Salvation Godly Rule

Chalced on/Ros s House B o oks
Va l l e c i t o, C a l i f o r n i a
Copyright 1983, 2004, 2020
Mark R. Rushdoony
Chalcedon/Ross House Books

PO Box 67
Vallecito, CA 95251
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Other books by
Rousas John Rushdoony
The Institutes of Biblical Law, Vol. I

The Institutes of Biblical Law, Vol. II, Law & Society
The Institutes of Biblical Law, Vol. III, The Intent of the Law
Systematic Theology (2 volumes)
Hebrews, James & Jude
The Gospel of John
Larceny in the Heart
The Biblical Philosophy of History
The Mythology of Science
Thy Kingdom Come
Foundations of Social Order
This Independent Republic
The Nature of the American System
The “Atheism” of the Early Church
The Messianic Character of American Education
The Philosophy of the Christian Curriculum
Christianity and the State
Salvation and Godly Rule
Romans & Galatians
God’s Plan for Victory
Politics of Guilt and Pity
Roots of Reconstruction
The One and the Many
Revolt Against Maturity
By What Standard?
Law & Liberty
For a complete listing of available books by

Rousas John Rushdoony and other Christian
reconstructionists, contact:
ROSS HOUSE BOOKS

PO Box 67
Vallecito, CA 95251
www.rosshousebooks.org
Table of Contents
1. Salvation: Pagan and Christian . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1

2. Salvation Versus Insurance . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11
3. Salvation and Judgment. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 21
4. Salvation and Sovereignty . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 31
5. Salvation and Dominion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 43
6. Assurance. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 53
7. Political Saviors . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 63
8. The Certain Word . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 73
9. Paradise and Salvation. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 81
10. Sacrifice . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 91
11. Perfection and Salvation. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 99
12. Causality . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 109
13. The Sabbath . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 119
14. Idleness and Revolution . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 131
15. The Intellect as Savior . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 141
16. Salvation by Love and Hate . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 149
17. Buddhist Salvation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 159
18. Degradation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 165
19. Judgment. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 173
20. Change . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 181
21. Salvation by Slavery . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 189
22. Outlaw Cultures . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 195
23. Works . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 213
24. Truth . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 219
25. Facts . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 231
26. Evil . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 241
27. Progress and Providence . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 249
28. Providence and the End. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 259
29. Fate . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 269
30. The Antithesis. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 277
31. The Harmony of Interests . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 287
32. Suicide . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 295
33. Death. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 307
34. Hell . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 313
35. The Forgiveness of Sins . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 321
36. Effectual Calling . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 329
37. Justification . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 337
38. Adoption . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 351
39. The Forgiver . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 361
40. The Forgiven . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 369
41. Forgiveness . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 375
42. Regeneration . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 385
43. Repentance . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 395
44. Sanctification. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 403
45. The Incarnation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 411
46. Perseverance . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 417
47. Incarnation and Indwelling . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 427
48. Predestination . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 437
49. The Principle of Hilarity. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 443
50. The Holy Spirit and the Redeemed Man. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 451
51. The Return to Reality . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 457
52. Work . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 465
53. Justice . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 475
54. Christian Liberty . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 481
55. Christian Obedience . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 491
56. Liberty of Conscience. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 501
57. Mercy. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 511
58. Justice and Mercy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 519
59. Faith . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 525
60. “Just and Having Salvation” . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 533
61. The Resurrection and Man. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 537
62. The Daysman . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 547
63. Prophet, Priest, and King. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 555
64. Pentecost and Responsibility . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 561
65. Salvation and Evangelism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 567
66. “The Kingdom of Heaven Suffereth Violence” . . . . . . . . . 573
67. Godly Rule . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 579
68. Manipulated Man . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 589
69. Humanism. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 597
70. Marriage and the Family. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 603
71. Manners. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 611
72. Reigning in Life . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 617
Appendix: The Curse . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 621
Scripture Index . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 629
Index . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 645
I
Salvation: Pagan and Christian
The Greek word salvation, soteria, means deliverance,

preservation, victory, and health, and it refers to material and
temporal deliverance, as well as personal, national, temporal
and eternal triumph. The Biblical doctrine of salvation is so
clearly one of victory, that it must be emphatically stated that
salvation is not escape. Many pagan concepts of deliverance are
really doctrines of escape. The deus ex machina (literally, the
god from the machine) idea shows us clearly how, in the
Greco-Roman world, problems were resolved into men’s
hopes and imagination. A god was introduced in the drama to
provide a supernatural solution to a dramatic difficulty by
intervening in the problem to separate the besieged person
from his difficulties. A way of escape was provided. Thus, in
Homer’s Iliad (Book III), when the angry husband Menelaos
meets Paris, the seducer of his wife Helen, in battle, all did not
go well with Paris. At this point, “Aphrodite snatched up
Paris, very easily as a goddess may, and hid him in thick
darkness, and set him down in his fragrant perfumed chamber;
and herself went to summon Helen.” The outcome is that Paris
said, “‘sweet desire taketh hold upon me.’ So saying he led the
way to the couch, and the lady followed him.”1 Paris thus was
raptured out of a losing battle into the rapture of Helen’s lap,
a good model of pagan salvation.
Escapism has been a dominant note in virtually all
non-Biblical religions, and, one may add, in most politics as
well. Thus, in Buddhism, the “Four Noble Truths” of
Gautama Buddha were: 1) “All existence involves suffering; 2)
All suffering is caused by indulging in inherently insatiable
desires; 3) Therefore all suffering will cease upon the
suppressing of all desires; 4) While still living, every person
should live moderately.” No distinction was made between
1. Lang, Leaf, Butcher, and Myers translation.
1
2 Salvation & Godly Rule
good and evil desires; “all desires” were to be suppressed, and
Nirvana, the total obliteration of consciousness, desire,
perception, feeling, and emotion, is to be sought. Nirvana is a
passionless peace which is beyond consciousness and beyond
nothingness.2 “The Buddhist monk aims at doing nothing at all,
and may well end in complete vacancy of mind and character.”
Commenting on a poem which sets forth the Buddhist monastic
goal, Parker called it “a poetic glorification of laziness.”3
The escapism can be from man’s inner problems and the
inner tension created by sin and guilt. St. Paul’s declaration
that “he is a Jew (i.e., a covenant man) which is one inwardly”
(Rom. 2:29), was countered by Mohammed, who asserted, “He
is a Muslim who is one outwardly.” The essential duties or
“five pillars of Islam” are pure externalism: 1) the regular
repetition of the creed; 2) repetition of prescribed prayers five
times daily and at three stated times; 3) the duty of almsgiving;
4) observance of the Feast of Ramadan, which called for strict
fasting in daylight hours and eating and drinking during the
rest of the day; and 5) pilgrimage to Mecca.
Blackman has called the Egyptian doctrine a conception of
“posthumous happiness.”4 This is an accurate description, because
the Egyptian conception is not one of salvation but rather of an
earned retirement or reward. The gods of paganism may be able in some
myths to provide an escape, but they cannot provide victory or
salvation because they do not have an absolute and sovereign
control over all things. Thus, an Egyptian love-spell from about
1100 B.C. indicates that the gods could be threatened by a lover if
he did not get his desire:
Hail to thee, O Re-Harakhte, Father of the Gods!
Hail to you, O ye seven Hathors,
Who are adorned with strings of red thread!
Hail to you, ye Gods, Lords of heaven and earth!
2.
Paul E. Kritzmann, The God of the Bible and Other Gods (St. Louis, Missouri:
Concordia, 1943), 68-71.
3. J. W. Parker, The Idea of Salvation In the World’s Religions (London: Macmillan,
1935), 190.
4. Aylward M. Blackman, “Salvation (Egyptian),” in James Hastings, editor, En-
cyclopaedia of Religion and Ethics, vol. XI, 131f.
Salvation: Pagan and Christian 3
Cause so-and-so (fem.), born of so-and-so, to come after me
Like an ox after grass,
Like a mother after her children,
Like a drover after his herd!
If you do not make her come after me
I shall set fire to Busiris-city and burn up Osiris!5
How limited the Egyptian idea of the gods was appears also in
The Book of the Dead, in which Osiris Nu declared, “I am he who
cometh for advancing, whose name is unknown. I am Yesterday.”6
Osiris is thus the evolving force of Yesterday, far from
self-conscious enough to know his own name or nature; Osiris is
thus as much a product as a producer, and as much an effect as a
cause.
The problem confronting paganism is thus apparent: only a
fully self-conscious, self-existent, sovereign, and creating God
can save man, because only He can fully control, govern, and
determine all things. Gods who are themselves determined
cannot save man, because they themselves are often in need of
being saved. In the cyclical outlook of paganism, the gods
themselves are born out of chaos and must ultimately return
to chaos with all things else. Such gods cannot save man, for in
their universe no salvation is possible; all they can offer is a
limited degree of temporary escape, a deus ex machina answer
which briefly placed Paris in Helen’s lap. Soon thereafter,
Paris was wounded by a poisoned arrow, and the nymph
Oenone, whom he had married as a youth and deserted for
Helen, was the only one able to heal him; she refused, and
Paris died.
Only in Scripture do we meet the God who is able to save;
Genesis 1:1 declares, “In the beginning God created the heaven
and the earth.” As the only creator and absolute sovereign over
all things, God is able to determine all things, and He does; and
only He has the power to save man in the full and true sense of the
5. Cited from the Journal of Egyptian Archaeology, xxvii (1941), 131, by Margaret
A. Murray, The Splendour That Was Egypt (New York: Philosophical Library,
1961), 217.
6. E. A. Wallis Budge, The Book of the Dead (New Hyde Park, New York: Uni-
versity Books, 1960), 609.
word. Where the doctrine of creation is weakened, the doctrine of
salvation is also weakened.
As a result, in paganism the quest is less for salvation than for
escape, or, as in Hinduism, for mukti, or release. For the
Hindu, release means “emancipation from bondage to matter
with all that this involves of pain and penalty, and entrance
into a haven of rest and peace for ever untroubled by the afflictions
and sorrows that attend upon all earthly conditions.”7
The ancient Iranian religion of Mazdaism could offer no
salvation, because it held to an ultimate dualism, the equal
ultimacy of the good god and the bad god. Ahura Mazda could
not save man; he himself was involved in continual battle with
Angra Mainyu, the spirit of evil. Man had to work his own
deliverance. As Casartelli noted, “the Mazdean doctrine is that
each man works out his own salvation, though under the
guidance of divine revelation and with the powerful spiritual
aid of Ahura Mazda, his hierarchy of spirits, and of the
teachings and examples of Zarathushtra and his followers.8 A
world, however, in which a man must save himself because the
gods cannot do so is also a world in which his own works can
be reduced to meaninglessness by a turning of history.
Pessimism and disintegration thus haunt all doctrines of
self-salvation.
It is thus wrong to speak of pagan doctrines of salvation;
salvation is a Biblical concept. The word for salvation (najah) is only
used once in the Koran:
The idea which the term najah conveys to the Muslim
mind is that of escape from future punishment in hell.
Khalas, which means ‘deliverance,’ is also used in the same
sense. Thus it is not so much escape from the power of sin
in this life as an escape from its punishment hereafter that
is implied in the term “salvation.”9
7. A. S. Geden, “Salvation (Hindu),” Hastings, op. cit.,

135.
8. L. C. Casartelli, “Salvation (Iranian),” in ibid., 137.
9. Edward Sell, “Salvation (Muslim),” in ibid., 149.
Thus, the Islamic conception of salvation “is entirely legalistic;
it is not a moral change in the heart now, leading a man to have
power over sin to repress it, but a release in the next world
from the punishment of hell, in virtue of certain good acts
done in this life.”10 What constitutes these good acts we have
already seen in our discussion of the “five pillars of Islam.”
Among the Teutonic pagans, salvation was essentially an
escape from external evil powers; it meant victory over evil
forces, but this victory was an external battle, not a change in
man’s relationship to God.
To the ancient Teutons the idea of salvation applied in the
first place to getting rid of those things which to him were
absolutely evil. It also meant preservation from such
destruction, danger, and calamity as he expected to meet.
Salvation thus meant delivery from evil spirits and from
anything which they might bring about. Of evil spirits
there were a great number and many kinds, such as dwarfs,
giants, dragons, and kobolds. Then there were the witches
and wizards, the sorcerers and the enchanters, with all their
arts and incantations used for the destruction of man.11
These pagan concepts thus cannot offer salvation, not only
because they have no God nor universe in which full and assured
victory is possible, but also because they have a defective view of
man and sin. In paganism, man seeks an escape from his problems,
or a retirement into sensual bliss from the world’s work and
responsibility. By failing to recognize his rebellion against the
sovereign God as his essential problem as well as his sin, pagan
man wants not salvation but escape. To admit the real problem, his
sin, is to admit that there is no way of escape, only the way of
salvation through God’s regenerating grace.
Moreover, the failure of paganism to offer salvation is not
accidental. It is a part of the pagan refusal to understand; it is a
willful rejection of the truth of God. Lenski has translated
Romans 1:18 thus:
10. Ibid.
11. S. G. Youngert, “Salvation (Teutonic),” in ibid., 149.
For there is revealed God’s wrath from heaven upon all
ungodliness and unrighteousness of men who suppress the
truth in unrighteousness, because what is known
regarding God is manifest in them, for God manifested it
to them. For the things unseen regarding him, by being
perceived from the world’s creation on by means of the
things made, are fully seen, both his everlasting power and
divinity, so that they are without excuse.12
The sinner suppresses, holds down, the truth of God because of
his unrighteousness. Instead of salvation, he seeks escape, or
retirement. At best, he calls it a problem to be solved which he
insists that he is capable of solving. The problem is disguised in
order to avert the answer. Thus, the requirement laid upon
Christian apologetics is not only to set forth the doctrine of
salvation, but also to so define it as to eliminate the pagan concepts
which masquerade as salvation.
This the apostles did as they confronted the world of their
day. Ramsay pointed out some years ago how common
references to salvation were on Greek tombstones of the era:
It is remarkable that the idea of “salvation” should be so
closely connected with the making of the grave. Respect to
the dead is a prayer for the whole family and its
permanence and prosperity. The dead has gone to be a god
with the gods; the tomb is his temple; and the worship of
this new god is inaugurated with the grave and epitaph,
which are the discharge of a vow to secure his blessing for
the entire household.13
Moreover, “To the pagans salvation was safety, health,
prosperity.”14 The word “salvation” was important to the mystery
religions, but it did not involve the idea of moral renewal, although
the hunger for fulness of life was there. “In paganism the
association of their ‘Salvation’ with the idea of rebirth, or of death
12. R. C. H. Lenski, The Interpretation of St. Paul’s Epistle to the Romans (Columbus,
Ohio: Wartburg Press, 1945), 89.
13. Sir W. M. Ramsay, The Bearing of Recent Discovery on the Trustworthiness of the New
Testament, Fourth edition (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1920), 190.
14. Ibid., 173.
and a future life, was invariable.”15 The means to this end were
pathetic ones:
Among the pagans, then, the term “Salvation” was largely
material in its connotation, and salvation was gained by
ritual and ceremony. There were three chief departments,
so to say, of salvation among the pagans: the salvation
gained by religious duties and vows and prayers, the
salvation sought by magic rites, and the Imperial salvation.
As in every other department of life, so here, the policy of
the Empire enters to dominate and to guide the thoughts and
acts and even the prayers and wishes of all its subjects.16
Salvation was personal in the mystery religions, but in every cult,
the basic background of salvation was political. Religion in
paganism was subordinate to, and an aspect of, political order. As
a result, the supervision of the state was held to be necessary and
inescapable, and to deny this necessary supervision and recognition
by the state, as the Christians did, was treason. Imperial salvation
meant cradle-to-grave security on the imperial estates, and men
regarded this loss of freedom in exchange for security as
“salvation.” Serfdom in its origins was this imperial salvation of
Rome. As Ramsay summarized it, “The ‘Salvation’ of Jesus and of
Paul was freedom: the ‘Salvation’ of the imperial system was
serfdom.”17
The early church refused to trust in man and in man’s way
for salvation. When persecuted for refusing to swear by the
genius of the emperor, the Christians reminded the Romans
that they took seriously such verses as 1 Timothy 2:2, the
command to pray “for kings, and for all that are in authority;
that we may lead a quiet and peaceable life in all godliness and
honesty.” As Tertullian wrote,
32. There is also another and a greater necessity for our
offering prayer in behalf of the emperors, nay, for the
complete stability of the empire, and for Roman interests
in general. For we know that a mighty shock impending
15. Ibid.,
175f.
16. Ibid.,
177.
17. Ibid., 198.
over the whole earth — in fact, the very end of all things
threatening dreadful woes — is only retarded by the
continued existence of the Roman empire. We have no
desire, then, to be overtaken by these dire events; and in
praying that their coming may be delayed, we are lending
our aid to Rome’s duration. More than this, though we
decline to swear by the genii of the Caesars, we swear by
their safety, which is worth far more than all your genii.
Are you ignorant that these genii are called “Daemones,”
and thence the diminutive name “Daemonia” is applied to
them? We respect in the emperors the ordinance of God,
who has set them over the nations. We know that there is
that in them which God has willed; and to what God has
willed we desire all safety , and we count an oath
by it a great oath . But as for daemons , that is, your
genii , we have been in the habit of exorcising them ,
not swearing by them , and thereby conferring on them
divine honour.
33. But why dwell longer on the reverence and sacred
respect of Christians to the emperor, whom we cannot but
look up to as called by our Lord to his office? So that on
valid grounds I might say Caesar is more ours than yours,
for our God has appointed him. Therefore, as having this
propriety in him, I do more than you for his welfare, not
merely because I ask it of Him who can give it, or because
I ask it as one who deserves to get it, but also because, in
keeping the majesty of Caesar within due limits, and
putting it under the Most High, and making it less than
divine, I commend him the more to the favour of Deity, to
whom I make him alone inferior. But I place him in
subjection to one I regard as more glorious than himself.
Never will I call the emperor God, and that either because
it is not in me to be guilty of falsehood; or that I dare not
turn him into ridicule; or that not even himself will desire
to have that high name applied to him. If he is but a man,
it is his interest as man to give God His higher place. Let
him think it enough to bear the name of emperor. That,
too, is a great name of God’s giving. To call him God, is to
rob him of his title. If he is not a man, emperor he cannot
be. Even when, amid the honours of a triumph, he sits on
that lofty chariot, he is reminded that he is only human.
A voice at his back keeps whispering in his ear, “Look
behind thee; remember thou art but a man.” And it only
adds to his greatness that he needs such a reminiscence, lest
he should think himself divine.18
Tertullian’s comments are of great interest on several counts.
First, it is clear that 2 Thessalonians 2:2-6 was interpreted by
the early church to mean that the Roman Empire was the
hindering power against the man of sin and his lawless, anarchic
sway. Thus, however great the persecution of Rome, Rome was to
be preferred to this alternative. Second, the trust of the Christians
could never be in the emperor’s genius, in the emperor as a divine
leader, but only as a man ruling over men under God. Third,
salvation thus is not political and is entirely supernatural. As a
result, the Christian hope is not in imperial salvation but in Christ’s
salvation, not in salvation as security under an emperor’s cradle-to-
grave care, but in Christ’s redemption from the power of sin and
death. The redeemed man is renewed in Christ and made a new
force in history, so that Christ, working in His saints, is actively
recapturing and restoring all men and nations to His kingdom.
As we have seen, the pagan concept of salvation (if the word
can be so used) was essentially escapism, a retirement from life,
or a search for security. These limited hopes reflected the
essential pessimism of paganism. St. Paul cited an ancient
pagan proverb expressing this cynicism: “let us eat and drink;
for tomorrow we die” (1 Cor. 15:32). Isaiah had cited this
centuries before (22:13; cf. 56:12). The constant refrain of
pagan wisdom was the misery of man; hence, the sensible
course for many was to grasp at the pleasures at hand, because
death and the end of all things may come tomorrow. As against
this, the Biblical emphasis is on joy, on what Ramsay termed
“the happy lot of man.” St. Paul spoke of “the unsearchable
riches of Christ” (Eph. 3:8), and declared, of the believer’s
future, that God “has raised us up together (with Christ), and
made us sit together in heavenly places in Christ Jesus: That in
ages to come he might show the exceeding riches of his grace
in his kindness toward us through Christ Jesus” (Eph. 2:6-7). In
18.Tertullian, “Apologeticus,” in Ante-Nicene Christian Library, vol. XI (Edin-

burgh: T. & T. Clark, 1872), 111f.
the face of all present problems, St. Paul’s happy word is,
“Rejoice in the Lord alway: and again I say, Rejoice” (Phil. 4:4).
The joyful prospect proclaimed by St. Paul is summarized by
Ramsay:
Not merely do we receive from Christ. We are the riches
of Christ. To that great honour have we been exalted by
the grace of God. The assembly of the saints, the whole
body of Christians, the Universal and Catholic Church,
constitutes the inheritance of Christ. The purpose of God
from the creation has been to create and complete this
structure as the kingdom of God, “the wealth of the glory
of Christ’s inheritance among the saints.”19
Men who have the assurance of salvation are confident and
triumphant men.
When St. Paul declared, “For I am not ashamed of the gospel
of Christ: for it is the power of God unto salvation” (Rom. 1:
16), he meant that, because salvation is entirely the work of the
sovereign and omnipotent God, the proclamation of that good
news could cause him neither shame nor embarrassment. His
gospel was not the uncertain and possible work of an impotent or
struggling god, but the absolute and certain work of the eternal,
triune, and omnipotent Maker of heaven and earth. To preach such
a certainty would bring Paul no shame or embarrassment: God’s
saving power is sure.
19.
Sir W. M. Ramsay, The Teaching of Paul in Terms of the Present Day (London:
Hodder and Stoughton, 1914), 219.
II
Salvation Versus Insurance
James Hastings’ Encyclopaedia of Religion and Ethics (vol. XII)

