15 September 2014 A.D. Remembering Justification by Faith Alone—Rev. Dr. Prof. James Innes Packer
15 September 2014
A.D. Remembering
Justification by Faith Alone—Rev. Dr. Prof. James Innes Packer
Packer, James.
“The Doctrine of Justification Among Puritans.” Monergism.com. N.d. http://www.monergism.com/doctrine-justification-among-puritans. Accessed 19 Aug 2014.
The Doctrine of Justification Among the Puritans by J. I. Packer
“The confession of divine justification touches man’s
life at its heart, at the point of its relationship to God; it defines the
preaching of the Church, the existence and progress of the life of faith, the
root of human security, and man’s perspective for the future.”
So Professor G. C. Berkouwer1 evaluates
justification as set forth by Paul and re-apprehended at the Reformation: a
truth which all the reforming leaders in Germany, Switzerland, France, and
Britain, and all the confessions which they sponsored, were at one in
highlighting, and which they all saw as articulus stantis vel cadentis
ecclesiae—the point on which depends the standing or falling of the Church.
Luther, the pioneer, predicted, as a sure inference from
what he knew of Satanic strategy, that after his death the truth of
justification which he had been so instrumental in making known would come
under stronger attack, and theology would develop in a way tending to submerge
it once more in error and incomprehension. We find Puritan writers voicing a
similar sense that the doctrine was very vulnerable, and only grace could keep
it from being lost. It is worth setting out their reasons for thinking this.
First, they said, justification is a gospel mystery—a
matter, that is, of divine revelation by grace. As such, it is doubly humbling.
It humbles pride of intellect, because it could never have been guessed or
worked out by unaided religious reason, and it humbles moral pride by assuming
that all men are hopeless and helpless in sin. Naturally, people resent this,
and, as Robert Traill said with abiding truth in his masterly Vindication of
the Protestant Doctrine concerning Justification (1692), “this enmity in men to
the wisdom of God, is . . . a temptation to many ministers to patch up and
frame a gospel that is more suited to, and taking with, and more easily
understood by such men, than the true gospel of Christ is.”2 The
mystery of justification is thus threatened constantly by human pride.
Second, justification is a climatic mystery, like the top
rung of a ladder which you reach via the other rungs, or the keystone of an
arch supporting, and supported by, the bricks that flank it. Wrote Traill: “All
the great fundamentals of Christian truth, centre in this of justification. The
trinity of persons in the God-head; the incarnation of the only begotten of the
Father; the satisfaction paid to the law and justice of God, for the sins of
the world, by His obedience, and sacrifice of Himself in that flesh He assumed:
and the divine authority of the scriptures, which reveal all this, are all
straight lines of truth, that centre in this doctrine of the justification of a
sinner by the imputation and application of that satisfaction.”3
Traill’s point, in context, is that to deny justification
is to deny these other realities too;4 but the contrary point, that
to query them is to lose justification also, is no less true. This has happened
in our own day; misbelief about biblical authority, God’s wrath, and the
atonement, has removed for many all basis for asserting justification in the
biblical sense. Thus heretical theology becomes a second threat to the mystery
of justification.
Third, justification is a spiritual mystery, which only
the enlightened conscience of the man convicted of sin can appreciate. “The
theme of justification hath suffered greatly by this,” complains Traill, “that
many have employed their hands and pens, who never had their hearts and
consciences exercised about it.”5 In the preface to his classic
work, The Doctrine of Justification by Faith (1677), John Owen puts the
positive point thus:
It
is the practical direction of the consciences of men, in their application unto
God by Jesus Christ, for deliverance from the curse due unto the apostate
state, and peace with Him, with the influence of the way thereof unto universal
gospel obedience, that is alone to be designed in the handling of this
doctrine. And therefore, unto him that would treat of it in a due manner, it is
required that he weigh every thing he asserts in his own mind and experience,
and not dare to propose that unto others which he doth not abide by himself, in
the most intimate recesses of his mind, under his nearest approaches unto God,
in his surprisals with dangers, in deep afflictions, in his preparations for death,
and most humble contemplations of the infinite distance between God and him.
