Category: Theology

“Christ is indeed the savior of all people prior to the day of judgment (I Tim. 4:10). Christ sustains the whole universe (Col. 1:17). Without Him, no living thing could survive. He grants to His creatures such gifts as time, law, order, power, and knowledge. He grants all of these gifts to Satan and his rebellious host. The answer to the question, ‘Does God show His grace and mercy to all creation, including Satan?’ is emphatically yes. Satan is given time and power to do his evil work. To the next question, ‘Does this mean that God in some way demonstrates an attitude of favor towards Satan?’ the answer is emphatically no. God is no more favorable toward Satan and his demons than he is to Satan’s human followers. But this does not mean that He does not bestow gifts upon them — gift that they in no way deserve.

Thus the doctrine of common grace must apply not only to men but also to Satan and the fallen angels. This is what Van Til denies, because he defines common grace as favor in general rather than gifts in general. The second concept does not imply the first.

God does not favor ‘mankind’ as such. He showers favors on all men, but this does not mean that he favors men in general. Man in general rebelled against Him in the garden. Adam and Eve, mankind’s representative, brought the entire human race under God’s wrath. God in His grace gave them time and covenant promises, for He looked forward to the death of His Son on the cross. On this basis and only on this basis, men have been given life in history. Some have been give life in order to extend God’s Kingdom, while others have been give life (like Pharaoh) to demonstrate God’s power, and to heap coals of fire eternally on their head.”

Dr. Gary North
Dominion and Common Grace — The Biblical bases of progress –pg. 44-45

Whether or not common grace really exists has been a bone of contention for centuries. If common grace exists then the seeming problem is that we are insisting that God loves those that Scripture teaches he has hated before they were born. A genuine contradiction. If common grace doesn’t exist then the seeming problem is that it is difficult to see how it could be true that “the goodness of God to the reprobate was intended to lead them to repentance,” or how in despising this genuine goodness of God towards them they were storing up God’s wrath. If God never had any inclination of goodness towards them that was to issue in repentance then how could they be storing up God’s wrath by living in defiance of that goodness?

The answer to this is in making distinctions between God’s gifts (favors) given and God’s favor given. Perhaps common grace should be defined as God giving gifts (favors) to those (reprobate) whom He has no favor towards. If we could use this definition then we could say that God extends favors towards the reprobate without extending favor to the reprobate. By extending His favors towards the reprobate, He superintends how His eternal decree works out in time so that the reprobate who have been differentiated from the elect from eternity by God differentiate themselves from the elect in time and history.

Try to imagine the reprobate as Christmas Geese set apart for the day of destruction by Farmer John. Over the course of the year Farmer John gives the Christmas Geese the best of gifts in the way of feed that will fatten them up. On the outside it may even look that Farmer John favors the Christmas Geese even more then the other Geese of the barnyard.

Despite the gifts of Farmer John the Christmas Geese despise Farmer John. Through their despite of Farmer John they are storing up wrath. In all of this Farmer John gave gifts to the Geese without having any intention of favor.

By dividing common grace up in this fashion we avoid the contradiction that God loves those He has set apart for destruction while at the same time we avoid denying that God gives good gifts to the reprobate. We would also be able to truthfully teach that the reprobate despise the goodness of God, that the reprobate have only themselves to blame for not repenting in the face of God’s goodness, that the reprobate, by not repenting have stored up for themselves God’s wrath because of their hardness of heart.

Some might insist (with understandable reasons) that this is equivocating on the traditional definition of common grace. Perhaps we should call this God’s “common benevolence.” If we did that then we could deny common grace while insisting upon common benevolence.

I realize that this still needs work.

I.) Roman Catholicism & Kingdom of God

Since the Kingdom of God is closely identified with the Church, if any institution or cultural phenomenon is to be part of the Kingdom of God it must come under the authority of the Church. The Church is the Kingdom in this world and holds within its power and jurisdiction every aspect and domain of life.

All in the Church were considered part of the Kingdom but there developed theoretical moral standard distinctions between clergy and laity. Such accounts for the rise of monasticism within the Church. All within the church was clean but the monastic orders were the Holy that kept all else clean. All outside the church was unclean.

In Christian countries this resulted in the entire social life being covered by the wings of the institutional visible Church.

So thorough was church control that the Roman Catholic Church had guidelines for the days when husbands and wives could consummate their marriage.

As a natural result the world corrupted the Church, and by its dominion over the world the Church proved an obstacle to every free development of life. Nothing was allowed to develop independently according to its nature under the hand of God.

Three distinctions here then …

1.) Church / Kingdom

a.) Holy — Monastic orders / Church proper
b.) Clean — All else in the Church

2.) All outside the Church / Kingdom

This gives us a minor dualism within the Church (between Holy & Clean) and a major dualism between the Church and all outside the Church.

