Nature and Grace

We are trying to get a handle on the question, is Christian theology words about words about words, or does it pass the reference test? Does the subject-matter of theology, God, his character, ways and works, actually refer to God, or does it refer only to further words, further sentences whose grammatical subject is God, but which may not, at the end, succeed in referring to God? In this post we look at the place that nature, human nature, plays in Reformed theology’s answer to that question.

In his account of theological method, Francis Turretin, the seventeenth –century Reformed theologian, emphasises the importance of human resources or tools. Christian theology, particularly Christian Reformed Theology, does not rely upon the operation of a superhuman sixth-sense, or a special mystical afflatus, in order to gain true, saving knowledge of God. Our knowledge of God is not simply the result of of what we feel or imagine.

Rather, in a way that Turretin no doubt thought that it was vital to grasp, but which it is easy to skip over, at the very outset of his enquiry, he unfolds the place of reason in faith. Before this he had dismissed the idea that human reason is the principle and rule by which the doctrines of the Christian religion and theology ought to be measured. None the less in his view reason still has a vital role, as we shall see.

Logic, reason and the senses

To the questions, Does any judgment belong to reason in matters of faith? Or is there no use for it? Turretin proceeds not to offer a yes or no answer to the questions, but to discriminate carefully between those who give reason too great a role in religion, and those who give it too little. (At the time when Turretin wrote the issue was a tense one because of the then-current power and influence of Socinianism.) He then goes on to argue that reason is not the rule of faith. But that’s not the question that interests him. The issue is whether reason has a part to play in the ‘judgment of private discretion by which truth is distinguished form falsehood’. It plays a role in judging the truth of conclusions in all propositions, whatever their source, whether from general or special revelation. But in the case of propositions that are from general revelation only, it is used both to establish the truth of such propositions and then what follows from them. So natural reason may judge of the truth of natural matters, but it plays a subordinate though real role in determining the truth of supernatural matters.

Although the human understanding is very dark, yet there still remains in it some rays of natural light and certain first principles, the truth of which is unquestionable, such as, the whole is greater than its part, an effect supposes a cause, to be and not to be at the same time is incompatible. If this were not the case, there could be no science, nor art, nor certainty in the nature of things. These first principles are not only true in nature, but also in grace and the mysteries of faith. (I.29-30)

But even then Turretin observes several cautions. These are in order to underline the fact that reason is not the source of Christian theology but is useful for illustrating it, for comparing one thing with another, for drawing inferences, and from establishing proofs

And then Turretin asks himself and the reader two simple questions, the significance of which it is easy to overlook. The first is, in matters of faith, does the question of whether some set of propositions is self-contradictory or not matter? This has to do with reason in its narrowest and purest sense. He claims that it is possible for human reason to judge whether a statement or a set of statements is self-contradictory. Why is this important? Because if a set of statements is self-contradictory then some statements included in the set must be false; not every member of the set of statements can be true. Turretin does not posit a higher, spiritual reason, nor does he appeal to paradox to justify theological statements which are manifestly incoherent. A theological impossibility is an impossibility. Full stop. And, by implication, Turretin is telling us that it is important in theology not to indulge in such nonsense.

We can judge the importance of this simple question and the way in which it is answered by noting some remarks of Alister McGrath’s concern that theology might allow itself to be ‘imprisoned’ by logicians.

Evangelicals, of all people, cannot allow revelation to be imprisoned within the flawed limits of sinful human reason. Whatever the extent to which the human mind is noeticially compromised by sin, it is imperative that those finite and fallen minds should not be permitted to be the judges of what is and what is not divine revelation. How can theology so willingly allow itself to be imprisoned by logicians? (A Passion for Truth, The Intellectual Coherence of Evangelicalism, Inter-Varsity), 170

For theology to be imprisoned by a logician presumably means it succumbing to the demand that theological propositions follow the elementary rules of logic such as the avoidance of contradiction, and the drawing of valid inferences from its statements. This may seem rather ironic given the book’s title. Whatever the intellectual coherence of evangelicalism, according to Professor McGrath it need not possess, and perhaps must not possess, the coherence that comes from consistency. That is the way to the prison. Rather it may possess some other non-logical or a-logical coherence which McGrath does not specify nor provide any instances of. He complains that Carl Henry sought to affirm a ‘logically consistent divine revelation' (70), and used the phrase ‘logically consistent’ rather recklessly. Such an approach, McGrath reckons, ‘opens the way to making the truth of divine revelation dependent on the judgments of fallen human reason’. Readers of this section of McGrath’s book will note that there is some confusion between affirming the logical consistency of the mysteries of the faith, and showing that they have not been proved to be inconsistent, and demonstrating their consistency. Perhaps it is McGrath who is using consistency somewhat recklessly. While it may be affirmed that God is both three and one, it is not a requirement of our faith that that claim is proved to be consistent, only that claims that it is inconsistent be successfully rebutted. At any rate, there is a sharp contrast between McGrath and Turretin: each affirms the fallenness of the human mind, and the finiteness of the human mind, but while one bids farewell to logic, the other invites it in.

