This began as a comment on Bryan’s piece about authority and apostolic succession.  It got long, and I decided it should either be a post in its own right or that it shouldn’t be posted at all.  It’s possible it shouldn’t be posted at all.  I decided to make it a post in its own right.  Wisdom is vindicated by her children.

1.

An interesting feature of the thesis that apostolic succession can be reduced to (retentively reduced to, adequately understood in terms of) baptismal succession is that it (a) preserves the idea that holy orders are sacramentally conferred, and (b) repudiates the doctrine that holy orders constitute a sacrament distinct from the sacraments already allowed by Reformed Protestants (viz., baptism and Eucharist).  It’s in this way that Protestants espousing this theory are able to affirm that holy orders are in a sense sacramental but that apostolic succession, as understood by Catholics and Orthodox, doesn’t have anything to do with holy orders.  The thesis of the priesthood of all believers, as understood by Reformed Protestants, looks to cohere pretty well with it too.

A further interesting feature of this thesis is that some of the justification for it adverts to typological considerations, which absolves it of the crime of being dispensationalist or gnostic or anyway insensitive to the continuities existing between the new and the old covenants/testaments.  Catholics (shall we say it?) pride themselves on occupying a golden mean between contrasting errors or exaggerations, and on upholding the right theological and hermeneutical relation between old and new.  Reformed Christians do as well.  The thesis before us is a case in which Reformed Christians (espousing the thesis) see themselves as maintaining the uniquely correct via media between two opposing errors or unbiblical extremes: they won’t abide the Catholic/Orthodox idea that (physico-sacramental-hands-laying-on-ish) apostolic succession is “spiritually” significant, and neither will they allow that anyone with a pulse may licitly found his own denominational empire just because he feels in his heart God’s telling him to do it and resolves, as a preparatory step, to lay hands upon himself.  The sacrament of baptism is thought to help in this regard.

I admit I’m not in possession of a knockdown (biblical/theological/philosophical) proof that apostolic succession cannot simply be reduced to baptismal succession.  But I do think it’s peculiar to affirm that such a view of apostolic succession can be somehow derived from the biblical data, or that typological considerations in particular can be shown to support it.  I’m skeptical about this.  What I want to do here is just to register my skepticism that this view is supportable in the aforementioned way, and offer a different way of viewing things that I hope is suggestive.

2.

We can summarily dismiss some potential proof-texts for this thesis without prejudice, at least in the present context.  No Reformed Christian worth his or her salt thinks that when Joel says that the Spirit will be poured out on everyone indiscriminately (via baptism?), or that when Jeremiah says the law will be engraved upon each individual’s (baptized?) heart, or that when John says no one (who’s been baptized?) need look to another for instruction, or that when Jesus says we (the baptized?) mustn’t call anybody “teacher,” these things together or singularly imply that ordinations, or “preaching licenses,” or elder/church-member distinctions make no difference whatever as long as all parties have undergone the baptismal rite.  No Reformed person would argue in this way, from those texts, I think.  If a Quaker or an Anabaptist quoted those texts to a Reformed guy, the Reformed guy would know what to say about them.  So I’m going to assume that these texts don’t serve to obliterate all distinctions as between ordained and non-ordained Christians, and that they don’t disprove any Catholic doctrines.

I don’t think I’m begging the question by doing this.  Maybe I am.  I hope not.  Anyway, I’m going to do it.

3.

Also: I’m not going to proof-text from particular NT passages that say things about the laying on of hands and so forth.  I saw an article from a Baptist exegete who said that the “laying on of hands” really just meant the “raising of hands,” which people do when they vote about things in an assembly.  The idea is that Christians in the first century “laid on hands/raised their hands” to determine by vote who should serve as pastor or deacon for them, in the same way Baptists register their votes on these matters today.

That’s the problem with proof-texts.

4.

Speaking of Baptists and proof-texts, let’s make our way into the question of apostolic succession by comparing it with the question of paedobaptism.

The children of Christians ought to be baptized, but it’s a pretty bad idea to try to prove this to credobaptists by citing the “household baptism” passages, or by pointing out that Paul baptized somebody’s family, or by noting that Peter says in that sermon that the promise is to us and to our kids.  Citing these proof-texts doesn’t persuade Baptists, and that’s because those verses don’t unambiguously prove that Baptists are wrong about baptism.

But we don’t believe in paedobaptism on the basis of those verses anyway, do we?  Those verses serve at best to confirm or to corroborate the already-held belief that our children should be baptized, but they are hardly the “ground” or the “proof” or the “reason” for which we believe in paedobaptism to begin with.  That’s not because we don’t care what Scripture says, it’s just because that’s not how we tend to read Scripture.

Here’s how we’re thinking.  As a general matter we try to read the Bible in a covenantal, unified way – allowing “Scripture to interpret Scripture” so as to let the old testament shine its light on the new, and vice versa.  So when we think about baptism we notice things like this: (1) that there is a discernable principle running throughout the Bible, to the effect that when a man enters into covenant with God he takes his children with him; (2) that baptism is the sign and seal of the new covenant, which replaces the sign and seal of the old covenant (circumcision), and that circumcision was applied to covenant children; (3) that the new testament is not radically disjoint from the old, but rather stands in relation to the old as the fulfillment – not the abolition – of what pointed ahead and led up to it; (4) that when we move from the old to the new we move from penultimate to ultimate, from partial to complete, from anticipated to more fully realized, from good to better, from less inclusive to more; (5) that there is nothing whatsoever in the new testament which indicates that that the children of covenant members are all the sudden no longer to be considered covenant members themselves, nor that the covenant’s sign and seal ought now to be withheld from them; (6) that the testimony of the early Church (and the history of the Church generally) overwhelmingly demonstrates unanimity of agreement that the kids of baptized Christians should likewise be baptized and they darn well always have been.

Those are the sorts of reasons that persuade us.  We don’t take a proof-texting approach; we don’t rely on the “household” passages to prove paedobaptism.  Rather, we become convinced of it in a more holistic, “whole Bible + tradition + history” way, and once we become convinced of it, we realize it’s only natural that we’d see whole households baptized when the head of the house came into the flock. “That’s just the sort of thing we’d expect to see,” we say to ourselves.  And the reason the new testament writers didn’t take pains to make paedobaptism explicit, or to specify that there really were children in those houses, we figure, is because it was so obvious to them as to be taken for granted.  It didn’t come up, in other words, because it wasn’t an item of dispute.

That’s how we end up thinking about paedobaptism.  Isn’t it?

5.

Catholics think about apostolic succession in a similar way.  “The sorts of considerations adumbrated in (1)-(6) above should guide our thinking here too,” we say.  We don’t think there’s much use trying to proof-text from the material in Acts and the Epistles about transmitting the Spirit and prophetic gifts through the laying on of hands, for the same reason we don’t think proof-texting from household passages in discussions with credobaptists is particularly advisable.  By themselves they don’t afford “proofs,” especially if we’re not looking through the “whole Bible lens,” or are not doing the sort of thing we do when we think about baptism.

At the same time, we think that once you look at the new testament material with this backdrop in place, it serves to corroborate or confirm something already arrived at in a more holistic way.  We say to ourselves, “This laying on of hands business is exactly what we should expect to find,” given the structures of succession foreshadowing apostolic succession, and given the covenantal-it-really-does-all-elegantly-fit-together-ness with which Catholics approach the bible.  We do not find it peculiar that people appear simply to have assumed that succession was still important, or that it didn’t have to be explicitly laid out in a “Thou shalt baptize thine infants” sort of way, and we don’t find it odd that people did not argue about whether succession mattered, or that they pointed to it so as to help determine right doctrine, or that the overwhelming testimony of the Church is in favor of it.

We feel pretty much the same way about it as we (as we all, Catholic and Reformed alike) feel about infant baptism.

6.

I think there is something like “dynastic succession” on display in Isaiah 22 and that it sheds a lot of typological light on the incident with Peter as recorded in Matthew 16.  (You know the episode I have in mind; it’s where Jesus says to Simon “Tu es Petrus,” hands him an oversized hat, and shoots a puff of white smoke up the flue while the disciples all cheer “Habemus papem!”  That’s how it goes in the NAB, anyway.)

I won’t try to argue for a Catholic reading of Matthew 16 here, but I think most readers know how Catholics believe Isaiah 22 relates to it.  What I want to point out is that the dynastic succession in evidence in Isaiah 22 is just one example of a much broader motif woven throughout the Old Testament as it leads up to Christ and the kingdom; that there are additional, interlocking “old covenant succession” parallels to it, which need attending to as we search through the new testament data on apostolic succession.

This is to be expected.  Jesus didn’t only fulfill the type of David’s royal Son; He was the consummation of all that led up to His coming. He was Prophet and Priest, as well as King.  So it shouldn’t be surprising to note that Jesus fulfills the old testament types of patriarch and high priest as well.  I think the new testament material concerning succession and the priesthood makes a lot of sense, and that it tends toward a Catholic orientation, when illuminated by the light of these anticipatory themes in the old testament.  Because I’m no professional theologian I’ll just try to draw an impressionistic sketch of what I have in mind.

7.
That Jesus is High Priest in the new covenant – fulfilling the types of Aaron and Melchizedec, e.g. – is perhaps the most familiar theme.  Hard to read Hebrews and not be struck by it.  But Scripture also presents our Lord as the new prophet and patriarch – fulfilling the types of Abraham and Israel (among others) by assuming the gravitational center of God’s new covenant family. Now that Jesus has arrived, the new testament says, gone are the days when “father and brother and houses and land” are definitive of family and inheritance; for when we leave those behind for Jesus’ new family, we receive a hundred times back the family and inheritance we’d left (Matt 19:29). Gone are the days when the boundary markers of God’s holy nation – Sabbath, diet, and all else Jesus kept subverting to Pharisaic and scribal chagrin – kept the family of God separate from all who could not claim Abrahamic descent. The Lord can raise up sons of Abraham from the very stones of the earth (Matt 3:9, Gal 3:29); and when He Himself is raised up, all men will be drawn unto Him (Jn 12:32).

So He, not Abraham, will be the Center of the new family. He, instead of Abraham, will oversee, not twelve tribes, but twelve apostles – who would themselves “sit on twelve thrones judging the twelve tribes of Israel” (Matt 19:28). He, not Abraham, will stand as Cornerstone of a global filial communion, whose “mothers and sisters and brothers” are tied together by love of the Word (Matt 12:48-50), by the outpouring of God’s own family-life within them, through water and the Spirit (Jn 3:3-5) – and, not least, by participation in the Flesh and Blood of God’s only begotten Son, through which they become bound by the ties of Flesh and Blood kinship themselves (1 Cor 10:16-17).

In this act of assuming the patriarchy and fathering this new family, Jesus shows Himself to be the Fount of all those blessings which the patriarchal head of the covenant alone could bestow, because only the patriarchal head possessed them to begin with.  To be sure, the blessings flowed from Abraham to his Seed, and through his Seed to “all the families of the earth.” But that’s only because Abraham himself had received these covenant blessings from God, the source from whom all blessings, promises and prerogatives must ultimately derive – that was, in fact, the only reason Abraham had anything at all to give.

And that is why, when the blessings were imparted to Isaac, not Ishmael, and then Jacob, instead of Esau, they really got something their elder brothers did not – and so on down the line, right through David and up to Christ. In other words, the old testament covenant promises were passed on, via patriarchal blessing, through a particular chosen line: a line of covenantal succession. Esau couldn’t just declare himself to be the “blessed” one if Isaac gave the blessing to Jacob; Isaac wouldn’t have been in a position to transfer any covenant blessings at all if Abraham had passed them to Ishmael, rather than him; and Abraham, for his part, had not a single covenant promise, not a single blessing to transmit, apart from what had been specifically given by God to him.  So you get your covenant blessings from somebody else, and they can pass them to you only if they have them to give – but ultimately, however long the line, they had to trace their way successively back to God, because they cannot come from man.

8.
Consider now the old covenant priesthood.  It was the sons of Levi who, at the golden calf incident, threw in their lot with Moses over against their idolatrous brethren, and who were thenceforth commissioned by God to carry forward the exclusive priestly line (Exod 32:25-29). No more could the firstborn son of any tribal family lay claim to the prerogatives of priest.  From that point forward any would-be priest would have to cough up the right credentials: Levitical, biological succession.  You couldn’t, in other words, affirm that you felt a vocation to the office of priest and let that suffice.  Still less could you found your own Temple and declare that your interpretations of Torah carried forward a Levitical spirit, even if you were just as circumcised as any old Levite. These things were not enough.  There wasn’t any point in submitting an application to the office unless you could demonstrate that you stood, as heir, to the priestly prerogatives and promises, handed down through genealogical succession.

Here again, whatever priestly authority, whatever priestly prerogatives you possessed were not sui generis; they couldn’t come from you.  You had to get them from someone, and they had to get them from someone – but ultimately, however long the line, they had to trace their way successively back to God, because they cannot come from man.

9.
In Christ, of course, in the new, all of these old covenant structures – royal, patriarchal, episcopal – have found their definitive fulfillment.  No doubt.  But this leads straightaway to an unavoidable and unavoidably crucial question.  Where, in the new, does “to fulfill” mean “to destroy?”

To be sure, there’s a nice question about what Jesus means when He says that He hasn’t come to abolish but to fulfill.  Clearly some things have been abolished; I know this because I put ham in my breakfast tacos this morning and felt no compunction.  Some others, though, have been taken up and transformed in a way that leaves a definitive similarity between type and antitype in place.  It seems to me to make more sense out of Scripture and Church history if the new covenant priesthood retains a succession-structure, like unto the familiar structures of the old.

10.
Here’s some relevant new testament data.

Right before His Passion, at the only point in which the words “new covenant” ever fall from His lips, Jesus imparts to His apostles their priestly mandate to “Do this in memory of Me” –

This is My Body, broken for you … This cup which is poured out for you is the New Covenant in My Blood. (Lk 22:19-20)

Directly upon instituting this new priestly function, this Eucharistic mandate, He declares His intention to pass over the kingdom to those who would thenceforth rule over the house –

And I assign [‘covenant’] to you a kingdom, as My Father assigned [‘covenanted’] a kingdom to Me, that you may eat and drink in My kingdom, and sit on twelve thrones judging the twelve tribes of Israel. (28-29)

And to the fearless leader, who would soon betray his Master from fear, Jesus announces that his faith ultimately will not fail –

And you, when once you have returned, strengthen your brethren. (32)

Now, fast-forward to the appearance of the resurrected Lord – the Prophet, Priest and King – who does something else to the disciples, so as to render their initial apostolic commission both coherent and complete:

Jesus said to them, “Peace be with you. As the Father has sent Me, even so I am sending you.” And when He had said this, He breathed on them and said to them, “Receive the Holy Spirit. If you forgive the sins of any, they are forgiven them; if you withhold forgiveness from any, it is withheld.” (Jn 20:21-23)

And to the fearless leader, who now has returned, Jesus gives the threefold charge to

Feed My lambs … Tend My sheep … Feed My sheep. (Jn 21:15-19)

It’s a lot to take in.  But notice, first, that each of Christ’s Offices is present in these episodes taken together: (i) Jesus the Patriarch imparts His blessing (“My peace I give to you…”), (ii) Jesus the King delegates authority over the kingdom (“I assign a kingdom to you … you will sit on twelve thrones…”), and (iii) Jesus the Priest confers authority to offer the Eucharist, the sacrificial meal of the new covenant, and to forgive (or retain) sins (“This is the New Covenant in My Blood … Do this…” “Whose sins you forgive are forgiven them, whose sins you retain are retained…”).

Notice, too, that (iv) in each case we see a transference of authority from Christ to the apostles, an authority which ultimately traces its way back to God (“As My Father assigned a kingdom to Me, so I assign a kingdom to you…,” “As the Father sent Me, so I am sending you…,” cf. Lk 10:16). In the same vein, Peter is once more singled out as receiving from Christ what Christ received from the Father (“I am the Good Shepherd. I know My own and My own know Me … So there will be one flock … My Father, who is greater than all, has given them to Me…” (Jn 10:14, 16, 29), “Feed My lambs … Tend My sheep … Feed My sheep…”). And finally, note that (v) what makes all this possible is the transmission of the Holy Ghost (“And He breathed on them saying, ‘Receive the Holy Spirit…’”).

