Crossway, 2012), 179. [iii] For a brief discussion of these two positions Vos and Ridderbos are responding to see Millard Erickson, A Basic Guide to Eschatology, pp. 21-22. [iv] Ridderbos adds, “The church is then supposed to owe its origin to the fact that those who had been waiting for the coming of the kingdom in vain had no other alternative in the continuation of history than, as Jesus’ disciples, to form an organization” (Ridderbos, The Coming of the Kingdom, 337). [v] The implications of these two systems of thought are massive since the church in both cases becomes a mere human invention and severed from its relationship to the kingdom. [vi] Vos, Geerhardus, The Teaching of Jesus Concerning the Kingdom of God and the Church, 79, 85-86. [vii] The full quote: “We must reject as inadequate the favorite modern explanation that in the figure of the kingdom the point of comparison lies primarily in the mutual association of men so as to form a moral or religious organism. The kingdom is indeed a community in which men are knit together by the closest of bonds, and especially in connection with our Lord’s teaching on the church this is brought out. Taking, however, the kingdom-teaching as a whole this point is but little emphasized, Matt. 13:24-30, 47-50. Besides, this conception is not nearly wide enough to cover all the things predicated of the kingdom in the Gospel, according to which it appears to consist as much in gifts and powers from above as in inter-human relations and activities. Its resemblance to a community offers at least only a partial explanation of its kingdom-character, and so far as this explanation is correct it is not ultimate because not the union of men as such, but that in God which produces and underlies it, is the true kingdom-forming principle” (Vos, The Teaching of Jesus, 49). However, Vos defines the kingdom differently with respect to this community aspect in his review of Das Reich Gottes nach den synoptischen as “a gift of God (not a task, a goal, an ideal or a community); the attitude of man with reference to it is purely receptive, not productive; the kingdom is wrought by God; human activity comes into consideration only in so far as it conditions the reception or loss of the kingdom … the world receives the kingdom in so far as the latter steps forward out of its hidden state and by drawing the world into its sphere becomes manifest; God brings the kingdom, though in Christ, and Christ through the power of God, these two being synonymous” (Vos, Geerhardus, and James T. Dennison, The Letters of Geerhardus Vos, 54). It should be noted that this definition was written in 1900, while the Teaching of Jesus Concerning the Kingdom and the Church was published in 1903. [viii] Vos, The Teaching of Jesus, 49 [ix] Ibid., 50, 52 [x] Ibid., 78 [xi] Ibid., 80-81 [xii] Ibid., 81 [xiii] Ibid. [xiv] Ibid., 82-83 [xv] Ibid., 83 [xvi] Ibid. [xvii] Ibid., 84 [xviii] Ibid., 85-86 [xix] Ibid., 87. Vos is sure to clarify the above conclusion noting that the church is not the only expression of the invisible kingdom. He writes, “Undoubtedly the kingship of God… is intended to pervade and control the whole of human life in all its forms of existence.” The kingdom, then, manifests itself in the various spheres of life (e.g., science; art; family; state; commerce; industry; etc.) when it comes under “the controlling influence of the principle of the divine supremacy and glory.” Jesus looked upon every province of human life as being intended to “form part of God’s kingdom,” though he did not see subjection to the visible church as the way it would be accomplished. For the kingdom to penetrate any sphere of life and manifest itself there, including in the church, the principle of regeneration must be there from which it supernaturally empowers it. “While it is proper to separate between the visible church and such things as the Christian state, Christian art, Christian science, etc., these things, if they truly belong to the kingdom of God, grow up out of the regenerated life of the invisible church” (Vos, The Teaching of Jesus, 87-89).

The complexity revolving around the question of the relationship between the kingdom and the church is largely due to varying definitions. So before setting forth Herman Ridderbos’ formulation in his magisterial work on the gospels, The Coming of the Kingdom, we’ll first consider his definition of the church and the kingdom.

The Church Defined

Ridderbos succinctly defines the church (Gk. ekklesia) as “the name of those who have been united into one community by the preaching of the gospel.”[i] In other words, the church is the people of God who have been called out to a single assembly by means of the Word and Spirit. Although Jesus does not use the term “church” often (cf. Matt. 16:18; 18:17), the idea of the church, according to Ridderbos, is “a very essential element in the scope of Jesus’ preaching and self-revelation.”[ii] This raises the question: where did this idea of the church in Jesus’ teaching originate from? Scholars have appealed to the Son of Man’s symbolic representation of “the people of the saints of the Most High” in Daniel 7[iii] and “the remnant” of the people of Israel (cf. Isa. 10:22ff). But Ridderbos (though not necessarily rejecting these connections) sees them as superfluous starting points for the origination of the idea in Jesus’ teaching.[iv] Instead, he argues, “The idea of God’s people has a much more general foundation in Jesus’ messianic preaching of the basileia [kingdom]. … [It] occupies a much more central place in it than can be made plausible on the ground of such special connections.”[v] He goes on to provide three grounds that he finds more suitable on which to build the idea of the church. First, there is “the a priori messianic viewpoint.” The Messiah must have a people, “a kingdom-of-God-community.” He must act for, answer to and be united with a people—a people whom he will confess before his Father (Matt 10:32-33), whom he calls his brothers (12:50; 25:40) and who are children of the messianic bridegroom (9:15). It is for this reason Jesus says, “my church” (Matt. 16:18)—“it is the ‘my’ of the Messiah speaking of the people to whom he has given his grace and whom he rules.”[vi] The fact that the kingdom has come, means that this people is not a purely eschatological entity, but a present reality that is being gathered even today (cf. Matt. 10:34-38; 12:30; Mark 9:40; Luke 9:50; 11:23; 12:51-53). Second, Israel’s rejection of the Messiah warrants “the concomitant new formation of God’s people”—something that “has already begun to be realized with the coming of Jesus.” The rejection of Israel as the people of God is seen in the parable of the wicked tenants (Matt. 21:33-44; cf. Isa. 5:2). Israel’s own rejection of Jesus as the Messiah catalyzes the ripping of the kingdom from their possession and the giving of the kingdom to “a people producing its fruits” (Matt. 25:43). “By this ‘people’ is… [meant] the new people of God to whom, in passing over the old Israel, he will give the salvation of the kingdom.” Ridderbos recognizes that here the two concepts—the kingdom of God and the gathering of a new people of God by the Messiah—are apparent. “The revelation of the kingdom is directed to the formation of a people that will replace Israel in the history of salvation.”[vii] This finds further support in the fact that Jesus gathers twelve disciples to form the nucleus or foundation of the new Israel, the new people of God. The point Ridderbos seeks to make here is that Jesus’ messianic mission was, in fact, directed and determined by this idea of forming the new people of God, his church. Third, the idea of the church arises from “the basic motif of the covenant and of the people of God.” This is found in the definition of ekklesia as “the gathering together of the people of the divine covenant.”[viii] These people who belong to the Covenant Lord are the people of the Messiah and vice-versa. These three observations lead Ridderbos to define the church as

the community of those who, as the true people of God, receive the gifts of the kingdom of heaven provisionally now already since the Messiah has come, and one day in the state of perfection at the parousia of the Son of Man.” In other words, “the ekklesia is the people elected and called by God and sharing in the bliss of the basileia.[ix]

The Kingdom Defined

The kingdom is defined by Ridderbos as “the revelation of God’s glory (Matt. 16:27; 24:30; Mark 8:38; 13:26, etc.).” Ridderbos notes that basileia can be translated as “kingdom,” “kingship,” and “kingly dominion.” The spatial interpretation is to be seen as secondary to the kingly dominion sense. From here Ridderbos argues that the kingdom of God has a “personal connotation” for it is “the coming of God himself as king.” He appeals to the parables of the kingdom for support since a personal character always stands at the center of them, not some static, impersonal force (cf. Matt. 13:24ff; 18:23ff; 20:1ff; 21:33ff; 22:1ff; 25:14ff). This is consistent with the Old Testament conception of the coming of the kingdom as a coming of a person, generally conceived of as the Messiah.[x] Nevertheless, dominion must create or maintain a territory where it can operate, which makes “kingdom” a legitimate translation of basileia. Therefore, the coming of the kingdom has both a spatial (a territory) and an ethical (a power of dominion) connotation. In Jesus’ coming, the kingdom is revealed as (1) a power seen in Jesus’ miracles and ruination of Satan’s reign that brings judgment, salvation, and restoration to the created order, (2) a message of salvation that is preached to the poor in spirit, and (3) a gift that the people of God, the church, may delight in. In summary, “the basileia is the great divine work of salvation in its fulfillment and consummation in Christ.”[xi] The question that now presents itself to us is: How does the church, the people elected and called by God, relate to the kingdom, the great divine work of salvation?

The Kingdom and the Church are Complementary

Ridderbos strongly stresses that the kingdom is not to be identified with the church. He writes, “The concept basileia nowhere occurs in the sense of this idea of the ekklesia … [nor is it] used in the sense that the kingdom of God in its provisional manifestation on earth would be embodied in the form and organization of the church.”[xii] However, the kingdom parables (e.g., Matt. 13), which keep the gospel central, seem to suggest the coming of the church. Calvin even tried to apply some of them to the church (e.g., the wheat and tares and the fishing net). The issue that is often at hand when these parables are taken up is the “mingling of the wicked and the good in the church.” This application is still widely popular in contemporary interpretation of the parables. However, Ridderbos rejects such un-nuanced application since “the field in which the wicked and good are growing up in together is the world,” not the church. The parables are much more broad, encompassing “the universal work of the divine salvation.” To limit them to the church is to unduly narrow them. This does not necessarily have to exclude the church, for, as Ridderbos comments, “this progress includes the salvation of all those who will inherit the kingdom.”[xiii] For Ridderbos, then, the relationship between the kingdom and the church is clear with regard to their connections and differences:

The basileia is the great divine work of salvation in its fulfillment and consummation in Christ; the ekklesia is the people elected and called by God and sharing in the bliss of the basileia. Logically, the basileia ranks first, and not the ekklesia. The former, therefore, has a much more comprehensive content. It [the kingdom] represents the all-embracing perspective, it denotes the consummation of all history, brings both grace and judgment, has cosmic dimensions, fills time and eternity. The ekklesia in all this is the people who in this great drama have been placed on the side of God in Christ by virtue of the divine election and covenant. They have been given the divine promise, have been brought to manifestation and gathered together by the preaching of the gospel, and will inherit the redemption of the kingdom now and in the great future.[xiv]

In Jesus’ coming, the kingdom is revealed as a power, message, and gift. The church, then, reveals the kingdom “in its redeeming and saving significance, in all the gifts and treasures promised and granted now already in and through Christ.” The church is “as far as humanity is concerned… the soteriological goal” of the kingdom. The salvation that the kingdom is bringing is universal and cosmic, restoring all of creation as far as curse is found, “in which the church is herself included.”[xv] That is to say, the church does not reveal the kingdom comprehensively, only in part—the kingdom is far more encompassing than the church. The church and the kingdom do not oppose one another, as if only one can exist, but neither are they to be construed as identical. The salvation that the kingdom brings “bears both a messianic and a historical character.” The Messiah must have a people and since the kingdom is already being realized in history, the church takes on a present, historical nature. “The ekklesia is the fruit of the revelation of the basileia; and conversely, the basileia is inconceivable without the ekklesia. The one is inseparable from the other without, however, the one merging into the other.”[xvi] The kingdom has a universal scope in which the church shares but which she never encompasses. The church is the fruit of the kingdom, not the kingdom itself. Raymond Zorn, in his helpful book, Christ Triumphant: Biblical Perspectives on his Church and Kingdom, writes in agreement with Ridderbos, “The church is to be found within the kingdom but is not co-extensive with it.”[xvii]

