Lawrence Feingold

Lecture:

Q&A:

The mp3s can be downloaded here.

This lecture helps further the ecumenical dialogue in the following way. Essential to reuniting Protestants and Catholics is finding the disagreements behind the disagreements, because these are the fundamental causes of the division’s persistence, and yet they tend to remain hidden and relatively undiscussed though implicitly presupposed. One such fundamental disagreement concerns the essence and relation of nature and grace, because this disagreement underlies the Protestant-Catholic disagreement concerning the relations of law and gospel, faith and works, and justification and sanctification. And not uncommonly the two sides talk past each other (or critique a straw man) when they use their own concepts for nature and grace when criticizing the other’s position.¹ The difference between their respective theologies of nature and grace is especially manifested in their doctrines concerning the pre-fall condition of Adam and Eve. St. Thomas, drawing from Aristotle’s On the Heavens, writes, “parvus error in principio magnus est in fine,” meaning “a small error in the beginning is a large error in the end.” And that is equally true here, where a small error concerning man’s initial state can lead to much larger errors in Christology and soteriology.

Meredith Kline

One Reformed position on this subject is that of Meredith Kline, who taught for many years at Westminster Theological Seminary, Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary and Westminster Seminary California, and whose theology concerning nature and grace is still the predominant position at that latter institution. For Kline, when God made man He made a “Covenant of Works” with man, and His making this covenant was necessitated by His nature, given His choice to create man. In other words, having freely chosen to make man, God was bound by His own justice to make the “Covenant of Works” with man. This is why for Kline the Covenant of Works is not rightly said to involve grace, because there was nothing gratuituous in the Covenant of Works, beyond the very decision to create man. For Kline, the reward for obedience under the Covenant of Works was heaven, the same reward we are offered through Christ under the Covenant of Grace.

Kline writes:

A principle of works – do this and live – governed the attainment of the consummation-kingdom proferred in the blessing sanction of the creational covenant. Heaven must be earned. According to the terms stipulated by the Creator it would be on the ground of man’s faithful completion of the work of probation that he would be entitled to enter the Sabbath rest. If Adam obediently performed the assignment signified by the probation tree, he would receive, as a matter of pure and simple justice, the reward symbolized by the tree of life.²

The problem with the notion that man without grace can merit heaven is that this is the heresy of Pelagianism, as Barrett Turner showed in his article “Pelagian Westminster?.” But Kline essentially locks himself into that notion by his definition of ‘grace.’ He defines grace as follows:

Properly defined, grace is not merely the bestowal of unmerited blessings but God’s blessing of man in spite of his demerits, in spite of his forfeiture of divine blessings. Clearly, we ought not apply this term grace to the pre-fall situation, for neither the bestowal of blessings on Adam in the very process of creation nor the proposal to grant him additional blessings contemplated him as in a guilty state of demerit.³

Because he defines ‘grace’ as “God’s blessing in spite of [man's] demerits,” there is by definition no room for or possibility of grace in the pre-fall condition. And in this way Kline defines himself into a Pelagian corner.

The error underlying Pelagianism is a denial of the Creator-creature distinction, because Pelagianism treats heaven (i.e. seing God face to face, as He sees Himself) as man’s natural end, proportionate to man, and thus attainable by man without grace, but simply through man’s own nature. Feingold’s lecture (above) explains why necessarily heaven is natural only to God, and therefore why for any creature heaven is a supernatural end. Therefore no creature, not even any angel, can enter heaven without grace elevating that creature to its supernatural end. (See my post titled “St. Thomas on Angels and Grace.”)

So by denying that God had given grace to Adam and Eve prior to their sin, while at the same time claiming that heaven was their reward for obedience, Kline’s position is Pelagian.

Kline has responded to the objection that “The disproportion between Adam’s work and the promised blessing forbids us to speak of simple justice.” He writes:

Another form of the attack on the Covenant of Works doctrine (and thus on the classic law-gospel contrast) asserts that even if it is allowed that Adam’s obedience would have earned something, the disproportion between the value of that act of service and the value of the proferred blessing forbids us to speak here of simple equity or justice. The contention is that Adam’s ontological status limited the value or weight of his acts. More specifically his act of obedience would not have eternal value or significance; it could not earn a reward of eternal, confirmed life. In the offer of eternal life, so we are told, we must therefore recognize an element of “grace” in the preredemptive covenant. But belying this assessment of the situation is the fact that if it were true that Adam’s act of obedience could not have eternal significance then neither could or did his actual act of disobedience have eternal significance. It did not deserve the punishment of everlasting death. Consistency would compel us to judge God guilty of imposing punishment beyond the demands of justice, pure and simple. God would have to be charged with injustice in inflicting the punishment of Hell, particularly when he exacted that punishment from his Son as the substitute for sinners. The Cross would be the ultimate act of divine injustice. That is the theologically disastrous outcome of blurring the works-grace contrast by appealing to a supposed disproportionality between work and reward.⁴

Kline’s argument goes like this. “If it were true that Adam’s act of obedience could not have eternal significance then neither could or did his actual act of disobedience have eternal significance.” But Adam’s act of disobedience did have eternal significance, in that it deserved the punishment of everlasting death. Therefore, Adam’s act of obedience could and must have eternal significance.

The problem with this argument is that it is a red herring. Its conclusion is fully compatible with the truth of the objection. Just because Adam’s act of obedience would have had eternal significance, it does not follow either that (a) heaven is proportionate to grace-less obedience or (b) pre-fall Adam was without grace. It seems that Kline is unaware of the distinction discussed in Feingold’s lecture, namely, the distinction between man’s natural and supernatural ends.

Kline continues his response to this objection:

On the approach that mistakenly contends that the presence of God’s paternal love involves grace and so negates the possibility of meritorious works and simple justice, divine justice ceases to be foundational to all divine government. A negative, punitive justice may be recognized, as in the retribution against the wicked in hell, to which paternal love does not reach. But there is no place in that view for positive justice; those who advocate it must deny that the rewarding of doers of the law with life forms the reverse side of the negative justice which punishes the breakers of the law with death. They cannot consistently confess that justice is the foundation of God’s throne (Pss 89:14(15); 97:2).⁵

Here Kline responds to those who claim that since the Covenant of Works involves grace therefore it cannot involve meritorious works. He rightly points out that such a position excludes divine justice, or arbitrarily recognizes only the negative aspect of justice while denying its positive aspect. The position he is criticizing in this paragraph is obviously not the Catholic position, according to which Adam and Eve could have merited heaven prior to the fall, precisely because God had infused into them sanctifying grace and agape.

Kline continues:

The disproportionality view’s failure with respect to the doctrine of divine justice can be traced to its approach to the definition of justice. A proper approach will hold that God is just and his justice is expressed in all his acts; in particular, it is expressed in the covenant he institutes. The terms of the covenant – the stipulated reward for the stipulated service – are a revelation of that justice. As a revelation of God’s justice the terms of the covenant define justice. According to this definition, Adam’s obedience would have merited the reward of eternal life and not a gram of grace would have been involved.⁶

Here Kline’s argument goes like this. The terms of the Covenant of Works are a revelation of God’s justice. According to the terms of the Covenant of Works Adam’s obedience would have merited the reward of eternal life. Therefore, by justice alone without a gram of grace, Adam’s obedience would have merited the reward of eternal life.

The problem with that argument is that the conclusion does not follow from the premises. The truth of the two premises is fully compatible with eternal life being the merited reward of graced-obedience.

In the last paragraph of his response to this objection Kline writes:

Refusing to accept God’s covenant word as the definer of justice, the disproportionality view exalts above God’s word a standard of justice of its own making. Assigning ontological values to Adam’s obedience and God’s reward it finds that weighed on its judicial scales they are drastically out of balance. In effect that conclusion imputes an imperfection in justice to the Lord of the covenant. The attempt to hide this affront against the majesty of the Judge of all the earth by condescending to assess the relation of Adam’s act to God’s reward as one of congruent merit is no more successful than Adam’s attempt to manufacture a covering to conceal his nakedness. It succeeds only in exposing the roots of this opposition to Reformed theology in the theology of Rome.⁷

Here Kline claims that the objection regarding disproportionality does not allow the Biblical account regarding God’s promise of reward and punishment for Adam to define the standard of justice. He means that the objection does not allow the Biblical account to define the standard of justice of what is due as reward to man for obedience carried out by human nature alone, without grace. But Kline’s rejoinder begs the question, by presupposing that the reward in the Biblical account is justly due for obedience carried out by human nature alone, and not carried out by man-infused-with-grace. If God had already given sanctifying grace to Adam when God laid before him the conditions for obedience and disobedience, then those conditions reveal the just reward and punishment for man-infused-with-grace, not for man-without-grace. So Kline’s response presupposes precisely what is in question between those holding his view of the Covenant of Works, and the Catholic Church. In short, none of Kline’s rejoinders to the disproportionality objection refute the Catholic disproportionality objection (as exemplified in the Feingold lecture).

R. Scott Clark

Westminster Professor R. Scott Clark likewise denies the possibility of pre-fall grace, writing: “Thus, the First Adam needed no grace before the fall. Grace is for sinners, not for the sinless.”⁸ And elsewhere Clark writes, “Grace, as we mostly use it, is reserved to describe God’s favor toward sinners not the sinless and not Adam ante lapsum.”⁹ Clark and Kline make this claim for two reasons in conjunction. First, they are presupposing a biblicist theological methodology according to which if we do not see in Scripture any explicit claim that Adam and Eve possessed grace prior to the fall, and no such claim follows by logical necessity from any explicit claims in Scripture, then we are right to conclude that Adam and Eve did not possess grace prior to the fall.¹⁰ Second, this method presupposes an ecclesial deism (as I’ll show below) according to which the thousand years of theology that preceded the 16th century cannot be trusted, and therefore all the theologians from St. Augustine onward who referred to Adam and Eve having grace prior to the fall can be summarily dismissed.¹¹

Clark’s position differs from Kline’s in that for Clark, but not for Kline, God could have withheld the Covenant of Works from man. Yet Clark, like Kline, maintains that there was no grace in the Covenant of Works. He holds that God entered only into a legal relation with Adam and Eve: “[I]t was a legal, and not a gracious relation. Adam was to earn his entry into glory.”¹² For this reason, Clark’s position is Pelagian in the same way as Kline’s. In response to the argument that denying pre-fall grace while affirming the possibility of meriting heaven entails Pelagianism, Clark writes:

Humanity (as Augustine taught us and as Boston repeated) has existed in four states. The prelapsarian state and the post-lapsarian states are distinct. Hence Paul called the natural state post lapsum “dead.” (Eph 2;1-4). Prior to the fall we were “alive.” Our abilities, then, suffered a mortal blow, literally, after the fall. Thus whatever we cannot do (anything meritorious) after the fall is no indicator of human ability before the fall.¹³

Clark’s argument goes like this. Prior to the fall Adam’s nature was greater than it was after the fall. In other words, human nature became corrupted through Adam’s sin. But Pelagianism is the error of claiming that corrupted human nature without grace can merit heaven. Therefore claiming that pre-fall Adam without grace could merit heaven is not Pelagianism.