In the church we live and move and have our being.

II.) Anabaptism & The Kingdom Of God

Whereas for Roman Catholicism if anything was to be part of the Kingdom of God it had to come under and be supervised by the Church, for anabaptists the Church and the Kingdom of God were co-extensive.

For the anabaptist the Kingdom of God is a believing community where all members are to be part of the monastic orders that existed in Roman Catholicism conceptions. All in the believing community must be separate and holy the way that the monks and certain clerical orders were separate and holy.

The anabaptists believed that the unbaptized world was under the curse and for that reason anabaptists withdrew from all civil institutions.

If civil life was to be participated in it must be brought under the guardianship of the anabaptist kingdom community and remodeled.

Two distinctions here then

1.) Church / Kingdom in which all is Holy

2.) All outside Church Kingdom is evil and wicked

This is a dualism.

In the Church we live and move and have our being.

III.) Radical Two Kingdom & The Kingdom of God

Two Kingdoms

God’s Right Hand — The Church / Personal individual ethics

Spiritual — meaning non-corporeal

Uniquely Holy

Ruled by Scripture

God’s Left Hand — Everything else

Material realm

Ruled by Natural Law — No, appeal to Scripture allowed

Uniquely Common

Church is silent though Christians are involved as long as Christians don’t appeal to the Bible for their convictions.

Dualism —

All in Church is Holy
All Outside of Church is common

No such thing as christian culture. Christendom is bad.

Never the twain shall meet.

Very similar to anabaptist with these exceptions ….

Anabaptist see all outside the Church as wicked and so not to be involved with by their people. R2Kt see all outside the church as common and to be involved with by their people as long as their people don’t seek to Christianize the common realm. In different ways both see the non-Church realm as hopeless. One says that there is to be no involvement with the realm of hopelessness while the other says that involvement with the realm of hopelessness is allowed.

IV.) Calvinism & The Kingdom Of God

“The Kingdom may be said to be considered a broader concept than the Church, because the Kingdom aims at nothing less than the complete control of all the manifestations of life. It represents the dominion of God in every sphere of human endeavor.”

— Berkhof, Systematic Theology, pg. 570

Calvinism denies that the church can be equated with the Kingdom: The church is not the Kingdom, but is in the Kingdom.

Calvin’s conception of the Kingdom eliminated the church as the manifest Kingdom and made the individual Christian, in his activity, the citizen of that eternal order by virtue of divine grace.

A key notion of Calvinist concept of Kingdom is the reality that the Kingdom has differing expressions. Calvinism believes that God is sovereign over all, and that no one sphere captures the exhaustiveness of God’s sovereignty or Kingdom.

In the Calvinist concept the one (unity) and the many (diversity) is honored. The one is honored because it is recognized that God is sovereign over all. The many is honored because it is recognized that God’s omnipresent sovereignty is expressed multilaterally.

All is Holy or unholy dependent upon how the life of each is governed by individual Christians handling faithfully the Word of God. No mediatorial institutions remain. Institutions are ministerial at best. Christian culture and Christian institutions can come to pass as Christian people incarnate their Christian faith in all that they do.

The Church’s, “as institution” role is to herald and minister Christ and His grace and to faithfully handle the keys of the Kingdom. Ministering Christ and His grace means to faithfully set forth both the indicatives and the imperatives of Scripture. As the Church faithfully sets forth the whole counsel of God, the Church as organism is equipped to take that counsel and apply it to their respective callings.

Try to look at it as kind of a reverse pollen gathering reality. The member bees come into the Church and gather the pollen whereupon they take that pollen out into their respective callings giving their respective callings the aroma of Christ.

The Church’s authority outside of its sphere as such is merely spiritual and persuasive. The Church has no sword to force itself upon the other spheres.

There is no dualism here.

God is sovereign over all.

There is nothing that can’t be brought under that sovereignty and be made uniquely Christian.

However there are distinctions here between the way God’s sovereignty is expressed in differing Kingdoms / Realms / Spheres.

Because God’s sovereignty is emphasized, only here do we find that it is in God that we live and move and have our being.

Sources

Kuyper — Stone Lectures
Rushdoony — Politics of Guilt & Pity
Berkhof — Systematic Theology
Verduin — The Reformers & Their Stepchildren

“The Levites are types of Christ just as earth is a type of heaven.”

It’s always encouraging to the teacher when the students begin to get it.

“Some men please themselves with constant regularity of life and constancy of behavior; some are punctual in attendance of public worship – perhaps even in the performance of private worship. Such men are not hypocrites. The virtues that they practice arise from their principles. Their religion is sincere. What is reprehensible is that it is partial.”