devotes sixty pages to worship in various religions. The series
of essays on worship are learned and informative, but in a real
sense futile, in that there is no common definition of worship
possible. The writers struggled as a result to find in a variety of
religions something which is largely alien to them, in that the
word worship has for us a Biblical context, whereas what is
called worship in these other religions has often little
relationship to anything we would recognize as such.
Christian worship is an organized corporate act grounded in
personal as well as corporate faith. It involves more than ritual,
important as ritual is: it is instructional and educational, in that
the Scriptures are read and expounded. It involves corporate
singing in praise to God and the glorification of God’s
sovereign power and purpose. In all these things, Christian
worship is radically different from pagan “worship.”
There is a reason for this difference, and this difference is
rooted in a key fact that makes pagan temple practices no more
than secondarily or incidentally worship at their best.
Christian worship celebrates salvation and victory; if it fails to
do this, it is not worship. In pagan temples there is no
celebration of either personal or corporate salvation. Instead,
there is a transaction which is in essence the purchase of
insurance.
Blackman wrote of ancient Egyptian temple rites that
The whole object of official worship, as represented in the
temple reliefs, was to obtain the favour of the divinities for
Pharaoh. In return for the offerings which he presents to
them they promise him victory, gladness, life, stability,
health, good fortune, abundance, millions of years, the
duration of Re, an eternity of jubilees, etc. The very
temples of the gods were erected by the king that he might
11
receive in return the “duration of heaven,” “hundreds of
thousands of years,” and that he might “be granted
eternity as king.” Thus the designation of every ritual act,
“giving (var. doing) this or that to (for) his father (var.
mother) N.N.,” is followed by the words “in order that he may
make an ‘Endowed-with-life’ like Re forever,” the
“Endowed-with-life” being of course the king himself.1
We have already seen how an Egyptian lover threatened the
god, if his love charm failed to work. The reason for such
attitudes in paganism was that the function of the temple was
essentially to provide insurance, and the insuring agent was a
god or spirit.
Because the god or spirit had supernatural powers, he was
feared, and it was good business to stay in the good favor of
such a force. Before embarking on a voyage, undertaking a
task, or on facing a personal or family crisis, the pagan sought
to buy protection by going to the temple or altar and offering
a sacrifice. The gods functioned somewhat like an old-
fashioned Italian Mafia, usually honoring loyalties, but
essentially self-centered and ruthless. Their favor had to be
bought at a price. However, if the god or spirit failed, then
obviously he was either unwilling or unable to provide
protection. In either case, he was either an enemy or a cheat,
and reprisals could be taken against the god.
Very obviously, this pagan belief has infiltrated the church.
The spare-tire concept of God, as Otto Piper pointed out some
years ago, is very prevalent. A spare-tire is not normally used;
in fact, it is highly desirable if it is never necessary to use it.
However, common sense requires that a man carry a spare-tire
and always avoid being without one. For many people, God is
a spare-tire, not normally to be used and an annoyance if required,
but a good thing to have handy in case of trouble.
Such an attitude confuses faith in God with a belief in the
value of fire insurance. Countless numbers of church
members, for example, believe that a Great Tribulation lies
1. A. M. Blackman, “Worship (Egyptian)” in James Hastings, editor, Encyclopae-
dia of Religion and Ethics, vol. XII, 780.
Salvation Versus Insurance 13
ahead. Many others, conservatives and liberals, have been
persuaded by the press and by current events that grim days lie
ahead. Such books as Lindsey’s horror story capitalize on this fact.2
The result is that many people become ostensible believers who are
in reality buying an insurance policy against disaster or tribulation,
an insurance which promises to rapture them out of any such dire
event. (One popular preacher assures his listeners that, because of
the supposedly imminent rapture, they may never die!)
But salvation is not insurance against problems, troubles, or
tribulation. The apostles and the saints of the early church
were certainly not spared fearful persecutions and executions.
The Reformation era saw many burned and beheaded for their
faith. The nineteenth century saw many natives in Africa and
Asia slain for their stand for Christ. In the twentieth century,
the Turks as well as the Marxists have slain millions of
Christians. Salvation did not mean an insurance policy for
them.
Nothing is more dishonest than the common “witness” at
testimonial meetings which says, “The Lord saved me and
took away all my troubles.” Salvation increases our
responsibilities because it makes us responsible men, and it
thereby increases our troubles. Salvation does not remove us
from troubles, tribulation, or problems. Rather, it thrusts us
into them, and, at the same time, gives us the assurance of
victory in Jesus Christ. We may lose a battle now and then, but
we shall win the war. Moreover, every lost battle also adds up
to victory, for “we know that all things work together for
good to them that love God, to them who are called according
to his purpose” (Rom. 8:28).
The religious quest for insurance is pagan. Where the desire
for insurance governs a church or a theology, we have
paganism revived. Salvation in Scripture is neither a promise of
escape, nor an insurance guaranteeing immunity against
2. Hal Lindsey, with C. C. Carlson, The Late Great Planet Earth (Grand Rapids,
Michigan: Zondervan, 1970).
tribulation. It is rather the assurance of victory in the warfare
of life.
A clear indictment of the desire to withdraw appears in the
account of the transfiguration of Christ (Matt. 17:1-8; Mark
9:2-8; Luke 9:28-36). Moses and Elijah appear as representatives
of the Law and the Prophets, conversing with Jesus on his
decease or exodus at Jerusalem (Luke 9:31). Peter, James, and
John were thus made witnesses to the fact that the whole purpose
of God’s revelation and redemption was to be fulfilled or put into
force in Christ’s atoning death and resurrection. This decease or
exodus (the word used in the Greek text) was the departure or
exodus from the slavery of Egypt, of sin, into the redemption and
new creation of God. The cross represented both the death
sentence on the fallen world and the release of its captives to
Christ, the destroyer of sin and death. The new creation is the goal
of the Law and the Prophets, and they were forerunners and
evidences of that new creation.
Mark tells us that the disciples were exceedingly or “sore
afraid” (Mark. 9:6). The vista opened up by the declaration of the
true exodus, the crucifixion and resurrection, was a shocking
and frightening one. They wanted the Kingdom of God to
come in by Christ’s proclamation and miraculous power. The
prospect in view for Christ, and then for the disciples
thereafter, was a terrifying one. They had been dreaming of
positions of power in the kingdom (Matt. 18:1-5; Mark. 9:33-37;
Luke 9:46-49). Now it was apparent that something else was in
store for them first, a world-battle against the powers of
darkness in the name of Christ.
Their preference thus was not to go forward into that
battle-born history, but to stand still in terms of the
supernatural experience of the moment. Peter “said unto Jesus,
Lord, it is good for us to be here: if thou wilt, let us make here
three tabernacles; one for thee, and one for Moses, and one for
Elias” (Matt. 17:4). Their hope was to continue at least for a
time to dwell on the revelation of the moment. For them,
revelation was to be used to arrest history, not to further it.
God, then, answered them out of the overshadowing cloud
(a symbol of glory and judgment), saying, “This is my beloved
Son, in whom I am well pleased; hear ye him” (Matt. 17:5).
Calvin said of this declaration:
When he enjoins us to hear him, he appoints him to be the
supreme and only teacher of his Church. It was his design
to distinguish Christ from all the rest, as we truly and
strictly infer from those words, that by nature he was
God's only Son. In like manner, we learn that he alone is
beloved by the Father and that he alone is appointed to be
our Teacher, that in him all authority may dwell.
Hear him. I mentioned a little ago, that these words were
intended to draw the attention of the Church to Christ as
the only Teacher, that on his mouth alone it may
depend.... In short, Christ is as truly heard at the present
day in the Law and in the Prophets as in his Gospel; so that
in him dwells the authority of a Master, which he claims
for himself alone, saying One is your Master, even Christ,
(Matth. xxiii, 8). But his authority is not fully
acknowledged unless all the tongues of men are silent. If
we would submit to his doctrine, all that has been invented
by men must be thrown down and destroyed.3
The intention of Peter in calling for three tabernacles was a
pious one in part; it was a desire to commemorate a great
revelation-event by an act of honor and piety. Piety is thus a very
common substitute for true religion and an impediment to
salvation. The piety of Peter, James, and John was designed to
forestall Christ’s death and resurrection and the subsequent
responsibility of the apostles’ to confront a hostile world with
the gospel. Thus piety was to replace conflict, but, in so doing,
it would have denied salvation.
This attitude has been all too common in the church. To
forestall the conflicts over faith and doctrine which might tear
the church apart and cleanse it, the pious ones plead for a pious
withdrawal instead, as though salvation means withdrawal
3.
John Calvin, Commentary on a Harmony of the Evangelists, Matthew, Mark, and
Luke, vol. II, William Pringle, translator (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Eerdmans,
1957), 314f.
rather than victory. Such piety, moreover, makes a great show
of spirituality and reverence, and it presents itself as superior
to the “trouble-makers” who want a godly confrontation.
True piety or growth in sanctification is a work of God’s
grace, whereby those whom God has chosen before the
foundation of the world, are, through the death and
resurrection of Jesus Christ, renewed in their whole man after
the image of God, so that now, in obedience to the law-word
of God, they put His word into force in every area of life,
serving God in joy and in thanksgiving. It is the application of
Christ’s victory, of His saving power, to every area of life in
terms of His word.
Thus, where the pagan wants insurance against trouble and
problems, the redeemed man wants victory over all troubles
and problems. The victory of the Christian begins with
Christ’s redemptive power in his own life, and he then applies
that victory to every sphere of life.
One school of pietists speaks much of “Victorious Living.”
By this, unfortunately, they mean a neoplatonic flight from
the responsibilities of life. In modern Protestantism, it was John
Wesley who propagated the idea of “entire instantaneous
sanctification.” More recent champions of “the Victorious
Life” have been Charles Gallaudet Trumbull, long-time editor of
The Sunday School Times, Hannah Whittall Smith, author of The
Christian's Secret of a Happy Life, James H. McConkey and his The
Threefold Secret of the Holy Spirit, W. E. Boardman, A. T. Pierson, A.
B. Simpson, and others. Their opinions are marked by the spiritual
pretension of a higher way, “The Second Blessing,” and so on.
These pietists preach faith and pious human effort as the solution
to sin; i.e., instead of recognizing God’s grace as the remedy for sin,
they see faith (as man’s effort) as the remedy for sin. People are
thus urged to have more faith, pray more, indulge in more acts of
pious withdrawal from the world, and so on, and thus, by their
efforts, acquire faith — power against sin. It is, as Warfield pointed
out, a Pelagianism which substitutes man’s faith for Pelagius’
works; it formally affirms God’s saving power in justification, while
insisting on “Christ plus my receiving” as the “hope for victory”
against sin.4
W. H. Griffith Thomas, in his interpretation of Romans 7, gives
us the fallacies of “Victorious Life” theology. As Warfield has
shown,
That chapter depicts for us the process of the eradication
of the old nature. Dr. Thomas reads it statically and sees in
it merely a “deadly warfare between the two natures”;
which, he affirms, “does not represent the normal
Christian life of sanctification.” He even permits himself
to say, “There is no Divine grace in that chapter; only
man’s nature struggling to be good and holy by the law.”
What is really in the chapter is Divine grace warring
against, and not merely counteracting but eradicating, the
natural evil or sin. To Paul the presence of the conflict
there depicted is the guarantee of victory. The three things
we must insist on if we would share Paul’s views are: first,
that to grace always belongs the initiative — it is grace that
works the change: secondly, that to grace always belongs
the victory — grace is infinite power: and thirdly, that the
working of grace is by process, and therefore reveals itself
at any given point of observation as conflict. In so far as
Dr. Thomas’s representation obscures any one of these things
it falls away from the teaching of the New Testament.5
Wherever man separates himself from God and the grace of
God, there he also tries to rival God and to be more than man. Not
surprisingly, not only do the “Victorious Life” people seek to be
holier than God in His word requires, but also to equal God. Thus,
in Every-Day Religion (1893), Hannah Whittall Smith
makes Mark xi. 22 mean: “We are commanded to have the
same sort of faith that God has. Romans iv. 17 describes,”
she says, “the sort of faith God has”: He creates things by
merely calling them as though they were. “How much of
this creative power of faith we his children share, I am not
prepared to say,” she modestly adds. “But,” she continues,
“that we are called to share far more of it than we have ever
4.
Benjamin Breckinridge Warfield, Perfectionism, vol. II (New York: Oxford
University Press, 1931), 608, 577.
5. Ibid., II, 583f.
yet laid hold of, I feel very sure.” All this from a simple
objective genitive! One would like to see them try their
system of interpretation on Col. ii. 12.6
In the name of God, such pietists have advanced a blatant
humanism in which God is not the sovereign lord and savior,
but simply another greater resource available to man. Thus,
Dr. A. T. Pierson, in his book on The Keswick Movement,
“speaks of God as a reservoir of grace on which we draw, and
even permits to himself such an objectionable phrase as ‘Holy
Ghost power,’ — which, we are informed, is at our disposal.”
The implications of such blasphemy are plainly stated by
Warfield:
God stands always helplessly by until man calls Him into
action by opening a channel into which His energies may
flow. It sounds dreadfully like turning on the steam or the
electricity. This representation is employed not only with
reference to the great matters of salvation and
sanctification in which God’s operations are “secured” (or
released) by our faith, but also with reference to every
blessing bestowed by Him. We are not only constantly
exhorted to “claim” blessings, but the enjoyment of these
blessings is with wearying iteration suspended on our
“claiming” them. It is expressly declared that God cannot
bless us in any way until we open the way for His action
by an act of our own will. Everywhere and always the
initiative belongs to man; everywhere and always God’s
action is suspended upon man’s will. We wish to make no
concealment of the distress with which this mode of
representation afflicts us. When Erasmus even distantly
approached it and spoke of “securing” the grace of God by
“some little thing” retained to human powers, Luther told
him flatly that he was out-pelagianizing Pelagius. Man
6.
Ibid., II, footnote 598f.; citation from H. W. Smith, Every-Day Religion, 153.
All that Mark 11:22 says is this: “And Jesus answering saith unto them, Have
faith in God.” Romans 4:17 reads “As it is written, ‘I have made thee a father
of many nations,’ before him whom he believed, even God, who quickeneth
the dead, and calleth those things which be not as though they were.” Clearly,
the text gives no ground for Mrs. Smith’s ideas, and she has read her thoughts
into Scripture. Warfield's challenge with respect to Col. 2:12 is to the point:
“Buried with him in baptism, wherein also ye are risen with him through the
faith of the operation of God, who hath raised him from the dead.” Let such
try to equal God by raising the dead!
does not “secure” the grace of God: the grace of God
“secures” the activities of man — in every sphere and in
every detail, of these activities. It is nothing less than
degrading to God to suppose Him thus subject to the
control of man and unable to move except as man permits
Him to do so, or to produce any effects except as He is turned
into the channels of their working at man’s option.7
The pagan view of spirits and gods was that they were a
resource man could use to provide insurance against troubles.
With this utilitarian view of the gods, there still went some
reverential fear of them. In the modern pietistic “Victorious
Life” and other Pelagian movements, such as Campus Crusade
and the Jesus Movement, even this reverential fear is often
lacking, and God is merely the great resource which man can
tap if he will. In such a perspective, man is sovereign, and God
the resource and insurance agency serving and glorifying man,
so that the whole world is turned upside down, and God made
man’s servant and instrument. Man has become his own god
and savior, and God’s function is to act as the insurance agency
so that man may prosper.
There can only be divine salvation where there is a sovereign
and omnipotent God. The salvation of the sovereign and
triune God is of necessity victorious because it is wholly
determined by Himself. As Nebuchadnezzar finally
recognized with respect to God,
And all the inhabitants of the earth are reputed as nothing:
and he doeth according to his will in the army of heaven,
and among the inhabitants of the earth: and none can stay
his hand, or say unto him, What doest thou? (Dan. 4:35)
Only such a God can be truly worshipped, and only such a
God can truly save man.
7. Ibid., II, 609f.

III
Salvation and Judgment
The word salvation in the Old Testament means safety, ease,

and deliverance (yeshuah, yesha, moshaoth); the verb to save
means to live, to preserve life, to give safety, preserve, or to deliver
(chayah, yeshua, yasha, malat, natsal, shamar). In Psalm 68:20,
“salvation” or “deliverance” comes from a stem meaning “to be
broad, spacious,” so that salvation also means enlargement.
According to Brown,
The root idea in salvation is deliverance. In every case some
danger or evil is presupposed, in rescue from which
salvation consists. Since in primitive times one of the
greatest dangers to be feared is defeat in battle, salvation is
often used in OT in the sense of “victory” (e.g. Ex. 15:2, I S.
11:13 RV “deliverance,” 19:5 RV “victory,” Ps. 20:5 RVm
“victory”), and successful warriors are called “saviours”
(e.g. Jg. 3:9, 15, Neh. 9:27). But this is only one
modification of a much broader usage.1
The word salvation came to be increasingly associated with a
savior or messiah, always retaining its basic idea of deliverance
and victory.
In the New Testament, the Greek words soteria (salvation)
and sozein (to save) have as their basic meaning deliverance,
bodily health, preservation, victory, and help. As Barclay has
observed, “Salvation in the NT is ‘total salvation.’ It saves a
man, body and soul.”2 It thus has many aspects: it includes
salvation from physical illness (Matt. 9:21; Luke 8:36, where
the verb is sozein); salvation from danger (Matt. 8:25; 14:30);
salvation from life’s infection (Acts 2:40); from “lostness”
(Matt. 18:11; Luke 19:10); from sin (Matt. 1:21); from wrath
(Rom. 5:9); it is moreover eschatological, and it means in its
1. W.
Adams Brown, “Salvation, Saviour,” in James Hastings, editor, A Dictio-
nary of the Bible, vol. IV (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1919), 358.
2. William Barclay, A New Testament Wordbook (New York: Harper, n.d.), 119.
21
fullness the enthronement of Christ (Rom. 13:11; 1 Cor. 5:5; 2
Tim. 4:18; Heb. 9:28; 1 Pet. 1:5; Rev. 12:10).3
In the Bible, salvation is inseparable from judgment. As
Ferries pointed out,
The truth that God will come to the world for judgment
is part of the burden of OT prophecy. The rule of God,
partially realized over Israel in the days of the prophets, is
destined to be made perfect, and it is to extend over all the
nations of the earth. This consummation will necessitate a
“day of the Lord,” i.e., a judgment of the faithless in the
chosen nation and of the heathen (Is. 2:12, Joel 1:15, 2:1
etc.); but Israel will be saved and enjoy the blessings of a
new and everlasting covenant (Is. 61:8, Jer. 31:31ff. etc.).4
In every instance, salvation involved judgment; in fact, it
must be said that salvation and judgment are different aspects
of the same event. An exception to this identification is that,
while this is true for the people of God, it is not true for the
reprobate. For them, judgment comes with only one face,
reprobation. Sinners, prior to their conversion, also find
judgment to be without a redeeming aspect.
Scripture, however, gives us numerous examples of the
coincidence of judgment and salvation in the history of God’s
covenant race. The more notable examples can be cited briefly.
The Flood was God’s judgment on the antediluvial world, and
a very radical and total judgment. It was at the same time the
salvation of Noah and his family from a corrupt world that
was steadily destroying all righteousness and law. Similarly,
the ten plagues on Egypt, and the Red Sea crossing, give us
dramatic evidence of the coincidence of salvation and
judgment. Only by judging and extensively destroying Egypt
was Israel freed from its bondage to that power. Every step in
the judgment was a step in the deliverance of Israel. Even the
first three plagues, which struck Goshen (or Israel) and Egypt
alike, served to bring home the power of God to Israel. The
tenth plague required Israel to accept God’s judgment on all sin
3. Ibid., 119-121.
4. G. Ferries, “Judgment,” in Hastings, Dictionary of the Bible, vol. II, 821.
Salvation and Judgment 23
and to seek the protective covering of the blood of the passover
sacrifice (Ex. 12:3-13). Judgment would only pass over those
who recognized the sovereign power of God as their only
redeemer, who accepted the judgment of God on all
unrighteousness and sought the covering of the vicarious
judgment and death-sentence God provided. At the Red Sea,
God delivered Israel and destroyed the Egyptian army. The
Song of Moses (Ex. 15:1-19) celebrated this judgment as
salvation, as the opening lines make clear:
1. Then sang Moses and the children of Israel this song
unto the LORD, and spake, saying, I will sing unto the
LORD, for he hath triumphed gloriously: the horse and
his rider hath he thrown into the sea.
2. The LORD is my strength and song, and he is become
my salvation: he is my God, and I will prepare him an
habitation; my father’s God, and I will exalt him.
3. The LORD is a man of war: the LORD is his name.
4. Pharaoh’s chariots and his host hath he cast into the sea:
his chosen captains also are drowned in the Red sea.
5. The depths have covered them: they sank into the
bottom as a stone.
6. Thy right hand, O LORD, is become glorious in power: thy
right hand, O LORD, hath dashed in pieces the enemy.
God in His majesty rises up to deliver His people and to
destroy His enemies. This event, and the Song of Moses, are
used as types and symbols of God’s salvation of His people and
His judgment on their foes. As Keil and Delitzsch noted,
As the fact of Israel’s deliverance from the power of its
oppressors is of everlasting importance to the Church of
the Lord in its conflict with the ungodly powers of the
world, in which the Lord continually overthrows the
enemies of His kingdom, as He overthrew Pharaoh and
his horsemen in the depths of the sea: so Moses’ song at the
Red Sea furnishes the Church of the Lord with the
materials for its songs of praise in all the great conflicts
which it has to sustain, during its onward course, with the
powers of the world. Hence not only does the keynote of
this song resound through all Israel’s songs, in praise of the
glorious work of Jehovah for the good of His people (see
especially Isa. xii.), but the song of Moses the servant of
God will also be sung, along with the song of the Lamb, by
the conquerors who stand upon the “sea of glass,” and have
gained the victory over the beast and his image (Rev. xv. 3).5
The entrance of Israel into Canaan, an aspect of their
salvation-victory, meant the destruction of the Canaanites
whom they displaced. As instruments of God’s judgment,
their salvation was not complete, because their judgment on
Canaan was incomplete. To the extent that they compromised
and evaded their responsibility, to that extent their victory was
limited, and the enemy remained in their midst as a snare and
a corrupting force.
The supreme example of the coincidence of judgment and
salvation is the cross of Christ. St. Paul, in Romans 5:6-21,
makes this abundantly clear. We are reconciled to God, i.e.,
His wrath and judgment against us are removed, by Christ’s
atoning blood; Christ saves us by being judged for us. As
Hodge noted of Romans 5:10, “‘Being justified by the death of
his Son,’ evidently corresponds to the phrase, ‘Being justified
by his blood.’” To be reconciled means to appease anger or
remove the ground of displeasure (Heb. 2:17). “It is the
appropriate business of a priest to propitiate God, and not to
reform men.”6 Christ removes God’s wrath, and God regenerates
us by His sovereign grace. “Redemption is not by truth or moral
influence, but by blood vs. 9, 10,”7 i.e., by judgment.
No one who refuses to accept the judgment of God upon
himself as a sinner and as a member of Adam’s fallen race can
become a member of Christ’s new humanity of restored,
regenerate men. Truly to accept the one involves accepting the
other. This means that evangelistic groups which downgrade man’s
fallen and helpless estate cannot truly accept Christ as savior. For
them Christ opens the door of salvation, and indeed must open the
door, for all who by their own act of sovereign will and faith
5. C.
F. Keil and F. Delitzsch, Biblical Commentary on the Old Testament, The Pen-
tateuch, vol. II (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Eerdmans, 1949), 50.
6. Charles Hodge, Commentary on the Epistle to the Romans (New York: Armstrong,
1893), 217f.
7. Ibid., 220.
choose God. Such judgment as they make on themselves is thus
not God’s judgment, for they assert their ability to repent and to
“choose Christ.” It is then they who reconcile a passive God to
themselves, whereas in Scripture the sovereign God and Jesus
Christ do all the work of reconciliation.
If judgment be denied, then salvation is also denied, because
no victory is possible without the judgment and overthrow of
the enemies of God and His people. Where men deny
judgment, they do it in the name of peace. Peace is offered as a
higher goal than judgment, and a surer way to salvation. The
proponents of world, racial, social, and religious peace call for
a suspension of judgment as the way of salvation.
The English word peace comes from the Latin pax, a word in
Latin akin to pacere, to make an agreement, and pangere, to fasten. It
is also related to the word pay (also from the Latin pax), and means
to satisfy, or requite. The New Testament word for peace (eirene)
means harmony, freedom from molestation, order, and quietness,
whereas the Hebrew shalom signifies wholeness. All of these
meanings aptly describe the goal of humanistic peace-lovers.
How can they have this peace without judgment? And what
kind of peace is it? Nietzsche expressed the nature of this
dream of peace very aptly: it is beyond good and evil. If no
judgment is permitted, then good and evil must coexist in
harmony and without warring against one another. For good and
evil to achieve this kind of harmony means that they must deny
their reality in favor of a higher factor, unity in peace. Nietzsche
had to begin by condemning the “Will to Truth.” A lie, he held, has
as much value as the truth and is often more useful. “There is no
such thing as moral phenomena, but only a moral interpretation of
phenomena.”8 Moreover, “What is done out of love always takes
place beyond good and evil.”9 Peace thus requires the transcending
of good and evil; not even love, however, can be called “good,” nor
“peace,” for we must be beyond the idea of good and evil.
(Nietzsche could not avoid seeing women as evil, as he called for
8.
Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, The Philosophy of Nietzsche (New
York: Modern Library, n.d.), 80.
9. Ibid., 88.
the world to go beyond good and evil.) In The Genealogy of Morals,
Nietzsche held that the idea of good and evil was an unnatural
addition (essentially Hebraic and Christian) to man’s world, and a
disturber of man’s life and peace. The Jew was for Nietzsche
the symbol of that tradition, and therefore rightly held by
Rome to be guilty of “hatred of the whole human race.”10 Abolish
good and evil, and man will be free.
Later, however, Nietzsche saw his program of life beyond
good and evil as a disaster, and he wrote on “Why I am a
Fatality” in Ecce Homo, declaring, “I am the voice of truth.”
His “truth” was the denial of all existing truths in the name of
the superman who lives beyond good and evil. It is “The
Transvaluation of all Values: this is my formula for mankind’s
act of highest self-recognition, which in me has become flesh
and genius.... Thus, I am necessarily a Man of Destiny.”
Nietzsche’s truth would act as an earthquake on all society.
The concept “politics” is thus raised bodily into the realm
of spiritual warfare. All the mighty forms of the old
society are blown into space — for they all rest on
falsehood: there will be wars, whose like have never been
seen on earth before. Politics on a grand scale will date
from me. 11
All definitions of good and evil were for Nietzsche restraints
on life and expressions of a hatred of life. “Here is a definition
of morality: Morality is the idiosyncrasy of decadents, actuated
by a desire to avenge themselves successfully upon life. The issue is
“Dionysus versus Christ.”12 But what is Dionysus?
It was against morality, therefore, that my instinct, an
instinct defending life, turned in this provocative book,
inventing for itself a fundamental counter-dogma and
counter-evaluation of life, one purely artistic and
anti-Christian. What should I call it? As a philologist and
man of words I baptized it, not without some
impertinence, — for who could be sure of the proper name
10. Nietzsche, First Essay of The Genealogy of Morals, in ibid., 36.

11. Nietzsche, “Why I am a Fatality,” Ecco Homo, in ibid., 133f.
12. Ibid., 142d, 145.
of the Antichrist? — with the name of a Greek god: I called
it Dionysian.13
Nietzsche’s Dionysus, while ostensibly defending life, is
pure negation. Ostensibly defending life, he called for total
war. Championing man, Nietzsche called for the death of man
and the birth of superman. Nietzsche’s view of the world
beyond good and evil is one of total hatred and total war, a
world in which there is neither peace nor salvation. Where
God’s judgment is denied, peace and salvation are impossible.
Not surprisingly, Warner has found in Nietzsche a major
example of the will to defeat and the urge to mass destruction.
Warner found in Nietzsche a desire for the annihilation of all
who live, and the development of a philosophy designed to
justify this mass destruction. The hatred of life was paramount
in Nietzsche, but he projected his own hatred on all his
opponents. In The Will to Power, Nietzsche said, “nihilism is... the
belief that everything deserves to perish.” Nihilism “is the
conviction that life is absurd in the light of the highest values
already discovered.” Of himself Nietzsche said, “I have been a
Nihilist from top to toe.” As Warner summed it up,
And therefore, if the syllogism is applicable to the
products of Nietzschean thought, the philosopher has said
this: I believe life is absurd; I believe everything deserves to
perish; I seek to destroy all life, to lead the living to suicide. 14
This concept of life as absurd is basic also to existentialism.
Ostensibly, it too offers the more abundant life to man.
Dostoyevsky once observed, “If God did not exist, everything
would be possible.”
And Sartre claims that this exactly is the starting point for
Existentialism: everything is permitted. And so it is man
who is the creator of all values; for by choosing certain
values for himself, by implication he chooses them for all
others also. Man is now God, because he creates himself —
he makes his own essence, and he also decides what values
13. Nietzsche, “An Attempt at Self-Criticism,” in ibid., 156.
14. Samuel J. Warner, The Urge to Mass Destruction (New York: Grune and Strat-
ton, 1957), 33f.
will be placed upon his life and his actions and even upon
the life and the actions of all others. It is no wonder that
anguish comes to haunt him in this work, for he must
make his decisions alone without reference to heaven or to
any stable norms; and he knows that he alone bears the
entire responsibility for his decisions. He has not chosen
to play God, and yet no matter what he does he cannot
escape his role. In the face of these brutal facts the
Existentialists can but speak of abandonment and despair.15
The existentialist chooses to deny God, and he then whimpers
at the implications of his choice. Instead of gaining peace and
salvation by his choice, he gains an empty universe; life has
become absurd. There is thus no intrinsic value to life. Life is
irrational and meaningless and hence absurd; the only thing
that can be said about existence is that it exists. The only thing
that can be said about life is simply that it is. For the
existentialist, man lives beyond good and evil, and beyond the
God of Scripture, as his own god, but in this meaningless world
it also is meaningless for man to be a god. Existentialism is
coherent atheism: it is man’s attempt to become god in the
place of God. Man, for the existentialist, is not a creature of
God, but “is self-creative.”16 As one existentialist, Malraux, first saw,
the death of God involves the death of man: “For you absolute
reality has been God, then man. But man is dead, after God.”17 The
salvation of existentialism, like that of Nietzsche, is mass murder
and suicide. Not only is it meaningless in a meaningless and absurd
life to be a god, it is also meaningless to be alive. No reason or value
exists; it is meaningless to die, but it is also meaningless to live.
A world without judgment is a world without values and
hence without meaning. To deny judgment is to deny value
and meaning. Without judgment, there can be no cultural
progress, and the only valid form of judgment is that which is
grounded in the word of God. The general revelation of God
15. Walter
Odajnyk, Marxism and Existentialism (Garden City, New York: Dou-
bleday Anchor Books, 1965), 13.
16. Everett W. Knight, Literature Considered As Philosophy, The French Example
(New York: Collier Books, 1962), 125.
17. Ibid., 182.
to mankind enabled some cultures to progress to a point, until
the relativism inherent in man’s original sin, his desire to be his
own god (Gen. 3:5), subverted judgment in his society. With
relativism came stagnation and deterioration.
Moreover, judgment and salvation cannot be separated from
one another. Those theologies which hold to judgment, while
having a limited view of salvation, as witness premillennial and
amillennial theologies, cut the vital nerve of both doctrines. Only
as man has a total concept of salvation, of victory in time and
eternity, can he apply a total concept of judgment to every sphere
of life. Judgment is of necessity total wherever it is held that every
sphere of life must be brought into captivity to Christ, because
every sphere must manifest His salvation as an aspect of His new
creation. A doctrine of salvation which calls for man’s redemption,
and limits that redemption to his soul now and his body in the
general resurrection, is defective. The redeemed man will of
necessity, because it is basic to his life, work to bring redemption
to every sphere and area of life as an aspect of his creation
mandate. The redeemed man’s warfare against the powers of evil
is not “after the flesh,” i.e., does not rely on human resources, but
relies rather on the supernatural power of God. Everything that
exalts itself against the knowledge of God, St. Paul tells us, shall be
cast down.18 In the words of Arthur Way’s rendering of 2
Corinthians 10:3-5,
Very human as I am, I do not fight with merely human
weapons. No, the weapons with which I war are not
weapons of mere flesh and blood, but, in the strength of
God, they are mighty enough to raze all strong-holds of
our foes. I can batter down bulwarks of human reason, I
can scale every crag-fortress that towers up bidding
defiance to the true knowledge of God. I can make each
rebel purpose my prisoner-of-war, and bow it into
submission to Messiah.19
18. Charles Hodge, Commentary on the Second Epistle to the Corinthians (Grand Rap-
ids, Michigan: Eerdmans, 1950), 232-236.
19. Arthur S. Way, translator, The Letters of St. Paul (London: Macmillan, 1935),
81.
IV
Salvation and Sovereignty
The Biblical doctrine of God is that He is eternal (Ps. 90:2; 1

