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Valuing Christ Alone

John Calvin, Harmony of the Gospels, V.2 on Matthew 17:8

They saw no man but Jesus only. When it is said that in the end they saw Christ alone, this means that the Law and the Prophets had a temporary glory, that Christ alone might remain fully in view. If we would properly avail ourselves of the aid of Moses, we must not stop with him, but must endeavor to be conducted by his hand to Christ, of whom both he and all the rest are ministers. This passage may also be applied to condemn the superstitions of those who confound Christ not only with prophets and apostles, but with saints of the lowest rank, in such a manner as to make him nothing more than one of their number. But when the saints of God are eminent in graces, it is for a totally different purpose than that they should defraud Christ of a part of his honor, and appropriate it to themselves. In the disciples themselves we may see the origin of the mistake; for so long as they were terrified by the majesty of God, their minds wandered in search of men, but when Christ gently raised them up, they saw him alone. If we are made to experience that consolation by which Christ relieves us of our fears, all those foolish affections, which distract us on every hand, will vanish away.

It’s obvious that being seized by prejudice against Calvin is simply a way to deprive yourself of great blessing.

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Essays Theological Reflections

The Ontological Gulf

The Westminster Standards (Confession of Faith, Shorter Catechism and Larger Catechism) are the home of a theology as profound as it is clear and precise. This may seem confusing to some, who think that if you can speak with plain forthrightness the matter must be simple, that if something is expressible it is consequently jejune. The ineffable does not lose its quality of mystery when we state with comprehensible precision everything that can be said about it. For though vagueness and mist are sometimes confused for depth, the real marvels can be set out plainly in the full light of day and still boggle the mind.

One area where this profundity is evident is in the doctrine of the covenants. WCF VII,1 says:

The distance between God and the creature is so great, that although reasonable creatures do owe obedience unto him as their Creator, yet they could never have any fruition of him as their blessedness and reward, but by some voluntary condescension on God’s part, which he hath been pleased to express by way of covenant.

The ontological gulf, the distance between God and man with regard to being, was bridged not by man ascending a ladder to God, not by a series of emanations, and not by the Incarnation of Christ. The ontological gulf between God and man was bridged by God’s voluntary condescension – by the covenant of works. When man fell into sin, and rendered himself uncapable of life by that covenant (VII,3), there was a new gulf. To the distance of being between God and man, there was added a moral distance. The covenant of grace, the appointment of Christ as Mediator with all that entailed, including the Incarnation, was the bridge of that moral gulf, so that God could again dwell in and among His people. The Incarnation was never meant to bridge the ontological gulf between God and man. Thus the Confession goes on to assert (VIII,2):
“…two whole, perfect and distinct natures, the Godhead and the manhood, were inseparably joined in one person, without conversion, composition or confusion.”
The Incarnation does not render us ontologically capable of union with God, or of the knowledge of God. There is never any possibility of some hybrid of deity and humanity: the natures cannot be blended: the ontological distance never disappears, though God accommodate Himself to us. The One who dwells in inaccessible light must still approach us: if we are to know Him at all He must condescend to our low estate, to our near approach to non-being, to our paltry ontological status. But the Incarnation, as part of what was required for the Son to be Mediator between God and man, bridges the moral gulf – the distance between our wickedness and God’s holiness, so that our vileness is no longer an obstacle to God’s purpose of condescension.
That means, of course, that the covenant of grace is superior to the covenant of works: in the latter, God kindly overcame a natural distance to make Himself known to us; but in the former, God graciously overcomes not only a natural but a moral distance to make Himself known to us as not only our Sovereign Lord but as also our Loving Redeemer.
That means also that salvation should not be conceived of in ontological categories. This would be sufficiently evidenced by God’s pronouncement of His whole creation, including man, to be very good. We don’t need deliverance from a condition of exceeding goodness. It is also manifest in the Incarnation itself. If being human were intrinsically wrong or evil, the Son of God could never have taken into personal union with Himself a complete human nature. Christ came, not to deliver us from the condition of humanity, but from humanity’s accidental (in the sense of not proper to its essence) bondage to sin and consequently the devil and death.
And together all of that means that the attempt to find some natural ground in God that required the Incarnation, to insist with some absurd speculators that Christ would have become incarnate even had the Fall never happened, is ultimately profane.
To begin with, it means prying into what has not been revealed, and in so doing that speculation reveals a lack of proper humility before God (Psalm 131).
This notion fails, secondly, in that it does not recognise God’s providence over all, which requires us to believe that the Fall was included in God’s decree, and though contingent as to Adam, infallibly certain as to God.[1]
It fails too because it seeks for something higher than the will of God, for a cause of God’s will. It looks for a necessity planted in the divine nature, so that the Incarnation is not a free determination of God’s will to deal with the problem of sin, but an inevitable expression of some thing essential in God. This is a fundamental mistake, since there is nothing higher than the will of God, and for His will no cause may be assigned.[2]
In addition to the preceding points, which demonstrate that such speculations minimise God’s sovereignty and the perfection of His decree, it should be said, as sufficient for simple souls, that believing Christ would have become incarnate without sin also falsifies the Scriptural representations that Christ came into the world to save sinners (e.g., 1 Timothy 1:15, 1 John 4:9,10). This wasn’t a super-added purpose, an additional benefit to proceeding with something that was already going to take place. This was the reason that the Son was united to a human nature, and took upon Himself our curse and our subjection to the law.
And the ultimate effect is to minimise and dishonour the grace of God. It diminishes God’s grace to argue that the Incarnation was not done graciously, freely, but because of an intrinsic compulsion: obscuring that this act of condescension is voluntary robs God of the praise due to Him for it. It dishonours the grace of God by failing to recognise that it was on account of sin that this staggering act of condescension was undertaken; it was not man as man, in his condition of humanity, but man as sinful -vile, rebellious, hateful- upon whom God had mercy in sending His Son to be born of a woman.

