In order to understand the doctrine of the Westminster Confession and Catechisms on the sacraments, one needs to get a feel for the overall system of doctrine. Of foundational import to Baptism and the Lord’s Supper is the doctrine of union with Christ.

Union with Christ

The most direct attention is given to the subject of union with Christ in chapter 26 of the Westminster Confession of Faith, "Of the Communion of Saints." Apparently, this communion mainly consists of and is founded upon union with Christ, for the first statement made in the chapter is: "All saints, that are united to Jesus Christ their Head, by His Spirit, and by faith, have fellowship with Him in His grace, sufferings, death, resurrection, and glory." This definition is followed by a colon, after which the communion of the saints with each other is mentioned and the obligations which follow from it. Curiously, nothing is said about the elect in this chapter; rather, the professing saints are discussed.

Other than asserting the supernatural agency of the Holy Spirit, not much else is said about the nature of union with Christ, except that does not mean partaking "of the substance of His Godhead, or to be equal with Christ in any respect: either of which to affirm is impious and blasphemous" (26.3). Of what then do we partake? The question is left unanswered.

From its placement in the Confession and the brevity of the description, the importance of union with Christ does not seem that great. But this is a false impression which is amply corrected by examining the application of redemption as it is set forth in the Catechisms.

Christ, Our Salvation

The elect are saved by the work of Christ only because Christ Himself is united to them and they to Him. "We are made partakers of the redemption purchased by Christ by the effectual application of it to us by His Holy Spirit" (SC 29). Redemption is effectually applied, and we are made partakers of that redemption, simply because Christ is applied and we are made partakers of Him. "The Spirit applieth to us the redemption purchased by Christ by . . . uniting us to Christ. . ." (SC 30). Union with Christ results in all that is necessary for salvation: justification, adoption, and sanctification (SC 32). Indeed to be "elect" means to be predestined to union with Christ (3.6). God planned in eternity to save those He had chosen for glory and then He saves them "in time by the Holy Ghost" (LC 57). God’s decision in eternity to elect some to glory does not itself constitute the salvation which He has predestined to give them (for that would confound God’s planning to do something with His actually doing it). For example, in the case of one necessary element of salvation: "God did, from all eternity, decree to justify all the elect, and Christ did, in the fullness of time, die for their sins, and rise for their justification; nevertheless, they are not justified, until the Holy Spirit doth, in due time, actually apply Christ unto them" (11.4).

Christ By Faith

While the Spirit sovereignly gives Christ to whom He wills (and Whom the Father has chosen in eternity), it would be wrong to infer from this that the person is entirely passive in this union. A person in union with Christ is in union with the whole Christ, and this union engages his entire person with Christ. Thus, a person’s will, mind, and heart–his whole being–is involved in union with Christ. The Westminster Divines, following Scriptures, believed the essential necessary response to God, by which union with Christ is effected and maintained, was faith. In giving us Christ the Holy Spirit renews us and gives us faith in Christ. As the Shorter Catechism succinctly puts it: "The Spirit applieth to us the redemption purchased by Christ, by working faith in us, and thereby uniting us to Christ in our effectual calling" (q. 31).

The fact that Christ is the object of faith presents something of a problem because we can only know Christ by the revelation He has given us of Himself by His prophets and apostles, that is, by the Scriptures. In describing the object of our faith, the Divines deal with this possible ambiguity by stating:

By this faith, a Christian believeth to be true whatsoever is revealed in the Word, for the authority of God Himself speaking therein, and acteth differently upon that which each particular passage thereof containeth; yielding obedience to the commands, trembling at the threatenings, and embracing the promises of God for this life, and that which is to come. But the principal acts of saving faith are accepting, receiving, and resting upon Christ alone for justification, sanctification, and eternal life, by virtue of the covenant of Grace (14.2; emphasis added).

Notice that in a sense the Bible is an object of faith because it alone is God’s Word. Yet to accuse Christians of "bibliolatry" would be ridiculous, for we do not think a mere book saves, nor even the saving message. Rather it is Christ who saves by His work (the redemption He purchased) and His Spirit (by which He gives us union with Himself). We are saved by the Triune God, not by paper and ink. Yet the Bible is more than paper and ink; it is the Word of the Triune God through which we are, indeed, saved. It is correct to say, "Only God saves," yet it is also correct to say, "The Gospel saves," just as it is correct to say "Faith saves." The terms are used in different senses.