Conclusion

Ridderbos’ formulation of the church from the viewpoint of the kingdom leads to three conclusions. First, the church is the community that awaits the full salvation of the kingdom. Second, it is the place where “the gifts and powers of the [kingdom] are granted and received.” Third, it is the instrument of the kingdom as she professes Jesus as the Christ, obeys his commandments, and fulfills the Great Commission by preaching the gospel to the ends of the earth. “In every respect,” then, “the church is surrounded and impelled by the revelation, the progress, the future of the kingdom of God without, however, itself being the basileia, and without ever being identified with it.”[xviii]

[i] Ridderbos, The Coming of the Kingdom, 343. [ii] Ibid., 347. [iii] G.K. Beale argues that “the Son of Man is both an individual and also a representative for a community” (A New Testament Biblical Theology: The Unfolding of the Old Testament in the New [Grand Rapids, Mich.: Baker Academic, 2011], 394ff). Also, in the book of Revelation the saints of the Most High, i.e., the church, shares the authority and dominion of the Lamb (1:6, 9; 2:26-27; 3:21; 5:9-10), which seems to be consistent with Daniel 7. [iv] cf. Ridderbos, The Coming of the Kingdom, 347-348. [v] Ibid. 348 [vi] Ibid. [vii] Ibid., 351-53 [viii] Ibid., 354 [ix] Ibid. [x] Ridderbos, The Coming of the Kingdom, 24-27. [xi] Ibid., 354 [xii] Ibid., 343 [xiii] Ibid., 344-47 [xiv] Ibid., 354-55 [xv] Ibid., 355 [xvi] Ibid. [xvii] Raymond O. Zorn, Christ Triumphant: Biblical Perspectives on His Church and Kingdom, 71 [xviii] Ridderbos, The Coming of the Kingdom, 356

The Heidelberg Catechism (1563) embodies the commitment of the Reformation to non-speculative theology as it logically expounds core biblical truths along practical and pastoral lines for the Christian life. Beginning with belonging to Christ as our only comfort in life and in death (Q/A 1) and concluding with the prayer Christ taught us to pray with full assurance knowing God will surely listen to us in his name (Q/A 116-129), the document constantly unfolds the implications of our personal, covenantal relationship with Christ. This is manifest in the catechism’s exposition of the article of the Apostles’ Creed on the resurrection of Christ. What good is it for the church to believe that on the third day Christ rose again from the dead? Is this article of faith dispensable for the Christian life? Specifically it asks, “How does Christ’s resurrection benefit us?” Are these benefits something we can do without? Behind this question is a biblical realization that just as Christ did not die for himself, but for us, so he was not raised for himself, but for us. The apostle Paul writes, “[Christ] was delivered up for our trespasses and raised for our justification” (Rom. 4:25). The question, then, is not selfish, hedonistic or man-centered, but properly Christ-centered as it shines the spotlight on his gracious role as our mediator. All of the magnificent benefits that we enjoy because of Christ’s resurrection resound to the praise of God’s glorious grace. With that in mind, we can now look at the three benefits that the Heidelberg lists.

1. Death Has Been Overcome

“First, by his resurrection he has overcome death, so that he might make us share in the righteousness he won for us by his death.” Scripture Proofs: Rom. 4:25; 1 Cor. 15:16-20; 1 Pet. 1:3-5

The Covenantal Structure of the Westminster Confession of Faith

Written at the entrance of the temple of Reformed theology are the words: “God does not exist because of man, but man because of God.”[1] This Reformed principle of a relentless commitment to the preeminence of God’s glory—what Geerhardus Vos called Scripture’s “deepest root idea”—found its most natural expression in covenant theology.[2] Cornelius Van Til went so far as to say, “Covenant theology is Reformed theology.”[3] For “only covenant theology gives all the glory to God, and without giving all the glory to God there is no true religion.”[4] This covenantal schema is embodied in what B. B. Warfield called “the ripest fruit of Reformed creed-making,” the Westminster Confession of Faith (WCF).[5] This should come as no surprise for the Westminster divines were wholly committed to the glory of God as the chief end of man and self-consciously began with Scripture as their principium cognoscendi—the two ingredients of covenant theology.[6] So, as Vos observed, “The Westminster Confession is the first Reformed confession in which the doctrine of the covenant is not merely brought in from the side, but placed in the foreground and has been able to permeate at almost every point.”[7] Likewise Warfield is well-known for writing, “The architectonic principle of the Westminster Confession is supplied by the schematization of the Federal theology, which had obtained by this time in Britain, as on the Continent, a dominant position as the most commodious mode of presenting the corpus of Reformed doctrine.”[8] The covenant, then, is not a disparate chapter in the confession, but the structural framework around which the entire confession is built, manifesting a commitment to the glory of God above all else.

The Covenant, Van Til’s Representational Principle and God’s Eternal Decree

The above context is vital for understanding the way in which the confession relates God’s absolute sovereignty to human freedom without falling into the rationalism of either fatalism or deism in chapter 3 (“Of God’s Eternal Decree”). The first paragraph of this chapter reads,

God, from all eternity, did, by the most wise and holy counsel of his own will, freely, and unchangeably ordain whatsoever comes to pass: yet so, as thereby neither is God the author of sin, nor is violence offered to the will of the creatures; nor is the liberty or contingency of second causes taken away, but rather established.[9]

The primary question of concern is this: How does the covenantal structure of the WCF inform its theological formulation of God’s sovereignty and human freedom? While this question could be considered from numerous vantage points, Cornelius Van Til provides an answer by way of his representational principle in continuity with the theology of the WCF. His representational principle pushes us beyond a superficial and impersonal understanding of the covenant idea, for it pushes us to its most basic foundation: the self-sufficient triune God of Scripture. Van Til writes,

The covenant idea is nothing but the expression of the representational principle consistently applied to all reality. The foundation of the representational principle among men is the fact that the Trinity exists in the form of a mutually exhaustive representation of the three Persons that constitute it.[10]

Notice, the covenant, according to Van Til, has an exhaustive impact on “all reality,” charging the whole of it with personality. Man does not operate or make choices in a vacuum or in an atmosphere of chance—such would render his will inoperative and his choices meaningless—but in an exhaustively personalistic environment, that is, within the comprehensive plan of God. “In him we live and move and have our being” (Acts 17:28). At all times and in all places man is coram Deo semper. The Trinity, in whom there is no residue of impersonality since the persons are mutually exhaustive of each other, provides the necessary ontological foundation for this personalistic environment, which is expressed in the covenant idea.

Critiquing Contemporary Non-Covenantal Formulations

We should note the relevancy of this exploration in the WCF and Van Til’s theology. There has been a welcomed resurgence to Reformed theology in recent years, which is a good sign of the church returning to Scripture and realizing its “root idea” of the glory of God. Unfortunately, Reformed theology is often reduced to the five points of Calvinism as found in the Canons of Dort[11] and so abstracted from its larger Reformed system, which is structurally covenantal. As Van Til said, “Covenant theology is Reformed theology.”[12] Richard Muller exposes this problem well,

Calvinism or, better, Reformed teaching, as defined by the great Reformed confessions does include the so-called five points. Just as it is improper, however, to identify Calvin as the sole progenitor of Reformed theology, so also is it incorrect to identify the five points or the document from which they have been drawn, the Canons of Dort, as a full confession of the Reformed faith, whole and entire unto itself. In other words, it would be a major error—both historically and doctrinally—if the five points of Calvinism were understood either as the sole or even as the absolutely primary basis for identifying someone as holding the Calvinistic or Reformed faith. In fact, the Canons of Dort contain five points only because the Arminian articles, the Remonstrance of 1610, to which they responded, had five points. The number five, far from being sacrosanct, is the result of a particular historical circumstance and was determined negatively by the number of articles in the Arminian objection to confessional Calvinism.[13]

At least two problems arise from this. First, many have embraced the five points abstracted from their covenantal context. This has led to a misunderstanding of Reformed theology by its opponents and a distortion of the five points by its proponents. The former waging accusations of fatalism or philosophical determinism, and the latter purporting some species of fatalism or philosophical determinism, despite explicit objections to such conclusions. Van Til and the WCF avoid these issues by means of situating the relationship between divine sovereignty and human freedom within its personalistic covenantal context. Second, many have embraced the five points purely in reaction to Arminianism, but have not escaped the fundamental rationalism of Arminianism. So while they object to Arminian conclusions they continue to operate with the same methodology and merely end up on the opposite end of the same rationalistic spectrum. Fatalism is as much rationalistic as libertarianism. It is as much a problem to rationalize away God’s sovereignty as it is to rationalize away human freedom. In contrast, Van Til and the WCF operate on a different spectrum entirely and are able to maintain the tension between the two equally valid biblical truths of divine sovereignty and human freedom.

Conclusion

Van Til, in congruity with the WCF, avoids the rationalism of both Arminianism (and Lutheranism as he demonstrates in his Survey of Christian Epistemology) by way of his representational principle, which maintains a robust covenant theology that provides an exhaustively personalistic atmosphere in which the relationship between God’s sovereignty and human freedom can be properly understood. The self-sufficient triune God of Scripture, in whom unity and diversity are eternally harmonized and equally ultimate, is the foundation of the representational principle, which is expressed by the covenant idea that reaches all reality, charging man’s entire atmosphere with personality as he is always operating within the plan of God. The fact that God has foreordained whatsoever comes to pass is the only environment in which the will of man can operate and his choices can be meaningful. And so God’s sovereignty does not destroy or limit man’s freedom, but rather establishes it.

[1] Geerhardus Vos, “The Doctrine of the Covenant in Reformed Theology,” in Redemptive History and Biblical Interpretation, 242. [2] Vos considers three implications of this Reformed principle that substantiate this claim: “When this principle is applied to man and his relationship to God, it immediately divines into three parts: 1. All of man’s works has to rest on an antecedent work of God; 2. In all of his works man has to show forth God’s image and be a means for the revelation of God’s virtues; 3. The latter should not occur unconsciously or passively, but the revelation of God’s virtues must proceed by way of understanding and will and by way of the conscious life, and actively come to external expression” (“The Doctrine of the Covenant in Reformed Theology,” 242). [3] Cornelius Van Til, An Introduction to Systematic Theology, 271. [4] Van Til, A Survey of Christian Epistemology, 98. [5] Warfield, The Westminster Assembly and Its Work, 58. [6] Westminster Confession of Faith 1. [7] Vos, “The Doctrine of the Covenant in Reformed Theology,” 239. [8] B. B. Warfield, The Westminster Assembly and Its Work, 56. [9] Westminster Confession of Faith 3.1. [10] Van Til, A Survey of Christian Epistemology, 96. [11] These five points are often summarized by the acronym TULIP: Total depravity, Unconditional election, Limited atonement, Irresistible grace and Perseverance of the saints. We should also note that the Canons of Dort were never understood to encapsulate the entirety of Reformed theology. Instead, they were received by the Reformed continental tradition along with the Heidelberg Catechism and the Belgic Confession. [12] Van Til, An Introduction to Systematic Theology, 271. [13] Richard Muller, “How Many Points,” 426.

