Category Archives: Presbyterian/Reformed

Mercy and justice

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Heidelberg Catechism
Q & A 11
Q. But isn’t God also merciful?

A. God is certainly merciful,1
but he is also just.2
His justice demands
that sin, committed against his supreme majesty,
be punished with the supreme penalty—
eternal punishment of body and soul.3

Note: mouse over footnote for Scripture references.

Andrew Kuyvenhoven writes (33-34),

The last of the three excuses attempts to play off God’s justice against God’s mercy. Polytheists . . . do that; they call on one god for protection against another. But our God is one (Deut. 6:4), and in the heart of our Father-Judge are no such contradictions. . . .

You and I have to do with a righteous God. He always punishes sin, temporally, eternally, in body and soul. Now our sins are either punished in Jesus—then it is all over—or we have to bear our own punishment.

Dr. Kuyvenhoven is right: God’s justice and mercy are not opposed, but united; and his mercy does not come by simply ignoring his justice. How it does come, how that happens, is the gospel.

Let it slide?

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Heidelberg Catechism
Q & A 10
Q. Will God permit
such disobedience and rebellion
to go unpunished?

A. Certainly not.
He is terribly angry
about the sin we are born with
as well as the sins we personally commit.

As a just judge
he punishes them now and in eternity.1
He has declared:
“Cursed is everyone who does not continue to do
everything written in the Book of the Law.”2

Note: mouse over footnote for Scripture references.

God will not let sin slide, because he cannot; it would be unjust, it would be against his nature, it would be wrong, and it would be inherently contradictory. At its core, sin is the assertion of our own self-will against God’s will in a declaration of mistrust: it is the insistence that God neither knows nor truly cares what is best for us, and that we’re better off going our own way. That is a defiant falsehood in the eye of the one who is Truth, a falsehood straight from the pit of Hell; he could not simply ignore it without ceasing to be true, nor would he be doing us anything but ill if he could. Nor, in truth, would his doing so be welcomed; having rebelled against God, why would we want him to come crawling to us to take him back?

Not fair?

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Heidelberg Catechism
Q & A 9
Q. But doesn’t God do us an injustice
by requiring in his law
what we are unable to do?

A. No, God created humans with the ability to keep the law.1
They, however, tempted by the devil,2
in reckless disobedience,3
robbed themselves and all their descendants of these gifts.4

Note: mouse over footnote for Scripture references.

Jerome De Jong writes (35-36),

After having considered the greatness and the extent of man’s sinfulness, disobedience and wretchedness, the Catechism concludes this division on human guilt by suggesting three possible objections. . . .

The initial objection concerns the Creator himself. Is not God unjust? . . . Is it right for God to require what man cannot do? But what is it really that God requires—a series of regulations and commandments and ordinances? Let us remind ourselves again that the entire law is summarized in one word: love! If man now has become a sinner, must God now say that it is no longer necessary for the sinner to love him? Of course not; God remains the same. His requirements do not change. But supposing this to be correct, can man fulfill the requirements of the law? The answer is No, but the answer was Yes! God created man able to perform and to do all the good pleasure of God. But Adam deliberately turned his back on God and disobeyed.

Dr. De Jong elaborates on this with the example of a contractor who agrees to build a home, then takes the money for materials and spends it on a drinking binge; he asks, reasonably enough,

Is it unjust for the original party to demand that his home be built? Can the contractor claim immunity because of his weak character? The contractor was given the means with which to build the house and willfully squandered them.

To be sure, as Kuyvenhoven admits (32), this doesn’t exhaust our objections on this point:

Still, we bristle in self-defense: That temptation happened . . . millennia ago. Why should we be doomed for what none of us remembers?

Here again, it’s a matter of perspective. We protest like individualists. But the Bible says that the very fact that we are able to think of ourselves as unrelated, disunited individuals presents evidence of our sinful perspective. God’s revelation views the human race not as a pile of gravel but as a giant tree. We are not pebbles thrown together but twigs and branches on a tree, all organically united.

We form a corporate unity. In many respects you and I have never doubted it. The national debts . . . are your and my debts. Yet when the debts were incurred, some of us were not yet born and none of us were asked. Similarly, the debt of the human race is yours and mine.

It’s an interesting illustration, since nobody really does deny our liability for the national debt; perhaps it’s because the corporate unity represented by the nation is visible, tangible, and human-created. It’s a reminder that, however hard we may try to avoid the fact, our responsibility in life goes beyond merely that for which we want to admit responsibility.

Total dependence

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Heidelberg Catechism
Q & A 8
Q. But are we so corrupt
that we are totally unable to do any good
and inclined toward all evil?

A. Yes,1 unless we are born again,
by the Spirit of God.2

Note: mouse over footnote for Scripture references.

This is the doctrine typically referred to as “total depravity,” and it’s one that confuses some people. Andrew Kuyvenhoven’s explanation (28) is helpful here:

Sin is worse than we are inclined to think, and salvation is bigger than any church can tell.