Tim. 1:17), immutable (James 1:17; Mal. 3:6), incom-
prehensible (Ps. 145:3), almighty (Gen. 17:1), free (Ps. 115:3),
and, among other things, absolute (Ex. 3:14). God also from all
eternity decreed all things that come to pass (Isa. 45:6-7; Eph.
1:5-6, 11; John 19:11; Acts 2:23; 4:27-28; 15:18; Prov. 16:33;
Rom. 9:11, 13, 15-16, 18, 22-23; Prov. 16:4; etc.) by His
sovereign will and for His own purpose.
The Greek concept that some idea or universal is above God,
or governs God, is alien to the Bible. The idea that the good,
the true, and the beautiful have an ultimacy governing God is
impossible for Scripture, because the reverse is true: the good
is what God decrees and does; the idea of the good does not
govern God, but is instead governed by God and His being. In
brief, God is sovereign: there is nothing by which He can be
judged, because He is the principle of all judgment. Nothing
governs or determines God except Himself, because God is
absolutely free, self-existing, and self-determinative.
When asked by Moses to name (or define) Himself, God
refused to do so, saying, “I AM THAT I AM: and he said, Thus
shalt thou say unto the children of Israel, I AM hath sent me
unto you” (Ex. 3:14). God cannot be truly defined, because He
is Himself the principle of all definition. All things are truly
known only in terms of Him and His sovereign purpose and
decree. All the ostensible definitions of God are simply partial
catalogues of His attributes. No definition can circumscribe
God.
In a sense we can say that God is the only true existentialist,
in that He is self-existent, and He is to be understood only in
terms of Himself and without reference to anything outside of
Himself. He alone has aseity or self-existence. Neither His
essence nor His existence are derivative, and, whereas
31
existentialism refuses to believe in any system or purpose in
the universe because it is as yet external to man, for God there
can be no other system or purpose dominating or controlling
the universe, because there is nothing external to His decree,
counsel, and government. He alone is Lord and sovereign.
Because God alone is sovereign Lord, God alone can truly
save man, because God alone decrees, ordains, and governs all
things absolutely. In Isaiah 45, God declares,
21. Tell ye, and bring them near; yea, let them take
counsel together: who hath declared this from ancient
time? who hath told it from that time? have not I the
LORD? and there is no God else beside me: a just God and
a Savior; there is none beside me.
22. Look unto me, and be ye saved, all the ends of the
earth: for I am God and there is none else.
23. I have sworn by myself, the word is gone out of my
mouth in righteousness, and shall not return, That unto
me every knee shall bow, every tongue shall swear.
In vv. 14-25, the nations are told that “they must be subdued,
but only in order to be blessed and saved, which is declared to have
been the divine purpose, and revealed as such from the
beginning.”1 In these three verses (21-23), the nations are
reminded that only God is ultimate and sovereign, and there is
none else who is absolute Lord save God, and none able to save
but God Himself. Moreover, God declares Himself “a just God
and a Saviour.” As Plumptre noted, “Stress is laid on the union of
the two attributes which in human actions are often thought
incompatible.”2 God asserts the ultimacy in Himself of all things,
here specifically of both justice or judgment and salvation. The
absolute judge is also the only savior, and the nations cannot sue
for either at any other court or agency.
All things have their origin in Him. “The Lord hath made all
things for himself: yea, even the wicked for the day of evil”
(Prov. 16:4). “Out of him came forth the corner, out of him the
1. Joseph
Addison Alexander, Commentary on the Prophecies of Isaiah (Grand Rap-
ids, Michigan: Zondervan, 1953), 177.
2. E. H. Plumptre, “Isaiah,” in C. J. Ellicott, editor, Commentary on the Whole Bible,
vol. IV (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Zondervan, n.d.), 536.
Salvation and Sovereignty 33
nail, out of him the battle bow, out of him every oppressor
together” (Zech. 10:4). Thus, nothing can be truly understood
unless we begin with the fact of God’s sovereignty as revealed
in His infallible word. Where men take as their starting-point
some aspect of creation, they quickly drift into heresies. One
Reformed pastor declared that his starting-point was the total
depravity of man, and hence the need of a Savior. The defects
of this position are readily apparent. Man was not always
fallen: he was once in the state of innocence. Many men are
now in the state of grace, and far more in the state of glory.
Even more, by beginning with the condition of man, his
position has increasingly become Arminian in practice,
man-centered and concerned with man’s needs rather than
God’s glory.
Moreover, to begin with any aspect of creation is quickly to
face impossible antinomies and contradictions, tensions which
offer no hope of resolution. Thus, many scientists, by their
analysis of the behavior of the physical universe, or of the
nature of energy, end in a strict and naturalistic determinism.
They not only can make no place for freedom, but also they find
themselves sometimes unwilling to speak of man’s mind and
consciousness. Some call consciousness an epiphenomenon;
others avoid the term consciousness altogether.
Still others, insistent on affirming historic humanism, are
staunch in affirming the freedom of man, and, with
existentialism, we have a radical assertion of this freedom.
Sartre will not even accept the concept of an unconscious
aspect of man lest man’s freedom be surrendered to the
underworld of nature. Modern science and humanism, both
born of an earlier humanism, are now in contradiction to one
another, however much at one in their hostility to God. Both
affirm a valid aspect of human experience. Both the simple,
naive experience of man and the scientific analysis of creation
point to an order and necessity which seems to indicate
determinism. Although some thinkers, because man’s
knowledge of the universe is not total, temper their
description of that necessity by calling it a probability concept,
they still operate in the laboratory and in life on the premise
of a necessary and determined order. However, naive experience
also confirms man’s freedom. Man’s decisions, moral and
intellectual, are often reached after much uncertainty, indecision,
inner agony, and torment, as well as a major hesitancy that points
to the reality of the free choice made. They indicate moreover the
frequent burden man feels at having this freedom. Naive
experience thus confirms both determinism and freedom.
Similarly, scientific evidences are commonly cited to vindicate both
determinism and indeterminism. On the human level, there is no
reconciling these mutually exclusive facts.
Very early Greek philosophy faced the same contradiction.
Heraclitus (c. 536-470 B.C.) saw the mutability of all things:
It is not possible to step twice in the same river. (It is
impossible to touch the same mortal substance twice, but
through the rapidity of change) they scatter and again combine (or
rather, not even “again” or “later,” but the combination and separation
are simultaneous) and approach and separate.3
All things change and are changed, so that mutability is the basic
fact about reality. In contrast, Parmenides of Elea (c. 475 B.C.)
insisted on the one basic unchanging substance behind all changes.
Heraclitus had seen the random, changing character of reality:
“The fairest universe is but a dust-heap piled up at random.” For
Heraclitus, all things flow: “Those who step into the same river
have different waters flowing ever upon them.” For Parmenides,
there is one unchanging being which is also thought and also
matter: “For it is the same thing to think and to be.” Again, “It is
all the same thing to me from what point I begin, for I shall return
again to this same point.” Moreover, “Being has no
coming-into-being and no destruction, for it is whole of limb,
without motion, and without end.... How could Being perish? How
could it come into being?”4 In effect, there is no change. Heraclitus
3.
Phrases of Heraclitus quoted in Aristotle’s Metaphysics; summaries of con-
texts, and words inserted in italics, provided to give meaning by Kathleen Free-
man, Ancilla to The Pre-Socratic Philosophers (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard
University Press, 1957), 31.
4. Ibid., 25, 33, 42, 43.
and Parmenides thus came to radically different conclusions by
stressing varying aspects of experience. They amply
demonstrated the inability of human experience and reason to
comprehend the nature of reality or to reconcile its apparent
paradoxes. The consequence of such an approach is a reduction
of reality at the very least to only one aspect of its appearance and
thus to render it an absurdity.
Where we begin with the sovereign God and His infallible
word, these problems disappear. Just as the problem of the one
and the many is reconciled in the equal ultimacy of
particularity and plurality in the trinity,5 so the problem of absolute
predestination and of freedom is reconciled in God. Predestination
is not determinism, which permits no will nor is personal, but is
personal, particular, and universal, and also permits freedom. In
God there is “no variableness nor shadow of turning” (James 1:
17). God says, “I am the LORD, I change not” (Mal. 3:6). The
unvarying, immutable nature of God is clearly set forth in
Scripture. However, God is not a prisoner of some outside law or
of His nature: He is absolutely free: “But our God is in the heavens:
he hath done whatsoever he hath pleased” (Ps. 115:3). The
immutability and freedom of God are absolute and primary; the
predestination and freedom of man are secondary and are aspects
of God’s creation. The freedom of man is the freedom of a
creature, not the freedom of God; it is very real as a secondary
freedom and cannot be reduced to an illusion without at the same
time making mind, will, and consciousness in man illusions also.
The counsel and determined purposes of man are no less real for
being a secondary factor.
This distinction is an important one, and it clarifies the
problem with respect to salvation. Because God from all
eternity freely and unchangeably has ordained whatsoever
comes to pass, for this very reason man has a secondary and
real part in his salvation. As the Westminster Confession stated it,
5.See R. J. Rushdoony, The One and the Many (Nutley, New Jersey: The Craig
Press, 1971).
God from all eternity did by the most wise and holy
counsel of his own will, freely and unchangeably ordain
whatsoever comes to pass; yet so as thereby neither is God
the author of sin, nor is violence offered to the will of the
creatures, nor is the liberty or contingency of second
causes taken away, but rather established.6
The secondary freedom of man rests only in the absolute
freedom of God. As Shaw noted,
It may be further observed, that, although God has
unchangeably ordained whatsoever comes to pass, yet this
does not take away the contingency of second causes,
either in themselves or as to us. Nothing can be more
contingent than the decision of the lot; “the lot is cast into
the lap; but the whole disposing thereof is of the Lord.”
Prov. xvi. 33.7
Existentialism, however, requires an absolute and primary
freedom for man. To say this means that man claims to be his
own god, a fact which Sartre affirmed:
The best way to conceive of the fundamental project of
human reality is to say that man is the being whose project
is to be God.... God, value and supreme end of transcendence,
represents the permanent limit in terms of which man makes
known to himself what he is. To be man means to reach
toward being God. Or if you prefer, man fundamentally is the
desire to be God. 8
Because, for Sartre, there is no God, man “is condemned to be
free,” i.e., absolute freedom is his responsibility as the
intelligent being in an absurd and irrational universe. Since
there is for him no God and no absolute predestinating and
eternal counsel of God, man is free and must provide that
counsel. “In other words, there is no determinism, man is free,
man is freedom.”9
6. Westminster Confession of Faith, Chapt. III, sect. 1.

7. Robert Shaw, An Exposition of the Confession of Faith
of the Westminster Assembly
of Divines (Philadelphia: Presbyterian Board of Publication, 1846), 62.
8. Jean-Paul Sartre, Existentialism and Human Emotions (New York: Philosophical
Library, 1957), 63.
9. Ibid., 23.
Dostoyevsky said, “If God didn’t exist, everything would
be possible.” That is the very starting point of
existentialism. Indeed, everything is permissible if God
does not exist, and as a result man is forlorn, because
neither within him nor without does he find anything to
cling to. He can’t start making excuses for himself.10
Man thus begins with his bare existence, without essence and
without an eternal counsel and law of God. “Man makes
himself. He isn’t ready made at the start. In choosing his ethics,
he makes himself, and force of circumstances is such that he
can not abstain from choosing one.” Sartre eliminates God as the
predestinating power, but “force of circumstances,” a blind power,
now enters the picture to push man into making himself. For
Sartre, this absolute freedom is “the basis of all values.” It is
personal, individual, and anarchistic, in that every man is his own
god, but necessity and survival require this freedom to be social, to
limit itself. “And in wanting freedom we discover that it depends
entirely on the freedom of others, and that the freedom of others
depends on ours.”11 In Sartre’s No Exit, Garcin declares, “Hell is
— other people!” In a world of many gods, another claimant to be
god must be a devil to the man who affirms himself as god. Lehan
called attention to the contradiction in Sartre, who wants an
antisocial and a social goal, two mutually exclusive ends,
although his philosophy is essentially antisocial:
Existential choice and freedom are constructed along
asocial lines; existential commitment, on the other hand,
is a principle of social involvement. The hero is thus torn
between the instinct to live outside society and the guilt
which follows such a choice. These two positions are
mutually exclusive — and yet to see them both in
existential philosophy is only to place Sartre’s No Exit next
to his What is Literature?12
10. Ibid.,
22.
11. Ibid.,
43, 45-46.
12.
Richard Lehan, “Existentialism in Recent American Fiction: The Demonic
Quest,” in Joseph J. Waldmeir, editor, Recent American Fiction, Some Critical Views
(Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1963), 78.
Sartre is thus concerned about the social and personal salvation
of men as he defines it, and yet logically only concerned with
his own freedom. Since he has “discarded God the Father,
there has to be someone to invent values.” This means that,
because “life has no meaning a priori,” it is therefore “up to you
to give it a meaning, and value is nothing else but the meaning
that you choose.” Sartre wants an existential humanism, but not
“the self-enclosed humanism of Comte, and, let it be said, of
fascism.” Man must transcend himself, not in the sense that God
is transcendent, “but in seeking outside of himself a goal which is
just this liberation, just this particular fulfilment.”13 Briefly, this
means social involvement as man’s salvation. He is free because
there is no God, but he is liberated from this freedom by turning it
into social involvement! It is thus a surrender of freedom to society
rather than to God; more than that, it is a surrender of being:
We can understand after these remarks that the abstract,
ontological “desire to be” is unable to represent the
fundamental, human structure of the individual; it cannot
be an obstacle to his freedom. Freedom in fact... is strictly
identified with nihilation. The only being which can be
called free is the being which nihilates its being. Moreover
we know that nihilation is lack of being and can not be
otherwise. Freedom is precisely the being which makes
itself a lack of being.14
As previously noted, Andre Malraux saw that the death of God
involves the death of man.15 The death of God is the death of man,
which also means the death of man’s society. In a famous passage,
Sartre’s pessimism appears clearly:
Every human reality is a passion in that it projects losing
itself so as to found being and by the same stroke to
constitute the In-itself which escapes contingency by
being its own foundation, the Ens causa sui, which
religions call God. Thus the passion of man is the reverse
of that of Christ, for man loses himself as man in order
13. Sartre, op. cit., 49, 51.
14. Ibid., 66.
15. Everett W. Knight, Literature
Considered As Philosophy, The French Example
(New York: Collier Books, 1962), 182.
that God may be born. But the idea of God is
contradictory and we lose ourselves in vain. Man is a
useless passion.16
Thus, when man proclaims the death of God and man’s
freedom from God, the meaning of all things, including
freedom and salvation, disappears, and man himself announces
his own futility and death.
Because the universe is one of absolute law and meaning,
being the handiwork of the absolute, predestinating God,
man’s life has meaning, but a derivative rather than
self-creating meaning. Because God has absolute freedom,
man, created in His image, has a secondary and creaturely
freedom. In a world of pure chance and of no meaning,
freedom has no meaning either. The absolute freedom of God
is the absolute self-determination of God. The relative and
secondary freedom of man is also his contingent
self-determination.
Thus, from start to finish, the initiative and the
determination in man’s salvation is God’s absolute and
predestinating purpose. Romans 9 makes it clear that this sovereign
decree precedes our existence, and, indeed, all creation (Eph. 1:4,
9, 11). Moreover, as the Westminster Confession declares,
All those whom God hath predestined unto life, and those
only, he is pleased, in his appointed and accepted time,
effectually to call, by his Word and Spirit, out of that state
of sin and death, in which they are by nature, to grace and
salvation by Jesus Christ; enlightening their minds
spiritually and savingly, to understand the things of God;
taking away their heart of stone, and giving unto them an
heart of flesh; renewing their wills, and by his almighty
power determining them to that which is good; and
effectually drawing them to Jesus Christ, yet so as they
come most freely, being made willing by his grace.17
16.
Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, An Essay in Phenomenological Ontology
(New York: Philosophical Library, 1956), 615.
17. Westminster Confession of Faith, Chapt. X, sect. 1.
Only because God is sovereign is man’s life and salvation even
possible. The Greco-Roman world in the days of the early
church affirmed the absolute freedom of man from a divine
predestination, and also the ultimacy of chance. However, just
as Sartre introduced “the force of circumstances,” so the
thinkers of that day introduced and developed the force of
circumstances, of the stars, fate, and other aspects of man’s
environment, so that man’s freedom was destroyed, and man
became the determined product of a meaningless environment
and passive before the world, his maker. The Christians, on the
other hand, affirmed predestination and freed man from his
environment, so that, instead of being a product of his
environment, man became lord over it and a free man under
God.18
Not even Sartre holds that man’s existence is self-created; it
is man’s essence and nature which existential man seeks to
create out of his own being and “the force of circumstances.”
Man’s existence is a product, for Sartre, of the absurd universe,
which again effects him by “the force of circumstances” and
the practical necessity for life in community. As a result, man’s
existence and his essence are products of the universe and of
society, so that man is, despite his rebellion, essentially passive
before them. He is reduced to “a futile passion.”
For orthodox Christianity, man’s existence and essence are
the sovereign work of the triune God, not of nature or the
universe, so that, while man is passive in relationship to God,
he is active in his relationship to the world around him and
towards society. In that area, as a creature made in God’s
image, man exercises his freedom under God. In knowledge,
righteousness, and holiness, the redeemed man exercises
dominion over all things, confident in the total meaning which
undergirds all things and which assures him that his “labour is
not in vain in the Lord” (1 Cor. 15:58), because he works in a
18.
See Charles Norris Cochrane, Christianity and Classical Culture, A Study of
Thought and Action from Augustus to Augustine (London: Oxford University Press,
1944); and R. J. Rushdoony, The Foundations of Social Order (Nutley, New Jersey:
The Craig Press, 1968).
universe of total meaning. This totality of meaning comes
from the triune God: it is personal. In the person of Christ, it
preserves him from falling and assures him of the unfailing
government of “the only wise God our Saviour.” In the joyful
ascription of St. Jude, the believer has the certainty of total
meaning, total salvation, and the fulness of victory and joy:
Now unto him that is able to keep you from falling, and to
present you faultless before the presence of his glory with
exceeding joy,
To the only wise God our Saviour, be glory and majesty,
dominion and power, both now and ever. Amen. (Jude
24-25)
A God who saves must be sovereign, personal, omniscient,
and omnipotent. He must be the self-existent one, “He Who
Is.” Neither man nor society can legitimately make such a
claim, and neither can play the role of savior. When, however,
existentialism leads men and societies to do precisely that, they
will claim the powers of God over the world. They will insist
on probing the mind of man totally, in treating him as entirely
subject to re-creation, and they will insist on subjecting him
totally to their determination. The God of Scripture is beyond
man and this world, not on their level. The gods of
existentialism are emerging out of the world, and therefore in
competition with the world. To make good their claims to be
gods over men, they must obliterate other men, their rival
claimants to godhood. Skinner thus will not allow man to be
man. He declares that “Careless references to purpose are still
to be found in both physics and biology, but good practice has
no place for them; yet almost everyone attributes human
behavior to intentions, purposes, aims, and goals.”19 All men are
for Skinner simply products of their environment and are governed
by a blind determinism. All men are held to be on a disaster course
because of over-population, abuse of the environment, and so on.
How can Skinner extricate himself and his associates from this
19. B.F. Skinner, Beyond Freedom and Dignity (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1971),
8.
blind determinism and then determine that determining world? As
one reviewer noted,
It would take a deus ex machina to remove anyone from
that apparatus, as Mr. Skinner has constructed it — his
argument certainly doesn’t.20
This is indeed the case. Skinner, after denying man everything
which Christendom has seen as essential to his humanity, must
suddenly transform himself, a denatured man, into a deus ex
machina, a god who is able to save. The salvation he promises is,
however, one of total slavery to the mind-conditioners: it allows no
secondary causality or freedom but only a mindless, purposeless
obedience to the will of his new gods. Salvation by anyone other
than the sovereign, personal, omniscient, and omnipotent God is
not salvation, but rather total slavery and control.
It must be acknowledged, however, that men like Skinner,
Marx, Stalin, and others have been very much in the right in
seeing the link between sovereignty and salvation. As a prelude
to their plans of salvation, they insist on total sovereignty by
an elite group whose plans constitute a new decree of
predestination by the new gods. Sovereignty and salvation
cannot be separated. The pertinent question must therefore
always be raised with respect to all would-be saviors: to whom
does their plan of salvation give sovereignty, and what is the
nature of their plan or decree of predestination?
The sad fact is that not only is this question not asked, but
the false ministers and priests of Christ are also busy denying God’s
sovereignty and His decree of predestination. Practically, this
means that they are denying salvation by the grace of God
through Jesus Christ.
But sovereignty denied does not disappear. It is simply
transferred to another source. To deny the God of Scripture is
implicitly to affirm other gods.
20. Peter A. Johnson, “Books…,” Stanford Observer, February 1972, 8.

V
Salvation and Dominion
John Wyclif, in his analysis of dominion, did some of the

