I
would not put Augustine’s doctrine of evil into the Church’s creed. I have no
right to impose it on others. I think it is an essential. But into the ‘credo’
I do not thrust it. Systematic theology has a wide margin round it, where we
must have the probabilia placed; but the creed should have none. A narrow theology, founded on
the theologian’s idiosyncrasies, is, after all, no theology at all.
So said John ‘Rabbi’ Duncan.
That’s the theme of what follows, as applied to Confessions, and then to this
theological hinterland of what Duncan calls
probabilia, probabilities.
The official Reformed theology is a
balancing act. In practice that theology pivots on one confession or another,
particularly, for Anglophones, on the Westminster Confession.
The system of doctrine.
One of the things that the recently-published
volumes on the work of the Westminster Assembly has brought home is the
adventitious or accidental aspect of the Confession, the way it was composed,
what was put in and what left out. (Chad Van Dixhoorn (ed.) The Minutes and Papers of the Westminster Assembly, (OUP, 2012)). The finished product was influenced by the
pressure of time, the opinion of the majority of divines who on a particular
day happened to be attending a committee or sub-committee, parliamentary
pressure to get a particular job done, interruptions, and no doubt the mood of
the meetings. Together with the clashes of personalities, the hobby-horses, and
so forth. Cold print cannot convey this. In such circumstances, in the
messiness of human life, the articles that resulted, chapters in the
Confession, were a series of compromises, clause by clause in some cases, and
we must remember that. As the debate on one matter was brought to an end, and a
majority were content with some particular wording, a minority or minorities
were not content, or not as content. In the nature of things confessions and
creeds are forms of compromise draftings that attract a majority on a particular
day.
So confessions and even the more basic
creeds of the church are political documents, ‘articles of peace’, what the
chaps could agree on that particular occasion. Part of this disagreement was
over what topics should be treated in a confession, and what not. Had the
divines met a week earlier or later things may have been, or would have been,
different. In this process we no doubt see the workings of an inscrutable
providence which has regard to the least nuance, the crossing of each t and
dotting of the i’s. In this sense the final form of a particular text was
‘infallibly decreed’. But what is divinely decreed is human compromise.
Behind that confessional agreement, and the
dissent of the minorities from the majorities, it is clear that there is a vast
hinterland of theological opinion, (theologoumena).
Private conjectures. Not simply Duncan’s probabilia,
but more than the purely speculative. What one thinks is a good and necessary
consequence of the teaching of Scripture others may not. What some may think
ought to find its way into a Confession others may dissent from. All right, it
is all godly opinion, (as we may suppose) but it is what you get when trained
people with different opinions are brought together. The Confession may or may
not imply any of these opinions, more likely it may permits them. Richard
Muller has recently shown what variety of opinion there is regarding the death
of Christ. (Calvin and the Reformed Tradition: On the Work of Christ and the Order of Salvation (Baker, 2012) If we think of all this mass of different points as a web, there is
a central core, the Creed or the Confession, and a vast surrounding area, not
holding the centre in place, as in a spider’s web, but a penumbra of opinion,
which may have any of several relations to the core. Perhaps the core entails
this opinion, or allows it, or make the holding of it reasonable. Or maybe
there is stuff in the hinterland that has nothing to do with the core. Either
way, there should be about a Confession a catholicity of spirit and expression,
reflecting the general Biblical scheme of Creation, Fall and Redemption, and
the absence of idiosyncrasy or an individual’s or group’s peculiarities.
The hinterland
If the production of the Confession has
ragged edges, how much more is it the case in the matter of theological opinion,
what I call the hinterland. To illustrate this,
let us take an example from an illuminating recent piece by Mark Jones which raises the
question of the nature and place of grace in the original Adam’s life, among
the Puritans. In particular whether this grace was a gift of the Holy Spirit,
and in what sense. (We must bear in mind that the concept of a covenant of
works, though a central motif of the Confession, is itself a theological
construct the elements of which are not clearly present on the surface of
things in the Genesis account, and the Holy Spirit never once mentioned in the relevant passages of Genesis). And that in turn raises questions about Adam’s
responsibility, and the nature and place of merit in the covenant of works. Two motifs
should control the answer, that Adam’s original state was ‘mutable’ and that it
resulted in what is sometimes called the loss of the image ‘in the narrow
sense’. (Here we take these positions for granted, as being generally held, but
they themselves are capable of fine tuning). And there is the abiding difficulty of understanding in what sense or senses 'nature' and natural' are used in discussion of these matters. The scene is therefore set for many possibilia. So, given all these caveats and qualifications, what are we to think
about this matter of the Holy Spirit and Adam? How are we to proceed?
