The Christian Family, Herman Bavinck, trans. from Dutch by Nelson D. Koosterman

Grand Rapids: Christian’s Library Press, 2012, pgs. 168.

Summary: Herman Bavinck (1854-1921) was the preeminent Reformed theologian of the last century. The book was originally published in 1912 as Het Christelijk Huisgezin.

Bavinck develops a brilliant biblical theology of the family, which he then applies to the threats to the family caused by sin in general, social Darwinism, socialism, Marxism, materialistic capitalism, and first wave feminism. He presupposes the historical accuracy of the entire Bible, that God created the two sexes, the institution of marriage and family, and that God did so to display his glory through his creation. The relationship between God and humanity and husband and wife were disordered by the Fall, but through the plan of salvation God is restoring all things. The family plays a pivotal role through the church in the reformation of all things until the return of Christ.  He provides guidelines for men and women in singleness, marriage, and the nurture of children in response to sin and modernity.

Exemplar Quotes:

It is God himself who subdues the earth under his feet through the human race, and it is God himself who desires to display his own glory in the discovery of all of creation’s treasures. (7)

God made two out of one, so that he could then make the two into one, one soul and one flesh. (7)

Shame is a sense of discomfort, a feeling of uneasiness, which consists particularly in fear of loss, something that overtakes us when we have done, something immodest. . . .Yet, that shame is also a blessing. An animal knowns no shame, and the devil even less. (10-11)

Rather than concluding from the limited number or complete absence of laws that people live in a situation without rights, in many cases we can with more warrant argue just the reverse and say: the more laws we need, the more it becomes evident that rational and moral understanding, that natural love and natural bonds, are losing their influence and power. If in the present day the rights of the wife, of the child, of the servant, and of the labor must be established by law, then surely this can be explained as due largely to self-interest undermining the moral character of society. (32-33)

But all those immoral ideas are entirely foreign to Holy Scripture; the Hebrew language does not even have a word for female deity. (35).

Many of these women also performed significant ministries in the church; they received [the apostles] in their homes (Acts 12:12; 1 Core. 16:19; Col. 4:15), helped the apostles in the work of the ministry (Rom. 16:3, 6-15), occasionally led in the gathering of believers, though not to teach (1 Cor. 14:34; 1 Tim. 2:12; 1 Peter 3:1), but certainly to pray and prophesy (1 Cor. 11:5), and were perhaps occasionally tasked with one or another project in the midst of the congregation, without holding a particular office (Rom. 16:1; 1 Tim. 3:11; 5:3-16). (49)

All good, enduring reformation begins with ourselves and takes its starting point in one’s own heart and life. (63)

Scripture speaks in a very human way about the essence of God, but it never transfers the sexual differentiation to him. God is never portrayed or presented as being feminine. But if the woman is said to be created along with man in the image of God, then that includes the fact that the uniqueness and richness of feminine qualities no less than those of the masculine capacities find their origin and example in the divine Being. God is a Father who takes pity on his children, but he also comforts like a mother comforts her son. (66)

Each [sex] has quite glorious virtues and each has rather serious defects. There is room for neither disparagement nor deification with respect to either of them. (70)

Moreover, preaching the absolute necessity of marriage robs a person in advance of the weapons he needs to fight against his passion. It weakens rather than strengthen him; it induces him to give up in the struggle before he begins; it surrenders the fort before the enemy even launches the attack. (72)

No Christian says that the person is corrupted by marriage, but he confesses that marriage is corrupted by the person; the modern realist blames the circumstances, the institutions, the laws and ordinances, ultimately, God himself, while the Christian finds within his own heart the source of all impurity. (79)

The family is a school for the children, but in the first place it is a school for the parents. (94)

But science can never replace living, it can fortify living, guide and improve living, but never take its place. Just as agriculture owes many improvements to science, but nevertheless remains dependent on nature, on soil and climate, rain and sunshine, on sowing and harvesting, so child-rearing can be assisted and supported by science but can never be appropriated by science or assigned to science. (104)

By means of science and technology, a person expands his own capacity for work. Science expands the human spirit, technology expands the human body. . . .In a word, a person invents tools with his own souls, his own thought, his own life; in technology man copies himself, but at the same time elevates, energizes, and extends his work capacity; even the rhythm of his work displays the poetry of his own soul.  (121)

Not only that, but money falsifies values; it supplies someone who otherwise would have deserved and received the disregard of everyone an immediate social position honored by everyone, making him rise suddenly in rank and stature, in honor and renown. The proverb contains all too much truth that says: the coin that is round makes straight was is crooked and wise what is stupid. Money justifies everything. (156)

For Christians, the future is portrayed entirely differently than for those without faith in any revelation. For a apart from revelation, the origin, essence, purpose, and destiny of the human race are entirely unknown to us. Because without this knowledge we cannot live and cannot die, cannot think and cannot labor, the Christian faith is replaced by arbitrary guesses and the Christian hope by vain expectations. (160)

Benefits/Detriments:

The Christian Family can be divided up into that which is universal for this age and specific applications to Bavinck’s time and place. His advice to young wives about how to govern household staff had to be dated when he wrote the book. He also vastly underestimated women’s interest in voting and is not committed to universal suffrage for the sexes. Regardless, he provides a deep and thoughtful exposition of Scripture in the development and maintenance of the Christian family.

