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

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

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

Adapted from a transcript of the video.

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

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

Adapted from a transcript of the video.

The church being known as a pilgrim people would obviously go back to the early church. Peter’s writings to the early church refers to them as strangers and aliens. How do you achieve that now? How do you try to follow that? If you become successful and prosperous, this seems a difficult thing to be. Does it mean that you and I always have to keep moving— leaving somewhere and setting up again so we are always in exile? That’s not what it means.

It does mean, of course, trying to serve God, to glorify God, to love God, and to love one’s neighbor. Let that be the guiding motive and not let success in the world be what you want to accomplish. So, consumerism and worldly advancement—seeking wealth and riches and fame—those are things that a pilgrim people doesn’t do. In some ways, I guess that seems obvious, but on the other hand, it becomes more difficult when you take on more responsibilities in life. You get older, you have a family, you have bills to pay, etc. You have a business that you want to see go well; you love employees that you want to see paid. So, how does that work for a pilgrim people?

This gets into all the questions about Christ and culture, and questions about vocation are bound up with that too. But for case of the OPC, I think it meant going back to Machen and the kind of stands that he took. It meant not trying to gain fame and influence at the expense of being firm in your convictions and resolute in your statements. It meant taking a stand when there’s a controversy, not avoiding it or evading it for the sake of maintaining your position.

If you need to be a pilgrim people in that case, then so be it. In fact, it may be much more often the case that you need to be a pilgrim people than to gain the praise of the world. So, knowing this is a way of preparing people that you’re not necessarily going to be rich and famous if you become a Christian, especially if you become an orthodox Presbyterian.

Adapted from a transcript of the video.

In another video, we spoke about the antithesis, the sharp distinction between believers and unbelievers. That distinction is covenantal, absolute, and ethical. We also spoke about how that distinction is not ontological. That is, believers and unbelievers all are still human beings.

That leads us to the question of the point of contact. Some people might wonder: if there’s such a distinction an absolute ethical and covenantal antithesis between believers and unbelievers, what do we have in common? How could we even speak with one another? How could a believer communicate with an unbeliever in the hopes of engaging them for the sake of Christ, sharing the gospel with them, praying for them, and hoping that the Lord would come and send his Spirit to work in their lives to redeem them from their sins and to regenerate them?

The point of contact is a theological principle or a concept that we use in Reformed apologetics to speak about the place where the believer and the unbeliever may meet. Quite simply, the point of contact is found in the image of God. All human beings are image bearers. That’s not just something that they have but it is something that they are. We are made in the image of God, and that image is ineradicable. It cannot be removed. It cannot be destroyed. If someone is a human being, they forever will be made in and continuing in the image of God.

Of course, when Adam fell into sin, he and all mankind were damaged. He was condemned and corrupted, and that corruption extends to the full man. We are not as corrupt as we could be, but we are corrupted fully throughout us. We are totally depraved, though not as some would say, utterly depraved.

Nevertheless, there is still an image of God and God’s word still touches and communicates to all who are made in God’s image. Every person retains a measure of moral and ethical faculties in their heart of hearts. They have a conscience, and they know what is right and wrong. Even in Romans Paul writes how the Works of the law have been written even on the hearts of Gentiles.

So no matter what people might do, how they might live their lives, how they might profess with their mouth, what they might say, or how much they might try to suppress the truth in unrighteousness, there’s always a point of contact. As Christian apologists, we need not be ashamed when seeking to provide a defense for the reason for the hope that we have within us. We need not fear because we know so long as we’re speaking with the human being and that there is a point of contact even though we may find ourselves on the other side of an absolute ethical antithesis.

You should have no hope in being able to defend the faith to dogs or cats (certainly not cats!) or other types of animals. But with human beings made in the image of God (and every human being is made and persists in the image of God) we may find this point of contact. That should give us great hope in terms of honoring the Lord with our apologia, that is, with our defense.

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

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

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

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

Adapted from a transcription of the video.

Reformed worship is distinctive because it uses only the Bible and not human traditions or human wisdom for knowing how to worship aright. That leaves Presbyterians in a difficult position, because the Bible doesn’t provide an explicit order of worship. If we are going to follow the Bible in worship, there must be some measure of creativity.

