REFORMED WITNESS
Volume XVI, June 2010, Number 6
Our Viewpoint - Part I
Chapter 3 of the book, Sin and Grace
By Henry Danhof and Herman Hoeksema
Instead of offering a solution to the question which Dr. Kuyper presented to us, we shall try to develop briefly our own viewpoint.
The Organism of the Creation
It should be understood at the very outset that we must think of the development of created things in an organic way, all individual creatures together form one organic whole. God not only makes the entire human race out of one blood, but He binds all creatures together in one whole. This must be understood in such a way that the central point of the life of the creation lies in the heart of man. It is obviously true that the angels are also independent, spiritual-moral creatures who are able to make choices, but this does not give them control in the creation. The creation itself grows worse as man becomes more sinful, because it finds its touchstone in man. Man is not only a microcosm, a miniature world; he is also prophet, priest and king. He causes every creature to know God's will. He dedicates the creation to the Creator. In his relationship to every creature, he exercises God's authority, and according to the choice of his own free will, he performs the basic purpose of God's will for him. In short, man is God's covenant friend-servant.
This is also the meaning of our Confession (of Faith), where Article 12 speaks of the creation of all things:
We believe that the Father, by the Word, that is, by his Son, hath created of nothing the heaven, the earth, and all creatures as it seemed good unto him, giving unto every creature its being, shape, form, and several offices to serve its Creator; that He doth also still uphold and govern them by His eternal providence, and infinite power, for the service of mankind, to the end that man may serve his God.
According to this article all creatures serve their Creator with their gifts, powers and offices, yet always through man. That is still the purpose of God. God upholds and rules all creatures by His eternal providence and infinite power for the same purpose. All creatures must serve man so that man may serve his God. All things are still bound to that requirement. God still upholds and rules according to the counsel of His providence in order that every creature is able to answer to its calling in its own God-ordained place in the organic unity of all things.
That is precisely our viewpoint. We are of the opinion that each creature is able to attain to the full realization of the original purpose of God in creation, which is its own eternal blessedness. It attains this purpose in its organic interdependence under the uninterrupted control of God's power, which entirely apart from any consideration of sin, upholds, works through, and rules all things. This is the organic idea.
The Effect of Sin
It must, however, be immediately added that in this view of things, sin did not introduce an essential change. The life that was in man's heart was turned around to its opposite in the spiritual-moral sense of the word. God's covenant friend became Satan's covenant friend, but this did not touch the essence of things. Sin did not remove the creation, nor did it destroy the original unity of the creation. God continued to work in all creatures by His infinite power and according to the counsel of His providence. Even the formal, covenant life of the sinner still shows its beginning, essential nature and original destiny.
Yet man's nature is corrupt, acts negatively, and works wrongly. The final result is that the material and spiritual-moral fruit of the life of the creation has become the opposite of what it ought to be, according to God's original creation ordinance.
Nevertheless, the unity of the life of the creation remains untouched. This can be more clearly seen if one of the basic errors upon which the theory of common grace builds its assertions is exposed. It is well understood that the essence of man as such is not affected by sin, and that man, in spite of sin, remains a man. But what is overlooked is the fact that the same thing was true of all that existed, and it is true of the essential and organic relation of things. The changes which sin brought about are never changes in the essence. They are always of a spiritual-ethical nature.
The same is the case when we consider the change brought about through the power of the grace of God in the final spiritual-ethical fruit produced in and by the organic life of the creation. If God destroys the enmity in a man's heart and once again works friendship with God, but does not perform this work of grace in all spiritual-moral creatures, then the antithesis is the result. The life of sin continues to develop in opposition to the life which rises out of the root of regeneration. But even this antithesis does not destroy the original organic unity of things. What happens in life is not the creation of a dualism. Two halves do not emerge from the original unified organism. But the spiritual-moral antithesis of light and darkness, of grace and sin, of life and death, of heaven and hell, comes into existence. All things continue to develop according to their own natures and in an underlying organic relationship to each other, but they develop out of the principles of sin and grace, and in the eternal, spiritual-ethical antithesis of friendship with God on the one hand, and enmity towards the God of the covenant on the other.
