May

'Which Comes First?' is the first of three Analyses that are not so much focussed directly on John Piper's book The Future of Justification, (Crossway, 2007) as prompted by it.

The second extract from Calvin: A Guide for the Perplexed, on the Reformer's views on the atonement, is also made available.

Next month it is intended to post the third extract from Calvin for the perplexed, 'Liberty, Luxury, Calling', and the second of the trio of Analyses on The Future of Justification, 'Baxter's Soup and Wright's Soap'.

Analysis 14 - Which Comes First?

John Piper

John Piper's book The Future of Justification (Crossway, 2007) is a great thing. If you have not read it, then you must. It is a clear, passionate, informed, pared down, thoroughly documented, careful expose of the Bishop of Durham's views on justification. It certainly needs no support in this task from Helm’s Deep.

But one or two things in the book deserve underlining, and in one case developing. In this Analysis I do some underlining, in the next two , ‘Baxter’s Soup and Wright’s Soap’, and ‘Aspirational Theology’, some developing.

In this Analysis I shall try to do two things.

The first is to draw attention to what I believe is one of the most significant methodological points that Piper makes, but one which may, in the flurry of interest about justification, and the dust raised by it, get overlooked. The second thing is to underline what Piper says about the ambiguity of some of Bishop Wright’s language about imputation and justification. What both of these have in common is that Piper shows us the need to observe theological distinctions.

Being and doing

Piper claims that ’Wright’s definition of righteousness does not go deep enough’ (62) What he means is that Wright’s account of divine righteousness starts and stops with his account of divine actions.(62-4) He treats righteousness in terms of actions. Piper asks, ’What is it abut God’s righteousness that inclines him to act in these ways? Behind each of those actions is the assumption that there is something about God’s righteousness that explains why he acts as he dos. What is that? That is the question, so far as I can see, that Wright does not ask.” (63 Piper’s emphasis) ‘God’s righteousness, , before there was a covenant, determined that punishment for sin would be part of what happens in the covenant (and outside it!)…..Limiting the “righteousness of God” in this context (ie Romans 3.25 etc.) to covenantal categories is too narrow.’ (68)

Piper's concern is not over some definition of righteousness not being adequate, but over the coherence of an account of divine righteousness that does not begin with who God is. Being, the being of God, comes first; acting is a consequence of being. This is true generally; glass is not fragile because it easily smashes, it easily smashes because it is fragile. In God’s case, doing righteously follows from being righteous. Acting faithfully is a consequence of being faithful. Wright’s account is not deep enough because it does not start with the character of God, but with the actions of God.

Piper’s identification of this failure in Wright is of considerable significance in his treatment of the Bishop’s view. But it is also vitally important more generally in Christian theology. For various reasons it is at present hugely fashionable to think of theology in narrative form: covenant (Horton), speech-act theory and ‘theodrama’ (VanHoozer), and, more generally, to think predominantly in the category of history, redemptive history, ‘biblical theology’. (Let’s call what is common to all these approaches, whatever their differences, ‘N theology’). In Wright’s case this way of thinking is habitual because he is first and foremost a historian, and so first and foremost thinks in terms of historical sequences, of sequences of action, human and divine, and of their significance.

But Piper has put his finger on, and highlighted, an inherent weakness with such approaches. They all need what a merely narrative, sequential focus does not and cannot deliver. They need a doctrine of God. (Piper has said this before, and at greater length, in his wonderful book The Justification of God, (Baker, 1983), but to say it again in The Future of Justification is more timely than when he first said it, I imagine.)

But if the Bible is a grand narrative, (not, incidentally, a 'meta-narrative') an account of God’s dealings in ‘redemptive historical’ terms, and nothing more than that, where does a doctrine of God come from? For the narrative theologian it can only come from a summation of divine actions, a generalization from them. God acts faithfully on this, that and the other occasion, and therefore he is faithful. But one thing is sure, that won’t work. It won’t work logically. (I know that life is more than logic, but it cannot be less than logic.) Why is this? Because from

(1) God has done A and then he has done B and then he has done C, and all these are faithful (or righteous, or loving or wise) actions

It does not follow that

(2) God is faithful (or righteous, or loving or wise)

At least it only follows that God happens to be faithful, in a similar way to the way you and I happen to be faithful. From the mere fact that God has been faithful on X occasions it does not follow that he will be faithful next time, X + 1. So God’s righteousness cannot be equivalent to covenant faithfulness, though covenant faithfulness follows from it. God might swear an oath, and he might confirm this with another oath. But what about next time?

The argument of the writer to the Hebrews is strikingly different from that of an N-theologian

So when God desired to show more convincingly to the heirs of the promise the unchangeable character of his purpose, he guaranteed it with an oath, so that by two unchangeable things, in which it is impossible for God to lie, we who have fled for refuge might have strong encouragement to hold fast to the hope set before us. (Heb. 6.17-9)

How does the writer get from ‘God gives two oaths’ to ‘these two oaths are unchangeably faithful and therefore can be utterly relied upon’? Answer, because an oath (usually) appeals to something greater. In this case God does not swear by something greater, but swears by himself. Why is that? Because there is nothing greater in respect of faithfulness than God himself, and (in respect of a covenant) that nothing-greater-than is expressed by the impossibility of God lying. God might have appealed to something that was generally faithful. But this would not have given the necessary credibility. It would have been swearing by something less than himself. But swearing by himself, swearing by one than whom there is no greater, underlines in a dramatic way the utter reliability of his covenant, the impossibility of it failing by God having lied.

So from where does the writer of Hebrews get to the impossibility of God lying? Answer: he must get it from non-narrative aspects of the narrative. These are aspects that, physically speaking, are within the narrative, but they do not have the logic of a narrative. They have the logic of declarations or announcements; the character of our old friend the proposition. God tells us truths about himself, (or as seems to be the case in Hebrews 6) he grants the inspired writer an insight that enables him to draw an inference that would have escaped the rest of us. Such declarations or inferences of a declarative nature about God stitch the narrative together. They make it not merely a narrative about God but God’s narrative.

Of course the suggestion that God might not be faithful next time seems preposterous to N-theologians. But it seems preposterous because they smuggle in another thought – that God is essentially or necessarily faithful. Where does this come from? From God’s self-revelation, a self-revelation that is about a timeless reality even though the act of revealing occurs in time. (Exodus 34 is a paradigm of this.) N-theology, concerned only with historical sequences, does not allow us that thought, but at this point – mercifully – the practice of the N-theologian is often better than his preaching. He gains leverage by a means that by the lights of N-theology is illicit. He stands on the shoulders of the Berkhofian systematic theologian.

I’d go so far as to maintain that the systematic theological task does not need biblical theology or any of its friends. What we do need is exegetical theology. I gain some encouragement to assert this from something that John Piper says. ‘Behind each of those actions is the assumption that there is something about God’s righteousness that explains why he acts as he does. What is that? I do not ask it for speculative reasons but exegetical ones.’ (63) Exegesis shows (Piper believes) that ‘What we find therefore in the Old Testament and in Paul is that God defines ‘right’ in terms of himself. There is no other standard to consult than his own infinitely worthy being’. (64, Piper’s emphasis).

Which comes first? Doing is an expression of being. Being comes first. There’s much more to be said, but enough for now.


‘On the basis of’, ‘according to’, ‘in accordance with which’.

Piper has an excellent, sustained discussion (in most of chapters 6-8 of the book) of the unsatisfactoriness of Bishop Wright’s claim that justification is ‘on the basis of……’. or ‘according to......’. Here I certainly do not think it is possible, on the available evidence, to do better than Piper does in trying to settle what Bishop Wright means when he uses these expressions. All I shall attempt is to sharpen the sources of the ambiguity which, as Piper shows (and despite 10,000 words of commentary by Bishop Wright on an earlier draft of The Future of Justification), still lies at the heart of the bishop’s views.

Bishop Wright’s views are fairly obviously ambiguous at this point, both in the sense that (though being ready to accuse others of ‘fuzzy’ thinking) he has not troubled to clarify the senses of ‘on the basis of’ or ‘according to’ and also because, as Piper shows, he flip flops from passage to passage, now stating that justification is on the basis of this, and now claiming that it is on the basis of that.

The distinction that needs to be drawn, and that Piper draws (e.g.119) is surely pretty straightforward. It is the distinction between something itself, and the evidence of that thing. Sometimes the evidence for a thing is part of that thing, sometimes it is distinct from that thing, it is what that thing is related to, or typically or usually manifests or expresses. The evidence of having measles is a high temperature, for this is one of the ways in which the viral infection we call measles characteristically expresses itself. The evidence of having been born in Blackpool may be a birth certificate that states as much. But ‘causing a rise in bodily temperature’ is not what measles is, not even a part of what measles is. And ‘possessing a certificate with my name on it stating that I was born in Blackpool’ is not what being born in Blackpool is. Being born in Blackpool is being in Blackpool when one was born. Usually the certificate is only a part of the evidence of being born in Blackpool, or (in certain circumstances) it may be the whole of the evidence for that fact. In normal circumstances, the rise in temperature confirms the fact of measles (along with other evidence), the birth certificate confirms the fact of being born in Blackpool (along with other evidence).

Justification ‘on the basis of works’ could thus mean one of three things. It could mean (a) that justification consists in the performance of certain actions, or (b) that justification partly consists in the performance of certain actions or (c) that justification is something which certain actions give evidence of the presence or reality of. There does not seem to be a fourth alternative. These alternatives have nothing to do with the doctrine of justification by works, but with what ‘on the basis of’ may mean.