I would prefer for Presbyterians to be more uniform in their order of worship. Presbyterians, however, have been very reluctant to have a General Assembly mandate things in a top-down fashion. Even though we have the “Directory for the Public Worship of God” in The Book of Church Order, we have wanted to give congregations great leeway in how they execute the directory. I think this has hurt Presbyterians at times—when you can go into different Presbyterian churches and have a different kind of service, a different order, and yes, even a different tone as well.

But there is a seriousness that characterizes Reformed and Presbyterian worship because trying to follow God’s Word means avoiding anything that would offend God or would be objectionable. There are all sorts of examples throughout the Bible, especially in the Old Testament, of people offending God with bad worship or false worship. Presbyterians are particularly eager not to engage in false worship, and that’s what the regulative principle tries positively to establish, but exactly what that has meant for Presbyterians has been harder to execute.

If you go to Presbyterian services in Scotland as compared to Ireland as compared to Canada as compared to present-day America, even though they all may be conservative churches, they may be following different kinds of patterns in worship, which is unlike Lutheran or Anglican churches. There you might have greater uniformity between the churches because they’re either using an Anglican prayer book or Lutheran service book. So, that uniformity is something I think Presbyterians still need to work on but with the idea of God as a consuming fire and thus the need to approach him with reverence and awe (Hebrews 12:28). I think this idea has characterized Christians throughout all times, but Reformed Presbyterians have made it particularly important.

Adapted from a transcript of the video.

In the field of Reformed apologetics we sometimes speak about the antithesis. The antithesis is a theological principle that is meant to describe the difference between believers and unbelievers. There are many ways that we could describe that difference, but we must at the very least describe that difference covenantally. That is, it describes a distinction between those who are in Adam and under the terms of the covenant of works and those who are in Christ—those who Christ has redeemed and brought into the covenant of grace. There is a covenantal distinction between these groups.

But we should also recognize that not only is this antithesis covenantal, it is absolute in the sense that there are no other categories of human beings. There is no one who is in some third group. We have those in Adam and those in Christ; there are none others. There is no middle ground. There is no neutrality. There are the two groups of people: those who are still children of wrath and those who have been redeemed by God’s grace and brought into the covenant of grace by the Holy Spirit applying the life death and resurrection of Christ unto them.

The antithesis is covenant and absolute. The antithesis is also ethical. We should not in other words understand this drastic divide between believers and unbelievers as an ontological difference. We should not understand the antithesis as meaning believers are human beings while unbelievers are something other than human beings. Certainly, we recognize that the Holy Spirit works in the hearts and minds of believers. He enlightens their minds and renews their wills so that they would embrace Jesus Christ as he is offered to us in the gospel. We also know that all those born in sin have had their minds darkened. Their hearts are turned against God, and they serve in active rebellion against God, seeking to suppress the truth in unrighteousness. Those are legitimate and significant differences—not merely a figure of speech or words used to describe something that isn’t actually there. Nevertheless, all humans are indeed still humans after the fall into sin.

Still, once Adam fell into sin there’s a great divide, an absolute ethical antithesis that is covenantally determined between those who are in Adam and those who are in Christ. In other words, there is a distinction between those who are children of wrath and those who have been redeemed, are being sanctified, and will arrive at the final day to meet their savior. Christ will bring them as fully sanctified and holy people, fully redeemed, consummate, and glorified people into the New Heavens and the New Earth.

Reformed militancy is something that comes up when you consider J. Gresham Machen because he was known to be a fighter. He defended it and militancy for noble, worthwhile causes that most people would agree with. The question becomes whether Machen overdid it or have Presbyterians have overdone it.

Reformed militancy is contending for the faith. Quite simply, what I think sometimes people forget or miss about Machen is that being a professor at Princeton, he was part of an institution that had a long history of polemical theology. I even think there were appointments in the nineteenth century that included the title of systematic and polemical theology or something like that. And if you go back and read the Princeton Theological Review and before that the Biblical Repertory and Princeton Review, you see article after article written by Princeton faculty and other Presbyterian leaders critical of developments in the church—transcendentalism, abolitionism, and developments in Scotland. I mean they were writing about everything, and they were oftentimes critical of it. So, it wasn’t at all unusual for Machen to do this from his position at Princeton. There was a long history of it.