Just as sin does not affect the essence of things, so grace does not affect the essence of creatures. Nor does sin affect the original relationships and divine ordinances of creation, but it does affect the spiritual-ethical character of man's deeds. The organic unity of the life of the creation is never elevated, nor is it pulled apart into pieces. It is maintained in spite of everything. The spiritual-ethical character of the fruit of the development of the organic life of the creation is determined by sin and grace.
This truth has an important result. The result is not that eternity will present to us the perfect realization of the original purpose of the creation, but that eternity will reveal the one fulfillment of the counsel of God concerning all the works of His hands. It is precisely the antithetical fruit of the organic development of the life of all created things which shall reveal that God does all His good pleasure.
God's Purpose in Christ
We are determined to maintain this organic and unifying idea of the development of the life of all created things.
First of all then, it seems to us that we can, by taking this viewpoint, understand the revealed mysteries of God's will, determined eternally in Himself according to His own good pleasure, "that in the dispensation of the fulness of times he might gather together in one all things in Christ, both which are in heaven, and which are on earth," both visible and invisible things (Ephesians 1:10; Colossians 1:15-20). God has not only made the entire human race of one blood, but all creatures are united. Paul's words in Acts 17:28 are not only true of men, but apply to all creatures in their basic, mutual relationships and communion of life: In God we live and move and have our being.
When, therefore, Adam sinned in paradise, the fruit of sin was not limited to man, but along with sin in the heart of man, death and the curse came into the creation. On account of man, as cause, or at least in connection with his sin, God cursed the earth. The entire creation was subjected to vanity, not willingly, but by reason of Him who has subjected the same in hope. This subjection took place in the hope that the creature itself also would be freed from the bondage of corruption into the glorious liberty of the children of God. The creation sighs as one in travail. It cannot develop normally according to its original creation-life. The original creation-life is lost. Everything is filled with and geared for strife. A terrible wrestling takes place between two spiritual powers. God and Satan enter the arena against each other. The struggle is over man and his world. It is in man and through man. Ultimately it is a struggle for man's love, a love which comes from his heart.
Everything takes part in that struggle. The earth bears the burden of the Lord's curse. The animals adjust themselves for a while to the service of corruption. The angels, as willing spirits, go out from the face of God in the service of those who are the heirs of salvation. The dragon and his angels also fight with Michael and his angels, and an ages-long battle over the covenant of God goes on between the holy seed and the people of the world.
Meanwhile, Jehovah the Lord of hosts makes all things subject to His purpose and puts them in the service of the salvation of His chosen people and the coming of the kingdom of the Son of His love. He rides on a cherub, makes the heavens drip, divides the sea, and turns the Jordan back again. Fire, hail, stormy wind, darkness, lightning, drought, heat, cold, sun, moon and stars, the heaven and the earth: all are His servants and do His will. He kills His enemies with the sword, with hunger, with pestilence, and with wild beasts. At the same time He creates Adam's offspring. He sends His Son into the world. He gathers His elect church through His Spirit and Word out of every tribe, language, people, and nation.
This all has a place in the work of organic development. Events in the world follow the line of the organic development of the seed of the woman. According to the requirements of this development, God reveals to us His salvation, creates the Holy Scriptures, realizes His covenant, permits His Word to become flesh, and through His Holy Spirit He enables His people to walk in the world, making confession of His name.
The world power also develops organically. It affects, with a certain human power, all tongues, peoples, and world kingdoms until finally Antichrist comes. At last the opposing powers of Gog and Magog lift up their cry against Zion: "Let her be profaned." That all this certainly happens is especially evident from the fact that already at the beginning of history God proclaimed the end. He did not only make known to Israel its future, but even Nebuchadnezzar saw before his very eyes in his image the entire progress and final destiny of the ungodly kingdom of men. The development of all this occupies the whole of this earthly history. God fills up the measure of time. He is very patient with the development of both the good and the evil. Good and bad grow together to the end of the world, according to the parable of the tares of the field. All the historical development of the kingdom of God here on earth is compared to growing seed. When judgment is given in the great day of the Lord, Christ shall send His sickle on the earth to cut and gather the wheat harvest and the grape harvest, and then, when all this has happened, God shall gather together in Christ all things both in heaven and on earth, both visible and invisible. Nothing shall be left out which is not subjected to Christ, except God Himself. Included are all the fruits of all the world's events. All created things develop in an underlying organic unity in the way of an appalling conflict in order that the covenant of the friendship of our God may be realized through the antithesis of love and of wrath.