most important thinking in the history of the church and of
Christendom. He used the term dominion (or lordship) in the
full meaning of the term in his day, in the double sense of
authority and ownership. God, he declared, is the universal
Lord or dominus, having absolute dominion over all things.
All men, as God’s creatures, hold all things as a feudal grant
from God, as a beneficium. Every beneficium implies and
requires a corresponding service. Wicked men who are in
revolt against God, and who fail to render their due service not
only to God but also to their fellow men, both those above and
below them, therefore have no rightful possession of anything.
The wicked thus have power, but not dominion. The
righteous man has dominion, although not always power. All
the same, it must be held that “Every righteous man is lord
over the whole sensible world.”1 Without pursuing this concept to
the same conclusions that Wyclif did, we can agree with his
concept of dominion, and also his rejection of revolution. As
Wyclif stated the case in a famous aphorism, “God must obey the
Devil”; i.e., even as Christ obeyed Pilate, so the people of God
must obey tyrants, because their way to dominion and power is not
by revolution.
The way to dominion is by the grace of God unto salvation
by saving faith, which is a gift of God, and the knowledge of
Scripture. Wyclif’s name for the Bible was “God’s law.”
Dominion requires a knowledge of God’s law; without such
knowledge, no dominion is possible. To disregard the laws of
God is to forfeit dominion. As a result, Wyclif translated the
Bible, holding that “Scripture alone is of absolute authority,”
and declared of that English Bible, “This Bible is for the
1. De. Civ. Dom. i. chs. 7, 14.
43
government of the people, by the people, and for the people.”
By their knowledge of Scripture, God’s law, the redeemed
people of God, His elect, would know their rightful dominion
and begin to exercise it, reordering all things in terms of the
word of God.2
Wyclif’s appeal to feudalism in his concept of dominion was
not unscriptural; the feudal concept of dominion and
beneficium was not unlike the Biblical doctrine of the
covenant. The relationship of the covenant concept to
feudalism deserves study. Moreover, the feudal concept of
beneficium had a profound effect in shaping the idea of a social
compact or contract. The American Declaration of
Independence is a feudal document, dissolving a feudal
relationship. Because George III, the feudal king over the
several states, had violated the charters which governed his
relationship to those states, the obligation of the states to
George III was therefore declared dissolved. Justification for
that dissolution was grounded not only on a feudal concept of
law and lordship, but also on a theological principle which
rendered a lawful resistance a legitimate and necessary step.
This argument had been developed in Vindiciae Contra
Tyrannos (1579), which John Adams held to be one of the most
influential books in America on the eve of the War of
Independence.
An analysis of the Biblical doctrine of dominion undergirds
Wyclif’s insight and position. The word dominion first appears
in Genesis 1:26, 28. A number of words are translated as
dominion. In Genesis 1:26, 28, it is the Hebrew radah, to rule,
tread down (cf. 1 Kings 4:24; Neh. 9:28; Ps. 49:14). Leupold cites
as the meaning of radah, “to trample down” or “to master,” and it
means here “dominion over the earth” in every area of life.3
2. On Wyclif,
see H. B. Workman, “Wyclif,” in James Hastings, editor, Encyclo-
paedia of Religions and Ethics, vol. XII, 812-823; Gotthard Lechler, John Wyclif and
His English Precursors, 2 vols. (London: Kegan Paul, 1878); G. M. Trevelyan, En-
gland in the Age of Wycliffe (London: Longmans Green, 1900); H. B. Workman,
John Wyclif, 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1926); John Wickliffe, Writings
(London: Religious Tract Society, n.d.); John de Wycliffe, Tracts and Treatises
(London: Blackburn and Pardon, 1845); etc.
Salvation and Dominion 45
The New Testament Greek word for dominion is kratos;
“kratos, force, strength, might, more especially manifested
power, is derived from a root kra-, to perfect, to complete:
‘creator’ is probably connected.”4
Man was created by God and given a mandate or command
to subdue the earth and to exercise dominion over it. This
meant ruling, trampling down or possessing and mastering
every aspect of this world, religiously, scientifically,
agriculturally, and in every other way. Man was created in
God’s image to develop God’s creation, the earth, by
perfecting or completing it under God.
By his rebellion (Genesis 3), man set himself outside God’s
law: he sought for power independently of God and His
law-word. Man sought authority and ownership outside of,
and in defiance to, God. As a result, man was dispossessed of
Eden as a sign of his dispossession of the earth; the earth would
be in contradiction to him as long as he remained outside of
God’s government and law (Gen. 3:15-19). This dispossession
was furthered by the Flood, which destroyed the privileged
conditions of life and longevity and left a reduced existence for
man. Only with redemption is man restored to dominion
under God and by means of His law.
The Fall had radical implications for man’s dominion. It
affected dominion with respect to authority. According to
Iverach,
Authority and obedience are correlative terms, supremacy
being implied on the part of authority, and dependence on
the part of those who have to obey. Authority has the
right and the power to say the last word, and to give a
decision from which there is no appeal.5
3. H.
C. Leupold, Exposition of Genesis (Columbus, Ohio: The Wartburg Press,
1942), 91.
4. W. E. Vine, An Expository Dictionary of New Testament Words, vol. I (New York:
Revell, 1966), 332.
5. James Iverach, “Authority,” in Hastings, Encyclopaedia of Religion and Ethics,
vol. II, 249.
Only God has absolute authority, and only God can require
absolute obedience. Where God’s authority is acknowledged,
all other legitimate authorities are obeyed as a part of man’s
obedience to God and His order. However, where God’s
authority is denied, the logic of that denial, when developed in
all its implications, undercuts all other authorities. Indeed, the
reprobate rebel at the very idea of authority. Authority in their
minds is associated with ignorance, repression, and tyranny.
Instead, they appeal to “reason.” Arthur Balfour, for example,
contrasted authority to “Reason.” Authority, he held, was
incapable of coping with reason and argument, because authority
only knows coercion, whereas reason analyzes and understands.
Iverach, while agreeing to a degree with Balfour, held that reason
itself has a kind of authority. “All thinking must assume the law of
non-contradiction, as all fruitful thinking must recognize the
validity of the laws of logic.” The axioms of reason “are
authoritative in the ordinary meaning of the term.”6 Thus, a Greek
concept of logic and rationality, the would-be autonomous
rationality of apostate man, is given final authority. Authority has
thus been transferred to man, as well as sovereignty.
Since God is denied primary and ultimate authority in favor
of man, authority is accordingly transferred either to
anarchistic man or to collective man, in the form of the state.
The state thus becomes for most men the source of authority.
But what constitutes legitimate authority in the state?
According to Iverach, “Those in authority must do service,
and must justify their action on the ground of recognized
worth or good achieved; or even on the lower ground of
utility…. According to Aristotle it (the State) must be an
institution in which goodness, virtue, and justice are produced
in the citizens.”7 In Aristotle’s words,
Whereas, those who care for good government take into
consideration virtue and vice in states. Whence it may be
further inferred that virtue must be the care of a state
which is truly so called, and not merely enjoys the name:
6. Ibid.,
249-250.
7. Ibid., 251.
for without this end the community becomes a mere
alliance which differs only in place from alliances of which
the members live apart; and the law is only a convention,
“a surety to one another of justice,” as the sophist
Lycrophon says, and has no real power to make the
citizens good and just.8
But what is held to be “good and just” varies from culture to
culture; moreover, where reason is the final authority, very
logically, as Plato held, the philosopher-kings are alone
competent to exercise authority and to say whether their
authority is “good and just.” Moreover, Aristotle did not
require the state and its rulers to be just, but that they make the
citizens “just” in terms of their preconceived definition. Not
surprisingly, these ideas have long been a fountainhead of
tyranny, and men have long been sacrificed at the altar of ideas,
the ideas of their elite rulers. Those who denounce God’s
authority as the ground of coercion and tyranny always end up
with a social order which, in the name of reason, institutes the most
drastic tyranny and coercion men can force upon society.
Iverach wrote,
Briefly, it may be said that the State is an ethical
institution, and while material force is needed, yet the
exercise of that force is conditioned by the fact that it must
always be exercised for the good of the community, and in
the interests of the higher values. Authority and loyalty must
go hand in hand in every State which is worthy of the name.9
The state is indeed “an ethical institution,” and, we must add,
a religious institution since law is a religious matter, and
authority, also. But if the state does not depend on God’s
sovereign authority and word, then the state is grounded in
some way on man’s authority and word, however much it may
be disguised as “Right Reason,” “Nature,” “Natural Law,” or
any other term. There is, then, little appeal beyond the state to
God’s law, unless it is that sorry appeal from one set of
philosopher-kings and their ideas to another set of such
8. Aristotle, Politics, Jowett
translation (New York: Modern Library, n.d.), 142f.
9. Iverach, op. cit., 252.
tyrants. “The good of the community” is then what elite
thinkers say it is, not what God’s word declares. After God’s
absolute authority is bypassed in the name of “reason,” the
absolute and final authority of reason is affirmed, and we are
piously informed that “Authority and loyalty must go hand in
hand in every State which is worthy of the name.” Thus, the
real objection of such men to the authority of God is simply
that they themselves are not god. Their claims are simply a
development of their original sin, their desire to be as god,
determining for themselves what constitutes good and evil
(Gen. 3:5). By denying God, they deny the supreme court of
appeal beyond and against themselves, and they seek thereby to
bind men absolutely to themselves, or to the projections of
themselves, which they call “Right Reason,” “Natural Law,”
and like terms.
Turning now to the other aspect of dominion, ownership, it
is interesting to note the definition of owner in the Second
Edition of Webster's New International Dictionary: “One who
owns; a proprietor; one who has the legal or rightful title,
whether the possessor or not.” Ownership is defined as “State,
relation, or fact of being an owner; lawful claim or title;
property; proprietorship; dominion. All ownership is by
purchase or descent.” Noah Webster’s 1828 American Dictionary of
the English Language, from which the definition of owner is taken in
the Second Edition (1929, 1960), defines ownership more specifically
as “Property; exclusive right of possession; legal or just claim or
title. The ownership of the estate is in A; the possession is in B.”
Clearly, these definitions reflect a moral problem: there is often a
distinction between rightful title and actual and legal possession.
True ownership is by valid purchase or by descent; it should give
exclusive right of possession, but in a fallen world, ownership is
not always possession. Wyclif drew his conclusions from this
difference between moral and physical fact.
Calvin, in commenting on Genesis 1:26, “And let them have
dominion,” stressed the fact of ownership under God:
The use of the plural number intimates that this authority
was not given to Adam only, but to all his posterity as well
as to him. And hence we infer what was the end for which
all things were created; namely, that none of the
conveniences and necessities of life might be wanting to
man. In the very name of creation the paternal solicitude
of God for man is conspicuous, because he furnished the
world with all things needful, and even with an immense
profusion of wealth, before he formed man. Thus man was
rich before he was born. But if God had such care for us
before we existed, he will by no means leave us destitute
for food and of other necessities of life, now that we are
placed in the world. Yet, that he often keeps his hand as if
closed is to be imputed to our sins.10
Calvin stated it well: “man was rich before he was born,”
because God endowed him with dominion, with authority and
ownership. By his sin, man forfeited his dominion and was
dispossessed. Sinful men, however, claim God’s realm as their
own. Christ having reestablished man’s dominion by His
victory over sin and death, and by His perfect keeping of God’s
law, is now dispossessing the false heirs by a continuing judgment
or plague against these modern pharaohs and their hosts.11 He is
working to restore ownership to the covenant people of God, who
are called to live in terms of God’s law and to exercise dominion,
authority and ownership, over the earth.
This Biblical perspective on ownership is clearly not that of
the modern world. Thus, the Dictionary of Sociology gives us a
very different picture of ownership:
Ownership. Socially established, recognized, and
enforceable command over any object, involving the right
to use, destroy, or transfer. Such rights may be complete or
partial, exclusive or shared, but are always socially
conferred and socially limited. The relationship of ownership
is closely connected with the institution of property.12
10. John Calvin, Commentaries on the First Book of Moses, called Genesis, vol. I (Grand
Rapids, Michigan: Eerdmans, 1946), 96.
11. See R. J. Rushdoony, Thy Kingdom Come (Nutley, New Jersey: Presbyterian
and Reformed Publishing Company, 1971), 147-155, 167, 229f.
12. Henry Pratt Fairchild, Dictionary of Sociology (New York: Philosophical Li-
brary, 1944), 211.
Ownership in this perspective is conditional upon the
consent of society. If men favor state ownership or
communism, then communism is legitimate and supposedly
morally right. If men favor private ownership, then private
ownership is legitimate. The conservative who does not
ground his defense of private property on Scripture, and few
do, is thus in essential agreement with the communist that man
is the source of law. If he insists that men should not steal, he
cannot ground it in more than his wishes and social
convention. The communist and the thief can then appeal to
their wishes and a long tradition of legalized theft by men and
civil governments as their vindication. An intelligent inmate of
a state prison once told this writer that God did not exist;
morality is a myth; evolution is the fact about man and the
world, and therefore all laws and moral codes are social
conventions. All men, he held, are out to get what they can
from others in any way they can, and only fear and timidity
restrain them to a degree. Successful men in industry, in civil
government, and in other areas as well, are only successful
thieves who have not yet been caught. The only argument a
conservative humanist could offer him was a utilitarian one,
namely, that someone had to work productively, or there
would be nothing to steal. The thief, however, favored
productive work; he had often engaged in it, he saw nothing
incompatible between work and stealing. His world had room
for everything except the sovereign God and His absolute law.
The thief ’s opinion of all public and private property was not
unlike the communist definition: property is theft.
The humanist alternatives are thus very meager. Property
and ownership rest in social convention and can be established
or taken away at the discretion of society, or else property is
theft. The difference is not very great. When the state, by
majority opinion or without it, introduces property and
inheritance taxes, it may do so legally, but not righteously,
because God’s law does not permit either.13 Such taxes, in terms
13. SeeR. J. Rushdoony, Institutes of Biblical Law (Nutley, New Jersey: Presbyte-
rian and Reformed Publishing Company, 1974).
of civil law, are legal; in terms of God’s law, they are lawless, and
they are theft.
True ownership, like authority, is an aspect of dominion,
and it can only exist in obedience to God. Salvation, which is
an act of God’s sovereign grace, reestablishes man in terms of
his inheritance, the calling to exercise dominion. Dominion is
thus the calling of the redeemed man; it is the practical
implication of his salvation. As we have seen, the New
Testament word, kratos, dominion, probably comes from the
root kra-, to perfect or to complete. Dominion is salvation thus
come to maturity or completion. The promise of the Saviour
in Genesis 3:15 declares that He shall “bruise” the head of the
serpent. As Leupold pointed out, bruise, shuph, here means crush.14
Every tool and agency of Satan is meant by the serpent; the
crushing of the head means the destruction of their ability to
function.
This is confirmed by St. Paul in Romans 16:20: “And the
God of peace shall bruise Satan under your feet shortly.” The
word bruise is here the Greek suntribo, to break and to shatter. James
Moffatt rendered the sentence thus: “The God of peace will soon
crush Satan under your feet.” This is very plainly a promise of
victory and dominion. This statement of St. Paul is, as Hodge
noted, “not a prayer, but a consolatory declaration that Satan
should be trodden underfoot.” Moreover,
As Satan is constantly represented as “working in the
children of disobedience,” the evil done by them is
sometimes referred to him as the instigator, and sometimes
to the immediate agents who are his willing instruments.15
Practically, this means that the promise of the Savior, the seed of
the woman, is not only a promise of salvation but also of
dominion. It means that the enemies of God shall be crushed when
the people of God obey God’s law and exercise dominion in terms
14. Leupold, op. cit., 166.

15. Charles Hodge, Commentary on the Epistle to the Romans, Revised edition (New
York: Armstrong, 1873), 710.
of it. It means that the promises of Psalm 149 are not poetry, but
a declaration of the victorious dominion of the saints of God.
The way to the restoration of dominion is not by revolution.
As our Lord declared to Simon Peter, “...all they that take the
sword shall perish with the sword” (Matt. 26:52). Those who
seek reconstruction by means of blood and violence shall reap
a harvest of the same. There must be rather the grace of God
unto salvation, followed by the restoration of dominion
through the law of God. As men keep the law, they shall reap
the dominion which the law establishes (Deut. 28:1-4).
VI
Assurance
Salvation cannot be confused with insurance, but it is

inseparable from assurance. Three Greek words are used in the
New Testament which give us the meaning of assurance. Pistis,
faith, “has the secondary meaning of assurance or guarantee,
e.g., Acts 17:31.” Moreover, “by raising Christ from the dead,
God has given ‘assurance’ that the world will be judged by
Him... cp. 1 Tim. 5:12 where ‘faith’ means ‘pledge.’” Plerophoria is
a fulness, abundance, also means full assurance, entire
confidence; lit. a “fullcarrying” (pleros, full, phero, to
carry). Some explain it as full fruitfulness.... In I Thess. 1:5 it
describes the willingness and freedom of spirit enjoyed by
those who brought the Gospel to Thessalonica; in Col. 2:2, the
freedom of mind and confidence resulting from an
understanding in Christ; in Heb. 6:11 (A. V., “full
assurance,” R. V., “fulness”), the engrossing effect of the
expectation of the fulfilment of God’s promises; in Heb.
10:22, the character of the faith by which we are to draw
near to God.
Hupostasis, lit., a standing under, support, (hupo, under,
histemi, to stand) hence, an “assurance,” is so rendered in
Heb. 11:1, R. V. for A. V. “substance.”1
It may here signify a title-deed, as giving a guarantee, or reality.
Salvation is not only the redemption of man from sin and death
into the victory of God, but is also the assurance of personal
salvation. This assurance is, according to the Westminster Confession
of Faith, “the testimony of the Spirit of adoption witnessing with
our spirits that we are the children of God.”2 The Larger
Catechism declares,
1. W.E. Vine, An Expository Dictionary of New Testament Words, vol. I (New York:
Revell, 1966), 84f.
2. Westminster Confession of Faith, Chapt. XVIII, “Assurance of Grace and Salva-
tion,” 11.
53
Q. 80 Can true believers be infallibly assured that they are
in the estate of grace, and that they shall persevere therein
unto salvation?
A. Such as truly believe in Christ, and endeavour to walk
in all good conscience before him, may, without
extraordinary revelation, by faith grounded upon the
truth of God’s promises, and by the Spirit enabling them
to discern in themselves those graces to which the
promises of life are made, and bearing witness with their
spirits that they are the children of God, be infallibly
assured that they are in the estate of grace, and shall
persevere therein unto salvation.
According to St. Paul, the Holy Spirit makes the sons of God
conscious of their adoption into the household of faith, and the
Holy Spirit within them cries out to God as their Father. In
Romans 8:14-17, St. Paul declared:
14. For as many as are led by the Spirit of God, they are
the sons of God.
15. For ye have not received the spirit of bondage again to
fear; but ye have received the Spirit of adoption, whereby
we cry, Abba, Father.
16. The Spirit itself beareth witness with our spirit, that
we are the children of God:
17. And if children, then heirs: heirs of God, and
joint-heirs with Christ; if so be that we suffer with him,
that we may be also glorified together.
The grounds of assurance are plainly stated. First, the
redeemed, the sons of God, are led by the Spirit of God. This
is not imitation, nor does it require perfection. It means simply
that all such men are governed by God. By their rebirth, the
redeemed are born into the new humanity of Jesus Christ, and
they submit to His authority and government. Second, the
redeemed serve God, not in a spirit of bondage or slavery, but
in the Spirit of adoption, like children. The language of our
heart is the language of our citizenship, and if we are members
of Christ’s Kingdom, the hopes of our heart are governed by
covenant goals. Third, we as sinners still are far from perfect or
mature in our faith, and this often discourages us. However,
Assurance 55
the Holy Spirit testifies within us to the reality of our
salvation. “God hath sent forth the Spirit of his Son into your
hearts, crying, Abba, Father” (Gal. 4:6). “The love of God is shed
abroad in our hearts by the Holy Ghost given unto us” (Rom. 5:5).
Fourth, this assurance is not only of our sonship, but also that we
are heirs of God, joint-heirs with Christ. Our union with Christ is
an assurance not only of our inheritance in and with Him, but also
of our suffering for His sake, our participation in the battle against
the false heirs who lay claim to the world. “The union of believers
with Christ, in suffering as well as glory, is what he and his apostles
taught them to expect.”3
This assurance rests on the outward witness of Christ’s death
and resurrection, and the inward witness of our hearts, and
both aspects receive their confirmation from the witness of the
Holy Spirit, the Spirit of truth. As Nicol noted, “The prayer
of St. Paul and his friends for the Colossian Christians is that
they may stand perfect and ‘fully assured’ in everything willed
by God (Col. 4:12).”4 The word in the King James version is
rendered “complete,” an aspect of its meaning, as is “fully
assured.”
The Christian doctrine of assurance is regarded with belligerent
hostility by many. Why, it is held, should anyone hold in anything
but contempt an assurance which is, as far as any outsider can tell,
purely subjective? The Christian declares that he knows himself to
be saved. What validity can such private knowledge have? Without
resorting to a doctrine of empirical proof, we can say that such an
assurance is not merely private knowledge. Our Lord made it clear
that the redeemed bear good fruit: they reveal themselves by their
entire lives (Matt. 7:15-19), “wherefore by their fruits ye shall know
them” (Matt: 7:20). The basic fallacy in the objection to the
doctrine of assurance lies elsewhere. Humanism requires a
common ground between men which comes from man. For one
man to have an assurance (and, ultimately, a predestination to
1893), 421.
4. Thomas Nicol, “Assurance,” in James Hastings, editor, Dictionary of the Apos-
tolic Church, vol. I (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1919), 108.
glory) from God which is withheld from other men, is regarded by
the humanist as offensive to the highest degree. If God is good to
any man, it is held that He must be good to all. If any man has an
eminence over other men, it is an eminence he has gained by his
own effort, or has had conferred on him by other men. Man must
be the principle of differentiation, and man himself must make the
difference, if any differences exist. In a Biblical perspective, the
common ground between men is their common creation by God
in His image, and it is totally subject to Him. Therefore, all men
have all things in common metaphysically, but epistemologically,
the unbeliever has nothing in common with the Christian. The
Christian begins with the sovereign God and His eternal decree,
whereas the unbeliever begins with chance as ultimate and brute
factuality. Thus, in principle, the two have nothing in common; in
reality, the unbeliever thinks with premises borrowed from theism,
because otherwise no knowledge would be possible on his
premises. As Van Til has noted,
But all this does not in the least reduce the fact that as far as
the principle of the natural man is concerned, it is absolutely,
or utterly, not partly, opposed to God. That principle is
Satanic. It is exclusively hostile to God. If it could it would
destroy the work and plan of God. So far then as men self-
consciously work from this principle they have no notion in
common with the believer. Their epistemology is informed by
their ethical hostility to God.
But in the course of history the natural man is not fully
self-conscious of his own position. The prodigal cannot
altogether stifle his father’s voice. There is a conflict of
notions within him. But he himself is not fully and self-
consciously aware of this conflict within him. He has within
him the knowledge of God by virtue of his creation in the
image of God. But this idea of God is suppressed by his false
principle, the principle of autonomy. This principle of
autonomy is, in turn, suppressed by the restraining power of
God’s common grace. Thus the ideas with which he daily
works do not proceed consistently either from the one
principle or from the other.5
5. Cornelius VanTil, The Defense of the Faith (Philadelphia: Presbyterian and Re-
formed Publishing Company, 1955), 189f.
Assurance 57
Man wants to establish the common ground between men
out of man’s would-be autonomous consciousness and without
reference to God. This means that he wants to establish the
ground rules for communication between men, and between
man and whatever God exists. If a doctrine of assurance is to be
allowed, it must be as an assurance open to all men as men,
whether covenant-keepers or covenant-breakers, so that all
men can experiment with God’s assurance of grace, test and
prove it to see if it is to their liking, and then accept or reject it
at their discretion. Not only salvation, but also the assurance of
salvation must be man’s decision and choice; only options
open to all men at their will are thus tolerated.
Again, the doctrine of assurance is ridiculed as an aspect of
the Christian’s “quest for certainty,” to use John Dewey’s
term. The quest for certainty is not limited to the Christian.
Dewey’s hostility was limited to the Christian quest for
certainty, and to those philosophies he disagreed with. His
own philosophy began with certain presuppositions and
ostensible certainties, and, secure in his own humanistic
assurances, he ridiculed all others. It did not occur to Dewey
that his own humanism required an amazing act of blind faith
and rested at every point on religious (but anti-Christian)
presuppositions.
Unless men deny all possibility of knowledge, and at the
same time renounce life itself (for to deny the possibility of
knowledge is to hold to an assurance of no possible
knowledge), they will begin with some starting point, some
assured truth or condition, in order to think at all. The
doctrine of assurance in humanism is the supposed autonomy
of man. It is in terms of this “assurance” that the humanist
attacks the Christian doctrine. Autonomy is his religious
principle and presupposition.
But the doctrine of assurance is inseparable from the
doctrine of salvation. As a result, the humanist finds his
assurance a very shaky and dubious one. Salvation is for him
independence from God and being his own god, his own
source of ultimate authority, law, and determination. Because
he is a creature of God and has the inescapable witness of God
in every fiber of his being (Rom. 1:18-21), he cannot rest in his
claims to salvation and assurance.
Instead of salvation and assurance, the humanist has a more
basic concern, elementary justification, trying to justify his
existence. This can be done by insisting, in existentialist
fashion, on the irrelevance of all judgments and standards; life is
the only criterion for life, it is held. It is sufficient that life is.
Salvation is then a do-it-yourself project whereby a man defines
himself or shapes his own nature or essence as a part of becoming
his own god and creature. The end result of this even for Sartre is
“a futile passion.” Salvation and assurance elude such a man.
More commonly, even among existentialists, the humanist
seeks to gain assurance by giving his life a social reference, by
doing something for humanity. This appeal to humanity is
very dear to the humanistic heart. Even a prostitute, who
declares herself a homosexual, admits to a craving for incest,
describes an act of bestiality, participates also in perversities
including sodomy, tries to assure herself and her readers that
she renders a social service by giving happiness to many
people. Because she took men at the request of a psychiatrist,
for “therapy,” she credited herself with working a cure, but her
concept of health leaves much to be desired!6 This example of
humanistic assurance is not out of place, in that it illustrates
how deeply rooted the appeal to humanity is in our time.
Almost anything can be justified in the name of humanity.
This appeal fails to give assurance, however. Miss Hollander,
for all her assurances of her usefulness to humanity, still echoes
a Latin proverb, The world wants to be cheated, so cheat. The
idealistic reformer as well as the pragmatic politician both
appeal to humanity as their assurance that their labor is not in
vain for man, and at the same time damn humanity for its
waywardness and ingratitude. There is no sound or valid
assurance in a false faith. As Isaiah declared, “Cease ye from
6.
Xaviera Hollander, with Robin Moore and Ivonne Dunleavy, The Happy
Hooker (New York: Dell, 1972).
Assurance 59
man, whose breath is in his nostrils: for wherein is he to be
accounted of?” (Isa. 2:22).
A valid assurance must rest on valid foundations. In essence,
there are two possibilities. First, man has a valid assurance of
salvation because Scripture is indeed true, and the sovereign
and triune God of Scripture, faithful to His word, not only
redeems man but also fulfills all His promises, so that we can rest
assured that God is true to Himself and His word.
Second, the other possibility is that man is his own god, and
able to save himself. This is the belief of existentialism and of
modern science. It holds to a new concept of “futurism,” and
Dennis Gabor has stated it thus: “The future cannot be
predicted, but futures can be invented. It was man’s ability to
invent which has made society what it is.”7 The goal is to make the
future finally, and the future as present, totally man’s product, so
that man’s predestination will totally govern man.8 That man as a
secondary cause has thus a secondary role in developing the future
is clearly true. The goal, however, of thinkers and planners since
the Enlightenment is a primary and total creative power over the
present and the future. Such a power would indeed give man
assurance that he is his own savior, and that he can be or is saved,
but such a power is beyond possibility.
Assurance, however, must have both a present and future
validity, and at this point it fails even the true believers among
humanists. The humanistic planner can envision a future
paradise on earth, and he can believe that scientific socialism
can establish that ideal order, but he cannot give himself any
assurance concerning the present: he may be dead long before
that conquest of war, death, poverty, and disease arrives. All he
can then offer himself for the present is “the courage to be,”
which means essentially “to grin and bear it” that you are
indeed not a god when you have insisted that you are.
7. Cited from Dennis Gabor, Inventing the Future (New York: Alfred A. Knopf,
1963), 207, by John McHale, The Future of the Future (New York: Ballantine
Books, 1971), 276.
8. For examples of such thinking, see R. J. Rushdoony, The Mythology of Science
(Nutley, New Jersey: The Craig Press, 1967).
Paul Tillich thus held that “there is nothing ‘beyond
religious socialism.’”9 His heaven and paradise were thus very
simply described. That dream world, however, was not in
sight in his lifetime. He had thus no heaven to await him at
death, nor a present savior and comforter, but only a distant
goal. Moreover, having reduced historic Biblical faith to myth
and relativistic teachings, where did Tillich gain his ostensible
assurance? Tillich did hold to some absolutes:
These absolutes were: the structure of the mind that makes
sense impressions possible, and the logical and semantic
structures of the mind; the universals that make language
possible; the categories and polarities that make
understanding of reality possible. Others were the
unconditional character of the moral imperative,
regardless of its contents, and the principle of justice —
acknowledgment of every person as a person. Finally,
there was agape, love, which contains and transcends
justice and unites the absolute and the relative by adapting
itself to every concrete situation.10
The moral imperative is “unconditionally valid” when it
most fully expresses “our own true or essential being.” To act
against the “command from our true being” is to “violate
ourselves. If the moral command (whatever its content is)
comes from any other source than our true being, if it is
imposed on us from outside, if it comes from authorities of any
kind, it is not an unconditional command for us. Then we can and
must resist it, because it denies our own dignity as persons.”11
Thus far, the Marquis de Sade would be in happy agreement with
Tillich. Fixed “moral contents” like the Ten Commandments are
all relative and are false absolutes.12 But de Sade wants the right to
murder, and Tillich holds that every person is an absolute. Tillich’s
world thus gives us a clash of absolutes, as surely as does the world
of de Sade, and neither has any assurance that this position has any
9. Paul
Tillich, My Search For Absolutes (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1967),
40.
10. Ibid., 124f.
11. Ibid., 95.
12. Ibid., 97ff.
Assurance 61
validity other than his say-so. However, since each is his own
ultimate and god, this is apparently sufficient.
Tillich holds that, with respect to an understanding of the
absolute, “What commands us is our own essential nature, our
unique and eternally significant true being. It speaks to us and
demands of us that we do not waste and destroy it.”13 This is the
supposedly reasoned conclusion of a modern philosopher who
found the concept of the infallible word of God, a word revelation
with propositional truth, unreasonable. Is his position pure reason?
Is it simply rationality at work, or does it constitute rather a private
revelation? While more intellectual a presentation, it is not radically
different from the many private revelations of disordered minds
who earnestly profess a great assurance because, supposedly, they
have a special revelation concerning reality, and concerning
spaceships and visitors from other worlds. The world of Tillich’s
absolutes is another world and a closed world, a private domain, a
world of his own making, an apostate dream of autonomy. The
visible universe is the handiwork of the sovereign and triune God.
To deny God is ultimately to deny man and the world; it leaves man
nothing but a meaningless world of brute factuality, and man as a
lonely and empty island in an ocean of nothingness. Not only is the
Christian assurance firmly grounded in God and His universe, but
the lack of that assurance reduces a man to emptiness and poverty;
man becomes no more than a ghost, trying to haunt a nonexistent
house.
13. Ibid., 97.