So why does Wright not immediately disambiguate? Why does he not say, ‘I see, of course, the distinction between X and the evidence of X, and that these may be different. And what I am saying is…..’ and then provide us an answer of type (a) or (b) or (c)? Partly, perhaps, because of a certain ecumenical motivation, a desire to look for an approach that will harmonise his doctrine with that of the Reformation. But chiefly because he can’t, since certain concepts are intrinsic to certain doctrines. (See Piper, 131-2) The problem is that the concepts inherent in the Reformed doctrine of the imputed righteousness of Christ – imputation, alien righteousness, the instrumentality of faith, and the like - cannot be translated into other categories. They can be translated into different words, provided with definitional equivalents, but that’s not the point. Ultimately we are dealing not with words but with things and their expression in concepts.

Bishop Wright comes as near as he can to the Reformed view but has the opinion that the doctrine of the imputation of the righteousness of Christ is ‘saying a substantially right thing in a substantially wrong way’. (quoted in Piper, 131) But there is not something, the doctrine of X, which can be less well expressed in the categories of the Reformation, and better expressed in the categories employed by the Bishop of Durham. If you state the doctrine in a substantially wrong way this affects the substance of what you say. And then you lose that substance; it changes into another substance, and what you state is something else.


A common pattern?

Although the two matters that we have briefly touched on in this Analysis are quite different, perhaps they exhibit a common pattern or tendency of thinking, a tendency to conflate X and the evidence for X: to say, the evidence of God’s righteousness is God’s righteousness: the evidence of justification is justification. Is this the result of a disinclination to make distinctions, and to draw logical inferences? Is this also a feature of N-theology? Maybe we can even draw another moral, that certain doctrines essentially involve certain concepts. If for whatever reason you change those concepts you necessarily change the doctrine.

Which comes first? In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.

2 - Calvin and the Atonement

We now turn our attention to Christ’s work, and first to his priesthood.

In his great work Cur Deus Homo Anselm of Canterbury (1033-1109) argued that given God’s intention to restore humanity, atonement by God was necessary in virtue of the depth of human sin, and that atonement must be made by the God-man in order to restore human nature. Whether or not Calvin was directly influenced by Anselm - and it seems likely that he was not - he nevertheless uses Anselmian language to characterise the atonement. He rarely quotes or refers to Anselm directly. In fact there is only one quotation from him in the Institutes but this has no connection with the atonement. Since in drawing attention to Calvin's Anselmianism no direct literary influence is evident, perhaps the true explanation of Calvin’s language is simply that Anselmianism was ‘in the air’ in the circles in which he first learned theology, and that he came to believe that this outlook fairly expressed the biblical view.

But Calvin is not straightforwardly Anselmian because, rather surprisingly, we find two views of the atonement, and two views of the necessity of the atonement, side by side in Calvin’s writings. The first, the main view, is to be found expounded in extenso in the Institutes and elsewhere, and is expressed by the following representative statements.

It deeply concerned us, that he who was to be our Mediator should be very God and very man. If the necessity be inquired into, it was not what is commonly called simply or absolute, but flowed from the divine decree on which the salvation of man depended. What was best for us, our most merciful Father determined. …...The case was certainly desperate, if the Godhead itself did not descend to us, it being impossible for us to ascend Thus the Son of God behoved to become our Emmanuel, i.e. God with us.

He writes of the necessity of the atonement, that it is ‘required’, and that the atonement must be undertaken by the very majesty of God himself in the person of the Son becoming Immanuel. 'For if Adam's uprightness had not failed, he along with the angels would have been like God, and it would not have been necessary for the Son of God to become either man or angel'. This was in reply to the Lutheran, Andreas Osiander, (1498-1565) who to Calvin's extreme annoyance held that if Adam had not sinned the Incarnation would nevertheless have occurred. Note that Osiander's claim is not that there could be atonement without incarnation (and so without blood shedding) but that there could have been incarnation without atonement. Calvin denied this, claiming that the Incarnation was a gracious response to human sin.

But does Calvin go to the other extreme, voluntarism? Does the fact that the necessity of the Incarnation, for Calvin, 'stemmed from a heavenly decree' undermine the Anselmianism? Is the heavenly decree to be understood as governing the fact of reconciliation or the nature of the reconciliation? If the first, then Calvin’s Anselmianism is at once compromised. In the passage just cited, at least, Calvin appears to conflate the two. However, this stress on the heavenly decree is taken up later, in a passage which several commentators have understood in a non-Anselmian way.

For Christ could not merit anything save by the good pleasure of God, but only inasmuch as he was destined to appease the wrath of God by his sacrifice, and wipe away our transgressions by his obedience: in one word, since the merit of Christ depends entirely on the grace of God (which provided this mode of salvation for us), the latter is no less appropriately opposed to all righteousness of men than the former.

But the point made here is in fact identical to that just discussed, and not, I believe, susceptible of a non-Anselmian interpretation as regards the mode of atonement. The words don't imply that the meritoriousness of Christ's atonement is due solely to God's decision that it be meritorious. Rather, Calvin is saying that we benefit from Christ's merit because it was God's will that we should. Nevertheless, in the reference to the heavenly decree of Inst. II.12.1, perhaps Calvin is hinting at the decidedly unAnselmian idea that God could have decreed redemption in another way, a view we shall shortly hear more of. Even if this is so, we need not think that Calvin holds that God‘s acceptance of some action as meritorious is sufficient for it to be meritorious, the doctrine of acceptio that originates with the mediaeval theologian Duns Scotus . What is 'best for us' is what is the best way of delivering us from our plight, and the point of what follows in the Institutes is to establish that only the descent of the very majesty of God would manage that.

In these extracts Calvin conflates two questions, seeing no need to separate them. The first is, in order for there to be pardon for sin, and so reconciliation between God and man, did there have to be an atonement? To this Calvin gives an affirmative answer. The second is, given that there had to be an atonement, who could provide the atonement of the sort that is necessary? Calvin answers: only the God-man, who was destined for this role by the grace of God. These questions are strictly speaking distinct, for it is possible to suppose that an answer to the question 'If there is to be salvation must there be an atonement?' should be answered affirmatively, but that there be a number of alternative possible answers to the question 'Who then may atone?' But Calvin takes the question as one question, not as two. One might press the issue further by asking, what must constitute the act of atonement? But as far as I am aware Calvin does not raise this further question.

Terms such as 'hypothetical' and 'necessary' in regard to the atonement have been variously used. In order to clarify the subsequent discussion the following distinctions are necessary.

(1) Necessarily, given creation and fall, there is to be reconciliation via the God-man
(2) Necessarily, if there is to be reconciliation, then it will be by atonement by the God-man
and
(3) If there is to be reconciliation, then possibly it will be by atonement by the God-man

I shall call (I) the absolute view, (2) the necessary view, and (3) the hypothetical view of the atonement. Only (2) and (3) are relevant to our discussion, since no party in this debate, certainly no view attributable to Calvin, subscribes to (1), since reconciliation is regarded by him as a free action of God. It is not an absolutely necessary matter that there be salvation at all, and given that reconciliation arises from God’s decree or decision there are necessary and hypothetical variants of this – reconciliation that necessitates atonement/satisfaction, or in some other way.

In my view, in the Institutes Calvin uniformly (though by implication) denies (3) and explicitly affirms (2), as this passage (among many others) indicates.

Another principal part of our reconciliation with God was, that man, who had lost himself by his disobedience, should by way of remedy, oppose to it obedience, satisfy the justice of God, and pay the penalty of sin. Therefore, our Lord came forth very man, adopted the person of Adam, and assumed his name, that he might in his stead obey the Father; that he might present our flesh as the price of satisfaction to the just judgment of God, and in the same flesh pay the penalty which we had incurred. Finally, since as God only he could not suffer, and as man only could not overcome death, he united the human nature with the divine, that he might subject the weakness of the one to death as an expiation of sin, and by the power of the other, maintaining a struggle with death, might gain us the victory.

This statement of Calvin's regarding the necessity of the atonement and the necessity of the eternal Son atoning by taking on human nature, has a decidedly Anselmian ring. Each corresponds in turn to the main two features of Anselm's project in Cur Deus Homo, that atonement is necessary for pardon, and that only atonement by the God-man is sufficient.

So far we may say that Calvin's approach to the atonement is Anselmian in its basic logic. However there are several important respects in which Calvin is not Anselmian. First, and most obviously, he does not argue remoto Christo, as if Christ had never been. Quite the contrary. In committing himself to the necessity of the atonement Calvin is, or believes that he is, simply summarising the Scriptural record regarding Christ and his work. Anselm's project was to argue a priori for the necessity of the atonement, claiming that any atonement considered as a reconciliation of God and mankind had to have a certain character. By contrast, Calvin proceeds a posteriori, from the revealed data. This is not a mere accidental difference. Calvin would not have been in sympathy with an a priori approach to the question, because of its potential for speculation, and because of the way in which such an approach takes its leave of the text of Scripture. He explicitly makes the point about the need to avoid speculation in his polemic against Osiander.

He who considers these things with due attention, will easily disregard vague speculations, which attract giddy minds and lovers of novelty. One speculation of this class is, that Christ, even though there had been no need of his interposition to redeem the human race, would still have become man.

Connected with this a priori emphasis in Anselm is his characteristic appeal to 'reason', his attempt to uncover the underlying rationale of a revealed doctrine. Calvin is much more cautious, attempting to adhere to the biblical data and what they imply. So we might say that Calvin takes up some of Anselm's conclusions, in particular that the atonement is necessary in our sense (2), without endorsing his arguments for those conclusions.

Apart from this, on the evidence of Institutes II.12.5 Calvin is simply making the point that to consider whether incarnation apart from atonement is possible is speculative in the face of statements of Scripture showing that they are 'joined together by God's eternal decree' to redeem the elect. Further, it is I believe unwarranted to assume that the reference to a Mediator in Calvin’s statement ‘Had remained free from all taint, he was of too humble a condition to penetrate to God without a Mediator’ is a reference to the Incarnation. As we have noted, for Calvin ‘divine Mediatorship’ is a generic term of which Mediatorship by Incarnation is one species. On the other hand, no proposal that there might be atonement in some other way, without divine satisfaction is in view here, or elsewhere in the Institutes.