Other notions . . . not seasoned with these ingredients . . . are insipid and
useless.6
The “light, frothy, trifling temper” of the 1690s seemed
to Traill a major hindrance to right thinking about justification. (What would
he have said had he lived in our day?) Spiritual frivolity, lacking seriousness
and experience in approaching God, thus threatens the mystery of justification
from a third angle.Fourth, justification is a life-giving mystery, the source of all true peace of conscience, hope, love, joy, holiness, and assurance. Therefore the Puritans, like Luther, saw Satanic hostility as a fourth threat to the mystery of justification; for they knew that the adversary of God and God’s people must wish to suppress a truth so productive of glory to God and good to men.
Fifth, justification is a contradicted mystery.
Justification by works is the natural religion of mankind, and has been since
the Fall, so that, as Traill says, “all the ignorant people that know nothing
of either law or gospel,” “all proud secure sinners,” “all formalists,” and
“all the zealous devout people in a natural religion” line up together as
“utter enemies to the gospel.”7 The Puritans saw that trio of theological
relatives, Pelagianism, Arminianism, and Counter-Reformation Romanism, as the
bastard offspring of natural religion fertilized by the gospel. So (to take one
for many)Traill writes: “The principles of Arminianism are the natural dictates
of a carnal mind, which is enmity both to the law of God, and to the gospel of
Christ; and, next to the dead sea of Popery (into which also this stream runs),
have since Pelagius to this day, been the greatest plague of the Church of
Christ.” Again: “There is not a minister that dealeth seriously with the souls
of men, but he finds an Arminian scheme of justification in every unrenewed
heart.”8 Natural religion is thus a fifth threat to the mystery of
justification.
My personal agreement with the Puritans in all this will
be clear from the way I have put their position. I believe that in equating the
Reformation doctrine of justification with that of the New Testament, and in
their analysis of the dangers and conflicts to which it stood exposed, they
were profoundly right, and it is from this standpoint that I shall now attempt
to trace out ways in which the Reformation doctrine both developed and declined
in the Puritan period—that is, for our purposes, from the last quarter of the
sixteenth century (the age of Perkins) to the end of the seventeenth (the last
publications of Owen, Baxter, Goodwin, and others of their generation). The
developments, as we should expect, come from circles where the fires of
spiritual vitality burned bright; the decline took place under influences which
were rationalistic, naturalistic, and in the long run hostile to evangelical
piety, though claiming to operate in its interest. We take the developments
first.
The Development of the Doctrine
Luther’s account of justification was not analytical. His
concern was to declare the fact that the living God justifies sinners through
the cross as the heart of the gospel, and he expounded justification as God’s
gracious answer to man’s desperate question, “How may I find a gracious God?
What must I do to be saved?” The Puritans, standing at this point in the
mainstream of second and third generation Reformed theology, took over Luther’s
emphasis and added to it a further interest, namely a concern to grasp
accurately the place and work and glory of the Lord Jesus Christ in our
salvation. If Luther’s concern was evangelical and a function of preaching,
this further concern was doxological and a function of worship. (Both concerns,
of course, derive directly from the New Testament, and they are complementary,
not contradictory.)
The Reformers’ exposition of justification boiled down to
the following seven points:
1. Every man faces the judgment-seat of God, and must
answer to God for himself. The Church cannot shield him from this.
2. Every man is a sinner by nature and practice, a
nonconformist so far as God’s law is concerned, and therefore can only expect
God’s wrath and rejection.
3. Justification is God’s judicial act of pardoning the
guilty sinner, accepting him as righteous, and receiving him as a son.
4. The source of justification is grace, not human effort
or initiative.
5. The ground of justification is Christ’s vicarious
righteousness and blood-shedding, not our own merit.
6. The means of justification, here and now, is faith in
Jesus Christ.
7. The fruit of faith, the evidence of its reality, is a
manifested repentance and a life of good works.