VII
Political Saviors
In describing the events of Palm Sunday, St. Matthew wrote:

4. All this was done, that it might be fulfilled which was
spoken by the prophet saying,
5. Tell ye the daughter of Sion, Behold, thy King cometh
unto thee, meek, and sitting upon an ass, and a colt the foal
of an ass (Matt. 21:4-5).
This formula, “All this was done, that it might be fulfilled
which was spoken by the prophet,” appears in nearly the same
words twelve times in Matthew’s Gospel, three times in Mark, six
times in Luke, and eight times in John. It is also common in Acts
and the Epistles. Even more common is an expression declaring
that it was thus written by a prophet: such references are almost too
numerous to cite.
In this case, the citation refers to Zechariah 9:9-10; although
verse 10 is not cited, it is clearly in mind, and the joyful
reaction of the people made it clear that they saw the self-conscious
fulfilment of the prophecy as a declaration of peace, victory, and
dominion:
9. Rejoice greatly, O daughter of Zion; shout, O daughter of
Jerusalem: behold, thy King cometh unto thee: he is just,
and having salvation; lowly and riding upon an ass, and
upon a colt the foal of an ass.
10. And I will cut off the chariot from Ephraim, and the
horse from Jerusalem, and the battle bow shall be cut off:
and he shall speak peace unto the heathen: and his
dominion shall be from sea even to sea, and from the river
even to the ends of the earth.
Whatever else this and all other citations of the fulfilment of
prophecy have to say, they do make it clear that history moves in
terms of God’s plan and is predestined by Him. What He has
declared, He brings to pass. Not only do the writers rejoice in
every fulfilment of prophecy, but they also clearly rejoice in the fact
63
that, whatever God has promised and declared, that He will perform.
Predestination by God is implicit or explicit in all of Scripture.
Predestination by man, however, is implicit and explicit in
humanism, scientific socialism, and in every doctrine of political
salvation. Man seeks to supplant God’s eternal decree with his own
total plan. The scientific socialist state is man’s predestination of
man and his world.
The Triumphal Entry of our Lord into Jerusalem is directly
related to this humanistic hope and in contradiction to it.
The world of Christ’s day was well aware of the Biblical faith
and hope which, from Judea, was extensively taught and
propagated by Judean missionaries. In 61 B.C., Cicero had rejected
it as a “barbarian superstition.” Biblical faith all the same appealed
to many who were “longing to believe that one day wickedness
would be abolished, the arrogant would be punished, and a higher
justice would be established.”1
In paganism, such a hope was normally essentially a political
hope. Religion was primarily concerned, in its cultic form,
with insurance against problems. Positive action towards
justice and salvation was basically political. Only as the
political hope in the form of the Roman Empire began to fade
into cynicism did pagan cults offer salvation, and even then it
was identified with security rather than victory.
Rome, as it developed from a City-State to an empire, presented
itself as “the City of Justice, belonging to all humanity.” This
Greater Rome was man’s vehicle of salvation. Cicero hailed
Octavian as a savior. “In him we place our hopes of liberty; from
him we have already received salvation (Philippics, V, vxiii, 49).”
Cicero spoke of Rome as “the light of the world, the guardian of
all nations (Philippics, IV, vi, 14).”2
Roman politicians saw their regimes as new eras, opening up
salvation for a needy world. Julius Caesar, like others,
instituted calendar changes and reform as pontifex maximus to
1. Lidia Storoni Mazzolani, The Idea of the City in Roman Thought, From Walled City
to Spiritual Commonwealth (Bloomington, Indiana: Indiana University Press,
1970), 76f.
2. Ibid., 97, 120, 129.
Political Saviors 65
indicate that time now had a new meaning. His assassins
believed equally as much that their political assassination
would renew the past and the present.
Almost as if they wanted to re-establish the ancient course
of events, the conspirators chose March 15 — the feast of
Anna Perenna, which had been New Year’s Day in the old
calendar — to murder the man who had subverted the very
sequence of the days.3
Whether with Caesar, Brutus, or their predecessors and
successors, salvation meant the power of the state and its
sword. Salvation meant coercion.
The nature of political salvation has not changed since then.
Whether in Marxist socialist states, Fabian socialist orders, or
in the democracies, political salvation means coercion. The
state has a plan, and man and society must submit to the
predestined Procrustean pattern. Procrustes, the Greek robber
of legend, amputated or stretched the limbs of his captives to
fit a certain bed and thereby destroyed them. His victims were
unwilling victims, but the modern citizens, believing in
political salvation, demand a Procrustean bed for society and
only complain when it is they who are stretched out upon it.
The predestination and salvation offered by humanism and
socialism is coercive and destructive. The dream is of a great
and noble leader on a white horse leading men into a new
paradise, and, age after age, men have raised-up to power their
own murderers and cheered their parades to murderous
power.
The Triumphal Entry had all this in mind and parodied it.
Israel itself had succumbed to the political hope. The
expectation of a world empire ruled by a Jewish messiah was
present among the disciples themselves. The contrast between
a conqueror riding on a white charger and an ass with its colt
trotting along cannot be more marked. The one gives us a
picture of power and might, the ability to compel and to
destroy. The other is a picture, as Zechariah 9:9 makes clear, of
3. Ibid., 121.
one who is “lowly” or humble, with no apparent coercive
power.
This difference is deliberate. The predestination of the state
is brutal and coercive; it is on man’s level, in man’s time, and a
pressure on man himself. The predestination of God is from all
eternity, before time began; it does no violence to us, because
we are what God created us to be, and all that He ordains is in
conformity to our being because we are what He ordained us
to be.
The use of the ass marked a renunciation of political power
as the way of salvation. After Solomon came to the throne,
horses became the distinctive riding beast of the nobility
(I Kings 10:25, 28-29; II Kings 9:18-19, etc.). From this time
onward the use of asses was characteristic of persons
without rank. If the Messiah appears riding thus He must
be of a humble rank and station.4
The crowds who hailed Jesus saw the prophecy fulfilled, but
they insisted on seeing it in terms of their political hopes. They
did this because the prophecy spoke of dominion. In Leupold’s
translation, “And He shall speak peace to the nations; and His
dominion shall be from sea to sea, and from the River to the
ends of the earth.”5 Thus, however humble the Messiah’s
appearing and entry, He would still exercise world dominion.
The question, of course, is simply this: what does dominion
mean? For the world, dominion is in essence the ability to
exercise power and force over persons and things. What men
mean by dominion is apparent in the connotation the word
domination has. The expectation thus was that the appearance
of the Messiah meant the domination of the world by a Jewish
monarch. Jesus, recognizing their false hope, wept over the
city, saying, “If thou hadst known, even thou, at least in this
thy day, the things which belong unto thy peace!” (Luke
19:42). As Stauffer wrote,
4. H. C. Leupold, Exposition of Zechariah (Columbus, Ohio: The Wartburg Press,

1956), 175.
5. Ibid., 163.
Many of them waved palms, thus making plain the
political meaning of their demonstration. For the palm
was the key emblem of Palestine in national heraldry and
in the international emblematic language of the day. Palm
trees and palm leaves are to be found on the Palestinian
coins of the early Maccabees, the Hasmonaeans, the
Herodians, the procurators, and the partisans; they are
found also on Flavian coins celebrating victories and,
above all, on the coins celebrating the advent of Hadrian.
On these last coins we see Judea kneeling or sacrificing,
surrounded by children bearing palms and marching in
solemn procession to meet the approaching Emperor. This
is how we must understand the palms of Palm Sunday:
Jerusalem was celebrating the epiphany of her messianic
king. Even the children crying Hosannah are included in
this description of the coming of a king.6
The dominion which Christ came to establish was not
political, although it would have political repercussions and
effect as men came under Christ’s dominion. Humanism
speaks of man’s goodness, but, practically, it moves in terms of
man’s depravity, because its plan for paradise is to coerce men
into goodness as the state defines it. In effect, man is compelled,
if he resists, to choose between the state’s definition of
goodness or to be an outcast, or even to be executed. Political
dominion and coercion are the humanistic means of coping
with man’s sin. In such an order, the state exercises dominion
over man, so that it is not man who exercises dominion, but
man who is dominated by a ruling elite.
In Christ’s Kingdom, dominion is restored to man, who lost
it by his fall, by man’s regeneration through Jesus Christ.
Christ by his resurrection destroyed the dominion of death
(Rom. 6:9). Therefore, “sin shall not have dominion over you”
(Rom. 6:14). Man is freed into dominion. The state exercises
dominion over man by means of coercive power: the gun and
the bayonet are its compelling and persuading power. Christ
the King leads His joint-heirs into dominion by His grace.
6.Ethelbert Stauffer, Jesus and His Story (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1960),
110.
Christ marched into Jerusalem in humble manner, in a
parody of statist might. “All this was done, that it might be
fulfilled which was spoken by the prophet.” He is declared
“just, and having salvation.” He will “cut off” or eliminate the
“battle bow” and the chariot, the weapons of war, and “the
horse,” the symbol of the proud conqueror, will give way to
His peace. Micah, as well as Isaiah, spoke of this peace:
And he shall judge among many people, and rebuke strong
nations afar off; and they shall beat their swords into
plowshares, and their spears into pruninghooks: nation
shall not lift up a sword against nation, neither shall they
learn war any more (Micah 4:3).
9. Thine hand shall be lifted up upon thine adversaries,
and all thine enemies shall be cut off.
10. And it shall come to pass in that day, saith the LORD,
that I will cut off thy horses out of the midst of thee, and
I will destroy thy chariots:
11. And I will cut off the cities of thy land, and throw
down all thy strongholds:
12. And I will cut off witchcraft out of thine hand; and
thou shalt have no more soothsayers:
13. Thy graven images also will I cut off, and thy standing
images out of the midst of thee; and thou shalt no more
worship the work of thine hands (Micah 5:9-13).
Christ, too, eliminates that which opposes His Kingdom, not
by coercion but by the judgment of history, by means of that
great shaking of the things which are, so that the things which
cannot be shaken may alone remain (Heb. 12:27). His word to
the nations is peace. But “war will cease on earth only when
wickedness ceases, and wickedness will cease only when
Christ’s universal empire begins.”7
Christ’s Kingdom comes by grace, and it restores man,
whereas political salvation suppresses. Rome sought to be the
City of Justice and became a city which even its emperors
abandoned for other havens. But of Christ Zechariah says, “He
is just.” His law gives men the means to liberty, dominion, and
7.Thomas V. Moore, The Book of Zechariah (London: Banner of Truth Trust,
1958), 151.
prosperity, and He, as the just ruler, is faithful to His word
(Deut. 28).
The crowd which on Palm Sunday hailed Jesus as the
Messianic King, the Great King coming “in the name of the
Lord” (Matt. 21:9), cried out savagely, before the week was
over, “Crucify Him” (Mark 15:12-14). Their attitude had not
greatly changed in those few days and was in essence the same.
Their expectation of Jesus was an empire which would kill
their enemies, in particular, Rome and its legions, its rulers,
and tax collectors. When they thought of deliverance and
salvation, they thought of death, death for their enemies, and
death for those of their own race whom they hated. Again and
again in the history of political saviors and salvation,
deliverance has meant a blood bath, a reign of terror,
concentration camps, and endless bloodshed. If hopes of
political salvation are offered by the left, they mean death for
capitalists, reactionaries, Christians, counter-revolutionaries,
Ethiopians, Jews, or whomever they are opposed to. If hopes
of political salvation are offered by the rightists or
conservatives, again it means war and death, death for
communists and for all who fit their definition of traitors.
Political salvation means the elimination of an element in the
life of the state, and it is a program of social regeneration by
means of death, the death of all offending individuals, followed
by the rigorous regimentation of the life of all the rest.
Biblical salvation means the elimination of sin and, finally,
death by the atoning and regenerating work of Jesus Christ,
and it is a gospel of individual and finally universal
regeneration through His sovereign creating and re-creating
power. It offers grace to the guilty through Christ’s vicarious
sacrifice and it sets forth God’s law as the way of sanctification,
so that society can flourish and prosper under God.
God having created man in His image, man, even in his sin,
inescapably bears the stamp of God and moves in terms of
godly categories which are perverted to man’s lawless ends.
Man is a law creature: because he is a man, he must have law,
direction, in his life. However much he hates God, fallen man
still echoes God’s law. As a result, when fallen, sinful man faces
the wrongs wrought by sin, everything within him cries out
against it. The demand for justice was no less present in Rome,
Egypt, Babylon, Assyria, and elsewhere than it is today. The
cry for justice is as old as man. As God’s creature, man cries out
against injustice, and his being longs for a just order even as the
plant seeks the sun.
All through the ages, as man has confronted the havoc
wrought by sin, he cries out in passion, “Someone must pay
for this!” This is the cry of the law, vengeance, restitution. It
cannot be evaded. Men may talk about eliminating judgment
and restitution, but such an era is usually most ruthless about
inflicting it. When fallen man begins to demand that “Someone
must pay for this!,” it means that sin is followed by unremitting
death. The Fall is all the more enforced by man himself. His
activities become sadistic and masochistic. Being himself guilty, he
passes the death sentence on himself with masochistic, suicidal
actions and impulses. Indignant at the guilt of all other men, he
turns on them sadistically, savagely, and murderously, laying upon
them his guilt and also his wrath at the omnipresent evil he sees.
The law becomes death, and a means of atonement and
justification. Society and history become a long story of
death-dealing as the way of salvation, so that, the greater man’s
edifices, the greater his ruins. His hopes like his structures crumble
as his salvation-death overtakes them all. Revolutionists have again
and again seen that their reigns of terror will sooner or later
overtake them, but they have no other way of salvation, and
they pursue death until it destroys them.
The death of man cannot justify, redeem, atone, or
regenerate. Jesus Christ, as man’s only Redeemer, parodied the
death march of world conquerors in His Triumphal Entry into
Jerusalem. The city rejected Him and looked to their own
power to inflict death as the way of salvation. The
Jewish-Roman War resulted (Luke 19:41-44), the greatest
disaster of history (Matt. 24:21). As a result, Jesus, after having
been whipped almost to death, and after a long night of agony,8
could still declare, on His way to the cross, to the weeping women,
28. Daughters of Jerusalem, weep not for me, but weep for
yourselves and for your children.
29. For, behold, the days are coming, in the which they
shall say, Blessed are the barren, and the paps which never
gave suck.
30. Then shall they begin to say to the mountains, Fall on
us; and to the hills, Cover us.
31. For if they do these things in a green tree, what shall
be done in the dry? (Luke 23:28-31).
Salvation is not death, but every attempt at political
salvation means death on a wholesale basis, massive, brutal
death. Because Jesus Christ came to offer life, in fulfilment of
prophecy He denied and parodied political salvation. Political
saviors, He declared, are false men, murderers, thieves, and
robbers. “The thief cometh not, but for to steal, and to kill, and to
destroy: I am come that they might have life, and that they might
have it more abundantly” (John 10:10).
The Kingdom of God comes, not by theft and murder, not
by political saviors, but by the grace of God unto salvation,
and by obedience to His law. The ass was the symbol, not only
of a humble status, but of work. Not conquest but work, not
coercion but patient labor in the Lord, establishes man’s
dominion under God.
8. See C. Truman Davis, M.D., “The Crucifixion of Jesus, The Passion of Christ
from a Medical Point of View,” Arizona Medicine (March 1965): 183-187.
VIII
The Certain Word
Salvation is the saving grace of God manifested through Jesus

Christ, whose atoning and vicarious death satisfied the absolute
and perfect justice of God. For God’s grace to be manifested, His
justice had to be satisfied, because sin requires death. God had
declared to man that disobedience to His word would lead to death
(Gen. 2:17), but man chose to doubt that word. Not only man’s
subsequent history, but also the vicarious death of Christ,
emphasize that God’s word is an assured or certain word, and that
sin is inescapably linked to death. Not only does God’s absolute
word require death for sin, but it also makes salvation possible and
certain.
To understand this, let us begin by examining the June 24, 1969,
entry in Rabbi Martin Siegel’s diary:
Several months ago, I talked to a couple who were feuding
over whether to have a $15,000 bar mitzvah for their son. The
father said he couldn’t afford it and didn’t want it. The mother
said she wanted it whether the father could afford it or not. I
urged her to have a small modest affair.
“That will take courage, Rabbi,” she said, “but I’ll try.”
She called me today to tell me that she had decided on a gala
$15,000 spectacular.
“You’ll drive your husband to bankruptcy,” I said.
“But at least we’ll be able to face our neighbors,” she replied.
The library in the community has been running a film called
The Answer, which is about a riddle and one man’s attempt to
solve it. The riddle embodies all the problems of mankind and
its solution, we find out in the end, is no less than the Ten
Commandments.
Tonight I was invited to speak after the film. I told the group
that I didn’t believe in abstract universals like the Ten
Commandments.
73
The librarian was very upset.1
What Rabbi Siegel failed to see was that there was a connection
between his denial of the Ten Commandments and the mother’s
attitude. If men are not governed by God, they will be governed by
men, and the opinions of men. Man’s life is never lived without an
assured and certain word, a principle of action and a guarantee of
salvation. For all too many, this Word is the opinion of men. In a
situation not unlike that of Rabbi Siegel, and the mother’s
expensive bar mitzvah, a woman justified a similar extravagance
because it had “helped” her husband and daughter. Her justification
was existential: what can my action do for me here and now?
Salvation for her was not a divine transaction, but any means of
deliverance from evil and ruin. For her, moreover, evil and ruin
meant any endangering of her totally humanistic and societal hopes
for herself, her daughter, and her husband.
Salvation is a passion of man, but not necessarily a holy passion.
As many men want deliverance from the necessity of
righteousness, as there are who look to be delivered from sin and
evil. The cry is for deliverance, for redemption, release, and
preservation, but very often into goals which are themselves evil
and reprobate. The intense reaction of men to Christ is, “We will
not have this man to reign over us” (Luke 19:14). Man wants
salvation from the certain word of God unto the open word of
man, to man’s uncertain word. The sin of man was his acceptance
of the creature’s word as against the word of God. The declaration
of the serpent was, “Yea, hath God said?” (Gen. 3:1). The salvation
of man was declared to be the lack of any absolute and certain word
of God. The world was held to be one of open possibilities, a
universe in which man could make and unmake reality at his will.
Men shall be their own gods, deciding what is good and evil as they
choose, and in terms of their needs at the moment and in their
situation (Gen. 3:5). If the world were so, then there would be no
word above and over man to judge man. Men resent an infallible and
certain word over and above them which judges them. For sinful
1. MelZiegler, editor, Amen: The Diary of Rabbi Martin Siegel (Greenwich, Con-
necticut: Fawcett Publications, 1972), 176.
The Certain Word 75
men, the cut-off point of the tolerable world is themselves. Thus,
a report of the attitudes of male, homosexual prostitutes describes
them as “true existentialists,” living only in terms of the moment.
Moreover,
Most seemed to feel that it was not terribly different from any
other job. Some made the point that everybody “hustles” and
that everybody has a price. The difference, they say, is wholly
in degree.2
The rise of occultism and Satanism is closely tied to this. These
prostitutes rationalize their way of life, first, by denying that any
higher way or law exists. If there be no God, then anything and
everything is permissible. Man is bound by no law, and prostitution
is then as “honorable” a profession as medicine. At the same time,
all things are equally “base,” since now there is no criterion
whereby anything can be called truly and objectively good or evil.
The possibility of judgment is thus negated. Second, because the
sense of guilt will not disappear, the means of justification used by
these prostitutes is to say that “everybody ‘hustles’ and that
everybody has a price.” All things being reduced to the same level
by the denial of an absolute standard, all things are declared to be
equally tainted. The thief declares that all men are thieves, the liar
insists that all men are liars, and the prostitute says that “everybody
‘hustles.’” There is in this perspective no reality or truth above us:
“We will not have this man to reign over us” (Luke 19:14), only a
reality below us, and this means occultism and Satanism.
Although there is much in occultism which frightens its
followers, there is also much in it that delights them. Guilty men
are defeated men and are defeatists. They have, as Warner and Reik
and others have shown, a masochistic urge to self-punishment,
defeat, and mass destruction.3 Whereas occultism and Satanism
masquerade as cults of power and victory, their essence is a cosmic
defeatism. The universe is a perverse, meaningless, and twisted
place, a world of darkness and of devious power. Man’s only hope
2. Peggy
Holter, “Prostitutes Talk,” Los Angeles News Advocate, vol. 2, no. 10,
15 March - 31 March 1972, 9.
3. See R. J. Rushdoony, Politics of Guilt and Pity (Nutley, New Jersey: The Craig
Press, 1970), 1-63.
in such a cosmos is a fleeting victory over others, an advantage
really rather than a victory, and man’s final end is darkness, death
or the shadows. Men who deny God have denied themselves
victory, and, for them, it is comforting to believe that the universe
ultimately denies victory and climaxes in death, with man dead, the
sun cold and gone, and the universe run down. God is then
replaced in their vision by the prince of defeat, Satan.
Eliphas Levi (Alphonse Louis Constant), an occultist, has said of
Satan that
According to the Kabalists, the true name of Satan is that of
Jehovah reversed, for Satan is not a black god but the negation
of Deity. He is the personification of atheism and idolatry. The
devil is not a personality for initiates but a force created with
a good object, though it can be applied to evil: it is really the
instrument of liberty.4
For such a perspective, God is Satan, and Satan, instead of being a
person, is a force, a negation of God, “the instrument of liberty.”
Liberation means freedom from God. Levi’s quest is for the “secret
of omnipotence.”5 Moreover,
The secret of the occult sciences is that of Nature herself; it is
the secret of the generation of angels and worlds; it is that of
God’s own omnipotence. “Ye shall be as the Elohim, knowing
good and evil.” So testified the serpent of Genesis, and so did
the Tree of Knowledge become the Tree of Death. For six
thousand years the martyrs of science have toiled and perished
at the foot of this Tree, so that it may become once more the
Tree of Life.
That Absolute which is sought by the foolish and found only
by the wise is the truth, the reality and the reason of universal
equilibrium. Such equilibrium is the harmony which proceeds
from the analogy of opposites. Humanity has sought so far to
balance itself as if on one leg — now on one and now again
on the other — Blind believers and skeptics are on a par with
each other, and both are equally remote from eternal
salvation...
4. Eliphas Levi, The History of Magic, E. A. Waite translation (London: Rider and
Company, 1963), 161.
5. Ibid., 360.
The Certain Word 77
Light is the equilibrium between shadow and brightness.
Motion is the equilibrium between inertia and activity.
Authority is the equilibrium between liberty and power.
Wisdom is equilibrium in thought; virtue is equilibrium in the
affections; beauty is equilibrium in form.... Whatsoever is true
is beautiful; all that is beautiful should be true. Heaven and hell
are the equilibrium of moral life; good and evil are the
equilibrium of liberty.6
Omnipotence is the goal, and it is attained by “equilibrium.”
Practically, what this equilibrium means is the reduction of all
things to an equality. Good and evil, placed in equilibrium, free
man from both good and evil, in that they are now equally
important, equally true, and equally meaningless. Both the believer
and the skeptic give way to the man who is beyond both: he is too
busy realizing his own supposed omnipotence to be troubled by
belief or doubt concerning the universe, especially since nothing in
that universe (or beyond it) is now an object of belief, since man is
his own ultimate. But man is his own ultimate in a meaningless
universe, with nothing save the quest for power and omnipotence
to replace the loss of God’s certain world. Levi affirmed all
“truths” and thereby denied them all, because none for him had
any objective value, but only a utility for man in his ascent to power.
In a world beyond good and evil, a world without God, man
must forsake the quest for meaning because he lives in a
meaningless universe. He must also forsake any desire for godly
dominion, since he recognizes no God who bestows it and who
establishes the terms of authority and ownership. Instead, his quest
is for power, and the result is occultism and demonism. According
to Levi, “It is by conformity with the rules of eternal power that
man may unite himself to the creative energy and become creator
and preserver in his turn.”7 Since this “creative energy” in a godless
universe is below, in the primeval energy of evolution, man must
then look below, to the primitive, magical, demonic, and the
immoral for power and energy.
6. Ibid.,
358-360.
7. Ibid., 34.
When God’s certain, infallible, and perfect word is denied, man
has no word left to give meaning to life, and no word whereby he
is commissioned to exercise dominion. As a result, man seeks
salvation in power. Against the hovering demons of darkness and
death, he has no protection except a fleeting assertion of power.
Thus, every age of unbelief is also an era of power-politics, tyranny,
and brutal death. Man seeks to substitute power for meaning and
dominion, and his use of power is murderous. Levi called for the
seizure of “creative energy,” but the energy exercised by man the
magician turns life into death.
As a result, in humanism, words which speak of a realm of
meaning, give way to power and the results of the exercise of
humanistic power, death. The more consistently humanistic the
state, the greater its contempt, as witness the Soviet Empire and
Red China, for words, the greater its reliance on lies and on
terroristic power.
As against this, Jesus Christ declared, in foretelling the fall of
Jerusalem and the history of the Christian era to the end of history,
that
Heaven and earth shall pass away, but my words shall not pass
away (Matt. 24:35).
This is a most remarkable sentence. The deliberate idiots who insist
on seeing Jesus as one who never claimed to be God choose to
disregard such statements. Lenski’s comment on the force of this
declaration is telling:
The statement that “the heaven and the earth shall pass away,
but my words shall in no wise pass away” loses much of its
force when it is regarded as an assurance of the fact that the
contemporaneous generation of Jews will not have
disappeared before all things foretold by Jesus shall have
reached an end. The statement gains in force when the
prophecy of v. 34 is properly understood. This verse is only
one of Jesus’ words. Jesus does not restrict his statement to his
present discourse and to the many statements it includes. He
does not say, “These my words,” but all-inclusively, “my words
shall in no wise pass away.” …Despite their apparent
durability the physical heaven and earth “shall pass away”…
The Certain Word 79
But the words of Jesus will never undergo even the slightest
change either in meaning or in form.8
Let us examine the implications of this statement. Its
implications concerning the person of Jesus are very great, as well
as with respect to His word. First, Jesus very clearly declared that
His word is the fundamental and creative word. All things are made
by Him (John 1:3), and they exist only as long as He decrees their
existence. As a result, all things else can pass away, but His word shall
not pass away. Jesus Christ is the Word Who speaks the creative
word which brings all things into being: “All things were made by
him; and without him was not anything made that was made” (John
1:3).
Second, not only did Jesus Christ as the second person of the
Trinity create all things, but He also predestined all things from
eternity. As a result, He speaks in Matthew 24 and in all His word
as the sovereign and predestinating Lord of all things. Not a
sparrow falls unplanned in this universe, where the very hairs of
our head are all numbered (Matt. 10:29-30). Because this is a fallen
world, it is often a grim battlefield, a place of grief and trouble. It
is, however, also a world of victory and salvation, where God’s
predestined purposes absolutely govern and decree all things. The
world is never out of control for the triune God but controlled to
the minutest and most far-reaching detail. It is a world therefore of
total meaning because it is a world of total government.
Third, Jesus Christ, in declaring that His words shall not pass
away, was speaking, among other things, about the future. That
future is absolutely determined by Him. Nothing can alter His
decree. All things have meaning and reward in relationship to
Himself and His purpose. As a result, He could declare,
And whosoever shall give to drink unto one of these little ones
a cup of cold water only in the name of a disciple, verily I say
unto you, he shall in no way lose his reward (Matt. 10:42).
“Ye have done it unto me,” Jesus said (Matt. 25:37,40). So small
a favor done to us is easily forgotten, but, God being total in His
8. R. C. H. Lenski, The Interpretation of St. Matthew’s Gospel (Columbus, Ohio: The
Wartburg Press, 1943), 953f.
government, nothing is unimportant in His world, and, as a result,
total government means total reward. A cup of cold water gains a
reward, even if it is given only in the name of a disciple of Christ.
In Matthew 10:41-42, three groups are distinguished: prophets,
righteous men, and little ones or ordinary disciples. “But there is no
distinction as regards the reward, which, as Chrysostom said, is
eternal life. A cup of cold water is a proverbial expression for a minor
service.”9 Chrysostom’s view of the nature of the reward need not
be accepted, but the fact of a full reward is very evident.
Clearly, the word of Christ is the word of true power because it
is the word of dominion. “All power is given unto me in heaven
and in earth” (Matt. 28:18). His word is clearly the saving word.
Throughout His ministry, He declared men to be saved in terms of
their relationship to Him. Even in the agony of the cross, His word
to the thief had total assurance of an absolute government and
authority, and the thief had the assurance of paradise that very day
(Luke 23:39-43). There was no doubt in the mind of the dying Jesus
of the certainty of His word.
Salvation is only possible in a universe in which our God and
Saviour speaks an unchanging and certain word. Salvation is not
possible against a background of brute factuality. Only against a
framework of total meaning and the total authority of our Saviour
can salvation have any significance. Only He who pronounces a
word which will not pass away, and whose every word has total
authority, can be man’s lord and savior.
9.
Sherman E. Johnson, “Matthew,” in The Interpreter’s Bible, vol. VII (New
York: Abingdon Press, 1951), 377.
IX
Paradise and Salvation
The memory of Paradise is common to many cultures all over