That last bit, in fact, seems particularly illuminating, because it’s somewhat puzzling what the gift of the Spirit means at this junction – after the Spirit had already been active among and through them, in their preaching and healing and exorcisms, and presumably after they had been baptized, but before the Spirit came at Pentecost, signifying the constitution day of the Church at large.  But try this out.  Suppose that the gift of the Spirit at this point has less to do with a new kind of presence among them (individually or collectively) than it has to do with a new kind of authority they were receiving, which was to be exercised and passed down in Jesus’ earthly absence.

Of course, if we think of apostles and their successors in the way Catholics do, it makes sense that they’d need a new kind of authority.  They’d need a new kind of authority, transmitted directly from God through Christ to them, if they were to fulfill the priestly/sacerdotal functions Jesus assigned them to perform when He was not around: if Jesus was accused of blasphemy for presuming to forgive sins (Lk 5:20-26), how much more would these mere men be guilty of blasphemy for the same?  But “the Son of Man has authority on earth to forgive sins,” a fact confirmed by the subsequent miracles, and if the Son of Man passes along this authority to men – who would likewise perform miracles in His name – then what would otherwise surely be presumption-at-best-and-blasphemy-at-worst simply becomes a day in the life of a priest (cf. Jas 5:13-16).

So too for their authority over the kingdom: no man could possibly assume such a position of authority, or claim that his words were Christ’s, or that his mission was the Lord’s, and still less could he pass all this along to others – unless the King was prepared to delegate that kind of authority to him, which Christ, at the moment of initiating the new covenant, according to the Catholic Church, did.
11.
Naturally, the new priesthood is both similar to, and different from, the old.  No longer does the priestly office depend upon flesh and blood, biological succession; but that isn’t to say that no genealogical succession is required at all.  As in the old, so in the new: whatever priestly prerogatives and authority a person has must trace their way successively back to God, because they cannot come from man.  It’s just that in this case it isn’t genealogical succession of the Levitical ancestry by the “laying on of genes,” it is Spiritual succession of the apostolic ancestry “by the laying on of hands.”

Baptism provides an important link between Christ/His apostles and the baptized.  But it isn’t clear why this should make us think that it (baptism) suffices for priestly ministry.  Nor, if baptism does suffice, does this explain what all the remarkable material in the new testament – which makes good sense if we think in terms of apostolic succession – is supposed to signify.

I’m not sure how many readers are persuaded by Wilson’s interesting suggestion that Catholics actually denigrate the power and significance of baptism by denying that every gift or prerogative required for the priesthood are contained within it.  But I think it’s no denigration of baptism to say that (a) it effectively accomplishes exactly what it is supposed to, and that (b) it doesn’t accomplish things it was not intended to accomplish.  Wilson himself does not, in my view, denigrate the sufficiency of baptism for priestly orders by appending to it additional requirements for priestly service (being male, for instance).  And Catholics don’t, in my view, denigrate baptism by affirming that priests have to have male hands laid on them too.  Everyone requires something in addition to baptism, some further set of conditions that have to be met, for a person to become a fully functional priest.  The question is just about what those additional requirements are, and it won’t do to say there’s something deficient about baptism if baptism alone does not satisfy those additional conditions.

Anyway, with these things in view, it seems to me that the proof-texts for apostolic succession are indeed “just what we would expect to see” if we already believe in it.  [Spoiler alert: here come proof-texts.]

To be sure, the apostles exercised their power to transmit the Holy Ghost to all believers, through baptism and the laying on of hands (as in Acts 8:17, and 19:6; cf. Heb 6:2). Yet equally was this sacramental action used for the commissioning of a person to the ecclesial office (as in Acts 6:6 and 13:3). Thus St. Paul tells Timothy to remember the “gift of God” he has received “through the imposition of my hands” (2 Tim 1:6) so as to encourage him in his ministry, and that he should let no one look down on his youth, nor “neglect the gift you have which was conferred on you through the prophetic word and the imposition of hands of the presbyterate” (1 Tim 4:14) – a gift he should be careful not to transfer to others until they’re proven worthy of the office: “Do not lay hands too readily on anyone, and do not share in a person’s sins” (5:22; cf. the passing of authority from Moses to Joshua by the imposition of hands in Nm 27:18-23 and Deut 34:9).

And similarly with Jesus, who says “to the crowds and to the disciples, ‘The scribes and the Pharisees sit on Moses’ seat, so practice and observe whatever they tell you – but not what they do. For they preach, but they do not practice” (Matt 23:1-2). Here Jesus reminds His followers that they have an obligation to listen to and obey the scribes et al. irrespective of their wickedness – wickedness for which He reserves His most heavy duty invectives (23:4-36) – precisely because they hold the office that they do, and despite the fact that they weren’t at all worthy to hold it. They weren’t Moses, in other words, but the Jews still had an obligation to respect the decisions and disciplinary measures of these lawyers because they sat “on Moses’ seat.”  (It interests me that this passage comes on the heels of Christ’s conferral of the power to bind and loose.)

Nota bene: I’m not using this passage to “prove” something about the “seat” of Peter, for example, or to “prove” anything else really.  What I’m wanting to note is something that I think should not be very controversial.  It is that in reminding them of this obligation, Jesus clearly isn’t (i) appealing to anything in the old testament which says that Moses had a “seat” upon which scribal and Pharisaical folks would later “sit,” nor is He (ii) introducing some novel idea they’d never heard of before or voicing some alien concept for which their culture and tradition hadn’t prepared them.  It was all very ho-hum; everybody knew about this stuff and those were the categories in which they thought, which is why He could just shoot off the remark and move on without offering any explanation as to what He meant.

Same goes for Peter.  When he says of Judas’ vacant spot, “Let another take his office,” and claimed to see a “prophecy” to this effect in the old testament, nobody needed any explication of what was going on.  That’s how things worked.

12.
Apostolic succession, as noted ad nauseam, is much like paedobaptism as regards the “proofs” and “proof-texts” for it.  Like infant baptism, the fathers and new testament authors did not treat it as some kind of additional doctrine which required justification or elaboration; they seemed to appeal to it as a piece of common knowledge, especially when doctrinal purity or Church unity were at stake.  That’s why there is a noteworthy dearth (argument from silence! like infant baptism!) of controversies erupting about the principle of succession itself back then.  What you see instead, from time to time, is people relying on or appealing to the succession of bishops in order to resolve the disputes which did erupt.  In other words, it seemed to be something you employed, inter alia, to test theological claims against the standard of orthodoxy, but not something whose orthodoxy itself needed to be tested.  This makes sense from a Catholic perspective.

Lest my ambitions be exaggerated: let me make clear that I’m not offering this as an argument that deniers of apostolic succession should find entirely persuasive.  I’m offering a sketchy, alternative way of pulling the data together, and I commend it to you for consideration.

The best way to argue against it typologically, I think, would be to say that the new covenant restores things to the way they were in pre-golden-calf days, wherein first-born sons could evidently assume a priestly mantle in and for their families.  That would be an interesting line to take, and I think I’d try to argue like that if I were a proponent of succession-by-baptism.  Perhaps one of our readers would like to take that point of view up.

I would maybe say more about this possibility, but if I did I think I would need a new section break, and I really want to end this post with 12.

Discuss…

I argue in this post that the Catholic should not consider this claim – the claim that Catholics who reject Reformed theology just don’t understand it – to be uncharitable.  The Reformed Protestant who registers this charge need not be behaving uncharitably; the Reformed Protestant who registers this charge may instead be moved to register it precisely because he is motivated by genuine charity.

*          *         *

Remember that debate between Greg Bahnsen and Gordon Stein?  Probably you’ve either listened to the debate or have heard about it.  It’s supposed to be a shining example of how presuppositional apologetics laid to waste the futile atheistic objections of folks like Gordon Stein.  I’ve got no present interest in evaluating what happened in the debate, but there is something relevant to the present discussion which occurred in that debate that is worth remarking upon.  At one juncture, Bahnsen pointed out to the audience that Stein’s PhD dissertation was about whales.  Sperm whales, I think.  (Maybe some other kind; it’s been a while.)  Stein was a biologist.  And the point (I guess) Bahnsen wanted to make was that persons who write dissertations about whales can’t expect to be accorded expert status when it comes to questions about the existence of God.

Stein fired back, later on: “Well, you wrote your dissertation on the concept of Self-Deception,” he said.  And the point (I guess) was that persons who write their dissertations about psychological/epistemological phenomena like self-deception should not expect to be accorded expert status when it comes to questions about the existence of God.  Tu quoque.

Bahnsen was wrong to tell the audience that Stein was just a biologist in hopes they’d infer that Stein didn’t have anything very interesting to say about God.  That looks pretty much like a desperate measure, and all the more so when it’s undertaken by an avowed presuppositionalist.  (Did Bahnsen want his audience to conclude that Stein’s arguments were bad and that his arguments were good just because of their disparate academic specializations?  Is there any presuppositionalist in the known universe who’d endorse such a rhetorical strategy upon reflection?)  But Bahnsen was right when he defended himself against Stein’s tu quoque: the phenomenon of self-deception is relevant to the current debate, he said.  “Very relevant,” he said.  And the reason why is just that atheists are in the grip of self-deception, and this point is the point that Bahnsen had all along really been wanting to make.

It’s a nice question whether Bahnsen’s subsequent remarks were apologetically useful, but whether or not they were I think we can at least recognize this: self-deception is a real phenomenon, and it’s something that the evangelist should know something about.  Since the apologist just is (or had very well better be) some sort of evangelist “at the core,” the phenomenon of self-deception is relevant to the task of apologetics, or is at least something that apologists should spend some time thinking about.

This isn’t a specifically “presuppositionalist” insight, mind you.  It isn’t news to any Christian that some persons may suppress the truth in unrighteousness, nor that the effectiveness of their apologetical efforts with individuals is going to depend not just upon the cognitive condition but also the conative states of the individual being evangelized – those motivational states beyond the power of rational argumentation itself directly to manipulate or guide, at least in the present postlapsarian situation. ²  It’s weird that some people think this was a discovery of Van Til’s.  It wasn’t.

In any case, the phenomenon of self-deception is as peculiar as it is pervasive.  Think about it.  Typically, to deceive another person about X, it requires that you know X not to be the case and that you wish (for whatever reason) to make another person believe that X is the case.  Some theorists want to analyze self-deception along these same lines – along the lines of interpersonal deception.  They are called “intentionalists” about self-deception.

What they’ll say is that self-deception occurs when a particular person knows that X is not the case and then tries to get himself to believe that X is the case.  But that’s weird.  To successfully deceive another person, it seems, you have to get them to believe something to be false that you yourself know to be true, and that they themselves don’t know antecedently to be true.  (Else how could you get them to believe it’s false?)  But if you’re trying to deceive yourself, then you must already know that the thing you’re trying to deceive yourself about is true.  So it seems that you couldn’t possibly deceive yourself about it.  That is the “static paradox,” as it’s sometimes called, concerning self-deception: self-deception requires both that you believe X and also that you believe not-X, and this seems psychologically impossible.

Another paradox is called the “dynamic paradox.”  It points out that in order to deceive another person about X, you need to adopt the intention to deceive them: you need intentionally to adopt a course of action that you believe will eventuate in their belief that not-X.  This requires, of course, that you (the mendacious party) already know the truth about X.  But what about the case of self-deception, in which the liar and the victim of the lie are the same party?  In which the deceiver and the deceived are the same?  It looks, in this case, as if one and the same person needs to adopt the intention to get himself (perhaps later on, through various mediating circumstances) to believe something he knows already to be false.  But that’s weird.  It’s weird because if another person were to make known to you his intention to deceive you, and then ask you to go through a certain process at the end of which you’d end up believing something you presently know to be false, then the “cat,” so to speak, would already be “out of the bag.”  Since you know the other guy’s intent on deceiving you, whatever process he asks you to go through so as to render you deceived would be a process that you antecedently know would issue in false beliefs, and so would be an ineffective process.

You can’t deceive someone like that.  If you want to deceive someone, you’ve got to keep your deceiving intentions hidden from them.  But if the deceiver and the deceived are one and the same person, if the person trying to hide his intentions is the same as the person he’s trying to hide them from, then it looks, once again, as if self-deception is an impossibility.

But it is a possibility, isn’t it?  Self-deception is possible.

So suppose we adopt a non-intentionalist approach to self-deception.  What we’ll say, then, is that there are certain sub-conscious or sub-intentional processes at work in the person – processes concerning which they aren’t explicitly aware – and that these processes have the effect of making them consciously believe something to be false which they either (simultaneously) sub-consciously believe is true or (consciously) believed at one point to be true. ³

This seems less fraught with paradox, but there is the following concern.  In cases of self-deception, it is typical for us to extend moral evaluations – specifically, judgments of disapprobation or blameworthiness.  Very often when people deceive themselves via putatively sub-conscious or sub-intentional processes, we still find them culpable for those acts of self-deception.  The person who forces herself against all evidence to believe in her spouse’s fidelity, or who believes against all evidence that her children really aren’t being abused by her lover, and who believes these things only because it would disturb her greatly to believe otherwise – such persons we may well pity, but we do not typically exculpate them.  The mother still should have ensured the safety of her children, even if it meant kicking out the new (and apparently abusive but otherwise suitable) boyfriend.  The betrayed spouse should still have looked the facts square in the face.  We still, in other words, consider such persons morally responsible for the beliefs that they acquire via self-deceptive processes, and for the actions they undertake (or omit to undertake) on the basis of self-deceptively induced beliefs, despite the reactive attitude of pity engendered in us by awareness of their unenviable circumstances.

Non-intentionalist theories of self-deception may avoid the static and dynamic paradoxes, but they apparently do not explain why it is intuitively right and fitting, at least in some cases, to hold persons morally responsible for their self-deceptions when they are sub-intentionally induced delusions.  This is so because we typically do not hold people morally responsible simply for being deceived, for being tricked.  And if the sub-intentional processes at work in the person are beyond the range of their awareness or conscious control, it isn’t obvious why self-deceived persons aren’t just straight-up victims of non-rational processes they know nothing about and couldn’t do anything to thwart.

Christians are, however, so far as I can see, committed to the reality of cases of self-deception, and committed to the claim that self-deceiving persons are in some cases morally responsible for what they believe and do. ⁴

One way to allow for this is to adopt a stance according to which “the will” has a certain primacy or independence with respect to “the intellect.”  That is however not the only option.  Even as strong an “intellectualist” as Aquinas apparently made room for the reciprocal influence of will upon intellect, of a kind that might direct the intellect to consider some ends that the agent would not otherwise have considered as goods to be pursued, and this is consistent with the claim that intellect is in general primary over will in the sense that will of necessity follows whatever the intellect presents to it as the good (under some description, in some circumstance) to be pursued.  And Calvin evidently did the same thing, at least in his discussions about the will/intellect relation in prelapsarian man. ⁵  But the point is just that Christians need some way to allow for instances of morally culpable self-deception.

*         *         *

However best to understand it theoretically, a question worth asking at this point is whether or to what extent the propensity for self-deception survives in regenerate persons, in Christians.  Plausibly it does, to some extent.  (Why shouldn’t it?)  But if it does (to some extent), there is a question to be asked about how disagreeing Christians should relate to one another, how they should view one another within the context of disputation.

What should the Reformed Christian make of the Arminian Christian, for example?  It’s worth noting that Reformed Christians typically think of Arminian Protestants as genuine Christians, despite the confusions that the latter have (according to the former) fallen into.  “Felicitous inconsistency,” it’s sometimes called.  Here’s why: the Arminian Protestant may well endorse justification by faith alone (and let’s just put aside the fact that some Wesleyans, following Wesley, reject what confessional Reformed Christians mean by this), and this may be enough to gather them into the fold.  What they’re confused about is this: they don’t understand that if they’re really to embrace sola fide they must also embrace every other sola you wish to name, and that they can’t do this unless they’re five point Calvinists.  They don’t see how the thing hangs together as a package.

In other words their systematic theology is inconsistent – but the crucial thing is that they just don’t recognize this, and not necessarily through any moral fault of their own.  They’re good Christians, not good systematicians.  It’s an intellectual problem.  But we don’t typically evaluate others in a morally unfavorable way simply for being unintelligent or torpid.