[1] For more on this point, B.B. Warfield’s article “The Principle of the Incarnation” in Selected Shorter Writings, v.1 is a good beginning point.
[2] For more on this point consult Thomas Aquinas’ Summa Theologica Part 1, Question 19, Articles 4 & 5 and Francis Turretin’s Institutes of Elenctic Theology, Topic 3, Question 17.

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Quotations Theological Reflections

Justification Differs from Sanctification

Heppe (Reformed Dogmatics) quotes from Wollebius:

Sanctification differs from justification (1) in genus; the righteousness of the former belongs to the category of quality, that of the latter to the category of relation; (2) in form; (a) in justification faith is regarded as a hand grasping the righteousness of Christ, in sanctification faith is regarded as the principle and root of good works; (b) in justification sin is removed only as regards liability and punishment, in sanctification it is gradually abolished as regards existence; (c) in justification Christ’s righteousness is imputed to us, in sanctification a new righteousness inherent to us is infused into us; (3) in degrees: for justification is an acting, one individual, perfect, happening alike to all; but sanctification is a successive act, gradually tending to perfection and, according to the variety in the gifts of the H. Spirit, more shining in some, less so in others.

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Pastoral Care Practical Notes Quotations Theological Reflections

True Assurance Results in True Piety

Turretin, Institutes of Elenctic Theology, IV.13,22

So far is the doctrine of the certainty of grace from being the mother of security and the midwife of licentiousness, that there is no greater incentive to true piety than a vivid sense of the love of God and of his benefits. This so powerfully lays hold of and inflames the mind that it is all on fire with a reciprocal love of him from whom it receives so great favors and has been so highly preferred over others left in the common mass of perdition.

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Quotations Theological Reflections

The Divine Word

Calvin points out that God’s word is Godlike:

….as the Prophet possessed the discernment of the Holy Spirit, he penetrated into their hearts and brought out what was hid within. We indeed know this to be the power of the word, as the apostle teaches in the fourth chapter to the Hebrews: for the word partakes of the nature of God himself, from whom it has proceeded; and as God is a searcher of hearts, so also the word penetrates to the marrow, to the inmost thoughts of men, and distinguishes between the feelings and the imaginations.

Commentary on Amos 6:13

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Preaching Quotations Theological Reflections

Preaching the communication of properties

Our times do not seem like a high-water mark for doctrinal preaching, for a variety of reasons (one of which might be a foolish notion that doctrinal preaching is opposed to textual or expository preaching). And some doctrines seem harder to preach than others, they seem to be set forth primarily as a safeguard against error, but to serve no purpose other than defense of more fundamental truths.

I suspect it is easy to feel that way about the doctrine of the communicatio idiomatum, set forth in WCF VIII.7 in these words:

VII. Christ, in the work of mediation, acts according to both natures, by each nature doing that which is proper to itself; yet, by reason of the unity of the person, that which is proper to one nature is sometimes in Scripture attributed to the person denominated by the other nature.