But what makes Pelagianism false is not merely that Adam had lost some natural, finite power. What makes Pelagianism false is that no creature is by nature proportionate to the supernatural end which is the Beatific Vision. As the Feingold lecture above explains, the supernatural end which is God’s own inner life is natural and therefore proportionate only to God Himself. Hence no creature, not even the highest angel, could, without grace, merit God’s own inner life. So Clark’s reply that the pre-fall Adam had a greater nature (though without grace) does not obviate the Pelagian error. It treats man as naturally proportionate to God, and in this way denies the Creator-creature distinction.

We know that in order for the heavenly reward for Adam’s obedience to be just, his obedience must have been graced-obedience, i.e. obedience done out of the supernatural virtue of agape flowing from a heart infused with sanctifying grace. Only if his obedience was done through a participation in the divine nature could it be directed to that supernatural end which is heaven. So the Covenant of Works had to have included infused grace, because otherwise one faces either the Scylla of Pelagianism or the Charybdis that the reward Adam could have merited (and which the second Adam did merit) was something infinitely less than heaven.

Both Clark and Michael Horton reject the doctrine of grace as participation in the divine nature. They construe union with Christ as entirely extrinsic and stipulative. Clark writes, “Our union with Christ is both legal and vital, but never ontic. We are “in Christ” by virtue of God’s decree.”¹⁴ One problem with a merely covenantal notion of union with Christ is that it reduces heaven to the equivalent of Abraham’s bosom. (Luke 16:22) A merely covenantal union with Christ is what we have now in this present life, and what the saints in Abraham’s bosom had as well. It is not the Beatific Vision. Hence if Clark holds that in the eschatological consummation our union with Christ is only covenantal, and not ontological, then his position denies the possibility of attaining heaven, and offers to men in its place something infinitely lower. But if he admits that in the consummation our union with Christ is ontological, then he has no principled reason for claiming that grace cannot be a participation in the divine nature in addition to divine favor.¹⁵

But, again, part of the problem here is semantic. Clark claims that the Covenant of Works was a free act by God, but not gracious. He writes:

Now, that “earning” was within a covenant freely made by God by, as the WCF says, “voluntary condescension,” …. They [the authors of the WCF] turned not to grace to explain God’s free act in covenanting with Adam, instead they turned to the divine free will. Hence “voluntary condescension.” … The Creator/creature relations are such that man did not have any claim on God without God having freely willed to enter into a legal relation. That done, it was a legal, and not a gracious relation. Adam was to earn his entry into glory.¹⁶

Because of his definition of ‘grace,’ Clark cannot describe Adam’s pre-fall ability to merit heaven as made possible by infused grace. So he must attribute it to human nature, and thus run into the Pelagian problem. But if he were not hamstrung by this stipulated definition of ‘grace,’ he could simply grant that in offering to Adam the supernatural end which is heaven, and in making this supernatural end attainable in justice by the merit of Adam’s obedience, God had to infuse Adam with a participation in the divine nature (i.e. with grace) to make his actions proportionate to that supernatural end.

Another objection to the Catholic doctrine is the claim that it implies that human nature in itself (even prior to the fall) is defective or fallen. Clark attributes this notion to St. Thomas, writing, “For Thomas, nature is inherently defective and requires grace, as a result of creation, to perfect it.”¹⁷ Clark construes the Catholic position in this way. He writes, “We were not created corrupt (Augustine and Thomas) or fallen.”¹⁸ Here Clark is claiming that for St. Augustine and St. Thomas, God created man corrupt. But that is untrue and inaccurate. Listen to the second question in the Q&A of the lecture above, in which this very question is addressed; it begins at 5 minutes and 10 seconds into the audio. Human nature is good, because everything God made is good. But our lower appetites (such as our desire for food and our sexual appetite) are not intrinsically ordered to our overall good; they are not in themselves ordered to the good, but to particular types of good. They contribute to our overall good when governed by reason: sometimes prodded forward by reason and other times restrained by reason. Hence they need to be governed by reason, which by its very nature is ordered toward the good, not merely toward that which is good in a certain respect. But since lower appetites are not by their nature docile to reason, therefore without the preternatural gift of integrity, they would often be at odds with reason. So God provided Adam and Eve with the preternatural gift of integrity, which they forfeited when they sinned. The lack of this integrity is not a defect in human nature; something is “defective” only if it falls short of its nature. But human nature does not contain or require this integrity; otherwise we would not now be human, since we do not now possess this integrity. Therefore, the lack of this integrity is not a defect in human nature.¹⁹ Likewise, mortality is natural to man, not because man was created defective but because man is a material being. A body is not by its nature as body subject to the soul. This is why corporeal creatures are naturally mortal. Hence the immortality possessed by Adam and Eve was a preternatural gift, and this gift too was lost by their sin. If immortality belonged to human nature proper, then we mortal creatures would not be human; we would be another kind of creature altogether.

A bit further down Clark writes:

The notion that the fall was a fall from grace stems, as I’ve said before, from an unbiblical and pagan view of divine-human relations. We do not exist on one end of a continuum with God. We are and only shall be analogues to God. Full stop.

To say that grace was necessary before the fall is to say that, in effect, divinity is a pre-requisite for obedience, that humanity as such is incapable of obedience. That scheme almost always (and certainly did in Thomas and certainly does in contemporary evangelicalism) lead to a doctrine of theosis — divinization as salvation. See M. Karkainen’s (Fuller Sem) new book where teaches this explicitly.

This, of course, destroys not only the Creator/creature relations by turning the creature into the Creator it also makes our problem ontological rather than moral. Scripture never does this. The Protestants didn’t do this. Augustine and Thomas did. Augustine and Thomas were wrong! Luther, Calvin and our theologians and symbols were more biblical.

This approach also destroys the incarnation. We have a God-Man Savior. His humanity is not deified and his deity is not confused with his humanity. We have a Savior with two distinct natures united in one person.

Why did God the Son have to become, having willed to be our Mediator and representative, a true man? Why not just come without the incarnation? To fulfill the covenant of works broken by Adam. If the “fall” was a “fall from grace” then why all the fuss about the law? About Jesus “righteousness” and “obedience”? Why the brutal 40 day temptation in the wilderness? Why not just “poof” and make it all go away? Why sweat, as it were, great drops of blood? Why “learn obedience” by the things he suffered? Why die outside the camp? Why be circumcised for us on the cross? Because, he was the Second Adam? He had to go back into the garden and do battle with the evil one, as a true man, and he did that his whole life. That is why he said “It is finished!”

None of that makes any sense on an alternate scheme. The truth is that western theology was schizoid for most of 1000 years and God bless that fat little Saxon monk for finalizing the divorce from Plotinus and Dionysius and the rest of the theologians of glory!²⁰

The notion that the fall was a fall from grace does not come from paganism; it follows from two truths that are part of the gospel: (1) man cannot merit a supernatural end without grace, (2) the heaven offered to Adam and Eve upon obedience was the supernatural end of seeing God as He is.²¹ The Catholic doctrine that Adam and Eve possessed grace prior to their fall does not imply or entail a denial of the Creator-creature distinction. Ironically, however, Clark’s own view that Adam and Eve could attain to heaven without grace does imply a denial of the Creator-creator distinction, because as I explained above, it treats as natural to man (i.e. as intrinsic to his primary nature) what is natural only to God.²²

To say that grace was necessary before the fall does not in any way entail that “divinity is a pre-requisite for obedience, that humanity as such is incapable of obedience.” Even if man had never been given grace, he could (in principle) have obeyed and thus attained to his natural end. Clark’s objection here is based on an implicit denial of the distinction between man’s natural and supernatural ends. The necessity of grace is not “for obedience” simpliciter, but for graced-obedience, i.e. obedience coming from a heart of agape, and ordered to man’s supernatural end, rather than to a merely natural end. For obedience ordered to a supernatural end grace is necessary, and for perseverance in that grace, grace upon grace is necessary.

The Creator-creature distinction is an ontological one, and denying that distinction is what underlies the Pelagian error, as explained above. Clark claims that we need grace only because of a moral problem, and not because of an ontological problem. In making this claim, Clark commits himself both to nominalism and to voluntarism, by disconnecting morality from ontology.²³ Pope Benedict addressed this notion five years ago in his famous Regensburg Address, in which he said:

In all honesty, one must observe that in the late Middle Ages we find trends in theology which would sunder this synthesis between the Greek spirit and the Christian spirit. In contrast with the so-called intellectualism of Augustine and Thomas, there arose with Duns Scotus a voluntarism which, in its later developments, led to the claim that we can only know God’s voluntas ordinata. Beyond this is the realm of God’s freedom, in virtue of which he could have done the opposite of everything he has actually done. This gives rise to positions which clearly approach those of Ibn Hazm and might even lead to the image of a capricious God, who is not even bound to truth and goodness. God’s transcendence and otherness are so exalted that our reason, our sense of the true and good, are no longer an authentic mirror of God, whose deepest possibilities remain eternally unattainable and hidden behind his actual decisions. As opposed to this, the faith of the Church has always insisted that between God and us, between his eternal Creator Spirit and our created reason there exists a real analogy, in which – as the Fourth Lateran Council in 1215 stated – unlikeness remains infinitely greater than likeness, yet not to the point of abolishing analogy and its language. God does not become more divine when we push him away from us in a sheer, impenetrable voluntarism; rather, the truly divine God is the God who has revealed himself as logos and, as logos, has acted and continues to act lovingly on our behalf. Certainly, love, as Saint Paul says, “transcends” knowledge and is thereby capable of perceiving more than thought alone (cf. Eph 3:19); nonetheless it continues to be love of the God who is Logos. Consequently, Christian worship is, again to quote Paul – “λογικη λατρεία”, worship in harmony with the eternal Word and with our reason (cf. Rom 12:1).