It could be otherwise.  Suppose that the Arminian’s beliefs are generated through some fault of their own: perhaps they like the idea of sola fide, but they think the rest of Reformed theology takes too much control away from them, makes God too sovereign, makes God too exclusive, gives too much control to God, or makes them out to be morally worse than they want to believe they are.  In each case the Reformed Christian will stand ready to explain to them why their theology is illicitly shaped by a distorting and morally depraved stance: they want to usurp the place of God (like Adam), or they don’t want to believe that they’re really all that bad (like everybody, I guess.)  And so here the problem will be identified as a moral one as opposed to an intellectual one: they don’t want to give God the glory, and they want rather to give themselves the glory; that’s why their systematic theology is screwed up, and that’s why their religious beliefs are screwed up too.

This is different from felicitous inconsistency because the intellect has been clouded by an immoral will, even if only sub-consciously.  At some deep (possibly sub-intentional) level they know the truth but have set about the business of suppressing it in unrighteousness, deceiving themselves thereby into believing that, say, Jesus died for everybody, when they know darn well that He didn’t, because they’re fully aware of the implications of affirming that He did.

Question: If you were an Arminian, how would you prefer the Calvinist view you?  As felicitously inconsistent?  Or as engaged in outright moral rebellion against God, expressing itself in truth-suppression and morally blameworthy self-deception?  Who wouldn’t rather be called confused, muddle-headed, inconsistent, given the alternatives?  I would.  Wouldn’t you?

But compare now the case of the Catholic and the Reformed Christian.  It remains that there are two alternatives to consider: the Reformed Protestant may consider that the Catholic’s beliefs are the result of an immoral will clouding the intellect’s judgment, or he may not.

Suppose the Reformed Protestant were to diagnose the Catholic’s distinctively Catholic beliefs as having been formed by way of a morally culpable self-deceptive process.  The Catholic’s failure to embrace Reformed theology will then be chalked up to a moral problem, an intellectual one only secondarily.  But notice, if this were the diagnosis of the Reformed Protestant, then the last thing he’d say is that the Catholic just doesn’t understand Reformed theology.  For the problem here is that the Catholic doesn’t believe Reformed theology, has rejected as false particular aspects of Reformed theology.  Maybe the Catholic has deceived himself (culpably) into believing that these things are false when he knows full well (“in his bones”) that they are true, but that is not the same thing as simply not “understanding” the content of the theological beliefs that he has culpably deceived himself into believing false. (Indeed, so as to reject them, he evidently needs to understand what they say.)

What then might the Reformed Protestant mean by suggesting, to the Catholic, that he just does not understand Reformed theology?  Might there be any other negative moral evaluation implicit in this allegation?

One might think so.  Suppose for instance that the Reformed Protestant follows Charles Hodge in thinking that (i) the “Church” is to be identified with “all true Christians,” that (ii) “all true Christians” are to be identified with all Christians who agree about the “essential teachings of Scripture,” and that (iii) the “essential teachings of Scripture” include some subset of the distinctively Reformed beliefs held by Charles Hodge and others like him.

Given (i)-(iii), the Reformed Protestant may follow Hodge in arguing that since (iv) “the Bible be a plain book,” and since (v) “the Spirit performs the functions of a teacher to all the children of God, it follows inevitably that they must agree in all essential matters in their interpretation of the Bible,” this entails that (vi) “all the true people of God in every age and in every part of the Church, in the exercise of their private judgment” do indeed “agree as to the meaning of Scripture in all things necessary either in faith or practice,” which amounts to “a decisive proof of the perspicuity of the Bible, and of the safety of allowing the people the enjoyment of the divine right of private judgment.” ⁶

And given (iv)-(vi), finally, the Reformed Protestant is in a position to conclude that the Catholic’s failure to understand Reformed theology (or the subset of Reformed essentials) entails that the Catholic does not have the Spirit as his teacher, and therefore is neither a true Christian nor really a member of the Church.  And surely some negative moral judgment lurks here?

Not necessarily.  Again, it is much more natural for the Reformed Christian to explain why the Catholic does not believe these things (the “essentials”) in this manner; but failure to believe isn’t equivalent to a failure to understand, especially given that “the Bible be a plain book,” “intelligible by the people.”  If he says that the Catholic just doesn’t get plain stuff that normal people find intelligible, he isn’t thereby making any negative moral judgments about the Catholic.

More plausible, I think, is to view the Reformed Protestant as doing all he can to explain why the otherwise apparently intelligent and godly Catholic Christian does not believe particular aspects of Reformed theology without committing himself to the claim that the Catholic is culpably deceiving himself in unrighteousness.  That is to say, the Reformed Christian who assumes that the Catholic just does not understand Reformed theology is straining to give the Catholic the benefit of the doubt, straining to explain (to himself and to the Catholic) why the Catholic does not believe something that is on the whole perspicuous to every reasonably intelligent (or at least Spirit-led?) person – and he’s doing it all precisely in an attempt to avoid rendering the kind of outright moral condemnation implicit in the assessment that apparently informed Catholics are simply self-deceptively suppressing the truth in ungodliness out of willful moral rebellion.

He is in other words straining to identify the Catholic’s problem as just an intellectual problem, and not necessarily a moral one.  This is not an exercise in uncharitable name-calling; it is not an abandonment of charity.  It is actually an attempt to stretch charity to its very limits.  For if the Reformed Protestant does believe that Scripture is perspicuous on all the essentials, and also perceives that the Catholic is not an absolute idiot and has spent some time with the Biblical texts, then surely the easiest, most tempting, and seemingly even inevitable conclusion is that the Catholic is in the grip of sin – that the Catholic’s failure to believe is fundamentally a moral problem and not a simple failure to understand.  But failing to understand may for all that simply owe to an intellectual deficiency in the Catholic’s head and not to a moral one in his heart.

*         *         *

I conclude that Catholics who are told that they do not understand Reformed theology should take it as a compliment of sorts, and should take it as an expression of their Reformed interlocutors’ favorable moral appraisal of and limit-stretching charity toward them.  They shouldn’t get all uppity about it.  The Reformed Protestant has, given the alternatives, chosen the more loving and gracious explanation for the Catholic’s failure to believe in various Reformed distinctives.

It would of course be Pollyannaish in the extreme to suppose that every Reformed Christian who’s ever said anything like this to any Catholic on planet earth was doing it out of charity.  But so what?  Catholics should still suppose that this is what the Reformed Christian is doing with them in any particular instance in which they hear the familiar charge: “You just don’t understand our theology.”  Charity, at least, demands that Catholics not instinctively suppose otherwise. ⁷

1. Here I assume for the sake of convenience that there is a monolithic Reformed theology (MRT), such that any Catholic who disagrees with any aspect of MRT must eo ipso disagree with something that every Reformed Protestant believes to be true.  There is, of course, no such thing as MRT, but it facilitates discussion if we pretend that there is.
2. Cf. the remarks of “Arminian-classical-apologist” William Craig: “In the absence of the work of the Holy Spirit, our best arguments will fall like water on a stone, for the natural man suppresses the truth in unrighteousness (Rom. 1:21) … Apart from the work of the Holy Spirit, he will do all he can to resist the argument, even adopting extreme and outlandish beliefs rather than yielding to the truth of Christian theism” (“Classical Apologetics,” in Stephen Cowan et al eds., Five Views on Apologetics, Zondervan (2000), p. 53).
3. Pascal is sometimes referenced here, because he argued that even if there weren’t evidentially sufficient grounds for belief in God it was still most rational practically to believe in Him on the basis of egocentric or self-interested calculations regarding the expected utility of belief over disbelief.  Pascal was of course aware that a person could be brought to recognize that believing in God was on the whole most practically rational without thereby forming a belief that God really does exist.  And he counseled such persons to behave as though they did really believe: they should go to Mass, say their prayers, and so forth.  They should enter into a Christian form of life.  Eventually, this form of life would (or at least could) engender within them the virtue of genuine belief.  This is, according to some people, an instance of adopting a course of action aimed at making oneself believe something to be true that one either believes to be false or does not as yet believe to be true, and so is an instance of self-deception.
4. Compare Augustine’s moral condemnation of his former self-deceiving self in the Confessions VIII –

   Ponticianus told us this story of [a conversion] and as he spoke You, O Lord, turned me back in on myself.  You took me from behind my own back, where I had placed myself because I did not wish to look upon myself.  You stood me face to face with myself, so I might see how foul I was, how deformed and defiled, how covered with sins and sores.  I looked, and I was filled with horror, but there was no place for me to flee from myself.  If I tried to turn my gaze from myself, he still went on with the story he was telling, and once again you placed me in front of myself and thrust me before my own eyes, so that I might find out my iniquity and hate it.  I knew what it was, but I pretended not to; I refused to look at it and put it out of my memory.

   See Mark Johnston’s pertinent discussion of the kind of state evinced by Augustine here in “Self-Deception and the Nature of Mind,” in Brian McLaughlin et al eds., Perspectives on Self Deception, University of California Press (1988).

5. For discussion and helpful references see Dewey Hoitenga’s John Calvin and the Will: a Critique and Corrective, Baker Books (1997).
6. See Charles Hodge, Systematic Theology vol. I: Theology, Eerdmans Publishers (reprint 1997), pp. 183-184, 188.  Yes: I know that many Reformed Protestants will want to argue that they don’t rely upon a “private judgment/perspicuity” hermeneutic, and that this is really a version of “solo scriptura” as opposed to “sola scriptura,” the latter of which is not objectionably individualistic.  But this just buttresses my point: the Reformed Christian who backs away from Hodge here will view Hodge simply as misunderstanding what Reformed theology actually teaches on this point; but he will hardly conclude thereby that Hodge must be in the grip of morally culpable self-deceptive sin.  He’s just making an honest intellectual mistake.
7. I wish to thank my friend and sparring partner Andrew McCallum for causing me to reconsider what Reformed Protestants may have in mind when they say that Catholics don’t understand Reformed theology.  He has taught me that my former Reformed self was insufficiently charitable towards Catholics.  I dedicate this post to him and others like him.

Taken seriously, what this means is that wherever the doctrine of justification as Luther understood it is not embraced and taught there is no Christian Church: a group of persons who do not endorse it may believe they are saved in Christ by the grace of God, may assemble together and worship God the Three-In-One, may proclaim the Scriptures, may sincerely affirm the Nicene Creed, may celebrate the sacraments, and so forth. But they are not a true Christian Church. They are either an apostate church or an imposter church of some kind.

When you add to this the recognition that Luther’s doctrine of justification – according to which Christ’s righteousness is imputed to believers and appropriated by faith alone, and not also imparted to believers through faith formed by love – had evidently not been believed until Luther formulated and started believing it, an interesting and difficult question arises. What should we say about all the “Christians” who lived and died before the 1500s, when Luther formulated the correct doctrine of justification? Were they really Christians at all, or no? Relatedly: what should we say about the “Church” before the 1500s? Was it really a Church at all? Or no?

This was something Luther and Calvin both wrestled with, but not everyone really wrestles with it. For example, I’ve recently read an interesting article in JETS, written by Matthew Heckel, in which he criticizes the presentation in R.C. Sproul’s book Faith Alone principally because it fails to address this question.¹ In that book Sproul advances the thesis that the Catholic Church is not a true Christian Church, because it denied the Gospel at the Council of Trent. And he argues that Evangelical Christians cannot seek unity with Catholics, since that would amount to embracing heresy and destroying the Church. It would destroy the Church because the Church cannot exist unless it embraces something like Luther’s doctrine of justification, according to R.C. Sproul.

Heckel’s piece critiques Sproul’s book on a number of grounds, but, again, the principal thing has to do with the seemingly unavoidable – and in truth unacceptable – conclusion that there just wasn’t any Church for a very long time until Luther came round in the 16^th century:

Sproul supports his thesis from Reformation sources, but his conclusions are not informed by an engagement with patristic and medieval treatments of justification; this is one of the major weaknesses of the book. He does introduce Augustine and Aquinas into the conversation to establish that they believed justification to be exclusively by grace, and he uses their theology to accuse the Council of Trent of semi-Pelagianism [I hear tell B.B. Warfield accused it of “semi-semi-Pelagianism.” It isn’t semi-pelagian, and I guess I have no idea what semi-semi-pelagianism is supposed to be – N. Judisch]. Beyond this, Sproul does not substantially treat the views of Augustine and Aquinas on justification. If he had, his thesis would surely have led him, as it did the Reformers, to deal with the question of the Christian status of the pre-Reformation church, since Augustine and the rest of the theologians did not teach that we are justified sola fide in the Reformation sense. In fact, unless Sproul’s thesis is qualified, it would lead to the unintended consequence of confining to perdition the entire Church from the patristic period up to the dawn of the Reformation, something the Reformers did not do. This is because the Reformation understanding of justification sola fide was unheard of in the pre-Reformation church and thus not believed until Luther. Alister McGrath points out that “there are no ‘Forerunners of the Reformation doctrines of justification.’”

To put it another way, Luther’s doctrine of justification sola fide was not a recovery but an innovation within the Western theological tradition. What is provocative about Sproul’s thesis is that the equation of the construct of sola fide with the gospel itself would mean that the Roman Catholic Church not only rejected the gospel at Trent, but the Church never possessed it at all from the post-apostolic period up to the time of Luther. In this unqualified form, Sproul’s thesis would also mean that since no one knew the gospel in the pre-Reformation church, no one experienced justification, and thus there was no Church.²

I think many of Heckel’s complaints about Sproul’s work and overall strategy can be made to stick. Sproul fails to engage with Christian history and consider head-on the implications of what he’s saying. (The Reformers did not do this; they engaged, and they did consider the implications of what they said.) He also fails to engage with the many (Catholic) developments and constructive engagements with Luther’s work. Perhaps unwittingly, he centers upon the 16th century discussions of justification, which took place within an explicitly polemical context only, rather than looking through the vast body of serious scholarly literature which would have enabled a more sophisticated and nuanced reading of Catholic thought and how it relates to Luther’s legitimate concerns. Finally, if Heckel’s interpretation of him is right, anyway, Sproul reduces “being justified by faith alone” to “believing in the doctrine of justification by faith alone,” which the Reformers did not do, and which is sort of a strange thing to do.

But put Sproul aside. Luther himself did not fail to ponder the question about the status of the pre-Reformation Church, because he was quite aware that if he really was right about St. Paul’s central message, then (virtually?) nobody before him had really understood what St. Paul was talking about.

It is a very saddening thing, I think, to read what Luther says about the Fathers. Here is Luther, a theological force of the first order, who has convinced himself that he has to stand “against the pope, against the world, and the devil,” and, indeed, against all of Christian history, if he is to be truly faithful to God. Can you imagine what that must feel like? And can you imagine what Luther might have produced had he engaged in a different, perhaps more humbly constructive way, with the Fathers and Doctors who came before him? It would have been even better than all of the very good things he did write, I can tell you that.

But listen to him:

Ever since I came to an understanding of Paul, I have not been able to think well of any doctor. They have become of little value to me. At first, I devoured, not merely read, Augustine. But when the door was opened for me in Paul, so that I understood what justification by faith is, it was all over with Augustine.³

Or again:

Behold what great darkness is in the books of the Fathers concerning faith; yet if the article of justification be darkened, it is impossible to smother the grossest errors of mankind. St Jerome, indeed, wrote upon Matthew, upon the Epistles to the Galatians and Titus; but, alas! very coldly. Ambrose wrote six books upon the first book of Moses, but they are very poor. Augustine wrote nothing to the purpose concerning faith … I can find no exposition upon the Epistles to the Romans and Galatians, wherein anything is taught pure and aright. O what a happy time have we now, in regard to the purity of doctrine …⁴

Or again:

The more I read the books of the Fathers, the more I find myself offended; for they were but men, and, to speak the truth, with all their repute and authority, undervalued the books and writings of the sacred apostles of Christ.⁵

Or again:

When God’s Word is by the Fathers expounded, construed, and glossed, then, in my judgment, it is even as when one strains milk through a coal-sack, which must needs spoil and make the milk black; God’s Word of itself is pure, clean, bright, and clear; but, through the doctrines, books, and writings of the Fathers, it is darkened, falsified, and spoiled.⁶

Doesn’t it make you a little sad? What might have been, right? Can you imagine combining Luther’s native intelligence and persuasive powers with a conviction that the Church Fathers were in fact among the “evangelists and pastors and teachers” whom God promised to raise up “for the equipping of the saints, until we all attain to the unity of the Faith,” and from whom he might be able to learn, instead of concluding that they were all “darkened” and hopelessly confused about the “main and plain” message of the Gospel?