The Dualism of Common Grace
It is a riddle to us how anyone who has such an understanding of Holy Scripture still dares to maintain an individualistic and particularistic doctrine of predestination and a realization of the original plan of creation through common grace. And yet that is precisely the difference between Bavinck and Kuyper and us. We want an organic development of all things. They, however, limit God's eternal predestination to a determination of the eternal destiny of rational and moral creatures, and they permit the organic unity of the creation to develop according to God's purpose in a good way through common grace. They end with a dualism, we want to maintain a unity. We are agreed that our fathers saw predestination almost exclusively as particularistic. But we want the eternal character of eternal foreordination to be understood correctly as a part of the will of God, which includes the whole organism of created things. They on the other hand, at least in a relative sense, continue to speak of predestination as the eternal intention of God concerning the lot of rational, moral creatures only. Then, naturally, if they inquire further about the life of other creatures, they must ask different questions about the will of God.
It is true that they find the answers to their questions in God's counsel. They admit that the purpose of the life of all creatures is indeed the honor of God. But that life, though proceeding from one source, goes in two directions. The mistake is that in this way the idea of the honor of God is actually without any content, because they place the life of the creation outside the foreordination of the life of rational and moral creatures. So they make a division between that which we insist must be as closely united as possible. That is in fact the one difference between us. In order to make this point as clearly as possible, we will make use of a series of quotations.
The following quotation is from Bavinck: [1]
This is the case if one wants to solve successfully the problem of supra- vs. infra-lapsarianism and still do justice to the variety of statements in Scripture. For one thing, both sides have solved the problem only by making themselves guilty of one-sidedness. It is not right, as so many have said, to describe the supreme end of all things as the revelation of God's mercy in the elect and God's righteousness in the reprobate. It is certainly true that the glory of God and the manifestation of his perfections are the purpose of all things. But the double state of salvation and misery is not to be understood as if its proper relation is that of the one serving as the means to the other. It cannot be demonstrated at all that, if God's glory is indeed the purpose of all things, the consequence must be this double state of being. Indeed, God performs his works ad extra [outside his own being] in such a way, that He cannot do anything else but seek the honor of his own name. But that God seeks the honor of his own name in this way and in no other way depends exclusively on his own free purpose.
Apart from that, however, it is also not true that God's righteousness is revealed only in the misery of the reprobate and his mercy only in the salvation of the elect. Also in heaven his righteousness and holiness shine, and also in hell there is still something of his mercy and compassion.
In the second place, it is incorrect to make the misery of the lost the goal of predestination. It is true that sin can not be reduced to a nuda praescientia en permissio Dei [a bare foreknowledge and permission of God]. The fall, sin and everlasting punishment are included in the determination of God, and in a certain sense they are willed by God. But this is true only in a certain sense and not in the same way as grace and salvation. God finds pleasure in grace and salvation, but his desire and joy are not sin and punishment. When God makes sin serve his glory, He does this through his omnipotence, but it is contrary to his nature, and when He punishes the wicked, He does not rejoice in their suffering itself, but He celebrates the triumph of his virtues (Deuteronomy 28:63; Psalm 2:4; Proverbs 1:26; Lamentations 3:33).
In the third place there is another equally important reason why praedestinatio ad mortem aeternam [predestination to eternal death] may not be made coordinate with, and may not in the same way, be made the purpose of praedestinatio ad vitam aeterram [predestination to eternal life]. The object of election is not merely individual people, as with reprobation, but in election the human race with its new Head (Christ) is the object. Thus, through grace, not only are some individuals preserved, but also the human race itself with the entire cosmos is preserved. In this preservation of the human race and the entire cosmos, God does not reveal only a few of his attributes, so that an eternal destruction is necessary to reveal his righteousness; but all the perfections and attributes of God are unfolded in the completed kingdom of God: his righteousness and his grace, his holiness and his love, his sovereignty and his mercy. This status gloriae [state of glory] is the only direct purpose that God attains with his creation, though that purpose be subordinate to the glory of his name.