In the Old Testament, the altars of the patriarchs, the tabernacle constructed under Moses, and the temple built by Solomon were all sufficient and efficacious means by which the people of God experienced the covenantal and joy-full presence of the Lord their God. All of the spectacular and mighty acts of redemption that God worked on behalf of his people were always unto this end of union and communion. In other words, redemption served the covenant promise: I will be your God and you will be my people. This promise is the refrain played on the pages of Scripture as the mighty hand of God beats down upon the enemies of his people and gently orchestrates Israel’s entrance into the land of Canaan. Notice, for example, how the exhortation in Psalm 105 to seek the LORD’s presence continually (v. 4) arises from God’s work of (1) rescuing his people from their Egyptian bondage and (2) bringing them into the land in which he promised to dwell with them. He brings his people out with joy, as the Psalmist recounts in v. 43, for he brings them out to dwell in his presence in which there is fullness of joy (Ps. 16:11). Nevertheless, while these means of God dwelling with his people in the Old Testament were good as both sufficient for the time and effectual in administering the covenantal presence of God, they were still only temporary and provisional (Heb. 8:13). They ultimately foresignified Christ to come, as foretold by the prophets (see Westminster Confession of Faith 7.5). In the incarnation, the Son of God “tabernacled” among us as the true and eternal, the final and permanent dwelling place of God (John 1:14). For in him the whole fullness of deity dwells bodily (Col. 2:9). With this redemptive-historical transition from what was good, yet provisional, to what is now better and permanent, that is, from the shadows to the substance, which is Christ, the joy-full presence of God is experienced in more fullness, evidence and spiritual efficacy, even extending to all nations (see Westminster Confession of Faith 7.6). With all that in mind, we can consider the event of Pentecost with its momentous background as the Holy Spirit is poured out upon the church by the risen and ascended Lord, Jesus Christ. If it is by a Spirit-kindled faith that we share in Christ (Belgic Confession art. 22; Heidelberg Catechism Q/A 53), who is himself the end-time temple of God, then what does that tell us about the nature of the church?

Pentecost and the Church as the Temple of God

The apostle Peter writes, “As you come to [Jesus Christ], a living stone rejected by men but in the sight of God chosen and precious, you yourselves like living stones are being built up as a spiritual house” (1 Pet. 2:4-5; cf. Isa. 8:14; 28:16; Ps. 118:22). In a similar vein, the apostle Paul asks the Corinthian church, “Do you not know that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit within you…?” (1 Cor. 6:19; cf. 3:16; 2 Cor. 6:16; Eph. 2:20-22; Rev. 3:12; 11:1-2). The point is that as believers are united to Jesus Christ by faith they too are built up as the temple of God. The church is the eschatological temple where God now dwells in the power of his Spirit. This is the reality that the tabernacle and temple prefigured. However, God is not just dwelling with his people, as he did in the past, but within them in an unprecedented way. This indwelling of the Spirit in the church transforms the church into the dwelling place of God, which takes place at Pentecost. Pentecost closely parallels the Sinai theophany when Moses received the blueprint for building the tabernacle.[1] But rather than Moses coming down from the mountain with a blueprint to construct a shadow of the heavenly reality, Jesus comes down from heaven in the power of the Holy Spirit[2] with the heavenly reality itself. Pentecost also parallels those occasions in the Old Testament when God came to fill with his presence the tabernacle (Exod. 40:34-35) and temple (1 Kgs. 8:10-11). This is why Peter on the day of Pentecost uses the prophecy of Joel to explain the significance of this extraordinary event (Joel 2:28-32). The church as the eschatological temple of God is totally dependent upon Jesus Christ and filled with his resurrection joy (Ps. 16:11). Clowney helpfully writes,

The church’s existence as the body-temple depends totally on the resurrection body of Christ in which the church is raised up, and on the Spirit of Christ by which the church lives. Paul’s appeals for the unity of the church are drawn from the unity of the body of Christ as the true and final temple. For Paul the body and the temple go together: the breaking down of the middle wall of the temple creates one body; the New Temple grows as a body (Eph. 2:21); the body is built as a temple (Eph. 4:12, 16). Christ is the cornerstone of the structure, the Lord in whom the New Temple exists.[3]

Pentecost and the Mission of the Church

The substance has superseded the shadow, the church has superseded the Solomonic temple as the eschatological end-time temple with people from all nations being built up as a spiritual house. “Subsequent to Pentecost, when people believe in Jesus, they become a part of Jesus and the temple, since Jesus himself is the locus of that temple.”[4] Consequently, as the church expands throughout the earth by Christ’s Word and Spirit, God’s dwelling place is also extended and the creation mandate is fulfilled in the form of the Great Commission (note, for example, the allusion to Gen. 1:28 in Col. 1:6).[5] G. K. Beale powerfully captures the impact of this theme on the mission of the church today:

Jesus … becomes the cornerstone of the new temple, and Christians are like living stones being built into the dwelling place of God (Eph. 2:22; 1 Pet. 2:5), which ‘grows into a holy temple in the Lord’ (Eph. 2:21) through the proclamation of the word of God during the church age. Through faithful witness, even in the midst of suffering, the church expands with power, eventually to fill the entire earth.[6]

Pentecost tells us most emphatically that God is a missionary God (Ezek. 20:34; John 3:16; 4:23) who has sent his missionary Spirit (John 16:8ff) to testify to and apply the work of his missionary Son (Luke 19:10) to form a missionary people (John 20:21; Acts 1:8; 1 Peter 2:9) to fulfill his mission for the world (Gen. 1:28; Matt. 28:19-20). At Pentecost the church became the eschatological temple set ablaze by the Holy Spirit to proclaim the gospel during the already-not yet until the mission of God is complete.   For more on this topic check out this episode of Vos Group with Drs. Camden Bucey and Lane Tipton as they expound upon the insight of Geerhardus Vos regarding the redemptive-historical significance of the tabernacle and God dwelling with his people.

[1] For a defense of relating the two events see G. K. Beale, “The Commencement of the Spirit’s Building of Believers into the Transformed Temple of the End-Time New Creation,” in A New Testament Biblical Theology, 592ff. [2] For a discussion of the close relationship between Jesus Christ and the Holy Spirit see Richard B. Gaffin, “Pentecost: Before and After,” Kerux 10, no. 2 (September 1, 1995): 3-24. [3] Clowney, “The Final Temple,” WTJ 35 (1973), 184-85. [4] Beale, New Testament Biblical Theology, 634. [5] It can be said that the church inherits the creation mandate in the form of the great commission. [6] Beale, God Dwells Among Us, 135-36.

The apostle Paul teaches that “the Jerusalem above,” that is the eschatological Jerusalem, “is our mother” (Gal. 4:26). Likewise the author to the Hebrews exclaims, “You have come to Mount Zion and to the city of the living God, the heavenly Jerusalem” (Heb. 12:22). The believer has already in part reached the destination he seeks by faith. Though he is a pilgrim on earth, today he belongs to that eschatological city, which the saints of old greeted from afar:

These all died in faith, not having received the things promised, but having seen them and greeted them from afar, and having acknowledged that they were strangers and exiles on the earth. For people who speak thus make it clear that they are seeking a homeland. If they had been thinking of that land from which they had gone out, they would have had opportunity to return. But as it is, they desire a better country, that is, a heavenly one. Therefore God is not ashamed to be called their God, for he has prepared for them a city (Heb. 11:13-16).

Because the believer is said to have “come to… the heavenly Jerusalem” (Heb. 12:22) in a way he has already “received the things promised,” which the Old Testament believers only “greeted … from afar” (Heb. 11:13). How can this be? Only through the person and work of the Messiah, Jesus Christ. He has become for them true Israel, summing up the entire nation in himself, and the new Jerusalem. Just as Christ is the true tabernacle in whom the fullness of God was pleased to dwell (Col. 1:19), the true Israel who loved God with all his heart, soul, strength, and mind, the true son of David who has ascended the throne of his everlasting kingdom, so he is also the true Jerusalem and the true promised land. But he does not remain these things alone. As the Spirit gathers his people from throughout the world and works in them faith so that they are united to Christ, they too partake of these ineffable realities. All who identify with Christ are themselves part of the true tabernacle, true members of Israel, true sons of David, and true citizens of Jerusalem.

Believers are Given a New Name: The New Jerusalem

Jesus wrote to the church in Philadelphia, “The one who conquers, I will make him a pillar in the temple of my God. Never shall he go out of it, and I will write on him the name of my God, and the name of the city of my God, the new Jerusalem, which comes down from my God out of heaven, and my own new name” (Rev. 3:12; cf. 2:17). The new name that Christ now possesses (“my own new name”) is “the name of the city of my God, the new Jerusalem,” which he writes on the believer. Thus, upon the believer is written the name of the new Jerusalem. This reference to a “new name” is an allusion to Isaiah’s repeated prophecy that in the eschaton God’s people will have a “new name.” For example, “The nations shall see your righteousness, and all the kings your glory, and you shall be called by a new name that the mouth of the LORD will give” (Isa. 62:2; cf. 56:5; 65:15). This new name, according to Isaiah, designates Israel’s future kingly status: “You shall be a crown of beauty in the hand of the LORD, and a royal diadem in the hand of your God” (Isa. 62:3). It also designates the restoration of the covenant marriage relationship in the land: “You shall no more be termed Forsaken, and your land shall no more be termed Desolate, but you shall be called My Delight Is in Her, and your land Married; for the LORD delights in you, and your land shall be married” (Isa. 62:4). Notice the inextricable relationship between Israel’s kingly designation as the New Jerusalem and the restoration of Israel’s land. The fulfillment of the land promise (in which the Lord swore to return Israel from exile) coincides with the new name that Israel is to receive. For this reason, the church is given a new name from the Lord, which implies the beginning restoration of the land. It was Christ who first received this name as the true Israel and true Jerusalem and who then writes this name on all believers. By having the new name written on them the believer is identified with Christ and have, therefore, begun to be restored to the land. The name of the very city that has foundations, whose designer and builder is God, that Abraham was looking forward to by faith (Heb. 11:9-10), has been given to the church by Christ in whom the land promise is now being fulfilled. The heavenly city, which was typified in the Old Testament, has been entered into by its rightful king, King Jesus. He has taken his seat upon the throne of his eternal city to reign forever and ever. And all who are united to him by faith come to join him in this city to share in his anointing as eschatological kings. This means, as the Heidelberg Catechism so nicely puts it, we are to “fight with a free and good conscience against sin and the devil in this life, and hereafter reign with him over all creation forever and ever” (Q/A 32).

Jesus Christ is Isaiah’s prophesied Suffering Servant who took upon himself the iniquities, transgressions and sins of his people as their substitute, so that they might be reconciled to God in right relationship as new creation.[i] Or, in Paul’s words, “For our sake he made him to be sin who knew no sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God” (5:21).[ii] Herein is how God reconciles exiled sinners to himself, propitiates wrath and replaces divine judgment with eschatological peace. In short, herein is how there can be new creation. In this article we will reflect on 2 Corinthians 5:21 with an eye on the new creation declared by Paul a few verses earlier in 5:17 and God’s work of reconciliation that comes in between (5:18-20).