But as to the question with which we began: how can Luther avoid saying that there was no such thing as a Christian Church during the time between, say, 50 years after Pentecost and the early 1500s?

One might wonder whether he couldn’t just bite the bullet here and say that there was no Church during that time. But Luther was rightly unwilling to say this. For one thing, he well knew that Christ had promised to remain with the Church until the end of the age and had guaranteed that the gates of hell wouldn’t ever overcome it, from which it seems to follow that the Church wouldn’t collapse into nothingness within a century of Christ’s saying this. For another, as I learned from Robert Koons,⁷ Luther’s defense of infant baptism in the Larger Catechism relies explicitly on the continuing persistence of the Church throughout the centuries. Relatedly, that their own baptisms were validly performed in the Church was not incidental to the defense of some Reformers’ claims to be lawfully ordained ministers working within the Church, rather than being “outsiders” who were trying to shake things up.⁸

And we can add to these reasons a fourth: it is just ridiculously implausible to think that the Church went away like that; and it is also ridiculously implausible to think that there were no true Christians for all that time.

So what are his options? Heckel discusses three different possible responses from Luther (and Calvin), all of which may with some plausibility be justly attributed to them, and he ends up concluding that these Reformers justified their belief that the Church existed before them in something like this way:

Some people, such as Augustine, were Christians before the Reformation, because even though they denied the Gospel in what they wrote, they did not really believe the things they wrote. Alternatively, they did experience justification personally, but when they wrote things about it they fell into inconsistencies between what they said about justification and what they experienced when they were justified.⁹

Alternatively, they really did believe the “substance” of the Lutheran theory, but they made intellectual mistakes which caused them to formulate their own theories of justification in ways that contradicted Luther’s. This might have happened with Augustine, for example, because Augustine believed that we were saved by grace alone; Augustine’s problem, then, was that he did not recognize that if we are saved by grace alone then we must be saved by faith alone, as Luther understood it, as well.

Alternatively, some of them really did believe the things they said and wrote; but then, toward the end of their lives they gave up these views and embraced the truth, although we have no record of this. (Calvin likened some of the Fathers to past kings of Israel, who fell into idolatry throughout their lives, but then returned to trust in the True God when they were getting ready to die.)

One of these things, or some combination of them, according to Heckel, is probably what allowed Luther to say that the pre-Reformation Church was a Christian Church.¹⁰

Heckel might be right in his interpretation of Luther/Calvin, but I wonder whether this is an adequate response to the question as it stands. One of the problems I don’t think Heckel really resolves adequately is this: if a Reformer (or Reformed person) wants to say that the present-day Catholic Church is not a true Church, but an apostate body of some kind, and they say this because the Catholic Church does not accept Luther’s (or some similar) doctrine of justification, then they will have to say this about the pre-Reformation Church as well, since, as the Reformers realized, the “papists” of their day understood the doctrine of justification in the way that Augustine and the other Fathers did.

Here are the things we need to be true together:

1. Unless it embraces and teaches the Lutheran doctrine of justification, the Church cannot exist.
2. Because the Roman Catholic Church does not embrace or teach Luther’s doctrine of justification, the Roman Catholic Church is not a Christian Church, but an apostate church. It “falls” on the article of justification.
3. Prior to Luther, Christians did not embrace or teach the Lutheran doctrine of justification.
4. Prior to Luther, and continuously throughout history, there has been a Christian Church.

These are the things I think it is difficult to make true, all at the same time. If denying or not believing the Lutheran doctrine of justification entails that the Catholic Church was apostate and did not exist as a Christian Church in the 16th century, then the same must be said mutatis mutandis for the pre-Reformation Church. (We cannot blithely assume that all of the “real Christian” Fathers would have agreed with Luther if only they had been exposed to his theology; they said things that flatly contradicted a Lutheran picture, and they did so intentionally and with their heads fully about them.)

If, however, some combination of the considerations above is sufficient to ensure that the pre-Reformation Church really was a Christian Church, or that the Church was able to exist in the absence of Luther’s doctrine, then the same thing should be said about the Catholic Church now: it is also a Christian Church, because it has people in it who really believe Luther’s doctrine but do not realize this about themselves, or because they will convert to it on their deathbeds, or what have you.

It seems to me there may be more options here that I’m not thinking of. (Above all, I think the discussion in Heckel invites opportunities for confusion by failing to systematically distinguish between (i) might there be true Christians in an apostate church? and (ii) what conditions must be met for the Church to remain in existence, as a Christian Church?)

Mind you, I’m not “arguing for” the “Catholic view” of justification, or arguing against Luther’s, or whatever. I’m just assuming it is true for the sake of argument, and trying to figure out how to say (a) the Catholic Church is an apostate church because it does not accept Luther’s doctrine, and (b) the pre-Reformation Church was not an apostate church, even though no one before Luther accepted Luther’s doctrine of justification. One might, of course, argue that the current Catholic Church is apostate for another reason, not on account of justification. But that’s changing the game. I want to know how to make (1) – (4) true.

Here are some possibilities, maybe.  Suppose, first, you were to just dig in your heals and argue like this:

“Look, we know that justification sola fide as understood by Luther is something you have to believe to be a Christian. And we know that if people do not believe and teach this anywhere, then there is no Christian Church.

However, we also know that the gates of hell won’t prevail against the Church and that it could not have gone out of existence, else Jesus would be a liar, which He isn’t.

Therefore: there have always been at least some people, before Luther, who believed in justification sola fide (as described by Luther). Perhaps none of these people wrote things indicating their stance on justification, or, if any of them did write anything, maybe it has been lost. But that doesn’t mean these people didn’t exist. In fact, they must have existed, because the Church must have existed, and the Church cannot exist unless there are people who believe in justification sola fide (a la Luther).

This kind of response has the following attraction: there’s a kind of cool bravado to it. Nothing pansy on display; just straight-up, “Yes, that’s right, so there must have been lots of proto-Protestants, so I’m going to believe that there were even though we have no evidence for this and even though every Christian theologian to speak out on the issue was completely wrong about justification.” Got to have guts for that sort of approach.

On the other hand, it seems too easy: it couldn’t possibly be falsified, for one thing. We’d just be insisting on the existence of something for which we have no evidence, and then saying “Well, you can’t prove me wrong either.” And, moreover, there are no independently good reasons to believe a far-flung theory like this anyway. The only possible reason anyone would accept it, I think, is if they were up against the wall, had nothing else to say, and knew it.

So here’s another possible approach I was thinking of. First, we can distinguish between (a) not believing X, and (b) rejecting (or denying) X. These are different. I might not believe that Obama will win the 2012 election, but that doesn’t mean I think he will lose. I might just be agnostic; I might not have firm beliefs either way.

So suppose you say this: the pre-Reformation Church did not believe in Luther’s sola fide, but that does not mean they rejected it. The contemporary Catholic Church however, at least since Trent, not only does not believe Luther’s sola fide, but also rejects/denies it.¹¹

And then you can say this: just not believing in sola fide is not enough to make you an apostate or a heretic, and it is not enough to destroy the Church. However, rejecting it or denying it – which is another, stronger way of “not believing it” – is strong enough to make you a heretic and to destroy the Church.

That is why the Catholic Church ceased to exist as a Christian Church in the 16th century, even though what it said about justification at Trent is no different than what Augustine et al. had been saying about justification for years.  Augustine and those guys get to be Christians and have a Church because they weren’t confronted with Luther’s specific formulation of sola fide, and so they couldn’t “reject” it; they could only “not believe” it. But Catholics can’t hide behind their ignorance now: they have finally been confronted with the truth of the Gospel – post tenebris, the lux has arrived – and if they don’t believe it still they are “rejecting” it and thereby apostatizing.

I’m not sure I can buy this line either. If you read, say, Augustine’s On Grace and Free Will or On the Spirit and the Letter, it is quite clear that he is combating a version of ‘sola fide.’ Naturally, he’s not explicitly “combating” the idea that the righteousness by which we’re justified is only ‘imputed’ and always ‘extra nos’ etc., because nobody’d ever said anything like that before. But he did go after a version of “faith alone” and explain why the faith that justifies is a transformative “faith working through love,” or “formed faith,” fides formata. And that is a specific denial of at least a couple major aspects of Luther’s formulation.

So, what I guess I’m urging is that the Fathers were clearly formulating their positions over and against distinctive features of Luther’s later formulation, and that is enough, by my lights, to conclude that they not only “did not believe” but they also “rejected” the novel aspects of Luther’s theory.

One more try. Imagine a wife who does not really love her husband but remains married to him. Maybe she thinks she loves him some days, maybe she knows well that she doesn’t love him. Then, one day, she finally declares, officially, “I do not really love you. I do not want to be your wife anymore.” Even if the husband knew all along that she did not really love him, he might forebear with her and remain truly married to her. But then, when she officially declares her lack of love, that might be the time for him to say: “Okay, it’s over for good now.”

Maybe something like this happened at the Council of Trent, on a Reformed view of things. All along, people believed a view of justification which was more or less reaffirmed at Trent (although specified with more precision, etc.). That’s like not really loving God but being married to him “for real.” Then, at Trent, that’s like when the woman got up and said “I officially do not love you.” The Church said: “I officially embrace this view of justification taught by the Fathers, etc.” And that was like filing for a divorce, perhaps. So on this picture, it’s not really believing or not believing that is the culprit, it’s officially declaring (in conciliar setting, or in some comparably somber way) your commitment to a heretical view of justification. That’s why you officially lose your Christian credentials (as an individual or as a Church) when you do that, and that’s what separates the pre-Ref Church from the post-Ref Catholic Church.

I’m not sure; this possibility seems to me to be over-institutionalized in an odd way. But perhaps this is a line worthy of further exploration.

In any event, I’m honestly not too sure what to say about this. So I’m floating the question. Any thoughts?

1. “Is R.C. Sproul Wrong About Martin Luther? An Analysis of R.C. Sproul’s Faith Alone: the Evangelical Doctrine of Justification with Respect to Augustine, Luther, Calvin, and Catholic Luther Scholarship,” Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society (March 2004).
2. Heckel, “Is R.C. Sproul Wrong,” pp. 2-3. I should note that my friend Andrew McCallum has objected to McGrath’s/Heckel’s historical assessment on the grounds that there was a plurality of imprecise formulations of justification prior to Luther, so that the claim that there were no forerunners to his doctrine is overdrawn. I happily admit the plurality of theoretical approaches, both pre- and post-Trent; but I do not see that the approaches on the offing espoused a Lutheran picture, and I think it’s hard to establish that the approaches in question, variegated though they were, were in some other way agreeably aligned with the unique doctrines Luther eventually produced.
3. I can no longer find the reference for this quotation. Secondary sources attribute it to both LW and to Tabletalk, but I’ve just spent a maddening hour trying to find it again in Tabletalk and I don’t own the volume of LW in which it shows up. Heckel has the quotation cited in fn. 59, a footnote, naturally, that we cannot view in the electronic format. Help?
4. Tabletalk 530.
5. Tabletalk 534.
6. Tabletalk 523.
7. See Rob’s “A Lutheran’s Case for Roman Catholicism,” whenever it gets back into cyberspace.
8. Another interesting question emerges here, if Taylor Marshall is right that Calvin rejected the validity of the Eucharistic celebration within the Mass. We may then wonder whether additional essential “marks” of the Church were for some very long time absent, even if some members within the Church held to the doctrine of justification sola fide.
9. Luther says things here and there which seem to imply he held a view like this. For example, he writes that “Jerome should not be numbered among the teachers of the Church, for he was a heretic; yet I believe that he is saved through faith in Christ. He speaks not of Christ, but merely carries his name in his mouth” (Tabletalk 539). This makes it pretty clear that you can be a heretic and also saved by faith in Christ, which is perhaps one way that the Church might have existed for all of those years through which it taught heresy concerning justification.
10. Thus Heckel, “Is R.C. Sproul Wrong?,” p. 13: “Luther discounted [the idea that the essence of the gospel was grace alone rather than faith alone/imputed righteousness], and both Reformers tended to vacillate between [the alternatives above] (Calvin even in the same sentence), as they struggled with the lack of historical precedent for their doctrine and their view of the pre-Reformation saints. Their solutions reflected both ideas of felicitous inconsistency in the Fathers and Medievals themselves, as well as interpretations of them that corresponded to the Reformers’ teaching. In either case the saints, unlike the papacy, retained Christ and were considered Christian teachers whose profession resulted in salvation.”
11. Or anyway certain aspects of it. It would be well for interested parties to read the Joint Declaration on Justification of 1999 here (yep, I am fully aware there’s a question about the magisterial status of the JDJ).

I heard about this problem years ago as a young Reformed Christian and it struck me as one of those “Can God make a stone so big He can’t lift it” quibbles: an annoying question to which somebody or other had the answer but which certainly wasn’t going to consume my time and energy. But after a while I didn’t think it was just a quibble and I wanted to hear what the answer was supposed to be.

As it turned out, there were really just three: (i) Calvin’s misleadingly characterized “Scripture is self-authenticating” response; (ii) the popularly advanced “Scripture is a fallible collection of infallible documents” response; (iii) the “Look, we just need to have faith in the Bible and not bother about this” response – a response which on its most plausible reading just meant we had to have faith in the Church. Here I want to focus primarily on (i), which expresses a response I memorized and subsequently advanced, but which, I think, doesn’t stand up to scrutiny.

Here is the locus classicus of the “Scripture-forms-itself-all-by-itself” position, as advanced in Calvin’s Institutes:

But a most pernicious error widely prevails that Scripture has only so much weight as is conceded to it by the consent of the church. As if the eternal and inviolable truth of God depended upon the decision of men! For they mock the Holy Spirit when they ask … Who can persuade us to receive one book in reverence but to exclude another, unless the church prescribe a sure rule for all these matters? What reverence is due Scripture and what books ought to be reckoned within its canon, they say, rests upon the determination of the church … Yet if this is so, what will happen to miserable consciences seeking firm assurance of eternal life if all promises of it consist in and depend solely upon the judgment of men?

It is utterly vain, then, to pretend that the power of judging Scripture so lies with the church and that its certainty depends upon churchly assent. Thus, while the church receives and gives its seal of approval to the Scriptures, it does not thereby render authentic what is otherwise doubtful or controversial … As to their question – How can we be assured that this has sprung from God unless we have recourse to the decree of the church? – it is as if someone asked: Whence will we learn to distinguish light from darkness, white from black, sweet from bitter? Indeed, Scripture exhibits fully as clear evidence of its own truth as white and black things do of their color, or sweet and bitter things do of their taste.

Let this point therefore stand: those whom the Holy Spirit has inwardly taught truly rest upon Scripture, and that Scripture indeed is self-authenticated; hence it is not right to subject it to proof and reasoning. And the certainty it deserves with us, it attains by the testimony of the Spirit. For even if it wins reverence for itself by its own majesty, it seriously affects us only when it is sealed upon our hearts through the Spirit. Therefore, illumined by his power, we believe neither by our own nor by anyone else’s judgment that Scripture is from God; but above human judgment we affirm with utter certainty (just as if we were gazing upon the majesty of God himself) that it has flowed to us from the very mouth of God by the ministry of men. We seek no proofs, no marks of genuineness upon which our judgment may lean; but we subject our judgment and wit to it as to a thing far beyond any guesswork!¹

Putting to one side his characteristically passionate rhetoric, Calvin’s response is inadequate.

First, he clearly conflates two claims which are crucial to distinguish at the outset by speaking as though an infallible, Spirit-guided recognition of which books were inspired and which were not is equivalent to the Church’s somehow making those books inspired or investing them with a divine authority they didn’t previously possess.  This is a confusion. Whether a book is inspired or not depends solely upon whether the Holy Spirit “moved” its human author to write it or not. If He did, the thing’s inspired and authoritative and it ought, in accordance with God’s good pleasure, to go in the canon. If not, it shouldn’t; case closed. It’s a different question entirely to ask by what means we can tell which of the books in question actually have this inspired status. And if the Catholic claims that the Holy Spirit infallibly led the Church to recognize the right books and thus make the right decision, it by no means follows that which books actually possess this status – which books objectively, apart from anyone’s decision, really do contain the “eternal” and “inviolable truth of God” – somehow depends upon “the decisions of men,” or that the “promises of God” “depend upon their judgment” and must be “rendered authentic” by them. So whatever’s he’s refuting here it’s not the Catholic position.