Finally, in establishing the necessity of the atonement Calvin does not proceed from the nature of God viewed abstractly (as Anselm did) but rather from the character of the Incarnation itself. He denies that there has been an absolute necessity (our sense (1)) for the Mediator to be both true God and true man, but one that flowed from the divine decree. That is, it does not follow as a matter of logic from the fact of the Fall, and of universal human sinfulness that there must be an atonement for that sin. Rather it follows solely from the divine decree, a decree that is free but which, for Calvin, must reflect and expresses God’s character. Hence ‘mere gratuitous love prompts him to receive us into favour’.

So he avoids what is the more basic question of whether the atonement was necessary simply in view of the fact that mankind had sinned. That would be to give the atonement an 'absolute' necessity, our sense (1). Nevertheless he could in theory have argued that though the atonement was not absolutely necessary (in sense (1)) yet granted that it is the free, non-necessitated divine intention to provide one, that atonement could not have been other than via the incarnation of the Son of God. But he does not think in this fashion but (as we have seen) he conflates the two questions: Must there be an atonement? And, must Christ atone? into an affirmative answer to the second. This is usually taken to be Anselm's view as regards the Incarnation.

A second Calvin?

However, there is another side to Calvin's idea of the atonement, expressions of which may be found in his sermons and commentaries, represented in the following statements:

For if God had simply proclaimed our pardon by declaring that he had decided to receive us in mercy, despite our unworthiness, that would have been a great thing. Even then, we would never have been able to utter sufficient praise for such grace. But God has given us his own Son as a token of his love. Indeed, he has given us himself through his Son, and declared himself to be our Father. This so far outshines pardon alone that even if we employed all our faculties to worship and adore, we could never perfectly praise him for such mercy.

If God pardoned us without Jesus Christ interceding for us and being made our pledge, we should think nothing of it. We should all shrug our shoulders and make it an opportunity for giving ourselves greater license. But when we see that God did not spare His only Son, but treated Him with such an extreme severity that in His Body He underwent all the sorrows that it would be possible to suffer and then even in His soul He was afflicted to the limit, to the point of crying out “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?” – when we hear all this, it is impossible for us, unless we are harder than stone, not to shudder and be filled with such a fear and amazement as will utterly put us to confusion; impossible not to detest our offences and iniquities seeing that they provoke the anger of God against us in this way. This, then, is why it was necessary for all the correction of our peace to be laid upon Jesus Christ that we might find grace before God His Father.

How are we to understand these decidedly unAnselmian sentences? I think we can rule out the idea that Calvin changed his mind on the question. For one thing, the Anselmianism of the Institutes is affirmed in the last (1559) edition. But perhaps the Institutes testifies to some hardening of Calvin's position in the direction of Anselmianism, prompted by his correspondence with Laelius Socinus, as I argued in John Calvin's Ideas. Yet the writings from which we have just quoted cannot be easily assigned to an 'earlier' or 'later' Calvin. The Sermons on Galatians were delivered in 1557 and published in 1563, those on Isaiah 53 have a similar date, 1556, after his exchanges with the older Socinus which came to an end in 1555. Throughout these years Calvin was preparing the definitive edition of the Institutes. Nowhere does he repudiate a view of the atonement that he once held, nor in these passages or elsewhere does he express a sense of dissonance between them and the view expressed in the Institutes.

How are we to understand this puzzling state of affairs: two apparently dissonant approaches to the atonement, but one that Calvin did not (apparently) notice? Is he guilty of a logical faux pas about a fundamental aspect of his teaching without seeing it? I shall try to argue that it is possible to harmonise these two points of view.

The views of the 'second Calvin' have their source in Augustine, and are also to be found in Thomas Aquinas, and no doubt in others. Not that these two affirmed the possibility of salvation by ‘a word’, but they deny the necessity of the atonement, or, in the case of Thomas, he denies the necessity of a necessary condition of the Anselmian view of the atonement, the Incarnation.

Thomas discusses the Incarnation in Summa Theologiae 3a 1-6, and among the questions he considers is, Was the Incarnation necessary for the restoration of the human race? Citing Augustine in support he says

We refer to something as necessary for an end in two senses. First, when the goal is simply unattainable without it, e.g. food for sustaining human life. Second, when it is required for a better and more expeditious attainment of the goal, e.g. a horse for a journey. In the first sense the Incarnation was not necessary for the restoration of human nature, since by his infinite power God had many other ways to accomplish this end. In the second sense, however, it was needed for the restoration of human nature.

Accordingly, Augustine writes, Let us point out that other ways were not wanting to God, whose power rules everything without exception, yet that there was no other course more fitting for healing our wretchedness.

It may be that what Aquinas claims gives us a way of harmonizing Calvin. What he says implies that any view of atonement that requires the Incarnation (as Anselm’s view of the atonement does) is not necessary. Is this compatible with salvation ‘by a word’? Perhaps it is. Such a way of salvation may be among the ‘many other ways’ that God had of accomplishing the restoration of human nature.

Here is my suggestion. Overall, Calvin is interested not only in the end of atonement - pardon, reconciliation – as if this could be understood abstractly, but also and perhaps chiefly in the connection of means and ends. For him there are not two equivalently alternative means to one end, pardon and reconciliation, which God might indifferently choose between. That would be clearly voluntaristic. Rather, Calvin thinks that there are alternative ends with alternative means; in each case there is a conceptual or internal connection between means and ends.

There are possible schemes of atonement in which the love of God is not maximally expressed. For Calvin there is only one possible way of God maximally expressing his love, namely atonement by the Incarnation of the Logos and satisfaction by the death of the God-man. For the Incarnation and satisfaction of divine justice by the God-man, and much else, are in his view logically necessary and jointly sufficient for procuring those precise, rich benefits which (Calvin understood the New Testament to teach) we in fact enjoy. There may have been another way to pay the price of sin; or rather, not to pay the price of sin but to freely pardon it. But there was no other way of procuring those God-glorifying effects that fill us with wonder and amazement at the character of God's love.

If it is God’s will that we are to enjoy such specific, maximal blessings, then we cannot enjoy them without they come to us in a manner which ensures them, and which gives them their distinctive character, and to achieve this requires Incarnation and atonement of a broadly Anselmian kind. Yet quite unlike Anselm, Calvin starts not with a relatively abstract view of reconciliation, but with the concrete blessings of being in Christ, and then asks: what does being in union with Christ in this sense require on the part of God? His answer is clear: it requires Incarnation, propitiatory death of the incarnate Son rendering satisfaction to divine justice, resurrection, ascension, and session, along with the applicatory work of the Spirit bringing men and women to the position of being 'in Christ'. Only by presupposing all this can the distinctive Pauline blessings of union with Christ, which (as we shall shortly see) Calvin so notably emphasises, be ensured.

If this is the true account of Calvin's views, then we must say this: Calvin briefly, but several times, expresses the opinion that an alternative outcome could have been decreed with good reason by God. But he quickly moves on, impelled by what he understands to be the Scriptural account of what actually happened. Though pardon by fiat is abstractly possible, the reconciliation that would ensue would have been a thin thing. If the reconciliation is to be that which befits the majesty, goodness and grace of God and maximally benefits us, then it must be undertaken and procured by the God-man.

For Calvin what is 'best for us' is not merely that we are pardoned and received back into the favour of God, but that we are pardoned through the person and work of the God-man. Pressing the Anselmian parallel a little further, we might say that Calvin thinks that that view of reconciliation and salvation is most fitting which maximally benefits us and maximally honours God our Redeemer, as expressed in this double superlative: 'What was best for us, our most merciful Father determined’. Such an atonement is one than which no better can be conceived.

April

' Calvin's Restrained Trinitarianism' is the first of three, or perhaps four, extracts from the forthcoming book Calvin - A Guide for the Perplexed, (to be published by T & T Clark later this year). Further details.

A lecture, 'John Calvin: What's the Big Idea?' is also available. This was recently given as a John Murray Lecture at the Highland Theological College. The voice recording can be heard here.

So, this month Helm's Deep offers a modest Calvinfest.

To round things off there is the last of the three Analyses on aspects of divine sovereignty, 'Owen's Option'.
Next month sees the first of three Analyses on aspects of John Piper's book The Future of Justification (Crossway, 2007 ). It is entitled 'Which Comes First?'. The second, 'Baxter's Soup and Wright's Soap' will be posted in May, and the third, 'Aspirational Theology', in June.

Apollos has published The Emergence of Evangelicalism: Exploring Historical Continuities (edited by Michael Haykin and Kenneth Stewart), and as a consquence 'John Calvin, A. M. Toplady and the Bebbington thesis' vanishes from Helm's Deep.




In May, Broadman and Holman will publish Perspectives on the Doctrine of God, ed. Bruce A Ware. This includes 'The Classical Calvinist View', as well as other 'perspectives' offered by Messrs. Olson, Sanders and Ware.

Remember that you saw these pieces first on this site, but not, alas, for much longer.

1 - Calvin's Restrained Trinitarianism

Writing of the 'order' of the persons in the Trinity, Calvin says:

Moreover, though the eternity of the Father is also the eternity of the Son and Spirit, since God never could be without his own wisdom and energy; and though in eternity there can be no room for first or last, still the distinction of order is not unmeaning or superfluous, that Father being considered first, next the Son from him, and then the Spirit from both.

Although Calvin gives primary attention to Scripture’s teaching on God’s Trinitarian character, as we noted in Chapter One he is not a flat-footed biblicist. He thinks it is permissible, and even necessary, to use language and concepts drawn from extra-biblical sources to articulate—and in particular to defend—the biblical doctrine.