But the church, you could argue, or American society, you could argue, had become softer by then, and there were efforts to try to make everybody get along and harmonize. And so, now you have someone come along who’s a fighter that doesn’t fit so much. I would argue that Calvin, Knox, and going back through Presbyterian history—back to Europe and the British Isles—Presbyterians have always been fighters. They’ve been sons of a gun. So, you know all the sudden now, they’re supposed to be nice. Where does that come from?

Adapted from a transcript of the video.

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

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

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

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

Adapted from a transcript of the video.

At Reformed Forum we often speak about the organic unity of the Scriptures. This is the basic idea that the Old Testament is naturally related to the New Testament. I’m using “naturally” in distinction from “artificially.” In the Old Testament God is revealing his plan and purpose to his people of old, but he’s revealing it to them in “seed” form.

Just as soon as Adam and Eve sin in Genesis 3, God promises to provide the seed of the woman who would crush the head of the serpent. He promises them a redeemer, no one other than Jesus Christ.

There in Genesis 3 we see Christ, but he is revealed in shadowy form—as a seed compared to a full flowering plant. God’s full plan of redemption in Jesus Christ has not fully unfolded. Later on, we see it in greater detail as God reveals himself to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. We see it through Moses and the Mosaic Covenant through David and the Theocratic Kingdom. In all of these stages, we come to see more and more the greatness and the fullness of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ so that when Jesus Christ comes in the flesh and he accomplishes his perfect work of redemption. He is fulfilling that which was depicted and revealed in advance throughout the Old Testament.

Just as a seed is planted and then watered it comes to sprout from the ground. Over time it grows and matures into a larger plant. We then begin to see it bud and eventually it will blossom into a full flower. All the beauty and grandeur we see in that process over time is part of a whole. No phase is discreet and unrelated to the whole. The parts are naturally—as opposed to artificially—related to one another. What we see in the growth of that plant over time is the unfolding of what it is intended to be from the very beginning.

Likewise, when we read of the Apostles speaking about Christ as the fulfillment of the Old Testament, they are underscoring that Christ is the sum and substance of Old Testament revelation. The Apostles are not artificially placing Christ onto the Old Testament Scriptures as if they’re somehow engaging in some form of reader response theory. Jesus is not tacked onto the message of the Old. The Scriptures from beginning to end are all about Jesus Christ. He is the sum and substance of the word of God. He is the word of God incarnate and all of his word is organically related.

The Modernist-Fundamentalist Controversy occurred in the 1920s. When I teach it, I typically talk about the social aspects of it, the high points being the Scopes Trial of 1925 and the effort to remove the teaching of evolution from public schools. This wasn’t simply an anti-science movement, though there were clearly aspects of that. Indeed, “science vs. faith” is a recurring theme in the history of Christianity.

But William Jennings Bryan and others were concerned about eugenics, which was a prominent feature of the scientific establishment at this point in time. Eugenics was the idea that you could breed better human beings. It is the fruition of Darwinism in many respects. There were efforts at the time to restrict unfit people from from procreating. Advocates sometimes even included Roman Catholics in this prohibition. Protestants were worried that Roman Catholics were breeding like rabbits. Eugenics was a way to try to control the population. Bryan recognized this, and the textbook that was under review during the Scopes trial did teach eugenics. So this wasn’t simply science versus faith. This was also an issue of public health.

Denominationally, there were controversies in the Baptist world over theological liberalism. There was also a controversy in the Presbyterian world over theological liberalism. Those dates don’t coincide with the Scopes trial. So you have all these controversies coming together—some denominational some political. Some historians, as people tend to do, lumped these different groups together and called them “fundamentalists.” But when you look at the particular aspects of this lump, whether Baptist or Presbyterian, they don’t line up. In some ways you lose a real sense of what was going on in the Presbyterian side of this controversy if you just call it the “Fundamentalist Controversy.”

For instance, I was recently reading a piece by a grad student at Stanford trying to link Machen and his views on inerrancy through McIntire to Schaeffer to the Christian right. This was quite a set of lumping to do. The student didn’t seem to be aware of the particular nuances to the Princeton view of inerrancy and other concerns that Machen had in his critique of liberalism.

