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.
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.
You know, come to think of it, the concept of natural grace goes right on through the medieval age all the way to the patristics. I know that won’t be seen as a positive support from certain critics, but it is true. Athanasius taught us that the only way creation could keep from reverting back to nihilio was for it to participate in God. Augustine speaks of the original state of grace (as in “the Fall from grace”) and this gets picked up all through the Western tradition, notably in Aquinas.
Of course, this all connects with eschatology. WestCali is dominated by its overarching metanarrative of 2kingdomz and law/gospel, both of which work together in this controlling Amillennialism which becomes its own distinct worldview.
Now this is very ahistorical in terms of Christian thought. John Milbank has shown pretty persuasively that Augustine did not hold to secularism, and I think we could say the same for Martin Luther. In order to deal with this though, the WestCali crew try to assure us that the Reformers made a big break with all previous Christian tradition, and it is here that Bavinck will be hauled out as evidence that the Reformed rejected any notion of perfecting nature (or the nature/grace paradigm). This is problematic though because it only shows that the Neo-Calvinists rejected the notion. Westminster speaks of “advancing nature,” and William Ames will speak of “perfecting nature.”
That’s the bigger issue that is at the heart of the pre-fall grace debate. It would be fascinating for someone with the real brains to flesh it all out into a book. The next generation’s historians will have a ripe harvest.