There is a tension here between, on the one hand, Calvin's commitment to the divine spirituality and immensity and to divine simplicity and atemporalism (which induce in him a reserve in his theological approach to God in himself) and, on the other hand, the explicitly Trinitarian declarations of the New Testament. Addressing this tension, Calvin warmly endorses the approach of Hilary of Poitiers and of Augustine in their use of terms such as person and substance in characterising the Trinity, even though Scripture does not do so. At the same time he endorses the reticence of the Fathers about pressing the meaning of these terms. He refers approvingly to this passage from Hilary

The guilt of the heretics and blasphemers compels us to undertake what is unlawful, to scale arduous heights, to speak of the ineffable, and to trespass upon forbidden places. And since by faith alone we should fulfill what is commanded, namely, to adore the Father, to venerate the Son with Him, and to abound in the Holy Spirit, we are forced to raise our lowly words to subjects that cannot be described. By the guilt of another we are forced into guilt, so that what should have been restricted to the pious contemplation of our minds is now exposed to the dangers of human speech.

Augustine held that 'on account of the poverty of human speech in so great a matter, the word "hypostasis" had been forced upon us by necessity, not to express what it is, but only not to be silent on how Father, Son, and Spirit are three'. He went on to say, in the passage which Calvin quotes,

For the sake, then, of speaking of things that cannot be uttered, that we may be able in some way to utter what we are able in no way to utter fully, our Greek friends have spoken of one essence, three substances; but the Latins of one essence or substance, three persons; because, as we have already said, essence usually means nothing else than substance in our language, that is, in Latin. And provided that what is said is understood only in a mystery, such a way of speaking was sufficient, in order that there might be something to say when it was asked what the three are, which the true faith pronounces to be three, when it both declares that the Father is not the Son, and that the Holy Spirit, which is the gift of God, is neither the Father nor the Son.

Augustine’s point is that the word 'person' when used of the Father, Son and Spirit warrants certain kinds of thought and speech about God . When the New Testament refers to God the Son we are warranted in treating the Son as one who is a subject of a certain range of predicates, some of which he has in common with the Father, (his divinity), others he has distinct from the other two persons of the godhead (his Sonship). What distinguish the persons, then, are certain relational predicates each of which expresses a 'peculiar subsistence'.

Father, Son and Spirit are three "'who's", three 'someones or other' about whom we can and must say different things. The language of three ‘persons’ allows us to say that there are properties possessed by the Son that are not possessed by the Father and vice versa, a position surely endorsed by the New Testament. But it would be a mistake to think that the three 'persons' of the Trinity are like three distinct human beings with a common human nature. To think that would be to hold that God is divided into three. What would then stop us from thinking of the three divine persons as three gods? So the term 'person' is to be used with self-awareness and some care.

In Calvin's view, then, the use of one kind of expression for God’s threeness (‘person’) and another kind of expression for God’s oneness (‘nature’ or ‘essence’ or ‘substance’) safeguards New Testament language about the triunity of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit. Such usage not only keeps us from manifest inconsistency; it guides us into thinking and saying the right kinds of thing in turn about God the Father, about God the Son and about God the Spirit.

Calvin’s endorsement of the use of the terms 'person', 'substance’ and 'Trinity' in Christian thinking about the godhead, along with his warnings elsewhere about the introduction of extra-biblical terms such as 'merit', reveals some tension in his overall attitude to extra-biblical language. It is not easy to find any place where he discusses his view in a way that provides us with an overall, consistent picture of it. On the one hand, he believes that some extra-biblical language is permissible—and even required—to identify and exclude heretical teaching. On the other hand, he hesitates to endorse models or analogies that attempt to explain the Trinitarian mystery, or God's providence. For instance, in an obvious allusion to Augustine's analogies in On the Trinity, Calvin says

I am not sure whether it is expedient to borrow analogies from human affairs to express the nature of this distinction. The ancient fathers sometimes do so, but they at the same time admit, that what the bring forward as analogous is very widely different. And hence it is that I have a great dread of anything like presumption here, lest some rash saying may furnish an occasion of calumny to the malicious, or of delusion to the unlearned.

Yet Calvin himself does not always shrink from such rashness. He readily appeals to the relation between mind and body as an analogy of Christ's divine and human nature, as we shall see in the next Chapter. Yet when he debates the nature of divine providence he is opposed on principle to the use of analogies of divine activity drawn from human affairs and not from Scripture. Calvin's general reluctance to use analogies drawn from outside Scripture, to indulge in 'thought experiments', underlines his anti-speculative temper. Overall, he is somewhat ambivalent about the use of analogies to aid theological understanding

Calvin's restraint over the Trinity is seen in another, rather surprising, way. He says

Where names have not been invented rashly, we must beware lest we become chargeable with arrogance and rashness in rejecting them. I wish, indeed, that such names were buried, provided all would concur in the belief that the Father, Son, and Spirit, are one God, and yet that the Son is not the Father, nor the Spirit the Son, but that each has his peculiar subsistence

.

Although Calvin always believed it was necessary to go beyond the very words of Scripture in order to elucidate the doctrine of the Trinity, it seems that were it not for the controversy about the Trinity that recurrently plagued him he would have been content to express the doctrine in that very simple form of words. The formula is an emphatic endorsement of the full deity of the three persons, and (perhaps because of this) it contains nothing, however hallowed by usage, that might serve to diminish this emphasis. So Calvin is here silent on the claim that the Son is begotten of the Father, or that the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father and the Son. It seems that he would prefer to leave such claims to one side, neither affirming them nor denying them.

Calvin offers a minimalist expression of the Trinity in order to avoid speculation or extravagance of some other kind that might ultimately prove to harbour heresy. In particular he was emphatic on the full and undiminished deity of the Son. So despite his willingness to use non-biblical terminology he favours a formulation of the doctrine of the Trinity that uses neither 'Trinity', nor 'person' nor 'substance', nor the begetting of the Son nor the procession of the Spirit.

John Calvin - What's the Big Idea?

I thank Professor McGowan for his kind invitation to deliver this John Murray Lecture. I met Professor Murray only once, but I have profited from his writings many times, and it is an honour to be associated with him in this way.

I have boldly, perhaps foolishly, chosen to talk about a central theme in the thought of John Calvin. There is danger here, the danger of attempting to tell you what everyone in this part of Scotland already knows, the danger of bringing coals to Newcastle. And I do not want to spoil my time at HTC, and the warmth of the welcome you have given me, by saying the wrong thing. You may also think it somewhat impertinent for an English outsider a to enter this bastion historic Calvinism, where the memory of Calvin is revered, and impertinently to tell you what to think about the Reformer. Who is this fellow Helm? Who does he think that he is? There may be something in that; but I myself also am a Calvinist, though one from a different strand of Calvinism than is Scottish Calvinism. It may also be that a spectator, or at least a visitor, sees a bit more of the game.

A stronger defence would be to claim there is also something quintessentially Calvinian about this project of mine. And I do claim this. For what I am proposing is an exercise in ad fontes - back to the sources! - a catchphrase of the Renaissance. And John Calvin, whatever his other gifts and accomplishments, was a Renaissance figure. These days the Renaissance's celebration of 'humanism' is perversely interpreted as the lauding of secular humanism, of the idea that man is the measure of all things. But John Calvin was no more a humanist in this sense than were Erasmus or Melanchthon. I think that we may understand John Calvin's endeavour to get back to the sources of the Christian Faith - to the Holy Scriptures - as an expression of the Renaissance project. So - greatly daring - this is what I propose to do this evening: to return to the sources of Calvin’s thought and to talk about his Big Idea.

The mention of John Calvin's 'Big Idea', the very idea that he had one big idea, is likely to provoke different reactions. Some will immediately think of predestination. In the nineteenth-century the idea of a significant theologian having a 'central dogma’ became widespread. A 'central dogma’ is a controlling idea, to which every other dogma propounded by the theologian in question is subordinate and dependent, like the rim of the wheel depends on its hub, or even - so some crazily said - it is that idea from which every other of the person's religious ideas were logically derived, like a theorem of Euclid. For Martin Luther that central dogma, his controlling idea, was said to be justification by faith alone; for John Calvin it was the dogma of predestination.

But a moment or two's flip through Calvin's Institutes of the Christian Religion , or for that matter any other of his writings, including his writings devoted to the theme of predestination - will show that this was not the case, and could not have been the case. For Calvin's model for theological exposition, at least in the later editions of the Institutes, was the so-called Apostles' Creed, or perhaps Paul's Letter to the Romans. Both documents may be said to be predestinarian, the one implicitly, the other explicitly so. But in neither is the concept the controlling concept. This idea of a Calvinian 'central dogma' has more recently been met with an overreaction: scholars have been at pains to try to show that because of where predestination was placed in the Institutes, in Book III, where Calvin deals with salvation through Christ, it could not have been his central dogma. The idea is that were it to have been found in Book I then it would have been the central dogma, or at least have been a promising candidate for that dubious honour. But Calvin's notably predestinarian treatment of divine providence is in Book I. So this argument is hardly convincing. In any case, I think that the search for such a concept is a vain one.

But even if there is no Calvinian central dogma, there is, I believe, a central thrust to Calvin's thought, a Big Idea. The recent Cambridge Companion to John Calvin, in many ways a very useful book, disappointingly gives no sense of what made the Reformer tick. No scholar writing in that book succeeds in finding or disclosing Calvin's heartbeat, or even attempts the job. The significance of his life is dissolved into a series of scholarly reflections on this or that aspect of his career and of his thought. It is as if no one dare ask the central question, what was Calvin's big idea, for fear of being accused of wanting to restart the search for a central dogma. The sum of the parts of Calvin’s thought turns out to be less than the whole of it.

