According to Chad Van Dixhoorn’s excellent lecture on the debates over imputation at the Westminster Assembly, Vines made a statement that was closer to Roman Catholicism than Protestantism. Vines, in opposing the need for the imputation of the active obedience of Christ claimed that the difference between being restored to the state of innocence, and being admitted into glory, was more properly covered by sanctification rather than justification.
I don’t agree with Vines’ statement as summarized or quoted by Van Dixhoorn, but I do think this represents another point where it seems like current PCA intellectual leadership, or popular PCA teaching, is smoothing and correcting the actual faith we find articulated in the documents that are supposed to be our doctrinal standards.
Consider: Benedict Pictet was translated and published by the Presbyterian Sunday School Board in the 1800s for the edification of readers. While some portions were expurgated and some rated a footnote of disagreement, this was allowed to stand as Presbyterian teaching:
As to the necessity of good works, it is clearly established from the express commands of God–from the necessity of our worshipping and serving God–from the nature of the covenant of grace, in which God promises every kind of blessing, but at the same time requires obedience–from the favors received at his hands, which are so many motives to good works–from the future glory which is promised, and to which good works stand related, as the means to the end, as the road to the goal, as seed-time to the harvest, as first-fruits to the whole gathering, and as the contest to the victory…
So good works are instrumentally related to entering into eternal glory. It is hard to imagine this being published today. Yet it sounds quite like what we find in the Westminster Confession on good works, as well as in Scripture.
These good works, done in obedience to God’s commandments, are the fruits and evidences of a true and lively faith: and by them believers manifest their thankfulness, strengthen their assurance, edify their brethren, adorn the profession of the gospel, stop the mouths of the adversaries, and glorify God, whose workmanship they are, created in Christ Jesus thereunto, that, having their fruit unto holiness, they may have the end, eternal life.
The Confession is translating the contemporary English translation of First Corinthians 6.22. Here it is in context:
20 For when you were slaves of sin, you were free in regard to righteousness. 21 But what fruit were you getting at that time from the things of which you are now ashamed? For the end of those things is death. 22 But now that you have been set free from sin and have become slaves of God, the fruit you get leads to sanctification and its end, eternal life. 23 For the wages of sin is death, but the free gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord.
The Westminster Confession teaches that personal holiness (sanctification) is the means to the end, which is eternal life. That sounds somewhat similar to what I understand Van Dixhoorn to be claiming that Vines said.
So while I’m not willing to endorse what Vines may have said, it does strike me that Vines and others who agreed with him to some extent had more influence on the Westminster Confession and Catechisms than people today would be fully comfortable with. Yet how can one use words correctly and criticize the Westminster Standards for not being Protestant enough? I don’t see how. The Westminster Assembly was a council that defined Reformed Protestantism, at least officially. It is Protestant by definition.
But read the Westminster Confession some time, and both Catechisms, and ask yourself if it does not, in places, seem more Roman Catholic than Protestant by the standard of modern Evangelical expectations. Perhaps it is time to have a new council and purify the documents of what we now see as Roman Catholic tendencies. Or maybe the documents contain wisdom that might pull us back from false and unnecessary polarizations in doctrine that were never the teaching the Protestant Reformation in the first place..
Simply admitting the discrepancy between us and the Westminster divines would be a necessary first step to making any progress one way or the other.