Second, his own theory simply comes down to the idea that each individual can replace the Church’s activity in this regard – that although it’s demeaning to Scripture and indeed sacrilegious to say that the Spirit can tell the Church in Council which books are inspired and which are not, it’s God-honoring and perfectly pious to say that He does this with each particular person, as a kind of little church standing alone, one by one.

Now Calvin, I honestly believe, didn’t see himself as doing this. But this was because he clouded the issue by assuming (as have many following him) that when something seems clear and evident to him it’s got to be because the Spirit is speaking directly to him, giving him the unvarnished news, as it were, whereas anyone who doesn’t see precisely the same thing must not enjoy that unmediated spiritual insight he has but is instead being blinded by some or other interpretive “filter.” The misled might feel just as inwardly certain about their own beliefs as he does, of course, but if so they’re just deluding themselves, mistaking their own unfounded psychological certainty for the testimony of God Himself.

This is a fairly typical Enlightenment notion to which both philosophers and theologians in that era tended to fall prey, and it is what explains his otherwise perplexing claim that he’s somehow able to set his “reasoning” and “judgment” aside, allowing the Spirit to tell him “inwardly” what’s what in a way that evidently involves no intellectual or cognitive activity of his own. In effect, the idea underlying his thought was that you could eliminate the “middle man” by insisting that you had direct and untarnished access to the truth, while the folks who disagreed with you didn’t see that same truth either because they were not “inwardly taught” by the Spirit, or because they were looking at it indirectly, through an interpretive or traditional grid which blinded and led them astray – a condition from which you yourself couldn’t possibly suffer.

And this, in turn, is what explains how he can say that the Scriptures are “self-authenticating” when the only thing that can mean in this context is “infallibly recognized as authentic by me.” This is of course not to say Calvin consciously believed himself to be infallible, but rather that he believed the Spirit to be infallible, and believed that the Spirit infallibly testified to him personally about the canon, while ensuring that he would infallibly receive the testimony given. (In other words he was a kind of one-man magisterium, sans the obligation to uphold Tradition.)

Once this maneuver is seen for what it is the parallel between the Catholic and the Calvinist position should become obvious. This parallel is obscured by the confusion we noted above, which leads Calvin to lay out the false dichotomy upon which his argument relies: if one says that the Holy Spirit guided the Church by enabling her to infallibly recognize inspired texts for what they are, that is supposed to be equivalent to saying that these texts are “rendered” inspired by the Church and given an authenticity they do not intrinsically have. On the other hand, if one says that the Holy Spirit guides individual Christians by enabling them to infallibly recognize inspired texts for what they are, that’s only to say that the texts are “self-authenticating.”

But there is no principled reason for making this distinction. If Scripture is “self-authenticating” in the latter case it is equally “self-authenticating” in the former, but if it isn’t in the former it cannot be in the latter either. So either (a) in both cases Scripture possesses the marks of divine authorship in itself and the Spirit brings this fact to human attention, thereby testifying to Scripture’s divine source, or (b) in both cases we “vainly pretend that the power of judging Scripture” lies in humans, so that “its certainty depends” ultimately upon human assent. There is absolutely zero reason to think that substituting the individual for the Church could make any difference to this, and it is disingenuous in the extreme to suggest that Catholics, as opposed to Calvinists, just sort of leave the Holy Spirit out of the equation, or that “miserable consciences seeking firm assurance of eternal life” are any better off when they rely on their own “determination” of the canon as opposed to the “determination” of the Universal Church.

Which brings me to my final point. What makes Calvin’s proposal attractive is his rightful insistence that the Holy Spirit provides us with testimony and assurance as to the truth of the Word and its applicability to us, and that this truth “seriously affects us only when it is sealed upon our hearts by the Holy Spirit.” Yet it is a further step to say that any true Christian will therefore be able infallibly to determine what is inspired and what is not quite as easily as they perceive the difference “between white and black.” I don’t think I’m betraying my lack of communion with the Spirit one bit when I admit that my bosom burns just as brightly upon reading Wisdom as it does upon reading Proverbs, and that I frankly get a good deal fewer warm fuzzies from Ecclesiastes than I get from Ecclesiasticus. And I am certain I’m not deficient in this respect. For can anyone truly put their hand over their heart and pretend they see exactly why Esther should be in the canon, whereas Judith obviously shouldn’t? Or why St. Jude’s epistle made it in while St. Clement’s epistle, for instance, had to be left out? And does anyone really want to say that their own personal insight and receptiveness to the Spirit are so much superior to, say, those of St. Augustine, who insisted upon the inclusion of all those deuterocanonical books Protestants like Calvin reject? I, for one, simply cannot bring myself to adopt Calvin’s hypothesis if it means accepting the patently ridiculous inference that men like St. Augustine either are not real Christians or are just too blind to see black and white.

Suppose then we reject the idea that each individual Christian infallibly knows what counts as Scripture and what doesn’t, and suppose we likewise reject the Catholic proposal. This leaves us with the alternative that the decisions reached at Hippo and Carthage (e.g) were possibly, maybe even probably, correct – at least as far as the New Testament goes – but that these decisions weren’t infallibly made, so that neither we nor they can have strict certainty that the decisions reached there were right. This is more or less the solution of R.C. Sproul and others, which they express in the slogan that the Bible is “a fallible collection of infallible books.”² It is a deeply unsatisfactory solution. One cannot claim that Christians may have complete certainty regarding the words and promises of Scripture while simultaneously denying them certainty about which of the words and promises are Scriptural. Nor can one suggest that the Protestant tradition’s view of the Bible is superior to the Catholic’s, if the Catholic can know with certainty what belongs to Scripture and the Protestant cannot. That’s all I guess I have to say about this.

The final solution is similar in some ways to Calvin’s in that it does not seek to determine the canon by “reasoning” or principled “marks” of genuineness, but it differs in a crucial way. It is represented by Robert Reymond just below:

To such questions [about the canon] no answers can be given that will fully satisfy the mind that desires to think autonomously, that is, independently from Scripture. For regardless of whether or not the Christian scholar thinks he possesses the one right criterion or the one right list of criteria for a given book’s canonicity, at some point – and if at no other point, at least, at the point of the established number, namely, twenty-seven New Testament books, not twenty-six or twenty-eight – the Christian must accept by faith that the church, under the providential guidance of God’s Spirit, got the number and the “list” right since God did not provide the church with a specific list of New Testament books. All that we know for certain about the history of the first four centuries of the church would suggest that God’s Spirit providentially led His church – imperceptively [sic] yet inexorably – when it asked its questions, whatever they were, to adopt the twenty-seven documents that the Godhead had determined would serve as the foundation of the church’s doctrinal teaching and thus bear infallible witness throughout the Christian era to the great objective central events of redemptive history, and that this “apostolic tradition” authenticated and established itself over time in the mind of the church as just this infallible foundation and witness.³

Now on one reading this statement contains a Protestant solution which provides false comfort, and on another reading it contains a comforting response which Protestants cannot comfortably adopt. On the first reading we’re told we should forget about the question and stop trying to think “autonomously,” that we should instead just think according to those books of the Bible whose list and number were decided upon by somebody else. This just pushes the question back a step. The Christians involved in those Councils certainly couldn’t ignore questions about “criteria” and simply “think according to” a list and specific number of documents when that list and number were the very things about which it was their job to decide. On the other hand, he clearly states that the decision they made was providentially and infallibly guided by the Spirit, which is definitely a solution into which I can sink my teeth. The only drawback of course is that it’s the Catholic’s solution. And the only problem with a Protestant proposing it is that Protestantism specifically repudiates the theological underpinning which gives us any reason to think it true. For how can we consistently “accept by faith” that God infallibly guided a Church Council just long enough to get our canon established, only to turn around and try to argue from the canon we’ve just been handed that God doesn’t do that sort of thing, since the canon itself is the only infallible authority we’ve got? And how could our belief in the exclusive infallible authority of the Bible be consistent, if our certainty about what makes up the Bible in the first place inevitably borrows from a piece of Catholic doctrine – even if only temporarily – which is flatly incompatible with that belief?

Does any of this amount to a knockdown argument? I’m not sure. In both theology and in philosophy, the sort of ‘knockdown’ arguments which wrestle you to the mat and compel you to accept some or other conclusion are extremely hard to come by – especially when they are evaluated in isolation from surrounding, salient facts. Still, this at least seems to me to be true. If we are to take a ‘presuppositional-style’ approach, an approach with which many Reformed folks are sympathetic, and ask which overall view (the Protestant or the Catholic) is, for example, most internally consistent and coherent, and which of the views seems to collapse under its own weight, then there is nothing problematic about the Catholic stance vis-à-vis Scripture and Tradition, whereas the Protestant approach appears to be beset with irremediable internal conflicts. On the one hand, we are told that since Scripture’s the only authority we cannot legitimately “go beyond” what it says; yet we have to “go beyond” what it says just to specify which texts are the Scriptures that we are not supposed to go beyond. And once we arrive at these Scriptures, however we ultimately do, we are supposed to hold fast to the thesis that nothing is to be accepted unless it’s Scripturally demonstrable, a thesis which cannot itself be Scripturally demonstrated. So, we again have to go beyond Scripture just to specify that we are not allowed to do that.

To be sure, these theses are indeed integral parts of a theological tradition with respect to which any Christian can justifiably be proud. But pride in the tradition is one thing, and Biblical support for (distinctive aspects of) that tradition is another. And that is precisely what, in the final analysis, the tradition in question most centrally needs. But whereas this tradition is quite right to insist that the Bible gives us the Truth, the whole Truth, and nothing but the Truth – still, it has to make room for the significant fact that Scripture itself must have something relevant in view when it identifies the Church as that Truth’s “Pillar and Support” (1 Tim 3:15).

1. John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, I.vii.1, 2, 5, John T. McNeill, ed., trans. Ford Lewis Battles, Philadelphia: Westminster Press, pp. 75-76, 80.
2. R.C. Sproul, Essential Truths of the Christian Faith, Wheaton, IL: Tyndale House (1992), p. 22.
3. Robert Reymond, A New Systematic Theology of the Christian Faith, Thomas Nelson (1998), p. 67.

The question of assurance should of course be distinguished from such things as (c) the doctrine of the Perseverance of the Saints and (d) the possibility of being justified at one time and failing to be justified at a subsequent time. These are straight-up theological issues, about which people disagree. So for example, Luther would deny the Perseverance of the Saints if understood in such a way as to entail the impossibility of being justified at a time and then failing to be justified at a subsequent time. So would Augustine and Aquinas. Calvin, on the other hand, I take it, would see the class of elect persons as coextensive with the class of persons who have at any time been justified, from which the Reformed doctrines of the Perseverance of the Saints and the impossibility of becoming unjustified subsequent to having been at any time justified follow.

To lay it out a little more explicitly, the topic of ‘perseverance’ is metaphysical or (broadly) theological, and the topic of ‘assurance’ is epistemological or psychological. Discussion of the former requires a distinction between the following theses:

Metaphysical/Theological:

1. Perseverance of the Elect: All of the elect of God (those who’ve been predestined by God for salvation) are recipients of the grace of final perseverance – all will be justified, grow in sanctification, persevere to the end and be saved.

2. Perseverance of the Saints: Any person who has at any time been justified will ever remain justified, will grow in sanctification, and will persevere to the end and be saved.

Perseverance of the Elect does not imply Perseverance of the Saints, or “once saved always saved.” For it can be true that all of the elect will be justified and persevere to the end (and thus finally be saved) even if it is also true that some persons will experience the grace of justification (“be saved”) but will not persevere to the end and thus will not finally be saved. People in this latter class are not among the elect. (They may be among the ‘elect’ in the sense of having been baptized into the Body of Christ; they are not among the ‘elect’ in the sense of having been predestined to final salvation. These are two different ways of being ‘elect’, as Calvin pointed out: those who’ve been elected to final salvation are a proper subset of those who’ve been elected in any sense.)

Since ‘elect’ in the salvific sense simply means “those folks God has predestined for final salvation,” the Perseverance of the Elect is definitionally true and consequently nobody denies it. Perseverance of the Saints, on the other hand, appears to have been first formulated by John Calvin, and people disagree about it.

Another thing: Perseverance of the Saints is sometimes wrongly correlated with a particular view of Divine sovereignty, or a particular view of predestination. Some people speak as though any strong view of Divine sovereignty or predestination – such as those we discover in Augustine, Aquinas, Luther and Calvin – automatically implies the Perseverance of the Saints. But it doesn’t. God can sovereignly justify a person and then (sovereignly) allow that person to be choked by the worries of the world and fall away. This can happen without mitigating in the least Divine sovereignty or the supposition that all and only those predestined to final salvation will ultimately be saved.

And then there’s the issue of “assurance,” which requires a corresponding distinction:

Epistemological/Psychological:

3. A person who is justified at a particular time may have strict certainty that he is justified at that time.

4. A person who is justified at a particular time may have strict certainty that he is a recipient of the grace of final perseverance (that he is among the elect).

These are distinct too. It’s possible that a person who is justified at a time is able to have strict certainty that he is justified at that time, without its being the case that he can have strict certainty that he is among the elect. If, however, a person endorses the Perseverance of the Saints (let’s say, if they are strictly certain that the Perseverance of the Saints is true), and if they also possess strict certainty that they are justified at a particular time, then it is plausible to think that they could have strict certainty that they’re a recipient of the grace of final perseverance as well: they could, in other words, infer from their present justified condition (concerning which they have certainty) that they are among the elect, because they’re certain about “once saved always saved.”

The crux of the theological dispute thus concerns the question whether justification can be lost, or, if you like, whether the class of elect persons is coextensive with the class of persons who have at any time experienced the grace of justification. However, even after answering that question we wouldn’t yet have answered the epistemological-cum-psychological questions about “assurance.” For it could be that the Perseverance of the Saints is true, but nobody can have certainty as to whether they are in fact justified (or, alternatively, the degree of certainty they have concerning their present condition is insufficient to underwrite the inference that they will never fall away). It could also be the case that the Perseverance of the Saints is false – that one can be justified at one time and then fail subsequently to be “saved” – but that, even so, we can have certainty that we’re justified when we are justified, despite the fact that we cannot have certainty concerning whether we are among the elect. ¹

I used to think that Calvin provided the strongest combination all the way around – strongest in the sense of giving us the strongest combination of possibilities – because he endorsed the Perseverance of the Saints, which Luther and the others didn’t, and also because he endorsed the possibility of certainty concerning (i) our present justified status and (ii) our membership among the elect. I came to think, through time, that Calvin didn’t really have the resources to explain how we get the kind of assurance I thought he ascribed to Christians, and, indeed, I chalked this failure up to a faulty epistemological orientation in Calvin which can be found in a number of his philosophical and theological contemporaries as well. ²

But I’ve since come to see that Calvin’s position is perhaps more nuanced, and that he might not really have attempted to provide (or insist upon) more assurance than anyone else did. (More below.) However all that may be, I’ve come to believe that Luther and Calvin are sort of inverse images of one another with respect to perseverance and assurance: Luther doesn’t give us “once saved always saved,” but he gives us greater assurance of our salvation than Calvin; Calvin gives us “once saved always saved,” but he gives us lesser assurance of our salvation than Luther.

On this point I’m afraid I must demur from the ordinarily trenchant analysis of Louis Bouyer, who writes the following concerning Luther in the critical section of The Spirit and Forms of Protestantism:

…in spite of the conservatism Luther and Lutheranism have always shown in the matter of the liturgy and the sacraments, it is beyond doubt that Luther closely linked the subjective side of justification by faith … with a denial of the objective value of the sacraments and of all the other means of grace. Once faith is present, there is salvation; but there is nothing in the sphere of salvation existing apart from faith itself, and faith in its turn has no transcendental object, no content outside itself. All this can be supported by the most categorical passages from Luther; it was to be systematized little by little down to its ultimate consequences by Protestant writers, although the early scholastics of Lutheranism saw the dangers of this position and eluded its logic. This view, in fact, reduces the sacraments, the Church, and defined dogma to the status of mere signs, easily dispensable, lacking even any content of their own. They are made into mere psychological stimulants or supports of a wavering faith, which a clear and firm faith can do without. ³

I simply don’t recognize this orientation as characteristic of Luther. In fairness, it could be that Bouyer’s really aiming to trace out the eventual results of a germ which is found incipiently within Luther; and I do think his description gives an accurate portrait of some strains of Protestantism. Luther, though? Not so much.