Because faith involves trust in Jesus Christ, it invariably includes the fundamental belief in what God has revealed. For an adult of sound mind this means, as described above, that faith entails believing the message of the Scriptures. However, infants and others, such as severely retarded persons, are also capable of faith, being "regenerated, and saved by Christ, through the Spirit, who worketh when, and where, and how He pleaseth" (8.3).

Christ by Covenant & Church

In the above quote, we see that faith receives Christ "by virtue of the covenant of Grace." What is the Covenant? The covenant is the structured relationship which God has with His people. It is something formal and organized which, in this age, is "administered" (7.5) or "dispensed" by "ordinances" which are "the preaching of the Word, and the administration of the sacraments of Baptism and the Lord’s Supper" (7.6). One enters into this relationship or covenant by meeting the condition which God has set down as the requirement: faith in Jesus Christ (7.3).

This covenant is closely related to the institutional Church, which "is the kingdom of the Lord Jesus Christ, the house and family of God, out of which there is no ordinary possibility of salvation" (25.2). The Confession describes the Church as having the same "ordinances of God" (25.3) as it associates with the Covenant of Grace.

The Standards often use the terms "inward" and "outward" in their formulations. They go together. One cannot be given union with Christ, without it showing forth to others in a faithful way. A child in a family, not only receives his life from his parents, but enters into a relationship with them involving communication and role expectations. So union with Christ and the institutional Church are both necessary aspects of God’s relationship with His people.

Responding & Continuing in Faith

The question might arise: How can the Confession claim that one must (ordinarily) be a member of the Church in order to be saved if it also declares that salvation is by faith alone? That is a good question. The fact is that the Standards contain several similarly inconsistent sounding statements. For example, the Larger Catechism asks: "What doth God require of us, that we may escape his wrath and curse due to us by reason of the transgression of the law?" The answer:

That we may escape the wrath and curse of God due to us by reason of the transgression of the law, he requireth of us [1] repentance toward God, and [2] faith toward our Lord Jesus Christ, and [3] the diligent use of the outward means whereby Christ communicates to us the benefits of his mediation (q. 153).

Now here we have a list of three things required for escaping God’s wrath at the Final Judgment, and faith is only second on the list! Furthermore, the third item itself expands into a host of others ("all his ordinances"-q. 154). There is no doubt, however, that the Catechism is listing requirements for salvation; question 57 includes "redemption" as one of the benefits communicated by these outward means.

The Westminster Divines seem to see no contradiction between the Reformation slogan, sola fide and the Biblical passages which lay out other requirements for entering into and continuing in God’s Covenant of Grace. The point is that one must respond in faith to the Gospel. Whatever the Bible considers to be a necessary part of that response is not contradiction of "faith alone" but rather an elaboration and unfolding of it. If one truly trusts God and believes His Word one will do what He says. In question 153 above, "faith" is used in its narrower sense of "accepting, receiving, and resting upon Christ alone for justification, sanctification, and eternal life," whereas repentance and diligent use of the means of grace covers believing

to be true whatsoever is revealed in the Word, for the authority of God Himself speaking therein, and acteth differently upon that which each particular passage thereof containeth; yielding obedience to the commands, trembling at the threatenings, and embracing the promises of God for this life, and that which is to come.

Thus, if one truly believes Jesus, He will do whatever necessary to become part of His Body the Church. There is no opposition between faith and the importance of Church membership. Rather, they support one another.

Coming Next, Part Two: The Reality of the Sacraments.

Listening to a lecture I heard Peter Leithart and Ralph Smith accused of being “skeptical” about ontology and insisting we can only know the relational.

But a relational ontology is just that: an ontology.

Relationship is not opposed to ontology, being, or even substance. The point is that the relational is the substance, rather than an imagined impersonal thing. There is no “stuff” more basic than persons.

Club .977 just played “Take on me.”

I miss it.

A few years ago I led my adult Sunday School through Chosen by God by R. C. Sproul. I was actually converted to “calvinism” by his book, The Holiness of God. However, since that book was not, as far as I can tell, intended to bring about such conversion, I’ve always given Chosen first place in my choice of introductory books. If you want to smash someone in the head with the sheer number of Biblical prooftexts, then you might go with Arthur Pink’s The Sovereignty of God (the other book that I read early enough to be highly affected by), but for persuasion, I think Sproul still has the most accessible book on the market.