In the fourth place, both supra- and infra-lapsarianism err in that they make all that precedes God's final purpose the means in a mutually subordinate relation. It is true that these means are subordinate to God's final purpose, but not to each other. Creation is not a means for the fall, nor the fall a means for grace and perseverance. Nor do all of these serve as means for salvation and misery. It is sometimes thought that the decrees of God are as equally rich in content as the history of the world, for this latter is the unfolding of the former. Who is in a position to put the history of this world together in a logical scheme of a few ideas? Creation, sin, Christ, faith, unbelief, and so forth are certainly not in a relation in which one serves as means to another, so that the earlier event falls away, as it were, when what follows is completed. They are not mutually subordinate, but also coordinate - as Twisse [2] taught earlier. Creation truly did not have its place only so that the fall could happen, but it gave to the world a certain character that will also continue in the state of glory. The fall did not only happen so that there would be a creatura miserabilis [a miserable creature], but it has significance for all the consequences which come from it. Christ has not only become Mediator in order to accomplish what was necessary for atonement of sin, but God has also ordained Him to be Head of the church. The entire history of the world is not a means that falls away when God's purpose is achieved, but history continues to operate and produce fruit for eternity. Election and reprobation do not take place here on earth as two straight lines alongside each other, but in unbelievers is to be found a great deal that does not come from reprobation, and much is present in believers which does not have election to thank for its presence in them.
On the one hand, we find among men both sin and sin's works of mercy and righteousness (Romans 9:15, Ephesians 1:4); on the other hand, both are also deeds of divine power and sovereignty (Romans 9:11,17,21). In the same way Adam before the fall was already a type of Christ (1 Corinthians 15:47), and yet the incarnation always finds its necessity in Scripture in the fall of the human race (Hebrews 2:14). Sometimes Scripture speaks so strongly that reprobation is completely coordinate with election, and everlasting punishment is described as a purpose equally important to God as everlasting blessedness (Luke 2:34; John 3:19-21; 1 Peter 2:7,8; Romans 9:17,18,22, and others). But sometimes morn aeterna [everlasting death] completely disappears in the description of the future: the final purpose of all things will be the triumph of the kingdom of God, the new heavens and the new earth, the new Jerusalem, where God shall be all in all (1 Corinthians 15; Revelation 21,22). All is subordinate to the church, just as the church is to Christ (1 Cor. 3:21-23). Reprobation is entirely subordinate to election.
Therefore, finally neither the supra- nor the infra-lapsarian presentation of predestination is able to express the full and rich truth of Scripture and to satisfy our theological thinking. The truth in supra-lapsarianism is that all the decrees constitute a unity; that there is a final purpose to which everything is subordinate and which everything serves to attain; that sin did not come into the world apart from God's thought and in a way unexpected by Him, but that it is, in a certain sense, willed and determined by Him; that creation is from the beginning formed for the re-creation of all things, and that it was before the fall reckoned as Christ's through Adam.
But the truth in infra-lapsarianism is that the decrees, although one, are also distinct from each other when considering their object; that not only a theological but also a causal order in the decrees must be noticed; that creation and the fall do not have their only purpose in serving as means to a final purpose; that sin is above all and in the first place a disturbance of the creation and that it can never be willed by God for its own sake.
In general, the formula that the final purpose of all things is the revelation of God's righteousness in reprobation and the revelation of his mercy in election is too one-sided and sober. The status gloriae shall be indescribably rich and glorious. We expect a new heaven and a new earth, a new humanity, a re-created creation, a continuous development which shall never be disturbed by sin, and to that end creation and the fall, Adam and Christ, nature and grace, faith and unbelief, election and reprobation, work together and each in its own way, not only after but also alongside of and with each other.