But I predict another reaction to this idea of Calvin's big idea, one that, I confess that I find even harder to understand. Some will be bold to assert that Calvin's central idea is the idea of common grace. Here, I think, 'central' has the meaning of 'distinctive'. In the pantheon - if that's the right word - of the great theologians - Augustine, Anselm, Aquinas, Scotus, Luther, perhaps Jonathan Edwards - Calvin' s distinctive contribution is said, at least by those who read him with the lense provided by Abraham Kuyper and Herman Bavinck, to have been to rehabilitate and legitimise culture, particularly modern culture, by noting that culture is God's gift, his gift of common grace, and so freeing us from the ‘dualism’ of nature and grace. People who think this about Calvin point to passages such as this in the Institutes

If we regard the Spirit of God as the sole fountain of truth, we shall neither reject the truth itself, nor despise it wherever it shall appear, unless we wish to dishonor the Spirit of God. For by holding the gifts of the Spirit in slight esteem, we contemn and reproach the Spirit himself. What then? Shall we deny that the truth shone upon the ancient jurists who established civic order and discipline with such great equity? Shall we say that the philosophers were blind in their fine observation and artful description of nature? Shall we say that those men were devoid of understanding who conceived the art of disputation and taught us to speak reasonably? Shall we say that they are insane who developed medicine, devoting their labour to our benefit? What shall we say of all the mathematical sciences? Shall we consider them the ravings of madmen? No, we cannot read the writings of the ancients on these subjects without great admiration. We marvel at them because we are compelled to recognize how pre-eminent they are. But shall we count anything praiseworthy or noble without recognizing at the same time that it comes from God?

This is fine stuff, but are such data sufficient to do the trick, to show that Calvin is a revolutionary in this area of the relation of faith to culture, a revolution accomplished by overthrowing the 'nature-grace' dichotomy bequeathed to him, and to us, by medievalism? I think not. And I think not because there is abundant evidence that Calvin endorsed that 'dichotomy' (if that is what it is) between nature and grace. Space forbids me to develop this claim, but I briefly and quickly note a couple of things: what Calvin has to say about the 'eternal law' in his exposition of the Decalogue, as in this statement: ‘Now, as it is evident that the law of God which we call the moral, is nothing else than the testimony of natural law, and of that conscience which God has engraven on the minds of men, the whole of this equity of which we now speak is prescribed in it. Hence it alone ought to be the aim, the rule, and the end of all laws.’ Secondly, there is the pervasive approving references to natural law throughout his writings. The Calvin scholar Harro Höpfl reports that "Calvin thought that 'nature' or 'natural sense' or 'reason' teaches the authority of fathers over wives and children, the sanctity of monogamous marriage, the duty to care for families, breast-feeding, primogeniture (albeit with qualifications) the sacrosanctity of envoys and ambassadors, the obligation of promises, degrees of marriage, the need for witnesses in murder trials, the need for a distinction of ranks in society; and natural law prohibits incest, murder, adultery, slavery, and the even the rule of one man. And again, nature itself teaches the duty to award honours only to those qualified, respect for the old, equity in commercial dealings and that religion must be the first concern of governors.' Höpfl provides textual support for each of these claims. I shall have more to say about common grace a little later.

So, Calvin's Big Idea is not predestination, nor, I have ventured to suggest, is it common grace. Then what is it?

II

For an answer to this question I believe we need look no further than the opening sentences of the Institutes, sentences which appeared at the head of every edition of that great work, and particularly the first two sentences: 'Nearly all the wisdom we possess, that is to say, true and sound wisdom, consists in two parts; the knowledge of God and of ourselves. But, while joined by many bonds, which one precedes and brings forth the other is not easy to discern'. Before I try to make good this claim, it is well to note certain features of what Calvin says here, as well as noting what he is not saying. First, note the emphasis on wisdom. The Christian religion offers a method of possessing true and sound wisdom. Here Calvin taps into one medieval emphasis, that the Christian religion has to do with the imparting of wisdom, sapientia, and he implicitly rejects another medieval emphasis, that theology has to do with theoretical understanding and certainty, scientia. In this sense Calvin is a Franciscan rather than a Dominican. Theology does not provide us with more knowledge in the form of more explanations, as nuclear physics and astronomy and criminal detection do, but with wisdom. It has to do with the knowledge of God, certainly, but with that sort of knowledge that enables us to enjoy the favour and presence of God, and to bring us to our everlasting home. It is an exaggeration to say that for Calvin the knowledge of God is mere know how, but there is nevertheless more than a germ of truth in this. Here is one place at least where the affinity of Calvin's thought is more with John Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progess than it is with Aquinas's Summa Theologiae.

A moment or two ago I used the word 'theology' in connection with Calvin' s thought. This was a mistake. Calvin rarely uses that word, and scarcely ever of himself. When he does use it, it is often as a term of contempt. For Calvin, the 'theologians' are the speculative thinkers, especially the sorbonnistes of his own day who attempt to distract attention from and to disrupt the progress of the Reformation in France by their own ‘blasphemous inventions’ (as Calvin frequently dubbed them) about God. Calvin's word was not theologia (a word which, after all, was the invention of Aristotle) but religio , which bespeaks the binding of the self to God.

And then there is the emphasis, in these opening sentences, of where this wisdom is to be found: in the knowledge of God and of ourselves. Where did Calvin get this emphasis on wisdom from? One plausible suggestion is that he simply took it from Scripture, from the emphasis on Christ as the wisdom of God, from its warnings against the wisdom of this world, from the 'wisdom literature', and especially from the Psalms. Perhaps this is the correct suggestion. But there are other possibilities, too, not incompatible with this. Suppose we ask, where does that emphasis on the twofold knowledge, of God and of ourselves, in this particular formulation, emerge from? I suggest that it was one of the very many things that Calvin learned from St. Augustine. The supreme importance for Augustine of this twofold knowledge, of God and of ourselves, is found vividly in the Confessions. In his wonderful discussion of memory in Book X he says, addressing the Lord, 'to hear you speaking about oneself is to know oneself' and 'what I know of myself I know because you grant me light'. The fundamental point is stated with deliberate plainness, and rather more formally, in the Soliloquies: 'I desire to know God and the soul. Nothing more? Nothing at all'.

Although Calvin may get it from Augustine, I shall suggest in a moment or two that he gives this relation between the knowledge of God and of ourselves his own distinctive twist. But in any case, he did not quite say what Augustine said, did he? He did not add Augustine’s 'nothing more', and there is much evidence in the Institutes and elsewhere that there were other things that Calvin desired to know, and other sources of wisdom than the self in its relation to God . For instance, he was particularly fascinated and impressed by astronomy. He's very careful to state, in the opening sentence of the Institutes, that 'Nearly all the wisdom we possess - nearly all, but not quite all - consists in the knowledge of God and of ourselves.

Before looking at the distinctive twist that he gives to the idea of the knowledge of God and of ourselves, however, it is also worth looking ahead, to another Frenchman who was also greatly indebted to Augustine, René Descartes. For he also has interesting things to say about the knowledge of God and of ourselves. In his Meditations Descartes subjects his own claims to knowledge to a series of unrelenting sceptical doubts, doubts that he imagines are produced by some malign demon, in order to reach, if possible, an indubitable foundation of knowledge. He believes that he finds this indubitable foundation in the knowledge that he has of himself. But this knowledge is rather meagre, about as meagre as can be: it is merely the knowledge that he has a self, that even when he is doubting there is something that is doing the doubting of which he is indubitably aware, namely his own consciousness. The foundation of his certainty is in his consciousness as such rather than any particular content of his consciousness. It is this alone that provides Descartes with relief from scepticism. Cogito, ergo sum. But that's all that he can know. At least this meagre fare is all that he can immediately know. What more he can know emerges when - by a series of rather questionable steps, it has to be said - Descartes is able to establish that God exists. So there are two things that he knows, the soul and God. Though Descartes was undoubtedly a religious man, when it comes to the articulation of his epistemology, the knowledge of God is a consequence of the knowledge of oneself. For Augustine, the goal is knowledge of God and the soul; the two have parity. For Descartes, at least in his formal philosophy, the goal is certain knowledge that he has, or is, a soul, and derivatively that we can be certain that there is a God. The emphasis is on that there is a God rather than on what God is like.

But John Calvin and before him Augustine, occupy a much richer world than the spare, theoretically-orientated world of Descartes. It is a world of sapientia, as we have already seen, but more. I mentioned a few moments ago that in the opening sentences of the Institutes not only does Calvin assert the importance of the knowledge of God and of ourselves, but he imparts his own distinctive emphasis to this. We must now go on to look at this, and to tease out some of its importance for us.

III

As I have said, in bringing together the knowledge of God and of ourselves Calvin imparts his own distinctive twist. The theologian John R. Franke, coming from the Reformed tradition, begins his recent book The Character of Theology by quoting the words of Calvin from the beginning of the Institutes that I have quoted. And then he says 'Calvin's observation continues to provide a helpful model for reflecting on the character of theology and suggests that we must always be attentive not only to the knowledge of God but also to the knowledge of ourselves as human beings if we hope to practice an approach to theology that leads to wisdom.….This suggests that in the discipline of theology we must take account of the particular social and intellectual settings in which we engage in theological reflection and exploration'. Then follows what is by now an all-too-familiar apologia for the need for us to be postmodernists in theology.

But despite this genuflection in Calvin's direction, this is a radical misunderstanding of what he is saying. Calvin is not saying that when we do theology (which concerns the knowledge of God) we are to be aware of the social and cultural setting in which we, as human beings, are placed (the knowledge of ourselves). This is a point almost too obvious to be worth noting. After all, the opening words of Book One of the Institutes are preceded by an elaborate apologia for the Reformation addressed to King Francis the First of France. When it comes to being a contextual theologian (which all theologians are now urged to become) John Calvin was certainly no slouch. In any case, in 16th century Geneva, Calvin could hardly have been unaware of his cultural setting! Unfortunately, Franke has missed Calvin's distinctive twist, even though he quotes the very words that express it. That emphasis is that the knowledge of God and of ourselves are immediately reciprocal. In knowing God we at once gain true knowledge of ourselves, and in knowing ourselves we are at once led to know God. There is, so to speak, no choice in the matter. It is not that there are two distinct subject matters, God, and ourselves, which it is wise to bring into some kind of positive relationship. No, the knowledge of the one immediately leads to the knowledge of the other; the knowledge of the other leads immediately to the knowledge of the first. For a moment or two let us see how Calvin works this out in the first few paragraphs of the Institutes.