The Passive Obedience of Christ: Made to be Sin (2 Cor. 5:21a)

In order for the Isaianic restoration promise to be fulfilled (or reconciliation as new creation to take place), Israel’s iniquities, transgressions and sins had to be removed. So the first thing that Christ’s atoning death achieves is stated by Paul in these terms: “For our sake [ὑπὲρ[iii]] he made him to be sin who knew no sin” (5:21a). The substitutionary death of Christ is “the foundation on which or the way in which … reconciliation takes place.”[iv] What does it mean that Christ was made to be sin? It is clear that this does not refer to an ethical change in Christ so that he became sinful. For if this were the case the efficacy of his death to constitute sinners righteous would be compromised. In addition, it would contradict Paul’s statement that he knew no sin, as well as all biblical teaching on the atonement (e.g., Heb. 4:15). It seems better to understand it then as a reference to a change in Christ’s legal status before God, making him liable for the guilt accrued not by himself, but others, namely, his elect people.[v] Vos notes, “The use of the word ‘sin’ … generalizes and universalizes the legal identification between Christ and sin.”[vi] For Christ to be made sin is to make him personally responsible for its punishment.[vii] This would imply a legal imputation of the guilt of sin to Christ. This is further demanded by the consequent clause, “so that in him we might become the righteousness of God” (5:21b). “If Christ was made sin that we might become righteousness,” remarks Vos, “then obviously He was made sin in the sense of unrighteousness, by imputation. And if the effect of this imputation was death, then obviously there was a legal penalty. The death was but the execution in act of the ideal imputation.”[viii] This legal status change was not owing to his own sin for he knew no sin. Rather, like the Isaianic Suffering Servant who “surely … has borne our griefs and carried our sorrows,” Jesus had the sin of his people imputed to him, so that while sinless he could be legally charged with the punishment for sin. Paul has in mind then a penal, vicarious, substitutionary death wherein Christ suffered for the sin of his people legally imputed to him. Calvin comments, “[H]e assumed in a manner our place, that he might be a criminal in our room, and might be dealt with as a sinner, not for his own offences, but for those of others, inasmuch as he was pure and exempt from every fault, and might endure the punishment that was due to us—not to himself.”[ix] More specifically, if the above Isaianic background is sustained, Paul probably has in mind the vicarious, sin-bearing of the Suffering Servant (Isa. 52:13-53:12).[x] For Christ to be made sin then is for him to be constituted a guilt offering, incurring the legal ramifications of sin as a substitute for his people (cf. 1 Cor. 5:7; 11:25; Eph. 5:2). This notion of Christ being a guilt or sin offering is outright rejected by some, though the legal status change taking place here is still upheld.[xi] Nevertheless, the propitiatory nature of it must be maintained and is here expounded by Paul as a substitutionary, atoning sacrifice (cf. Rom. 8:3; Gal. 3:13). The reconciling transaction is given an explicit vicarious character.[xii] Ridderbos rightly notes that any effort to detract from the substitutionary and vicarious nature of Christ’s death “readily does wrong to the most fundamental segments of Paul’s gospel.”[xiii] To put it tersely, Christ by being made sin by imputation took full responsibility for it, was identified with it, charged with it and paid its penalty.[xiv] “For our sake he made him to be sin who knew no sin.”

The Active Obedience of Christ: Made to be the Righteousness of God (2 Cor. 5:21b)

While the removal of the iniquity, transgression and sin of God’s people in reconciliation is achieved by the imputation of the believer’s sin to Christ who then legally bore it on the cross as his or her substitute, there is also the need for a positive reuniting and renewing of sinful people with God. Both of these together amount to a new creation.[xv] Thus, “For our sake he made him to be sin who knew no sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God” (5:21). This carries with it a soteriological and eschatological thrust. For us to become the righteousness of God is for us to be constituted a new creation, reconciled to God into an eschatological state in Christ. Those who once were objects of God’s wrath, rightfully banished from his presence and closed off from re-entering, according to the holiness of God which cannot condone sin,[xvi] have in Christ by means of his death and resurrection been legally and objectively constituted the righteousness of God. There is therefore a positive status imputed to the believer through Christ’s resurrection, namely, the righteousness obtained by Christ in his active obedience, for we are the righteousness of God in him. In summary, for the work of Christ in his death and resurrection to have an eschatological impact on those who are in Christ, two things must occur. First, the believers’ sin must be imputed to Christ rendering him legally liable to receive the punishment on their behalf, as their substitute, in their place, which is his passive obedience. Second, his active obedience must be imputed to believers so that they might be constituted the righteousness of God.[xvii]

Reconciliation as Objective and Legal

The legal rendering of Christ as sin and the believer in Christ as the righteousness of God carries with it an objective status as a redemptive-historical accomplishment, similar to justification. In the words of Barnett, “[It] points to forgiveness, the reversal of condemnation. Here, then, is the objective, forensic ‘justification’ of God to those who are covenantally dedicated to God ‘in Christ,’ whom God ‘made sin.’”[xviii] Likewise, Ridderbos writes,

[Reconciliation] appears in more than one place as the parallel and equivalent of justification. … Whereas ‘to justify’ is a religious-forensic concept that is highly typical of the basic eschatological structure of Paul’s preaching, ‘reconciliation’ … has a more general, less qualified meaning in theological parlance. It originates from the social-societal sphere (cf. 1 Cor. 7:11), and speaks in general of the restoration of the right relationship between two parties.[xix]

Interestingly Vos states, “The objective reconciliation took place in the death of Christ; its subjective result is justification.”[xx] Reconciliation consists not only in the removal of man’s guilt (or “objective legal obstacles”[xxi]) before God and of his sin not being imputed to him, but “it consists above all in the effecting eschatological peace as the fruit of justification (Rom. 5:1), and thus prepares the way to receiving a share in the new creation, the new things, peace as the all-embracing condition of salvation.”[xxii] In short, reconciliation is both the foundation and summation of the whole Christian life. In reconciliation, God does not merely restore a broken relationship, but also in this restoration propels them into the eschatological new creation.

[i] The transition into right relationship is to enter the new creation. In the words of Beale, “To be propelled into the eschatological new creation is to enter into peaceful relations with the Creator. … [R]econciliation is a facet of the larger diamond of the new creation. Nevertheless, the point is that they are of a piece with one another and are organically linked” (Beale, New Testament Biblical Theology, 537). [ii] The difficulty in relating 5:21 with the preceding is that it is asyndetic, so that “it stands as an impressively absolute statement” (Barnett, Corinthians, 312). Nevertheless, Paul has already spoken of the death and resurrection of Christ in 5:15, which with 5:21 seems to form a possible inclusio. Barnett rightly considers this passage as effectively the foundation of 5:16-21 (p. 315). Vos writes that this verse “constitutes the essence of the reconciliation” (“The Pauline Conception of Reconciliation,” 364). [iii] Vos argues that ὑπὲρ (“for the sake/benefit of”) here, as well as in 5:14, has the full force of ἀντὶ (“in the place of”; cf. Matt. 20:28; Mk. 10:45). “What Christ did as priest,” writes Vos, “He did as the substitutionary Surety of believers, and, precisely for that reason, did before God and not toward man” (Reformed Dogmatics, Volume Three: Christology, 100). [iv] Ridderbos, Paul, 186. [v] Vos, “The Pauline Conception of Reconciliation,” 364. [vi] Vos, “The Pauline Conception of Reconciliation,” 364; emphasis mine. [vii] Vos captures it well, “To make someone to be sin … does not mean to actually change him into a sinful being or to transmit the blemishes of sin to him but simply to make him personally responsible for the penal consequences of sin. The same thing is meant by the term ‘imputation.’ It occurs with respect to both the penal guilt that the sinner himself has accrued and the guilt transferred to him from someone else” (Reformed Dogmatics, 3:112). [viii] Vos, “The Pauline Conception of Reconciliation,” 365; see also idem., Reformed Dogmatics, 3:106-7; Donald Macleod, Christ Crucified: Understanding the Atonement, 155: “The idea of imputation underlies the whole passage.” [ix] Calvin, Second Epistle to the Corinthians, 242. [x] Cf. Barnett, Corinthians, 313; George H. Guthrie, 2 Corinthians, 313-15; Calvin, Second Epistle to the Corinthians, 242: “It is the guilt, on account of which we are arraigned at the bar of God. As, however the curse of the individual was of old cast upon the victim, so Christ’s condemnation was our absolution, and with his stripes we are healed (Isaiah liii. 5).” [xi] The following reject the notion of Christ being a guilt offering: Robert Letham, The Work of Christ, 134; John R. De Witt, “The Nature of the Atonement: Reconciliation,” in Atonement, ed. Gabriel N. E. Fluhrer (Phillipsburg, NJ: P&R Publishing, 2010), 26. De Witt will however go on to say, “The Father legally made him liable for the punishment of sin. He consigned his own Son to darkness and separation from his presence. It was as though he, the spotless Lamb of God, were responsible for the sin of the world. … [T]he Father stripped the Son of his own holiness and perfection and made him wear the rags of our unholiness and imperfection. He stood in the place of the condemned and the guilty” (pp. 26-27). This seems to compute with an understanding of Jesus as the sin-bearing Suffering Servant of Isaiah, which is closely related, if not paralleled, with the guilt offering, though of course Christ is not a passive animal with no say in the matter, but a willing Son who lays down his own life for the sake of his people. [xii] Vos, “The Pauline Conception of Reconciliation,” 364. [xiii] Ridderbos, Paul, 190. [xiv] Macleod, Christ Crucified, 155. [xv] Beale, NTBT, 535. [xvi] Cf. Macleod, Christ Crucified, 151-53. Calvin writes, “For so long as God imputes to us our sins, He must of necessity regard us with abhorrence; for he cannot be friendly or propitious to sinners” (Second Epistle to the Corinthians, 237). God’s act of reconciliation, then, includes the non-imputing of our sins to us and the imputing of them to Christ who bears the legal punishment for them in his suffering and death as our substitutionary sacrifice. All of this effects a right relationship of peace where there once was judgment and condemnation (Eph. 2:14-17; Col. 1:20). [xvii] “Treating the sinless Christ as a sinner was the means by which treating sinners as sinless was made possible” (Vos, Reformed Dogmatics, 3:106). [xviii] Barnett, Corinthians, 315. [xix] Ridderbos, Paul, 182. [xx] Vos, “The Pauline Conception of Reconciliation,” 363. [xxi] Vos, “The Pauline Conception of Reconciliation,” 364. [xxii] Ridderbos, Paul, 185; Similarly Vos: “God reconciled the world … by a non-imputing of sin, by removing the legal demands that He had against the world, and doing this in Christ” (Reformed Dogmatics, 3:96).

James Ussher (1581-1656) was one of the most influential Reformed theologians of the seventeenth century. He adroitly contended throughout his life against Roman Catholicism on various platforms, whether writing, preaching or debating. And even though he turned down an invitation to the Westminster Assembly for political reasons, he might well be considered the man who stands behind the Westminster Confession of Faith.

A Brief History

Ussher was born on January 4, 1580, in Dublin, Ireland to a distinguished family. His last name testified to this, as one relative was usher to King John. At the age of ten he was converted upon reading Romans 12:1, “I beseech you therefore, brethren, by the mercies of God, that ye present your bodies a living sacrifice, holy, acceptable unto God, which is your reasonable service” (KJV). He would eventually succeed his uncle, Henry Ussher, as Archbishop of Armagh. From early on he had a special interest in history and chronology and would soon be known as the scholar who composed a biblical chronology and dated the creation at 4004 BC. This interest of his is especially evident in his work The Annals of the World. His formal education began at the age of thirteen when he was admitted to Trinity College in Dublin. He would remain there for his entire academic career. In 1607, he received his Bachelor of Divinity and was appointed Professor of Divinity at the university where he lectured for the next 14 years. In 1613, he was made Doctor of Divinity. In 1621, he was called to the bishopric of Meath and by 1625 he was made Archbishop of Armagh, primate of the Irish church. In 1601 he had taken up an eighteen-year study of the church fathers in order to commence his battle with the claims of the Roman Catholic Church, a battle that he would wage throughout his whole life.

Ussher contra Rome

Ussher’s family included both Protestants and Roman Catholics. His grandfather was Roman Catholic and his uncle would eventually turn to Rome as well. Later, when he was on a trip to England, his own mother became a communicant of Rome. Ussher made it a regular habit of visiting England, traveling there one summer out of every three for study and to grow his library, which some have numbered around ten thousand volumes! When he returned to Ireland, however, he tried to convince his mother to return to the Protestant fold, but she resisted. Ussher would go on to dedicate much of his life to the refutation of Rome’s dogma. Interestingly, the Act of Uniformity required Roman Catholics to attend the worship services that Ussher led and preached at every Sunday.