Pope Benedict explains that the voluntaristic theology of certain late medieval thinkers gave rise to positions that “clearly approach” that form of Islamic theology according to which God is not Logos, but will, and thus brute capricious power. Among other consequences, this conception of God makes violence in the name of God justifiable, and leads to the fideism which underlies certain fundamentalist forms of religion.

Catholic theology does not make our problem “ontological rather than moral,” as Clark claims. Catholic theology recognizes that morality and ontology are related, and that we need not only forgiveness of our sins and the grace to obey God’s laws, but a participation in the divine nature (2 Pet. 1:4) in order to attain to our supernatural end. Theosis just is that participation about which St. Peter writes. To reject theosis is to reject our supernatural end of seeing God as He is. And to reject our supernatural end is to reject the gospel.

According to Clark, the theology of St. Augustine and St. Thomas concerning theosis “destroys the incarnation.” Clark seems to think that the doctrine of theosis must result in an ontological confusion of Christ’s two natures. He describes theosis as “overcoming our humanity.”²⁴ For Clark, the Catholic doctrine of participation in the divine nature “vitiates” the Creator-creature distinction.²⁵

But the doctrine of theosis has no such implication, and to construe it that way is to critique a straw man. Theosis is not a confusion of natures, but a participation in the divine nature, as St. Peter says. Participation by its very nature is in something other, because a thing does not participate in itself. Hence creatures’ participation in the divine nature entails a distinction between the Creator and the creature. Therefore the sort of union entailed by participation is not a fusion that confuses the natures or makes one nature out of two; that would eliminate participation. And for this reason grace as participation in the divine nature does not deny the Creator/creature distinction. Grace does not destroy nature but perfects and elevates it. Construing grace as elevating nature such that nature is obliterated is contrary to that dictum. Union with God does not eliminate human nature; human nature remains, but is elevated by its participation in the divine nature. This is revealed in Christ’s glorification, in which His human nature is divinized and glorified, but not destroyed; He remains human, and yet He can go through walls, and His face radiates light like the Sun.

In addition, Clark claims that for St. Thomas and the Catholic Church, grace is a substance. He writes:

The medieval notion was that grace is a substance which can be imparted or dispensed through human agency to sinners. The Protestant view is that grace is a divine disposition toward sinners.²⁶

St. Thomas, however, explicitly denies that grace is a substance.²⁷ What is given to us through the sacraments Christ established in the New Covenant is a participation in the divine nature. Sanctifying grace is the participation of the soul in the life of God. If we did not have sanctifying grace, the presence of the Holy Spirit in us would be mere presence (like omnipresence), not union. That’s why there cannot be theosis without sanctifying grace as something distinct from the Holy Spirit. And without union with God in which we participate in the divine nature, we could not enter into the inner life of the Blessed Trinity; we would be cut off from the Beatific Vision, and heaven would be reduced to something equivalent to Abraham’s bosom, with Christ visible to us only in His human nature.

But the second reason Clark thinks that the notion of pre-fall grace destroys the incarnation is that he thinks that pre-fall grace would make the incarnation unnecessary. For Clark grace is conceived as something intrinsically incompatible with law. Therefore, if Adam and Eve fell from grace (as opposed to falling while under law), there would be no reason for Jesus to come and fulfill the law. For Clark, if man had been always under grace, then God could just go ‘poof’ and make all our sin vanish by fiat; there would be no need for atonement or merit or satisfaction. Grace is pure favor, and so for those always under pure favor, there is never any need for law-keeping, not even by someone on their behalf. There’s just no law in grace proper.

Underlying Clark’s entire argument here is his Reformed (Lutheran) presupposition that grace and law cannot go together.²⁸ But if God had already given Adam and Eve sanctifying grace before He commanded them not to eat of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, then Clark’s presupposition is false. When Clark says “None of that makes sense on an alternative scheme” he’s right that none of that makes sense when one presupposes that law and grace are incompatible. But to use that presupposition is to beg the question. If law and grace can go together (as St. Augustine explains that they do — see “St. Augustine on Law and Grace“) then all these thing make perfect sense. So Clark’s whole argument here is an exercise in question-begging, i.e. using a Reformed presupposition to argue against Catholic doctrine.

But there is an irony here in Clark’s claim that the Catholic teaching that Adam and Eve possessed grace prior to their fall “destroys the incarnation.” The irony is that it is Clark’s own position that makes the incarnation unnecessary. The Church’s tradition handed down to us from the early Church Fathers maintains that Christ took on human nature so that we might become partakers of His divine nature through union with Him. As St. Athanasius said:

For He was made man that we might be made God.” (On the Incarnation, 54.3)

And again:

I am from earth, being by nature mortal, but afterwards I have become the Word’s flesh, and He carried my affections, though He is without them; and so I became free from them, being no more abandoned to their service because of the Lord who has made me free from them. For if you object to my being rid of that corruption which is by nature, see that you object not to God’s Word having taken my form of servitude; for as the Lord, putting on the body, became man, so we men are deified by the Word as being taken to Him through His flesh, and henceforward inherit life everlasting. (Discourse III Against the Arians, 34)

If mere covenantal (and not ontological) union were our eschatological end, such that we are not made partakers of the divine nature, then Christ did not need to take on human flesh. If we were not called to partake of the divine nature, Christ would not have needed to partake of our human nature. Given the Reformed notion of imputation, all that is needed for salvation is a double imputation. For example, instead of sending Christ, God could have created another group of humans equal in number to the elect, made no promise of reward to them (since for Clark God didn’t have to make such a covenant of works with men) monergistically ensured their just obedience to God, and then imputed their obedience to the elect, and imputed the sins of the elect to them. From the divine point of view, it would just be another form of supralapsarianism, except without the incarnation. Of course the notion is far-fetched, but the point is that if man is not ordered to a supernatural end, then Christ did not need to become incarnate.²⁹

For Clark, “western theology was schizoid for most of 1000 years.” That’s the ecclesial deism I mentioned earlier. The alternative is that the Church developed the Apostolic faith organically and faithfully, and that early Protestants influenced by later medieval nominalism and voluntarism had to posit a one thousand year breakdown in orthodoxy in order to justify their theological novelties and their rejection of the Tradition as passed down from the Church Fathers through this thousand year period.

To bring about reconciliation between Protestants I contend that what needs to be examined are not points of disagreement that depend on more substantive assumptions, but those substantive assumptions themselves. Here, it seems to me, the meaning of nature and grace, and their relation, are theologically fundamental, because they play a role in arguments used to reject the other’s position. Prof. Feingold’s lecture above lays out a critical distinction between our natural and supernatural ends, and this distinction significantly illuminates the Catholic understanding of the distinction and relation of nature and grace.

1. See, for example, “Michael Horton on Terrence Malick’s “Tree of Life”.”
2. Kingdom Prologue, as quoted in “Answering Objections to the Covenant of Works.” (my emphasis)
3. “Covenant Theology Under Attack.”
4. “Answering Objections to the Covenant of Works.”
5. “Answering Objections to the Covenant of Works.”
6. “Answering Objections to the Covenant of Works.”
7. “Answering Objections to the Covenant of Works.”
8. “Concupiscence: Sin and the Mother of Sin.”
9. “Natural Man Before the fall: Ability and Grace.”
10. I have briefly discussed what is wrong with this presupposition both in the “Scripture and Tradition” section of my discussion with Michael Horton, and in “The Tradition and the Lexicon.”
11. On St. Augustine’s teaching that Adam and Eve had grace prior to the fall, see the first five footnotes in “Pelagian Westminster?”
12. “Natural Man Before the Fall: Ability and Grace.”
13. Natural Man Before the Fall: Ability and Grace.”
14. “Natural Man before the Fall: Ability and Grace: P. 2.” For Horton’s view of union with Christ see chapter 18 of his recent book The Christian Faith, in which he defines union with Christ as covenantal, and rejects an ontological union (which he describes as ‘fusion’).
15. Cf. Summa Theologica I-II Q.110 a.1.
16. “Natural Man Before the Fall: Ability and Grace.”
17. In Clark’s “A Brief Glossary of the Medieval and Reformation Church,” under “Aquinas, Thomas.”
18. “Natural Man Before the Fall: Ability and Grace.”
19. I addressed this same question in about the fourth paragraph of “Michael Horton on Terrence Malick’s “Tree of Life”.”
20. “Natural Man Before the Fall: Ability and Grace.”
21. Clark maintains that the same end offered to pre-fall Adam on condition of merit is the same end attained by the elect through Christ’s merit. He writes, “The Reformed expressed this affirmation of the goodness of Adam (before the fall) as created (contra Thomas and Augustine) by teaching the covenant of works in which Adam was said to have been, before the fall, able to keep the law and to earn (yes, I said “earn”) a state of consummate blessedness. … This is the background for our view of Jesus’ sinlessness (impeccability) and active obedience for us and imputed to us. Our standards and theologians all have it that Jesus “earned” or “obtained” our justification and eventual consummate blessedness.”
22. If two things have the same primary nature, they are the same in kind. Hence, if man and God have the same primary nature, then man is God.
23. See “William of Ockham.”
24. He writes, “We don’t confess apotheosis. We’re categorically opposed to it. We don’t have to be divinized to be glorified. Consummation does not mean overcoming our humanity. In Pauline terms, in 1 Cor 15, it is conformity to the will and presence of the Holy Spirit …”
25. “One of the great, if often unspoken, breakthroughs of the Reformation was the restoration of the Creator/creature distinction. Thomas’ doctrine (and he’s not alone in this at all) of participation in the divine nature vitiates this.” On Clark’s now defunct Heidelblog.
26. Clark’s “A Brief Glossary of the Medieval and Reformation Church,” under the entry “Grace.”
27. See Summa Theologica I-II Q.110 a.2 ad 2.
28. See my “A Response to Darrin Patrick on the Indicates and the Imperatives.”
29. For a brief comparison of the Catholic and Reformed conceptions of the atonement, see “Catholic and Reformed Conceptions of the Atonement.”

Barrett Turner

One sometimes hears the charge that the Catholic Church, through the Tridentine decrees on justification, adopted a semi-Pelagian soteriology.¹ I contend here that Calvinists for their own part must give account for the similarity of their view of the Covenant of Works to the Pelagian view on nature and grace in the original state of man.