The occasion of the later Reformed development was
controversy with Romanism and Arminianism. This prompted closer reflection on
the nature of the saving union between Christ and Christians, and led to
development of thought at the following three points:
1. The ground of justification. The Council of Trent had
defined justification as inner renewal plus pardon and acceptance, the renewal
being the basis of the pardon, and had gone on to affirm that the “sole formal
cause” (unica formalis causa) of justification, in both its aspects, was God’s
righteousness (iustitia) imparted through baptism as the instrumental cause.9
“Formal cause,” in the language of the schools, denoted that which gave a thing
its quality (thus, heat was the formal cause of a thing being hot, or having
the quality of hotness). The thesis therefore was that the ground of our being
pardoned was the quality of actual divine righteousness infused into us: God
declares us righteous, and not liable to punishment for our sins, because we
have been made genuinely righteous in ourselves. In the more biblical
terminology of Protestantism, this was to make regeneration, or the
commencement of sanctification, the ground of justification. In reply, a host
of Reformed divines, continental and British, episcopal and nonconformist,10
drew out at length the position already made explicit by Calvin,11
that the “sole formal cause” of justification is not God’s righteousness
imparted, but Christ’s righteousness imputed; and to make their meaning more
clear they drew a distinction between Christ’s active obedience to God’s law,
in keeping its precepts, and his passive obedience to it, in undergoing its
penalty, and insisted that our acceptance as righteous depends on the imputing
to us of Christ’s obedience in both its aspects. The same point was pressed
against the Arminians, who held that faith is “counted for righteousness”
because it is in itself actual personal righteousness, being obedience to the
gospel viewed as God’s new law. The argument against both Romans and Arminians
was that by finding the ground of justification in the believer himself they
ministered to human pride on the one hand, and on the other hand robbed the Son
of God of the glory which was His due. It is not enough, the Reformed writers
held, to say that without Christ our justification would be impossible; one
must go on to say that it is on the ground of His obedience, as our representative
and substitutionary sin-bearer, and that alone, that righteousness is reckoned
to us, and sin cancelled.
Though the phrase “formal cause,” and the distinction
between active and passive obedience, do not appear in the statement on
justification in the Westminster Confession, nonetheless this statement is a
classic indication of the precision and balance of thought, as well as the
polemical thrusts that were learned in these exchanges.
Those
whom God effectually calleth He also freely justifieth; not by infusing
righteousness into them, but by pardoning their sins, and by accounting and
accepting their persons as righteous; not for anything wrought in them, or done
by them, but for Christ’s sake alone; not by imputing faith itself, the act of
believing, or any other evangelical obedience, to them as their righteousness;
but by imputing the obedience and satisfaction of Christ unto them, they
receiving and resting on Him and His righteousness by faith; which faith they
have not of themselves; it is the gift of God.12
2. Regeneration and justification. Roman theologians attacked the Reformers from the first on the grounds that in denying inner renewal and subjective righteousness to be any part of justification they were affirming that justification can exist without regeneration and faith without good works. Roman thinking was evidently ruled by the typical legalist assumption that if good works do not bring salvation, but salvation is given freely without them, then no reason for doing them remains. The Reformers’ reply, that it is the nature of biblical faith, which is a gift of the Holy Spirit, to be active in good works all the time, made little impact: theological understanding and spiritual perception of the Holy Spirit’s work in the believer were alike lacking on the Roman side. The Puritans found themselves facing this same Roman polemic, and with it the Arminian thesis that justifying faith is, in the last analysis, not only man’s act but also his work, an independent achievement of which prevenient grace, though the necessary precondition, is not the effective source. On this basis, of course, no divine guarantee that faith will work by love can exist. Thus the Arminians appeared to Reformed thinkers to be playing into Rome’s hands at this point: Rome complained that justification according to Protestants was divorced from subjective renewal, and Arminianism admitted that faith might fail to produce good works every time.