Secondly, Turretin asks, Is there any use of the testimony of the senses in the mysteries of faith, or ought such testimony be entirely rejected? To this he says ‘We affirm the former and deny the latter’. Reliance on the senses ought not to be rejected. The senses are needed.

Although the orthodox are unwilling that the testimony of the senses should be heard in all mysteries, they nevertheless maintain that a proper regard should be paid to their testimony when the discussion concerns sensible and corporeal things which come within the sphere of their activity.

That is, we may place reliance on them. If we could not, how would we know that we were reading the Bible and not Gulliver’s Travels? And how could we identify the marks on its pages so that we can read them? So, according to Turretin, both human reason and the senses have a distinct role to play in Christian systematic theology. (Turretin has a nice proof text: ‘Touch me and see’ , Luke 24.39)

What the point of stressing such basic matters? Turretin is simply making the point that gifts and powers that are essentially human play a role in theology, where it is appropriate for them to do so. Theology is a humane discipline. These powers are, as we might put it, natural in the sense that they are universally-distributed tools and powers. They are the resources that we rely on in making observation, and drawing conclusions, and making calculations about all matters of fact, including the matters of fact of the Christian faith. Of course, besides stressing human finiteness, and the consequent mysteriousness to us of the doctrines of our faith, Turretin also maintains that these powers and tools are universally corrupted by sin, and that for a true, spiritual understanding of the teaching of Holy Scripture, and the appropriate response of faith and obedience, the regenerating and illuminating work of the Holy Spirit are necessary, indispensable. Turretin is, when all is said and done, a Reformed theologian. (But, he is implying, in regeneration the Spirit works through human nature, the intellect, the senses, and the will.)

He is not so emphatic upon asserting the need for special revelation and supernatural grace that its operation overrides or bypassed such powers in favour of some direct, mystical, inner light. Rather Turretin attempts to hold a fine balance between nature, human nature, even the senses and the intellect of fallen human nature, and the supernaturally-acquired knowledge of God our Creator and Redeemer.

So far we see that nature plays a vital instrumental role in acquiring the knowledge of God. But it also has an important thematic place.


Human nature created and fallen

Alongside this, Turretin argues in true Reformed fashion for the two-fold knowledge of God, that of God our Creator and of God our Redeemer. However it must be stressed that there is not for him (any more than for Calvin) a one-to-one correspondence between nature and the knowledge of God the creator on the one hand, and special grace and the knowledge of God the Redeemer on the other. To know of the true God the Creator, special revelation and divine grace are every bit as much needed as they are in order to know God the redeemer in Christ. Nevertheless, there is some rudimentary and rather inchoate knowledge of God the creator available to everyone. And to know God the redeemer in Christ, human senses and the exercise of the human intellect are every bit as vital (where appropriate) as are the regenerating and illuminating agency of the Holy Spirit of Christ. In these ways grace builds upon nature, it does not destroy it.

Besides this, and in a rather more formal way than Calvin, Turretin argues for what he calls ‘natural theology’, a term which he does not use exclusively to refer only to arguments for God’s existence. (I. 6-16) He uses it interchangeably with ‘knowledge’ as in ‘natural theology or [natural] knowledge of God’. There are, in fact, two parts to such natural knowledge, one ‘partly innate, (derived from the book of conscience by means of common notions and partly acquired (drawn from the book of creatures discursively)’. (I.6) Such knowledge is derived from the natural law written upon each person’s conscience which necessarily implies some knowledge of God the lawgiver. So the acquired knowledge of God (and the scope of the term ‘natural theology’) is not confined by Turretin to cosmological proofs for the existence of God , for example, but includes those matters referred to in passages of Scripture such as Ps.19.1 Acts 14:15-7: Rom 1.19. Obviously enough such natural knowledge of God cannot be derived from Scripture, and Turretin goes on to claim that it is a matter of universal experience. (I.7), referring to Cicero to provide evidence for this universality (as well as to the reports of contemporary explorers (I.8) ) as Calvin had done before him; the universal sensus divinitatis, and the place of of religious observances throughout the world). ‘The special knowledge of true faith (by which believers please God and have access to him, of which Paul speaks) does not exclude but supposes [i.e. presupposes] the general knowledge from nature’. (I.8)

It is at such points that the Magisterial Reformers, as well as clearly referring to Romans 1 and 2, draw upon Augustine, especially his anti-Pelagian work On Nature and Grace. In the short chapter 3 (and also chapter 22) Augustine makes a series of important distinctions. The first is between two senses of ‘nature’: nature as fallen and as unfallen. ‘Man’s nature, indeed, was created at first faultless and without any sin; but that nature of man in which every one is born from Adam, now wants the Physician, because it is not sound.’ Second, he draws a distinction between the good qualities that remain in human nature despite the Fall and the evil qualities it comes to have as a result of the Fall. ‘All good qualities, no doubt, which it still possesses in its make, life, senses, intellect, it has of the Most High God, its Creator and Maker’. Here we see a possible antecedent of the later Calvinist view of common grace. But we also see that these distinctions are fundamental to the idea that nature is fallen but not obliterated, on which divine grace builds.