In 1613, he penned De Christianarum Ecclesiarum Successione et Statu, which “answered Rome’s query on the state of Protestantism before Luther.” In this work, he demonstrates that Christ has always had a visible church untainted by Rome’s corruptions. His most monumental piece would come in 1631, Historia de Gotteschalci, in which he sharply points out the difference between the Roman tradition and the Protestant tradition in early Ireland. He engages such topics of issue as Scripture, purgatory, grace, justification, sacraments, the mass, and the Pope’s authority. His theological acuity in this work has led some to say that it never received even a plausible answer from Rome. In 1660, his work Historia Dogmatica Controversiae … de Scriptures et Sacris Vernaculis was posthumously published. In this book he showed that the celebration of public worship in an unknown tongue (say, Latin, as the Roman Catholic church practiced at the time) was unknown from the early church up to the 7th century. He also makes the case that from early on the people of God were always exhorted to read Scripture for themselves. On top of writing, he was also a prolific speaker and debater. At the age of nineteen, he was chosen to debate with a Jesuit on the points of contention between Rome and Protestantism. The debate was organized with weekly engagements, but after the second round the Jesuit threw in the towel. Ussher, wanting to continue the debate, sent a letter in the spirit of David before Goliath:

“I Am Going Out of the World”

Ussher’s earthly service came to an end on March 21, 1656. Richard Parr preached before Ussher earlier in January of that same year. After the sermon, Ussher remarked,

For Further Study

• James Ussher, A Body of Divinity.
• Crawford Gribben, The Irish Puritans: James Ussher and the Reformation of the Church.
• Richard Snoddy, The Soteriology of James Ussher: The Act and Object of Saving Faith (Oxford Studies in Historical Theology).
• Jonathan D. Moore, “James Ussher’s Influence on the Synod of Dordt.” In Revisiting the Synod of Dordt (1618-1619), 163-179.
• You can read some of his sermons here.
• His works are also available for Logos Bible Software.

[1] Smith, Robert Worthington. “James Ussher: Biblical Chronicler.” Anglican Theological Review 41, no. 2 (April 1959): 84-94. [2] Clary, Ian Hugh. “The Irish Puritans: James Ussher and the Reformation of the Church.” American Theological Inquiry 3, no. 1 (January 15, 2010): 175-179.

Herman Bavinck, reflecting on the all-important impact of Christ on history, writes in The Philosophy of Revelation, “[R]evelation gives us a division of history. There is no history without division of time, without periods, without progress and development. But now take Christ away. The thing is impossible, for he has lived and died, has risen from the dead, and lives to all eternity; and these facts cannot be eliminated,—they belong to history, they are the heart of history. But think Christ away for a moment, with all he has spoken and done and wrought. Immediately history falls to pieces. It has lost its heart, its kernel, its centre, its distribution. … It becomes a chaos, without a centre, and therefore without a circumference; without distribution and therefore without beginning or end; without principle or goal; a stream rolling down from the mountains, nothing more” (p. 141). From this we can draw two vital principles for understanding the relationship of Christ to the history of special revelation in the Old Testament. First, Christ is at the center of the Old Testament. We see this confirmed when the risen Christ declares in Luke 24:44 that Moses, the Prophets and the Psalms (which is a way of speaking of the 3 parts that comprise the entirety of the Old Testament) spoke of him. He is its supreme subject matter—not moral principles, geo-political conflict, societal progress, or the evolution of religion, but Christ himself. History draws its lifeblood from him. Second, Christ is the goal of the Old Testament. The history of the Old Testament does not arbitrarily unfold, nor is its movement in time the product of chance or mere happenstance; rather, Christ is the guiding principle of the Old Testament and upon him they consummate. If the Old Testament were an arrow, Christ would be its intended target—and God didn’t miss. For “he has appeared once for all at the culmination of the ages to do away with sin by the sacrifice of himself” (Heb. 9:26). At Reformed Forum we have been committed from the beginning to seeing Christ as the center and goal of all of Scripture. This is evident in the very name of our program, Christ the Center. I’ve compiled twelve of our top episodes in which we try to explain and apply this hermeneutic. We have had the privilege of interviewing some of the top thinkers and writers in the church today on this subject, and we hope that you will take advantage of them. If this topic sparks your interest, you could even develop a 6-week course for yourself or a group of friends by listening to 2 episodes each week and assigning 2 or 3 books to work through on the topic.

1. Seeing Christ in All of Scripture w/ Vern Poythress and Iain Duguid
2. Jesus on Every Page w/ David Murray
3. Walking with Jesus Through His Word w/ Dennis Johnson
4. Redemptive-Historical Hermeneutics w/ Lane Tipton
5. Redemptive-Historical Hermeneutics, Divine Authorship, and the Christotelism Debate w/ Lane Tipton
6. Vos Group #32: Symbols and Types w/ Lane Tipton
7. Seeing Jesus in Old Testament History w/ Nancy Guthrie
8. Christ in the Old Testament w/ Nancy Guthrie
9. Seeing Jesus in the Old Testament w/ Nancy Guthrie
10. Seeing Jesus in the Prophets w/ Nancy Guthrie
11. Sacrifices and Festivals in the Old Testament w/ Ben Shaw
12. Typology and Jehoiachin w/ Matthew Patton

The author of the letter to the Hebrews makes explicit in the prologue that there is an organic progression to God’s revelation[1] and that the content and mode of God’s revelatory speech demarcates history into two comprehensive epochs: “long ago” and “these last days.” He writes, “Long ago, at many times and in many ways, God spoke to our fathers by the prophets, but in these last days he has spoken to us by his Son” (1:1-2a). I want to consider in this article three implications of this passage for the exhortation that will come later in 6:1, “Let us leave standing the basic teaching about Christ and go on to perfection [τελειότης].” We will then try to define what exactly the author has in mind by the basic teaching and perfection.

1. God’s Revelation is Objective and Historical

First, the revelatory speech of God is an objective reality in redemptive-history that is not dependent on its subjective reception. In other words, God has spoken whether or not it is recognized and received by faith. This means that the epochal shift brought about by the speech of God in his Son is the indicative upon which the imperative of 6:1—to progress in knowledge—is grounded. The author is exhorting his readers to be up-to-date in their knowledge with respect to redemptive-history; he does not want them to be lagging behind or living according to an outmoded, antequated or obsolete redemptive-historical model (cf. 8:13). The author, then, desires his readeres to progress from the basic teaching about Christ (τῆς ἀρχῆς τοῦ Χριστοῦ λόγον) to perfection (τὴν τελειότητα) not because he is an intellectualist or committed to a Gnostic epistemology, but because it is appropriate and fitting, even demanded, with the recent advancements in redemptive-history that have taken place in Christ. To put it another way, the reason the recipients of the letter are to go on to perfection in their knowledge (imperative) is because God has definitively and objectively advanced the knowledge base of his people by a new speech in his Son (indicative). Since God has spoken in these last days in a Son, to remain knowledgeable only of what he has spoken in the past to our fathers is inadequate and antiquated in light of the objective historia salutis situation of the readers. The church is to progress along with God’s revelatory speech. When God speaks new and fresh things, the church, by a redemptive-historical necessity, must receive it and live accordingly.

2. God’s Revelation Progresses from Good to Better

Second, the nature of the progression of God’s revelatory speech is not from evil to good or from false to true, but from good to better since both find their source in God who cannot lie. The two are organically related with the former anticipating the latter, just as the old covenant anticipated the new and the Levitical priesthood anticipated the Melchizedekian. This implies that the good and better are redemptive-historically qualified. That which was good was good for a specific time in redemptive-history; it does not remain good in a timeless or generic sense. It is not as if that which is good and that which is better exist simultaneously in history as two viable options to be chosen from. Rather, that which is good grows obsolete and soon vanishes when that which is better arrives (8:13). There is no returning to what once was good when the better has come. Once the better comes, the good can no longer be faithfully appropriated.

3. God’s Revelation Constitutes Covenant Knowledge

Third, the revelatory speeches of God in history constitute the knowledge base of their respective covenants. “Revelation,” writes Vos, “is the speech of God to man. It forms one side of the covenant intercourse. … [It is] a process of fellowship between God and man.”[2] Neither the old covenant, nor the new exist apart from God speaking, and his speech is what is to be known and believed. The speech of God to our fathers by the prophets comprises the knowledge of the old covenant, while the speech of God to us by a Son comprises the knowledge of the new covenant. This is not to say there is no overlap, there is, for these two sets of knoweldge are not in antithesis to one another, but organically related. Furthermore, while the first is good, as it is temporary and anticipatory, so the second is better, as it is final and eschatological. The speech of God in his Son brought about an epochal shift from what is temporary and subeschatological to what is permanent and eschatological.

Looking at Hebrews 6:1 Directly

Coming now directly to Hebrews 6, the author begins his argument by tapping into this two-fold covenant knowledge scheme. He will carry this scheme through the entire pericope. He writes, Therefore, let us leave standing the basic teaching concerning Christ and go on to perfection” (Διὸ ἀφέντες τὸν τῆς ἀρχῆς τοῦ Χριστοῦ λόγον ἐπὶ τὴν τελειότητα φερώμεθα). The participle ἀφέντες (“leave standing”) is not to be taken in the negative sense of abandoning or forsaking something, but rather in the positive sense of progressing beyond something in the same way a builder progresses beyond the structural foundation of a house by putting up walls and a roof. Lane properly translates it as “leave standing.”[3] The author then has in mind some kind of advancement from one knowledge base to another. These two sets of knowledge are organically related in the same way the walls and roof of a house are related to the foundation. The first is spoken of as τῆς ἀρχῆς τοῦ Χριστοῦ λόγον (“the basic teaching concerning Christ”) and the second is spoken of as τὴν τελειότητα (“perfection”). The author is exhorting his readers, along with himself, to progress from the one to the other. The question then is what does the basic teaching concerning Christ and perfection refer to? Can both be subsumed under the same knowledge base—so that he has in mind a mere quantitative progression or maturity within the same set?[4] Or does the author have in mind the historical speeches of God that constitute two different knowledge bases—so that he has in mind both a qualitative and quantitative progression from one to the other? A case will be made for the latter: the author has in mind the transition from subeschatological, anticipatory old covenant knowledge to eschatological, final new covenant knowledge, which resulted from the epoch-shifting speech of God in his Son.[5] It will become evident that the elements that constitute the “basic word about Christ” can all be found in the old covenant, which were spoken in the prophets, while “perfection” consists of all new covenant-specific items, which were spoken in a Son.

What is the basic teaching concerning Christ?