Historically, the charge of semi-Pelagianism against the Catholic doctrine of justification is difficult to support, given the Church’s prior condemnation of both Pelagian and semi-Pelagian theologies. The Second Synod of Orange, which was approved by Pope Boniface II in A.D. 531, stated the following:

If anyone contends that God waits for our decision to cleanse us from sin and does not confess that the bestowal of the Spirit and his action in us moves us to will to be cleansed, he opposes this Holy Spirit who says through Solomon, ‘The will is prepared by the Lord’ [Prov. 8:35 LXX], and the salutary preaching of the Apostle, ‘It is God who works in you both to will and to accomplish for good will.’ [Phil. 2:13] (Canon 4)

And Canon 18 of that same Council reads:

No merits precede grace. Rewards are due for good works if they are performed; grace, which is not owed, precedes so that they will be performed.

So much for the accusation of semi-Pelagianism.

I instead propose instead that Calvinism is closer than Catholicism to the teachings of Pelagius with respect to the fundamental relationship of man to God in the primitive state. Through the doctrine of the Covenant of Works, as articulated in the Westminster Confession of Faith, the Reformed tradition approaches Pelagius’ conflation of nature and grace before the Fall of Adam and Eve.

To see why this is the case, we first have to understand what constitutes salvation. From the Church Fathers’ reflection on biblical revelation, the Church has taught that the beatitude of heaven consists in the immediate vision of God. In other words, the reason why people are eternally happy in heaven is because they will see God “face to face;” they see God as He is and as He sees Himself. This theme runs throughout the entire narrative of Sacred Scripture, from Moses’ desire to see God’s face (of course not referring to a corporeal visage) to St. John’s promise that “when [Jesus] shall have appeared, we shall be like Him, because we shall see Him as He is.” (1 John 3:2) St. Augustine comments on this verse, connecting it to the beatific vision:

Thus do the holy angels see already, who are also called our angels. . . . Just as they see, so too shall we see; but we do not see thus. That is why the Apostle says what I repeated just above, “Now we see obscurely by a mirror, but then face to face.” This vision is reserved as a reward, certainly, for our faith; and of it also the Apostle John speaks: “When He shall have appeared,” he says, “we shall be like Him, because we shall see Him as He is.”²

What was at stake in the Pelagian controversy was more than just whether man needs grace after the Fall to obtain this vision of God. What is often missed in the controversy is an additional element, namely, whether man needed grace even in the Garden to obtain eternal blessedness.³ The Second Synod of Orange says in its nineteenth canon:

No one is saved without God’s mercy. Human nature, even had it remained in the integrity in which it was created, could by no means have saved itself without the assistance of its creator. Thus, since without God’s grace it could not retain the salvation it had received, without God’s grace how will it be able to gain the salvation it has lost?

By contrast, Pelagius had asserted that after the initial ‘grace’ of creation, Adam and Eve could merit eternal life by their own natural effort.⁴ In opposing Pelagius’ denial of man’s need for God’s grace to obtain salvation, the Augustinian theologians posited the necessity of infused grace for man’s salvation before the Fall.

St. Augustine teaches that if man were to love God above all things and for God’s own sake, he needed the grace of supernatural charity implanted in his heart.⁵ With infused charity, man is elevated from mere creatureliness to become a son of God, capable of loving God with filial piety.⁶ The Church eventually formally defined this Augustinian teaching of the priority and necessity of grace for salvation both before and after the Fall into sin.⁷

Now the theological standard for conservative Presbyterian denominations in America is the Westminster Confession and its attendant catechisms. Within the document is a section describing the “Covenant of Works,” a late Calvinist doctrine explaining how our first parents were to inherit eternal life. As Reformed theologian Louis Berkhof explains, if the gap between God and his creatures is infinite, there is no possibility for a creature to merit anything with respect to God.⁸ The Covenant of Works doctrine seeks to solve this problem by positing an extrinsic arrangement whereby God promises eternal life to Adam and his descendants upon Adam’s perfect obedience (WCF, ch. 7, sec. 2). Without such an arrangement, man could in nowise merit eternal life from God.

The parallel between this doctrine and Pelagianism is that Reformed theologians who accept the Covenant of Works tradition ascribe to Adam and Eve a natural righteousness and a natural power by which they were to keep the Covenant of Works. These theologians deny the Catholic doctrine that the first couple needed a supernatural charity infused into their souls to make their wills proportional to the supernatural end of the vision of God. Berkhof is explicit here: “[Man] was by nature endowed with that original righteousness which is the crowning glory of the image of God.”⁹ Thus, for Calvinists with allegiances to Westminster, the Covenant of Works doctrine implicates them in a basic Pelagian view of salvation in the original state of man.

Some Calvinists might think such a characterization is unfair, especially since any covenant between God and man contains an element of gracious condescension, as noted by Berkhof and taught by the Westminster Confession.¹⁰ Therefore, even the Covenant of Works was ‘gracious’ in that the arrangement was made by God’s condescension to man. However, the problem with this objection is that Pelagius also left room for extrinsic ‘graces’ in his scheme. For Pelagius, ‘grace’ was either the gift of initial creation of man (especially man’s faculties of intellect and will)¹¹ or the ‘grace’ of ‘the law and the teaching’ which would help mankind to salvation by making it easier for him to do what he nevertheless could do by his own power of free will.¹² No one denies that man’s creation is totally gratuitous, so this cannot be the controversial doctrine. More germane is the notion that something merely extrinsic to man can be the ‘grace’ needed for salvation, such as a covenant or a law. In limiting grace to merely extrinsic things, Pelagius could still hold that man by his own power is able to obey perfectly and thereby merit eternal blessedness. The same obtains for the idea of the Covenant of Works as articulated by the Westminster Assembly: such a covenant would only add an extrinsic ‘gracious’ arrangement to man’s natural state. It would not actually elevate man such that his actions could have a salutary quality in the supernatural realm.

In contrast, Catholic theology understands that in order for Adam to merit the reward of the beatific vision, the relationship between Adam and God in the Garden had to be one of divine sonship. Not only were Adam and Eve given the gift of existence as human beings with a rational nature, they were also given something gratuitous in addition to their existence and nature, namely, sanctifying grace and charity. By the gifts of sanctifying grace and charity they were more than just God’s creatures; they were God’s children, adopted and destined for no mere imperfect creaturely happiness. In addition to this, God gave them actual grace to incline their wills to choose the good, namely Himself. God created them for a supernatural end, namely, to see His own essence and to share in the eternal blessedness of the Holy Trinity, to fulfill a destiny fitting for children of God. This is why they needed something in addition to mere human nature, so that they could become partakers of the divine one (2 Peter 1:4).

1. Semi-Pelagianism is the notion that man, by his natural desire and free will alone, is able to begin to turn to God, who then responds by giving grace to increase man’s faith and elevate man by making him a partaker of the divine nature. See the Catholic Encyclopedia article on Semi-Pelagianism.
2. St. Augustine, City of God, 22, 29, 1.
3. Regarding this grace that Adam and Eve had before the Fall, St. Augustine wrote:

   The former immortality man lost through the exercise of his free-will; the latter he shall obtain through grace, whereas, if he had not sinned, he should have obtained it by desert. Even in that case, however, there could have been no merit without grace; because, although the mere exercise of man’s free-will was sufficient to bring in sin, his free-will would not have sufficed for his maintenance in righteousness, unless God had assisted it by imparting a portion of His unchangeable goodness. Just as it is in man’s power to die whenever he will (for, not to speak of other means, any one can put an end to himself by simple abstinence from food), but the mere will cannot preserve life in the absence of food and the other means of life; so man in paradise was able of his mere will, simply by abandoning righteousness, to destroy himself; but to have maintained a life of righteousness would have been too much for his will, unless it had been sustained by the Creator’s power. … We are to understand, then, that man’s good deserts are themselves the gift of God, so that when these obtain the recompense of eternal life, it is simply grace given for grace. Man, therefore, was thus made upright that, though unable to remain in his uprightness without divine help, he could of his own mere will depart from it. (Enchiridion, 106-107.)

   Elsewhere he wrote:

   When, indeed, Adam sinned by not obeying God, then his body — although it was a natural and mortal body — lost the grace whereby it used in every part of it to be obedient to the soul. (On Merit and the Forgiveness of Sins, Book 1, 21.)

4. St. Augustine writes:

   “For this, too, the Pelagians have been bold enough to aver, that grace is the nature in which we were created, so as to possess a rational mind, by which we are enabled to understand — formed as we are in the image of God, so as to have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that creeps upon the earth.” (On Grace and Free Will, 25.)

   In contrast to Pelagius’s position, St. Augustine argued:

   The first man had not that grace by which he should never will to be evil; but assuredly he had that in which if he willed to abide he would never be evil, and without which, moreover, he could not by free will be good, but which, nevertheless, by free will he could forsake. God, therefore, did not will even him to be without His grace, which He left in his free will; because free will is sufficient for evil, but is too little for good, unless it is aided by Omnipotent Good. And if that man had not forsaken that assistance of his free will, he would always have been good; but he forsook it, and he was forsaken. Because such was the nature of the aid, that he could forsake it when he would, and that he could continue in it if he would; but not such that it could be brought about that he would. This first is the grace which was given to the first Adam. (On Rebuke and Grace, 31.)

5. Cf. Romans 5:5.
6. St. Augustine says of Adam and Eve, “as soon as they disobeyed the Divine command, and forfeited Divine grace, they were ashamed of their nakedness.” (City of God, 13, 13.
7. See Session V of the Council of Trent. See also St. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica, I Q.95 a.1.
8. Louis Berkhof, Systematic Theology, p. 215 ff.
9. Systematic Theology, p. 209. If by “naturally righteous” it is meant that Adam was in right covenantal relationship to God because through sanctifying grace he was participating in the divine nature “by nature,” then he would in this sense be divine by nature, i.e. by participating in the divine nature. To have the beatific vision is to share in God’s own happiness in knowing Himself. This is due only to God. Without grace Adam could only have had a righteousness that was proportional to human nature. In such a hypothetical state of “pure nature” it would have been possible to have a righteousness that was purely natural, i.e. a justice in regard to God that was proportionate to human nature, and not supernatural (i.e. a righteousness that transcends human nature simply speaking — cf. St. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica I-II q. 109, a.2). That being said, this natural righteousness would not be meritorious for supernatural beatitude, so it is unclear to me how Reformed theologians like Berkhof could maintain the above idea.
10. Ch. 7, sec. 1.
11. cf. Augustine, On Nature and Grace, ch. 59
12. Cf. St. Augustine, On the Grace of Christ and on Original Sin Bk. 1, ch. 45. The Catholic Encyclopedia article on ‘Actual Grace‘ states:

    Pelagius and his disciple Caelestius, who found an active associate in the skillful and learned Bishop Julian of Eclanum, admitted from the beginning the improper creative grace, later also a merely external supernatural grace, such as the Bible and the example of Christ.

