Jason Stellman:

As you may know, it is fashionable in various circles (i.e., New Perspective, Norman Shepherd, Federal Vision) to insist that God’s dealings with his creatures have always been gracious. After all, no creature—fallen or not—can ever hope to earn anything from God by means of merit, right?

As laudable (and Reformed) as this emphasis upon divine grace may appear at first blush, I would argue that it both flatly contradicts the teaching of the Westminster Standards and serves, ironically perhaps, to undermine the grace it seeks to exalt.

Bill Baldwin:

The tide of Reformed opinion is that the first covenant God made with Adam was somehow gracious. The grace, it is argued, enters in one or both of two places: 1) God was not bound to offer Adam any reward for his obedience but could have required such obedience from him without any reward. That God chose to offer a reward through a covenant is considered gracious. 2) The reward God offered is so out of proportion to the obedience required that the size of the reward constitutes a further act of grace.

A veritable All-Star team of Reformed heroes have subscribed to one or both of those points, asserting or implying grace in the covenant of works: William Ames, Johannes Cocceius, Frances Turretin, the Westminster Divines[1, John Owen, Thomas Boston, R. L. Dabney, Geerhardus Vos, John Murray, Louis Berkhof, Anthony Hoekema, Sinclair Ferguson, Richard Gaffin. Only a handful — Johannes Heidegger, Herman Witsius, Charles Hodge — hold out against this tide. And Witsius does so after much agonizing. He knows what he’s up against.

Bill is right. Whatever one wants to argue to allow for in the Westminster documents (see Bill’s footnote for his case), the Reformed heritage as a whole, before, during, and after the Assembly all overwhelmingly believed that the covenant of works was based on the grace of God.

For further reading: The Covenant of Works in the Reformed Tradition by Dr. S. Joel Garver / The Covenant of Works, the Mosaic Covenant, & the Necessity of Obedience for Salvation in the Day of Judgment by Mark Horne.

I have to say it gets boring to keep posting the same thing over and over only to see false and unjustifiable portrayals of the Reformed heritage continually passed off when no one who knows anything can fail to know better.

I don’t mind Rev. Stellman making an argument for his position. I do mind him bearing false witness about his own relationship to the record of Reformed Orthodoxy. I don’t mind people not approving of my own variations from Reformed Orthodoxy. I do mind it when they claim I have hidden those variations or pretended that the Reformed Faith is something other than it is.

That sort of revisionism is being perpetrated, but it never came from Moscow or Monroe or me. I almost added something about Westminster West’s record regarding honor as historians. But Bill is from Westminster and he shows no lack of character. Then again he graduated before John Frame left. Was R S Clark even there back then?

I’ve criticized Bill in the past. But he looks better and better to me every day.

This is another post on how Van Til misled me.  It has to do with God and glory.
Van Til asserted that a belief in the God of the Bible involved accepting the “full-bucket paradox”–that you could add to that which was already full.  What was being added, he said, was glory to God, even though God was already all-glorious.

I suppose I should interject a word about paradox in theology.  The difference between a real contradiction and an apparent contradiction is that one is, in principle, reconcilable, but the person doesn’t know how yet.  The whole idea behind an apparent contradiction is that we can know truths without knowing the truth of how the two truths can both be true.

So, I have no problem acknowledging that there are things that appear contradictory and aren’t really so.  And it is perfectly conceivable, in my opinion, that God can tell us things that we don’t understand how to relate to one another.  We don’t have the right to reject one of both of these affirmations because we can’t reconcile them.

All this is to say that my present disbelief in the “full-bucket paradox” is not due to some refusal to accept the possibility that a paradox is the best we can do.

For a long time I did accept this paradox, taking it as an unquestioned axiom that God did all things for his own glory in that sense.  I was taught better when I attended a Sunday School class that consisted in videos of John Gerstner’s “Handout Theology.”  I was more or less prejudiced against Gerstner, because of my loyalty to Van Til and Gerstner’s commitment to “classical” apologetics.  Also, Gerstner said some things about God and creation in the name of logic which sounded, and still sound to my ears, seriously heretical.