Yes, the present world with its history is also, by itself, already a continuous revelation of God's virtues. It is not only the means for a higher and richer revelation which comes in the future, but it has worth and value in itself. It is not only a means to attain the higher and richer revelation which shall come; it has importance in its own right. It continues to operate even in the future dispensation, and it shall produce continuous benefits to the new humanity for the worship and glory of God.
Therefore, there is not only a causal and a teleological, but also an organic order in the decrees of God just as there is in the facts of world history. We can only, with our limitations, see things either from the one viewpoint or the other, so that on the one hand the advocates of a causal conception and, on the other hand the advocates of a teleological world-and-life-view are at every point opposed to each other. But it is entirely different with God. He oversees everything. Everything is eternally present in his consciousness. His counsel is a unified conception, and in that counsel every distinct decree stands in the same relationships in which the facts of history, considered aposteriori [after the fact], appear only partially to us and shall be seen fully only later. This relationship is so rich and complicated that it cannot be described in one word such as infra- or supra-lapsarianism. It is both causal and teleological. That which has already taken place works on that which follows, but the future is already fixed in the past and in the present. There is a rich, many-sided wechselwirkung [interaction].
Predestination, in the usual sense of the word, is a fore-determination of the eternal state of rational creatures and of the means to that state. But it is not the one, all-embracing and all-inclusive decree of God. It is an important part of the counsel of God, but it is not an integral part of that counsel. The counsel of God is the chief idea, because it is the all-inclusive idea. It includes everything without exception: heaven and earth, spirit and matter, visible and invisible things, lifeless and living creatures. It is the one will of God for the whole cosmos, past, present, and future. But predestination deals with the eternal state of rational creatures and the means which attain that state. But one cannot fit under those means everything that is and happens in the world. Therefore, providence must be discussed separately from the decree of God, though not divorced from predestination.
Much more than formerly, common grace has properly been given its rightful place in the counsel of God, and it has been given its own proper worth. In one word the counsel of God and the history of the world, which answers to it, is not to be described exclusively as one straight line with various other lines before and after which are related as cause and effect, means and purpose, as infra- and supra-lapsarianism want to describe it. But they are a whole, in which things stand, alongside each other and work with each other towards what always was and is and shall be the deepest ground of all things that exist, the glory of God.
Just as in an organism all the members are dependent on each other and in turn influence each other, so the world is an artistic production of God in which all things are bound together in organic relationships, and the counsel of God is the eternal idea of that world both in its length and in its breadth.
We are not going to raise a lot of objections to this view. It is, for example, very strange that Bavinck sees operations of some aspects of God's mercy and compassion even in hell. Kuyper as well as Hepp wanted nothing of this. With respect to this point, neither Rev. Tuuk nor Rev. Manni can appeal to Bavinck in support of their sentiments. [3]
It sounds still stranger to us that Bavinck contends that we expect a new heaven and a new earth, a new humanity, a re-created world, a continuous development without sin and without death. And that to this end, creation and the fall, Adam and Christ, nature and grace, faith and unbelief, election and reprobation, work together and each in its own way, not alone but also cooperating alongside each other.
We cannot form in the light of Scripture any plausible conception of such a view. Apart from the fact that this reasoning (which joins nature and grace) rests in part on a false antithesis, it also joins the things which, following God's Word, cancel and exclude each other, as faith and unbelief, and this reasoning permits things to stand alongside of each other, things which, according to revelation, follow upon each other, such 'as Adam and Christ. With the coming of Christ, Adam disappears. It is indeed true that this representative of men and all those included in him lie in the midst of death apart from redemption. It is also true that Adam in the earthly life, which he possessed, was the image of God in heaven and possessed a life of glory. Yet that in no way suggests that he could remain such alongside of and outside of Christ. The Scriptures know nothing of this. Whatever is and remains outside of Christ goes lost, and the entire creation as a unity is ushered into blessed glory.