the world. Men have long dreamed of a return to a blissful order in
a perfect world, a state of pastoral innocence and unbroken peace.
This is no less a factor in the modern world, and, in fact, all the
more powerful in that it is now a political hope. Rousseau sparked
a modern form of the dream, a state of nature attained by a new
politics. The Marxist hope is for a stateless world in which men
attain perfection by means of the abolition of the instruments and
forms of oppression. In the democracies, politicians plan for a
world without war, poverty, disease, or death.
The means of returning to, or advancing to, paradise have been
various. An important expression of a way, first, can be found in
Horace, in Epode 16 (as translated by Arthur S. Way):
Scourges of civil dissension now lash us, the new generation,
And Rome by her own strength is falling ruin-banned,
For whose overthrowing prevailed not her neighbors, the
Marsian nation...
Rome her unnatural sons blood-tainted to ruin are bringing:
Wild beasts again for lairs shall choose the soil of Rome:
Aliens triumphant shall trample her ashes; with hoof-strokes
ringing
The horsemen of our foes shall spurn the ancient home...
Let this be our counsel of counsels: — as when, after dread
oath taken,
The people of Phocaea left their Asian home,
Fled from their lands, from the hearths of their fathers, their
temples, forsaken
For boars to dwell therein, for ravening wolves to roam:
Let us go, whither fortune may guide, whither over the surges
the finger
Of wild South-west or West wind beckons us away.
Thus are ye minded? Hath any aught better to counsel? Why
linger
To haste aboard the ship in this the accepted day?...
Us Ocean awaiteth, the girdler of earth: let us seek, on-sailing,
81
The fields of Paradise, the Islands of the Blest,
Where yearly the soil without tillage the harvest unfailing,
Where blossoms aye the vine by pruner’s knife undressed...
There to the pails unbidden the milch-goats come in the
gloaming:
For love the heifer comes full-uddered to the byre.
They fear not at even the growl of the bear round the
sheepfold roaming;
Nor the earth with viper-nests swells up in hillocks dire…
For still the King of Heaven there tempers sun and rain...
The way to ‘scape wherefrom my prophet-lips have told.1
The occasion for this desire to flee was either the civil war (31 B.C.)
or the threat of a Parthian attack (40-30 B.C.). Horace spoke as a
would-be prophet. His message had a double summons and
content, apart from his despair over Rome. First, he assumed that,
somewhere, an unfallen, untainted world remained, a world not
contaminated by man. There animals lived in peace, and the bear
and the lamb were in peace. Cows and goats there came unbidden
to the pail to give their milk. It was described as “the fields of
Paradise, the Islands of the Blest,” but still available to man by ship.
Second, Horace assumed that man could make a new beginning by
escaping to this new world, to Paradise. Salvation for Horace was thus
not a new man but a new beginning for man. In this Paradise, where vines
need no pruning nor soil tillage to yield a full harvest, man himself
will need nothing to prosper and to be free. Mazzolani comments
on this hope,
Among the cultivated classes, the same yearning for peace and
justice coincide with the certainty, derived from the
Neo-Pythagorean and Stoic creeds, that a return to a state of
pastoral innocence would follow the end of the Cycle of
Ages.2
In this cyclical view of history, the world has its springtime and
decay, and all this irrespective of any absolute moral law. A
springtime realm may survive here and there, but it, too, like all
1. George F. Whicher, editor, Selected Poems of Horace (New York: Van Nostrand,
1947), 25-27.
2.
Lidia Storoni Mazzolani, The Idea of the City in Roman Thought, From Walled City
to Spiritual Commonwealth (Bloomington, Indiana: Indiana University Press,
1970), 154.
Paradise and Salvation 83
things else, is subject to the same cycle, which forever begins and
ends. This belief in the continuing existence somewhere of a land
where innocence prevailed and where man could make a new
beginning persisted among humanists through the centuries. It was
an important aspect of the attitude of many towards the discovery
of the Americas in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. America
was the surviving Garden of Eden, the natural Paradise of
humanist dreams, and the Indians were seen as the unfallen and
innocent children of nature. This view of the Indians still survives
among followers of “the new left” and among some
anthropologists.
In such a perspective as manifested by Horace and his modern
counterparts, salvation is escape from an evil environment to a good one. In
the good environment, man will develop his physical and mental
abilities in all directions. With a “polytechnical education,” man
will be able to perform every kind of task, scientific, educational,
agricultural, or otherwise, with equal ease.3 This is the Marxist
dream of Paradise.
The belief is very simply that, if the old environment be cast off,
the new will blossom and flourish. Thus, it is held that, if all the old
restrictions of Biblical sexual morality are abandoned, a world of
super-sex will suddenly begin to flourish. Magazines like Playboy are
dedicated to bringing in that new world of super-sex, wherein man
is to find salvation by being delivered from the evil environment of
God’s law.
These popular ideas are directly the reverse of the Biblical
doctrine that a new beginning is only possible where there is a new man. As
long as the fallen man remains, the old results remain, with sin and
death governing man’s history. It is the new man who creates a new
environment, so that there can be no Paradise without a new man.
That new world, however, requires not only a new man but
God’s law. The word paradise is instructive at this point. It comes
from the Old Persian pairidaeza, akin to the Greek peri, around, and
teichos, a wall.4 Some have held it to be from the Armenian pardez,
3.
Dr. F. N. Lee, Communist Eschatology, A Christian-Philosophical Analysis of the
Post-Capitalist Views of Marx, Engels and Lenin, vol. II (Bloemfontein, South Af-
rica: 1972), 441ff.
garden. “Among the Persians the term meant a royal park, the
enclosed pleasure-ground of king or of nobles, richly wooded, well
watered, and amply stocked with game.”5 The word thus tells us
something about Paradise, and the Biblical usage confirms the
original meaning of the word. First, Paradise is a restricted place,
designed only for the aristocracy of grace, those whom the King of
Kings calls in His sovereign grace to be His people. In the Garden
of Eden, we have a restricted place, and a quick ban on man’s
entrance or return to it after his fall. In the vision of Revelation 21
and 22, the new Paradise of God is a walled garden-city and all
ungodly men are strictly barred from it. It contains all things
desirable within its walls, and its choicest gift is life itself, eternal
life, untainted by sin and unclouded by death. Thus, Paradise is not
only restricted to an aristocracy of grace, but also the place where
all that is desirable to the saints is to be found.
Second, in Revelation 21 and 22, Paradise is clearly a walled area.
Entrance is impossible to the reprobate. Faith and obedience, grace
and the law, are essential to the life of the elect.
14. Blessed are they that do his commandments, that they may
have right to the tree of life, and may enter in through the gates
into the city.
15. For without are dogs, and sorcerers, and whoremongers,
and murderers, and idolaters, and whosoever loveth and
maketh a lie (Rev. 22:14-15).
As Terry noted, “all that was lost in Eden shall be restored to
heavenly places in Christ, and man, redeemed and filled with the
Spirit, shall again have power over the tree of life, which is in the
midst of the paradise of God.”6 Scott’s comment, too, was very
good:
Those who “do the commandments of God,” as delivered to
sinners in the gospel, by repentance, faith in Christ, attendance
on the means of grace, and renewed unreserved obedience
4.
W. E. Vine, An Expository Dictionary of New Testament Words, vol. III (New
York: Revell, 1966), 158.
5. S. D. F. Salmond, “Paradise,” in James Hastings, editor, A Dictionary of the Bi-
ble, vol. III (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1919), 669.
6. Milton S. Terry, Biblical Hermeneutics, Revised edition (New York: Eaton &
Mains, 1890), 273.
from evangelical motives, are “blessed”; and they have “a
right,” or privilege, derived from grace, to “the Tree of life,” or
all the blessings of salvation by Christ, and admission into
heaven; that they may there have fellowship with God and his
holy angels, for ever and ever. But without the city, even “in
the lake of fire,” (for there is no middle place, or condition, so
much as intimated,) “are dogs,” selfish, greedy, fierce, and
sensual persons, or apostates, with others of a like hateful
character....7
The fence or wall around Paradise is the law-word of God. It is
that wall of law which establishes, demarcates, and creates Paradise.
Without the law, there can be no Paradise.
Paradise has reference both to the original Garden of Eden and
to the reconstructed world of redeemed man on the one hand, and
to heaven on the other (Luke 23:43). In either case, it is the wall
which establishes it. The wall is “great and high” (Rev. 21:12). The
original Paradise was governed by God’s law, and man’s violation
thereof led to his expulsion. The law is basic to the historical and
heavenly Paradise, in that it is the realm of God’s law-people, His
covenant race. A godly law-order provides safety because it works
to punish lawlessness and to protect and advance the law-abiding.
The prophet Ezekiel spoke of Eden as “the garden of God”
(Ezek. 28:13), so that we must recognize that Paradise is not only
man’s destined home, but it is also the dwelling-place of God.
Salvation is thus in part restoration into communion with God in
His own place.
The descriptions of Paradise, the New Jerusalem, the new
creation, the reconstructed, restored earth, are various. The figures
at times are set in contradiction to one another to convey in full
force a normally paradoxical meaning. Paradise, Revelation makes
clear, is walled, but Isaiah 60:10-14 gives us a remarkable vision of
its walls:
10. And the sons of strangers shall build up thy walls, and their
kings shall minister unto thee: for in my wrath I smote thee,
but in my favour have I had mercy on thee.
7. Thomas Scott, The Holy Bible, with Explanatory Notes, vol. VI (Boston: Samuel
T. Armstrong, 1830), 789.
11. Therefore thy gates shall be open continually: they shall
not be shut day nor night; that men may bring unto thee the
forces of the Gentiles, and that their kings may be brought.
12. For the nation and kingdom that will not serve thee shall
perish; yea, those nations shall be utterly wasted.
13. The glory of Lebanon shall come unto thee, the fir tree, the
pine tree, and the box together, to beautify the place of my
sanctuary; and I will make the place of my feet glorious.
14. The sons also of them that afflicted thee shall come
bending unto thee; and all they that despised thee shall bow
themselves down at the soles of thy feet; and they shall call
thee, The city of the LORD, The Zion of the Holy One of
Israel.
The chastening hand of God has as its goal the preparation of His
covenant people for world rule. Their very enemies shall build-up
their walls: all the wealth of the reprobate nations, and all their
accomplishments, will be used by the people of God to establish
God’s law-order. Even now, the walls of Paradise are being built by
the ungodly. Whatever worthwhile gains they make we must view
as our ultimate possession. All nations must serve God or perish:
“yea, those nations shall be utterly wasted.” All danger shall be
removed, and the earth shall flourish with beauty. All men and
nations will recognize the priority and authority of the Kingdom of
God. “None are excluded from her pale but those who exclude
themselves and thereby perish.”8 Revelation 21:24-27 echoes this
passage:
24. And the nations of them which are saved shall walk in the
light of it: and the kings of the earth do bring their glory and
honour into it.
25. And the gates of it shall not be shut at all by day: for there
shall be no night there.
26. And they shall bring the glory and honour of the nations
into it.
27. And there shall in no wise enter into it any thing that
defileth, neither whatsoever worketh abomination, or maketh
a lie: but they which are written in the Lamb’s book of life.
8. JosephAddison Alexander, Commentary on the Prophecies of Isaiah (Grand Rap-

ids, Michigan: Zondervan, 1953), 379.
This is both a vision of the future of the earth in history and
beyond the end of history. God’s Kingdom is glorious in time and
in eternity. It is a glorious and wealthy realm, and its wealth is
gained by fighting God’s battles. Victory brings the wealth of the
world into the hands of God’s people:
And Judah shall fight at Jerusalem: and the wealth of all the
heathen round about shall be gathered together, gold, and
silver, and apparel, in great abundance (Zech. 14:14).
The riches and the possessions of the world shall become the
inheritance of the people of God. Their enemies shall be destroyed,
and their “sons,” according to Isaiah 60:14, “shall come bending
unto thee.” E. H. Plumptre saw in these words “an expression of
the law of inherited retribution, which entered so largely into the
Hebrew’s thought of the moral government of the world.”9 All
things are governed by the providence of God, who destroys one
and sets up another. In these days when statist schools are
destroying themselves, when socialized medicine is destroying an
honored profession and legalized abortion is turning many doctors
into murderers, when cynicism concerning church and state and
much else is destroying these institutions, we must recognize the
hand of God in these things. He is throwing down a reprobate
order and preparing the way for His own Kingdom and authority.
The full accomplishment of this prophecy of Isaiah will occur with
the Second Coming, but, before that, there shall be a large measure
of fulfilment.
Calvin wrote of Isaiah 60:11, “And thy gates shall be open
continually,” that
The ordinary exposition of this verse is incorrect. The
Prophet is generally supposed to mean that the Church will be
perfectly safe under the Lord’s protection and guardianship;
for “open gates” indicate that danger is far off. But I think that
the Prophet himself explains it; namely, that the gates shall be
open, that riches may be brought into the city from every
quarter. And as burdens are usually carried in the daytime,
“The day,” he says, “will not be enough, so vast shall be the
9. E. H. Plumptre, “Isaiah,” in C. J. Ellicott, editor, Commentary on the Whole Bible,
crowd of those who bring into it precious treasures, and
therefore the carrying will be so constant that it will be
necessary to keep the gates open night and day.”10
Calvin’s point is a good one, although he limits the meaning by
restricting the reference to the Church rather than to the Kingdom
of God. Moreover, while he is clearly correct in saying that the
open gates refer to the unending stream of wealth poured into the
Kingdom, the factor of safety is also implied. This is clearly stated
in Zechariah 2:1-5, where Jerusalem, or the Kingdom of God, is
spoken of as an unwalled city, or, rather, “inhabited as towns
without walls for the multitude of men and cattle therein: For I,
saith the LORD, will be unto her a wall of fire round about, and
will be the glory in the midst of her.”
How, asks the skeptic, can such a godly order be achieved when
so much of the world seems to be all the more ungodly every day?
One third of the world is in Communist hands, and the rest is in
varying degrees socialistic and ungodly. Efforts to counteract this
seem to be destined to fail, and, indeed, every major effort has led
to a costly failure.
The failures are not surprising and are indeed inescapable. The
efforts have been political, and their essential nature has been like
Horace’s hope. For these political efforts, salvation is not a new
man, but a new beginning for man, not a change in man but a
change in his politics. Conservatism has thus been guilty of the
same antichristian faith as its enemies, an environmentalist faith.
Had the conservatives succeeded in gaining political power at any
time after World War II, they could not have altered the moral and
religious collapse which is the prime cause of all the evils they rail
against. They themselves would then be the lords of a collapsing
world. The moral confusion would be all the worse, in that the
decline would take place under the auspices of a supposed
restoration.
The “triumph” of the left has been a brutal but hollow one.
Socialism has demonstrated its ability to destroy, but not to create.
10. John Calvin, Commentary on the Book of the Prophet Isaiah, vol. IV (Grand Rap-
ids, Michigan: Eerdmans, 1956), 288.
Being itself immoral, it creates an immoral people, or, rather, it is
first created by an immoral people who are then confirmed and
increased in their immorality by the socialist state.
An amusing example of this is reported from Communist East
Germany:
Communist East Germany is facing this growing problem:
Thousands of tenants in state-owned housing are skipping
their rent payments. News media hammer at “immoral” and
“unsocialistic” behavior of those who ignore the Government
landlord, spend rent money on vacations and consumer
goods.
Back-rent bill, according to official estimates, totals 3 million
dollars. Since state subsidies hold rents to a trivial $10 or $20
a month, the problem thus covers many thousands of tenants.
Solution? Evictions won’t do. Anyone moved from an
apartment by the East German Government is legally entitled
to another — same size and quality.
Financial penalties for rent defaults? None so far. That could
change, some critics maintain. Meanwhile, the staff of one
district housing office in East Berlin spends 45 percent of its
time dunning deadbeats. Rent dodgers also upset economic
planners by diverting housing funds to other purchases.11
This is simply one minor example of the kinds of problems which
plague socialist states. The problems the U.S. faces in dealing with
welfare cases are small by comparison to the problems the Marxist
nations face in dealing with workers, on whom production
depends. A socialist state has as its basic premise theft, stealing from
some to give to others. It comes into existence because theft as a
principle governs the people, and they remake the state in their
own image. (East Germany was previously under a National
Socialist regime which the people voted into power; it now has by
conquest an international socialist regime.) A state based on theft
will only aggravate theft in the life of the people. Theft is a way of
life in every socialist state, whether Chinese, Russian, English,
French, American, or anything else. Where theft is a way of life, as
11. “Business Around the World,” U.S. News & World Report, vol. LXXII, no.
15, 10 April 1972, 70.
it is with us today, no politics of nostalgia can restore men to a good
society. The hard realities of politics rest on the moral order of the
people. Without that moral order, every politics becomes a politics
of disintegration.
The road to recovery lies through Jesus Christ and His sovereign
law-word. A sick and decaying age is no contest for the power of
God unto salvation as revealed through His covenant people. The
prophecies of Scripture concerning the nature and glory of God’s
reign are not exaggerations, nor are they hopeless dreams. They
describe an aspect of the salvation of our God. The earth, made
sick by man’s fall, is to be healed by man’s restoration:
If my people, which are called by my name, shall humble
themselves, and pray, and seek my face, and turn from their
wicked ways; then will I hear from heaven, and will forgive
their sin, and will heal their land (2 Chron. 7:14).
Meanwhile, those who, after Horace, want a new environment for
man to make a new beginning, therein are looking to space.
Somewhere, they hope, there is a new planet to be colonized, an
untouched paradise where man can make a new beginning
unpolluted by the ideas of God, sin, good, and evil. There scientific
man will become the new Adam, according to this dream, in a
world without a serpent. But man remains, and with him remains
the handiwork and testimony of God. As a result, a new version of
this old dream is emerging, a call for a new and artificial man, the
handiwork of man, a machine, and therefore without a conscience
or an inner witness to God. To escape from God, the new
humanists call for the death of man!
X
Sacrifice
The English word sacrifice comes from the Latin sacrificium, sacere,
holy, and facere, to make, so that the English word in its original
Latin form meant to make holy. The Hebrew words used in the Old
Testament have a much less noble meaning. They mean a
slaughtered animal; one word, chag, means a festival (Ex. 23:18; Ps.
118:27; Isa. 29:1), another (minchah) means an offering or present
(1 Kings 18:29, 36; Ezra 9:4-5; Ps. 141:2), another a fire offering
(ishsheh) (Lev. 10:13; Num. 15:13; 28:2, 6, 8, 13, 19, 24; 29:13, 36;
Josh. 13:14), and still another (todah) a thank offering (Jer. 17:26;
33:11). Most occurrences of the word have reference to a killing or
slaughter. The New Testament words (thusia, thuo) are also
concerned with a killing and a victim. The sacrifice is a victim, and
to sacrifice is to kill. The Biblical words thus have an inescapable
bluntness as well as an ugliness. The Latin word gives us an exalted
idea; the Biblical words smack of blood and an innocent victim.
Biblical sacrifice is related to a harsh reality, sin, the consequence
of which is death.
This makes sacrifice an unpleasant fact and an unhappy reminder
to many of certain consequences of history and of judgment and
its consequences. As a result, hostility to sacrifice arose even in
ancient times. Thus, Buddha was strongly opposed to all sacrifice.
He saw it as a futile effort, as well as cruelty to the animals involved;
moreover, it was a religious exercise which he felt lacked
spirituality. Buddhists thus worked very early to abolish all
sacrifice. King Asoka ruled that “No animal may be slaughtered for
sacrifice.” The idea that men could gain innocence by killing was
ridiculed by the Buddhists.1 Innocence or holiness was to be
gained, for the Buddhist, by man’s work, by forsaking the material
world and renouncing life and the world as illusions. The holy man
worked to extirpate all passion and illusion and sought to escape
1. C. A. F. Rhys Davids, “Sacrifice (Buddhist),” in James Hastings, editor, En-
cyclopaedia of Religion and Ethics, vol. XI, 7f.
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from life into nirvana. The “sacrifice” of the Buddhist was thus a
surrender of a part of life in order to gain an escape from karma,
the burden and penalty of sin and guilt.
Not surprisingly, the Buddhist perspective is again popular in the
twentieth century, not only because of its radical relativism and its
denial of meaning to any supernatural order, but also because of its
concept of sacrifice as surrender. Salvation for the twentieth
century humanist involves the sacrifice or surrender of certain
aspects of our life for the common good. By means of confiscatory
taxation, men are deprived of their wealth in order to save those
segments of society in need of salvation. The net result of all such
redistribution is always the impoverishment of all society and the
destruction of productivity. It is an illusion of the humanistic mind
that production is a result of sacrifice and work, whereas it is in fact
a product of capitalization and work. Sacrifice in the sense of giving
up or surrendering something is neither Biblical nor efficacious
unto salvation. The common idea of sacrifice is now, however,
precisely that: it is giving up something, and it is believed that this
act of giving up somehow ennobles the one who does it, as well as
adding to the general good.
As a result, the foolish clergy try to prompt sacrifice in this sense
among the laity. People are asked, “What have you given up in
Lent?”, “How much have you sacrificed for the Lord?”, and so on,
all of which smacks more of blasphemy than it does of sound
doctrine. God requires tithes of us, and He expects gifts above and
beyond that. God, who made us and redeemed us, asks us to keep
His law-word. To act as though something we do is a
magnanimous surrender of something on our part to God is
Phariseeism. Our Lord taught the contrary: “So likewise ye, when
ye shall have done all those things which are commanded you, say,
We are unprofitable servants: we have done that which was our
duty to do” (Luke 17:10).
When the Bible talks about sacrifice, it talks about a killing, an
execution, and the cause of that execution is sin. Thus, the sentence
on all sin is death (Gen. 2:17). Death is the common lot of all of us
as sons of Adam. Since all men born of Adam are already destined
to die, the death of none of them can be accounted a sacrifice in
Sacrifice 93
the Biblical sense. The death of men is a consequence of the Fall,
and a just consequence. Biblical sacrifice has reference to the killing
of an unblemished animal, a clean animal, “a male without
blemish” (Lev. 1:3, 10).
As Ginsburg noted, “To offer a defective sacrifice was an insult
and a deception.”2 Defective sacrifices are described as an offense
to God and grounds for a curse in the burden of the prophet
Malachi:
13. Ye said also, Behold, what a weariness is it! and ye have
snuffed at it, saith the LORD of hosts; and ye brought that
which was torn, and the lame, and the sick; thus ye brought an
offering: should I accept this of your hand? saith the LORD.
14. But cursed be the deceiver, which hath in his flock a male,
and voweth, and sacrificeth unto the Lord a corrupt thing: for
I am a great King, saith the LORD of hosts, and my name is
dreadful among the heathen (Mal. 1:13-14).
This sacrifice the believer had to bring “of his own voluntary
will,” but strictly in terms of God’s prescription and way (Lev. 1:3).
“And he shall put his hand upon the head of the burnt offering; and
it shall be accepted for him to make atonement for him” (Lev. 1:4).
The believer thus identified himself with the sacrificial animal,
which was then killed. According to Leviticus 17:11,
For the life of the flesh is in the blood: and I have given it to
you upon the altar to make an atonement for your souls: for it
is the blood that maketh an atonement for the soul.
“The blood is the life” (Deut. 12:23). The comment of Micklem
has an element of truth, although the reference to death is also
present in sacrifice, very clearly:
When it is said that we are saved “by the blood of Christ,” this
does not mean by his death so much as by his life. In the old
sacrifices the slaying of the victim was only incidental to the
ritual of the blood which was subsequently applied to the altar
and sometimes to the worshiper: “For the blood is the life”
(Deut. 12:23). In the case of the victim it is the life that has
passed through death. The “blood of Christ” is the life that
2.C. D. Ginsburg, “Leviticus,” in C. J. Ellicott, editor, Commentary on the Whole
Bible, vol. I (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Zondervan, n.d.), 343.
has passed through death. We are said to be saved, then, by the
life of the Crucified, by the life of him who died for us.3
Micklem is right to this extent, that in Scripture “blood and life are
used interchangeably.”4 Moreover,
As the blood of the victim is identical with its life, and
represents the soul of the animal, hence God has appointed it
as a substitute for the sinner’s life. Thus the life of the sacrifice
atones for the life of the offerer. Hence the remark of the
Apostle, “without shedding of blood there is no remission”
(Heb. ix. 22).5
Reference was made earlier to the believer’s identification with
the sacrificial animal. This was not an identity of being, of course.
Moreover, the difference between the believer and the sacrifice was
a very great one. The man who came to the door of the tabernacle,
to God’s governmental seat, came as a sinner needing God’s
salvation. The sacrificial animal, in contrast, was without blemish,
signifying and symbolizing Jesus Christ, the sinless one. Neither
man nor anything which to any accurate degree represented man’s
nature could provide atonement. It required a sinless substitute.
Jesus Christ, as this substitute, was both sinless, having kept the
law perfectly, and also our representative. He assumed death for us
and destroyed the power of sin and death. In His atoning death,
Jesus Christ died, was killed, in atonement for our sins. The
sacrifice of Christ was His death for our redemption.
In His sacrifice, Christ manifested His office as prophet. St. Paul
tells us that Christ, “before Pontius Pilate witnessed a good
confession” (1 Tim. 6:13). As prophet, Christ witnessed to His
royal power before Pilate, declaring that He was indeed King, but
that His Kingdom was not derived from this world but was of
divine origin and power (John 18:36-37). At every step, Christ
spoke and acted as the great Prophet, revealing the will of God for
our salvation. He manifested the true knowledge of salvation in His
3. Nathaniel
Micklem, “Leviticus,” in The Interpreter’s Bible, vol. II (New York:
Abingdon Press, 1951), 13.
4. Ginsburg, op. cit., 414.
5. Ibid.
Sacrifice 95
sacrifice, whereby He set forth the enormity of sin, the necessity of
justice, and the magnificence of God’s saving grace.
Moreover, in His sacrifice, Jesus Christ revealed Himself as
King. “His dying on the cross was a being exalted above the earth
and a victory over His enemies (John 3:14; 8:28; 12:32 and 34), for
it was the most perfect obedience to the commandment of the
Father (John 14:31).”6 As King, Christ subdues us to Himself, rules
and defends us, and restrains and conquers all His enemies as the
one who has conquered sin and death and reestablished in His
person the new humanity of the second or last Adam. His sacrifice
marks the beginning of the restoration of all things: it is paradise
regained, the first step in the new creation of God, because His
sacrifice was a killing of the principle of sin in His people. He who
was nailed to the cross nailed our death sentence to that cross, and
also our death in sin and the uncircumcision of our fallen human
nature; He made us alive, quickened us “together with him, having
forgiven... all trespasses” (Col. 2:13-14). Christ’s sacrifice was thus
an act of Kingship whereby He declared Himself to be the King of
the new creation and alone able to deliver, defend, and prosper His
people. As King, He attacked our great enemies, sin and death, and
overcame them.
It is, however, supremely as our great high priest that Christ
manifested Himself on the cross. As priest, He offered the
sacrifice, Himself, “of his own voluntary will” (Lev. 1:3), as a
sacrifice freely given to the Father in atonement for our sins.
Atonement requires sacrifice, death, and shedding of blood. Life
was created by God to serve His sovereign purpose, and sinful life
must be destroyed as surely as cancer must be removed from the
body. It was required that the animal sacrifice be brought to the
house of God, its blood poured out in death and then sprinkled
about the altar by the priest (Ex. 29:15ff.). The blood was also
placed on the persons of the priests, according to Exodus 29:19-21:
19. And thou shalt take the other ram; and Aaron and his sons
shall put their hands upon the head of the ram.
6. Herman Bavinck, Our Reasonable Faith (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Eerdmans,