In part I deny this picture of Luther because it doesn’t sufficiently incorporate Luther’s very interesting remarks about “alien faith” and the “alien Word.” ⁴  But I’m also indebted to the interesting discussion in Philip Cary’s “Sola Fide: Luther and Calvin.”  There Cary forcefully argues that the foundation of assurance for Luther was entirely distinct from what he calls “reflective faith,” which requires us to believe that we have sufficient faith in the Gospel to be saved, and which he assigns to Calvin and the later Evangelicals following him. For Luther, in other words, our assurance isn’t grounded in the quality of our religious interiority, or our psychological confidence in the strength of our personal faith, or whatever: it is grounded in the objective trustworthiness of God, who specifically promises to each one of us individually that we will be saved in our baptisms, through the voice of the Church. Thus Luther’s argument for assurance wouldn’t be “Whoever believes will be saved; I believe; therefore, I am saved,” but rather: “Christ told me, ‘I baptize you in the Name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit’; Christ never lies but only tells the truth; I am baptized (i.e., I have new life in Christ).” Here is Cary:

Notice how very different the baptismal formula is from the major premise of the standard Protestant syllogism. Logically, it’s not a conditional statement. It lays down no conditions about what I must do or decide or even believe in order to make sure the promise applies to me. The promise applies to me because it says so: Christ says “you” and he means me. So the promise of the Gospel, on Luther’s reckoning, is inherently, unconditionally, for me. Faith does not make it so but merely recognizes that it is so, a recognition that happens because we dare not call Christ a liar when he tells us, on that one momentous occasion, “I baptize you…” That is why the minor premise is not about my faith but about the truth of Christ. This is absolutely essential, and Luther makes a very big deal about it …

Now to say that God speaks the truth is, of course, to make a kind of profession of faith – but not in the Calvinist mode, because it is not reflective. We’re not required to talk about our faith, to know we have faith … We are required, of course, to believe … But that, of course, is what faith essentially does: it believes in the truth of the Word of Christ. The problem with reflective faith is that it must do more: if reflective faith is required, then believing in God’s Word is not quite enough, because we must also believe that we believe …

What faith says, fundamentally, is “God speaks the truth.” Only secondarily, and not fundamentally, faith may also say, “I believe.” But faith may also say, “My faith is weak” or “Lord, I believe, help my unbelief” or “I have sinned in my unbelief and denied my Lord, like Peter the apostle.” Faith may confess its own unbelief. What it cannot do, if it is to remain faith at all, is stop clinging to the truth of God’s Word.  For faith does not rely on faith, but on the Word of God. ⁵

He continues:

The logical distinction we must observe, then – and it is a crucial distinction – is between having faith and relying on faith. “There is quite a difference between having faith, on the one hand, and depending on one’s faith, on the other,” says Luther. “Whoever allows himself to be baptized on the strength of his faith is not only uncertain [because he doesn't know for certain whether he believes] but also an idolater who denies Christ. For he trusts in and builds on something of his own …”

Don’t you agree? Isn’t it much easier to confess, “Christ is no liar” than to profess, “I believe” – especially if what you’re supposed to mean is: “I have true faith in my heart, I truly, really trust in God,” etc. For this reflective faith, faith relying on itself, is how faith becomes a work, something we must do and accomplish in order to be saved. And then it has exactly the same problems as justification by works. You can always wonder if your works are good enough, and if you’re honest, the answer will be: No, they’re not good enough. In exactly the same way, you can always ask: Do I trust God enough? Have I really, unreservedly, surrendered by whole heart in faith to Christ? Is my faith strong, sincere, unhypocritical, un-self-serving? And the proper answer to all these questions is: No. My faith is never good enough, and thank God, I am not justified by such works of faith but by the truth of the word I believe in. My faith is not good enough, but the one I have faith in is. ⁶

None of this implies that Luther held out the possibility of strict certainty concerning our salvation or our membership among the elect. Luther’s advice – and a pastorally adept bit of advice it is – was to say, “What do I care if I’ve been predestined? I’ve been baptized, and He who baptized me does not lie.” It isn’t that your baptism entails that you’re among the elect; that’s something you just can’t know. But the external Word coming to you from Christ is true, and Christ applies it to you. That’s the thing to cling to when you’re looking for assurance.

Now if this is representative of Luther’s orientation I fail to perceive any substantive differences between what Luther says and what Augustine or Aquinas or the Catholic Church generally says. The whole idea is that a person shouldn’t presume to have certainty that they will be saved or that they are among the elect on the basis of things about them – the quality of their works or the genuineness of their faith or whatever. That would just be spiritual presumption. Rather, the point is to look in a different direction altogether: not inwardly, toward me and my faith and my works, but outwardly, toward Christ and His Sacraments and His Word. Fundamentally, it is the Lord who is your Assurance, even as it’s the Lord who is your Righteousness. So you can and should place your confidence – your assurance of salvation – in the One who saves; but you can’t and you shouldn’t place your assurance of salvation in some quality of yourself.

Seen from this perspective, Luther’s celebrated concern to provide assurance for the troubled conscience terminates in a solution which is, happily, entirely consistent with Catholic teaching, despite the fact that “the Protestant/Luther’s position” on assurance is often set up in opposition to “the Catholic/Trent’s position.” I note with some pleasure that Alister McGrath has arrived at the same conclusion:

Trent’s point seems to be that the reformers seemed to be making human confidence or boldness the grounds for justification, so that justification rested upon a fallible human conviction, rather than on the grace of God. The reformers, however, saw themselves as stressing that justification rested upon the promises of God; a failure to believe boldly in such promises was tantamount to calling the reliability of God into question. ⁷

But of course the whole point of the Catholic position is that God’s reliability cannot be doubted, whereas whether you yourself have a sufficiently “bold” faith or sufficiently “good works” can be doubted. Thus your assurance of salvation ought to be grounded in the former, not the latter. And that’s what Luther says.

What of Calvin, and the other branches of the Reformation which failed to retain a Lutheran or Catholic sacramentology? Here the case is different. To be sure, you can be told to look outward to Christ. But what matters is not grace objectively, tangibly, sacramentally conferred, but rather whether you are a member of the elect. For recall: (a) no non-elect persons are ever at any time justified, (b) baptism does not effect justification (or membership among the elect), and (c) you can appear – to other people and to yourself – to have saving faith, even though you are not among the elect and therefore are not really justified.

As I mentioned, I used to think that Calvin held out the possibility of strict certainty concerning one’s status as ‘elect’ (and, indeed, Cary portrays him this way as well). ⁸ On the other hand, we may also see him as distinguishing between theological certainty and psychological certainty: the first has to do with divinely revealed truths which cannot be doubted, and the second has to do with items we believe to be true – such as, “I am saved” – but which aren’t divinely revealed dogmas. (Homework for the reader: To what degree does this approximate the Catholic distinction between certainty of faith and certainty of hope?) McGrath again:

Faith is not the same as certainty; although the theological foundation of Christian faith may be secure, the human perception of and commitment to this foundation may waver.

This point is brought out clearly by Calvin, often thought to be the most confident of all the reformers in relation to matters of faith. His definition of faith certainty seems to point in this direction:

“Now we shall have a right definition of faith if we say that it is a steady and certain knowledge of the divine benevolence toward us, which is founded upon the truth of the gracious promise of God in Christ, and is both revealed to our minds and sealed in our hearts by the Holy Spirit.”

Yet the theological certainty of this statement does not, according to Calvin, necessarily lead to psychological security. It is perfectly consistent with a sustained wrestling with doubt and anxiety on the part of the believer.⁹

This makes Calvin’s considered view more readily defensible than I thought it was at one point. And it makes sense of the post-Calvin preoccupation with the question: “How can I be sure I’m among God’s predestined? How can I truly know I am saved?” You will notice, in precise accordance with Cary’s analysis of “the standard Protestant” answer (as opposed to Luther’s answer), that the Calvinists who grappled with this question rotated through a series of answers – each of which were centered inwardly, on the self. First, it was: “Well, Do I have true faith? If so I must be among the elect.” Then it was: “Well, maybe I’m fooling myself about my faith; so, Do I have good works? Am I growing in sanctification? If I am, I must be among the elect.” And then it was: “Well, isn’t it true that lots of people begin to bear fruit and fall away? And isn’t it possible that my works aren’t quite as good as I think they are? So, Do I have a regenerate heart, accompanied by certain specific religious affections or feelings? If I do, I must be among the elect.” And then it was: “Well, wait, look at all these ‘revivalist’ types who keep whipping people up into a frenzy of religious enthusiasm. What if my religious affections aren’t really inspired by a regenerate heart, either? The feelings aren’t enough. I must have true faith.” So, once more: “Do I have true faith? If so, I must be really among the elect;” and so on it goes.

Recall Cary’s “Standard Protestant Syllogism” aimed at delivering assurance to Christians: “All who believe will be saved; I believe; therefore, I am saved.” This is an instance of reasoning which is motivated by the conviction that assurance requires “reflective faith,” and we’ve already seen that the results of this approach can be pretty disastrous to the aim of providing assurance. But notice how the same syllogism continues to pop up in the following passages, the first from McGrath’s Iustitia Dei (volume 2), and the second one from A Life of John Calvin:

A second aspect of [Puritan federal] theology which claims our attention is the concept of ‘temporary faith’, intimately linked with the Puritan quest for assurance of election. Perkins’ discussion of the question: how may I know that I am among the elect? exemplifies both the Puritan preoccupation with, and response to, this issue. The earlier Reformed appeal to the present existence of faith as the basis of assurance was negated by the rise of the Bezan doctrine of limited atonement. The reprobate may seem to have a faith at every point identical with the elect, but it is merely a ‘temporarie faith’, which fails to apply the promises of God to the believer. The individual believer is therefore prevented from knowing whether his is a true or a temporary faith, and thus from knowing whether he is among the elect or the reprobate. Perkins produces the following syllogism for troubled consciences:

Everyone that beleeves is the childe of God
But I doe beleeve
Therefore I am the childe of God.

Unfortunately, as Perkins himself appears to have appreciated (in that he died in the conflict of a troubled conscience, uncertain as to whether he was among the elect), the similarity between the faith of the elect and reprobate excluded such an appeal as the basis of assurance. ¹⁰

So, if you’re not supposed to look to your own faith, but you still are supposed to examine something about yourself to ground your assurance, you look to your behavior: “It is precisely this difficulty which led to the later shift in emphasis away from faith to personal sanctification as the basis of assurance.” ¹¹ And it appears that this strategy is perhaps truer to Calvin’s own thought as well:

Grace … is only given to the elect. This being the case, an obvious question arises. How can anyone know whether he or she is among the elect? Given that grace is invisible and beyond human detection, may its presence be discerned by its effects?

Although Weber argued that Calvin did not regard such questions as problematical, the evidence suggests quite the reverse. A struggle with unbelief, Calvin suggested, was a permanent feature of the Christian life … Although he indicated certain theological or spiritual means by which such doubts may be countered – for example, by looking to the promises of God as they are revealed in Christ – he also appealed to more practical considerations: good works. Although Calvin stressed that works are not the grounds of salvation, he nevertheless allowed it to be understood that they are the grounds of assurance …

Anxiety over this question of election is subsequently a pervasive feature of Calvinist spirituality, and is generally treated at some length by Calvinist preachers and spiritual writers. The basic answer given, however, remains substantially the same: the believer who performs good works has indeed been chosen …

This idea was often stated in terms of the ‘practical’ syllogism, which rested upon an argument constructed along the following lines:

All who are elected exhibit certain signs as a consequence of that election.
But I exhibit those signs.
Therefore I am among the elect.

The syllogismus practicus thus locates the grounds of certainty of election in the presence of certain signs (signa posteriora) in the life of the believer. ¹²

But then, when it occurs to you that non-elect people can do pretty good works too, and that your own works might not be all that spectacular after all, you attempt to discern an internal quality bound up in some way with regeneration – feelings of love, and the like. ¹³ And then the cycle starts again, always spinning around the center.

But notice this interesting upshot: if I can’t have grounds for assurance that I’m among the elect, and if my baptism neither entails that I am elect nor that I have been justified, then, since a person can be justified at any time only if he is elect, I cannot even have assurance that I am, right now, in a state of grace, or a justified position, before God. It follows that Calvin doesn’t only fail to give us more assurance than Luther (regarding whether we’re elect), but that he fails to give us even as much assurance as Luther does (with respect to the question whether we are currently in a right relationship with God). In this regard, too, I think Catholic theology is likewise in a position to provide more assurance to believers than Calvinism.

But aside from these implications, I think there is something just intrinsically peculiar about the whole orientation on display here. What could be less justification-by-faith-ish than saying, “Well, my works are pretty good and my faith is pretty strong, so I am justified.” And what could be more justification-by-faith-ish than saying: “Neither my works nor my faith nor my religious feelings amount to a hill of beans, truth be known; but Jesus amounts to a whole mountain of beans, and I know right where to find Him.” Thus Cary:

The best answer to [the worry about assurance], I’d suggest, is not to go Calvin’s route but to stick with the sacraments and say “What do I care if I’ve been predestined or not?” Today’s sacramental faith is sufficient for the day. Today you can believe that God is not lying to you. Tomorrow’s faith will have to wait for tomorrow. The sacramental promise of your baptism will still be there, and the struggle to believe it (against worries about predestination, the weakness of your own faith, and so on) will still be there to be fought. That’s just how Christian faith goes, a continual struggle against unbelief in which … unbelief is in fact stronger than the faith of our own hearts, and we have no hope at all except the truth of God’s promise in Jesus Christ. But that’s enough. For precisely the experience of the inadequacy of my efforts to believe is what convinces me that I must put my trust in Christ’s word alone, not in my ability to believe it – and precisely this strengthens true faith. So Anfechtung is the right agony of conscience to have, rather than the distinctively Protestant struggle to come to the belief that I truly believe, and to experience my own inward sanctification and righteousness because of the work of the Spirit in me, and so on. Save me from such inwardness, I say. Give me Word and Sacrament instead. ¹⁴

Amen to that.

1. A helpful resource for study is John Davis’ “The Perseverance of the Saints: A History of the Doctrine,” in Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society 34 (1991): 213-228, though I think that Davis, too, at times, fails to distinguish between perseverance and assurance as clearly as he could, and I think his brief discussion of Trent should be supplemented.
2. I shall have more to say about Calvin’s epistemological orientation in the near future.  For the present, I simply note that when he needs to, Calvin speaks as though he has direct access to the Truth, in such a way that any possible questioning of his interpretations or critiquing of his inferences are made to sound as though the critic is questioning, not the views of Calvin, but the very Truth of God.  Something similar is at play here: there is a tendency among some Calvinists to speak as though questioning the degree of certainty (concerning election or salvation) a person may be said to possess is tantamount to questioning whether God is really sovereign or reliable.  This is to confuse the metaphysics with the epistemology.
3. Louis Bouyer, The Spirit and Forms of Protestantism, Scepter (1956), p. 170
4. Luther’s “alien faith” can best be approached through the sacrament of baptism: the infant is justified by faith in baptism, but she isn’t experiencing particular emotions or thinking articulate thoughts whose content involves religious, dogmatic propositions. We can say that the infant is in fact given “the Faith” when the Holy Spirit acts upon her through baptism; but it is the child’s parents and the Church at large who believe (who believe that Faith) for the child vicariously. Thus she is “saved” in that instance by an “alien” faith, which (so to speak) channels to her the “alien righteousness” of Christ in baptism.  For more on the “alien faith” and “alien word” in Luther, see Heiko Oberman’s Luther: Man Between God and the Devil, Yale University Press (1989), especially pp. 232-244, and see also my “The (Marburg) Eucharistic Controversy and Luther’s ‘Alien Faith’.”
5. Sola Fide: Luther and Calvin, pp. 3-4.
6. ibid., p. 5.
7. Reformation Thought (2^nd ed.), Oxford Blackwell (1993), p. 118.
8. See here “Sola Fide: Luther and Calvin,” pp. 6-9.
9. Reformation Thought, 117
10. Iustitia Dei vol. 2, Cambridge University Press (1986), p. 114.
11. ibid., p. 115.
12. A Life of John Calvin, Oxford Blackwell (1990), pp. 240-241; cf. 242.
13. cf. Iustitia Dei, pp. 115-121
14. “Sola Fide: Luther and Calvin,” p. 9.