The Puritans’ response to this situation was twofold. First, they reaffirmed the Reformers’ point, that “faith . . . the alone instrument of justification . . . is . . . not alone in the person justified, but is ever accompanied with all other saving graces, and is no dead faith, but worketh by love.”13 Second, they emphasized that justifying faith is given by God through effectual calling, which includes regeneration—that is, vitalizing union with the risen Christ through the sovereign work of the Spirit, from which, as a work of new creation, flows the sinner’s response to the gospel. (Rightly did George Smeaton describe Puritan divinity as “a theology of regeneration cultivated and expanded as a topic in itself,” a theology of which “it was the prominent peculiarity to bring out the distinction between nature and grace.”14) This emphasis both answered the Romans, by showing that though justification and regeneration are distinct the former cannot take place without the latter, and dealt with the Arminians by showing how completely man’s faith is God’s gift.15
3. The covenant context of justification. The Puritans
developed what has been called “covenant theology”; they saw this as the
scriptural setting in which the jewel of justification by faith should be
exhibited. They defined the gospel as declaring “the Covenant of Grace; whereby
(God) 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 life his Holy Spirit, to make them
willing and able to believe.”16 They valued this covenant concept,
first, because it links God’s promise to save believers with His purpose to
bring His elect to faith; second, because it gives justification its place in
the “golden chain” of stages in God’s saving purpose (election, redemption, and
effectual calling going before; sanctification and glorification coming after);
third, because it brings into sharp focus the saving ministry of Christ, as
mediator and federal head of His people. The Westminster Confession embodies
Puritan covenant theology in its classical form. Its biblical correctness is
something which the student of the Scripture proofs adduced by the Confession
may safely be left to estimate for himself.
The final element in the Puritan development of the
doctrine of justification was to safeguard it against misstatement within the
Puritan camp. Chapter 11 of the Westminster Confession wards off two such
aberrations. The first is that justification is from eternity, i.e., before
faith. William Twisse, first prolocutor of the Assembly, had maintained this as
part of his case against Arminianism, but in addition to being unscriptural the
idea is pastorally disastrous, for it reduces justifying faith to discovering
that one is justified already, and so sets seekers waiting on God for assurance
instead of exerting active trust in Christ. The trouble here was the
assimilating of justification to election, and the Confession deals with it by
drawing the correct distinction: “God did, from all eternity, decree to justify
all the elect . . . nevertheless they are not justified until the Holy Spirit
doth in due time actually apply Christ unto them.”17
The second misconception was that God takes no notice of
the sins of the justified. This was the position called “Antinomian” by the orthodox,
which created a major stir in the 1640s.18 In their zeal to magnify
the liberty, peace, and joy of the man in Christ, the Antinomians (none of whom
were front-rank theologians) had largely lost sight of two distinctions: that
between God’s law as a covenant of works and as a rule of life, and that
between justification and adoption, or God’s relationship to believers as Judge
and as Father. Hence their failure to see, and say, with adequate clarity that
the moral law still binds believers, as expressing God’s will for His adopted
children, and that the Father-son relationship between Him and them will be
spoiled if His will is ignored or defied. The Confession says what is
necessary. “God doth continue to forgive the sins of those that are justified:
and although they can never fall from the state of justification, yet they may
by their sins fall under God’s fatherly displeasure, and not have the light of
His countenance restored unto them, until they humble themselves, confess their
sins, beg pardon, and renew their faith and repentance.”19
The Decline of the Doctrine
Now we turn to the sadder side of the picture, and trace out those influences which distorted the doctrines of justification in England, and progressively robbed it of its proper influence, even among the Puritans themselves. This part of our story deals with two movements: Arminianism, and the Neonomianism (so-called) of Richard Baxter.
Arminianism, as broached by Jacob Hermandzoon (Arminius) at the turn of the sixteenth century, formulated in the Remonstrance of 1610, and taught by Episcopius, Curcellaeus, and Limborch at the Remonstrant Seminary in Amsterdam, was essentially a denial of some basic Reformed assertions.
The first denial relevant to our theme was that already noticed, namely that man’s act of faith is wholly God’s gift.
The second relevant denial was that there is a direct
correlation in God’s plan between the obtaining of redemption by Christ’s
obedience, active and passive, and the saving application of redemption by the
Holy Spirit—direct, that is, in the sense that the former secures and
guarantees the latter. The Arminian alternative was that the atonement made
salvation possible for all but not necessarily actual for any. This involved
abandoning the concept of the atonement as substitutionary¸ for substitution
is, by its very nature, an effective relationship, securing actual immunity
from obligation for the person in whose place the substitute acts:
Payment
God will not twice demand,
First
from my bleeding Surety’s hand
And
then again from mine.
Grotius’ famous, or infamous, theory of the atonement as
an example of punishment was one of several ways in which the Arminian
conception was spelled out.