I have to confess when I was PCA I embraced this view of Calvin but when Father put it that way I had never thought of it that way before either. That being said, is not Calvin’s view strangely similar to the Jewish opponents of John the Baptist, who warned the Pharisees, “do not presume to say to yourselves, `We have Abraham as our father’; for I tell you, God is able from these stones to raise up children to Abraham” (Matt 3:9)? Is not the appeal of Calvin an appeal to natural generation as the means to covenant participation and salvation? Lest anyone think Calvin did not have in mind salvation he wrote this, “Our children, before they are born, God declares that he adopts for his own when he promises that he will be a God to us, and to our seed after us. In this promise their salvation is included.”²

Is Calvin’s view similar to those who claimed natural lineage to Abraham as their means for being sharers of salvation? What say you?

1. Institutes Book IV 15:22
2. Ibid. IV 15:20

The book begins with an event in which I encountered a Jewish Rabbi while I was still an Episcopalian priest. This encounter led me to explore Catholicism more deeply. Ultimately, it ended in my conversion to the Catholic Church. The bulk of the book demonstrates how only Catholic Christianity can truly fulfill Old Testament expectations of the Messiah and His Kingdom.

If I could give you one simple reason why should purchase the book, it would be that the appendix includes an extremely helpful list of over three hundred (300!) Old Testament prophecies that were fulfilled by Jesus Christ – this list even includes prophecies from the Deuterocanonical books that Protestants don’t accept (e.g. Wisdom). This is a great resource to have on your bookshelf.

Here’s a short video to give you the gist of the The Crucified Rabbi:

Please visit the book’s profile on amazon.com for more details.

Here’s the Table of Contents:

How I Discovered the Jewish Origins of Catholicism 1

Introduction 11
Does the Pope Wear a Yarmulke? 11
Is Catholicism Anti-Semitic? 13
The Philo-Semitism of Pope John Paul II 16
Rabbi Israel Eugenio Zolli – The Catholic Rabbi 18

1. Jewish Messiah, Catholic Christ 23
What is Messianic Prophecy? 24
The Old Covenant “Proto-Gospel” 25
Specific Messianic Prophecies Fulfilled by Christ 28

2. Jewish Kingdom, Catholic Church 39
Mary as the Queen Mother of Jerusalem 40
The Pope as the King’s Royal Steward 42
Were Jewish Expectations Left Unfulfilled? 45
Messianic Judaism 51
What about the Accusation of Supersessionism? 52

3. Jewish Tevilah, Catholic Baptism 57
John the Baptist and the Tevilah 59
Baptism, the Tevilah of Conversion 61
Is Baptism a Ceremonial Washing? 63
Catholic Baptism as the Tevilah for Original Sin 64

4. Jewish Passover, Catholic Mass 67
The Passover Meal 68
But Why the Mass? 70
What is Manna? 71
The Bread of Life, the Eucharist 73
“Who can listen to it?” 76

5. Jewish Kohenim, Catholic Priests 79
The Firstborn Priesthood before the Law of Moses 80
The Levitical Priesthood in the Law of Moses 82
Christ the High Priest 87
The Order of Melchizedek 88
The Catholic Priesthood of the New Covenant 91
Priestly Celibacy 94
Is the Pope a High Priest? 95

6. Jewish Vestments, Catholic Vestments 99
Cosmic Clothing 101
Old Covenant Vestments 103
New Covenant Vestments 105
Description of Catholic Vestments 107
Catholic Choir Dress 109

7. Jewish Temple, Catholic Cathedral 113
The Garden of Eden as Archetype 114
Temple Cosmology—Creation and Worship 115
Blueprints of the Old Covenant Tabernacle 116
The Tabernacle Becomes the Temple 117
The New Covenant and the End of the Temple 118
Birth of the Catholic Cathedral 119

8. Jewish Synagogue, Catholic Parish 123
Structure of the Synagogue 125
Structure of the Catholic Parish 126

9. Jewish Nazirites, Catholic Monastics 131
The Nazirite Vow 132
Christian Monasticism 133
Liturgy of the Hours and Jewish Prayer 135
Was Jesus a Nazirite? 138

10. Jewish Marriage, Catholic Marriage 141
First Step: Betrothal 143
Second Step: The Marriage Proper 144
The Catholic Marriage as a Sacrament 146
Valid Marriages 147
A Brief Word on Annulments 148

11. Jewish Holy Days, Catholic Holy Days 153
Passover and the Feast of Unleavened Bread 155
Feast of Pentecost 157
New Year’s Day 157
Day of Atonement 158
Feast of Tabernacles 160
Two Additional Holy Days – Purim and Hanukkah 163

12. Jewish Tzaddikim, Catholic Saints 167
The Maccabean Martyrs 168
Heavenly Intercession of the Saints 173
A Hero of the Holocaust—Saint Maximilian Kolbe 174
The Nun of Auschwitz—Saint Teresa Benedicta 175

13. Jewish Afterlife, Catholic Afterlife 179
The Resurrection of the Body 180
Religion of Now or Later? 183
Heaven and Hell, Eden and Gehenna 184
The Harrowing of Hell and the Hope of Heaven 186
Catholic Heaven 189

Epilogue: Pray for the Peace of Jerusalem 193

Appendix: Over 300 Prophecies Fulfilled by Jesus Christ 195
Bibliography 203
Index 209

If you want more details, please visit my site: www.crucifiedrabbi.com

Thanks again to my friends at Called to Communion for allowing me to make a shameless plug. Please read the book and please share your thoughts. I hope you enjoy it at least half as much as I enjoyed writing it!

Yours in Christ,

Taylor Marshall

The great biblical scholar, David Noel Freedman (d. 2008), recognized that Scott Hahn’s Kinship by Covenant “adapts Dual Covenant Hypothesis: namely, the apparent contradiction between God’s covenant with Abraham and the covenant with Moses on Sinai” (book’s preface). Hahn reassesses how the New Covenant authors contrast the various covenants established at Moriah (Abraham and Isaac), Sinai (Law), Moab (Deuteronomy), and Zion/Moriah (New Covenant). Accordingly, the New Covenant does not “supercede” the Mosaic Law–rather the New Covenant, in a sense, “precedes” the Mosaic Covenant by a return to and expansion of the covenant made with Abraham.

Hahn shows appreciation for E.P. Sanders’ scholarship regarding covenantal nomism, but he also supplies a subtle criticism of Sanders for not maintaining the “tensions and discontinuity” between Scripture’s covenantal relationships (pp. 239-41). Kinship by Covenant also complements the work of N.T. Wright by showing how the Deuteronomic curses relate to the magnanimous conditions of the New Covenant (p. 252 ff).

Hahn expands the work of covenantal scholars Meredith Kline (Reformed) and D.J. McCarthy (Catholic), by demonstrating that the divine economy often begins with a Kinship Covenant (divine promises), moves to a Treaty Covenant (divine law), and then ends in a Grant Covenant (divine oath). This pattern can be mapped as “Adam as created” > “Adam being tested (and failing)” > “Adam receiving promise of redemption” (Gen 3:15). With regard to Abraham, the pattern is Gen 15 (kinship) > Gen 17 (probation) > Gen 22 (grant oath). If we apply it to salvation history: Abraham > Moses > Christ. This pattern follows the natural unfolding of human life that begins with childhood (kinship), moves into adolescence (probation-law), and finally the reception of the father’s promise (inheritance-oath-grant).

In sum, Hahn demonstrates that covenantal realism leads to a soteriology based on the divine Sonship of Christ, hence the book’s emphasis on Luke 22, Galatians 3-4, and Hebrews. By emphasizing the familial dimension of law and covenant, Hahn establishes the Catholic conviction that a strictly forensic depiction of justification falls short of the language of Scripture. Moreover, the social/familial aspect of salvation highlights the role of the Church as a soteriological category–something that recent Protestant scholarship is beginning to realize.

Kinship by Covenant brings together so many biblical concepts that one finishes the book with two new conclusions: First, Sacred Scripture is much more inner-connected than we previously assumed. Secondly, many of our biblical “gut intuitions” have been confirmed by Hahn’s insightful account of covenantal realism.

Reading Kinship by Covenant was very much like reading N.T. Wright’s Resurrection of the Son of God. Each is thick and takes time to consume–but that is also true of a fine steak. Kinship by Covenant leaves you wanting more: “Oh no! There are only 50 pages left!”

We at Called to Communion are producing a comprehensive case, one step at a time, for the unique identification of God’s people with the Catholic Church in communion with the See of St. Peter.   At this early stage in the discussion, we have reached a critical point where we would like to pause and reflect for a moment.  What follows is a brief re-cap of our arguments:

We started by showing that, given important qualifications, certain true principles of the Reformation are found in Catholic theology:

1. Catholic theology does not detract glory due to God and therefore the principle of Soli Deo Gloria, with qualifications, is part of Catholic doctrine.
2. Catholic soteriology insists on salvation by grace alone and therefore Sola Gratia is found in the Catholic Church.

Next we shifted our attention to the critical questions regarding God’s people which this blog post is presently discussing:

1. God’s salvific covenant is fulfilled in and through the Catholic Church.
2. Christ founded a visible Church.

The last mark is where we have reached the critical point of discussion.  To supplement this argument, I have personally argued that the ecclesiology of the early Church cannot be reconciled with an essentially invisible Church and later that our ecclesiology must be informed and centered around the doctrine of the Incarnation.  Bryan Cross briefly argued the Catholic Case for ecclesial authority, and Dr. Neal Judisch discussed Luther on the identify of the Church as existing wherever the true gospel is preached.

In the next several days, we will publish our final argument, for the near future, demonstrating that the Church is (A) Visible, (B) Indefectibly United, and (C) a Hierarchical Continuum.  Although A, B, and C entail the antithesis of every common Protestant ecclesiological system, we have not yet demonstrated the fullness of the Catholic ecclesiology (e.g. infallibility, necessity of union with the See of Peter).  That is to say, while even the ecclesiology of Federal Vision would fall short of A, B, and C, we need much more discussion before we can say that we’ve sufficiently argued the Catholic case.

Kingdom

Objections to co-identifying the Kingdom and Church together spring, no doubt, from a purely eschatological rendering of “Kingdom.”  It was always referred to eschatologically by Christ because while He was among us, it had not yet been fully manifested.  But in the Church we do indeed see the “beginning of the Kingdom” because it is “already present in mystery” through her.¹ Now there is certainly an eschatological dimension of the Church as the Bride of Christ while she awaits her final purification for the Bridegroom, but nevertheless she retains her identity as Bride of Christ and mystically the Body of Christ right now as she sojourns this earth as the Church Militant.  For this reason, eschatological renderings of the Kingdom should not hinder our appreciation of the Kingdom of God as mystically present in the Catholic Church. The Catholic Church is the Kingdom, in its present stage.