Bear in mind that in the first instance at least the Institutes is addressed to Christian people. It is not a work of apologetics, except in the sense that it is an apologia for the Reformation, nor is it a textbook of theology, a systematic theology like those of Berkhof or Hodge or Pannenberg. In the crisis of the Reformation Calvin is attempting to set forth the character of the Christian religion to those who already confess Christ. So what does he tell them?

He tells them that the knowledge of God and of ourselves are 'joined by many bonds', but that 'which one precedes and brings forth the other is not easy to discern'. If we look on ourselves then we immediately turn our thoughts to the contemplation of God. For our 'mighty gifts' are clearly not of our own creation. Further, it is our 'miserable ruin' that especially 'compels us to look upward'. He goes on, 'Thus, from the feeling of our own ignorance, vanity, poverty, infirmity, and - what is more - depravity and corruption, we recognise that the true light of wisdom, sound virtue, full abundance of every good, and purity of righteousness rest in the Lord alone'. So 'We cannot seriously aspire to him before we begin to become displeased with ourselves'. So, 'the knowledge of ourselves not only arouses us to seek God, but also, as it were, leads us by the hand to find him'. So, the knowledge of ourselves leads to God.

In the same way, the knowledge of God leads us to a knowledge of ourselves. 'Man never achieves a clear knowledge of himself unless he has first looked upon God's face, and then descends from contemplating him to scrutinize himself.' Our innate pride is such that unless we look to the Lord, the sole standard of righteousness, we shall not be convinced 'of our own unrighteousness, foulness, folly, and impurity'.

These are not only words from the opening sections of the Institutes, a sort of motto, they are, I shall now briefly argue, words that provide the orientation of the entire work, the orientation of Calvin's theology, even though, as we have seen, he would not have liked that word 'theology' applied to himself. Or, if you like, since the word is now fashionable, we could say that these words are fundamental to Calvin's worldview. Given the time that remains, I shall have to be selective in indicating the pervasiveness of the theme in Calvin. And so I shall attempt to look at three areas, albeit sketchily, to try to persuade you that this is indeed Calvin's Big Idea - first, what he has to say about God, then about faith, and finally about our life in society.

God

Fundamental to Calvin's treatment of God in the Institutes and - I would argue - throughout the large corpus of his other writings, is the distinction he draws between God as he is in himself, and God as he is revealed to us. I believe that he took this distinction from Thomas Aquinas, though there is no direct evidence of this: at least, he took it from the climate of late medieval thought in which he was educated. (Educated in philosophy and law, remember, but never in theology). But from wherever exactly he got that idea it perfectly served his purpose.

It is clear from what we have seen already (I hope) that for Calvin the knowledge of God is not what we might call theoretical knowledge, knowledge of something that may not affect us, that we can take or leave as we see fit. This is the 'frigidity' of the scholastics which repels him. That is knowledge which, as he puts it, merely 'flits in the brain'. In fact, for this reason he can scarcely bring himself to call it knowledge at all. Here are some characteristic ways that Calvin has of using the distinction to make this point: 'What is God? Men who pose this question are merely toying with idle speculations. It is more important for us to know of what sort he is and what is consistent with his nature.'

In Exodus 34.6, God reveals himself to his people as Jehovah. Calvin’s comments in the Institutes on this passage constitute a fundamental locus of his exposition of the divine nature as it is to us:

Here let us observe that [God’s] eternity and his self-existence are announced by that wonderful name twice repeated. Thereupon his powers are mentioned, by which he is shown to us not as he is in himself, but as he is toward us: so that this recognition of him consists more in living experience than in vain and high-flown speculation. Now we hear the same powers enumerated there that we have noted as shining in heaven and earth: kindness, goodness, mercy, justice, judgment and truth.

And again

The pious mind does not dream up for itself any god it pleases, but contemplates the one and only true God. And it does not attach to him whatever it pleases, but is content to hold him to be as he manifests himself.

Calvin invites us, as part of our Christian confession, to think of God 'operationally' or functionally. For this is how God has revealed himself to us in Scripture. This does not mean that Calvin is a reductionist or pragmatist in his religion, for how God has revealed himself - his nature - is a fitting expression of his essence, that which is incomprehensible to us because we cannot know God as God knows himself. So it would be badly wrong to think of Calvin as a theological agnostic. Furthermore God has revealed himself; but he has not done so to satisfy our curiosity, he has not revealed the whole of himself, and he most certainly has not revealed himself as he knows himself: this is not revealed and is not revealable. This approach of Calvin's to our knowledge of God is reinforced by what he says about the way in which God accommodates himself to us. Part of his self-manifestation to us is that he lisps to us like a nurse talks to her children. God adapts himself to our time bound and space bound circumstances, both in the language that he uses of himself, and supremely by taking unfallen human nature in Christ.

So if we are tempted to speculate about God, to ask 'What if?" questions about him, to attempt to peer into his secrets, to offer solutions to the divine mysteries, then we are moving in a decidedly unCalvinian direction even though - it must be said - Calvin himself occasionally, perhaps without realising it - indulged in a little speculation on his own account. More importantly, it is the knowledge of this God, the God as he is toward us, that gives us the knowledge of ourselves, and so makes us wise.


Faith

According to Calvin by God’s grace our knowledge of our own weakness immediately causes us to reflect on God as he is manifested to us: this is the path of true wisdom. Such reflection in turn produces penitence and faith. So in believing we come to know ourselves. For Calvin, Christian faith is always faith in the word of God, supremely faith in the God-man. To the extent that we understand our own believing, its ups and down, the sources of its health and strength, to that extent we know ourselves as believers, and know ourselves as we really are. Calvin's definition of faith is well-known

Now we shall possess a right definition of faith if we call it a firm and certain knowledge of God's benevolence toward us, founded upon the truth of the freely given promise in Christ, both revealed to our minds and sealed upon our hearts through the Holy Spirit.

Many have seen in this definition the idea that faith, and the assurance of faith, are for Calvin essentially connected. And such a reading of Calvin is natural given the current evangelical mindset, which easily concludes that if a person thinks that he is a Christian then he is a Christian. No doubt should ever be allowed to cloud the sunny Christian mind, for is not doubt unbelief? But I am afraid that this is far from being Calvin's view. For it would be a big mistake to think that this definition of faith was Calvin's last word on the subject. It soon becomes clear that this is a definition of an ideal, of what faith ought to be like, of what at its best it is, not of faith as we routinely experience it.

This is clear from what Calvin goes on to say immediately after giving his definition. So we must read on, beyond the definition. For example, he claims that there can be temporary faith, as in the case of Simon Magus, people who taste the Word, giving an assent to it that does not penetrate to the heart. 'The human heart has so many crannies where vanity hides, so many holes where falsehood lurks, is so decked out with deceiving hypocrisy, that it often dupes itself'. So 'believers are taught to examine themselves carefully and humbly, lest the confidence of the flesh creep in and replace assurance of faith'. Note this, then: the assurance of faith is not automatic, part of faith itself, but it must often be fought for, preserved against doubts and fears and distinguished from false confidence. So it is not surprising that Calvin takes great pains to distinguish true faith from its counterfeits. On the one hand he stresses faith's certainty, yet before giving the celebrated definition of faith he says that it is surrounded by error and unbelief, and after giving the definition he goes on to say that even weak faith is real faith, and that faith is 'not content with a doubtful and changeable opinion, (the sort of thing that is the result of speculation) .....but requires full and fixed certainty'. It must contend with the deeply rooted unbelief of our hearts. At the other extreme Calvin says there are those who artificially constrain God's mercy, and so receive no consolation in believing. 'They ponder that (God's kindness) is indeed great and abundant, shed among many, available and ready for all; but that it is uncertain whether it will ever come to them, or rather, whether they will come to it'. True faith renders the conscience calm and peaceful before God's judgment. 'Without it the conscience must be harried by disturbed alarm, and almost torn to pieces; unless perhaps, forgetting God and self, it for the moment sleeps'. Note once more the explicit interlinkage between the knowledge of God and the knowledge of self. In a way that is shocking and scandalous to the modern Christian mind, Calvin even speaks of the possibility of temporary faith, of faith that may even bear some fruit, and yet does not endure to the end. All these convictions about faith arise by virtue of the interplay between the knowledge of God, revealed in his word, and the knowledge of ourselves, weak and wounded as we are.

It has frequently been claimed that there is a great gulf fixed between Calvin and those who later called themselves Calvinists, the 'precisionists' of the Netherlands, the Puritans of old and New England, and of course the Covenanters of Scotland. There are indeed many differences between Calvin and the Calvinists. Yet not so many as we are sometimes told that there are. Here, in Calvin's remarks on faith, part of his Big Idea, we can see a strong link, the link of 'experimental religion' as it was once quaintly called, a link between Calvin and Samuel Rutherford, and Calvin and William Perkins, and Calvin and Thomas Shepherd. If we are to know ourselves, then we must be aware of our capacity for hypocrisy and self-deception, of the wonderful ability of our minds to manufacture idols, and of our readiness to enjoy false comfort. We come to know this as we come to know God: it is part of the awakening and enlightening activity of His Spirit. We must know ourselves, but this knowledge is not gained ourselves, nor does it rest in our capacity to speculate, peering into the secrets of God, but in Christ.