Recommended for all.  

Baptist Church in Watertown, WI: What We Believe and Who We Are

Our Church is Christian, Evangelical, Baptist, and First Baptist of Watertown, WI. 

We love Jesus Christ the Son of God, and we believe his word. Our church is Christian: we recite the early church creeds at the Lord’s Supper: we are evangelical in that we embrace the gospel recovered by the Reformation, and we cooperate with Christians who disagree with us about secondary issues but agree about the gospel: we are Baptist—to be a member of our church you must be baptized on profession of faith by immersion and agree with our doctrinal statement and church covenant. We have been in Watertown since 1854, and we pray that Jesus allows us to continue worshiping and proclaiming the gospel until his return. 

• First Baptist is Christian

  Historically, all Christians have believed the Bible is true and that the Bible teaches that there is one God who is three persons—Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Our first parents, Adam and Eve, sinned against God, introducing sin and death into the world with the consequence of eternal punishment. God put forward a plan for saving humanity through faith in the coming Son of God. About 2,000 years ago, the Son of God became a man without giving up his divinity and died on the cross to save his people from their sins. He rose again on the third day and will soon return. Broadly speaking, this is what all professed Christians have believed throughout history.

  Athanasius (296-373), Augustine (350-430), Anselm (1034-1109), and Aquinas (1225-1274) all believed the above. To be a Christian is to believe the Bible is true, that God is Trinity, that Jesus is both fully God and fully man, and that the Son of God died on the cross to save the world from the consequences of sin. 

  Yet, the Bible also teaches us that some people who claim to believe the above have a dead or useless faith. They are like the demons who believe the truth about God but shudder (James 2:19). Such people twist Scripture to their own destruction (2 Peter 3:16). This means that there are some Christians, Evangelicals, and Baptist who do not have a living faith through the regeneration of the Spirit and trust in the Bible. In Church history one great division occurred in 1517 dividing Western Christians between those in fellowship with the Bishop of Rome and the Evangelicals or Protestants. The Protestants “protested” that the Roman Church had diluted and even changed the evangel or gospel. 

• First Baptist is Evangelical

  The word evangelical comes from the Greek word euangelion which is translated into English as good news or gospel. Martin Luther (1483-1546) was a Roman Catholic priest who realized that neither the Bible nor theologians like Augustine and Athanasius offered the same gospel as the Roman Church of his day. Thus, Luther attempted to recover the gospel by the preaching of God’s Word. In particular, he focused on reforming the church through the Five Solas—Scripture, Faith, Grace, Christ, and God’s Glory. The gospel is that Scripture tells us we are saved by faith through grace given to us by Christ’s work to God’s glory alone. 

  The Reformation in the 16th Century was a return to the Bible and a response to theological changes within the Roman Church away from the Bible. Different Reformers—Luther, Calvin (1509-1564), Cranmer (1489-1556), Owen (1616-1686) —came to different understandings not of the gospel, but of what was the church. The gospel preached by the Reformers was identical, but their understanding of what the local church was and who should participate in the Lord’s Supper and baptism was different. Baptist Reformers like John Bunyan (1628-1688) bring us to the first Baptist churches. 

  Before, we can speak about the Baptists, we must notice that in the last 80 years the word evangelical has taken on a secondary meaning. The Reformers all understood that our sinful desires have two impulses—to add to God’s Word and take away from it. They understood the Roman Church as adding to God’s word through the hierarchy and traditions. But they also understood that professed Christians who disagreed with Rome could themselves add to God’s word or take away, and so they had the motto—Semper Reformata, always reforming. 

  In the early 1800’s a group of professed Christians started taking away from the Bible by claiming the Scriptures were only partially true. This led to the modernist crisis. Some Christians were claiming that Jesus was not born of a virgin or Jesus simply provides us a good example. The Christians who continued to believe in the truthfulness of the Bible became divided over how to separate from professed Christians who rejected the inspiration of Scripture. The Fundamentalists separated by isolating themselves institutionally from those with whom they disagreed on multiple issues. Evangelicals worked to limit institutional separation to the gospel while continuing to proclaim the truth in the public square and cooperating with Christians they disagreed with on lesser issues.  

  First Baptist is evangelical in both the old and newer meaning of the term. We agree with the Reformers about the gospel, and we separate from professed Christians who reject the gospel.

• First Baptist is Baptist

  The first distinctively Baptist churches were English speakers living in Holland in about 1611. These Englishmen were congregationalist. Congregationalists believe that the highest earthly spiritual authority is a local congregation united by a doctrinal statement and a church covenant. 

  These Englishmen also believed in infant baptism and in the possibility of a national church. In Holland, they began interacting with Anabaptists. Anabaptists believe in baptism on profession of faith, separation of church and state, refusal to take oaths, and pacifism.