If this is so, and Christ Himself is the founder of the Kingdom, then the phrase “hierarchical continuum”, as applied to the Church, is supremely applicable. She is, as all Kingdoms are, a hierarchy and she shall continue in perpetuity.  The objections to this phrase are raised for reasons parallel to the Gnostic agenda – as the gospel made Christ too mundane, so this conception of Kingdom makes the Church hierarchy too mundane.  The kingdom, in their mind, is too involved in the space-time continuum; or more likely, involved in too dangerous of a way.

Those who would attack the Catholic Church are quite sure that she is one and the same, and therefore retains the ‘guilt’, as the aggressor in the Crusades and the Inquisition, but they are equally as certain that she is not the same, existing in continuity, as the Church who called the council of Nicaea and yet cannot offer a principled reason for this distinction.

As for the hierarchy: the individual Christian is directly connected to Christ spiritually, but sacramentally, he is connected to Christ only as a foot is connected to the head (through the hierarchy of the body) and not directly.  The believer cannot bypass the hierarchy of the Church in his connection to Christ any more than a foot can bypass the hierarchy of the body in its connection to the head.  It has been demonstrated here and in the links above, that Christ indeed founded a hierarchy which continues in perpetuity – one which cannot be broken and cannot, without penalty, be disobeyed.

Church & Communion

The divinely revealed marital analogy between Christ and the Church is helpful for developing a proper ecclesiolgy.  The Church must be one because, as Dr. Peter Kreeft says, when Christ returns for His bride, He shall not be found a polygamist.² Unity is one of the four marks of the Church which we confess in the Nicene Creed.   The Apostles’ Creed also offers a helpful and trustworthy insight into identifying the true Church.  As the Apostle’s Creed shows, Christians have always confessed faith in “the Holy Catholic Church” and in the “Communion of Saints” as explicitly distinct concepts.

The very ordering of these phrases suggests not merely an explicit distinction, but also a certain procession.  We believe in the Church first because it is she who gave birth to the saints.  But Protestant ecclesiology regularly confuses the Church with the Communion of Saints and this is a discontinuum of the orthodox Christian faith.

After this final case regarding the Catholic ecclesiology, which will be published shortly, we shall turn our focus to the authority of the Scriptures.  We spoke of the Church first because it is she who holds them in her bosom and has delivered them faithfully to her children.  But before we discuss the authority of the Scriptures, we must agree on the ecclesiological foundation of our faith.

1. CCC 669.
2. http://www.peterkreeft.com/audio/03_ecumenism/ecumenism_transcription.htm

All mankind is of one author and is one volume; when one man dies, one chapter is not torn out of the book, but translated into a better language; and every chapter must be so translated. . . . As therefore the bell that rings a sermon calls not upon the preacher only, but upon the congregation to come, so this bell calls us all; but how much more me, who am brought so near the door by this sickness. . . . No man is an island, entire of itself . . . [a]ny man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind; and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.¹

These familiar words have been echoed by many souls in their own ways but, despite unique flairs and lilts, they challenge us all to escape a world of isolation. For my part, a childhood spent in agnosticism brought my teenage mind away from a world where I would live and die with no connection to the rest of the world, to faith in a God who loved me and gave Himself for me. In accepting Christ as my savior at a nondenominational evangelical congregation at the age of fifteen, there was an end to a world where I viewed myself as ultimately alone. Exiled from my deepest sentiments that we are not floating islands, the world of only greys and no contrast was despairing, and a relationship with the God of the universe seemed to be the panacea for the basic questions about the meaning of life.

In coming to Christ through evangelicalism, there was a strong sense of this relationship with God. But as time passed, new islands of isolation emerged. It seemed that as much as we had fellowship groups and the like, my faith was just that: mine, with no linkages to another’s. It was all about me and Jesus. And knowing my frailties, this was not something I could count upon. Even if I were more of a steadfast believer, other implications of this “me and Jesus” mentality troubled me. My children, as yet unborn, would have been viewed as largely disconnected from me in matters of faith. One practical consequence of this is that baptism would not be bestowed on them until the point where they had made their own individual profession of faith, and it seemed preferable if said profession came after some traumatic stage of rebellion. Even the basic eschatological structure of dispensational premillenialism had a world where the Church Age was hermetically sealed from that age of Adam, as was the age of Noah, and David, and perhaps others depending on one’s affinity to C.I. Scofield, or lack thereof.

And so it was that after 6 years of wrestling with evangelicalism, I wandered into the world of Reformed Presbyterian Christianity. What I found there was refreshing–in its view of the Covenant. In fact, the grandeur of its view of the Covenant was such that while having philosophical objections to Calvinism’s view of primary and secondary causes, I was excited enough about Covenant theology to become a member of a congregation before settling those matters about free will and the like. The mere fact that we were called to be members was enthralling to me, as my former spiritual home would make the absence of membership a mark of the purity of the faith. I realized that to say truly that no man is an island, we needed accountability–we needed the Covenant.

But that is enough autobiographical thought for one article that is meant to be more of an argument than a narrative.

This article will first describe the grandeur of Covenant theology as it is embraced and explained by those Protestant Reformers and their successors. It will then compare this view with the Catholic understanding of the Covenant. Lastly, it will offer a critique of the Reformed stance of the Covenant, and leave the floor open for a discussion of whether the Church that Christ established is ultimately visible and traceable. This will serve as the focus of our next article on Called to Communion. For now, let us consider what can be said of the Covenant between our great God and man.

I would like to begin this investigation of Covenant theology by citing a document loved (to my knowledge at least) by all Presbyterians. The Westminster Confession of Faith states in precise terms that God’s Covenant is not to be changed in its essence as time passes. Instead, from Adam to the present day, there is a commonality of God’s grace being at the heart of it all. And at that heart there is also a grace which has grown in salvation history. Chapter VII of the Westminster Confession, on “God’s Covenant with Man,” states:

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

2. The first covenant made with man was a covenant of works, wherein life was promised to Adam; and in him to his posterity, upon condition of perfect and personal obedience.

3. Man, by his fall, having made himself incapable of life by that covenant, the Lord was pleased to make a second, commonly called the covenant of grace; wherein He freely offereth unto sinners life and salvation by Jesus Christ; requiring of them faith in Him, that they may be saved, and promising to give unto all those that are ordained unto eternal life His Holy Spirit, to make them willing, and able to believe.

4. This covenant of grace is frequently set forth in Scripture by the name of a testament, in reference to the death of Jesus Christ the Testator, and to the everlasting inheritance, with all things belonging to it, therein bequeathed.

5. This covenant was differently administered in the time of the law, and in the time of the gospel: under the law it was administered by promises, prophecies, sacrifices, circumcision, the paschal lamb, and other types and ordinances delivered to the people of the Jews, all foresignifying Christ to come; which were, for that time, sufficient and efficacious, through the operation of the Spirit, to instruct and build up the elect in faith in the promised Messiah, by whom they had full remission of sins, and eternal salvation; and is called the old Testament.

6. Under the gospel, when Christ, the substance, was exhibited, the ordinances in which this covenant is dispensed are the preaching of the Word, and the administration of the sacraments of Baptism and the Lord’s Supper: which, though fewer in number, and administered with more simplicity, and less outward glory, yet, in them, it is held forth in more fullness, evidence, and spiritual efficacy, to all nations, both Jews and Gentiles; and is called the new Testament. There are not therefore two covenants of grace, differing in substance, but one and the same, under various dispensations.²

Here in the Westminster Confession we have the outline of Covenant theology in distilled form. Unlike other theological schools such as dispensationalism or Schweitzer’s notion of a god whose Covenant evolved with himself, in Covenant theology there is an emphasis on a unity which pervades the history of salvation. Moses did not teach a works-based religion that contrasts with the grace of the gospel; instead, to a Covenant theologian, grace was and is ever-present.

The great 19th century systematic theologian of Princeton University, Charles Hodge, clarified that while there is a fundamental unity of essence in the Covenant of God, there is still a uniqueness to the dispensation of grace after Christ’s death and resurrection, as compared to the time before Our Lord’s incarnation.

Hodge writes as follows:

The gospel dispensation is called new in reference to the Mosaic economy, which was old, and about to vanish away. It is distinguished from the old economy, —

1. In being catholic, confined to no one people, but designed and adapted to all nations and to all classes of men.

2. It is more spiritual, not only in that the types and ceremonies of the Old Testament are done away, but also in that the revelation itself is more inward and spiritual. What was then made known objectively, is now, to a greater extent, written on the heart. (Heb. viii. 8-11.) It is incomparably more clear and explicit in its teachings.

4. It is more purely evangelical. Even the New Testament, as we have seen, contains a legal element, it reveals the law still as a covenant of works binding on those who reject the gospel; but in the New Testament the gospel greatly predominates over the law. Whereas, under the Old Testament, the law predominated over the gospel.

5. The Christian economy is specially the dispensation of the Spirit. The great blessing promised of old, as consequent on the coming of Christ, was the effusion of the Spirit on all flesh, i.e., on all nations and on all classes of men. This was so distinguishing a characteristic of the Messianic period that the evangelist says, “The Holy Ghost was not yet given, because that Jesus was not yet glorified.” (John vii. 39.) Our Lord promised that after his death and ascension He would send the Comforter, the Spirit of truth, to abide with his people, to guide them into the knowledge of the truth, and to convince the world of sin, of righteousness, and of judgment to come. He charged the Apostles to remain at Jerusalem until they had received this power from on high. And in explanation of the events of the day of Pentecost, the Apostle Peter said, “This Jesus hath God raised up, whereof we all are witnesses. Therefore being by the right hand of God exalted, and having received of the Father the promise of the Holy Ghost, he hath shed forth this, which ye now see and hear.” (Acts ii. 32, 33.)