Anyway, this time through I noticed something on the chapter on original sin (4). First, Sproul deals with the “mythical view” of the Fall (which would equally apply to pelagian views–i.e. not only those who don’t think it really happened, but also those who don’t think it was our fall as well). He points out that the mythical view cannot account for the world as we know it. If everyone is morally free to not sin (everyone is physically free, of course) then some number of people among the billions who presently exists would never have fallen into sin.

Sproul deals with some objections that might arise to his reasoning and makes what I think is a solid case.

But later Sproul says something quite different in explaining why the federal view is morally acceptable. He states that Adam sinned as our representative so that his sin is accounted to us and we are justly held guilty for what he did. This would be considered unfair, at first, because we never had a chance to choose Adam to be our representative. But Sproul replies that we often make mistakes in choosing a representative and pick one who doesn’t really represent us. God is faithful and omniscient and we can trust him to have chosen our representative in an infallibly accurate was.

He writes that each one of us would have done what Adam did if we had been there instead of him.

But this presents a problem, because according to this explanation, there is no need for the doctrine of Original Sin to explain why we are all sinners. We would all choose to sin anyway, even if we were unfallen originally and placed in the Garden.

These sorts of issues were behind my award-winning paper, “Real Union or Legal Fiction? John Williamson Nevin’s Controversy With Charles Hodge Over the Imputation of Adam’s Sin (with a Comparison to Robert L. Dabney).” I was reminded of it later, seeing the lead essay at PCANEWS by Michael Horton, “What Is The Reformed Faith?” (It is now at the RUF website). The article leads off with this line:

How do I go to God?”, someone asked the Scottish Presbyterian, Horatius Bonar. The parson answered, “It is with our sins that we go to God, for we have nothing else that we can truly call our own.”

But that’s the problem I think with the way I hear the federal view argued. The parallelism insisted upon between the imputation of Adam’s sin and the imputation of Christ’s righteousness would demand that they both be our own, or else that they both be alien.

In other words, if the imputations are too parallel, then we get into difficulties. If we are, rightly, told we must blame ourselves for our sin and not blame another, then we must also take credit in our status in Christ as if it was not a gift. On the other hand, if we are, rightly, told we must thank God for being reckoned with the alien righteousness of Jesus Christ, then we may deny responsibility for our sin in Adam and blame him for it.

Obviously, we must both blame ourselves for our sinful status and thank God in Christ alone for our right standing before him. While Adam is the originator of our guilt and sin, he has done so in a way that is “deeper” to our very selves then the salvation that is in Jesus. If this seems like a slur on the grace of Christ, then you are misunderstanding. It is a more glorious thing for God to be praised by forgiven, sanctified, sinners whom Christ rescued from Adam’s Fall, then to be praised by some new race that were never permitted to be guilty whom Christ somehow created. Jesus didn’t want to literally start a new race, but to make guilty sinners into a new, righteous, race.

In my view, it is a mistake to think that God can not allow a human being to be conceived as sinful unless he already regards him as guilty and thus punishes him with a corrupt nature. There is no point in time in which an offspring of Adam is not already corrupt. Federalists rightly criticize realists for positing a pre-existence on the part of individuals. But some popularized forms of Federalism itself demand pre-existence as well. Somehow one is first held as guilty and then brought into existence and concieved. The prominant view that “each individual sinner of us had a federal existence before we were conceived; that we bore a covenanted or legal relation before we existed,” writes Dabney, “is incorrect” if “this language means anything more than a reference to foreordination and foreknowledge.” On the contrary,

There is, then, no moral nature of the first Adam to which we can be naturally united save his fallen nature. To this emphatically agree the Scriptures. Gen. v. 3: “And Adam . . . . begat a son in his own likeness, after his image and called his name Seth.” 1 Cor. xv. 48, 49: “As is the earthy, such are they also that are earthy . . . And as we have borne the image of the earthy, we shall also bear the image of the heavenly.” “Put off . . . the old man, which is corrupt according to the deceitful lusts, . . . . and put on the new man, which after God is created in righteousness and true holiness.” (Eph. iv. 22-24.) These words, in requiring conversion, allude to the two unions; the first, corrupt; the second, holy. (Compare Col. iii. 9, 10.)

To Dabney it is obvious that a person cannot be guilty if he does not exist. God may plan to bring a person into existence, and that person may be guilty, but it is incoherent to talk of our guilt before we were conceived.