Augustine has a view of nature and of evil drawn in metaphysical terms, some of the language of which is in turn drawn from Platonism, though it ultimately finds warrant, for him, in the biblical account of the goodness of the creation by an all-good Creator. Existence is good, and the only proximate source of good. Evil is the absence of good, a privation, a lack or loss or defect. So it follows as a metaphysical truth for Augustine that evil can ‘exist’ only by being parasitic upon some good, and only in so far as it is a ‘withdrawal from a substance’. An evil nature or an evil agent insofar as it exists, is good, despite its evil, for its existence is given by the good Creator. So that the Fall, since it did not entail the annihilation of the ones who fell, must be thought of as the perversion of the good and not as the total annihilation of the good:

Sin is not a substance; but God is a substance, yea the height of substance and only true sustenance of the reasonable creature. The consequence of departing from Him by disobedience, and of inability, through infirmity, to receive what one ought really to rejoice in, you hear from the Psalmist, when he says: ‘My heart is smitten and withered like grass, since I have forgotten to eat my bread’.

So the coming of sin led to loss, since sin is itself a loss, infecting us with defects, disabilities and infirmities, as Augustine calls them. This is a forceful expression both of Augustine’s view of evil as basically privative and also of the organic character of human nature; the Fall, like a pathogen, eats away at human nature without annihilating it.

All this is in sharp contrast to the modern theological outlook, both conservative and liberal, which has less and less time for the Biblical doctrine of the Fall. One characteristic of modern narrative theology is that all too frequently the narrative begins not with the Adamic fall but with the Abrahamic covenant, while the original creation, the so-called covenant of nature or covenant of works, is largely ignored. This may partly be due to embarrassment over the doctrine of evolution by natural selection, which tends to shut theologians’ mouths at this point. But it also may be due to a more widespread departure from the very idea of nature as a theological resource. Similarly the biblical account of the Noahic covenant is downplayed. In it the Lord appears to covenant with himself on behalf of mankind, giving the rainbow as a covenant sign both to himself and the human race, to preserve and regulate nature for the benefit of mankind, notwithstanding their sin. In our eagerness to arrive at the covenant with Abraham we tend to push past this covenant with creation, So just as torah supplants natural law, so Abraham pushes out Noah.

Grace on nature

Grace builds upon human nature, we are arguing. Human nature is fallen and perverted, but it remains functioning human nature nonetheless. The Fall does not literally de-humanise the race. Why is this important? Because it is through the investigative resources of human nature, our reason and our senses, that we gain our basic awareness of what is objectively true and false which in turn gives us good reason to believe that we are able successfully to refer to what is distinct from us, and really there, and come to establish what is objectively true, and not a mere fable or fantasy. As we earlier quoted form Turretin, ‘If this were not the case, there could be no science, nor art, nor certainty in the nature of things’. Of course more than nature is needed, but not less than nature. We make mistakes, and are self-deceiving about what is really true, but there are also corrective mechanisms which enable us to finesse our claims about objective reality, reducing the chance of error. We know that the table is real and not a phantom, because of the judgment of our sensory experience, and the obvious ways in which the top and legs of the table resist us and support us, and ways in which we can mend and re-varnish the table, and so on. And we use these same objectivity-recognising tools, where it is pertinent to do so, for the purpose of enquiring about God and gaining knowledge of him. Yes, once again, these alone are not sufficient, but they are necessary, and if they neglect their importance then theologians can never hope to pass the successful reference test.

Imputation and the Grammar of Justification

What is grammar?

Besides the logic of the act or declaration of justification, which we looked at in the past post, there is what I shall call a grammar of justification that arises on the basis of such an act of imputation. By a ‘grammar’ here I do not merely mean a way of talking, what it makes sense to say and not to say within a particular ‘form of life’ of a vaguely Wittgensteinian sense, in the way that Lindbeck uses the term in his book The Nature of Doctrine. There is a decidedly non-realist flavour to this Lindbeckian usage. (George Lindbeck, The Nature of Doctrine 79f.)