6. The old dispensation was temporary and preparatory; the new is permanent and final. In sending forth his disciples to preach the gospel, and in promising them the gift of the Spirit, He assured them that He would be with them in that work unto the end of the world. This dispensation is, therefore, the last before the restoration of all things; the last, that is, designed for the conversion of men and the ingathering of the elect. Afterwards comes the end; the resurrection and the final judgment. In the Old Testament there are frequent intimations of another and a better economy, to which the Mosaic institutions were merely preparatory. But we have no intimation in Scripture that the dispensation of the Spirit is to give way for a new and better dispensation for the conversion of the nations. When the gospel is fully preached, then comes the end.³

Here the increase of grace that came through Christ is shown to be more quantitative than qualitative. More grace is now given to more people in a deeper manner. Christ’s sacrifice was foreshadowed in the Old Covenant, and the way we live today has a connection to the way people have always lived throughout history. As such, when one who loves Covenant Theology considers the older dispensation, the fact that circumcision was performed upon an “unwilling” baby leads the mind to have no qualms with the idea of baptism being given to the Covenant children of believing parents. And it would appear that the Apostle Paul argues in a similar fashion when he states:

In him you were also circumcised with a circumcision not administered by hand, by stripping off the carnal body, with the circumcision of Christ. You were buried with him in baptism, in which you were also raised with him through faith in the power of God, who raised him from the dead. ⁴

Going to other words of Scripture, we find, if anything, even more reasons to be excited about God’s Covenant. Not only is the Covenant chronologically new, it is something which enters one’s heart more deeply, and will lead to a state where “all” shall know the Lord. As the years pass, mankind’s grasp of the goodness of God is to grow in its extent and depth. Depending on one’s eschatological school, this could mean several things at several times and locations, but the general sketch is the same. Scripture states:

But he finds fault with them and says: “Behold, the days are coming, says the Lord, when I will conclude a new covenant with the house of Israel and the house of Judah.
It will not be like the covenant I made with their fathers the day I took them by the hand to lead them forth from the land of Egypt; for they did not stand by my covenant and I ignored them, says the Lord.
But this is the covenant I will establish with the house of Israel after those days, says the Lord: I will put my laws in their minds and I will write them upon their hearts. I will be their God, and they shall be my people.
And they shall not teach, each one his fellow citizen and kinsman, saying, ‘Know the Lord,’ for all shall know me, from least to greatest.
For I will forgive their evildoing and remember their sins no more.”
When he speaks of a “new” covenant, he declares the first one obsolete. And what has become obsolete and has grown old is close to disappearing. ⁵

The glory of the Covenant inspired a sense of awe and wonder in the great Reformed writers. What Christ established is not only greater than the Old Covenant, it is more permanent. Not only is it more permanent, the sense we have is that the Covenant will be even more broad in the extent of its being followed. Jonathan Edwards, while congregationalist in his ecclesiology, grasped this when he wrote in A History of Redemption:

We may observe its continuance, signified here by two expressions; for ever, and from generation to generation. The latter seems to be explanatory of the former. The phrase for ever, is variously used in Scripture. Sometimes thereby is meant as long as a man lives. It is said, that the servant who had his ear bored through with an awl to the door of his master should be his for ever. Sometimes thereby is meant during the continuance of the Jewish state. Of many of the ceremonial and Levitical laws it is said, that they should be statutes for ever. Sometimes it means as long as the world shall stand, or to the end of the generations of men. Thus, Eccles. i. 4. “One generation passeth away, and another cometh; but the earth abideth for ever.” Sometimes thereby is meant to all eternity. So it is said, “God is blessed for ever,” Rom. i. 25. And so it is said, John vi. 51. “If any man eat of this bread, he shall live for ever.“—And which of these senses is here to be understood, the next words determine, viz. to the end of the world, or to the end of the generations of men. It is said in the next words, “and my salvation from generation to generation.“ Isa li. 8. Indeed the fruits of God’s salvation shall remain after the end of the world, as appears in “Lift up your eyes to the heavens, and look upon the earth beneath: for the heavens shall vanish away like smoke, and the earth shall wax old like a garment, and they that dwell therein shall die in like manner, but my salvation shall be for ever, and my righteousness shall not be abolished.” Isa li. 6. But the work of salvation itself toward the church shall continue to be wrought till then: till the end of the world God will go on to accomplish deliverance and salvation for the church, from all her enemies; for that is what the prophet is here speaking of. Till the end of the world; till her enemies cease to be, as to any power to molest the church. And this expression from generation to generation, may determine us as to the time which God continues to carry on the work of salvation for his church, both with respect to the beginning and end. It is from generation to generation, i. e. throughout all generations; beginning with the generations of men on the earth, and not ending till these generations end. ⁶

The Covenant was established by Christ, and it will never end as long as people exist. Through every generation, He has been faithful to us. The Church will be delivered from all of her enemies. His Covenant is more stable than the material universe, because his work of salvation for the Church is a more important work than the work of creation itself. In a later part of the same work, Edwards appears to grow in boldness and amazement of God’s Covenant, when he writes:

III. Another great design of God in the work of redemption, was to gather together in one all things in Christ, in heaven and in earth, i. e. all elect creatures; to bring all elect creatures, in heaven and in earth, to an union one to another in one body, under one head, and to unite all together in one body to God the Father. This was begun soon after the fall, and is carried on through all ages, and shall be finished at the end of the world.

IV. God designed by this work to perfect and complete the glory of all the elect by Christ—glory, “such as eye hath not seen, nor ear heard, nor has ever entered into the heart of man.” 1 Cor ii. 9 He intended to bring them to perfect excellency and beauty in his holy image, which is the proper beauty of spiritual beings; and to advance them to a glorious degree of honour, and raise them to an ineffable height of pleasure and joy. Thus he designed to glorify the whole church of elect men in soul and body, and with them to bring the glory of the elect angels to its highest elevation under one head.

V. In all this God designed to accomplish the glory of the blessed Trinity in an eminent degree. God had a design of glorifying himself from eternity; yea, to glorify each person in the Godhead. The end must be considered as first in order of nature, and then the means; and therefore we must conceive, that God having professed this end, had then as it were the means to choose; and the principal mean that he adopted was this great work of redemption. It was his design in this work to glorify his only-begotten Son, Jesus Christ; and by the Son to glorify the Father: John xiii. 31, 32. “Now is the Son of man glorified, and God is glorified in him. If God be glorified in him, God also shall glorify him in himself, and shall straightway glorify him.” It was his design that the Son should thus be glorified, and should glorify the Father by what should be accomplished by the Spirit to the glory of the Spirit, that the whole Trinity, conjunctly, and each person singly, might be exceedingly glorified. The work that was the appointed means of this, was begun immediately after the fall, and is carried on till, and finished at, the end of the world, when all this intended glory shall be fully accomplished in all things.⁷

God’s great work of redemption entailed this majestic Covenant–what a joy and hope for the history of the world! The ruin of the fall is to be restored through God’s Covenant with man, all to the praise and glory of the Holy Trinity! It is hard to stay calm while reading these words of Edwards.

To read these and similar words about the Covenant as a Christian struggling with evangelicalism made so much sense out of life on a conceptual level. This is not meant to be a polemic for the postmillenial mindset, which was held by Jonathan Edwards. The Reformed world is indeed mostly amillenial today, and there are those stalwart premillenialist brethren who also inhabit the Reformed trenches. But what should be kept in our consideration is that this is the Reformed view of the Covenant, irrespective of millenial particulars. As we keep this in mind, the question arises: how does the Catholic Church view the Covenant?

This question needs to be answered through a historical analysis, as well as by looking at what the Catholic Church teaches on the Covenant. Historian Jaroslav Pelikan, writing as a Lutheran (but who lived the last eight years of his life Eastern Orthodox), wrote clearly about the various views on the Covenant.

What the first generation of New Englanders had held,” together with their Puritan colleagues in old England, was a system that came to be called “covenant theology” or federal theology. Yet it is important to remember that the theme of “covenant” was one that Roman Catholic theologians also found useful; and before it became the watchword of a theology that was somehow set against Calvinism, the covenant of grace, and God’s declared ends in the appointment and constitution of things in that covenant was, for orthodox Calvinism as it was to be again for Edwards, an authentic way of describing the will of God for the world, a way that took its place within the context of the doctrine of election in the total body of Reformed teaching.⁸

The Reformed view of the Covenant has its own parallels and uniqueness among Roman Catholic theologians? It was useful to them? But wasn’t their faith one of empty rituals? Wasn’t the claim of Rome that we must work our way to God? I asked myself these kinds of questions when I first took the claims of Rome seriously. To get beyond the Reformed attacks on Rome, one must turn to a primary source, and not to caricatures or emphases upon those poor examples who admittedly tarnished the Church’s reputation. Let’s read from Article I of the Catechism of the Catholic Church, on the Revelation of God, for guidance on the Catholic Church’s stance.

I. GOD REVEALS HIS “PLAN OF LOVING GOODNESS”

51. “It pleased God, in his goodness and wisdom, to reveal himself and to make known the mystery of his will. His will was that men should have access to the Father, through Christ, the Word made flesh, in the Holy Spirit, and thus become sharers in the divine nature.”

52. God, who “dwells in unapproachable light”, wants to communicate his own divine life to the men he freely created, in order to adopt them as his sons in his only-begotten Son. By revealing himself God wishes to make them capable of responding to him, and of knowing him and of loving him far beyond their own natural capacity.

53. The divine plan of Revelation is realized simultaneously “by deeds and words which are intrinsically bound up with each other” and shed light on each another. It involves a specific divine pedagogy: God communicates himself to man gradually. He prepares him to welcome by stages the supernatural Revelation that is to culminate in the person and mission of the incarnate Word, Jesus Christ.

St. Irenaeus of Lyons repeatedly speaks of this divine pedagogy using the image of God and man becoming accustomed to one another: The Word of God dwelt in man and became the Son of man in order to accustom man to perceive God and to accustom God to dwell in man, according to the Father’s pleasure.

II. THE STAGES OF REVELATION
In the beginning God makes himself known

54. “God, who creates and conserves all things by his Word, provides men with constant evidence of himself in created realities. And furthermore, wishing to open up the way to heavenly salvation–he manifested himself to our first parents from the very beginning.” He invited them to intimate communion with himself and clothed them with resplendent grace and justice.

55. This revelation was not broken off by our first parents’ sin. “After the fall, [God] buoyed them up with the hope of salvation, by promising redemption; and he has never ceased to show his solicitude for the human race. For he wishes to give eternal life to all those who seek salvation by patience in well-doing.”

Even when he disobeyed you and lost your friendship you did not abandon him to the power of death. . . Again and again you offered a covenant to man.⁹

Later in the catechism, we read this statement on the culmination of the Covenant.