If you just use these categories like “fundamentalist,” “evangelical,” or “mainline,” you miss a lot of the detail. For me at least what makes history fun is the variety—it’s the way things don’t line up. It’s the jostling of ideas. There’s a tension there. You can divide historians into two groups: the splitters and the lumpers. People that use “fundamentalism” as a handle are the lumpers; I’m a splitter.

Adapted from a transcript of the video.

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

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

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

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

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

When I was first introduced to Reformed covenant theology, things were really confusing. I kept trying to figure out how many covenants there were and how they related to one another. I was hearing ideas from a wide range of voices, but over time, I started to become more convinced of and more familiar with the classical, typical confessional view of covenant theology that we find perhaps best encapsulated and codified in the Westminster Confession of Faith and its catechisms, the Larger Catechism and the Shorter Catechism.

Quite simply, there are two main covenants that God establishes with mankind. The first is called the covenant of works. Sometimes it’s called the covenant of life or the covenant of creation. This is the covenant established in Genesis 2:16–17. In this passage, God commands Adam not to eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil for in the day that he would eat of it, he would surely die. That was a covenant.

Implicit in that covenant is also the promise of life. If Adam would have obeyed throughout the time of his probation, he would have entered into glorified, consummate life in the new heavens and new earth. If you’d like more details, we seek to demonstrate this exegetically in my course, Introduction to Covenant Theology.

But Adam did not successfully pass through his probation; he fell into sin. He broke the terms of that covenant and was cursed. And he brought all human kind into condemnation with him—all but our savior Jesus Christ. Jesus did not descend from Adam in terms of ordinary generation, but he was conceived in the womb of the Virgin Mary by the power of the Holy Spirit. And praise be to God for that for now we have a redeemer.

Just as soon as Adam fell into sin and brought condemnation upon the whole human race, God promised a champion, a redeemer. He promised the seed of the woman who would crush the head of the serpent. Right there in Genesis 3, we learn of the promise of a new covenant, a covenant of salvation, a covenant of grace.

So there are two main covenants. All human beings find themselves in one or the other. Either in the covenant of works under the federal headship or representation of Adam as fallen or as a member of the covenant of grace as one who is redeemed by our lord and savior Jesus Christ. You can find this in many different passages throughout the scriptures, but perhaps most notably Romans 5:12–21 and 1 Corinthians 15.

Dr. D. G. Hart speaks about the Old School-New School Controversy in the Presbyterian Church in the United States of America, which lasted from 1837 to 1870 in the North.

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

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

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

The Old Side/New Side controversy occurred in colonial presbyterianism between 1741 and 1758 with a couple of stages in between. It was a controversy that grew out of the first—I don’t like to call it great, but pretty good awakening. That’s a phrase I get from an old friend, who is now deceased, Leo Ribuffo, historian at George Washington University. It’s not my own, but I do think it’s a useful way of thinking about the way we talk about events. We say it’s great. Well, there was a Great Depression. How great was the Great Depression? We tend to think, oh, a Great Awakening, well, it must be really great!

But for those who oppose the awakening, it wasn’t so great. So that was the old side. They were concerned that the people promoting revival were violating all sorts of presbyterian procedures, preaching outside of bounds, going into the town of another church and preaching there without the permission of the pastor, ordination requirements, requiring ministers to give a conversion narrative.

That related to piety as well. Did someone need to be converted to be a minister? The old side would have said, well, of course they must be a Christian, but is conversion the only way to become a Christian? Or could you be a covenant child baptized, reared in the church, make profession of faith with not ever having a conversion experience? Those were the issues going on.

In the heat of the moment, the pro-revivalists were very concerned and very convinced that they were right and probably a tad self-righteous about it. So the old side said, no, we’d like to back away from this. The church synods went their separate ways. They reunited in 1758 with a plan of union that few people actually study. If you do look at it, it’s a curious document. It was able to heal this breach in the church.

The next stage of the presbyterian church is to form the first General Assembly in 1789. This is a very early stage of the church. Presbyterianism in America only started in 1706. So the church is in its adolescence as it’s working out these events and circumstances.

Adapted from a transcript of the video.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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