Regarding the first—τῆς ἀρχῆς τοῦ Χριστοῦ λόγον—three arguments can be advanced to take it as old covenant knowledge. First, the phrase harkens back to “the basic principles of the oracles of God” (τῆς ἀρχῆς τῶν λογίων τοῦ θεοῦ) in 5:12. Schreiner, acknowledging this connection, says that this “confirms the notion that the basic principles have to do with a Christian understanding of the OT.”[6] Lane also writes, “[It] may have reference to a preliminary and insufficient teaching based upon the OT, without specific reference to Christ.”[7] This connection with 5:12 implies that the foundation, made up of repentance and faith, was something that the readers had already laid some time ago.[8] Second, the author denotes it as a foundation: “Therefore, leaving the basic [τῆς ἀρχῆς] word about Christ, let us go on to perfection, not laying again the foundation (θεμέλιος) of repentance away from dead works and faith toward God” (6:1). Earlier in 1:10 the author brought together ἀρχή and θεμελιος in quoting Psalm 102:25, “You, Lord, laid the foundation [θεμελιος] of the earth in the beginning [τῆς ἀρχῆς].” The two words appear also to complement one another here in 6:1. Third, and building upon the previous point, the items that constitute the foundation—repentance and faith—are both explicitly found in the Old Testament (cf. Heb. 11). Furthermore, the teaching (διδαχή) in 6:2, which is either conjoined with or in appositional relationship to the foundation, is also found in the Old Testament: “washings [βαπτισμῶν], the laying on of hands, the resurrection of the dead, and eternal judgment.” Before looking at the second heading, a possible objection should be answered. Does not the fact that the author speaks of the basic word as being about Christ exclude an old covenant formulation? While much can be said in answer to this, Acts 18:24-28 may be most helpful. There we read that Apollos’ knowledge had not progressed beyond John the Baptist (his knowledge was not redemptive-historically up-to-date). Not that he rejected the further redemptive-historical developments, but word of them had not yet reached him. Nevertheless, we read that he still “taught accurately the things concerning Jesus” (18:25). Thus, consistent with Jesus’ own words in Luke 24:18, the knowledge pertaining to the old covenant was about him. While this knowledge will be supplemented and heightened by the revelation belonging to the new covenant, it is still true and accurate—it is still good. The old is not in antithesis to the new so that to move from the one to the other is the equivalence of moving from what is evil to what is good. Rather, the new organically develops out of the old in the same way a shadow gives way to its substance or as a promise turns into fulfillment or as a type is superseded by its antitype—in all of these cases the former is good, while the latter is better. This objection, therefore, actually adds to the redemptive-historical argument being made: the contrast is not between what is evil and good, false and true, unbelief and belief, but between old covenant belief that is good and new covenant belief that is better. In the same way milk is good, even necessary, for a specific time in the life of a person, solid food is better as it supersedes an all-milk diet and provides more wholesome nutrition for greater growth and superior strength.

What is perfection?

The second—τὴν τελειότητα—is often translated as “maturity” (ESV, NIV, NASB, etc.), but “perfection” should be preferred.[9] Lane is correct when he writes, “The problem with translating the word with ‘maturity’ is the implication that a state is being described that is achieved gradually by successive steps of development. What is described, however, is the accomplishment of God through Jesus Christ.”[10] Silva rightly observes that the author links τελος with the new covenant in a technical sense throughout the letter. This suggests an eschatological interpretation of “perfection” in terms of new covenant fulfillment. This, however, does not exclude the traditional cultic interpretation (i.e., being fit for service before God),[11] but provides “a more consistent use of the word-group in Hebrews.”[12] If this can be applied to τὴν τελειότητα in 6:1, then what the author had in mind was eschatological knowledge that belonged to the new covenant. This eschatological reading of τὴν τελειότητα may be objected to on the basis of the readers elsewhere in the letter being said to already belong to the new covenant and the age of fulfillment. How can the author exhort them to go on to perfection if they’ve already been made perfect? Silva draws a parallel with Paul’s theology to provide an answer. While Paul can make an eschatological statement regarding all Christians by referring to them as spiritual (πνευματικός; e.g., 1 Cor. 2:15), he can nevertheless “also restrict the use of the word so that it has reference to those who give proper manifestation of their spiritual status.”[13] He goes on,

For example, [Paul] hesitates to call the immature Corinthians spiritual (1 Cor. 3:1); similarly, in Galatisn 6:1 he speaks of those who are spiritual in contrast to those who are caught in a fault. Could we not argue therefore that the author of Hebrews in some contexts may restrict the meaning of perfect to those who are giving proper manifestation that they belong to the age of fulfillment? Indeed, the danger faced by the recipients of the letter was that of going back to the old, obsolete, pre-eschatological (!) covenant.[14]

In further support of an eschatological, new covenant reading of τὴν τελειότητα, we should also recognize that the items of the second list are all new covenant specific: “who have tasted the heavenly gift, and have shared in the Holy Spirit, and have tasted the goodness of the word of God and the powers of the age to come” (6:4-5).

Conclusion

We have made the case for a redemptive-historically sensitive reading of 6:1, which the author will carry through the entire passage of 6:1-6. In light of what has been said so far, we can paraphrase the verse as such: “Therefore, leave standing the foundational subeschatological knowledge of the old covenant, which is the product of God’s previous speech to our fathers in the prophets long ago, and let us go on to the eschatological knowledge of the new covenant, which is the product of God’s speech to us in a Son in these last days.” The progress he desires for his readers is redemptive-historical in nature. The author is urging his readers to have knowledge that is up-to-date or current with the recent developments in redemptive-history. To put it negatively, he does not want their knowledge to lag behind their present redemptive-historical situation.

[1] Geerhardus Vos, The Teaching of the Epistle to the Hebrews (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1956), 68; Idem., Biblical Theology: Old and New Testaments (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1977), 5-8. [2] Vos, The Teaching of the Epistle to the Hebrews, 68-69. [3] William L. Lane, Hebrews 1-8 (Dallas, TX: Thomas Nelson, 1991), 131. [4] Cf. Francis Turretin, Institutes of Elenctic Theology, trans. George Musgrave Giger, ed. James T. Dennison, Jr. (Phillipsburg, NJ: P&R Publishing, 1994), 1:48, 49, 52. [5] This is contrary to the entry for θεμέλιος in NIDNTE, which reads, “[It] evidently refers to the basic doctrines of the Christian faith. The distinction made here is between the groundwork, which every Christian has to know, and further insights that come to those who are prepared to study the Scripture in greater depth (cf. 5:11-14)” (2:432). This implies progression within the same knowledge base, instead of progression from one knowledge base into a greater, though organically related, knowledge base. [6] Thomas R. Schreiner, Commentary on Hebrews (Nashville, TN: B&H Publishing, 2015), 175. [7] Lane, Hebrews, 140. [8] See Lane, Hebrews, 131. [9] See Moises Silva, “Perfection and Eschatology in Hebrews,” WTJ 39, no. 1 (September 1976), 69n18. [10] Lane, Hebrews, 131-32. [11] See for example Geerhardus Vos, “The Priesthood of Christ in the Epistle to the Hebrews,” in The Shorter Writings of Geerhardus Vos, ed. Richard B. Gaffin, Jr. (Phillipsburg, NJ: P&R Publishing, 1980). [12] Silva, “Perfection and Eschatology in Hebrews,” 68. [13] Ibid., 69. [14] Ibid.

With a smirk befitting someone about to deliver the authoritative word on a subject long puzzled over, the apostle John reaches for his pen to begin inscribing his gospel account (or so I can at least imagine). Going from 0 to 60 in record time, he opens: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” The Word was with God—and so differentiated. The Word was God—and so identified. Here we have the eternal Son of God, the second person of the Trinity, equal in power and glory with the Father, and who with the Father and the Spirit are one God. Later we learn from John that before the world existed and its foundation was laid, the Word both possessed glory with the Father and was unreservedly loved by him (17:5, 24). The Father and Son (and the Spirit), in other words, have eternally existed in perfect, complete, interpenetrating, joy-full fellowship. Furthermore, John divulges that this Word was at work in the beginning as the instrument of creation, for “without him was not any thing made that was made.” But the world of his making was plunged into deep darkness and so incited his coming into it as the true light for a new work of redemption. Remember the biblical thread that we have been pulling on that runs the full gamut of Scripture from Genesis to Revelation: the triune God’s desire to dwell with his people in joy-full fellowship. We have considered the blueprints for this in the Garden, as well as the disastrous effects of Adam’s fall that led to separation and exile. Yet, the Lord in his grace and mercy maintained his pursuit of his people even in the face of sin, rebellion and death. He met with the patriarchs temporarily at altars; he dwelled in the midst of Israel’s camp in the tabernacle as they pilgrimaged through the wilderness; and he resided in the temple that Solomon built bringing about a glorious transformation to Jerusalem. But, as Isaiah and Ezekiel and the rest of the prophets make known, all of this anticipated something superior, something far greater, something eschatological. With that in mind, the apostle John makes plain to us that something: “The Word became flesh and tabernacled [σκηνόω] among us, and we have seen his glory, glory as of the only Son from the Father, full of grace and truth” (1:14). As you can probably already recognize for yourself at this point, these words resonate with vocabulary reminiscent of the tabernacle and temple being filled with the glory of God (cf. Exod. 40:34-35). Inciting wide-eyed wonder, John reveals the mystery hidden from ages past: the Son of God enfleshed in history as the place of joy-full fellowship between God and man. Truly he is Immanuel—God with us. The tabernacle and temple were only shadows of God’s presence in Jesus Christ throughout the Old Testament (Heb. 9:11); he is the temple toward which they looked and anticipated (cf. 2 Sam. 7:12-14; Zech. 6:12-13).[1] Jesus spoke of his own body as the temple (John 2:19-21) and Paul spoke of Jesus as the new temple as well (Col. 1:19; 2:9). He has taken over the function of the temple as God now dwells in him and forgiveness is found in him. “He would be the end-time temple-builder by raising it up in the form of his body, in line with OT prophecies that predicted that the Messiah would build the latter-day temple.”[2] The contact point between heaven and earth is no longer the temple, but Jesus Christ himself. The alters, the tabernacle and the temple—all good, but temporary, anticipatory and sub-eschatological realities of the Old Testament—have been rendered obsolete with the arrival of what is permanent, final and eschatological, namely, the incarnate Word (Heb. 8:13). True worshippers must come to him if they are to worship the Father in spirit and truth (4:20-24). Jesus is the great high priest of the heavenly tabernacle, not made with hands, who by his atoning sacrifice passed through the holy place, the greater and more perfect tent, into the holy of holies itself. (Note the reappearance of the ark in Revelation 11:19.) The earthly sanctuary was merely a shadowing down of the heavenly. The entry of Christ into the sanctuary signifies his heavenly rule and assures our participation in the present benefits of the new covenant and their consummation at the eschaton. According to Geerhardus Vos, as our sympathetic high priest, Jesus “does not merely send, but actually brings men near to God.” He goes on,

The priest himself must approach God first. Therefore the representative element must be included in the conception; the priest brings men to God representatively, through himself. Secondly, in the priest, the nearness to God is not merely counted as having taken place for the believer, as a mere imputation. Rather, so close is the connection between the priest and the believers that a contact with God on his part at once involves also a contact with God for them. The contact with God is passed on to them as an electric current through a wire. Thirdly, a priest does not content himself with establishing contact only at one point; he draws the believers after himself, so that they come where he is.[3]

While the high priest of the tabernacle representatively brought the people near to God as he bore their names on twelve stones (Exod. 28:21; 39:14), Christ really brings us into the joyfully charged presence of God by his Spirit. “Let us then with confidence draw near to the throne of grace, that we may receive mercy and find grace to help in time of need” (Heb. 4:16). The new creation has begun in Christ, “so that he is God’s tabernacling presence of the new creation, which is to expand further until it is completed at the very end of the age in the whole cosmos becoming the temple of God’s consummate presence.”[4] The new creation is inaugurated in his resurrection which entitles him to dispense the Holy Spirit (John 7:37-39) by whom he comes to dwell in the church. In our next article we will consider the significance of the resurrection of Jesus Christ and the way in which Peter understands Psalm 16:11 to be fulfilled in him (Acts 2:22ff). We will also tie this in with something we have alluded to in this article: Jesus’ high priestly prayer in John 17 that the glory and love he had with the Father before the world existed would be conferred upon his people.

[1] Cf. G. K. Beale, A New Testament Biblical Theology, 632. [2] Beale, A New Testament Biblical Theology, 633. [3] Geerhardus Vos, The Teaching of the Epistle to the Hebrews, 94. [4] Beale, A New Testament Biblical Theology, 633.