The third relevant denial was that the covenant of grace is a relationship which God imposes unilaterally and unconditionally, by effectual calling, saying to His elect, “I will . . . and you shall. . . . ” The Arminian alternative was that the covenant of grace is a new law, offering present pardon on condition of present faith and final salvation on condition of sustained faith.
The fourth relevant denial was that faith is essentially
fiducial (a matter of trusting another, and what he has done). The Arminian
alternative was that faith is essentially volitional (a matter of committing
oneself to do something, i.e., live by the new law which Christ procured).
The fifth relevant denial was that the ground of
justification is Christ’s righteousness imputed. The Arminian alternative was
that faith itself is the ground of justification, being itself righteousness
(obedience to the new law) and accepted by God as such. Appeal was made to the
references in Romans 4:3, 5, 9 (cf. 11, 13) to faith being reckoned for
righteousness, though the absence from Romans of the “new law” idea, the
insistence that the Christian’s righteousness is God’s gift (5:15–17), and the
repeated emphasis that sinners, though ungodly (4:5, 5:6–8), are justified
through Christ’s blood irrespective of their own works, makes this exegesis
really impossible.
Arminianism made small inroads into the Puritan ranks: the only Arminian Puritan of ability was John Goodwin, author of Imputatio Fidei (on Romans 4), An Exposition of Romans 9, Redemption Redeemed, and The Banner of Justification Displayed.20 But Caroline Anglicans, Cambridge Platonists, and later Latitudinarians took up with Arminianism, linked to a strong anti-Calvinistic polemic, and after the Restoration the mainstream of English Christianity flowed in this channel. Typical of the later outlook was the (unhappily) influential Bishop Bull, who interpreted Paul by James and understood both as teaching justification by works (faith being, on Bull’s view, “virtually the whole of evangelical obedience,” and thus a work in the fullest sense).21 Arminian doctrine of this kind led inevitably to a new legalism of which the key thought was that the exerting of steady moral effort now is the way to salvation hereafter. The meaning of faith as trust in Christ’s person and work was forgotten; the experiences of conversion and assurance were dismissed as “enthusiasm,” dangerous to the soul; and present justification ceased to be an issue of importance or interest.
One effect of the Arminian controversy on the Continent was to spark off the mediating theology of the “new Methodists” of Saumur seminary. This teaching, pioneered by the Scot John Cameron, who taught at Saumur from 1618 to 1621, was developed by Moise Amyraut and has gone down in history under the name of Amyraldism. A. W. Harrison calls it a “half-way house between Calvinism and Arminianism”;22 it adopts the Arminian view of the covenant of grace and indefinite (universal) redemption, but retains the Calvinistic belief in particular election, effectual calling, and final preservation. Its importance for our story is that Richard Baxter, perhaps the greatest of Puritan writers on Christian practice, advocated a version of it, which as a result of more than forty years’ campaigning by him in its interest became both popular and notorious in England and Scotland at the turn of the seventeenth century. In the 1690s it was referred to as “Baxterianism” and (because of the prominence it gave to the “new law” idea) “Neonomianism.”23
Baxter’s view sprang from natural theology; he thought Bible teaching about God’s kingdom and rule should be assimilated to contemporary political ideas, or, as he put it, that theology should follow a “political method.” God should be thought of as governor, and the gospel as part of His legal code. Our salvation requires a double righteousness: Christ’s, which led to the enacting of God’s new law, and our own, in obeying that new law by genuine faith and repentance. Faith is imputed for righteousness because it is real obedience to the gospel, which is God’s new law. Faith, however, involves a commitment to keep the moral law, which was God’s original code, and every believer, though righteous in terms of the new law, needs pardon every moment for his shortcomings in relation to the old law. Jesus Christ, who procured the new law for mankind by satisfying the prescriptive and penal requirements of the old one, should be thought of as Head of God’s government, enthroned to pardon true believers. Into this “political” frame of concepts, learned mainly from the Arminian Hugo de Groot (Grotius), Baxter fitted the Amyraldean soteriology.