While it can be seen that this is certainly an explanation of the workings of Scripture phrases such as “crucified the Lord of Glory” (1 Corinthians 2:8; other texts cited in supports of this doctrine include Acts 20:28 and John 3:13), and that this usage itself serves as a safeguard against Nestorianism, the use of the doctrine may not be immediately apparent. But Martin Luther provides an example, not only of preaching doctrine, but of preaching this doctrine and doing so clearly, simply, and movingly. From Volume 24 of the Works edited by Jaroslav Pelikan, speaking of John 14:16:

We have stated often enough that in the divine essence of Christ and the Father there are two distinct Persons. Therefore when speaking of Christ here one must teach clearly that He is one Person, but that there are two distinct natures, the divine and the human. Again, just as there the nature or the divine essence remains unmingled in the Father and in Christ, so also the Person of Christ remains undivided here. Therefore the attributes of each nature, the human and the divine, are ascribed to the entire Person, and we say of Christ: “The Man Christ, born of the Virgin, is omnipotent and does all that we ask � not, however, according to the human but according to the divine nature, not by reason of His birth from His mother, but because He is God’s Son.” And again, “Christ, God’s Son, prays the Father, not according to His divine nature and essence, according to which He is coequal with the Fathe,r but because He is true man and Mary’s Son.” Thus the words must be brought together and compared according to the unity of the Person. The natures must always be differentiated, but the Person must remain undivided.
And now since He is believed as one Person, God and man, it is also proper for us to speak of Him as each nature requires. Therefore we should consider what Christ says according to His human nature and what He says according to His divine nature. For where this is not observed and properly distinguished, many types of heresy must result, as happened in times gone by, when some people asserted that Christ was not true God and others that He was not true man. They were unable to follow the principle of differentiating between the two types of discourse on the basis of the two natures.
(…)
Yes, all that Scripture says of Christ covers the whole Person, just as though both God and man were one essence. Often it uses expressions interchangeably and assigns the attributes of both to each nature. This is done for the sake of the personal union, which we call the “communication of properties.” Thus we can say: “The Man Christ is God’s eternal Son, by whom all creatures were created, Lord of heaven and earth.” And by the same token we say: “Christ, God’s Son (that is, the Person who is true God), was conceived and born of the Virgin Mary, suffered under Pontius Pilate, crucified and dead.”
(…)
Here we must again confess with our Creed: “I believe in Jesus Christ, God the Father’s only Son, our Lord, born of the Virgin mary, suffered, was crucified, died.” It is always one and the same Son of God, our Lord. Therefore it is certain that Mary is the mother of the real and true God and that the Jews crucified not only the Son of Man but also the true Son of God. For I do not want a Christ in whom I am to believe and to whom I am to pray as my Savior who is only man. Otherwise I would go to the devil. For mere flesh and blood could not erase sin, reconcile God, remove His anger, overcome and destroy death and hell, and bestow eternal life.
Furthermore since the angels in heaven adore Him and call Him Lord as He lies in the manger, and say to the shepherds, according to Luke 2:11: “To you is born this day … a Savior, who is Christ the Lord.” He must be true God. For the angels do not worship mere flesh or human nature. Therefore it follows that both God and man must dwell in this Person. And when you speak of Christ, you speak of an undivided Person, who is both God and man; and he who sees, hears, or finds Christ with the faith of the heart surely encounters not only the man Christ but also the true God. Thus we do no let God sit idly in heaven among the angels; but we find Him here below, lying in the manger and on His mother’s lap. We summarize and say: “Wherever we encounter this Person, there we surely encounter the Divine Majesty.”
As has often been stated, all this makes it possible for us to withstand the devil and to vanquish him in the hour of death and at other times when he terrifies us with sin and hell. For if he were to succeed in persuading me to regard Christ as only a man who was crucified and died for me, I would be lost. But if my pride and joy is the fact that Christ, both true God and true man, died for me, I find that this outweighs and eclipses all sin, death, hell, and all misery and woe. For if I know that He who is true God suffered and died for me, and also that this same true man rose from the dead, ascended into heaven, etc., then I can conclude with certainty that my sin was erased and death was conquered by Him, and that God no longer views me with anger and disfavor; for I see and hear nothing but tokens and works of mercy in this Person.
Make sure that you comprehend this doctrine in such a way that you leave the Person of Christ intact and assign the functions of each nature to Him despite the difference in these natures. For according to the divine nature, He was not born of a human being, nor did He inherit anything from the Virgin. It is true that God is the Creator and that man is a creature. But here the two have come together in one Person, and now God and man are one Christ. Mary bore a Son, and the Jews crucified a Person who is God and man. Otherwise � if He were only man, as other saints are � He would be unable to deliver us from even one sin or to extinguish one little drop of hell’s fire with all His holiness, His blood, and His death.

