One of the problems with this chart is that the black line of unbelief only passes through Creation, Fall, and unbelief, and doesn’t touch on Christ the mediator. I guess this is because “mediator” is being used as a specialized theological term that only entails ultimate salvation. Fine, but I doubt your going to find the word used in such a specialized way in the Bible. Being a mediator would mean being a king and judge for God, an office that Christ fulfills by judging unbelievers in history and finally at the Last Judgment.
Furthermore, mediator is a two-way word, both from man to God and from God to man. So when all judgement is given by the Father to the Son, executing judgment on the reprobate would be an aspect of that office. The Father’s wrath is mediated through the Son.
Also, if you look at the black line as it goes to the left, that ineffectual call would be from Christ the mediator. Yet there is no contact in the diagram.More generally, there is no room at all for common grace in this diagram. I doubt Perkins was a hyper-calvinist, but one would expect it to soon arise if this became a widely popular teaching tool.
Finally, the C lines, with the printed explanation for them, look subordinationist to me. But I may be way out of my depth in this.
Thoughts?
I don’t see any subordinationism. The “God” circle in the middle is the shared essence, and the Father’s place up top is pretty traditional. He begets the Son and breathes out the Spirit.
Charts are never a good idea, of course, but as far as it goes, this one isn’t terrible on the trinity.
Now as far as the ordo, well yeah, this is not biblical at all. This is a completely eternalized schema, which is also why it is supralapsarian.
Another problem is the absence of the other means of grace besides preaching. What about baptism, the Lord’s Supper, the prayers of the Saints, and the Church? Why does preaching make it on the chart, along with all that awful preparationism on the far left, but not the normal outward means?
Well it is an eternal begetting, so we are both right.
I guess I have a problem of some sort with the idea that this begetting / breathing qualifies as “communication of Godhead.” After all, unless the Father begat the Son, he would not be the Father. So I think the Father is just as much as dependent on the Son as vice versa. And those both are equally the source of their own Godhead. (And to get really paranoid, the line between Father and God looks thicker than the line between Son and God and Spirit and God.)
Wow, I’m not sure what is worse, this Perkins chart or the crazy tribulation/armageddon charts of the dispensationalists.