Baxter was convinced that those who held the ground and formal cause of our justification to be the imputing to us of Christ’s own righteousness (i.e., his fulfillment of the precept and penalty of the moral law) were logically committed to Antinomianism, on the “payment-God-will-not-twice-demand” principle. At this point in his thinking (though not elsewhere) Baxter assumed, with his Roman and Socinian contemporaries, that law-keeping has no relevance for God or man save as work done to earn acceptance and salvation, so that if the law has been kept once in our name, no basis remains for requiring us to keep it a second time in our own persons. It is an odd mistake to find him making; but he never got his streak of legalism out of his theological system. Naturally, his conviction on this point (of which he made no secret) led to vigorous debate at several periods in his life, including, sadly, his last months on earth, when by assaulting as Antinomian the reprinted sermons of Tobias Crisp (first in a Pinner’s Hall lecture, and then in The Scripture Gospel Defended) he effectively wrecked the “happy union” between Presbyterians and Independents almost before it had been contracted.
The Crispian controversy produced much heated writing, but the best contribution was the coolest—Robert Traill’s Vindication of the Protestant Doctrine Concerning Justification, and of Its Preachers and Professors, from the Unjust Charge of Antinomianism: In a Letter from the Author, to a Minister in the Country.24 Quietly but effectively Traill made the two points which really scupper Baxter’s scheme. First, the scheme demonstrably fails to come to terms with the representative headship of Christ, the second Adam, as this is set forth in Romans 5:12ff. It is, of course, on this unique federal relationship between Christ and His people that the imputing to them of His righteousness is based. Then, second, the scheme is so artificial as to be spiritually unreal; for a sinner pressed in conscience by the burden of uncleanness and guilt finds relief, not by reminding himself that his faith is evangelical righteousness according to the new law, but by looking to the cross of Christ. “My Savior’s obedience and blood Hides all my transgressions from view.” Talk of one’s faith as one’s righteousness at such a time is at best a frivolity and at worst a snarl.
Nor is this all that needs to be said. Baxter was a great and saintly man; as pastor, evangelist, and devotional writer, no praise for him can be too high; but as a theologian he was, though brilliant, something of a disaster. On his “political” theology, viewed as an attempt to explicate Bible teaching, the following points have to be made:
1. The “political method” is itself rationalistic. To make concepts of monarchy, legislation, and ideal government, borrowed from the world of seventeenth-century political theory, into a straitjacket for the scriptural proclamation of God the King and Christ the Lord, is not merely quaint; it is theologically vicious, and has bad effects all along the line.
2. The “political” idea of sin is of transgression and
guilt, analogous to crime. This externalizes sin, so that its indwelling power
in the individual, and its demonic corporate influence, are under-stressed.
3. The “political” idea of Christ as Head of God’s
government rather than of His people, and of His death as one presupposition of
our sins being remitted rather than the procuring cause of it, and of the
remission of sins itself as public pardon rather than personal forgiveness,
makes the Lord Jesus seem remote to a degree, and more like a Judge than a
Savior. It obscures His substitution for us on the cross, and plays down His
sympathy for us from the throne.
4. The “political” idea of faith as allegiance and
commitment loses sight of the dimension of self-despairing trust: faith appears
less as the outstretched empty hand of a spiritual bankrupt than as the signing
on of a resolute volunteer, a work of some strength and merit.
5. The “political” idea of God in a real sense loses God.
It is important to see this. Baxter follows Grotius in maintaining that when
God purposed to glorify Himself by restoring fallen man, He carried out His
plan not by satisfying the law, but by changing it. A new law was brought in,
which waived the penal requirement of the original law. This assumes that the
demand for retribution in the original law was not grounded in the nature of
God, but only in the exigencies of government. What is at issue here is the
divine holiness. Reformed theology sees both the precept and the penalty of the
law of God as a permanent expression of God’s eternal and unchangeable holiness
and justice, and argues that God does not save sinners at His law’s expense;
rather, He saves them by satisfying His law on their behalf, so that He
continues to be just when He becomes their justifier. Baxter’s scheme makes the
wrath of God against sin something less than a revelation of His abiding
character, and so opens the door to the idea that benevolence is really the
whole essence of his moral being: an idea made explicit by the liberalism of a
later age.