  The English Congregationalists became Baptists when they agreed with the Anabaptist on the timing of baptism and separation of church and state, but rejected pacifism and allowed the taking of oaths. When they returned to England, they began to organize Baptist churches on the British Isles and soon in the English colonies. English Baptist missionaries also started the first Baptist churches in Germany in the early 1800s. 

• First Baptist Church of Watertown, WI

  Our church was founded as a German speaking station church of Lebanon Baptist in 1854. We became an independent Baptist Church in 1882 as the First German Baptist Church of Watertown, WI. We adopted The New Hampshire Confession of Faith on our founding. Our last German service was held in the 1930s when we became simply First Baptist Church of Watertown, WI. 

  We cooperate with the old German Baptist convention now North American Baptist Conference and the Southern Baptist Convention. We use a lightly modified version of The New Hampshire Confession of Faithand a church covenant. Our confession of faith was written in 1833 and teaches eternal security and the imminent return of Christ

No Quick Fix: Where Higher Life Theology Came From, What It Is, and Why It’s Harmful, Andrew David Naselli.

Bellingham: Lexham Press, 2017, 123.  

Summary: A careful and somewhat academic summary, history, and critique of higher life theology, exegesis, and method by Andrew David Naselli. Naselli grew up in independent fundamental Baptist circles and has a PhD from both Bob Jones and Trinity Evangelical Divinity School.

Higher life theology teaches that there are merely saved Christians (carnal/regular) and Spirit-filled Christians. The Spirit filled Christian experiences the higher life or second blessing of surrender to God through crisis and participating in the process allowing dynamic service.

Naselli also encourages readers to embrace a Reformed understanding of progressive sanctification or of the pursuit of holiness.

Exemplar Quotes:

The fundamental reason higher life theology is harmful is that it creates two categories of Christians (49).

[Higher life is] A FORM OF PERFECTIONISM. (77)

[Higher life is] A FORM OF QUIETISM. (81)

[Higher life is] A FORM OF PELAGIANISM [and] Portrays the Christian’s Free Will as Autonomously Starting and Stopping Sanctification. (84)

[Higher life] Does Not Interpret and Apply the Bible Accurately. (86)

[Higher life] Assures Spurious “Christians” They Are Saved. (88)

[Higher life] Fosters Dependency on Experiences at Special Holiness Meetings. (91)

[Higher life] Frustrates and Disillusions the Have-Nots. (92)

Benefits/Detriments: Higher life theology tends to almost destroy sensitive practitioners when followed in detail. Quick Fix is based on Naselli’s dissertation and is a passion project. The greatest weakness is the number of charts and the length of the footnotes.

Recommended for pastors, seminarians, and folks who are confused about why “letting go and letting God” isn’t working for them. 

Triumphing Over Sinful Fear, John Flavel

updated language by J. Stephen Yuille

Grand Rapids: Reformation Heritage Books, 2011. Pgs. 124.

Summary: Originally, published as A Practical Treaties of Fear in 1682. The original language but not orthography can be found here:

“A Practical Treatise of Fear” It is also available on Audible, read passably by AI.

Flavel makes the biblical argument that all fear besides the fear of God is sinful fear. He then explains how fear is used as the grounds of sin and as the way to heaven. Fear is distinguished into natural, sinful, and religious. We share natural fear with the animals and with the human nature of Jesus. Such is shunning pain and suffering.  The second fear is sinful—here is the fear of death which empowers Satan and the fear of man. The last distinction is religious fear—the clean fear of Psalm 19:9. He then provides spiritual disciplines and teaching to overcome sinful fear. Framed by a Reformed understanding of God’s Word.  

Exemplar Quotes:

There is a holy and laudable fear, which our treasure, not our torment. It is the chief ornament of the soul—its beauty and perfection, not its unhappiness or sin. (19)

A clear understanding of the covenant’s nature, extent, and stability, along with our interesting in it will go a long way to cure our sinful and slavish fear. (63)

In all our fear and distress, the committing act of faith rests upon this supposition. “I trust in Thee, Lord. Thou are my God. My times are in Thy hands. Deliver me from the hands of my enemies.” (81)

The believer’s living time is his fighting time, but his dying time is his conquering and triumphing time (1 Cor. 15:55-56).  

It is also a great mistake to think that natural tenderness and weakness, when divinely assisted, cannot bear the heaviest burden that God ever laid on a Christian’s shoulders. Our ability to bear suffering does not come from nature, but grace. (114)

Benefits/Detriments:

Triumphing over Sinful Fear will be a sweet encouragement to the fearful and an edifying challenge. Suggested for all. 