1956), 349.
20. Then shalt thou kill the ram, and take of his blood, and put
it upon the tip of the right ear of Aaron, and upon the tip of
the right ear of his sons, and upon the thumb of their right
hand, and upon the great toe of their right foot, and sprinkle
the blood upon the altar round about.
21. And thou shalt take of the blood that is upon the altar, and
of the anointing oil, and sprinkle it upon Aaron, and upon his
garments, and upon his sons, and upon the garments of his
sons with him: and he shall be hallowed, and his garments, and
his sons, and his sons’ garments with him.
The offerer had to identify himself with the victim; even so, Christ
as our high priest identified Himself with us, and as Himself the
sinless substitute for our offenses, accepted death for us. Then, as
George Rawlinson noted,
The blood was regarded as the life (Gen. ix. 4). The life
consecrated to God and accepted by Him was given back by
Him to His ministers, that it might consecrate them wholly to
His service, and so fit them for it. Placed upon the tip of the
right ear, it reminded them that their ears were to be ever open
and attentive to the whispers of the Divine voice; placed on
the thumb of the right hand, it taught them that they should
take in hand nothing but what was sanctified; placed upon the
great toe of the right foot, it was a warning that they were to
walk thenceforth in the paths of holiness.7
This is very true, and yet it constitutes a limited and therefore false
witness. It speaks of a negative sanctification, as so much of the
Church’s teaching has done. Rather, a most positive sanctification is
indicated by this deliverance from death and ordination into life by
the blood of the sacrifice. Their hands, ears, feet, garments, and
persons are now positively under the power of the new life. The
blood had been first placed upon the horns of the altar (Ex. 29:12),
the symbols of God’s power. Fugitives clung to the horns of the
altar as the symbols of God’s virtue and strength (1 Kings 1:50;
2:28). The strength of God is now associated with the sacrificial
blood. Those under the blood are out from under the curse and are
now the people of God’s power, glory, and Kingdom. They are
now the people of the blood and the law. The promise made to redeemed
7. George Rawlinson, “Exodus,” in Ellicott, op. cit., 299.
Sacrifice 97
Israel is the promise magnified by the blood of Christ to His
covenant race, the new humanity:
24. Every place whereon the soles of your feet shall tread shall
be yours: from the wilderness of Lebanon, from the river, the
river Euphrates, even unto the uttermost sea shall your coast
be.
25. There shall no man be able to stand before you: for the
LORD your God shall lay the fear of you and the dread of you
upon all the land that ye shall tread upon, as he hath said unto
you (Deut. 11:24-25).
This is no three-monkey doctrine of hear no evil, speak no evil, see
no evil, no Hindu or Buddhist doctrine of sanctification, but rather
a summons to possess the earth in the name and power of God.
Waller pointed out that “upon all the land” may be read “upon all
the earth that ye shall tread upon.”8 This promise is repeated in
Joshua 1:3-5.
But this promise is not automatic in its fulfilment. It will not do
to say that God has not given us these things. There is a
requirement, above and beyond the basic requirement of the blood
and the law: “Thus it appears that what Israel would conquer, the
sole of his feet must tread.”9 The kingdoms of this world, its arts,
sciences, commerce, wealth, and all things, must be occupied in the
name of the King and in His power. In this respect, Micklem is
right: the blood signifies life. The blood is our release from the
power of sin and death into true knowledge, righteousness,
holiness, and dominion. Not only must the head of Satan be
crushed under our feet (Rom. 16:20), but all things must also be
placed under our feet, and us at Christ’s feet. God declares, “I have
sworn by myself, the word is gone out of my mouth in
righteousness, and shall not return, That unto me every knee shall
bow, every tongue shall swear” (Isa. 45:23). Isaiah 60:14 declares
that “The sons also of them that afflicted thee shall come bending
unto thee; and all they that despised thee shall bow themselves
down at the soles of thy feet; and they shall call thee, The city of
8. C.
H. Waller, “Deuteronomy,” in Ellicott, Commentary on the Whole Bible, vol.
II, 38.
9. C. H. Waller, “Joshua,” in ibid., 107.
the LORD, The Zion of the Holy One of Israel.” Because these
things were truly believed by both Israel and then the Christians,
Rome greatly feared the spread of Biblical faith. It was the word of
power and of conquest.
Every area of life must be occupied in the name of the King. To
assume that a “calling” is only to the ministry of the word is
fallacious. Sacrifice not only sanctified or set apart to a holy use
Aaron and his sons, the priests, and all the utensils of the service,
but also all the congregation of Israel (Ex. 29:43-46). They were
now doing the Lord’s work in all their callings.
Sacrifice or death thus opened the door to life, not a narrow or
circumscribed life, not merely an ecclesiastical vocation, but the
whole of life as the full and proper realm for the people of God.
Sacrifice in the Biblical sense is not a giving up of something or a
surrender of an aspect of our lives, but it is the gift of God unto
salvation: it is the fullness of life.
XI
Perfection and Salvation
Edna St. Vincent Millay began her poem “Moriturus” with these
telling words,
If I could have
Two things in one:
The peace of the grave,
And the light of the sun;
and then added,
If I might be
Insensate matter
With sensate me
Sitting within,
Harking and prying,
I might begin
To dicker with dying.
Here, in a few words, we have an important aspect of humanism,
the attempt to get the best of all possible worlds without the
responsibilities of any. The desire is to be dead to all that might hurt
us, but alive to all that we can enjoy; to have all the fullness of life
and meaning which God has ordained, but without God; to have
both “the peace of the grave, and the light of the sun.” The
humanist wants life to be an endless smorgasbord table, on which
all the gods of humanism’s past and present, as well as the God of
Scripture, serve up their finest offerings for man to pick and
choose at, world without end, forever. In this humanistic sense,
perfection is the sum total of everything man can desire, together
with the total absence of all responsibility, accountability, and all
problems. Humanistic man wants to be able to act as pragmatically,
amorally, and irresponsibly as possible, and yet see his idealistic
professions realized because he so demands it. A world, however,
in which one wants to enjoy both “the peace of the grave, and the
99
light of the sun” is a world of insanity and is doomed to the slave’s
cell and the grave.
There is another aspect of humanistic perfectionism which requires
notice, and that is the expectation of flawless, sinless behavior in
other people. This expectation goes hand in hand with a bitter
cynicism about man. Humanistic idealism is inseparable from a
cynicism about man and a willingness on the basis of this cynicism
to take advantage of man. “Why shouldn’t I cheat on my wife?,” a
man once observed, adding, “Once you find out what women are
like, you either cheat on them or become their patsy.” He went on
to say that, if he could find the perfect woman, “believe me, I
wouldn’t act this way.”
A major problem in modern marriage is this expectation of
perfection. People in love are usually oblivious to the faults of the
loved one. Marriage is a quick indoctrination course in the sins,
faults, and imperfections of the person we have married. What
does not come as quickly to us as it does to others is a knowledge
of our own sins and failings. We find our own sins and frailties
tolerable in a way that we do not find those of others.
Humanistic perfectionism leads, as we have noted, to an
unrealistic demand for “the peace of the grave, and the light of the
sun.” Practically, it means the politics of disintegration as the
means to regeneration. Thus, the most cynical politics in American
history has prevailed from Woodrow Wilson on. It has marked the
entrance of the United States into the world of power politics and
imperialism. At the same time, this politics has had as its earnest
facade the thesis of American innocence. Wilson’s goal was to
“make the world safe for democracy.” F. D. Roosevelt wanted the
worldwide reign of the “four freedoms.” The appeal of J. F.
Kennedy was his ability to combine this facade of innocence and
its dream of perfection with a radically immoral and pragmatic
politics. His successors have not been able to maintain the same air
of idealism and innocence and have suffered for it, although in
practice they have been more effective politicians. As Gutman
noted,
Perfection and Salvation 101
The reason no one really likes Nixon in a heartfelt way is that
most of us like to feel innocent even though obviously we
aren’t, and when you look at him you know he’s not innocent.
None of the others were innocent either, not Lyndon, J.F.K.,
nor Ike nor Truman (Truman was a loyal soldier in one of the
most corrupt machines ever to operate in American politics),
nor even Bobby with that wild shock of hair — but they all,
except maybe Lyndon, were able to maintain the dream that
America was innocent. With Nixon that dream is hard to
maintain.1
This dream is common to all nations, if not, in many cases, with
respect to their politicians, at least with respect to their countries.
It is not new; it was common to Roman humanism as well as to its
modern form. This is more than loyalty to one’s own country.
Decatur held to this older form of loyalty in declaring, “My
country, right or wrong, but my country.” This older loyalty
admitted to serious sins and faults in one’s country but required
loyalty all the same; now, the belief in innocence is basic to this
loyalty. This is common on the national and on the personal level.
Thus, a woman was deeply offended and hurt because her
husband, whom she admitted was very much in love with her, still
was openly aware of her faults; her feeling was that love should
blind him to such things, or, somehow, erase them.
Why has this amazing concept of perfection, the dream of
realizing “the peace of the grave, and the light of the sun,” of
playing the “game” of power politics and seeing hell instead of
paradise result, of following the fantasies of sexual promiscuity as
a means to the bliss of godly marital union, of expecting perfection
while practicing sin, come to be a way of life?
The answer lies in the nature of humanism. Because its god is
man, humanism must expect perfection from man. But it is the
nature of all false gods to expect of others what they themselves are
not. If I am my own god, then I shall regard myself as the standard;
I shall expect all other people to meet my standards without feeling
that I must myself conform to them. As a humanistic man, I will
require the law of others, but I will submit to no man’s law. The
1. Walter K. Gutman, “Money,” Penthouse, vol. III, no. 9, May 1972, 32.
result is a breakdown of human relations wherever humanism
prevails. All men have impossible expectations and demands of all
other men, and all refuse to accept their own shortcomings, sins,
and frailties. We then judge all people, not in terms of God’s law,
but in terms of our pretended law. We do not ask, are they obedient
to God’s law, and do they, within the limitations of their nature and
abilities, strive faithfully to be a servant of God? Instead, we ask,
are they tactful, respectful of us, good in terms of our social
standards, while we indulge ourselves in those frailties we ourselves
possess. For us to be tactless is to be plain-spoken and honest; in
others, it is bad manners. For us to keep house carelessly is to put
first things first and to concentrate on our children or our work,
but in others this means sloppiness. The Bible does not ask us to
be blind to the faults of others, but to be forbearing and kind. In
humanism, which infects us all, we are neither forbearing nor
patient with the faults of others, but only with our own. Thus,
when my wife once remarked that she loved me dearly, and was
ready to put up with my faults, I responded that I was ready to meet
her halfway on that: I was ready to live with my faults also, a
statement made in jest but with more than a little truth to it.
Humanism leads us to demand perfection in other people
without demanding it of ourselves, because we see ourselves as our
own ultimate, our standard and our god. Thus, an English girl
justified her cynicism concerning men as a consequence of “an
early affair,” declaring, “He promised me everything, and like a fool
I believed it. I came down so hard I could never forget it. I won’t
ever quite trust a man in the same way again.”2 This girl did not
raise the question about her own nature; in entering a non-marital
relationship, she was no better than the man in question, and, had
she chosen to break it rather than he, in preference for something
“better,” he would have indulged in a like self-pity to rationalize his
sin. The humanist continually sees reality in terms of a myth of the
moral man, himself, as against immoral society, all others.
2. “Super Starr,” in ibid, 78f.

John Greenleaf Whittier, by way of contrast, gives us a vivid if
brief account, in “Snowbound,” of the Calvinistic doctor who
expected others to meet a standard because he himself first met
that standard of godly conduct:
We heard once more the sleigh-bells’ sound;
And, following where the teamsters led,
The wise old Doctor went his round,
Just pausing at our door to say,
In the brief autocratic way
Of one who, prompt at Duty’s call
Was free to urge her claim on all,
That some poor neighbor sick abed
At night our mother’s aid would need.
As against the humanistic ideal of perfection, it is important to
understand the Biblical doctrine. Perfection in Scripture is not
sinlessness, but rather uprightness, sincerity, and maturity of faith
and obedience. In Genesis 17:1, we find Abraham confronted by
God, who declares, “I am the Almighty God; walk before me, and
be thou perfect”; the marginal reading gives “upright, sincere,” for
“perfect.” The “Almighty God” is in Hebrew El Shaddai, meaning
“strong so as to overpower.”3 The meaning of this designation, is,
as Calvin noted, that God thereby declared
that he had sufficient power for Abram’s protection: because
our faith can only stand firmly, while we are certainly
persuaded that the defence of God is alone sufficient for us,
and can sincerely despise everything in the world which is
opposed to our salvation. God, therefore, does not boast of
that power which lies concealed within himself; but of that
which he manifests towards his children; and he does so, in
order that Abram might hence derive materials for confidence.
Thus, in these words, a promise is included.4
Without the sovereign, all-powerful, and all-perfect God, our faith
becomes illusion. Humanistic man cannot play god and require
3. R. Payne Smith, “Genesis,” in C. J. Ellicott, editor, Commentary on the Whole

Bible, vol. I (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Zondervan), n.d.), 70.
4. John Calvin, Commentaries on the First Book of Moses, called Genesis, vol. I (Grand
Rapids, Michigan: Eerdmans, 1948), 443.
others to meet his ideal of perfection without becoming both a fool
and a tyrant. The sovereign creator God can require of us that we
meet a standard which has been written into our total being. In
commenting on the commandment, “walk before me, and be thou
perfect,” Calvin said,
In making the covenant, God stipulates for obedience, on the
part of his servant. Yet He does not in vain prefix the
declaration that he is ‘the Almighty God,’ and is furnished
with power to help his own people: because it was necessary
that Abram should be recalled from all other means of help,
that he might entirely devote himself to God alone. For no one
will ever betake himself to God, but he who keeps created
things in their proper place, and looks up to God alone.
Where, indeed, the power of God has been once
acknowledged, it ought so to transport us with admiration,
and our minds ought so to be filled with reverence for him,
that nothing should hinder us from worshipping him.
Moreover, because the eyes of God look for faith and truth in
the heart, Abram is commanded to aim at integrity. For the
Hebrews call him a man of perfections, who is not of a deceitful
or double mind, but sincerely cultivates rectitude. In short, the
integrity here mentioned is opposed to hypocrisy. And surely,
when we have to deal with God, no place for dissimulation
remains. Now, from these words, we learn for what end God
gathers together for himself a church; namely, that they whom
he has called may be holy. The foundation, indeed, of the
divine calling, is a gratuitous promise; but it follows
immediately after, that they whom he has chosen as a peculiar
people to himself, should devote themselves to the
righteousness of God. For on this condition, he adopts
children as his own that he may, in return, obtain the place and
the honour of a Father. And as he himself cannot lie, so he
rightly demands mutual fidelity from his own children.
Wherefore, let us know, that God manifests himself to the
faithful, in order that they may live as in his sight; and may
make him the arbiter not only of their works, but of their
thoughts. Whence also we infer, that there is no other method
of living piously and justly, than that of depending upon God.5
5. Ibid., 443f.
A God-centered perfectionism is a relationship between the
individual and God in terms of His grace and law; it is growth in
obedience, integrity, and maturity. It is first of all a standard
whereby we see ourselves in terms of God’s law-word, and then a
standard for assessing others. Whittier’s Calvinistic doctor first of
all met “Duty’s call” under difficult circumstances, snowbound
weather, and then felt “free to urge her claim on all” by
commanding help for a sick neighbor. Humanistic perfectionism is
not God-oriented; instead, it is a unilateral demand we make of
other people and then condemn them for failing to meet it.
Humanistic perfectionism leads to a fragmenting society and to
loneliness in a crowded place, whereas Whittier’s Calvinistic doctor
bound man to man in terms of God’s requirements.
Humanistic perfectionism leads to a flight from man and a
horror for people and personal relationships. It has again and again
led to casual, impersonal sexuality on a promiscuous basis as a
substitute for “getting hurt” by other people. Not surprisingly, the
English girl cited previously, who found herself unable to “trust a
man” again because her illicit relationship failed her, is now “a
specialist in Regency inlaid tables.”6 Quite commonly, in a
humanistic age, a love of impersonal, inanimate, and sometimes
mechanical perfection replaces human relationships. Humanists
give a love and passion to fine craftsmanship, rare works of art,
choice wines and foods, and finely tooled machines, which goes
beyond normal appreciation. It represents a humanizing of
impersonal things, and an over-valuation of their perfection,
because man has been written off as an object of love. Humanistic
perfection turns against man, because man fails to meet its hopes.
St. Paul, in contrast, counselled “the elect of God” to clothe
themselves in
12. ...bowels (or heart) of mercies, kindness, humbleness of
mind, meekness, long suffering;
13. Forbearing one another, and forgiving one another, if any
man have a quarrel against any: even as Christ forgave you, so
also do ye.
6. “Super Starr,” Penthouse, May 1972, 20.

14. And above all these things put on charity, which is the
bond of perfectness (Col. 3:12-14).
In the last sentence, “above all” can be better translated, “over all.”
St. Paul here spoke against a humanistic perfectionism common to
his day, Gnosticism. Barry ably commented on this:
The phrase is remarkable, apparently suggested by the claim to
perfection, set up by the Gnostic teachers. They sought such
perfection in knowledge peculiar to the few; St. Paul in the
love which is possible to all. For as he elsewhere urges (I Cor.
viii. 1), “Knowledge puffs up, charity builds up”; knowledge
gains a fancied perfection, charity a real perfection.7
The Gnostic perfection was sought in knowledge, and it was a
ground for despising “the common herd.” Humanism seeks
perfection in a variety of areas because it is in flight from man; the
worship of man leads to the contempt of man.
This humanistic perfectionism leads to both a radical intolerance
and a radical tolerance for man. When a humanist sets up his own
requirements as the standard for mankind, he is doomed to
disappointment, because man was created, not to conform to
man’s purpose and calling, but to God’s sovereign decree. As a
result, the humanist despises man and is intolerant of other people,
because they do not meet his fiat word; men are then regarded by
him as reprobate, worthless, and hopeless. Having now no
expectation of anything from other men, he can tolerate them as
fools and knaves. Thus, while a missionary to the American
Indians some years ago, I found that one federal officer regarded
the Indians with total contempt and intolerance: they were no
better than animals, he insisted, and his language became
pornographic as he described their life and character. At the same
time, he was able to gain a very wide and popular following among
the Indians as a friendly and indulgent official and to associate with
all on a very congenial basis. The reason was that, while he despised
and hated them as men, he could like and indulge them as animals,
and, many of them, as pets. Because they were not for him human
7. Alfred Barry, “Colossians,” in Ellicott, Commentary on the Whole Bible, vol. VI-
II, 114.
beings in the same sense that he was, he could be radically tolerant
of their ways, and he was loved by all. Only when confronted by
the Biblical doctrine of man did his savage hatred and intolerance
come to the fore. (After one encounter with me on the subject, he
avoided me, maintaining that the only way to do his work was on
his basis, not on mine.)
Humanistic tolerance, which asks us to accept all men without
reference to any law of God, and without any Biblical principal of
separation, is grounded in a radical contempt for man. To expect
men to meet the standards of God’s infallible word is to treat them
as creatures made in the image of God, now fallen, but capable by
the grace of God of exercising knowledge, righteousness, holiness,
and dominion under God. To expect men to meet God’s standards
means also that we ourselves seek to meet them, with humility and
meekness, and in our common effort, we view one another with
godly forbearance, and forgiveness, and with the love and charity
which is “the bond of perfectness.”
A pagan perfectionism, however, when imported into
Christianity, cuts the vital nerve of the creation mandate. It leads
men to reject this world in favor of a perfect order, a sinless, static
state. It becomes thus antinomian and denies the validity of God’s
law as the instrument of establishing God’s kingly government
over the earth, or else it postpones the law to a millennial order.
Instead of work, man’s calling under God, it stresses withdrawal
from the world into a quietistic waiting on God. Instead of seeing
time as an opportunity, it views time as something to be waited out
in expectation of eternity. A mature faith is thus replaced with a
perpetual childishness, and an irrelevance to history. But to be
irrelevant to history is to deny salvation.
XII
Causality
A cause is that power or agent which produces any thing or

event. The idea of a cause implies a purpose, goal, or end, so that
it has reference to persons and to God. The concept of causality
has been replaced in relativistic, positivistic, and naturalistic circles
with the probability-concept for precisely this reason, namely, that
it points to an ultimately personal first cause, God. In a world
without God, events are the product of chance, not of purpose;
they therefore are without cause. The framework and ground of
causality is both personal and theistic.
In a universe of chance, causality cannot exist. First, there will be
no universe, a unified order of law, where chance prevails. Second,
where chance prevails, no history is possible. A cause is a sequence
of meaningful, purposive events, and every cause is set in the
context of a universe of interlocking causes and events, so that no
cause and no effect stands in isolation. Nothing can thus be
explained in terms of a simplistic approach. As Custance has noted,
In physiology, for example, we dissect the body, or we
experiment with it only as an electro-chemical machine and
our findings confirm the effectiveness of our tools of research
and our own methodology by giving us the only kind of
information we were looking for. But as Paul Weiss,
recognizing this aspect of the inherent limitation of the
scientific method, observed:
“Maybe our concept of our nervous system is equally
inadequate and insufficient, because so long as you use only
electrical instruments, you get electrical answers; if you use
chemical detectors, you get chemical answers; and if you
determine numerical and geometrical values, you get
numerical and geometrical answers. So perhaps we have not
yet found the particular kind of instrument that tells us the
next unknown.”1
1. Arthur C. Custance, Scientific Determinism and Divine Intervention (Brockway,
Ontario: Doorway Papers No. 44, 1972), 4f.
109
It was this simplistic view of causes which led to confusion in
medicine some years ago with respect to ulcers. It was “proven”
that ulcers had a chemical cause; later, of course, a psychological
cause was also discovered, and there is no reason to believe that all
is now known with respect to ulcers. The simplistic view is a
product of a syncretism of theistic causation with chance variation.
In a world of brute factuality, nothing is tied to anything else by an
overall cause or purpose, or by any inherent natural unity. In such
a world as envisioned by Newtonian science, a collision of two
entities resulted in something. A single collision produced a result,
it was held, and thus a bastard and simplistic concept of causality
resulted from this belief. Causality was seen as mechanical, because,
under a deistic viewpoint, God as the first cause remained
somewhere in the remote past. The personal aspect was thus
drained out of events by this mechanistic perspective, and, later,
when God was dropped as a necessary hypothesis, causality gave
way to the probability-concept. Purpose was thus replaced by
chance.
However, as John Wilson has observed, from a Christian
perspective, the older view of causality is also untenable, not
because causality does not exist, but because it is too complex for
any simplistic usage. Causes are so multiple in the natural world,
that events are more readily described than traced to their causes.
Turning now from the problem of causes as the scientist must
work with them, let us examine causality in its broadest
implications. How shall we view the world around us, and in terms
of what kind of perspective of causality? Clearly, as Christians, we
regard God as the ultimate and absolute cause of all things, but in
what sense do we mean this?
Towards this end, let us examine the events described in 2 Kings
18, 19, and Isaiah 36, 37. King Hezekiah’s reformation of Judah (2
Kings 18:1-8) was apparently lacking in any depth or popular
support. According to Ellison,
There is no mention or commendation of this reformation in
either Isaiah or Micah. The reason is that, as these prophets
show, it was purely external, and even at the court there was
Causality 111
no real trust in Jehovah, as was shown by Judah’s alliance with
Egypt and lack of moral reformation (Is. xxviii, 7—xxxi, 9).
He rebelled against the king of Assyria (7). The result was
disastrous, and there is no indication that Isaiah approved.2
When Assyria moved against Judah, the national resistance
collapsed, and many joined the enemy to fight against their own
people or to be used by them elsewhere, or else had left the
country. Sennacherib (704-681 B.C.) referred to this in an account
of his conquests:
As to Hezekiah the Jew, he did not submit to my yoke, I laid
siege to 46 of his strong cities, walled forts and to the
countless small villages in their vicinity, and conquered (them)
by means of well-stamped (earth-) ramps, and battering-rams
brought (thus) near (to the walls) (combined with) the attack
by foot soldiers, (using) mines, breeches as well as sapper
work. I drove out (of them) 200,150 people, young and old,
male and female, horses, mules, donkeys, camels, big and small
cattle beyond counting, and considered (them) booty. Himself
I made a prisoner in Jerusalem, his royal residence like a bird
in a cage. I surrounded him with earthwork in order to molest
those who were leaving his city’s gate. His towns which I had
plundered, I took away from his country and gave them (over)
to Mitinti, king of Ashdod, Padi, king of Ekron, and Sillibel,
king of Gaza. Thus I reduced his country, but I still increased
the tribute and the katru — presents (due) to me (as his)
overlord which I imposed (later) upon him beyond the former
tribute, to be delivered annually. Hezekiah himself, whom the
terror-inspiring splendor of my lordship had overwhelmed
and whose irregular and elite troops which he had brought
into Jerusalem, his royal residence, in order to strengthen (it),
had deserted him, did send me, later, to Nineveh, my lordly
city, together with 30 talents of gold, 800 talents of silver,
precious stones, antinomy, large cuts of red stone, couches
(inlaid) with ivory, nimedu-chairs (inlaid) with ivory,
elephant-hides, ebony-wood, box-wood (and) all kinds of
valuable treasures, his (own) daughters, concubines, male and
2.
H. L. Ellison, “II Kings,” in F. Davidson, A. M. Stibbs, and E. F. Kevan, The
New Bible Commentary (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Eerdmans, 1953), 328.
female musicians. In order to deliver the tribute and to do
obeisance as a slave he sent his (personal) messenger.3
This was a brutal invasion and taxation, and it was a divine
judgment. Judah had placed its hope in an Egyptian alliance rather
than in God (Isa. 30:1-7). The Biblical position with regard to
alliances is that alliances are religious acts. An alliance means “an
understanding between Jehovah and the gods of the country
involved” as well as between the citizens of both countries.4 An
alliance means that a common cause and a common faith motivates
the allies. (The hostility of the United States in its earlier years to
“entangling alliances” had this religious overtone.) In antiquity, the
religious aspect of alliances was always an open and avowed fact.
Judah trusted in Egypt, and Egypt proved faithless. Sennacherib,
despite the tribute, decided to level and destroy Jerusalem. Only
when all human help had failed did Hezekiah turn to the prophet
Isaiah and the Lord (Isa. 37:1-5). God declared through Isaiah that
Sennacherib would be defeated by His hand, and would return to
his land to be slain there (Isa. 37:6-7). We are then told of the
results:
35. And it came to pass that night, that the angel of the LORD
went out, and smote in the camp of the Assyrians an hundred
fourscore and five thousand: and when they arose early in the
morning, behold, they were all dead corpses.
36. So Sennacherib king of Assyria departed, and went and
returned, and dwelt at Nineveh.
37. And it came to pass, as he was worshipping in the house
of Nisroch his god, that Adram-melech and Sharezer his sons
smote him with the sword: and they escaped into the land of
Armenia. And Esarhadden his son reigned in his stead. (2
Kings 19:35-37)
Clearly, God’s judgment against Sennacherib is here depicted.
Just as clearly, however, the preceding events are a judgment on
Judah. Thus, every step of this history, “natural” and
“supernatural,” is an act of God. Moreover, every aspect of history
3.
James B. Pritchard, editor, Ancient Near Eastern Texts (Princeton: Princeton
4. Ellison, op. cit., 335.
Causality 113
is an aspect of God’s foreknowledge and predestination (Acts
15:18, Romans 9, etc.). God’s role cannot therefore be limited to
the miraculous in history: it includes His absolute government of
the sparrow’s fall and every hair on each man’s head (Matt.
10:29-30).
We have noted the retreat of the idea of causality to a
mechanistic concept, and then to a probability hypothesis. Let us
now examine the origins of the idea of causality. The history of the
causality concept is inseparable from the dialectical nature of
non-Christian thought. In the ancient world, as witness Greece,
reality was seen as two rival substances or realms, spirit, form,
ideas, or light, versus matter, particulars, or darkness. These two
realms, in non-Biblical thought, could be viewed in three ways with
respect to their relationship: first, they could be held as both
incompatible and yet necessary to one another, and thus held in
dialectical tension, as in Western thought; second, their
incompatibility could be stressed to the point of an ultimate and
irreconcilable difference, with a resultant dualism, as in Aryan or
Iranian thought; third, one or another could be held to be an
illusion, with monism resulting, as in Eastern thought, the Greek
Cynics, or the Western mystics. For the Western mystics and
Eastern thought (and Mary Baker Eddy), matter is an illusion; for
the Cynics, the world of spirit was an illusion.
The nature of men’s thinking on these two realms governed their
views of causality. The dialectical background meant that two
diverse realms existed. As Dooyeweerd has pointed out, the Greek
dialectic was ideas and matter, the medieval dialectic, grace and
nature, and the modern dialectic, freedom and nature. The modern
form develops an implication of the previous forms of the
dialectic, namely, that the mental or spiritual realm is the world of
freedom from the blind, mechanical causality of the world of
nature. This is not to say that causality is absent in these
perspectives from the realm of man’s mind or spirit. The causality
of the realm of ideas or freedom is self-caused and self-determined.
It is the realm of man’s autonomous mind and man’s own decree
of predestination. The philosopher-kings of Plato, therefore, were the
predestinating power over society and nature because in them this
power of self-determination had been realized. Modern socialistic
concepts of predestination and social planning rest on the same
premise of man’s autonomous mind and its self-caused,
self-determinative nature. In the existentialists, this is
self-consciously held. Thus, Sartre declared, “my freedom is a
choice of being God and all my acts, all my projects translate this
choice and reflect it in a thousand and one ways, for there is an
infinity of ways of being and of ways of having.” To avoid the
influence of the world of matter on the autonomous mind, Sartre
rejected the concept of the unconscious. In order to be free, man
must create his own essence without any influence from the world
of God or the world of matter. Sartre’s goal was to “get rid of that
dualism which in the existent opposes interior to exterior.” It was
the world of essence, of a predetermined nature, that Sartre wanted
to eliminate. Man must be free to create his own essence, i.e., issue
his own decree of predestination and become his own cause
without any outside interference. It is important for him to be able
to say, for better or for worse, that “The world is human.”5
Long before Sartre, Oriental thought reached a similar
conclusion, with disastrous consequences. This was the doctrine of
karma. The material world was held to be in some sense either
illusory or an illusion, and the wise man would withdraw from it or
write it off. This left the world of the mind, in process of
disentangling itself from the world of matter or illusion, and able
now to concentrate on its self-caused nature. Freedom was from the
material world, and thus essentially negative; there was no freedom
from self-causality except in nirvana, or death, an end to the cycle of
transmigration or reincarnation. In its developed form, in
Buddhism, little remains of man’s private world of mind except a
relentless causality which must be escaped. A man is a self-enclosed
universe of causality, inheriting nothing from anyone else nor
passing on anything to another. Every man is his own cause and
effect. As Poussin observed,
5. Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness (New York: Philosophical Library,