The Bible teaches that, by nature, people are “totally depraved.” This is again a technical term, and it might be helpful to say, first, what it does not mean. We don’t mean to say that people are as bad as they can possibly be. Most of the time, most of them are not. Neither do we mean that ordinary decent people cannot perform acts of kindness, helpfulness, courtesy, and so on. Many people do, and we thank God for the milk of human kindness and the paint of civilized surroundings.

By total depravity, we mean that sin has affected every part of every human being. . . .

The only solution to total depravity is total renewal. No person can do anything that is really acceptable to God unless he or she has a new heart.

The Christian life is a life of total dependence on the grace and the power of God. There is no “pull yourself up by your own bootstraps” here, and no suggestion that if you just work harder, you can be good enough (nor the corollary that if anything’s wrong in your life, it must mean you’re not trying hard enough); nor is there any trace of the idea that to keep your salvation, you have to keep working harder. Rather, there is the call to joyful acceptance of our deliverance by Jesus Christ, who set us free from our slavery to sin, who took our death and gave us life.

Parents, children, and sin

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Heidelberg Catechism
Q & A 7
Q. Then where does this corrupt human nature come from?

A. From the fall and disobedience of our first parents,
Adam and Eve, in Paradise.1
This fall has so poisoned our nature2
that we are born sinners—
corrupt from conception on.3

Note: mouseover footnote for Scripture references.

Our first ancestors fouled the well, and poisoned our inheritance. Kuyvenhoven puts it well, I think, when he says (27),

[The catechism] intentionally calls Adam and Eve our “parents,” thereby teaching that, just as black parents get black children and white parents get white children, so sinful parents get sinful children, whether they are yellow, red, black, or white. None of us can escape this poison, for all of us have parents. That’s the teaching.

And none of us can avoid passing it on, for all of us are sinners. As the father of three, I can testify that I am far more aware of my own depravity now than I ever was before they came along.

“God made me this way”? Not exactly

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Heidelberg Catechism
Q & A 6
Q. Did God create people so wicked and perverse?

A. No.
God created them good1 and in his own image,2
that is, in true righteousness and holiness,3
so that they might
truly know God their creator,4
love him with all their heart,
and live with him in eternal happiness
for his praise and glory.5

Note: mouse over footnote for Scripture references.

There’s a real tendency these days to appeal to genetics to explain behavior—and increasingly, to excuse behavior, as action is reframed as identity.  The church can’t appeal to the word of God with regard to homosexual activity without someone (usually a good many someones) standing up and saying, “God made me this way, and therefore this is how I’m supposed to be, and therefore God can’t really have meant that.”  Unfortunately, the steady repetition of that assertion has convinced a lot of folks (especially younger folks) who consider themselves evangelicals that it must be true.  That has done considerable damage to the authority of Scripture in the American evangelical church.

I have no interest in the debate over whether or not or to what degree homosexual desires are a matter of genetics.  To be blunt, I consider the whole question a red herring.  We recognize this when it comes to other issues.  From the studies I’ve seen, the heritability of alcoholism is about the same as the heritability of homosexual preferences, but nobody uses that as a defense for driving drunk.  Certain cancers, we well know, come to us through our genes, yet we don’t tell cancer patients, “God made you this way, so he must want you to die of cancer.”  (The federal government might, if Obamacare passes, but that’s another matter.)  It would be quite consistent to label same-sex erotic desires just another inherited disease—but we don’t do that.  This makes it clear that it’s not the genetic element that’s driving the argument, it’s the affective element.  It’s the fact that those who practice such behaviors don’t want to give them up.

Since the appeal to genetics has been effective (whether logical or not), we can expect to see it raised as a defense for other behaviors as well.  In time, it will become impossible for the church to call people to holiness without hearing, “God made me this way!”  As such, it’s important to remind Christians that the Scriptures give the church a firm answer to this, to which the Heidelberg bears witness:  No, he didn’t.  We are all sinners, we are all bent to defy the will of God and to prefer evil to good in at least some areas of our lives, and all of our natural tendencies, preferences, orientations and desires arise out of sin-distorted hearts—but God didn’t make us that way.  God created us good, in his own image.  Our sinful desires are someone else’s fault altogether.

Just because something is natural to us doesn’t make it right.  Just because we inherited it along with our hair and eye color doesn’t mean that God approves of it.  All it means is that we’re born sinful—just like everybody else.

 

Photo © 2006 Joonas L.  License:  Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic.

Falling short

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Heidelberg Catechism
Q & A 5
Q. Can you live up to all this perfectly?

A. No.1
I have a natural tendency
to hate God and my neighbor.2

Note: mouseover footnote for Scripture references.

This is what causes all the problems. This is what people don’t want to admit; but it’s true. Left to ourselves, we can’t live up to what God wants from us, because we aren’t bent to really love God or the people around us. We’re oriented all wrong; we need to be re-oriented and straightened out.