The False Critique of Critical Theory on Faith

Below is a quote from Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno’s Dialectic of Enlightenment, translated by Gunzelin Schmid Noeri, Stanford University Press, 2002. If you are not familiar with the work, it is in some ways the beginning of Critical Theory in 1930’s Germany. It’s a fun, dense read if you enjoy the angry young men genre. And we should note they weren’t just angry; they were frightened and frustrated. They were frightened because Adolf Hitler was a progressive modern. They were frustrated because Enlightenment thought didn’t have an answer to Hitler. Hence, during the Nuremberg trials American eugenic laws were cited, and Americans had produced the computers that helped organize the death camps. Hitler was a modern, supported by progressive moderns throughout the world. Remember Charles Lindbergh and H. L. Mencken.

Given that Horkheimer and Adorno are frightened, we can forgive them for their writing style while recognizing their influence on contemporary thought. Allow me to summarize their critique and then you can read for yourself. Faith requires some knowledge but is not knowledge nor a part of the process of gaining knowledge. The more that one knows the less she believes, so that fuller knowledge is destructive to faith. Believers are aware of this and so they are disingenuous.

 Yet don’t take my word for it: below their quote with all their grinding, twitching neo-Marxist energy and solemnity:

The attempt made by faith under Protestantism to locate the principle of truth, which transcends faith and without which faith cannot exist, directly in the word itself, as in primeval times, and to restore the symbolic power of the word, was paid for by obedience to the word, but not in its sacred form. Because faith is unavoidably tied to knowledge as its friend or its foe, faith perpetuates the split in the struggle to overcome knowledge: its fanaticism is the mark of its untruth, the objective admission that anyone who only believes for that reason no longer believes. Bad conscience is second nature to it. The secret awareness of this necessary, inherent flaw, the immanent contradiction that lies in making a profession of reconciliation, is the reason why honesty in believers has always been a sensitive and dangerous affair (14).

There are two hidden assumptions in the passage: first, faith is at loggerheads with knowledge. There is a negative dialectic between faith, requiring ignorance, and knowledge, requiring knowing. Thus, faith is destroyed by knowledge and “why honesty in believers has always been a sensitive and dangerous affair.” Knowledge in this conception cancels faith.

Christians admit that a portion of faith is the knowledge gap. Hebrews 11:1, “Now faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen.” Faith allows us to leap over the ditch of history and of ignorance. But faith is not simply overcoming ignorance through a blind leap. Faith includes trusting an authority who is not ignorant. Belief includes trusting another’s knowledge and character. Faith does not exclude knowledge, but rather places trust in God’s knowledge. Thus, Hebrews 11:7 “By faith Noah, being warned by God concerning events as yet unseen, in reverent fear constructed an ark for the saving of his household.”

A moment of thought reminds us that the process of faith whereby we trust in the knowledge and character of another knower is basic to all human experiences. How do you know who your parents are? And if you say by a genetic test, how did you know who to test as potential subjects among 7.5 billion people?  How do you know that the test is accurate? Almost all knowing comes down to trusting an authority outside of self. In fact if by knowing you mean there is a shared reality outside of your own mind that can be affirmed, you are trusting the authority of truth. You know that all truth is personal, unless you suspect rocks contemplate truth.

There are always at least two knowers, one might say fundamentally Three. But there are two knowers in faith—God and man. God does not have faith because he knows “the events as yet unseen.” Noah must have faith because he does not know the future, unless God reveals it to him. Faith and knowledge are self-destructive only when the believer has the same capacity of knowing as the revealer.

The second assumption of Horkheimer and Adorno’s critique is then clear:  there is no God, nor is there any knower greater than man. And so, they are frightened and frustrated by Enlightenment’s product in Hitler, but they have no answer. They want mystery and enchantment, but not the Enchanter or the mystery of God which is Christ. Like the ouroboros of, they are self consumed. 

Richard A. Muller, Prolegomena to Theology

in Post-Reformation Reformed Dogmatics: the Rise and Development of Reformed Orthodoxy, ca. 1520 to ca. 1725, vol. 1, 2nd ed.

Baker Books, 2006, 463 pgs.

Summary: An analysis of the Protestant Scholastic prolegomena in Reformed dogmatics. Muller traces the interaction between the medieval sources (Lombard, Thomas, Duns Scotus, Henry of Ghent, etc.), the first generation of Reformers (i.e. Luther, Bullinger, Zwingli, Calvin) and the scholastics Protestants (Ames, Turretin, Owen, Heidegger, etc.).

His basic argument is that scholasticism is a method of developing and teaching a theological system appropriate for the schools. The Reformers, many of whom were scholasticly trained, were forced by polemical and practical necessity to develop theological systems and schools designed for creating and maintaining the Protestant movement. The next generation of the reformed then developed theological systems that were designed to maintain reformed churches through academic training and analysis. The second generation became the Protestant scholastics or the Reformed orthodox. Conceptually both the Reformers and the reformed scholastics were drawing on the theological tradition of the Middle Ages with its rich theological and biblical reflection.

Even as the Protestant orthodox entered into the academic lists, they did not compromise the fundamental epistemological ground of the Reformed insight of Scripture alone. They understood reason and philosophy as the handmaiden of theology and not the mistress. Scripture and scriptural presuppositions (the existence of God as the greatest possible being, creation of the world ex nilhio, the historical nature of the Fall, etc.) remained primary. At the same time the topics of theology were rationally ordered and systematized to maintain and defend the Reformed movement.