Let the clear, convincing language of the Confession of Faith, touching the counterpart subject of justification, illustrate this statement. Chap. XI., Sec. 4: “God did, from all eternity, decree to justify all the elect; and Christ did, in the fullness of time, die for their sins, and rise again for their justification; nevertheless they are not justified until the Holy Spirit doth, in due time, actually apply Christ unto them.” By parity of reasoning, we hold that God did, from all eternity, decree to condemn all men descended from Adam by ordinary generation; and that Adam did, some time after his creation in holiness, sin and fall for them as well as for himself; nevertheless, individual fallen men are not condemned in him until such time as their existence doth actually unite them to Adam. And then it is a corrupted Adam to whom they are united.

Notice how this solves the problem that R. C. Sproul faces. If Adam had been confirmed in righteousness by the Covenant of Works then his offspring would have been so conceived and born. He would have represented them accurately. Likewise, when Adam sinned, he became corrupt and had only a corrupt nature to bring about children. Again, he is the accurate representative. Federalism works as an explanation that morally justifies God, holds humans accountable, and glorifies God in salvation, as well as deals with all the exegetical data.

The mistake that trips people up is the claim that it would be unfair for God to bring a sinful creature into existence. It is true that it would be inconsistent with God’s character to do so. But God covenanted with Adam as a creation partner. From that point onward, God would no longer directly create individuals, but rather create new humans through the humanity of Adam and Eve. If they were fallen, that does not impinge on the goodness of God’s gift of life.

On the other hand, people act like a morally corrupt creature would have some just accusation against God, “Why did you make me like this?” Unless God can say, “Because you were already guilty,” then he has a case. But that is simply untrue. A morally corrupt creature is (as Sproul explains quite well) still responsible for his actions. His actions spring from himself. He has no one else to blame. This is mysterious and hard to swallow, but it is simply inescapable if free will involves a person choosing. God has not robbed anyone of moral uprightness because there was no microsecond of uprightness possessed by the creature that could be taken from him. He was spontaneously sinful from the moment he existed. Every creature conceived morally corrupt freely agrees with that corruption–and thus, in the actual case of humans, agrees with Adam’s rebellion.

(Sidenote: If Adam had not sinned, you would not exist. Some other group of humans would exist at this point in time. To wish for the Fall to have never happened is to wish that you would never be. If you change the past then history changes, different people get married and different individuals are born to them. Your personal status as sinner or sinless was not hanging in the balance in the Garden, but rather what was at issue is whether or not you would ever be born, or your parents, etc.)

Thus, the sinfulness of our estate in Adam, both in guilt and corruption, is deeper to our identity than our righteousness in Christ, because Adam is basic to our very existence and Christ intervenes. This does not mean a less than total redemption (and I’m open to better ways of expressing what I am trying to say). What it means is that we must own our sin and guilt in Adam, but we must be grateful for our sanctification and justification in Christ coming to us from outside ourselves.

J. I Packer, A Quest for Godliness: The Puritan Vision of the Christian Life, p. 155.

The final element in the Puritan development of the doctrine of justification was to safeguard it against mis-statement within the Puritan camp. Chapter XI of the Westminster Confession wards off two such abberations. 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 reduced 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 the elect… nevertheless they are not justified until the Holy Spirit doth in due time actually apply Christ unto them” (XI:iv).

More coming.

Go here and give Jennifer your suggestion (scroll down to March 13, 2006 if you need to do so).

Doctrine is supposed to be the DNA of a confessional denomination. It is supposed to explain and motivate the existence of the distinct group. “We act this way because we believe these things.” “We must continue to uphold these truths.”

But it is all too easy in many cases (not all) to show that the group’s distinctives cannot be explained by their professed beliefs and/or that very different people hold to the same affirmations. Doctines do not explain the distinctives, but a desire to be distinct exists quite apart from any credo. As Lewis observed, one finds in the inner circle that exclusion is not an accident, but the essence.

Doctrine then can often (not always) hold the necessary function within a group of rationalizing a hostility against other people as love for the truth. It allows members to claim and feel like their identity is positive rather than purely negative.

This should surprise no one. It simply provides an analysis of First Corinthians 13 as applied to confessional formulation.

Anyone who talks nostalgically about the past and about the evils of modernism has never used a `flush free’ restroom in the far east of Turkey or listened to Paint it Black on an old vinyl LP.

The whole post on “selling out” is great. Though I would have appreciated it more if he had used a real rock group for his example.

What do Michael Horton, Jeff Meyers, Keith Mathison, Robert Letham, Daryl Hart and Rich Lusk all have in common?