If we have been chosen in him we shall not find assurance of our election in ourselves; and not even in God the Father, if we conceive him as severed from his Son. Christ, then, is the mirror wherein we must, and without self-deception may, contemplate our own election. For since it is unto his body the Father has destined those to be engrafted whom he has willed from eternity to be his own, that he may hold as sons all whom he acknowledges to be among his members, we have a sufficiently clear and firm testimony that we have been inscribed in the book of life [cf. Rev. 21:27] if we are in communion with Christ.

Earthly and heavenly things

You will recall that in the opening words of Book One of the Institutes to which I earlier called attention Calvin refers not only to our 'poverty' and 'miserable ruin' but also to the 'mighty gifts with which we are endowed' as propelling us to a knowledge of God. Awareness of these gifts immediately tells us that we are the offspring of God, just as awareness of our poverty and miserable ruin tell us that we need the Saviour. Calvin is not one to belittle these gifts; they are to be recognised and admired where they occur, and whoever has such gifts must use and foster them. So there is tension here: man, made in the image of God, has great gifts. But these gifts are misdirected due to fallenness. But they are not worthless, nor is it a waste of time for the mind to turn its attention to 'things below'. But note the terminology; 'things below'.

In what is probably the fullest discussion of the theme of common grace in Calvin, H. Kuiper's Calvin on Common Grace, Calvin's references to nature are simply counted in with all the other expressions in Calvin of God's common goodness which Kuiper records, He invokes the view of Herman Bavinck as claiming that 'Calvin was the first one to overcome the unwarranted dualism between nature and grace which is inherent in the Romish system of thought....Calvin's logical mind could not put up with this dualism'. Kuiper's own bias is revealed in the comparison he draws between Luther and Calvin.

Luther did not entirely do away with this dualism although he emphasised the truth that the opposite of grace is sin rather than nature. The great German Reformer sought to leave room for the good found with natural man by drawing a sharp line of demarcation between things heavenly and things earthly.

But the very same line of demarcation is to be found in Calvin. Indeed he uses the very same terminology as Luther, distinguishing between earthly things and heavenly things. So if Luther exhibits remnants of 'dualism' in using that distinction then so does Calvin. But in fact there is no dualism there, not if by such dualism is meant an opposition between nature and grace. For Calvin nature is God's gift, his common grace.

Calvin sets considerable value by the activities of those engaged in 'things below'. Mankind tends through natural instinct to foster and preserve society, through fair dealing, and the recognition and respect for law, despite many disputes and quarrels. Human acuteness is to be seen in the arts, and in our talent for undertaking and appreciating them. Literature shows that the mind of man, though fallen and perverted, is nevertheless clothed with God's excellent gifts. He says 'Those men whom Scripture calls 'natural men' were, indeed, sharp and penetrating in their investigation of inferior things. Let us, accordingly, learn by their example how many gifts the Lord left to human nature even after it was despoiled of its true good.' 'If the Lord has willed that we be helped in physics, dialectic, mathematics, and other like disciplines, by the work and ministry of the ungodly, let us use this assistance.'

On such statements from Calvin, scholars have endeavoured to build a Calvinistic view of culture, a world and life view. And there is some justification for this. But attention to Calvin's language shows that whatever warrant there is to find a warm appreciation of culture in Calvin, , this cannot be the main thing for him, his Big Idea. These gifts, for all their grandeur, concern 'things below', not 'things above', 'earthly things', not 'heavenly things', 'inferior things', they are 'unstable and transitory'.

Take, for example, Calvin's attitude to philosophy. He often writes approvingly of it, or of some of it. He incorporates elements of Stoicism and of Aristotle, and of course Plato, into his thought, or at least permits himself the use of their terms. He writes approvingly not only of the ideas of the philosophers but of the activity of doing philosophy. In the Institutes we find that Calvin is somewhat ambivalent with respect to the value of philosophical discussions about the soul. On the one hand he characteristically wishes to avoid anything that is subtle or speculative, but on the other hand he does not think that philosophical discussions about the soul are worthless. Subtle questions are the province of the philosophers, yet they are not to be entirely repudiated.

But I leave it to the philosophers to discuss these faculties in their subtle way. For the upbuilding of godliness a simple definition [of the soul] will be enough for us. I, indeed, agree that the things they teach are true, not only enjoyable, but also profitable to learn, and skillfully assembled by them. And I do not forbid those who are desirous of learning to study them. Therefore I admit in the first place that there are five senses . . . .

Thus, despite his reservations about including philosophical discussion in the Institutes, he does at times nevertheless commit himself to certain philosophical conclusions. At other times he is more scathing of philosophy in general, particularly when the philosophers deal with moral and spiritual matters: they are, he says, 'blinder than moles'! But all in all is there an endorsement here of what might be called 'Christian Philosophy’? I do not think there is. Like his mentor Augustine he sees the value of philosophy to be its service to the Christian religion. It is not to be autonomous, and Christians with philosophical gifts are to respect the mysteries of the Christian faith, resisting the temptation to reduce or smooth these away in the interests of developing a philosophical system out of the Christian gospel.

As it is with philosophy so it is with other disciplines. Had we time we could work it out.

It might be said: but if such gifts, and the ability to develop and appreciate them, are instilled in us by the Spirit, as Calvin says they are, is not their possession and use a part of what it means to know God, and to know ourselves, and so be at least as aspect of Calvin's Big Idea? Not according to Calvin. In answering the objection, what have those who are utterly estranged from God to do with his Spirit? He replies that the Spirit of God is not here to be considered as the Spirit of sanctification. It is in his aspect as Creator, as the one who in the beginning moved on the face of the waters (Gen. 1.2), that he fills, moves and quickens all things.


Objections

I have attempted to argue that Calvin's big idea is a particular view of religion. He sees himself as setting forth a purer version of the Christian religion than those then current, and ambitiously - and vainly - endeavouring to reform the visible church, at least the visible church of the West, in its likeness. To the attaining of this end, the knowledge of God and of ourselves, Christian dogmas - even the dogma of predestination - are subordinate, they are means to ends. By comparison, other ambitions and activities, even though imbued with the Spirit of God and therefore divinely warranted, are inferior - even philosophy.

I can forsee at least a couple of objections to what I have said. Perhaps there are more. So before I come to an end it is well briefly to consider these. The first likely objection is that I have been advocating pietism, painting a pietistic portrait of John Calvin. I plead 'not guilty' to this charge. 'Pietism' is a regular term of abuse, a sort of religious swear word, and it can be taken to mean various things. But if it means a religious attitude of withdrawal from 'the world' because of its capacity to distract us from the life of the soul then Calvin was no pietist and the sketch that I have made of him was not that of a pietistic Calvin. For as we have seen he had a high estimate of the arts and sciences, of the gifts of theoretical thought as well as of leadership, even when he is critical of the empty and worthless things that we can expend our energies on. He was a cultivated, aristocratically-minded Frenchman who remained that even when Christ conquered him. He did not take a 'dualistic' attitude to the world and the church, but he did place a subordinate though real value on what does not directly contribute to the knowledge of God and of ourselves.

Secondly, it may be said that the picture that I have painted is of an undogmatic or untheological Calvin. Certainly not! There is no controlling dogma in Calvin, but that does not mean that he did not value dogma! He believed. that God has given us the knowledge of himself in Scripture, and that Christians are under an obligation to come to as clear a view as they can of that. However, part of this clarity lies in the discipline of respecting the limits of what God has revealed, and of recognising that the articulation of Christian dogma is not an end in itself but subordinate to the main thing.

Finally, have I presented an 'other worldly' Calvin? Here I willingly plead guilty. Another way of putting the point is to claim that Calvin’s understanding of religion is founded on his understanding of God’s saving grace in Jesus Christ. Everything else takes second place, and has this grace as their axis. But he did not have such an all-encompassing view of ‘religion’ as to allow the doctrine of creation to swallow up and neutralise the doctrine of redemption. Christianity must not be subordinated to the culture, nor made into a message about culture. If Christ, in his warnings about the danger of planning to build bigger barns, and to neglect the soul, or in his urging on us of the need to find the pearl of great price, is an ‘other worldly’ Christ, then so was Calvin. Nevertheless, as we have seen, Calvin does not neglect culture, he does not fail to praise it, and to be fascinated by it.

This leaves us with something of a dilemma. If we are, as Calvinists, not to neglect the one thing that is needful, but at the same time we are not to seek the destruction of culture, or to seek to escape from or disparage the life of the human mind, broadly considered, or to put it into a separate compartment from that occupied by our ‘spiritual life’, or to consider involvement in it as a necessary evil, what is to be our attitude to education?

Our intellectual powers and all that they imply are the gift of God. How then are they to be regarded?

They are not to be disparaged or belittled, for that would be to dishonour God our Creator. But neither are they to be so valued as to squeeze out the central quest for the knowledge of God and of ourselves, for that would be to disparage God our Redeemer. It is not a case of either – or, but of both – and. What then? How are we to proceed? Here’s my suggestion. We are to seek the highest attainments possible in these ‘lower things’, gifts of our heavenly Father, and in doing so to consecrate them to the service of God. Such consecration involves an earnest quest to connect these endeavours to the gospel. We must dedicate our powers to God, and find that those powers are enlarged and heightened as we do so. In familiar words, if we seek first the kingdom these things will be added to us. In pursuing our studies in this manner we shall both increase in the knowledge of God and in wisdom regarding the culture in which God has providentially placed us. *

* This is a slightly revised version of the John Murray Lecture delivered at the invitation of the Highland Theological College, Dingwall, Scotland, on March 6th 2008. An earlier version was given as the Byron I Bitar Memorial Lecture at Geneva College, Beaver Falls, Pennsylvania, in November, 2005. I thank each of these Colleges for their invitations, and for the kindness and warmth of the welcomes I received.