The Scriptures know only one organic unity of things which, however, develops out of the spiritual-moral principles of sin and grace as cause. It develops in an eternal, antithetical fellowship with the Creator, of love and hate, life and death. It is impossible for Bavinck to arrive at such an organic conception of things on the basis of his viewpoint. He ends up with a conglomeration of things and not an organic unity. The individual creatures and groups of creatures surely are related according to God's counsel and have their life and existence for the honor of God. In Bavinck's conception, however, they do not develop out of one common life-principle. That is also our chief objection. Bavinck, just as our fathers, applies predestination and the means of it to the everlasting state of rational creatures. But he denies that everything that is in the world and happens in the world can be included under these means. He does not connect all things to man, as Article 12 of our Confession does.
Whatever, according to Bavinck, cannot be included under those means, and therefore, cannot be connected to man, he allows to develop according to God's counsel and for God's honor all right, but he does not join the two in an organic relationship. In his world-view he does not have a truly organic unity. According to him, all things are surely to be included in the idea of the counsel of God, and the honor of God is the purpose of everything, but the counsel and honor of God remain empty ideas. He clearly fails to explain how the counsel of God is realized, or could possibly be realized, in the way of the development of all things to God's honor. In fact, Bavinck really makes that impossible by separating a part of what happens in the world from the everlasting destination of man. The relation, then, in every case is not organic, but mechanical, and he fails to give an explanation of all things. Bavinck is willing to make a broad place for his treatment of the counsel of God only in connection with so-called common grace. Obviously, therefore, what is in the world and what happens in the world are not related to the spiritual-moral development of the rational creature, according to eternal predestination. The things in the world and the things that happen must develop according to God's counsel and to God's honor through common grace.
This creates a breach in the organic unity of the life of creation and does not succeed in solving any difficulties. Bavinck stays hanging in the one-sided, faulty conception of the fathers concerning the theological idea of eternal, divine predestination. He does not carry through the biblical idea of the will of God. What Bavinck fails to understand concerning predestination and the counsel of God with respect to all things is bound up in God's Word in such words as will, counsel, foreknowledge, and foreordination. But Bavinck, like Kuyper, wants a one-sided separate cosmic development of the creation through common grace, which development is neither rational, spiritual, nor normal. Bavinck appeals in support of his opinion to Kuyper. Therefore, we now give a quotation from Kuyper through Bavinck. [4]
The question of infra- and supra- is a very weighty question, but the way in which it was explained neither helped nor led to a solution. Each one who considered this question from man's perspective, had to take election, as did Walaeus, [5] as an election out of the fallen human race. On the other hand, he who considered the matter from God's perspective understood the matter of election, as Gomarus [6] did, as a decision taken before the foundations of the world that included the creation ordinance. All the controversy which raged between parties over this question did not bring the church one step closer to a realization of the simple fact that both parties were proceeding from opposite standpoints. The one side stood foursquare on the ground; the other looked at the difference from the top of the mountains. So neither one could understand the other. It is, therefore, absurd to say that one theologian in our time is a "before-the-fall proponent," while over against him is to be placed an "after-the-fall proponent." [7] This is simply unthinkable, because this profound question has taken on an entirely different form in our day.
Further, in the same work [8] Dr. Kuyper asks the question whether our Reformed dogmatics are not in a one-sided way in conflict with Holy Scripture, because foreordination has been considered almost exclusively as a decree of God concerning the eternal well-being and eternal woe of his rational creatures. He answers this question thus:
In earlier times theologians, although properly placing man in the foreground of the decree, yet applied the decree in a one-sided way to men and angels. Thus, they lost from sight the overall creation of God and made no use of common grace in the development of the doctrine of predestination. [9]
We have repeatedly seen how Kuyper allows the creation after the fall to continue to exist and to develop cosmically through common grace. We have also seen how he makes provision for the working of particular grace in election to eternal life. In Bavinck and Kuyper, even though there are some slight differences, we meet with the same duality in the life of the creation in its mutual relationships. They have discovered that the fathers (also the ones at Dordt) considered saving grace in an individualistic and particularistic way. This discovery agrees with our opinion, which we expressed earlier. The fathers at Dordt spoke of a certain crowd of people which God had from eternity elected unto eternal life and a reprobation of the rest unto eternal death. Now Bavinck and Kuyper want to retain this imperfect theological development of the doctrine of eternal predestination, even though they could have known that the fathers in no sense wanted to maintain election and reprobation in a particularistic way. But the fathers could not express the doctrine differently over against the Remonstrants, because the Remonstrants denied personal predestination. The fathers set over against this view the idea of a will of God included in the counsel, which concerned the rational-moral creature, but they did not establish a truly organic connection between these two parts of God's will. They did not agree with Article 12 of our Confession of Faith, [10] which connects all things to man as means in the eternal predestination of God. Some things they separated from the "all things" of Article 12. They say these things exist and develop in a cosmic development, according to God's counsel and to God's honor, through common grace.