Historically the Reformed Scholastics were not bested on rational grounds, either by the Catholics or secularist; however, the rules of engagement among academics shifted as Enlightenment thought swept Western culture. Nature progressively became the exclusive epistemological foundation or interpretation of reality, thus excluding the possibility of Reformed academic participation on the grounds of a presupposition.

Benefits/Detriments: Absolutely brilliant. Not accessible without a background in theology and philosophy.

Muller’s reading of history is that the shift in epistemology was caused by a decline in general of the Aristotelian understanding of substance and accidents, but I am not yet convinced of this conclusion. My sense is that both Platonic and Aristotelian understanding of the “real” allows Christian appropriation, but that the materialistic or Epicurean systems deny this possibility.

Exemplar Quotes:

“The Reformation, in spite of its substantial contribution to the history of doctrine and the shock it delivered to theology and the church in the sixteenth century, was not an attack upon the whole of medieval theology or upon Christian tradition. The Reformation assaulted a limited spectrum of doctrinal and practical abuses with the intention of reaffirming the values of the historical church catholic. Thus, the mainstream Reformers reconstructed the doctrines of justification and the sacraments and then modified their ideas of the ordo salutis and of the church accordingly; but they did not alter the doctrine of God, creation, providence, and Christ, and they maintained the Augustinian tradition concerning predestination, human nature and sin. The reform of individual doctrines, like justification and the sacraments, occurred within the bounds of a traditional, orthodox, and catholic system which, on the grand scale, remained unaltered” (97).

“At the same time, the orthodox writers of the era tended to argue against the Epicurean and Stoic revival. In the trajectory of rationalism also diverges, give both the associate of Epicureanism with the early “deists,” and the strong relationship between much of the later rationalist philosophy with the Stoic and Epicurean revivals of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries” (145).

“[Turretin] and the other Protestant scholastics recognize as correct the Aristotelian assumption that the reality is not the idea or universal known to the mind but universal in the thing. The establishment of theologia as an existent thing, moreover, represents the establishment both of true and of false theology—or more precisely, of the existence of the phenomenon claiming to be sapientia rerum divinarum and the possibility of attaining to a true theology, that is, a genuine wisdom of divine things. The presence of this problematic within the argument leads the Protestant scholastics to state their case in a somewhat interactive manner, the prolegomena both laying the ground for the system that follows and drawing upon the theological assumptions and conclusions present in that system. Theological prolegomena cannot be entirely vordogmatisch or predogmatic: they stand in dialogue with the system and in fact, are a system in miniature, stated at the level of presupposition” (161-162).

“[Y]et scholastic theology in the sense of revealed theology quatenus traditur modo scholis familiari (“to the extent that it is taught in the manner of the schools”), and as Alsted defined it, is useful in polemic against the scholasticism of the Roman Church, in debate with Gentiles and atheists, and in convincing rational souls of the truth of revelation” (187).

Archetypal and Ectypal Theology from Polanus’ Syntagma

True theology is either archetypal or ectypal.

Ectypal theology (theologia ectypa) is considered either in itself (in se) or as it is in rational creatures (in creaturis rationalibus).

The ends or goals (fines) of the theology communicated to rational creatures are two: the primary and highest is the glorification of God as the highest good (glorification Dei tanquam summi boni): the secondary and subordinate is the blessedness of rational creatures (beatitude creaturarum rationalium).

The parts of blessedness are two: (1) freedom from all evils and possession of all true goods that rational creatures can posses in God; (2) the vision of God (visio Dei), conformity to God, sufficiency in God and a certain knowledge of his eternal felicity.

The vision of God is either obscure or clear.

Ectypal theology considered as it is in rational creatures is either of Christ as he is head of the Church according to his humanity or of the members of Christ’s body (membrorum Christi).

This latter theology is either of the blessed (beatorum) or of earthly pilgrims (viatorum).

The theology of the blessed (theologia beatorum) is either of angels or of men.

The theology of pilgrims (theologia viatorum) has a two-fold pattern: for it is considered either absolutely (abosolute) or relatively (secundum quid).

The theology of pilgrims absolutely so-called and considered according to its nature, is essentially one, eternal and immutable: considered according to adjuncts it is either old (vetus) or new (nova).

Theology of pilgrims or our theology (theologia viatorum seu nostra) considered relatively or as it exists in individual pilgrims through the activity of efficient causes is partly infused (infusa) and partly acquired (acquisita). Polanus, Syntagma, Synopsis Libri I. (Muller, 226).

“The attempt to draw faith and philosophy together, whether in the more Aristotelian model of Albert and Thomas on in the more Augustinian approach of Bonaventure, had not resulted in any easy alliance of faith and reason, but in fact had yielded various cautionary approaches that recognized the diastasis between revelation and the truths known to reason. This diastasis, moreover, reflected the sense that God so radically transcended the grasp of human faculties that no easy analogy could be made between the divine and human” (227).