What (it seems) the divines mentioned by
Mark do is take different instances of the work of the Spirit from elsewhere in
Scripture and discuss the status of unfallen Adam in the light of them. Here
are four such instances. There is the work of the Spirit in calling and
regeneration; then the periodic and spasmodic operations of the Spirit on evil
men, such as King Saul; then the Spirit’s work in giving to people unusual
gifts which do not seem to have to do with regeneration, like those craftsmen
engaged in the building of Solomon’s Temple; and finally there is the
reprobate’s tasting of the Spirit, as in Hebrews 6.4. No doubt we can find more
cases. For example, there is the work of the Spirit in the ministry of Jesus
Christ (John 3.34).
Was unfallen Adam’s life a life of faith? Did he trust the promise of God given in the
Garden? Yes, and no. His condition was
unique, proceeding ‘very good’ from the hand of his Creator but ‘mutably’ so.
He has grace, and if we think of that grace as being the gift of the Spirit, the
Spirit is resistible and was repudiated, It was not that grace that ensured his
perseverance in the original position, even though such gracious influence,
persevering grace, could have been give to Adam, as it is given to the fallen
elect. Neither was ‘deserved’ by its recipient, but one was preserving grace
(as we might call it) suspended on the continued innocence of Adam, the other was regenerating effectual grace, designed to bring its recipient to glory.
So was Adam’s faith ‘temporary’ faith, the
faith of a mere professor? Well
(again!) Yes and no. Adam’s original innocence was certainly temporary, as what
befell him makes clear. But it was not , presumably, the temporary faith mentioned in Jesus’s Parable of the Sower. What of the
temporary ‘gifting’ of the Spirit that may grant special gifts to a person, say
the gift of designing things, for a period of his life, but such giving and
withholding acts in the realm of what some call ‘common grace;’ appear to be
actions of pure sovereignty, where questions of fittingness and unfittingness do not arise, much less desert or merit.
What all this meandering shows is that we
are trawling presently through the hinterland. where not only good and necessary
consequences operate, (what are these?) but a good deal of conjecture and even speculation may
also be at work in the thinking of the ‘godly’. (Nothing wrong with this,
provided it is recognized for what it is). Whether the divines recognized this,
their opinions of the Fall and the place of the Spirit in it, (to take one
example being currently discussed) were just
that: opinions. If they sought to make these opinions a part of the meaning of
the Confession they ought to be resisted. The Confession is what it is and
not another thing.
One of the factors that makes a theologian
is the exercise of judgment,
particularly judgment about himself and then, naturally enough, judgment of
others. Particularly a judgment between a central plank of the doctrine of the gospel,
and a personal quirk. There are big issues and small issues. A Confession is
not infallible, of course, but it is a good guide to the overall shape of
things, providing a ‘system of doctrine’.
What falls outside that Confession may be illuminating, suggestive,
profitable to some theologian and his friends, or to some Seminary and its
curriculum, but it ought not to be raised to the status of the Confession
itself and the ‘system of doctrine’ that it propounds.
Sometimes one has the impression that one
motivation that some have for engaging in Reformed theology in the way that they do is in order to extend the boundaries of the official
Reformed theology. I hope I'm mistaken. Despite
the all-too-human character of the Confession, as a result of its adoption by certain churches, for many it delimits the shape of Reformed
doctrine, and for others who do not subscribe to it is has a great deal of prestige. We are free to dissent from it, in whole or in part. In matters beyond the Confession we
are free to think and to let others think. That’s how it was in Puritanism, as
Mark Jones ably shows. And that’s how it should be with any adherent to the Confession nowadays.
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