Samuel Johnson
Rasselas

Victory only comes to those who are full in without reserve. We are living in times where half measures will be completely defeated.

I have often times written and insisted that the Doctrines of Grace (fashionably styled as TULIP) absolutely require the larger context of the Reformed faith in order to retain their meaning. This means that those who hold to TULIP while denying the larger context of the Reformed Faith either don’t really hold to TULIP or are involved in some serious contradictions. I have, on ironink especially made that argument regarding the sacraments.

Recently, I stumbled across an article that makes that same overall argument in spades. I highly recommend it. It was written by Dr. Richard Muller and can be found at,

http://kimriddlebarger.squarespace.com/how-many-points/

I am going to hit some highlights here for those who don’t have the time to read ten pages.

“They also — all of them (Reformed confessions) — agree on the assumption that our assurance of the salvation, wrought by grace alone through the work of Christ and God’s Spirit in us, rests not on our outward deeds or personal claims but on our apprehension of Christ in faith and on our recognition of the inward work of the Spirit in us. Because this assurance is inward and cannot easily or definitively be externalized, all of these documents also agree that the church is both visible and invisible — that it is a covenanted people of God identified not by externalized indications of the work of God in individuals, such as adult conversion experiences but by the preaching of the word of God and the right administration of the sacraments.”

In today’s evangelical church the push is commonly towards externalizing indications that a work of God in individuals has taken place. This push was seen once upon a time in raising a hand or walking an aisle or sitting at the seekers bench. When the Pentecostals came along indications became a little more bizarre. With the third wave we have external indications of God’s work that range from swinging from chandeliers to making animal sounds. What the evangelical church misses is that God has given us externalized indications of his work in the Word preached and the Sacraments distributed. When we push for these non Word and Sacrament externalized indications we are subtly moving away from the importance of the Church where the God given externalized indications take place in Word and Sacrament and are moving towards an individualized me and Jesus Christianity. After all, you don’t need to be at church to get an electric Holy Spirit charge, and even if you are at church the emphasis of church gets changed from God acting in Word and Sacrament to a anticipation of when the Holy Spirit will cause some strange and aberrant behavior. Because we are totally depraved God works in us through the ordained means of Word and Sacrament. Moving the emphasis from the means of grace that God uses to resurrect sinners, to funky behavior that can be mimicked by anybody overturns the TULIP applecart.

“Baptism, rightly understood from the human side, signifies the placement of our children into the context where the promised grace of God is surely at work. And who more than an infant, incapable of meritorious works, can indicate to us that this salvation is by grace alone? By way of contrast, the restriction of baptism to adult believers who make a “decision” and who come forward voluntarily to receive a mere ordinance stands against recognition of baptism as a sign of utter graciousness on the part of God: Baptism here is offered only to certain individuals who have passed muster before a human, albeit churchly, court — or to state the problem slightly differently, who have had a particular experience viewed as the necessary prerequisite to baptism by a particular churchly group. If grace and election relate to this post-decision baptism, they can hardly be qualified by the terms “irresistible” and “unconditional.” There is an inescapable irony in refusing baptism to children, offering it only to adults, and then telling the adults that they must become as little children in order to inherit the kingdom of heaven.”

Muller then moves on to slice and dice the evangelical piety and nomenclature that talks about “having a personal relationship with Jesus.” Muller suggest that such talk that belies such an easy and casual intimacy can possibly detract from the “majesty of the doctrine of Christ’s Kingship.” He also suggests that this “personal relationship” language with its implied reciprocity may subtly inject in our thinking that salvation is, like any personal relationship, a co-operative effort. Muller suggests, by appealing to the Heidelberg Catechism, that a more Reformed way to speak than speaking of a “personal relationship” is by speaking that we belong in body and soul and in life and death to our faithful savior Jesus Christ.

Anyway … I recommend the whole article for your perusal. I would only slightly question Muller on two points. First, I would slightly question the way he connects the decrees of God in eternity to the way those decrees come to fruition in space and time. Muller rightly faults some people for not having a temporal order of grace. I would only add that that other people probably need to be faulted for not understanding that their temporal order of grace needs to be anchored in an a-temporal order of grace.

Second, I could wish that Muller saw the connection between a vigorous postmillennialism and the doctrines of grace. I agree with everything he says about amillennialism (and I think he uses “amillennialism” to include postmillennial notions) but I believe that a denial of a victorious eschatology flies in the face of the perseverance of the saints. Granted, amillennialism perseveres the saints but they persevere in the context of defeat. Postmillennialism does more justice to the triumph of Christ over all of his enemies in my estimation.

Anyway … great article by Dr. Muller. Give it a read and tell me what you think.