“If, on the other hand, Aristotelianism is defined as a view of the universe that affirms both primary and a secondary causality, that assumes the working of first and final causality through the means of instrumental, formal, and material causes, and that, using this paradigm, can explain various levels of necessary and contingent existence, then a large number of Aristotelians appear on the horizons. . . applied loosely, the term will define the thought of numerous thinkers, all of whom denied or radically modified tenets central to Aristotle’s own thought”  (372).

“The demise of the model [R. scholastic] can certainly be chronicled in the in the loss of the hylomorphic understanding of substance and in its corollary concern the relationship between the logical realm and the realm of real being” (380).

“Once it has been recognized that philosophy, like natural theology, has a legitimate though not doctrinally formative or fundamental use in the context of Christian faith, the actual function of reason and philosophy within the system of revealed theology can be outlined. Theological criteria must be understood as functioning as the criteria by which philosophical conclusions are assessed while, at the same time, the rational argumentation of philosophy must serve to prevent errors of logic or pure irrationality from entering the Christian theological system. Reason, therefore is understood as a critical instrument, limited in its use and always subordinate to the divinely given truths of Scripture—a tool that does assist in the drawing of conclusions and in the formulation and defense of Christian doctrine but that does not supply the ultimate content or the final criterion of truth in Christian doctrine. The proper use of philosophy in the service of theology is to remove confusion and present valid arguments against heresies” (398).

“Reason, then, does not introduce into the text of Scripture a meaning that is not present there, but rather serves faith by drawing out legitimate conclusions from the text, by making explicit those truths which are presented implicitly” (401).

“Reason, therefore, cannot be the cognitive foundation of theology inasmuch as it cannot know God in and of himself and inasmuch as it is not a divine self-revelation but only an instrument for understanding revelation. Since, moreover, the archetype infinitely transcends nature and since the ultimate end of theology is of grace and not nature, the natural order and its revelation cannot be the cognitive foundation of Christian theology. What remains is the divine self-revelation in and through the word as recorded in the biblical witness. Thus, the Word of God written is the principium cognoscendi theologiae.” (434).

Pelagius’s Commentary on St Paul’s Epistle to the Romans, tran. Theodore De Bruyn

Oxford University Press, 236 pgs.

Summary: Pelagius’ verse by verse commentary on Romans.

Fundamentally, Pelagius reads the text as if there is no original sin or inherited sin from Adam. The Fall caused no internal change to humanity. Each person is born innocent and sins only as they gain the habit of sin from following the example others. When Paul speaks of a sin nature or the flesh as in Romans 8, Pelagius reads the habit of sin. Neither creation nor humanity has been fundamentally corrupted or changed by the Fall. The “creation groaning” in Romans 8 refers to the angels mourning the humans’ misuse of their will to do ill.

Each decision by a human being must be free in the sense of no prior proclivity to sin. Even the habit of sin can be broken by the free will alone. Pelagius is of two minds as to if all have sinned. He makes statements that allow if not require that some have not sinned or have overcome sin on their own, but he also speaks of the universal need for salvation. Sin creates a debt that must be paid, and Christ has paid that debt. Baptism washes away the debt that occurred through sins prior to baptism, but then the forgiven and baptized sinner must begin to merit his salvation and follow Christ’s example perfectly. Justification or salvation is a process that begins at baptism, but must be maintained by good works.

The systematic portion of his work is the constant presumption of libertarian free will and the lack of original sin. He can be understood to teach salvation without grace if the reader traces his arguments with care, but he will occasionally speak of salvation by faith and grace. Pelagius is an example of a person whose isolated statements are a mixture of orthodoxy, heterodoxy, and heresy, but whose overall system, or any possible system constructed maintaining his basic presumptions and interpretations, is wholly heretical.  It is possible that he lacked the cognitive skills necessary to grasp the logical and theological implications of his teaching. It is equally possible that he makes bold orthodox statements to distract and confusion the majority while expecting his discerning readers to understand his heterodox statements as his true position.

The judgment of the godly party of his day was that he was a vehement and dangerous heretic, and I see no reason to revise the opinion of the universal church from this commentary. To be somewhat ironic and anachronistic, he’s certainly Pelagian, though I see some room for hope that he believed better than he understood.

Exemplar Quotes:

• Libertas arbitrii (freedom of decision) for human beings.

Romans 1:21—“For the fact that they had been made in such a way that could recognize God if they wanted” (65).

1:24—“In the Scripture God is said ‘to give over’ when because of freedom of choice he does not restrain transgressors” (66).

6:13—“At the same it should be noted that it is through freedom of choice that a person offers his members for whatever side he wishes” (98).

8:3—“[Jesus] condemned sin, to show that the will was arraigned, not the nature, which God created in such a way that it was able not to sin, if it so wished” (107).

8:34—“He allowed him to be handed over, so that the freedom of choice of those who handed him over might be left intact. . .” (113).