Rather, as I shall use it, grammar is a way of talking that arises out of a recognition of particular divine realities as these are revealed to us in Scripture. These realities impose upon us a certain kind of mental discipline, a discipline regarding what it makes sense to say, even if what we are talking about are divinely-revealed mysteries that we cannot fully comprehend. And so the revealed reality of the Trinitarian character of God imposes on us the discipline of thinking of the threeness of the divine nature as not implying three Gods, three distinct divinities. To move in that way from the threeness of God to tritheism is to make a grammatical mistake, even though God’s threeness and oneness are shrouded in mystery. We simply do not do justice to the revelation if we move in the direction of tritheism, just as we do not do it justice if we talk in a modalistic way of the divine three-in-one-ness. Part of the function of a creed or a confession of faith is to spell out that grammar. (On this see Lewis Ayres, Nicaea and Its Legacy, (OUP, 2004), 14-5, 175).

Justification and Imputation

So it is with other revealed realities, especially (for us, here), the relation between the realities of imputation and justification. On the Reformed view of imputation it is only the immaculate righteousness of Jesus Christ himself, procured through the obedience and satisfaction of Christ, that is sufficient for justification.

For example, for Calvin, only a perfect righteousness will secure pardon, and such righteousness is that possessed only by God himself. ‘[T]he righteousness of which God makes us partakers is the eternal righteousness of the eternal God’. (Inst. III.11.9) Nevertheless, it is as the Mediator, as God-man, that Christ procures such righteousness for us.

Hence I infer, first, that Christ was made righteousness when he assumed the form of a servant; secondly, that he justified us by his obedience to the Father; and , accordingly that he does not perform this for us in respect of his divine nature, but according to the nature of the dispensation laid upon him. For though God alone is the fountain of righteousness, and the only way in which we are righteous is by participation with him, yet as by our unhappy revolt we are alienated from his righteousness, it is necessary to descend to this lower remedy, that Christ may justify us by the power of his death and resurrection. (Inst. III.11.8)

Believers are ‘clothed’ in this righteousness, they are ‘covered’ by it. (Inst. III.11.2, 23)

If this righteousness were not to be imputed to us, but to be imparted to us so as to become a part of our inner nature, our moral character, then it would inevitably be or become tainted, and so compromise its perfection and so lose its power to justify. (These are steps in the spelling out of the ‘grammar’). Because sanctification in this life is always imperfect, tainted, as a consequence the believer, the one justified, has to ask for pardon (based upon the objective provision of Christ’s righteousness) for the deficiencies of even his best, sanctified, efforts. We see from this that the impartation or communication that is involved in imputation cannot imply anything that would compromise or sully the character of the righteousness in question. The imputation must be understood in a way that completely guarantees and safeguards the character of the righteousness that is imputed. So justification must be wholly on the basis of imputation and not at all on the basis of impartation.

Therefore we must have this blessedness not once only, but must hold it fast during our whole lives. Moreover, the message of free reconciliation with God is not promulgated for one or two days, but is declared to be perpetual in the church (2 Cor 5:18,19). Hence believers have not even to the end of life any other righteousness than that which is there described. Christ ever remains a Mediator to reconcile the Father to us, and there is a perpetual efficacy in his death, i.e., ablution, satisfaction, expiation; in short, perfect obedience, by which all our iniquities are covered. In the Epistle to the Ephesians, Paul says not that the beginning of salvation is of grace, but “by grace are ye saved”, “not of works, lest any man should boast” (Eph. 2: 8,9). (Inst. III.14.11)

For the righteousness of Christ (as it alone is perfect, so it alone can stand the scrutiny of God) must be summoned for us, and as a surety represent us judicially. Provided with this righteousness, we constantly obtain the remission of sins through faith. Our imperfection and impurity, covered with this purity, are not imputed but are as it were buried, so as not to come under judgment until the hour arrive when the old man being destroyed, and plainly extinguished in us, the divine goodness shall receive us into beatific peace with the new Adam, there to await the day of the Lord, on which, being clothed with incorruptible bodies, we shall be translated to the glory of the heavenly kingdom. (Inst. III.14.12)

Justification is not a mere threshold blessing; something which applies to people at their conversion and not subsequently. It is operative at all times, an, objective, perfect, judicial righteousness. It is this righteousness, complete and unassailable, that is the ground of Christian assurance. So there is a sense in which for Calvin the believer never leaves the law-court in which the judge declares us righteous for Christ’s sake. He needs that declaration always to stand, and never to be relegated into something over and done with, or requiring to be supplemented by some righteousness of his own.

This is one element to the grammar of justification. It is justification through imputation and in no other way. But there are other grammatical elements which connect up with this one and these two elements as a consequence mutually reinforce each other.