John Calvin at 500

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In honor of the 500th anniversary of the birth of John Calvin, I’d like to draw your attention to an excellent article by Westminster-California’s W. Robert Godfrey entitled “Calvin: Why He Still Matters.” Here’s the beginning:

There can be no serious doubt that Calvin once mattered. Any honest historian of any point of view and of any religious conviction would agree that Calvin was one of the most important people in the history of western civilization. Not only was he a significant pastor and theologian in the sixteenth century, but the movement of which he was the principal leader led to the building of Reformed and Presbyterian churches with millions of members spread through centuries around the world. Certainly a man whose leadership, theology, and convictions can spark such a movement once mattered.

Historians from a wide range of points of view also acknowledge that Calvin not only mattered in the religious sphere and in the ecclesiastical sphere, but Calvin and Calvinism had an impact on a number of modern phenomena that we take for granted. Calvin is certainly associated with the rise of modern education and the conviction that citizens ought to be educated and that all people ought to be able to read the Bible. Such education was a fruit of the Reformation and Calvin.

Others have insisted that the rise of modern democracy owes at least something to the Reformed movement. One historian said of Puritanism that a Puritan was someone who would humble himself in the dust before God and would rise to put his foot on the neck of a king. Calvinists were strongly persuaded that they must serve God above men, and that began to relativize notions of superiority and aristocracy. King James I of England, who was also James VI of Scotland, once remarked as he looked at Presbyterianism in Scotland: “No bishop, no king.” If the Church is not governed by a hierarchy, certainly the political world does not need to be governed by a hierarchy either. Such Calvinist attitudes toward kings helped contribute to modern democracy.

Calvinism contributed to modern science with an empirical look at the real world. Calvin contributed to the rise of modern capitalism in part by teaching that the charging of interest on money loaned was not immoral. He was the first Christian theologian to do so.

When we look at that list—theology, church, education, science, democracy, and capitalism—here was a man that mattered. He had a profound influence on the development of the history of the West. But does he still matter? Should we care today to revisit John Calvin—who he was, what he thinks—and believe that what he taught is still significant, still valuable? Yes, he still does matter. John Calvin matters still above all because he was a teacher of truth. If truth matters, then John Calvin still matters because he was one of the great teachers of truth, one of the most insightful, faithful teachers of truth, one of the best communicators of truth. He was a teacher who had taken to heart the words of Jesus: “You will know the truth and the truth, and the truth will set you free” (John 8:32).

The bulk of Godfrey’s article, of course, is dedicated to expositing the truth of that last paragraph; I encourage you to read it. If you have additional time and interest, it’s also worth checking out Reformation21, which has a number of excellent pieces up in honor of Calvin’s 500th.

The core of God’s commands

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Heidelberg Catechism
Q & A 4
Q. What does God’s law require of us?

A. Christ teaches us this in summary in Matthew 22—

Love the Lord your God
with all your heart
and with all your soul
and with all your mind
and with all your strength.1

And the second is like it:
Love your neighbor as yourself.2

All the Law and the Prophets hang
on these two commandments.

Note: mouseover footnote for Scripture references. Also, earlier and better manuscripts of Matthew 22 omit the words “and with all your strength.” They are found in Mark 12:30.

As Kuyvenhoven notes (19),

our Lord Jesus made the love-commandment the centerpiece of his teaching. In fact, his whole ministry was designed to teach us that love is God’s law, which everyone has broken, as well as God’s gift that enables all of Jesus’ followers to lead a new life.

Along with that, it must be said, his ministry was also designed to teach us what love really is, and to correct the false ideas we learn about love from our fallen world. We’re perfectly happy to believe that love is God’s law if we get to be the ones defining what that means . . . but we don’t.

Hope begins with the right diagnosis

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Heidelberg Catechism
Q & A 3
Q. How do you come to know your misery?

A. The law of God tells me.1

Note: mouse over footnote for Scripture references.

For John Calvin, this is the first use of the Law: it shows us our sin by showing us our fundamental inability to keep it. It strips away our self-deception and our rationalizations and forces us to face ourselves as we really are—which is the necessary predicate for our salvation, because we won’t accept God’s grace until we accept that we need it.

As well, the Law shows us the true reason for human misery, and thus points us in the direction in which salvation can be found. This is an important gift, because even when we’ve admitted the problem, we tend to want to misdiagnose it (usually out of wishful thinking of some sort or another) as being something we can address on our own. As Jerome de Jong asks in Guilt, Grace, and Gratitude,

Man seems to be aware of the fact that he is miserable, but has he found the true source of his misery?

Left to our own devices, the answer is, “No, not really.”

When man seeks to find the source of his misery within the context of his own experience, the answers which he gives are false. His answers turn him in upon himself and the things with which he hopes to satisfy self. So far is man’s own understanding of his misery from leading him to God that all about us we see those who have experienced bitterness, despair, and utter hopelessness, who have out of this experience denied the reality of God. Man’s understanding of himself will have to come from outside himself. It must be revealed to him.