Conclusion: “Humankind, it is true, is also called good, but we have the ability to be good or wise as a result of instruction. . .” (154).

• The libertarian free will means that human beings are capable of not sinning in the sense of doing good independent of God’s grace:

5:11—“Through whom we have now received reconciliation. Thus he means to show that Christ suffered so that we who had forsaken God by following Adam might be reconciled to God through Christ.  12  Therefore, just as through one person sin came into the world, and through sin death. By example or by pattern” (92).

• And in fact some are saved without Christ:

2:4—“Many even rail at him, ‘Why doesn’t he punish right away?, because they do not realize that, if had done so, almost no on would have survived, and the righteous would  never have come from the unrighteous” (70).

3:4—“Though everyone is a liar. Here he uses ‘all’ for the greatest part. . .” (77).

• The problem of nature: nature is sufficient for salvation and peace with God.

1:32—“Although they had known the righteousness of God from the fact that they themselves also find evil displeasing, they did not realize that it follows from this that such person will be punished, if not in the present nevertheless in the future; for if they realized this, they would have been especially afraid of doing such things” (69).

2:1—“For by means of natural judgement each person pronounces a sentence which fits the deed, and all know both that uprightness deserves reward and that wickedness meets with punishment” (69).

2:9—“Either: He means those who were by nature righteous in the period before the law. Or: Those who even now do some good” (73).

5:10—“We were enemies, then, in our actions, not by nature; we have been reunited in peace, because by nature we had been united in peace” (91-92).

• The problem of merit:

1:8—“God is God of all by nature, but God of few in merit and will, as in the case of ‘the God of Abraham” (61).

8:11—“If you are so pure that the Holy Spirit deigns to dwell in you, God will not allow the temple of his Spirit to perish” (108).

9:15—“This is correctly understood as follows: I will have mercy on him whom I have foreknown will be able to deserve compassion, so that already than I have had mercy on him” (117).

9:23—“They were worthy of mercy, because they had committed lesser sins and had been severely oppressed” (120).

• Saved by faith, but salvation sustained by works:

3:1—“The apostle has explained that the law is useless once it has been treated with contempt, and that the privilege of physical circumcision is worthless unless it is sustained with works.

3:8—“when sins have been forgiven in baptism, love for God is increased, which covers a multitude of sins and finally keeps them from being counted against one as long as daily good works surpass past misdeeds” (85).

3:26—“[Jesus] alone has been found righteous, and also the one whom he has justified, not by works, but by faith” (83).

5:1—“He has also explained why neither race nor circumcision but faith makes people children of Abraham, who was justified initially by faith alone” (89).

• Substitutionary Atonement:

3:24—“Having been freely justified by his grace. Without the works of the law, through baptism, whereby he has freely forgiven the sins of all, though they are undeserving. Through the redemption which is in Christ Jesus. By which he has redeemed us with his blood from death. Through sin we had been sold to death--as Isaiah says: ‘You were sold  by your sin’--but Christ, who did not sin, conqoured death (Isa. 50:1). For we were all condemned to death, to which he handed himself over, though it is not his due, so that he might redeem us with his blood” (81-82).

Benefits/Detriments: A helpful introduction to Pelagius’ scheme of salvation. The notes ring true and provide cross references to Scripture, Augustine, Origen, and the like. This volume contains a reconstruction of Pelagius’ Latin text of the Epistle to the Romans.

Peter Martyr Vermigli, The Peter Martyr Library: Philosophical Works - On the Relation of Philosophy to Theology

1996, 342 pgs.

Summary: Peter Martyr Vermigli (1499-1562) was a former Augustinian monk and contemporary of John Calvin who joined the Reformed after careful study of the Bible. He taught at Oxford, Strasburg, and Zurich. He like Luther had received the scholastic training of the day.

This work is a compilation of his comments on locus classicus from his commentaries on the Bible and his lectures on “philosophical” topics—free will, natural religion, philosophy and the theology, revelation, and etc.

Exemplar Quotes:

“So it seems that philosophy should be defined as a capacity given by God to human minds, developed through effort and exercise, by which all existing things perceived as surely and logically as possible, to enable us to attain happiness” (7).

“A miracle is a difficult and unusual work of divine power, surpassing every capacity of created nature, made public in order to fill those who perceive it with wonder, and to confirm fain in the words of God. Therefore, the mater of miracles is works; the form is their being difficult and unusual; the efficient cause the power God, which surpasses created nature; and their end is both admiration and confirmation of faith” (199).

“Judgment belongs to the function of understanding, but desire belongs to the will. Reason or understanding has the place of an advisor, but the will desires, accepts, or rejects” (272).

“Augustine reminds us that under the praises of nature lie hidden the enemies of grace.” (298).

Benefits/Detriments: Martyr is at his best when he is defending Reformed doctrine from the Father’s (Augustine, Lombard, etc.). He lacks the wit of Luther and the theological insight of Calvin, but his clarity of thought and expression is a blessing.

The translators’ and editors’ notes—especially their theological and philosophical conclusions—need to be read with a great degree of skepticism. Works by Paul Helm and Richard Muller should be used to supplement and correct the notes.