Justification is justification at the bar of Almighty God. The primary question for is not whether or not a person, being justified, is a member of the visible covenant community. That’s a secondary question, though by no means unimportant. The primary question is, how can I face God’s judgment? This is vividly seen in the structure of Calvin’s discussion. Having set forth the main elements of justification by faith, after chapter 11 of Book III, with its polemic against Augustine, Osiander and the schoolmen, the reader is stopped short by the heading of chapter 12: ‘The Necessity of Contemplating the Judgment Seat of God in Order to Be Seriously Convinced of the Doctrine of Gratuitous Justification’. Justification is not a matter merely of academic debate, one confined ‘within the precincts of the schools’, nor is it basically an ecclesiological matter, but it has to do with the ‘judgment seat of God’.

[T]he question must be: How shall we answer the heavenly Judge when he calls us to account? Let us contemplate that Judge, not as our own unaided intellect conceives of him, but as he is portrayed to us in Scripture (see especially the book of Job), with a brightness which obscures the stars, a strength which melts the mountains, an anger which shakes the earth, a wisdom which takes the wise in their own craftiness, a purity before which all things become impure, a righteousness…. which once kindled burns to the lowest hell…..if our life is brought to the standard of the written law, we are lethargic indeed if we are not filled with dread at the many maledictions which God has employed for the purpose of arousing us, and among others, the following general one: “Cursed be he that confirmeth not all the words of this law to do them”. (Deut. 27.26) (Inst. III.12.1)

So the one declaration of justification, grounded in Christ’s righteousness, must be sufficient to carry the believer to the final judgment and to vindicate him there. This at one stroke puts paid to the idea that ‘first justification’ could be something separat from 'final justification’, as far as regards our acceptance with God is concerned. Once justified, always justified. A justification that requires some kind of augmentation or supplementation, for example, the supplemenation of a faithful life, in order to secure our acceptance, makes no sense. It is ‘ungrammatical’. Given the immaculate righteousness of Christ, why would human works, however saintly, also be necessary? For however saintly, they are still tainted by sin. And given that anything the saintliest believer does is tainted, how could such tainted righteousness be an element in ‘final justification’? Since the believer’s best efforts in sanctification are themselves tainted and spoiled by his sin, even these efforts need forgiveness. This is so-called ‘double justification’. One consequence of this is that, as A.N.S. Lane puts it, ‘[F]or the Protestant being reckoned righteous through faith alone is a truth not just for the moment of conversion but for the whole Christian life’. (Justification in Catholic-Protestant Dialogue, (London , T and T Clark, 2002), 265-6) Calvin sees Paul’s answer to his own exultant question ‘Who shall lay anything to the charge of God’s elect?’ to be the ‘unremitted continuance of God’s favour, from the time of our calling to the hour of death’. (Comm. Rom. 8.30) It can be seen from this that the two grammatical elements reinforce each other; they draw out distinct implications from the one divine reality of justification, implications that are grounded in the overall biblical witness, as when Paul and others link justification to vindication at the final judgment.


Sanctification and the grammar of justification

What of sanctification in all this? Considering this question leads us to a further, and perhaps a final element of the grammar of the Reformed doctrine of justification. On the Reformed understanding, sanctification is an inseparable concomitant of justification. The two are distinct, not merged or blended into each other, and they are inseparably connected, as two distinct gifts of God. (Inst. III.14. 19-20), even though justification has the priority. Everything depends upon the free righteousness of Christ. As we have seen, justification is sufficient for acceptance, and though sanctification is inseparably attached to justification, because of the sufficiency of justification for acceptance, sanctification cannot in any way be necessary for acceptance. God justifies the ungodly.

'JI'

There is a renewed interest in the notorious ‘split’ between Dr Martyn Lloyd-Jones and Dr J. I. Packer which resulted in the dissolution of the Puritan Conference and its replacement by the Westminster Conference in 1971. This interest has been sparked by a chapter of Dr Carl Trueman’s in J.I.Packer and the Evangelical Future ed. Timothy George (Baker) and an associated interview. As I write this I’ve not seen or heard this material, and before I do it seemed to me to be worth noting a number of points about Packer’s stance on cooperation.

I’ve no axe to grind on this, as I was brought up an evangelical Baptist (Baptist Union, y'know) though now for family reasons attend an Anglican congregation. Years ago I wrote publicly against the fruits of Dr Packer’s involvement in the Anglican-Methodist discussions.

One reason for putting together this piece is to redress the present imbalance that may arise as a result of the state of the of evidence. Dr Lloyd-Jones is dead, and his several defenders have access to the full range of his correspondence. Dr Packer is alive, and quite naturally his personal correspondence, and maybe other documents, are not available in the same way, even though as we shall see there are published fragments of letters and addresses. The second reason is that somewhat surprisingly, as far as I know, Packer has never published an account of his own outlook specifically addressed to those who were and are pained by his stance. If there is such an account I’d be pleased to know of it. (The nearest I think he comes to doing this is his booklet A Kind of Noah’s Ark, (Latimer House, 1981)) Iain Murray notes that Packer addressed the Westminster Fellowship, 21st March 1966, where he put the case for involvement in the Anglican ecumenical agenda. (The Fight of Faith, 515-6) He said

Am I separated from my friends in a way which is needless and which could be remedied? I am not sure that I am. Though we agree on essentials, there are other points on which we are divided...I do not see how the facts of the case can be met except by evangelicals maintaining fellowship while at the same time [continuing in] different denominational alignments.