III. CHRIST JESUS — “MEDIATOR AND FULLNESS OF ALL REVELATION”

God has said everything in his Word

65. “In many and various ways God spoke of old to our fathers by the prophets, but in these last days he has spoken to us by a Son.” Christ, the Son of God made man, is the Father’s one, perfect and unsurpassable Word. In him he has said everything; there will be no other word than this one. St. John of the Cross, among others, commented strikingly on Hebrews 1:1-2:

In giving us his Son, his only Word (for he possesses no other), he spoke everything to us at once in this sole Word–and he has no more to say. . . because what he spoke before to the prophets in parts, he has now spoken all at once by giving us the All Who is His Son. Any person questioning God or desiring some vision or revelation would be guilty not only of foolish behavior but also of offending him, by not fixing his eyes entirely upon Christ and by living with the desire for some other novelty.

There will be no further Revelation

66. “The Christian economy, therefore, since it is the new and definitive Covenant, will never pass away; and no new public revelation is to be expected before the glorious manifestation of our Lord Jesus Christ.” Yet even if Revelation is already complete, it has not been made completely explicit; it remains for Christian faith gradually to grasp its full significance over the course of the centuries.¹⁰

In considering the Catechism of the Catholic Church, there are, of course, differences between it and my former stance as a Reformed believer. The same could be said, however, about a comparison between my particular views on the Covenant versus the views of Jonathan Edwards, Charles Hodge, John Calvin, or the Westminster divines. What is crucial to keep in mind is that the concept of Covenant has the same fundamental importance to Catholics, and it has the same view of the source of all blessings–our Blessed Lord. Indeed, there is a place for the Catholic to show his love and appreciation for God’s Covenant, and this can be held in unison with one’s consideration of the past, present, and future of the Church. Despite our wanderings and failings as people, God’s faithfulness in the Covenant is unending and undeniable. For the Catholic, there is an unending chain of believers throughout all of Church history, and there are successors to the Apostles in this New Covenant era, just as Joshua succeeded Moses in the Old Covenant times.

But what of the Reformed view of its historical predecessor, from which the protests of the Protestant Reformation are made? How, according to the Reformers, does the Covenant actually exist or subsist in Catholicism, if at all? To answer this question, consider these words of John Calvin, from his Institutes of the Christian Religion:

Whoever will duly examine and weigh the whole form of ecclesiastical government as now existing in the Papacy, will find that there is no kind of spoliation in which robbers act more licentiously, without law or measure. Certainly all things are so unlike, nay, so opposed to the institution of Christ, have so degenerated from the ancient customs and practices of the Church, are so repugnant to nature and reason, that a greater injury cannot be done to Christ than to use his name in defending this disorderly rule. We (say they) are the pillars of the Church, the priests of religion, the vicegerents of Christ, the heads of the faithful, because the apostolic authority has come to us by succession. As if they were speaking to stocks, they perpetually plume themselves on these absurdities. Whenever they make such boasts, I, in my turn, will ask, What have they in common with the apostles? We are not now treating of some hereditary honour which can come to men while they are asleep, but of the office of preaching, which they so greatly shun. In like manner, when we maintain that their kingdom is the tyranny of Antichrist, they immediately object that their venerable hierarchy has often been extolled by great and holy men, as if the holy fathers, when they commended the ecclesiastical hierarchy or spiritual government handed down to them by the apostles, ever dreamed of that shapeless and dreary chaos where bishoprics are held for the most part by ignorant asses, who do not even know the first and ordinary rudiments of the faith, or occasionally by boys who have just left their nurse; or if any are more learned (this, however, is a rare case), they regard the episcopal office as nothing else than a title of magnificence and splendour; where the rectors of churches no more think of feeding the flock than a cobbler does of ploughing, where all things are so confounded by a confusion worse than that of Babel, that no genuine trace of paternal government is any longer to be seen.¹¹

Despite the greatness of the Covenant, it is clear that the 16th century Catholic Church was not a partaker of this greatness, in the mind of Calvin at least. He considered the practices of the Church of his day to be opposed to the heart of the Covenant which inspired the martyrs whose blood was the seed of the Church’s growth, and the Apostles who are Her foundation. It was this striking conflict between a high view of the Covenant that spoke so deeply of the riches of Christ and His Church, and the words of Calvin and others, that led me to wonder about how Covenant theology could be held by one who essentially thought that the Covenant faltered to the point of being unrecognizable, to the point where the Church needed to be re-formed by Luther, Calvin and others.

The words of Scripture that inspired Jonathan Edwards and the like to say that Christ would save men through all time from generation to generation seem not to cover the notion that Christ’s Church would persist through all time, if we are to take Calvin at his word. It reminded me of another man’s struggle with Christianity, written in the United States almost 200 years ago. He wrote as follows:

My mind at times was greatly excited, the cry and tumult were so great and incessant. The Presbyterians were most decided against the Baptists and Methodists, and used all the powers of both reason and sophistry to prove their errors, or, at least, to make the people think they were in error. On the other hand, the Baptists and Methodists in their turn were equally zealous in endeavoring to establish their own tenets and disprove all others.

In the midst of this war of words and tumult of opinions, I often said to myself: What is to be done? Who of all these parties are right; or, are they all wrong together? If any one of them be right, which is it, and how shall I know it? . . . I was answered that I must join none of them, for they were all wrong; and the Personage who addressed me said that all their creeds were an abomination in his sight; that those professors were all corrupt; that: “they draw near to me with their lips, but their hearts are far from me, they teach for doctrines the commandments of men, having a form of godliness, but they deny the power thereof.”¹²

Of course, the one speaking in this instance was not a Reformed scholar. He was definitely not an advocate of Covenant theology. Instead, these words were written by Joseph Smith, founder of Mormonism, writing in the autobiographical document known as the History of Joseph Smith.

It is undeniable that Smith’s view of the Church (and the Covenant undergirding it) becoming so corrupt fewer than 300 years after the Reformation is remarkably similar to Luther’s and Calvin’s view of the Church roughly 1500 years after Her birth. The idea that there was no place to go to worship God would mean that whatever the Covenant accomplishes, it does not provide us with a sure grasp of how or where to worship. Because this view is rejected by Catholics, it would seem that Catholicism actually has a higher view of the Covenant. In fact, when the data of Scripture are compared to history, the Catholic can say something that cannot be said by the Reformed person (or the Mormon)–the Covenant is so powerful that the Church will not be lost in the passage of time. The “Dark Ages,” with all of their flaws, were not ages without the Covenant. The 16th century was not an age in which “no genuine trace of paternal government” could be found, as Calvin said in the quotation above. Instead, to the Catholic, the words of Hebrews have a tangible application to all of history– “And they shall not teach, each one his fellow citizen and kinsman, saying, ‘Know the Lord,’ for all shall know me, from least to greatest. For I will forgive their evildoing and remember their sins no more.¹³

Of course, objections will arise: perhaps the Covenant was never meant to be manifested in a visible kingdom? Perhaps there were only a very small minority who believed as Calvin did in the 1500 or so years prior to the Reformation? Is this talk of the Covenant and the Catholic Church all Pollyanna-esque thinking? To answer these questions rightly, we need to consider whether the Church is ultimately both visible and invisible, or whether the Church is merely ultimately invisible. This will be the focus of my next article on Called to Communion.

1. John Donne, Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions, Meditation XVII (1624).
2. Westminster Confession of Faith, ch. VII.
3. Charles Hodge, Systematic Theology, 3.2.7 (1873).
4. Colossians 2:11-12.
5. Hebrews 8:8-13.
6. Jonathan Edwards, The History of the Work of Redemption, available here.
7. Id.
8. Jaroslav Pelikan, The Christian Tradition: A History of the Development of Doctrine, vol. 4, 240 (1985) (quotations omitted).
9. Catechism of the Catholic Church (CCC) (footnotes omitted).
10. Id. (footnotes omitted).
11. John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, 4.5.13.
12. Joseph Smith, History of Joseph Smith, available here.
13. Hebrews 8:11-12.

17th century Calvinism became increasingly focused on predestination and “eternal decrees” – much more so than John Calvin himself had been. I think it is safe to say that Calvin presented soteriology in a more Christological way than his later followers. Later Calvinism pushed the locus of salvation out of history and into the Godhead. This also led to a fully articulated doctrine of limited atonement (i.e. that Christ’s atoning death was only accomplished for the elect and not all mankind). This “decretal” perspective also diminished the role of the sacraments in the Calvinistic tradition. Unconcerned with questions about predestination, Lutheranism was disinterested or hostile to growing influence of covenantal theology in continential Calvinism. By the 17th century, covenant or federal theology was being called the “marrow of theology” by Reformed theologians.

The Federal Theology of Cocceius
The focus on salvation arising from eternal decrees and not from redemptive history led to the development of a late medieval notion of the pactum. Dutch Calvinist theologian John Cocceius taught that God the Father and God the Son entered into a eternal pactum by which Christ agreed to be testator of an eternal testamentum. History is thus divided into two covenantal eras: the covenant of works (foedus operum) and the covenant of grace (foedus gratiae). The covenant of works is the time before the Fall of Adam. The covenant of grace is the era of redemption in which the eternal pactum is anticipated by the Old Testament and executed in history by Christ.

The Federal Theology of Amyraut
Moses Amyraut (father of Amyraldianism or what is called “four point Calvinism”) was also a Dutch Calvinist of the 17th century. He put forth a competing covenant theology that was also triplex. However, Amyraut put forth three historical covenants corresponding to redemptive history. This model is historical, less esoteric, and more Catholic. He posited the foedus naturale (from Adam to Moses), the foedus legale (from Moses to Christ), and the foedus gratiae (from Christ forward). Anyone familiar with Thomas Aquinas’ treatment of the law will notice that this basically follows the triplex model of Thomas: Natural Law, Old Law, New Law.

It was however the model of Cocceius that won the day. The covenant theology of Cocceius was enshrined in the Westminster Confession of Faith as the Covenant of Redemption (pactum salutis), the Covenant of Works (foedus operum), and the Covenant of Grace (foedus gratiae).

What Does This Mean for Catholic Theology?
Nothing really. However, we can see in these models a failure to appreciate the ecclesial and familial language of Sacred Scripture. Covenantal theology of 17th century Calvinism is heavily contractual. Calvinists rightly gravitated toward the biblical model of the covenant but they filled it with their forensic presuppositions of extrinsic righteousness and legal, courtroom imagery. The Catholic Church, while not possessing an advanced “covenant theology”, has maintained the substance of what a covenant is – a unitive bond that creates a real ontological or familial union between God and man and man and man.

Taylor Marshall also writes at his personal blog Canterbury Tales.