Analysis 13 - Owen's Option

'The foundation of this whole assertion seems to me to be false and erroneous – namely that God could not have mercy on mankind unless satisfaction were made by his Son.'

- Owen, The Death of Death, (1647), (Works, 10, 205).

His personage was proper and comely and he had a very graceful behaviour in the pulpit, an eloquent elocution, a winning and insinuating deportment and could, by the persuasion of his oratory……move and win the affections of his admiring auditory almost as he pleased. - Anthony Wood

John Owen’s Dissertation on Divine Justice (1653) was the beginning of his response to the onset of Unitarianism in England, represented by the person of John Biddle (1615-1662) and the appearance of an English translation of the Racovian Catechism. The Dissertation was written while Owen was Dean of Christ Church, Oxford, and dedicated to the Lord Protector , Oliver Cromwell. We must in such cases (as Carl Trueman reminds us, (Minority Report, Mentor Books, 2008, 18-9)) have regard not only to what a man is saying, but also to what he is doing, in this case to Owen’s contribution not to Puritan theology but to strengthening or solidifying certain elements in the Cromwellian Protectorate, or to doing the same for his position in Oxford, or both. Here we restrict ourselves to what Owen is saying. Note however that Owen's Dissertation was followed the next year by the command of Parliament for him, by now Vice-Chancellor of Oxford University, to write more fully against Socinianism. Owen complied, and wrote Vindiciae Evangelicae (1655) dedicated to 'His Highness' the Lord Protector.


Justice and mercy in God

Owen's view of the atonement is that it is necessary if sin is to be pardoned, because justice is essential to God . The pardon of sin requires the satisfaction (or vindication) of divine justice, and only atonement by God himself (in the person of the God-man) could be sufficient. The justice that is essential to God is the same justice as that which is contingent to a just person, or a just king. In 1653 he finds it amazing that an orthodox theologian might suppose that God could have saved us by a word. Owen must thus be amazed at his earlier self, who in The Death of Death had taken the position respecting the atonement which he now argues against, as we can see from the quotation at the head of this Analysis. We cannot hold this against Owen of course; a man is entitled to change his mind. Here we shall be concerned not with the necessity of the atonement but the view of divine sovereignty, and especially the relation between the will of God and the justice of God that it implies.

The later Owen counters that 'vindicatory justice' (not to be confused with vindictive justice) is an exercise of 'the universal and essential rectitude of the divine nature'. (505) Justice is not a separate attribute of God, much less are there attributes of different kinds of justice. God’s acting justly is one exercise of the one God. It is an aspect of his government of the creation, God being not a 'private' but a 'public' person.

For Owen God is free, and his actions are free, and yet necessary. Free because they are the exercise of his will, necessary because his justice is a necessary or essential feature of his character. That is, God is not constrained from outside to exercise justice since it is part of his nature. In exercising justice God is simply being himself. So God exercises justices willingly. God is free in respect of extrinsic matters, (whether or not to create the world, say) but not similarly free with respect to the exercise of his own nature. That is, if he freely decrees to pardon mankind, then there is only one way, consistent with his justice, of providing for such pardon, namely, by atonement through the penal satisfaction of the God-man. That alone satisfies divine justice which is essential to the pardon of sinners.

It is necessary that God should speak truly, but he doth not speak from an absolute necessity; but it being supposed that he wills to speak, it is impossible that he should not speak truly. We say, therefore, that God cannot but punish sin, or that he necessarily punishes sin; not however, from an absolute necessity of nature, as the Father begets the Son, but upon the suppositions before mentioned , - by a necessity which excludes an antecedent indifference but not a concomitant liberty in the agent, for in punishing sin he acts by volition and with understanding. (589)

But whereas the exercise of justice is necessary, the exercise of mercy is free, discretionary

So whereas justice is necessary, mercy arises from the divine decree......These natural egresses (of justice) are the consequences, not of an absolute but of a conditional necessity, - namely, a rational creature and its sin being supposed, and both existing freely in respect of God, but the necessary suppositions being made (regarding the divine attributes), the exercise of other perfections is also necessary. (511-2)

So the exercise of mercy is necessarily subject to God's discretion, justice necessarily is not .

The difference may be put thus. For Twisse, the external exercise of God’s nature is freely decreeable. Although he is necessarily displeased by sin, nevertheless he may decree to pardon sin by a word, or by an atonement, as he sees fit. For Owen, once pardon is decreed, certain means are necessary for that end. So it is up to God whether or not he pardons sin, but if he decrees to pardon sin this must be in a way consistent with his nature and, Owen avers, it must be by atonement. Hence, in this subordinate, conditional sense, the atonement is necessary.

So the difference between Owen and Twisse starts not from consideration of the atonement, nor even of God's relation to justice, but from God's freedom. Owen and Twisse have a different understanding of how justice and mercy operate in God. Owen believes that there are asymmetries that Twisse fails to acknowledge, in particular the asymmetry between God's justice and his mercy. Owen argues at the start of the Dissertation that the logic of the two is different, and that even God must respect this logic. For Owen, divine justice, 'the power and readiness of God to do all things rightly and becomingly, according to the rule of his wisdom, goodness, truth, mercy and clemency' (503) 'presides' over all God's decrees and actions.

In a word, whatsoever, by reason of his right, he doeth or worketh "according to the counsel of his will", whatever proceeds from his faithfulness, mercy, grace, love, clemency, anger, and even from his fury, is said to be done by, through, and because of his justice, as the perfection inducing to, or the cause effecting and procuring, such operations. It is evident, then, that justice, universally taken, denotes the highest rectitude of the divine nature, and a power and promptitude of doing all things in a manner becoming and agreeable to his wisdom, goodness and right. (503)

So it follows, for Owen, that given the occurrence of sin, it is necessary that God punishes it. So when Samuel Rutherford, taking Twisse’s line, claims 'punitive justice to be a free act of the divine will', Owen is astonished, (507) denying that 'supposing a sinful creature, the will of God can be indifferent (by virtue of the punitive justice inherent in it) to inflict or not inflict punishment upon that creature, or to the volition of punishment or its opposite.' (509-10)

If for Owen divine justice is inexorable, divine sparing mercy behaves differently.

The nature of mercy and justice are different in respect of their exercise: for between the act of mercy and its object no natural obligation intervenes; for God is not bound to any one to exercise any act of mercy, neither is he bound to reward obedience, for this is a debt due from his natural right, and from the moral dependence of the rational creature, and indispensably thence arising. But between the act of justice and its object a natural obligation intervenes, arising from the indispensable subordination of the creature to God; which, supposing disobedience or sin, could no otherwise be secured than by punishment. (511)

God is thus subject to the ‘natural obligation’ which justice, and being a just God, requires.


Which is it to be, John?

Towards the end of the Dissertation, writing in defence of the Reformed theologian Johannes Piscator (1546-1625), Owen rather surprisingly offers some comments which might which may in fact be inconsistent with it.

It is necessary, sin being supposed to exist, that he (viz. God) should inflict punishment, - not the greatest that he is able to inflict, but as great as his right and justice require; for in inflicting punishment, he proceeds freely, according to the rule of these. It is necessary that the glory of the divine holiness, purity, and dominion should be vindicated; but in what manner, at what time, in what degree, or by what kind of punishment, belongs entirely to God, and we are not of his counsels. (604-5, italics in the original translation)

So because the justice of God is executed in accordance with his wisdom, Owen allows that it is possible for him to vary the 'degrees, modes, duration, and extension of punishment, according to the degrees of the demerit or circumstances of the sin, or even to transfer it upon the surety, who has voluntarily, and with his own approbation, substituted himself in the room of sinners'. (605) Again (against Rutherford on this occasion) Owen states 'Neither, however, do we think ourselves bound to teach that God could not forbid sin but under the penalty of eternal death'. (613) Owen argues that a punishment is determined by its end, the vindication of justice, and provided that end is met then the means to that end may vary. (614)

Here Owen appears to waver. On the one hand he allows that punishments may vary provided that the end of satisfying justice is met. On the other hand he seems to make an exception of the atonement, arguing or rather implying that there could not be another mode of satisfaction for sin than atonement by the God-man, the surety who has substituted himself in the room of sinners. Yet he seems to allow the possibility (though one that we are not in a position to know about) that the manner, time etc. of punishment belongs entirely to God, whose counsel we do not know. Which raises the question of why, if punishments in general, in respect of the their nature and circumstances, are in the hand of God, why the punishment for sin may not similarly be. And if it may similarly be, even if we have not a clue about what an alternative mode of punishment may be in this case, then the atonement by Christ is not necessary in even the restricted sense that Owen has argued for earlier. For there may be, for all we know, a possible world in which God exists, decrees sin, and ordains a mode of satisfaction that is a punishment different in kind from the one he has in fact ordained in the priestly work of Christ.


Postscript

It’s not my idea to attempt at this point to adjudicate between Owen and Twisse, except to say that besides the possible inconsistency just noticed, Owen’s view is much more complex than Twisse’s and the character of this complexity takes away some of the force of some of his own criticism of Twisse. For Owen God is necessarily (though freely) just, and not necessarily (though freely, in a different sense of ‘free’) merciful. This second sense of freedom , the sense in which God is free to exercise mercy or not, seems not a hairsbreadth away from Twisse’s view that God is indifferently free to pardon without atonement or not. If God, according to Owen, and in virtue of Christ’s atonement, is free show mercy to X and not to Y, how does this differ from an appeal to the freedom of indifference that he criticises Twisse for? Owen is not in a good position to critique Twisse’s view of freedom since he uses it, or something very like it, himself.

Logic chopping? Yes, logic chopping. (But remember that logic chopping is when the logic is doing the chopping and not when the logic is being chopped). And the way the logic chops often has significant consequences for central theological issues, in this case, the necessity or otherwise of the atonement.

March

Calvin, a Guide for the Perplexed