When Dr Packer responded to Dr Lloyd Jones’s’ letter telling him of the decision of three of the organising committee members to stop the Puritan Conference because of Packer’s involvement with Anglo-Catholics in the writing of Growing into Union, this is part of what he wrote back

I naturally regret that you and David and John have felt bound to take this line, but I recognise it as one more application of the principles of co-operation which you have been advocating so strongly in recent years (and which, as you know, have never convinced me)...My respect for you and my gratitude for what God has given me through you in the past remains undimmed. (Quoted in Iain Murray, Lloyd-Jones: Messenger of Grace, 207)

I believe it is possible to offer a perfectly understandable explanation of this failure to be convinced, one that is in line with full Christian integrity, but it rests on grounds that are somewhat unfamiliar to the people who level the charge of compromise: How can a man organise a Puritan conference and not himself be a Puritan? What follows is very largely a defence of J.I. Packer’s position vis-à-vis Anglicanism to the extent that it attempts to convey the coherence and strength of that position as (I believe) he sees it, and the bearing that these reasons have on ‘principles of co-operation’. In the next post I shall make some remarks on these reasons.

Wherever possible I use Dr Packer's own published words. I think it is fair to say that he presently sees Anglicanism as his least worst option, and that he can see equally sincere and informed Christian people disagreeing with him. I shall offer my account under a number of headings: the nature and advantages of Anglicanism; the character of Puritanism; the effect of the Enlightenment upon theology and upon connexional Protestant denominations; and finally, Packer’s understanding of the relationship between regeneration and being in error.


Anglicanism

Packer’s loyalty to the Church of England has been undeviating, a loyalty which has historic precedents, and which many of Packer’s non-Anglican friends simply accepted without agreeing with (or arguing over) before the appearance of Growing into Union, and the consequences that it triggered. It is, I think. hard for a non-Anglican to appreciate the grip of the Anglican ethos.

I am an Anglican not so much by sentiment or affection as by conviction,,,,,I cannot say that I ever particularly liked the Church of England as I found it, but I remain an Anglican out of conviction that here is the right place, for here I possess the truest, wisest and potentially richest heritage in all Christendom. (The Thirty Nine Articles: Their Place and Use Today (Latimer House, 1984, Preface).

I maintain that a man with his eyes open to the full range of Anglican doctrinal pluralism may yet responsibly choose to be an Anglican, even an Anglican minister, though it may be a hard-made decision bringing misery as well as fulfilment. I do not maintain (I had better say this outright) that choosing to be an Anglican is a virtue, or that choosing not to be one or not to stay one is a vice. Choice, we saw, is necessary, and anyone may conclude that, rather than be Anglican, Methodist, Baptist Union or United Reformed (all which bodies are doctrinally mixed), he should join one of the smaller groups (Brethren, Pentecostals, Fellowship of Independent Evangelical Churches, Reformed Baptists, Free Church of Scotland, etc.) which debar from the ranks of their teachers anyone holding ‘critical’ views of Scripture or rejecting major evangelical tenets. To be sure, some think these smaller bodies purchase doctrinal purity at the price of theological stagnation, and are cultural backwaters out of touch with society around, just as some think Anglican allegiance is an unholy identification with cultural privilege, ecclesiastical worldliness and theological indifferentism. But these matters are arguable both ways, and neither estimate need be accepted. More important is respect for the other man’s deliberate decision, whether or not it coincides with your own. (A Kind of Noah’s Ark. Latimer House, 1981. Note that the digitalised version used here is unfortunately not paginated. Emphasis added. )

The key to his analysis is his understanding of the comprehensiveness of the Church of England. Historically speaking, that Church was held together by the Creeds, the Articles and the Prayer Book (each variously understood) and a commitment to the norms of Scripture, tradition and reason (also variously understood). The Prayer Book and the Articles have each been moved into the shadows. So what is comprehensiveness? Packer notes an 'enormous gap’ that has opened between the older Anglicanism by liberal and critical theology within the Church of England. He identifies

a worldwide crop of Christian reconstructionists, all starting from a non-incarnational view of Jesus, all working with a unitarian idea of God seasoned with more or less of process-theology, all claiming that modern secular knowledge makes their type of view the only one possible, and all vigorously offsetting themselves from the categories and content of traditional belief. Many Anglicans, leading scholars among them, are in this camp. (Ark)