Following the apex of Israel’s glory with the construction of the Solomonic temple, the biblical drama enters a period of sustained decline with the occasional righteous Davidic king temporarily suspending its ultimate demise. The inhabitants of Jerusalem repeatedly fail to meet the standards of holiness appropriate to dwell with their gracious God who had redeemed them from Egypt for holy and joyful service in his presence.[1] The Lord is patient with them, but in the end they were unable to reverse course and so incurred the judgment of God as discipline with the gracious intention of restoring them: the temple is destroyed and Jerusalem is overthrown. Israel is traumatically sent into exile (Ps. 137). The prophets take center stage in the lead up to the exile in both Israel in the north and Judah in the south. At the heart of their message is the hope of a future restoration and an impending eschatological temple that will far exceed even the glory of the Solomonic temple. Israel is to cling to this message as she is purged as through fire in exile (Isa. 48:10).

Isaiah: The Fullness of Joy in the New Creation

We have already noted the common theme of the various sanctuaries of God being located on a mountain. In continuation with this, Isaiah foresees the mountain of the Lord, Zion, being established as the highest mountain, which is to say that “God himself will be exalted in majesty as he exercises supreme authority over the whole earth. This expectation brings to fulfillment God’s creation blueprint, for it anticipates the Lord dwelling in a temple-city that will fill the whole earth.”[2] This is found, for example, in Isaiah 65:17-25. Significant about this passage is that the creation of the new heaven and new earth parallels the creation of Jerusalem (cf. Isa. 24:23). “Jerusalem is deliberately equated here with the new heavens and the new earth”(cf. Rev. 21:1-2).[3] Thus, Isaiah is expectant of a divinely transformed Jerusalem that encompasses the whole earth, but without the previous shortcomings and fractures in holiness. In this renewed city, the refulgence of the presence of God will be so blinding that there will be no need for sun or moon (Isa. 60:15-20) and we, the reconciled and re-created people of God, will experience the glory of the fullness of joy in everlasting fellowship with our triune God.

Ezekiel: The Eschatological Presence of God

Ezekiel likewise contributes much to the theme of God’s joyfully-charged presence on earth with his people. In one of the most remarkable visions of the Old Testament, Ezekiel sees the ineffable chariot-throne of God riding toward Babylon (see 1 Chron. 28:18). The same glory that led Israel in the wilderness, descended on Mount Sinai, and filled the tabernacle and temple is now speeding before Israel to Babylon. Thus, the presence of God (remember the connection between God’s glory and presence) is not limited to a certain locale as was the case with the tabernacle and the temple, nor is it limited nationally to Israel; instead, it is wherever God’s people are. The remarkable thing is that the Lord is going into exile with his people—he has not abandoned them. Ezekiel prophesies that Jerusalem and the temple will be destroyed and the glory (and so presence) of the Lord will depart from the city in judgment. Yet, Ezekiel shines a bright light of hope as chapters 40-48 record another vision that focuses on God’s return to a restored land and a new, idealized eschatological temple set within a renewed city.[4] The presence of God will return, it has not been permanently lost in the exile and the great hope is that the return of his presence will far exceed anything Israel has experienced in her history so far. Though Jerusalem is to be destroyed, it will be rebuilt and renamed, “The LORD is there” (Ezek. 48:35).

The Return from Exile

Israel eventually returns to the land according to the decree of Cyrus and begins rebuilding the temple. However, this temple does not fully meet the expectations of the prophetic vision of a temple greater than Solomon’s; in fact, it pales in comparison, even bringing some to tears at its completion (Ezra 3:12). In this context Zechariah encourages the people that God will return to Zion and will dwell in the midst of Jerusalem (Zech. 8). “While the completed structure was unable to match the splendour of the temple constructed by Solomon, its erection was a powerful signal that God was still concerned to fulfill his creation blueprint.”[5] The message of the Old Testament ends on a note of hope as the prophets speak of a coming eschatological temple, but the mystery remains regarding how the major obstacles that have proven disastrous in the past (especially Israel’s inability to be a holy nation) will be overcome. So in a cloud of mystery awaiting revelation, the prophets anticipate something greater than the temple to enter into their midst.

[1] The concept of appropriateness of expression is taken from Geerhardus Vos, who writes, “The law was given after the redemption from Egypt had been accomplished, and the people had already entered upon the enjoyment of many of the blessings of the berith [covenant]. Particularly their taking possession of the promised land could not have been made dependent on previous observance of the law, for during their journey in the wilderness many of its prescripts could not be observed. It is plain, then, that law-keeping did not figure at that juncture as the meritorious ground of life-inheritance. The latter is based on grace alone… But, while this is so, it might still be objected, that law-observance, if not the ground for receiving, is yet made the ground for retention of the privileges inherited. Here it can not, of course, be defined that a real connection exists. But the Judaizers went wrong in inferring that the connection must be meritorious, that, if Israel keeps the cherished gifts of Jehovah through observance of His law, this must be so, because in strict justice they had earned them. The connection is of a totally different kind. It belongs not to the legal sphere of merit, but to the symbolico-typical sphere of appropriateness of expression” (Biblical Theology, 127). [2] Alexander, From Eden to the New Jerusalem, 52. [3] Ibid., 54. [4] See Taylor, “Temple in Ezekiel,” 67-69. [5] Alexander, From Eden to the New Jerusalem, 58.

• Introduction
• The Garden
• The Patriarchs
• The Tabernacle

Israel’s history progresses and time and time again they prove to be an unholy people unworthy to have the Holy One, the Lord of Glory dwell in their midst. Nevertheless, the Lord brings them into the land of Canaan as he goes before them on the seat of the ark. Following Saul’s stint on the throne, David ascends to the kingship and brings the ark into his recently captured city, Jerusalem (see Ps. 78). Previously the ark had resided in Shiloh, but now the throne of God and the throne of David will come together in the same city. The significance of this geographical movement is expressed well by T. Desmond Alexander,

The divine rejection of Ephraim and Shiloh is matched by the selection of David and Jerusalem (Zion). God’s choice of David as king is confirmed by his choice of dwelling place; the thrones of the Israelite king and the divine king are now located side by side in the same city. This convergence represents an important development in the biblical meta-story, especially when the building of a temple on Mount Zion follows it.[1]

David, however, recognizes the disparity between the Lord’s dwelling place in a tent and his own cedar palace (2 Sam. 7:2), and so determines to build the Lord a house. But the Lord prohibits David’s desire and promises instead to build David a house (2 Sam. 7:11ff). There is a wordplay in 2 Samuel 7 on “house.” David has in mind a physical building, while the Lord promises David a royal dynasty. It will be a royal son of David who will build a house for God, that is, a temple. Here we have the establishment of the Davidic Covenant (cf. Psalm 89:3). David gathered the vast amounts of materials needed for this project, but it would be his son, Solomon, who would build the magnificent temple in Jerusalem. In the same way the glory of the Lord filled the tabernacle, so we read of the temple immediately following its completion: “When the priests came out of the Holy Place, a cloud filled the house of the LORD, so that the priests could not stand to minister because of the cloud, for the glory of the LORD filled the house of the LORD” (1 Kgs. 8:10-11; cf. 2 Chron. 7:1-2). Thus, the Lord’s dwelling place on earth is now in the impressive Solomonic Temple.

The Glory of God and the Presence of God

We can begin to recognize here something vital to the theme of joy-full fellowship (Ps. 16:11) that we have been considering, namely the connection between the glory of God and the presence of God. We noted in our previous article that in the same cloud that led Israel in the wilderness, descended on Mount Sinai, and filled both the tabernacle and the temple was the presence of God. Notice that in the same breath the author of Kings says the cloud (presence) and the glory of the Lord filled the temple (1 Kgs. 8:10-11). Kline’s signature designation of the “glory-cloud” might be helpful here. We will say more on this in subsequent articles, but for now it is important not to think of the glory of God in the abstract, but as including the very presence of God in which there is fullness of joy.

The Continuity and Development of the Temple

The temple exhibits many commonalities with the tabernacle, for example, varying degrees of holiness, an exceptionally holy inner sanctum, Edenic and cosmic features, arboreal imagery (e.g., carvings of lilies and pomegranates), etc. (See our previous article on the tabernacle for the significance of these things.) The continuity remains of the biblical storyline of God dwelling with man, but what further developments does the temple bring to it? The main development consists in the fact that the temple’s permanence (no longer being mobile as it was in the tabernacle) affects the status of Jerusalem as a city, which “now becomes in a unique way the city of God.”[2] The city has become his dwelling place (cf. Pss. 78:68; 132:13). This moves us closer to the eschatological picture we are given in Revelation 21-22. Though we find a garden-like description there, the ultimate picture is of a city that encompasses the earth, i.e., “the holy city, new Jerusalem” (Rev. 21:2). God’s temple-garden is to become a temple-city as image bearers are multiplied. Thus, the city of Jerusalem as the dwelling place of God “is in miniature what God intends for the whole world”[3] (cf. Pss. 48:1-3; 12-14; 132:13-18; 133:1-3; 147:12-14). This is evident also in the fact that the glut of gold is no longer limited to the sanctuary, but is now found throughout the whole city: “The king made silver and gold as common in Jerusalem as stone” (2 Chron. 1:15). “The presence of gold throughout Jerusalem signifies that the whole city has become his dwelling place.”[4] Thus, pilgrimages to Jerusalem were significant since the believer came close to the Lord there (Pss. 84:1-5; 120-134).

The Temple Looked Forward to Something Greater

While the presence of the glory of God extended its majestic reach from the holy of holies to encompass the city of Jerusalem, even this fell vastly short of the hope expressed by Habakkuk: “The earth will be filled with the knowledge of the glory of the LORD as the waters cover the sea” (2:14). The temple was good, but it was not perfect. It was an advancement from the tabernacle, but it was not ultimate. The eschatological goal held out to Adam in the garden was for the whole earth to be transformed into a holy realm where God would dwell with his people in joy-full fellowship forever. The Solomonic temple, then, looked forward to something greater, spatially and temporally. In our next article we will consider the greater temple that God promises to his people through the prophets.

[1] Alexander, From Eden to the New Jerusalem, 43. [2] Ibid., 45. [3] Ibid. [4] Ibid., 46.

We continue our expedition through the biblical drama of the triune God’s pursuit of union and communion with his people in joy-full fellowship (Ps. 16:11). The promise, “I will be your God and you will be my people,” is the refrain of his heart that reverberates at every turn in the story to the glory of his name and the good of his people. We’ve already considered the blueprint of God’s plan for consummate fellowship in the garden and the way in which he continued his pursuit of it in the face of sin, death and rebellion during the era of the patriarchs. However, the temporary meetings between God and Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob ached for something more as they were only faint experiences that left so much more to be desired. What Israel needed was for God to take up permanent residency in their midst. This he would do in the tabernacle.

God’s Presence in the Cloud

During the exodus from Egypt we read of these two peculiar pillars, one of cloud and the other of fire, which led the Israelites during the day and at night, respectively (Exod. 13:21-22). Later we read of Israel seeing the glory of the Lord appearing in the cloud (Exod. 16:10) and the Lord informing Moses that he is coming to him in a thick cloud (Exod. 19:9), which descends upon Mount Sinai (Exod. 19:16; 24:15). Thus, the glory of the Lord dwelt on Mount Sinai in the cloud (Exod. 24:15-16) and Moses was summoned to enter the cloud, where he met with the Lord (Exod. 24:18). The point here is that God dwelt in the covering of the cloud—his presence was there. And if God’s presence is in the cloud, then Mount Sinai, upon which the cloud descended, can be considered a mountain-temple.[1]

The Purpose of the Tabernacle

Beginning in Exodus 25 we are informed of the Lord’s speech to Moses inside the mountain-temple, which instructs him to receive freewill contributions from the people to build a sanctuary according to the specifications that he will lay out (Exod. 25:10-30:38). Why? God gives us his reason: “And let them make me a sanctuary, that I may dwell in their midst” (Exod. 25:8). This is a remarkable statement in light of previous redemptive-history. Adam was banished from Eden where he dwelt with God and the patriarchs only had temporary visits from him, but now God is going to take up residence in the center of Israel’s camp, he will dwell among his people in the tabernacle! This is a major step toward the fulfillment of Psalm 16:11 and the consummative picture of Revelation 21-22.