This latter is inadequate, however, as is the whole conception. No attempt was made to understand the opinion of the fathers in the context of their practical handling of the Arminian error and to relate this opinion organically to the truth - which runs through the entire Confession of Faith; or if not to understand, at least to correct it.
On the other hand, theologians have connected these ideas to such things as 'natural light, remnants, and civil righteousness: things which Pelagians and Remonstrants had pushed to the foreground, but which had not been completely thought out by our fathers, nor carefully defined. Over against these theologians, we want to push into the foreground the organic character of divine predestination. This is after all in harmony with the positive line of thought in the fathers, and it is clearly perceptible in our confessions. All things are related to each other, and especially to man as the head, and thus are to be considered as an organic unity.
It is also true in a relative way that a distinction must be made between God's counsel in the broadest sense of the word, and predestination with particular application to rational-moral creatures. But that idea does not negate the fact that God's counsel must be thought of as including all created things in their underlying relationships. It is against the background of that real and actual object, that God, according to the counsel of His will and in incomprehensible ways, loves and is filled with wrath, elects and reprobates, blesses and curses.
Nor must we think of a second line, parallel to this purpose of God, which is for example the line of man's accountability. This is what some propose. God's will and man's accountability do not run parallel to each other. God deals with man in organic relation to all things, so that man acts with a will and with accountability before God. That is, neither one can be denied, but both are to be maintained in agreement with each other.
Footnotes
- Bavinck, Gereformeerde Dogmatiek,
vol. 2, 404-410.
[return to article] - William Twisse, who died in 1646,
was an early Scottish supralapsarian theologian.
[return to article] - Dr. Valentine Hepp was a professor
in the Free University, Amsterdam. Rev. Edward J. Tuuk, a CRC minister
and Janssen supporter, wrote against Herman Hoeksema and Henry Danhof
at the time of the controversy over common grace. Rev. J. Manni was
also a CRC minister who opposed Herman Hoeksema and even filed a protest
against him, which was treated by the Synod of 1924. Rev. Manni had
earlier served with Rev. Hoeksema on the committee that investigated
the teachings of Dr. Ralph Janssen.
[return to article] - The quotation is from Kuyper's DGG,
vol. 2, 95, 96.
[return to article] - Antonius Walaeus was a Dutch Reformed
theologian and professor at Middelburg who was present at the Synod
of Dordt and served on the committee which drew up the concept Canons.
[return to article] - Franciscus Gomarus was a Dutch Reformed
theologian, a professor at Leiden, and a delegate to the Synod of Dordt.
Gomarus represented the supralapsarian position.
[return to article] - "Before the fall" and "after the
fall" are literal translations of the terms supralapsarian and infralapsarian.
[return to article] - Kuyper, DGG, vol. 2, 91-93
[return to article] - See Bavinck, Gereformeerde Dogmatiek,
vol. 2, 407. Kuyper is being quoted by Bavinck.
[return to article] - The meaning is not that the fathers
at Dordt disagreed with Article 12, but that they did not include in
the Canons the organic conception expressed in Article 12.
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The Reformed Witness newsletter is published monthly under the auspices of the Evangelism Committee of the Hope Protestant Reformed Church of Redlands. This newsletter is available to anyone who is interested in the Reformed Faith. If you would like your name added to our mailing list, please write to:The Reformed Witness
Hope Protestant Reformed Church
1307 E. Brockton Ave.
Redlands, CA 92374-3802
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