Evangelicals perceive that much of the exploring is done on the basis of the academic freedom which all scholars outside Communist countries claim - that is, freedom to follow the argument wherever it seems to lead and to publish novel notions, hypothetically held, to see how the scholarly world reacts to them. Also, evangelicals perceive that if in the course of these explorations real fundamental heresy is put out, wittingly or unwittingly, more benefit comes to the church from public analysis and refutation (as when Paul trounced the Galatian and Colossian heresies, and Augustine the Pelagian heresy, and John Owen the Socinian heresy) than from any use of the big stick on the offending author. (Ark)

They [evangelicals] do not passively accept all the disorder they find. Nor do they accept that they are guilty by association of the errors they oppose (a nonsense notion, which has been given an unhappy airing during the past two decades); nor do they accept that they are settling for a situation in which no doctrinal discipline operates. They urge, rather, that discipline (which means training - Latin, disciplina) is in Scripture a primarily pastoral concept, and that the kind of pastorally-oriented controversy in which they engage is the basic form of discipline in the doctrinal realm. (Ark)

In effect, Packer proceeds to argue that in an age of academic freedom one either separates from heretics, or (in connexional congregations) takes them to the church courts, or maintains one’s own position vis a vis them in mutual tolerance.

However, the idea of a choice that must be made but which might equally be made one way as well as the opposite way, and part of the grounds of that choice being a principle of toleration grounded on human fallibility and ignorance, does not by itself seem a very strong ground for adhering to comprehensiveness. Packer supports it by other arguments.

Puritanism

The bulk of those who supported and attended the Puritan Conference, being independents (Baptists, mostly, but some Congregationalists), and some Presbyterians and of course a few Anglicans, saw the history of Puritanism as linear and progressive. As they see it, from the period from the Elizabethan Settlement to the Commonwealth, Puritanism became more and more itself, it got better and better. From being a reforming party in the Church of England it became Presbyterian and Congregationalist in ecclesiastical outlook. The 1662 ejection simply underlined the correctness of this view, for here the Church of England turned its back on Puritanism, and a chasm opened up between Anglicanism and Dissent.

Packer does not share this analysis. For him a Puritan is what used to be called a ‘doctrinal Puritan’, one who is soteriogically a Calvinist with a distinctive view of pastoral care. William Gurnall or Joseph Hall or Ezekiel Hopkins were all equally as much Puritans as were William Perkins or Thomas Goodwin or Anthony Tuckney. (If you did not know that Ezekiel Hopkins was Bishop of Londonderry you would not learn it from what he wrote.) Puritanism could co-exist with Laudian Arminianism if allowed to, just as George Whitfield was able to continue as a clergyman in the Church of England that contained virtual deists.)

Packer titled one of his pen portraits of Lloyd Jones ‘A Kind of Puritan’. You get the implication? In it he says of Dr Lloyd Jones ‘Regarding me as latter-day Puritan (which I took, as I was meant to do, to be a compliment), he once told me that I was not a real Anglican, and predicted with some distress that my fellow Anglicans would not accept me’. ((‘D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones: A Kind of Puritan’ in J.I. Packer, Collected Shorter Writings, 4.65)

Packer goes on

The Puritans did not differ much in their ultimate goal, nor in their theological principles, nor in their sense of the urgency of action against scandalous things, not in their judgement that the honour of God and the welfare of Christians were always directly bound up with the current state of the church; but they frequently differed among themselves as to when and in what form action to remedy abuses and reinforce righteousness could best be taken. It would thus be misleading to generalize about them as if at each stage one group and one line of action have more right to be called Puritan than another – Presbyterian national-churchmen opposing toleration, for instance, rather than Independent gathered-churchmen supporting it, or vice versa.

And

Yet he [Dr Lloyd-Jones], with historians generally, was surely right when he view these as divisions (over Separatisim and non-Separatism) within a body of people whose common outlook on basics made it proper to call them all Puritans, whether they were so called in their own day or note. This is my own point exactly. (71)

It is implied that this historical analysis was not shared by some in their understanding of how and why the Puritan Conference was organised.

The Enlightenment

For all his love for the Puritans, in Packer’s view the church-political situation has become even more complex since the influence of the Enlightenment on the churches. This led to destructively critical methods of Bible study, the narrowing of the work of Christ to that of a teacher of ethics, and as a consequence the message of the liberal wing of Protestantism was largely a liberal-ethical one. He saw that what historic evangelicals, such as himself, and the Anglo-Catholics had in common was an anti-Enlightenment stance, a stance against liberal and pragmatic churchmanship. Together they held to the historic creeds and to the authority of Scripture, the 'Great Tradition', even though they had important theological differences. In other words, for Dr Packer there is a theological issue of some consequence at stake here. This might be stated as follows: wherever possible, in the Church of England I should cohere with and make common cause with those who hold to the historic conciliar views of the godhead and the person of Christ against those who ignore or reject those views.