Richard Muller, Christ and the Decree: Christology and Predestination in Reformed Theology from Calvin to Perkins

Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2008, 235 pgs.

Summary: Muller argues that the Reformed scholastics were not rationalists and did not organize their doctrine around a central doctrine, such as predestination. Further, he shows the continuity and discontinuity between Calvin and the third and fourth generation Reformers.

The essential history of Reformed thought begins with the response of Luther to the sacramental system of the Roman Catholic Church via his interpretation of Paul. Paul placed Christ at the very center of salvation and history. Luther and the Reformers concluded that the “medieval system was christocentric only in a formal sense” (73). Christ merited the grace, but God as the first mover and the Church bestowed the grace through the sacraments ex opera operato. Christ as the current mediator and the meeting place of God and man was severely compromised by the Church’s view of itself as the mediator and dispenser of grace. The recipient of sacramental grace must not hinder the work of God and the Church, but faith in Christ was secondary. Christ’s merit was further eroded by the addition the saints’ merit to the process of salvation and sanctification.

The Reformers responded by attempting to return Christ to the center of salvation as the only mediator and meeting place of God and man through the five solas (grace, faith, scripture, Christ, glory of God). The solas also required that they return to a Paulian or Augustinian anthropology. Both theological moves required them to respond to the medieval scholastic system of thought defending the Roman Catholic system. The first generation of Reformers did so mainly through exegesis of Scripture, but the next several generations needed to work out a theological framework that organized and maintained that exegesis in a non-contradictory manner. All of the Reformers, including Luther and Calvin, appropriated theological and philosophical tools to develop the distinctions and structures in defense of Scripture. Their system was not rationalistic, but was reasonable assuming the inspired Bible as a controlling element of their theological developments.

Benefits/Detriments: An extremely helpful overview of the development of Reformed theology from Calvin to Perkins and the continuity and discontinuity between the Reformers, the patristic, and medieval scholastics. The book is narrowly focused in response to the poor historical analysis of the last 150 years.  It demolishes the “central dogma” tenant and the issue of “Calvin against the Calvinist.”

It was a delight to see the Baptist John Gill (1697-1771) mentioned as a Reformed scholastic.

Richard A. Muller, God, Creation, and Providence in the Thought of Jacob Arminius: Sources and Directions of Scholastic Protestantism in the Era of Early Orthodoxy

Baker Book House Company, 1991, 309 pgs.

Summary: A scholarly assessment of the development of Arminius’ theology. Muller’s basic argument is that Arminius is part of the third wave of Protestant theologians who attempted to systematize the earlier exegesis of Scripture by the first wave of the Reformers. In so doing, Arminius attempts to appropriate medieval scholastic and Jesuit tools in vocabulary and theological distinctions to help explain some of the inherent theological tension in theology. His greatest difference with his Reformed counterparts was not biblicism or scholasticism but how he understands God’s being and psychology and God’s relationship to creation.

Arminius adopts and modifies Thomas of Aquinas’ (1225-1274) understanding of the sovereignty of God in his relation to creation using his own modification of the doctrine of middle knowledge, which was developed and embraced by the Jesuits. Arminius’ hybrid theology teaches that God limits himself by his relationship to the order of creation so that God’s actions are contingent on the foreseen decisions of human beings. Thus God and creation are in a mutually reciprocal relationship and to a degree God’s actions are determined by human actions (cf. 135, 165). Arminius also defines the grace of salvation and the grace of creation in such a way as to require that the grace of salvation be universal in nature though limited by human freedom. Because Arminius’ theology allows for God and man to have a reciprocal relationship, Arminianism is more open to the materialistic rationalism of Enlightenment and post-Enlightenment philosophy (cf. 284-285).

Exemplar Quote:

The issue is not that the world has attained an equal ultimacy with God but rather that the conditions established by God in the act of creation become determinative of all subsequent discussion concerning God and world (75).

Thus, the intricacies of Arminius’ God language… are crucial to the whole Arminian system understood as a theological and philosophical construction of reality—a construction notably different from the Reformed thought of the day in its view not only of predestination but also of the entire relation of God to the world and, indeed, of the character of temporal reality (101).

What Arminius has done in this description of the self-communication of the divine goodness is to argue all the divine affections as manifestations of the two primitive or primary affections, goodness and love; benignity, kindness, and mercy as modifications of goodness in relation to its objects. This argument is crucial to his whole theological perspective inasmuch as it has the effect of binding the divine affections to the primary impulse of God ad extra, the self-communicative character of the divine goodness, and thereby relating the divine affections to the teleological presupposition of Arminius’ theology and, more immediately, to the gracious relationship of God to the created order (198).

Benefits/Detriments: The book cannot be read without a background in scholastic theology and half a dozen reference books. Muller persuasively explains how Arminius developed his system and the theological distinctions and the order necessary to maintain it. This book is not a discussion of soteriology, but of Arminius understanding of God, creation, and providence.