Thus Baxter, by the initial rationalism of his “political
method,” which forced Scripture into an a priori mold, sowed the seeds of
moralism with regard to sin, Arianism with regard to Christ, legalism with
regard to faith and salvation, and liberalism with regard to God. In his own
teaching, steeped as it was in the older affectionate “practical” Puritan
tradition, these seeds lay largely dormant, but later Presbyterianism in both
England and Scotland reaped the bitter crop. It is sadly fitting that the
Richard Baxter Church in Kidderminster today should be—Unitarian. What we see
in Baxter is an early stage in the decline, not simply of the doctrine of
justification among the Puritans, but of the Puritan insight into the nature of
Christianity as a whole.
Conclusion
So, after more than a century of clear gospel light, Arminianism brought darkness back to the minds of conformists and Baxterianism did the same for nonconformists. Natural theology and religious moralism triumphed in England, and, just as Luther had foreseen and Traill feared, the Scripture doctrine of justification was for a time lost to view—until the day when a tremendous voice rang across the country elaborating sermon scripts such as this:
Are
any of you depending upon a righteousness of your own? Do any of you here think
to save yourselves by your own doings? I say to you . . . your righteousness
shall perish with you. Poor miserable creatures! What is there in your tears?
What in your prayers? What in your performances, to appease the wrath of an
angry God? Away from the trees of the garden; come, ye guilty wretches, come as
poor, lost, undone, and wretched creatures, and accept of a better righteousness
than your own. As I said before, so I tell you again, the righteousness of
Jesus Christ is an everlasting righteousness; it is wrought out for the very
chief of sinners. Ho, every one that thirsteth, let him come and drink of this
water of life freely. Are any of you wounded by sin? Do any of you feel you
have no righteousness of your own? Are any of you perishing for hunger? Are any
of you afraid ye will perish for ever? Come, dear souls, in all your rags;
come, thou poor man; come, thou poor distressed woman; you, who think God will
never forgive you, and that your sins are too great to be forgiven; come, thou
doubting creature, who art afraid thou wilt never get comfort; arise, take
comfort, the Lord Jesus Christ, the Lord of life, the Lord of glory, calls for
thee. . . .O let not one poor soul stand at a distance from the Saviour. . . .
O Come, come! Now, since it is brought into the world by Christ, so, in the
name, in the strength, and by the assistance of the great God, I bring it now
to the pulpit; I now offer this righteousness, this free, this imputed, this
everlasting righteousness, to all poor sinners who will accept of it. . . .
Think, I pray you, therefore, on these things; go home, go home, go home, pray
over the text, and say, “Lord God, Thou hast brought an everlasting
righteousness into the world by the Lord Jesus Christ; by the blessed Spirit
bring it into my heart!” then, die when ye will, ye are safe; if it be
tomorrow, ye shall be immediately translated into the presence of the everlasting
God; that will be sweet! Happy they who have got this robe on; happy they that
can say, “My God hath loved me, and I shall be loved by Him with an everlasting
love!” That every one of you may be able to say so, may God grant, for the sake
of Jesus Christ, the dear Redeemer; to whom be glory for ever. Amen.25
Whose voice? Why, George Whitefield’s: a man who knew, and could express, what the Scripture gospel of justification by faith is all about. With him a new chapter opened in British Christianity—but that is another story, beyond the scope of this paper.
ENDNOTES
1. G. C. Berkouwer, Faith and Justification (Grand
Rapids: Eerdmans, 1954), p. 17.
2. Robert Traill, Vindication of the Protestant Doctrine
Concerning Justification, in The Works of the Late Reverend Robert Traill, 3
vols. (Glasgow, 1795), 1:313.
3. Traill, Vindication of the Protestant Doctrine, p.
332.
4. “The forsaking of the doctrine of justification by
faith in Christ’s righteousness, hath been the first step of apostasy in many,
who have not stopped till they revolted from Christianity itself.” Ibid., p.
333.
5. Ibid., p. 332.
6. John Owen, The Doctrine of Justification by Faith
(1677), in The Works of John Owen, ed. William H. Goold, 16 vols. (1850;
reprint ed., London: Banner of Truth, 1965), 5:4.
7. Traill, Vindication of the Protestant Doctrine, pp.
313–314.