So he celebrates the ‘happy fact’

that within the past thirty years the previously felt convictional and kerygmatic gap between the more conservative evangelicals and the more conservative anglo-catholics has shrunk.

It is in the context of a comprehensiveness with very wide limits that Packer argues that it is important not to miss the force of this reasoning by falling victim

to the sectarian idea, sometimes met, that evangelicalism, being Christianity at its purest, ought to practice self-sufficiency in theology, taking nothing from the mixed bag of Roman Catholic, Orthodox, Anglo-Catholic and liberal Protestant thought on the grounds that nothing in that bag can help evangelicals in the least. Were this idea sound, the case for patience with the intermittently heterodox would be less strong; but the idea is not sound. I for one regard the evangelicalism outlined in the opening paragraphs of this essay as the purest Christianity that the world has seen since apostolic times, and in that sense I affirm Christianity to be evangelicalism and vice versa. But it does not follow that adherents of other mutations of Christianity, mutations which seem less close overall to the spirit, belief and thrust of the New Testament, have nothing to teach me on this or that particular point - nothing, that is, which I could not have learned from some evangelical source. Nor does it follow that I serve God best by assuming there are no new truths, or new applications of truth, that wait to break forth from his holy Word, so that as a teacher in the church I need only repeat traditional evangelical positions and I shall have done my job. The truth is rather this: Theology is an ongoing corporate enterprise which in principle involves the whole church. It is an enterprise through which everyone’s under- standing of what God has revealed is again and again enlarged. It proceeds by dialogue with past and present attempts to spell out that revelation, dialogue through which Scripture actually evaluates the various attempts made to expound it. We all need to examine and re-examine by Scripture whether our own traditions, as well as those of others, are true and adequate (two questions, not just one); and the late B. B. Warfield, as doughty a Reformed traditionalist as the world has seen, was right when he said in conversation that the theologian must be like the busy bee, always moving around gathering raw material for honey from all sorts of flowers. (Ark)

The rank and file of those ministers who attended the Puritan Conference typically did not seek theological allies and theological enlightenment beyond those who were like-minded, other pastors of independent or independently-minded congregations seeking to promote their health and their extension through faithful Bible-ministry and pastoral oversight. Independency means local autonomy and a considerable self-sufficiency (in the best sense, of course). In such churches, the sense of continuity with the historic church, going back to the patristic and conciliar eras is in my experience not strong. Nor is the view that local congregations are part of one holy, catholic and apostolic church. Rather, the strength of such separatism is the freedom is gives to the pulpit to preach the gospel. The weakness is the danger of sectarianism. Dr Lloyd-Jones seems to have reinforced this rather sectarian tendency, for his public attention (whatever his private sentiments may have been) was given exclusively to the Reformation, to Puritanism, and to the Evangelical Awakening and its bearing on current evangelicalism. Trinitarian and Christological orthodoxy was taken for granted, and not dwelt upon, it being forgotten, perhaps, that this heritage has, as a matter of historical fact, been passed on in part through church authority and by Christian brethren of a very different kind than that espoused by evangelical independency.

There is a difference in perspective, then, and always has been, between Packer and his non-Anglican friends, those who used to invite him to preach, who read his books with relish, who attended rallies and conferences at which he spoke, and who came away both nodding and shaking their heads. Someone in Packer’s position, an evangelical Anglican in a comprehensive church who (at the same time) shuns pietistic withdrawal will be involved in ecclesiastical affairs more than is an independent pastor ever could be.

Regeneration and mental error

In his early work ‘Fundamentalism’ and the Word of God, (IVP 1958) Packer asks why it is

that any Christian should ever deviate form the Bible’s view of itself? The same question arises in connection with unscriptural views of any doctrine. It does not seem hard to answer. Christians fall into mental error, partly through mistaking or overlooking what Scripture teaches, partly through having their minds prepossessed with unbiblical notions so that they cannot take scriptural statements seriously. (123)

I believe that these words, and the section of the book from which they are drawn, must have been overlooked by many of Packer’s subsequent critics, at least those who have subsequently accused him of inconsistency. They also give us reason for thinking that Alister McGrath is somewhat mistaken in seeing the writing and publication of ‘Fundamentalism’ and the Word of God as the ‘coming out’ of Packer into the evangelical mainstream (as opposed to paddling along the Puritan and Reformed creek). Packer always saw himself, an Anglican Puritan, as being in the Anglican mainstream. In the Christian life there are points at which the head may go ahead of the heart, and points at which the heart may go ahead of the head. A person who is a Christian may have moral besetting sins which throw him off balance, so he may have intellectual besetting sins.

This piece has already gone on for long enough. In the next Taking a Line I shall try to assess these arguments, and then take a look at the infamous ‘split’ from another perspective.

(I’m grateful to Martin Downes and Melvin Tinker for pieces of information and sources which helped me in preparing this piece. They are in no way responsible for the result, of course.)