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Pastoral Care Quotations Theological Reflections

Victory Through Faith

Augustine (City of God, Book 21, Chapter 16) explains that our hearts must be purified through faith.

And if vices have not gathered strength, by habitual victory they are more easily overcome and subdued; but if they have been used to conquer and rule, it is only with difficulty and labor they are mastered. And indeed this victory cannot be sincerely and truly gained but by delighting in true righteousness, and it is faith in Christ that gives this. For if the law be present with its command, and the Spirit be absent with His help, the presence of the prohibition serves only to increase the desire to sin, and adds the guilt of transgression. Sometimes, indeed, patent vices are overcome by other and hidden vices, which are reckoned virtues, though pride and a kind of ruinous self-sufficiency are their informing principles. Accordingly vices are then only to be considered overcome when they are conquered by the love of God, which God Himself alone gives, and which He gives only through the Mediator between God and men, the man Christ Jesus, who became a partaker of our mortality that He might make us partakers of His divinity.

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Practical Notes Quotations

Farmers and Craftsmen Uphold the World

While the books commonly known as Apocrypha are not to be any otherwise approved or made use of than other human writings (and while claims for their divine authority naturally meet with revulsion and even tend to discourage their use), like other human writings they have some worthwhile theological reflection, some poetic forms of expression, and some shrewd common sense. Sirach (Ecclesiasticus) 38 & 39 deal with the value of the varying contributions that different sorts of people make to society. In between treating of physicians and intellectuals, there is this forceful and valuable statement:

Sirach 38:24-34

24: The wisdom of a learned man cometh by opportunity of leisure: and he that hath little business shall become wise.
25: How can he get wisdom that holdeth the plough, and that glorieth in the goad, that driveth oxen, and is occupied in their labours, and whose talk is of bullocks?
26: He giveth his mind to make furrows; and is diligent to give the kine fodder.
27: So every carpenter and workmaster, that laboureth night and day: and they that cut and grave seals, and are diligent to make great variety, and give themselves to counterfeit imagery, and watch to finish a work:
28: The smith also sitting by the anvil, and considering the iron work, the vapour of the fire wasteth his flesh, and he fighteth with the heat of the furnace: the noise of the hammer and the anvil is ever in his ears, and his eyes look still upon the pattern of the thing that he maketh; he setteth his mind to finish his work, and watcheth to polish it perfectly:
29: So doth the potter sitting at his work, and turning the wheel about with his feet, who is always carefully set at his work, and maketh all his work by number;
30: He fashioneth the clay with his arm, and boweth down his strength before his feet; he applieth himself to lead it over; and he is diligent to make clean the furnace:
31: All these trust to their hands: and every one is wise in his work.
32: Without these cannot a city be inhabited: and they shall not dwell where they will, nor go up and down:
33: They shall not be sought for in publick counsel, nor sit high in the congregation: they shall not sit on the judges’ seat, nor understand the sentence of judgment: they cannot declare justice and judgment; and they shall not be found where parables are spoken.
34: But they will maintain the state of the world, and [all] their desire is in the work of their craft.

There is no wealth apart from natural resources, the fruit of the earth, and the products made by skill and labor.

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Quotations Theological Reflections

God so Loved the World that He Gave His Only-begotten Son

Turretin, Institutes of Elenctic Theology IV.10,15

Although the love of beneficence and complacency cannot be exerted towards us except on account of Christ antecedently (because the actual pacification of God made by Christ ought necessarily to be supposed to the real communication of the divine love to us), this is not equally necessary with respect to the love of benevolence (which remains in God). God could be favorably disposed to us antecedently to Christ, although he could not bless us except on account of him. Nor does this carry any prejudice to his justice because that love does not exclude, but includes and draws after it a satisfaction necessarily. Just because he is favorably disposed to us, he appointed Christ as a Mediator, that he might actually bless us through him. If he loves us, he ought not to be considered as already appeased, but only as about to be. Beneficence indeed requires a reconciliation already made, but it is sufficient for benevolence that it shall be made in its own time.

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Literary Criticism Practical Notes Quotations

Poets’ Politics

George Orwell, “As I Please” Tribune 28 January 1944

Whether a poet, as such, is to be forgiven his political opinions is a different question. Obviously one mustn’t say “X agrees with me: therefore he is a good writer”, and for the last ten years honest literary criticism has largely consisted in combating this outlook. Personally I admire several writers (C�line, for instance) who have gone over to the Fascists, and many others whose political outlook I strongly object to. But one has the right to expect ordinary decency even of a poet.