Tim Troutman’s paper and Jonathan Deane’s recent post have inspired me to say something about one of my own “salient moments” on the road from Geneva to Rome.  So, if you’ll indulge me a little (indubitably utterly fascinating) autobiography, here goes.

From Antho- to Theocentrism

Not so long ago, I believed that Calvinism was equivalent to Protestant Orthodoxy (which was to say, equivalent to the Biblical faith).  It was exquisitely systematic and it had an answer for everything.  But the context in which I began to grow in this faith was very individualistic and human-centered, and the influence of this context on my thinking caused me to overlook some of the most beautiful and deeply Christian aspects of classical Calvinism.

I was thinking of Calvinism as a system explaining, in rigorous detail, how it was that individual folks came to be saved from their sins so that they could go to heaven when they died.  I thought that this was pretty much all there was to the Gospel – not that I didn’t think it was glorious – and I thought that it happened in precisely the way Calvin said it did, so far as I understood him.

Further reflection suggested that I was missing something about the faith.  For one thing, the whole point of creation couldn’t simply consist in the salvation of us sinners.  It wasn’t that I thought our salvation should just be ignored; I didn’t and don’t think that.  But if there was some overarching point or purpose to it all, in some sense it had to be fundamentally about God, the author of it all.¹ This is of course the conclusion towards which Calvinism tends, and I was delighted to discover this robustly theocentric theme expounded powerfully in the works of Jonathan Edwards and (following him) John Piper.²

Edwards on Glory and Felicity as the Ends of Creation

The genius of the thing was that Edwards had a way of explaining how the glory of God – which had to be the ultimate purpose of creation – was intertwined or “tied up” with His redemptive activity, because God’s glory on the one hand, and our salvation and happiness on the other, were really just two sides of the same coin.

This idea that God’s glory and our happiness fit together hand-in-glove was particularly eye-opening to me.  For before discovering this way of looking at things, I had been a little worried that if God was really only concerned about glorifying Himself – if He was just “looking out for number one,” so to speak – then it seemed as though He couldn’t be much concerned about us mere humans at all.  To be sure, maybe He cared about us in a certain sense, since He might want to use us as tools or instruments in His Big Self-Glorification Project.  But this was a little dissatisfying.  After all, if we were simply getting used like tools or mere “means to God’s ends” it wasn’t easy to see how God could love us as individual persons, as “ends in ourselves,” who genuinely mattered to Him as well.  But God is love.  So how could that be?

Yet Edwards had the right sort of answer to this apparent dilemma.  God’s pursuit of His own glory did not conflict with His fatherly concern for human creatures, after all.  It wasn’t something that had to be superadded to or somehow reconciled with His unselfish love, expressed in His yearning desire to rescue and make us forever blessed.  For, as John Piper cleverly formulated it, “God is most glorified in us when we are most satisfied in Him.”³

According to Edwards (and Piper) it was precisely in our recognizing and celebrating God’s supreme worth, in adoring and enjoying Him, in responding to His grace in love and trust, that God was genuinely glorified in us.  That was how He sought His own glory in and through us: by sharing His life and goodness with us, and thereby making us happy in Him.  And since that is the highest happiness any human creature could possibly attain, God’s unwavering pursuit of His own glory just was His unfailing pursuit of our happiness.  Thus Edwards:

And with respect to God’s being glorified in those perfections wherein his glory consists, expressed in their corresponding effects,-as his wisdom, in wise designs and well-contrived works, his power, in great effects, his justice, in acts of righteousness, his goodness, in communicating happiness,-this does not argue that his pleasure is not in himself, and his own glory; but the contrary. It is the necessary consequence of his delighting in the glory of his nature, that he delights in the emanation and effulgence of it…

From what has been said, it appears, that the pleasure God hath in those things which have been mentioned, is rather a pleasure in diffusing and communicating to, than in receiving from, the creature. Surely, it is no argument of indigence in God that he is inclined to communicate of his infinite fullness. It is no argument of the emptiness or deficiency of a fountain, that it is inclined to overflow …

[However,] God and the creature, in the emanation of the divine fullness, are not properly set in opposition; or made the opposite parts of a disjunction. Nor ought God’s glory and the creature’s good, to be viewed as if they were properly and entirely distinct, in the objection. This supposeth, that God having respect to his glory, and the communication of good to his creatures, are things altogether different: that God communicating his fullness for himself, and his doing it for them, are things standing in a proper disjunction and opposition. Whereas, if we were capable of more perfect views of God and divine things, which are so much above us, it probably would appear very clear, that the matter is quite otherwise: and that these things, instead of appearing entirely distinct, are implied one in the other. God is seeking his glory, seeks the good of his creatures; because the emanation of his glory (which he seeks and delights in, as he delights in himself and his own eternal glory) implies the communicated excellency and happiness of his creatures. And in communicating his fullness for them, he does it for himself; because their good, which he seeks, is so much in union and communion with himself. God is their good. Their excellency and happiness is nothing, but the emanation and expression of God’s glory: God, in seeking their glory and happiness, seeks himself: and in seeking himself, i.e. himself diffused and expressed, (which he delights in, as he delights in his own beauty and fullness,) he seeks their glory and happiness.⁴

In this discovery I found what I took to be two more major points in favor of Calvinism.  Not only did this perspective explain how God’s seemingly different aims (His glory, our happiness) fit together, but it also firmly grounded what I thought of as a specifically Protestant ethic.  Over against the Catholics, we didn’t believe in works-righteousness.  We knew salvation was a free gift from God.  But we also knew we had to do good works – not to “get saved” but because “we were saved.”  Well, one asks, what motivates us to do the works if we’re already saved?  Why bother?  Easy: we can say that we’re obeying God because we want to be happy and because we want to glorify Him (these things being all of a piece).  And in responding this way, we didn’t put ourselves in the ridiculously backward position of affirming that all our “merit” places God under some sort of obligation to pay us back with accolade and reward – so that “all glory, laud and honor” ultimately went to us instead of Him.

From Edwards to Irenaeus: gloria Dei vivens homo vita autem hominis visio Dei

Of course, if I had actually read any Catholic literature at the time, I would have realized that they’d beaten Edwards to the punch.  I would have seen then that the Catechism of the Catholic Church says just what the Westminster Catechism says about our “chief end,” and quite as insistently.  “Man’s chief end is to glorify God, and to enjoy Him forever,” says the Calvinist.  And the Catholic, for his part, insists that

Scripture and Tradition never cease to teach and celebrate this fundamental truth: “The world was made for the glory of God.” St. Bonaventure explains that God created all things “not to increase his glory, but to show it forth and communicate it,” for God has no other reason for creating than his love and goodness: “Creatures came into existence when the key of love opened his hand…”

The glory of God consists in the realization of this manifestation and communication of his goodness, for which the world was created.  God made us “to be his sons through Jesus Christ, according to the purpose of his will, to the praise of his glorious grace,” for “the glory of God is man fully alive; moreover man’s life is the vision of God: if God’s revelation through creation has already obtained life for all the beings that dwell on earth, how much more will the Word’s manifestation of the Father obtain life for those who see God.”  The ultimate purpose of creation is that God “who is the creator of all things may at last become ‘all in all,’ thus simultaneously assuring his own glory and our beatitude.” ⁵

That wonderful little sentence up there, taken from St. Irenaeus’s Against Heresies (2^nd century), says it all.  “The glory of God is man fully alive,” and “man’s life is the vision of God.”  In other words, God glorifies Himself in us by making us fully alive in Christ; and being made fully alive in Christ – which ultimately leads to eternal happiness in the heavenly “vision of God” – is exactly what God built us for in the first place: “Thou madest us for Thyself,” said St. Augustine, “and our hearts are restless until they find repose in Thee.”⁶ Thus when God relentlessly pursues His own glory in us, He is at the same time relentlessly pursuing our own happiness, our own heart’s rest in Him.  And that, of course, is how God manages to “simultaneously assure His own glory and our beatitude.”

Neat little package, no?  Nice and clean.

The Logic of Glory, the Logic of Grace

So it turned out that Edwards’ general solution went way back, that it flooded beyond the confines of the Calvinist stream right into the Catholic river.  But what of the bit about Protestant ethics?  Isn’t it here that the Catholic must pull back, and must hold that since our “merit” before God is the thing that saves us, the glory for our salvation cannot really go to God but must somehow go to us?

Not so much.  To be sure, Catholics do say with St. Augustine (and for that matter with Scripture) that God will crown us, will reward us for our obedience, and all the rest.  But they also say with St. Augustine (and for that matter with Scripture) that when God crowns these things, He’s doing nothing more than crowing His own gracious work in us.  “Grace is for grace, as if remuneration for righteousness,” says St. Augustine, “in order that it may be true, because it is true, that ‘God shall reward every man according to his works.’”⁷

In other words, God not only graciously works the good in us (“for we are His workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand, that we should walk in them” Eph. 2:10) but, as if that weren’t quite enough of a gift, He also rewards and glorifies us for those good works (“for those whom He called He justified, and those whom He justified, He also glorified,” Rom. 8:30)

So this was a “salient moment” for me, an important recognition that allowed me to understand what the Catholics had been getting at.  From a Catholic perspective, it is entirely in keeping with the impetus behind soli deo gloria to recognize that God not only liberally distributes His glory to creatures, but also that the creaturely pursuit of such glory is a thoroughly Christian activity, and is therefore entirely in keeping with the Gospel of grace.  Here of course we have to be careful; for naturally, we must never seek to exalt ourselves, or else we’ll be humbled.  And Catholics know that.  But it most certainly does not follow from this fact that God wants to withhold glory from everybody else, or to stop us from pursuing it; and to assume that He does is unwittingly to cut the Gospel off at its knees.

For consider, Jesus glorifies the Father, as we know, but in so doing He teaches us the crucial lesson that “If I glorify myself, My glory is nothing.  It is My Father who glorifies Me” (Jn 8:54).  Yet the Son brings us into precisely this filial relationship with the Father, which He won for us through His life, death and resurrection.  Now we are in a position to cry Abba, Father; now we too get to share in the life of God, by Christ and through the Spirit.  And just as the Father shares His life and love with the Son, and thereby glorifies Him, so too with us: for we who are brought into God’s family are ourselves “transformed into the same image from one degree of glory to another” (2 Cor 3:18).  Thus “to those who by patience in well-doing seek for glory and honor and immortality, He will give eternal life” (Rom 2:7) – that is to say, “the eternal weight of glory” (2 Cor 4:17).

In all this, strikingly, the Apostle Paul is commending the pursuit of “glory,” the hope of being transformed gloriously ourselves, and so forth.  Yet this does not conflict with “all glory laud and honor” going to God, according to the Church, because the “grace” that “extends to more and more,” which “increases thanksgiving to the glory of God,” is given precisely “for our sakes” in the first place (2 Cor 4:15).  After all, Jesus “earned” absolutely nothing for Himself that He didn’t already possess prior to becoming man.  He did not become incarnate, suffer and die in order to get something He lacked, or to receive something more for Himself.  He did it for us men and for our salvation.  He did it, not to reassert in front of everyone that all of creation belongs to Him, but to raise us up to live and love like Him, and share in His glory and rulership. That is why Scripture spends so much time talking about God’s glory on the one hand, but also our “rewards” and “crowns” and so forth on the other.

It’s a simple but staggering thought.  And like most simple ideas, it seems fairly obvious in retrospect.  As St. Bonaventure pointed out, God did not go to all the trouble of creating a universe and redeeming us in order to increase His glory – for how exactly is creating the universe supposed to make His glory any “bigger?”  Rather, He went to all the trouble of creation and redemption to communicate His glory, to share it with us, for “God has no other reason for creating than His love and goodness.”

It took a little while for me to put these pieces together.  But when I finally started to think through all this with fresh eyes, it became clear to me that I had fallen into the understandable mistake of thinking that if all the glory goes to God – which is most certainly true – then it must mean that no glory goes to anybody or anything else – which is most certainly false.  When God “crowns our merit,” as St. Augustine says, He crowns nothing but His own gifts.  But He cannot very well do that without crowning us.  And when God calls us for His own glory, and justifies us for His own glory, He glorifies us for us own glory as well.  But it would be a little tricky, even for God, to accomplish all that unless He really did end up glorifying us after all.  Yet this doesn’t mean any less glory goes to God.  The Lord simply isn’t in the business of playing tug of war with His creation; He hasn’t got anything to prove, and that’s not how the logic of glory (or the Gospel of grace) works.

Thus to glory in God’s works – including the works of our salvation, our sanctification and all the rest – is to glory in God.⁸ It is to glory in God for being the sort of God He is: glorious enough to share His glory, rich enough to afford a little liberality, and full enough of goodness to let His goodness overflow.

What thanks ought we to render to Almighty God my dear brethren, that He has made us what we are!  It is a matter of grace.  There are, to be sure, many cogent arguments to lead one to join the Catholic Church, but they do not force the will.  We may know them, and not be moved by them to act upon them.  We may be convinced without being persuaded.  The two things are quite distinct from each other, seeing you ought to believe, and believing; reason, if left to itself, will bring you to the conclusion that you have sufficient grounds for believing, but belief is a gift of grace.  You are then what you are, not from any excellence or merit of your own, but by the grace of God who has chosen you to believe.  You might have been as the barbarians of Africa, or the freethinker of Europe, with grace sufficient to condemn you, because it had not furthered your salvation.  You might have had strong inspirations of grace and have resisted them, and then additional grace might not have been given to overcome your resistance.  God gives not the same measure of grace to all.  Has He not visited you with over-abundant grace?  And was it not necessary for your hard hearts to receive more than other people?  Praise and bless Him continually for the benefit; do not forget, as time goes on, that it is of grace; do not pride yourselves upon it; pray ever not to lose it; and do your best to make others partakers of it.

And you brethren, also, if such be present, who are not as yet Catholics, but who by your coming hither seem to show your interest in our teaching, and you wish to know more about it, you too remember, that though you may not yet have faith in the Church, still God has brought you into the way of obtaining it.  You are under the influence of His grace; He has brought you a step on your journey; He wishes to bring you further.  He wishes to bestow on you the fullness of His blessings, and to make you Catholics … Yet now the first suggestions of grace are working in your souls, and are issuing in pardon for the past and sanctity for the future.  God is moving you to acts of faith, hope, love, hatred of sin, repentance; do not disappoint Him, do not thwart Him, concur with Him, obey Him.  You look up, and you see, as it were, a great mountain to be scaled; you say, “How can I possibly find a path over these giant obstacles, which I find in the way of my becoming Catholic?  I do not comprehend this doctrine, and I am pained at that; a third seems impossible; I never can be familiar with one practice, I am afraid of another; it is one maze and discomfort to me, and I am led to sink down in despair.”  Say not so, my dear brethren, look up in hope, trust in Him who calls you forward.  “Who art thou, O great mountain, before Zorobabel? but a plain.”  He will lead you forward step by step, as He has led forward many a one before you. – John Cardinal Newman, “Faith and Private Judgment“

1. “For My own sake, for My own sake, I do it, for how should My name be profaned? My glory I will not give to another,” Is. 48:11.
2. See Piper’s God’s Passion for His Glory: Living the Vision of Jonathan Edwards, Crossway Books (1998), and Desiring God: Meditations of a Christian Hedonist, Multnomah (1996).
3. Desiring God, p. 50.
4. “Dissertation on the End for which God Created the World,” sec. IV.
5. CCC 293-294.
6. St. Augustine, Confessions, I.
7. St. Augustine, On Grace and Free Will, 20.
8. Compare: wouldn’t it be weird if someone complained, after singing “Great Is Thy Faithfulness” on some Sunday morning, that this hymn was spending too much time glorifying the sun, stars, and seasons, all to the detriment of glorifying God? The person who makes this complaint doesn’t “get” “Great is Thy Faithfulness.” This is something like how Catholics hear the complaint that they are making too much of the saints or the Blessed Virgin or what have you; it manifests a kind of confusion about the logic of glory and grace.