Patterned After the Heavenly Tabernacle

After the Lord discloses his purpose for building the tabernacle, he includes precise instructions for building it and the various articles that will inhabit it. These instructions are not random or arbitrary, but patterned after the heavenly tabernacle. In this way, the heavenly tabernacle is shadowed down from heaven to earth in the earthly tabernacle (cf. Heb. 8:5-6). Geerhardus Vos explains from the epistle to the Hebrews,

When the Epistle [to the Hebrews] speaks of shadowing this means shadowing down (from heaven to earth), not shadowing forward (from Old Testament to New Testament). … The New Testament is not merely a reproduction of the Heavenly Reality, but its actual substance, the Reality itself come down from heaven. … In [Hebrews] 9:24 the author speaks of the earthly tabernacle as the antitype of the true tabernacle. … This manner of speaking differs from our own, and also from that of Paul and Peter. The latter uniformly regard the Old Testament as the type of which the New Testament is the antitype; this is the common New Testament usage. But the author of Hebrews, on the contrary, speaks of the Old Testament as the antitype. An antitype, of course, always has a type lying back of it as its model. To find the original type, of which the Old Testament is the antitype, then, we must go back of the Old Testament to heaven. This heavenly type was shown to Moses on Mount Sinai.[2]

The earthly tabernacle is the antitype of the heavenly tabernacle, which is the type. But in relationship to the New Testament (when the reality actually comes down from heaven), the tabernacle stands as a type for Jesus Christ and the church, which are the antitypes. This means that the reality did not come down in the tabernacle, only a shadow did. And this shadow prefigures the substance of the reality in the New Testament, namely, Jesus Christ and the church. Thus, the tabernacle was not an end in itself, but always pointed to something greater.

The Three Areas of the Tabernacle

The tabernacle consisted of three distinct areas: the courtyard, the Holy Place, and the Holy of Holies (the inner sanctum wherein the ark of the covenant was located).[3] The ark “served a double function, being both the footstool of a throne and a chest. Understood as a footstool, the ark of the covenant extends the heavenly throne to the earth; this is where the divine king’s feet touch the earth. Consequently, the tabernacle links heaven and earth.”[4] Solomon assumes this link in his prayer at the dedication of the temple (1 Kgs. 8:30-51; 2 Chron. 6:22-39).

The Tabernacle is Associated with the Garden

T. Desmond Alexander notes three aspects of this special sanctuary that link it to God’s plans for the earth. First, “the tabernacle has features that associate it closely with the Garden of Eden.”[5] The tabernacle was entered from the east, the lampstand may have resembled the tree of life, and the priests were to עבד and שׁמר the sanctuary (Num 3:7-8; 8:26; 18:5-6), which were the exact commands given to Adam in the garden (Gen. 2:15). The parallels clearly reveal that God is continuing his plan for the Garden of Eden with the construction of the tabernacle.

The Tabernacle is God’s Dwelling Place

Second, “the tabernacle becomes the dwelling place of God on earth.”[6] He says to Moses, “And let them make me a sanctuary, that I may dwell in their midst” (Ex. 25:8). The text suggests that God lived within the Holy of Holies (a development from the temporary residence he had throughout the patriarchal epoch). William Dumbrell writes,

The tabernacle’s significance [is] nothing less than the seat of divine kingship, fashioned as a copy of the heavenly temple/palace. Thus the golden calf incident interrupts the building of the tabernacle since it entails a denial of Yahweh’s rule. But acknowledgment of this lordship will secure peace in Israel’s greater sanctuary, the promised land. Here the twin motifs of tabernacle and Sabbath intertwine. The tabernacle symbolizes the presence of Yahweh the King who returns Israel to Eden rest by transforming the promised land into a sanctuary.[7]

The articles found in the tabernacle such as an ark (or chest), a table for food, and a lampstand for light point to its use as a home. The glut of gold found in the holy of holies would be consistent with God living there since it best (though inadequately) reflects the honor of the one dwelling there, namely, God himself. The most convincing evidence that God lived there, however, is found when the construction of the tabernacle is completed and we read that “the cloud covered the tent of meeting, and the glory of the LORD filled the tabernacle” (Exod. 40:34; cf. Num. 9:15-17, 22). This is the same cloud that we said earlier God dwelt in. The divine presence in the holy of holies prevented Moses from entering it, though he would regularly meet with God here at the “tent of meeting” (Exod. 27:21; 28:43; 29:4; 40:2; Lev. 1:1; 3:2; Num. 1:1; 2:2) where God’s glory surrounded it. The exceptionally holy status of the area also contributes to this understanding of the tabernacle as the Lord’s house. The further one moved away from the holy of holies the more access was granted.[8] In general, the people were permitted in the courtyard, the priests in the Holy Place, and only the high priest on the Day of Atonement after intense cleansing in the holy of holies. How amazing that the infinite God whose presence bursts the heavens takes residence in a 15 x 15 x 15 room constructed by human hands! The entire narrative screams of grace. How could a holy God dwell with a sinful people (cf. Exod. 32)? By grace alone. How could an infinite God be said to dwell in a small cube constructed by human hands? By grace alone.

The Tabernacle is a Model of the Cosmos

Third, “the tabernacle was probably also viewed as a model of the cosmos.”[9] In the Ancient Near East, temples were often viewed as microcosms. The various elements of the tabernacle also convey this idea. For example, the blue, purple, and scarlet colored fabrics may represent the colors of the sky, as Beale argues.[10] The light emanated from the lampstand may represent the sun, moon, and stars (Gen. 1:14-16). There are also links between the construction of the tabernacle and the creation of the earth. J. Richard Middleton notes that Bezalel is portrayed using terminology associated with the creation of the earth, being filled with wisdom, understanding, knowledge (cf. Prov. 3:19-20) and all crafts (cf. Gen. 2:2-3).[11] Note similar language is used to denote Hiram in 1 Kings 7 who constructs various furnishings for the temple. Like Bezalel he is “full of wisdom and understanding and knowledge” with regard to bronze work (1 Kings 7:14). The wisdom literature often depicts the creation as a tent (Ps. 19:4-5; 104:2; Prov. 3:19; 8:27; Job 28:26; 38:4-7), as do the prophets (Isa. 48:13; 51:13, 16; Zech. 12:1; Amos 9:6). “As models of the ideal cosmos, the tabernacle and temple are designed to remind people of God’s original purpose for the world.”[12]

The Tabernacle is Not Ultimate

The cosmic imagery of the tabernacle highlights the fact that this was not to be the final dwelling place of God, but that the whole earth is to become God’s dwelling place. “The temple was a small-scale model and symbolic reminder to Israel that God’s glorious presence would eventually fill the whole cosmos.”[13] The heavenly reality that the tabernacle was modeled after would one day come down (cf. Heb. 9:23ff). The tabernacle was a step towards the fulfillment of this, for with it God takes up permanent (though mobile) residence on earth.

[1] G. K. Beale argues for this in A New Testament Biblical Theology, 608-10; see also Nahum M. Sarna, Exodus, 105. [2] Vos, The Teaching of the Epistle to the Hebrews, 58; see also pp. 57-65. [3] Beale observes that Mount Sinai (or the mountain-temple) also had three distinct areas: “the majority of the Israelites were to remain at the foot of Sinai (Exod. 19:12, 23), the priests and seventy elders… were allowed to come some distance up the mountain (Exod. 19:22; 24:1), but only Moses could ascend to the top and directly experience the presence of God (Exod. 24:2)” (A New Testament Biblical Theology, 608). [4] Alexander, From Eden to the New Jerusalem, 33. [5] Ibid., 34. [6] Ibid. [7] Dumbrell, The End in the Beginning, 35. [8] See T. Desmond Alexander, From Paradise to the Promised Land, 206-215. [9] Alexander, From Eden to the New Jerusalem, 37; This view is also taken by Levenson, “Temple and the World,” 283-298; Barker, Gate of Heaven, 104-132; Beale, Temple and the Church’s Mission, 48. [10] Beale, “Eden, the Temple,” 16. [11] Middleton, The Liberating Image: The Imago Dei in Genesis 1, 87. [12] Alexander, From Eden to the New Jerusalem, 41. “With the book of Exodus Israel enters into the cosmic plan which Yahweh laid out at the beginning of the world” (M.S. Smith, Pilgrimage Pattern in Exodus, 117). [13] Beale, “Eden, the Temple,” 18.

Where can I find joy that is full and pleasures that are everlasting? This is the one great pursuit of men in every age. In the words of Pascal, “All men seek happiness. This is without exception.” Because this is true we immediately recognize a problem. While I may experience some joy in this world, I have never experienced a fullness of joy on level with, say, the fullness I’ve felt after a Thanksgiving meal. I might say, “That’s enough turkey.” But I’ve never found myself saying, “That’s enough joy.” And to compound the problem, not only does this world fail to max out my capacity for joy, but the occasional pleasures I do experience quickly dissipate so that the dullness of life settles in… again. So not just any joy will do and not just any pleasure will do. I am after a joy that is full and pleasures that are everlasting—where can I find them? The psalmist answers our heart cry for full and everlasting happiness in his praise to the one true God: “In your presence there is fullness of joy; at your right hand are pleasures forevermore” (Ps. 16:11). In God’s glorious presence there is a joy that is unbounded by space and time, one that is bursting with fullness and untouched by temporal decay. Fullness—like pouring a thousand oceans into a single bucket. Forevermore—like the ancient mountains withstanding the test of time from age to age. We exist to experience this, and every lesser pleasure will leave us unsatisfied and longing for more. “You have made us for yourself,” Augustine prays to God, “and our hearts are restless, until they can find rest in you.” Similarly C.S. Lewis remarked,

It would seem that our Lord finds our desires not too strong, but too weak. We are half-hearted creatures, fooling about with drink and sex and ambition when infinite joy is offered us, like an ignorant child who wants to go on making mud pies in a slum because he cannot imagine what is meant by the offer of a holiday at the sea. We are far too easily pleased.

The Westminster divines also knew that joy wasn’t merely optional for us: “man’s chief end is to glorify God, and to enjoy him forever.” Twice Paul refers to God as “blessed” or “happy” (μακάριος; 1 Tim. 1:11; 6:15). We have been created in the image of the supremely happy God whose dwelling is charged with fullness of joy and pleasures forevermore. What we come to marvel at in Scripture is that God reveals himself to be fiercely committed and desirous to dwell with his people in unhindered communion so that we might enjoy him forever. Here is the very heart of God as he has expressed it in his covenant: “I will be your God and you will be my people.” This is what drives the biblical story from its conception to its consummation. Playing off the words of Psalm 16, we can say that the theme of God dwelling with his people in joy-full fellowship is a vital vein that runs throughout the single story of the Bible stretching from Genesis to Revelation. We have already begun to trace this theme as it is first set forth in blueprint form in the Garden and then, following the entrance of sin into the world, the period of the patriarchs. In our next article we’ll consider the advancements that the tabernacle made toward this end of joy-full fellowship. We consider these Old Testament realities with our eyes looking forward to the ultimate fulfillment of Psalm 16:11 in and by Jesus Christ who will graciously confer it upon his church—but more on that later.