So when he addressed the “full-bucket paradox,” I wasn’t in the state of mind to hear him.  But he did address it.  He said that God did not do anything to glorify himself but to reveal his glory.

My automatic response was, “Well that doesn’t explain anything!  If God wants to reveal his glory, we have to ask why He does so.  Obviously, he does it to glorify himself.  So the paradox remains.”

It wasn’t until years later, during one of my unsuccessful attempts to get all the way through a Nozick book,  that I realized I had made an unnecessary assumption.  In order to offer an explanation for God’s basic behavior, all one has to do is offer a self-subsuming rule–a rule that explains itself; a rule that explains the decision to adopt the rule.  Doing all things for one’s own glory works that way.  Once can explain the decision to adopt the rule on the basis of the rule.  But Gerstner’s alternative works just as well.  There is no reason to assume some more basic motivation underlies it.

Of course, later, I was taught a more Trinitarian approach in which the persons of the Trinity eternally give themselves to one another, glorifying one another.

OK, this sermon outline is great, but listening to the audio there is a point where God is presented as the most selfish being in the universe and humility is made to sound like an exclusively creaturely virtue.

If that’s what “to His glory” means, then it is emphatically false to say that God does anything to his own glory.  In fact, theism 101 dictates that we deny that God is even capable of gaining glory.  As it is written:

God hath all life, glory, goodness, blessedness, in and of himself; and is alone in and unto himself all-sufficient, not standing in need of any creatures which he hath made, nor deriving any glory from them, but only manifesting his own glory in, by, unto, and upon them (WCF ch 2).

We “glorify God,” the same way the crowds “justified God” (Luke 7.29).  They justified God by acknowledging He was in the right, and we glorify God by acknowledging that our glory comes from Him as the origin and giver.

Are we supposed to seek our own glory?  Yes, we are to seek it as a graciously-given gift which the giving God bestows on all who trust in Him.  Jesus himself said it: “If I glorify myself, my glory is nothing. It is my Father who glorifies me” (John 8.54).  And he rebuked the Pharisees:

I do not receive glory from people.  But I know that you do not have the love of God within you.  I have come in my Father’s name, and you do not receive me. If another comes in his own name, you will receive him.  How can you believe, when you receive glory from one another and do not seek the glory that comes from the only God? (John 5.41-44)

It was Satan in the Garden who told Adam and Even that glory was a zero-sum game and that God was seeking or maintaining it at their expense.  When they believed in God the grabber of glory–the false god, I mean–they became like that idol, grasping for their own glory.

Jesus reveals true deity.  God’s character is a model for humility, not self-glory.

(Yes, God is and does represent himself as the greatest king.  But that’s the point, even important rulers can be humble in their office without denying their office.)

It may be thought by some that the subject of Justification is trite and exhausted; that, as one of the “commonplaces” of Theology, it was conclusively determined and settled at the era of the Reformation; and that nothing new or interesting can now be introduced into the discussion of it. It is not necessary to say in reply to this, as some might be disposed to say, that “what is new in Theology is not true, and what is true is not new;” for we believe, and are warranted by the whole history of the Church in believing, that Theology, like every other science, is progressive, – progressive, not in the sense of adding anything to the truth once for all revealed in the inspired Word, but in the way of eliciting and unfolding what has always been contained in it, – of bringing out one lesson after another, and placing each of them in a clearer and stronger light, – and discovering the connection, interdependency, and harmony, of all the constituent parts of the marvellous scheme of Revelation. In this sense, Science and Theology are both progressive, the one in the study of God’s works, the other in the study of God’s Word; and as human Science has not yet exhausted the volume of Nature, or reached the limit of possible discovery in regard to it, much less has human Theology fathomed the depths of Scripture, or left nothing to reward further inquiry into “the manifold wisdom of God.” There may be room, therefore, for something new, if not in the substance, yet in the treatment, even of the great doctrine of Justification, – in the exposition of its scriptural meaning, and in the method of adducing, arranging, and applying the array of its scriptural proofs.