A godly man will not overlook the secondary causes. And indeed, he will not, just because he thinks those from whom he has received benefit are ministers of the divine goodness, pass them over, as if they had deserved no thanks for their human kindness. - Calvin, Institutes I.17.9

Calvin the Philosopher

Among the most impressive displays of Calvin’s philosophical ingenuity are those we discover in his treatises against the Libertines (on the one side) and the Epicureans (on the other).[1] Indeed, after reading these through and reflecting a bit on the subtlety and intuitive sensitivity of Calvin’s philosophical theorizing, it’s hard to take him too seriously when he repeatedly avers – out of either humility or dismissiveness or both – that he doesn’t much bother his head about “the minutiae of Aristotle.” (Sure he does.) And, perhaps not coincidently, it is precisely in this context that Calvin’s thought takes on its most Thomistic hue.

The Epicureans and the Libertines were many-headed critters, but for our purposes they represent the Scylla of deism[2] and the Charybdis of occasionalism[3] respectively. That is, for Calvin the distinctive doctrines of these schools exemplified two inversely opposed errors, neither of which could be maintained without blasphemy: viz., the error of viewing God as a blissfully uninvolved (and more or less otiose) “watchtower” deity on the one side, or, alternatively, that of making Him out as the Sole Agent in a world that was, at bottom, evidently indistinguishable from God Himself.

In effect, for Calvin they were just versions of atheism and pantheism, clad scantly in diaphanous theistic veneer. He didn’t like them. So he labored to carve out a via media between these twin heresies, even as he engaged in full frontal warfare with the both of them at once. Happily, the result was (i) a few Libertine lacerations and Epicurean ecchymoses, and (ii) a vigorous Calvinian defense of St Thomas’ theory of providence, conservation and concurrence.

Here I’ll briefly describe the threat occasioned by the Libertines in particular and indicate Calvin’s reaction to this threat; I’ll then follow up with a presentation of Calvin’s corrective as compared with the corrective formulated by the Angelic Doctor. (That’s Catholic code for Aquinas.)

Why the Libertines were Fantastic and Furious

So far as Calvin was concerned, the Epicurean fad sweeping through Renaissance Europe was nothing more interesting than a thinly veiled version of naturalism – more attractive, perhaps, because it made room for a “God,” but more dangerous in fact because the “God” it invoked didn’t much make a difference. He was an initiating principle of the universe only, a force that “bestowed motion on this immense machine” (as Hume aptly put it)[4] and left it thereafter to run under its own steam. He may as well have wandered off or popped out of existence after He got things chugging. And to a theologian who thought even the distinction between God’s active and permissive wills was too much a compromise of divine omnipotence, it would have been the most natural thing in the world for Calvin to swing wildly toward the opposite end of the spectrum and deny any independence to any aspect of the created order whatever.

It’s a credit to his restraint that he didn’t do that. Calvin knew that “many an error is taken up by going too far from other men’s faults,” as Baxter memorably said,[5] and it’s no empty compliment to note that he had a good sense in this case as to how that adage should be applied. For consider: no less a thinker than Jonathan Edwards, who was otherwise much more philosophically inclined, lost the Calvinian sense of balance on this crucial point.[6]

Thus we see Edwards’ admirable rejection of deism (together with his characteristically eloquent insistence on the primacy of the divine will) terminate in a thesis that ruled out the possibility of anything causing anything else to happen, unless the thing in question happened to be God. For if God is causing the world and everything in it to exist from moment to moment (he reasoned), then nothing else could be causally responsible for the world or any of the stuff going on inside it.

The thrust of the thing is simple: Divine causation must exclude all other potential causes, otherwise we’re implying that (a) the divine will cannot get the job done on its own, or that (b) the universe is in some sense self-sufficient. But both (a) and (b) are false: the universe is continually dependent upon God, and God’s will is quite powerful enough to bring about any effect on its own. And from this it follows that every event occurring in the world, from the leaf’s turning brown to my typing out ‘brown’, is brought about directly by God and by nothing else at all.[7]

In a way I sort of admire this view. It’s whole-hog. But there are insurmountable problems with it. For example, it follows from this view that (i) individual humans can never act freely, and, indeed, can never perform any actions at all, and so cannot ever be morally responsible for anything they “do.” This is so because nobody but God causes anything to happen – which means that you never cause your body to move, or your mind to think, or whatever. Yet you’ve got to be able to do those things if you’re ever to do anything. Since you can’t, however: no free will for you, no moral responsibility for you – in fact, no “doing” anything for you, no human agency period.[8]

It follows from this, too, that (ii) all evil in the world traces immediately and exclusively back to God, with no “buffer-zone” holding between God Himself and the moral evil brought into the world (allegedly) by human beings. In other words, it makes God responsible for sin and evil in the strongest sense possible – a sense which conflicts with God’s essential goodness and beneficence – while it simultaneously exculpates human beings from wrongdoing entirely.

And finally, (iii) it looks to inch its way over to Spinoza’s outlook: once we say that God is the only thing with a will, the only thing that ever does anything, the only thing that ever makes anything happen – then it’s a short step to the conclusion that God is in fact the only thing that exists, and that everything else is just an aspect (or ‘mode’) of God. [9] You can call that pantheism, or panentheism, or Spinozism. You can even make up your own name for it, if you want. But whatever you call it, it ain’t Christian by a football field.

Now those, (i)-(iii), are pretty good reasons for concluding that Edwards’ theory of conservation and providence is wrong, wrong in a biggish way.[10] And these pretty good reasons are (mirabile dictu!) exactly the same reasons Calvin provides for rejecting the Libertine view wholesale. Take a glance at Calvin’s surgical knife in action:

Instead of our souls [the Libertines] say that it is God who lives in us, who gives strength to our bodies, who supports all those actions in us that pertain to life. [And from this they infer] that there is only one divine spirit that exists and indwells every creature. In saying this they eradicate the essence and nature of both human souls and angels.

Again, the Libertines maintain that

“in Him we live and have our being,” by virtue of which we are rightly called “His offspring” (Acts 17:28). But this does not mean that God is the spiritual nature that indwells man. True, we subsist in Him, insofar as we do not have our foundation in ourselves. But there is a vast difference between being the “work” and the “worker” himself.

And again:

“both Scripture and nature teach us that the eternal Spirit of God is the source and origin of everything.” This we readily concede. But it does not follow from this that He did not give each creature a unique being and substance. It is quite another thing to say that every creature comes from God and that what God has created is God Himself.

Notice that in each case the Libertines affirm something we Christians “readily concede.” But once we “consider the inference[s] that can be deduced from this wretched sect’s general articles of faith,” what we find is that their philosophical presuppositions (not their theological affirmations) lead them from half-truths to heresies.

To put the moral another way: their “‘valid argument’, by means of which they so confuse everything that they change God into a creature and do away with the human soul,” does not follow from the world’s dependence upon God, nor upon God’s providential governance alone. Those things we can accept. Rather, it follows from these things only when we assume in addition that what God does nothing else can also do, that what God causes nothing else may also cause. And the result of this mistake, according to John Calvin, is precisely our (i) through (iii) above:

After creating a single spirit among themselves, by means of which they destroy the nature of both the angels of heaven and the devils of hell, as well as human souls, the Libertines maintain that this single spirit constitutes everything. By this they do not mean what the Scripture means when it says that at the same time all creatures subsist in Him, are equally guided by Him, are subject to His providence, and serve His will, each according to its order. But they mean that everything in the world must be seen directly as His doing.

In making this claim they attribute nothing to the will of man, no more than if he were a stone. And they cast aside every distinction between good and evil, since nothing can be badly made in their view, seeing that God is its author.

If you concede this point, then we must either attribute sin to God or dissolve the world of sin, inasmuch as God does everything. Thus, any distinction between good and evil is eliminated.[11]

Calvinian Thomism: How to be a Godly Man

If that’s the mistake, what’s the corrective? Calvin’s antidote to the Libertine error can be found, already fully developed, within the pages of St Thomas’ Summa Theologiae (see e.g. I.19.5, 8 and I.22.1-4), and may be summed up in this way:

God has immediate providence over everything, because He has in His intellect the types of everything, even the smallest; and whatsoever causes He assigns to certain effects, He gives them the power to produce those effects [Thus,] there are certain intermediaries of God’s providence; for He governs things inferior by superior, not on account of any defect in His power, but by reason of the abundance of His goodness; so that the dignity of causality is imparted even to creatures. (ST I.22.3, respondeo)

The basic idea is that both Epicurean deism and Libertine occasionalism are wrong. God governs the natural order generally in a law-like way, and every particular event within it is likewise under His direct providential control; but this does not eliminate the reality of secondary, natural causes also making things happen, nor does it override or undermine the actions human beings undertake as a result of their own wills: “God’s immediate provision over everything does not exclude the action of secondary causes; which are the executors of His order” (ST I.22.3, rep. obj. 2). And again: “since the very act of free will is traced to God as a cause, it necessarily follows that everything happening from the exercise of free will is subject to divine providence. For human providence is included under the providence of God, as a particular under a universal cause” (ST I.22.2, rep. obj. 4).

For both Aquinas and for Calvin, then, providence and natural causation are not in conflict but in concord: natural events cause other natural events to happen, but not without God’s will concurring; and God directs the wills and hearts of men, but not without their voluntary concurrence. So Calvin:

For our part we do not deny that whatever comes to pass does so by the will of God. In fact when we explain why He is called all powerful, we attribute to Him a power active in all creatures, teaching that, having created the world, He also governs it, always keeping His hand in the work in order to maintain everything in its true state and to dispose of things as it seems best to Him…

… [Now] there is a universal operation by which He guides all creatures according to the condition and propriety which He had given each when He made them. This guidance is nothing other than what we call “the order of nature” … Nevertheless, this universal operation of God’s does not prevent each creature, heavenly or earthly, from having and retaining its own quality and nature and from following its own inclination…

… [Thus] we must observe that creatures here below do their works in accordance with their capacity, being judged good or evil based on whether they act in obedience to God or trespass against Him. Nonetheless, God is over all and directs things toward a good end and turns evil into good.[12]

In other words, you get universal divine governance, providence over each particular event, providence even over the free decisions of human beings – and you get it all without sacrificing secondary causes or making God the author of evil.

Nice Thomistic/Calvinian package.[13]

Soteriological Implications?

But buyer beware. The package comes with a price, and the price is that you’ve got to believe in concurrence. You have to believe, that is, that when God causes something to happen, that doesn’t entail that we creatures cannot make it happen as well. It means, in other words, that you’ve got to accept the full compatibility of divine and human cooperation regarding (a) what God chooses to work in and through us, and (b) what we do – really and freely do – by actively concurring with the divine will.

And it could be that some unexpected soteriological possibilities open up when you accept that. For between (Epicurean) Pelagianism and (Libertine) Monergism lies Calvinian Thomism: divine and human concurrence. And what Calvin rightly insists upon regarding providence and nature, the Catholic insists upon regarding nature and grace.

Thus for example, when Win Corduan contends (in his arguments against Catholicism) that “if God does it, it is grace; if we do it, it is not grace; calling something that we do God’s grace is not God’s grace”[14] – when Corduan says this, he isn’t just saying something that butts up against Aquinas. He’s relying upon the same philosophical presuppositions that led the Libertines from half-truths to heresies – the very presuppositions that Calvin was at pains to reject.

The interesting question, then, is whether there is any principled way for the Calvinist to (a) reject those philosophical presuppositions when we need to avoid Epicurean and Libertine errors, but (b) hang onto them when we want to argue against the Catholic Church.

[2] Deism affirms the existence of a creator but denies the continuing dependence of the world upon the creator; God does not “sustain” or “conserve” the world on this view, because the world is self-supporting.

[3] Occasionalism affirms that God sustains the world and governs everything that happens within it; it denies the reality of secondary causation, or any natural causes distinct from God’s immediate will.

[4] David Hume, An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding VIII.

[5] Richard Baxter, Church Divisions, pp. 224-225, quoted in Iain Murray, Evangelicalism Divided, Banner of Truth (2000), p. 299.

[6] It must of course be admitted that Calvin’s emphases varied with polemical context, though such variations need not amount to inconsistency. On this point Susan Schreiner, in The Theater of His Glory: Nature & the Natural Order in the Thought of John Calvin, Baker (1991), p. 19, strikes the appropriate cautionary note:

Against both the Stoics and the Libertines Calvin defended God’s transcendence over the realm of creation and insisted that God must not be entangled in the inferior course of his works. In Calvin’s view, providence must not be identified with the “stream of nature” nor with a single divine Spirit which works in all things. Basically pantheistic, both groups fell into a false determinism which resulted in the doctrine of fate and the idea that human beings are not responsible for evil, since nature, God, or the Spirit effected all things. When confronted by the implications of such determinism, Calvin defended the integrity and activity of the created order which included the human will as well as the secondary causes. Calvin works here with the idea of concursus; in his polemics against the Libertines he claimed the activity of the finite agent but insisted on the positive presence of the divine willing in all acts or events … Any acquittal of the charge of fatalism in the Reformer’s thought, however, must take seriously the discussions found in [Calvin's] arguments directed against the “Epicurean” error.

[7] For the actual arguments Edwards gives for this position, see his “The Great Doctrine of Original Sin Defended,” in J. Smith et al. eds, A Jonathan Edwards Reader, Yale University Press (1995), and compare Paul Helm, Faith and Understanding, Eerdmans (1997), chap 7. See also Tim Troutman’s discussion of Edwards in “Soli Deo Gloria: A Catholic Perspective,” and note the similarity between Edwards’ reasoning here and the reasoning behind the notion that the glory of God decreases proportionately as His glory “goes to” creatures.

[8] It should be noted that the incompatibility of Edwards’ view of divine conservation/providence and human freedom/responsibility does not rely on an analysis of freedom that Edwards (or Calvinists generally) would find contentious. It relies, rather, on Edwards’ own theory of freedom as set forth in his Freedom of the Will, which (in contradiction with his occasionalism) specifies causation by the agent’s will as a necessary condition for free and morally responsible action. So the worry here isn’t just that God determines everything, it’s that God does everything, and nobody else ever gets to play. Cf. my “Theological Determinism and the Problem of Evil,” Religious Studies 44 (2008), pp. 165-184 and Helm, Faith and Understanding, pp. 174-175.

[9] See Book I of The Ethics.

[10] I pass over in silence the further implication that human beings (like other created objects) cannot exist for more than an instant before promptly popping out of existence again – an implication with which, in contrast with the others, Edwards was quite content. Indeed, the whole point of Edwards’ argumentation was to establish that (a) you-right-now aren’t the same person as you-just-a-second-ago; that (b) you-right-now are nevertheless morally responsible for whatever you-just-a-second-ago might have done just a second ago; and that (c) there’s therefore no reason to object to your being held morally responsible for something that Adam did, despite the fact that you (at-any-time) aren’t identical to Adam (-at-any-time). The common reaction to this ingenious defense of original sin is that Edwards hasn’t succeeded in making original sin easier to grasp, so much as he’s made any kind of moral responsibility impossible to swallow.

[11] Against the Libertines [On the First Article of Libertine Doctrine and On the Libertine View that a Spirit Comprises Everything], my emphases.

[12] Against the Libertines [On How We Ought to Understand the Providence of God].

[13] I can’t resist referencing Barth’s interesting perception of a link between Calvin-the-theoretician and Calvin-the-colorful-personality on exactly this point:

In the later editions of the Institutes, in remarkable parallelism with Thomas Aquinas, Calvin developed the distinctive theory that divine providence constantly uses secondary causes, including the human will, to achieve its ends. Though he avoided mechanistic thinking, Calvin viewed the decisions of the will, whether his own or that of others, as guided, driven, and motivated by God, to whom we must constantly pay inner heed and whom we must always be ready to follow, so that we do not so much as lift a finger without a nod from him (Rom. 14 [v. 5]). Ideas of this kind – and his actual conduct both here and in many other cases was in keeping with them – show us that Calvin was not so strictly doctrinaire as we often like to depict him, but that in daily life he would constantly decide and act in accordance with the situation, which included his own shall we say volatile disposition, naturally within definite ethical limits, yet in detail with an extraordinary and incalculable freedom that we today – who knows? – might regard as romantic caprice, but that for him had the significance of supreme divine necessity.

Karl Barth, The Theology of John Calvin, trans. G.W. Bromiley, Eerdmans (1922/1995), pp. 376-377.

[14] Will Corduan, “As the Romans Do.” Thanks to Bryan Cross for calling this pithy quotation to my attention. Readers interested in pursuing the topic of divine/human “cooperation” in relation to original sin on the one hand and the process of sanctification on the other (i.e., before and after regeneration) should know that we plan to take these topics up in detail in the near future, and we look forward to the fruitful interaction we hope them to engender.