8. Ibid., pp. 321, 329.
9. Decrees of the Council of Trent, 6.7, cf. 5.5. Both
are translated in C. F. Allison, The Rise of Moralism: The Proclamation of the
Gospel from Hooker to Baxter (London: S.P.C.K., 1966), pp. 213–14. Allison has
assembled much thought-provoking material about the doctrine of justification
in the seventeenth century.
10. Among the Anglicans were Richard Hooker; Bishops
George Downame, John Davenant, James Ussher, Robert Hall, Thomas Barlow, John
Bramhall, William Beveridge, and Thomas Tuloly. Among the Presbyterians and
later non-conformists were Anthony Burgess, John Owen, and Robert Traill.
11. “It is entirely by the intervention of Christ’s
righteousness that we obtain justification before God. This is equivalent to
saying that man is not just in himself, but that the righteousness of Christ is
communicated to him by imputation, while he is strictly deserving of
punishment. Thus vanishes the absurd dogma, that man is justified by faith
inasmuch as faith brings him under the influence of the Spirit of God, by whom
he is rendered righteous.” John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion,
3.11.23. See also Calvin’s discussion of session 6 of the Council of Trent, in
his Tracts and Treatises, 3 vols. (1844; reprint ed., Edinburgh: Oliver and
Boyd, 1958), 3:108ff., especially pp. 114–21.
12. Westminster Confession of Faith, 11.1.
13. Ibid., 11.2.
14. George Smeaton, The Doctrine of the Holy Spirit, 2d
ed. (Edinburgh, 1889), pp. 327–28.
15. In the Westminster Confession, “Of Effectual Calling”
(chap. 10) precedes “Of Justification” (chap. 11). The first two sections of
chapter 10 read as follows: (1) “All those whom God hath predestinated unto
life, and those only, he is pleased, in his appointed and accepted time,
effectually to call, by his word and Spirit, out of that state of sin and death
in which they are by nature, to grace and salvation by Jesus Christ;
enlightening their minds spiritually and savingly to understand the things of
God; taking away their heart of stone, and giving unto them an heart of flesh;
renewing their wills, and by his almighty power determining them to that which
is good; and effectually drawing them to Jesus Christ; yet so as they come most
freely, being made willing by his grace.” (2) “This effectual call is of God’s
free and special grace alone, not from any thing at all foreseen in man; who is
altogether passive therein, until, being quickened and renewed by the Holy
Spirit, he is thereby enabled to answer this call, and to embrace the grace
offered and conveyed in it.”
16. Westminster Confession of Faith, 7.3.
17. Ibid., 11.4.
18. A clear if unsympathetic summary of Antinomian
tenets, viewed as so many deviations from Reformed orthodoxy, is given in James
Buchanan, The Doctrine of Justification (Edinburgh, 1867), pp. 171ff. The main
Antinomian authors were John Eaton, Henry Denne, Robert Towne, John Saltmarsh,
and (in the view of some) Tobias Crisp.
19. Westminster Confession of Faith, 11.5.
20. John Goodwin: Imputatio Fidei (London, 1642); An
Exposition of the Ninth Chapter of the Epistle to the Romans (London, 1653);
Redemption Redeemed (London, 1840); The Banner of Justification Displayed
(London, 1659).
21. George Bull, Harmonia Apostolica, Library of
Anglo-Catholic Theology (Oxford, 1842), 1:58; quoted in Allison, The Rise of
Moralism, chap. 6, “The Theology of George Bull.”
22. A. W. Harrison, Arminianism (London: Duckworth,
1937), p. 111. Amyraldism is evaluated (under the name “Post-redemptionism”) in
B. B. Warfield, The Plan of Salvation, rev. ed. (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1935),
pp. 90–96.
23. Cf. Peter Toon, The Emergence of Hyper-Calvinism in
English Nonconformity, 1689–1765 (London: Olive Tree, 1967), chap. 3, for
details of the story.
24. Robert Traill, Vindication of the Protestant Doctrine
Concerning Justification, and of Its Preachers and Professors, from the Unjust
Charge of Antinomianism: In a Letter from the Author, to a Minister in the
Countrey (London, 1692).
25. George Whitefield, Sermons on Important Subjects: By
the Rev. George Whitefield, A.M. (London, 1832), pp. 207ff.
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