1956), xlv, 50, 218, 599.
Causality 115
This doctrine might be called the essential element, not only
of all moral theories in India, but also of popular belief. If a
person is born deformed or unhealthy, it must be — so people
say — because of sins committed in his former life. It is in
Buddhism, however, that the doctrine of karma reaches its
climax and assumes a unique character. Elsewhere it meets
with correctives; there are counteractions to human acts; but
in Buddhism it may be said that karma explains everything, or
ought to.
Other Indian philosophies admit the existence of a
self-existent soul or an ego. In Buddhist philosophy the ego is
merely a collection of various elements constantly renewed,
which are combined into a pseudo-personality only as the
result of action.6
The conclusion of Oriental thought was similar to Sartre’s, that
“Man is a useless passion.”7
In the Western philosophical tradition, a blind, impersonal (and
later mechanical) causality was held to be present in the world of
“nature.” This purely physical, usually inanimate, and impersonal
world was governed by a cause and effect relationship which was a
necessity but was neither logical nor coercive, since logic and
coercion belong to the personal realm. (“The necessity in these
cases is neither that of logical implication nor that of coercion.”)8
This causality became mechanistic, as we have noted, and then
gave way to a probability-concept. In the world of mind or
freedom, we have seen the impasse which results from either
Oriental or existentialist emphases on man’s self-caused and
autonomous nature. The dialectical premise leads in every case to
a collapse of culture and society in the face of the problems of
causality and the relationship of the one and the many.
The Bible is hostile to dialecticism, dualism, and monism. Mind
or spirit and matter are alike God’s creation. The distinction is not
between mind and matter but between the uncreated Being of
6. L.
De La Valle Poussin, “Karma,” in James Hastings, editor, Encyclopaedia of
Religion and Ethics, vol. VII, 676.
7. Sartre, op. cit., 615.
8. Morris T. Keeton, “Causality,” in Dagobert D. Runes, editor, Dictionary of Phi-
losophy, 15th edition, revised (New York: Philosophical Library, 1960), 47.
God, and the created being of the universe. God’s law and causality
is total and operative everywhere, and it is everywhere personal. In
the case of Sennacherib, the judgment is both material and
spiritual, and the deliverance of Jerusalem is both material and
spiritual. There is no separation between the two realms, nor two
kinds of causality. The whole universe is one law sphere under one
God. However dimly we grasp aspects of that law here and there,
it is both real, total, and unified.
Before considering further implications of God’s sovereignty, let
us turn to a text cited by Custance as of central importance,
Genesis 2:1-3:
1. Thus the heavens and the earth were finished, and all the
host of them.
2. And on the seventh day God ended his work which he had
made; and he rested on the seventh day from all his work
which he had made.
3. And God blessed the seventh day, and sanctified it: because
that in it he had rested from all his work which God created
and made.
Custance then comments:
The meaning seems clear enough. But is it? Why would God
“rest”? Because he was weary? Surely not! The words must
have some other meaning than merely to reflect our own
weariness at the end of a week of intense activity. Indeed, the
Hebrew word rendered “rest” is not bound at all to any idea
of fatigue. It means rather “to disengage,” “to terminate active
involvement in” or simply as the New English Bible has it
here, “to cease from.” God did not stop work because He was
tired but because He had finished what He was preparing.9
In summoning man to exercise dominion and to subdue the earth
(Gen. 1:26-28), God was making man His agent and vicegerent in
the exercise of causality in the world, summoning him from simple
beginnings to continue to an unimagined scope of authority. Man,
however, chose to reject this calling for an imagined self-caused
destiny as his own god (Gen. 3:5), and the result was the fall and a
break from the divine sabbath.
9. Custance, op. cit., 3.
Causality 117
When Jesus healed the crippled man at the pool of Bethesda in
Jerusalem, He did so on the sabbath (John 5:1, 9-10, 16). When
charged with sabbath-breaking, “Jesus answered them, My Father
worketh hitherto, and I work” (John 5:17). Turning again to
Custance for a decisive comment, he points out that
The word “hitherto” is found in the original Greek as two
words which together mean “up to the present moment,” i.e.,
“until now.” I think it means a little bit more than simply that
the Father had been working now and then throughout
history. I suggest that the Lord really intended by His action
(healing on the Sabbath day) and by His explanation, that from
the moment Adam fell and the disruptive effect of sin was
introduced into the Natural Order, God has been actively
engaged continuously throughout history, constantly at work
in a way which, if man had not fallen, He would not have
needed to be. The cessation from work which followed
immediately upon the completion of the six days of Genesis
would have continued to this day. As a consequence, the
pattern of six days of work followed by rest, which was based
upon God’s original programme and was appointed as a guide
for human behaviors thereafter, had broken down so that
redemptive activity had to be carried on whether it was a
working day or a rest day, whether it was a week day or a
Sabbath. It seems to me very evident that the healing miracles
of the Lord were often deliberately structured to show that the
repair necessary to organisms which might otherwise have
operated mechanistically and faultlessly, was necessitated
because of the disruptive effects of the Fall, of the presence of
sin in life. Hence the Lord could repair the damage equally
well by saying either “Be healed,” or “Thy sins be forgiven
thee” (Mark 2:3-12).10
It is not our concern here to argue with the deistic implications of
the use of the word “mechanistically” by Custance. The point is
that the work man was to do was forsaken by man. God thus had
a work of restoration and regeneration to do, in order to reestablish
man in the sabbath rest of God, and in the exercise of dominion
which accompanies that rest. The work of creation has been
10. Ibid., 27.

resumed, in the form of regeneration and restitution, and Jesus
Christ came into history to further this work.
Because God’s creative act was total in its scope, in that “All
things were made by him, and without him was not anything made
that was made” (John 1:3), His causality is total. God’s work of
regeneration thus has a total scope: all creation is involved in it,
either looking to God’s deliverance, for which it yearns with
expectant longing (Rom. 8:19-22), or else reserved for His
judgment. Every fact is a created and predestined fact in terms of
God’s purpose. The meaning of His causality will fully unfold with
its realization and fulfilment, i.e., when it is fully in force. This
means that God is not merely a remote first cause, as in Deism, but
a very present cause. The reality of secondary causes is not denied
by affirming that simultaneously with them God is always active;
rather, the reality of causality is affirmed. It does not become a
mechanistic thing which quickly breaks down for lack of mind,
meaning, or direction. Every fact is a personal fact in a personal
universe, created by a personal God, and every cause has its
ultimate and always immediate frame of reference in that triune
God and His decree. The facts, the causes and effects, of
Sennacherib’s invasion are grim facts. Perhaps they are for some
more grim because they are ordained by God. However, apart from
God, they become meaningless and senseless. Under God, every
fact has reference to a total plan of creation and regeneration, to a
master plan of salvation which affects all things, either to judge or
to deliver, or both. God is as close to every secondary cause, and
as operative, today as in Isaiah’s day, and His goal remains the
same, the regeneration of all things in Christ, and the judgment of
the things which are, so that the things which cannot be shaken
may alone remain (Heb. 12:22-29).
XIII
The Sabbath
On the seventh day, according to Genesis 2:1-3, God rested from

the work of creation, i.e., He disengaged Himself from it and
ceased or desisted from further creative work. This does not mean
that God ceased working thereafter, or did not work again until the
Fall made re-creation a necessary work. As Ellicott noted, with
respect to John 5:17 and Genesis 2:2-3, “The rest on the seventh
day was the completion of the works of creation. It was not, it
could not be, a cessation in divine work, or in the flow of divine
energy. That knew no day nor night, nor summer nor winter, nor
Sabbath, nor Jubilee.”1 God is never weary and never needs rest in
the human sense, as Isaiah 40:28 makes clear, and as Psalm 121:3-
4 implies.
Although creation was completed in six days, we are told that
“on the seventh day God ended his work which he had made; and
he rested on the seventh day from all his work which he had made”
(Gen. 2:2). The actual completion was on the sixth day; the formal
finishing was on the seventh day, and Leupold finds tenable the
rendering, “He declared finished.”2
In Genesis 2:3, we are told, “And God blessed the seventh day
and sanctified it: because that in it he had rested from all his work
which God created and made.” The comment of Keil and
Delitzsch is very well stated:
The divine act of blessing was a real communication of powers
of salvation, grace and peace; and sanctifying was not merely
declaring holy, but “communicating the attribute of holiness,
placing in a living relation to God, the Holy One, raising to a
participation in the pure clear light of the holiness of God,”....
The blessing and sanctifying of the seventh day had regard, no
1.
C. J. Ellicott, editor, Commentary on the Whole Bible, vol. VI (Grand Rapids,
Michigan: Zondervan, n.d.), 418.
2. H. C. Leupold, Exposition of Genesis (Columbus, Ohio: The Wartburg Press,
1942), 102.
119
doubt, to the Sabbath, which Israel as the people of God was
afterwards to keep; but we are not to suppose that the
theocratic Sabbath was instituted here, or that the institution
of that Sabbath was transferred to the history of the creation.
On the contrary, the Sabbath of the Israelites had a deeper
meaning, founded in the nature and development of the
created world, not Israel only, but for all mankind, or rather
for the whole creation. As the whole earthly creation is subject
to the changes of time and the law of temporal motion and
development: so all creatures not only stand in need of definite
recurring periods of rest, for further development, but they
also look forward to a time when all restlessness shall give
place to the blessed rest of the perfect consummation. To this
rest the resting of God points forward; and to this rest, this
divine sabbatismos (Heb. iv. 9), shall the whole world, especially
man, the head of the earthly creation, eventually come. For
this God ended His work by blessing and sanctifying the day
when the whole creation was complete.3
The purpose of the Sabbath from the first was eschatological; it
was a sign of the end, not only of creation but also of re-creation.
The Sabbath in history took its pattern from the creation week of
Genesis, but its time and date on the calendar from the day of
salvation. Thus, in the Old Testament, the Sabbath celebrated and
commemorated the passover, Israel’s deliverance from Egypt.
Since Christ, the Sabbath is dated from the day of resurrection. In
both cases, it is future-oriented, looking forward to the great
restoration of all things.
The Sabbath thus was, and is, the rest of the people of God, their
disengagement from the battle of restoration and re-creation to
celebrate the dominion given to them by their redeeming God.
With this in mind, let us briefly turn to the tampering with the
calendar by the Marxist revolutionists in Russia in 1918. Local
revolutionary leaders began calendar changes before the central
government was able to consolidate its powers and institute them.
The Christian calendar was abolished, and the changes of the
French Revolution were imitated. In September, 1929, the central
government decided to try to abolish Christianity by abolishing the
3. C. F. Keil and F. Delitzsch, The Pentateuch, vol. I (Grand Rapids, Michigan:
Eerdmans, 1949), 68f.
The Sabbath 121
Sabbath. A five-day week was decreed, and factories were kept
working continuously, day and night. Workers were divided into
five colors or labor calendars. At any given time of the day or night,
four color groups would be working and the fifth resting. Unless a
man and wife were in the same labor calendar or color, they could
not enjoy a common day of rest. Both family ties and religious
worship were thus disrupted. In 1932, the color system was
dropped, the work-week lengthened to six days, and a common day
of rest readmitted. More calendar changes came in 1936.
Whereas the year of 365 days remains divided into twelve
months, two parallel weeks have been introduced, one of
seven, and the other of six days. Labour, industry and rest are
to be regulated by the shorter, government and international
intercourse by the longer. The rest days of the labour week fall
on the sixth, twelfth, eighteenth, twenty-fourth and thirtieth
day of each month, with March 1, taking the place of the fifth
rest day of February.4
The purpose of the Marxist calendar, like all its actions, is
revolutionary. It aims at the dissolution of the family and of
Christianity. It pretends to give liberty for both, but in reality it
legislates them into insignificance and irrelevance. The true holy
days of the Soviet Union are such days as May Day, Lenin’s Day,
and so on, occasions which point to the Marxist plan of salvation.
The Christian plan of salvation is expressly superseded by the
Soviet calendar. Moreover, Rosenstock-Huessy raised some very
major points in his comments on this new calendar:
How far is the Russian Labour Calendar the practice of
Western Man already? How far is it not? With the Russians
work is made into a public function of the people united,
leisure is a private business. Formally, this calendar contradicts
our tradition in which each individual is toiling, bent on his
work, during the week, and comes into the common
fellowship on Sundays only. However, the Russian shift in
family and religious tradition, its making work into a public
function, and rest into a private one, crystallized a movement
that was in progress throughout the industrial world. For even
4. Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy, Out of Revolution, The Autobiography of Western Man
(New York: William Morrow, 1938), 121f.
in Anglo-Saxon countries, the common day of rest was slowly
losing its importance for more and more millions of people.
Maids, waiters, clerks in drugstores, people working in the
pleasure industries, taxi drivers, telephone operators, are
required to take off, not Sunday, but some other day picked at
random, to allow production to continue more or less
undiminished. And in this change in calendar, this abolition of
“Sunday” for parts of the population, is implicit an emphasis
upon the community of labour. The difference between the
practice (not the theory) of Western Man and that of the
Russian Labour Calendar is one of degree. Leisure is
becoming more and more a private affair, production is
coming to the front as a common destiny. In America, some
great manufacturing plants have rejected the twelve-month
calendar and apply a thirteen-month calendar, each month
containing twenty-eight days. This thirteenth-month calendar
enables a plant to check more conveniently the amount of
production per month. It glorifies production and goods that
are produced; it no longer cares for the holidays of the whole
community. It stands halfway, then, between a calendar which
united people for worship only, and a calendar which unites
the people who are working in shifts together.5
Another comment on the Russian calendar by
Rosenstock-Huessy is also of major importance: “History is
dissolved into economics,” and “a system of repetitive character”
replaces it.6 The Sabbath belongs to history and to progress, the
calendar of Marxist work belongs to a non-historical ant-hill. Every
Sabbath is a contemplation of past, present, and future victories in
Christ. The calendar of continuous work marks an ant-hill in which
the sacrament is work. The medieval church felt that it was
necessary to have the church with its sacraments open at all times.
The perpetually open church provided escape from a sinful world.
The Reformation resulted in a closed church during most of the
working week. Christian vocation meant going forth as priests
under God to conquer the earth in Christ’s name, and the church
doors were opened on the Sabbath to celebrate that conquest.
5. Ibid.,
122f.
6. Ibid., 123.
The Sabbath 123
Not surprisingly, the sciences flourished most in Protestant
countries, and especially under Puritanism. Work was almost made
sacramental; man’s calling to work, to exercise dominion and to
subdue the earth, while not a means of grace, was clearly seen as a
product of grace and as under grace.
A problem arose as the Industrial Revolution produced around-
the-clock industrial operations; the Enlightenment meanwhile had
produced a generation and more of humanists to whom the
Sabbath had lost its original meaning. The churches meanwhile had
become pietistic, so that they were unable intellectually to meet the
challenge to the Sabbath. Work was producing a tremendous
technological instrument for man’s exercise of dominion. True,
this dominion was assuming in some quarters the pretensions of
the tempter and fallen Adam rather than of Christ, an attempt to
be as gods and to exercise autonomous dominion rather than
developing dominion under God.
The potential for the Sabbath in technology was, and is, very
great. Whatever furthers man’s dominion under God will further
the Sabbath. The heightened productivity of the Industrial
Revolution, while at some points requiring continuous operation,
was richer in its potential for furthering both man’s work and
man’s rest. A theology and sociology of the Sabbath was
desperately needed, and yet lacking at a time when a tremendous
union between the Sabbath and technology could have been
effected. The need and the lack both remain.
What followed was the decay of the Sabbath as an anachronism
in the mind of modern man. Rest came to mean idle leisure and
play, not the celebration of dominion in a relaxed disengagement
from work. However, it was not only the Sabbath which decayed,
but work also, because the two are inseparably linked. Churchmen
to whom the Sabbath means the bare bones of church attendance,
no work, and no play, were in no position to understand the
amazing potentialities for the Sabbath in the Industrial Revolution.
Their pietism had turned the Sabbath into a retreat from the world and its
work rather than a celebration of man's conquest of it in Christ. Pietism was
more glad to escape from work one day in seven than to celebrate
the victory inherent in work under God in Christ. For Pietism, the
Industrial Revolution was, and still is, a disaster. Pietism’s retreat
from the world was far greater than that of the Medieval Church,
which was not lacking in men of conquest.
Wanting the mainspring of the Sabbath, the sons of the
Industrial Revolution began to regard work as a curse, which it is
to Adam’s fallen sons. The twentieth century ecological movement
is a rebellion against the Industrial Revolution by its children. Its
adherents turn to childish arts and crafts, purely decorative in
nature, as the answer to the machine, and communes return to
primitive production with a hoe because mechanization is
somehow demonic. Even this primitive work is limited, and the
state and nature are somehow expected to feed these people while
they rhapsodize over “culture.” In the Marxist countries,
production is made possible by the whip and the gun, and even
then is below pre-Marxist levels. Without the Sabbath and its
eschatological emphasis, without the fact of victory, work becomes
drudgery and a curse.
The purpose of God’s Sabbath rest was that man should now
work. As Francis Nigel Lee has written,
With the creation of man on the sixth day as the crown and
lord of creation, God had finished creating. Now God rests
from creation. He rests in man, the masterpiece of His
creation. In man God sabbaths from creation, in order “to
make it,” to fashion it. And God appoints man His
masterpiece to make it for Him. He delegates His exclusive
right to make things to man as His deputy, as His image. God
shows to man the created earth, and it is as if He says: “Subdue
it. I have created the world to make it. To make it through you.
I have made you, now you must make the earth. I shall rest on
this sabbath of creation week until the end of history. And I
shall watch how you develop and subdue the earth and make
it for Me; watch how you proceed with the development of
culture — and hold you accountable on My eighth day, on the
Day of the Lord at the end of history.”7
When man denies God, he denies the ultimacy of a transcendent,
supernatural power, and must therefore assert something in and of
7. F. N. Lee, Culture, (Cape May, New Jersey: n.d.), 4.

The Sabbath 125
this world as the new source of power. Man, then, asserts that he
himself is that new power. This leaves man with a serious problem,
however, the machine. Under God, man uses the machine as a tool;
God is ultimate power and predestination, whereas man, created in
God’s image, exercises a delegated power. Man’s power, however,
is firmly grounded in the sovereign purpose of God, and all things
under man, the earth, animals (God’s creations), machines and
other creations of man, are instrumental to man’s purposes under
God. When man claims the powers of God for himself, those
powers concentrate in instruments of power, the state and
scientific technology. The machine can operate continuously, but
man cannot. God ordained a Sabbath for all His creation; man’s
creation, the machine, needs no Sabbath and takes no Sabbath
unless man so orders it. The machine as continuous power
becomes thus a power which appalls modern man. Although
technology is one of the great results of the creation mandate and
rich in its rewards of liberation for man, man views his own
creation with distrust, even as he depends on it, almost seeming to
expect the machines and computers to develop minds and revolt
against man even as man revolted against his creator, God. Some
science fiction writers, as well as experts in cybernetics, have
actually talked or written of a revolt and takeover by the computers.
Especially as computers are used to establish data banks with their
accumulating files on all citizens, men feel oppressed and haunted
by the machine. Miller’s comment is telling:
Some people feel emasculated when private information
about them is disclosed or exchanged even though the data are
accurate and they do not suffer any career or social damage.
Correctly or incorrectly, they think in terms of having been
embarrassed or demeaned by having been denuded of
something that hitherto was theirs alone….
This concern for the record will be reinforced by the popular
conception of the computer as the unforgetting and
unforgiving watchdog of society’s information managers. As
one observer has remarked, “the possibility of the fresh start
is becoming increasingly difficult. The Christian notion of
redemption is incomprehensible to the computer.”8
In Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, the social engineers were
called “The Predestinators.” In the new world of automation, men
see the computer as the new predestinator. The Sabbath is gone,
and man cannot find true rest, because salvation is gone. The new
power, the computer, does not forget, nor does it blot out our sins
and transgressions. Forgiveness of sins does not exist in the
impersonal power of the computer. In 1897, the idea of sabotage
was born when French workers (sabot, wooden shoe) began to war
against employers, capitalism, and the machine. The ecology
movement of the 1960s and 70s has become a more intense form
of sabotage and is motivated by this hatred of the machine.
Salvation is seen as a return to primitivism, to the hoe and the
primitive tool. Ecologically oriented communes have had a short
life, however, because there is either too little rest from work
because of the primitive tools, or too little results because of an
unwillingness to work. In brief, salvation, Sabbath, and work are all
lacking, because they are essentially interrelated; the absence of one
undermines the others.
As we have seen, the denial of God as the ultimate power has led
to the threat of the computer and the technological, scientific
socialist state as the new power. The rise to power of the machine
and the State has meant the death of humanism, or, more
accurately, its suicide. Rookmaaker, in commenting on Cubism in
art, observed:
The aims of the cubists, their quests for a new expression of
art, were in the final analysis the making of a new worldview,
one that broke away from the age-old humanism of western
society. The personal was lost, for there was no longer a
personal God. Man, animals, plants, things, they are all
basically the same. So there should be no basic difference in
the way they are depicted.9
The Sabbath was made for man (Mark 2:27), and the Son of man
is Lord of the Sabbath; man is not able to find rest apart from the
8. Arthur R. Miller, The Assault on Privacy (Ann Arbor, Michigan: University of
Michigan Press, 1971), 64-65. The citation is from Packard, “Don’t Tell It to
the Computer,” New York Times Magazine, no. 6, 8 January, 1967, 44, 89.
9. H. R. Rookmaaker, Modern Art and the Death of a Culture (London: InterVarsity
Press, 1970), 114.
The Sabbath 127
principle of rest. Denying the personality of God, man ends up
denying the personality of man as a valid concept. The personal is
despised and discounted. To deny the Sabbath, and that the
Sabbath was made for man to rest and enjoy his lordship in Christ,
is to remove the future from man’s life. The Sabbath truly observed
speaks of victories gained and a world to be conquered. It gives a
future orientation to the calendar. It points not only to man’s
victory on earth, but also to the resurrection of the body and life
everlasting. The Sabbath thus always gives a perspective to life
which lifts man, not only out of the routine of work, but also out
of a bondage to the past and present. His mind is pointed to the
great Sabbath of God. In the words of an Isaac Watts hymn of
1719,
This is the day the Lord hath made;
He calls the hours his own,
Let heav’n rejoice, let earth be glad,
And praise surround the throne.
Today he rose and left the dead,
And Satan’s empire fell;
Today the saints his triumphs spread,
And all his wonders tell.
Hosanna to th’ annointed King,
To David’s holy Son!
Help us, O Lord; descend and bring
Salvation from the throne.
This joyful celebration is only possible when the Sabbath has the
eschatology of victory, as Watts did. Without that association of the
Sabbath with work, salvation, and victory, it becomes a day of
boredom and another step in a life without a significant future.
Commenting on the modern calendar and its orientation to the
world of the machine, Rosenstock-Huessy said:
The new solar calendar trains man to think of the future not
as something new, but as something that can be calculated in
advance. Future, in this world of economy and technique, is
the prolongation of the past. If former civilizations had dared
to think of the future as an annex to what we know about the
past, a special grammatical form for the future would probably
never have been invented. Real future, in its proper meaning,
implies a change in quality, a surprise and a promise. To live in
the future means to be indifferent to present hardships.
In America the future was such a deity because it meant an
unknown life. The solar calendar of commerce is pedantic. A
witty banker in Berlin effectively made fun of it in the
following story. He had a conference with the president of the
largest German electric company, and after two hours they
saw that they would have to meet again. The industrialist was
rather self-important, and explained how terribly busy he was.
Every day was completely booked up. Practically every hour
was taken by meetings, consultations, committees and
business trips. It was now January, and not before April the
16th could he find a free day in his appointment book. Yes, the
16th of April would suit him, would it suit the banker too?
Bored by this pompousness, the banker said calmly, “I’m
sorry. On the 16th of April I have a funeral.”
The abolition of the real future is the price we pay for
overloading our calendar as though the days to come were as
much our own as those of the past. He who treats the future
as his private property never gets the full benefit of its
character of regeneration.10
The Sabbath says that we have a future; it says, moreover, that this
future is not a private affair, or an economic calendar, as with
Rosenstock-Huessy’s president of an electric company. The future
is a cosmic affair and it is only as we recognize with each Sabbath
that our private lives are part of a cosmic goal and victory that we
have a true future.
Rosenstock-Huessy raised the necessary question:
The framework of an industrialized world leaves the cog in the
machine in the precincts or antechamber of real life, in a
pre-arranged world without a future. The question arises:
where is he going to find his future?11
It is not industrialization, however, which is responsible for this
“world without a future”; it is man. The future cannot be found by
10.
Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy, The Multiformity of Man (Norwich, Vermont:
Beachhead, 1949), 20f.
11. Ibid., 22.
The Sabbath 129
trying to escape from industrialization, but only by a return to the
God who created time and all things else, and who commissioned
man to exercise dominion through righteousness, work, and
knowledge, and to celebrate that dominion in the Sabbath.
Men, like the German industrialist in Rosenstock-Huessy’s story,
have made the machine and then sought to remake themselves in
the image of the machine, their own creature. The result has been
a failure. They have worshipped the power of the machine and
have sought to imitate it in their own lives. Failing this, they have
turned against technology in many quarters.
The Sabbath, meanwhile, has been turned into a monkish retreat
by Pietistic Protestantism. The Westminster Confession of Faith,
chapter XXI, viii, “Of Religious Worship, and the Sabbath Day,”
concludes by permitting, on the Sabbath, “the duties of necessity
and mercy.” In terms of this, strict Sabbatarian farmers do not
hesitate to milk their cows. Because of arrested and frozen
thinking, no thought is given to the fact that it is not only cattle
which require continuous care but also some machines. Generators
and much else require continuous operation. As technology
advances, the areas of manpower needed for continuous operation
lessen. It is essential that man honor, not only the Sabbath, but also the work
which the Sabbath celebrates. This pietism has not done: it honors the
claims of the cow, because the cow existed in its eighteenth century
world, but it does not honor the generator and steel mill, which
have come since then.
Work must be respected and honored for rest therefrom to be
honored. The decline of any sense of priesthood in work has
reduced the Sabbath from a celebration to a retreat. Men will be
“always abounding in the work of the Lord” when they know that
their “labour is not in vain in the Lord” (1 Cor. 15:58). They will
also then rest with satisfaction, pride, and thanksgiving.
XIV
Idleness and Revolution
According to Proverbs 19:15, “Slothfulness casteth into a deep

sleep; and an idle soul shall suffer hunger.” The comment of Deane
and Taylor-Taswell is very revealing of the implications of this text:
Slothfulness casteth into a deep sleep; “causes deep sleep to
fall upon a man”.... The word for “sleep” (tardemah) is that
used for the supernatural sleep of Adam when Eve was
formed (Gen. ii. 21), and implies profound insensibility.
Aquila and Symmachus render it, ekstasis, “trance.”
Slothfulness ennervates a man, renders him as useless for
labour as if he were actually asleep in his bed; it also enfeebles
the mind, corrupts the higher faculties, converts a rational
being into a witless animal. Otium est vivi hominis sepultura,
“Idleness is a living man’s tomb.” An idle soul shall suffer hunger....
The LXX... here renders … “Cowardice holdeth fast the
effeminate, and the soul of the idle shall hunger.”1
The meaning thus is clear: man was created in God’s image to
exercise dominion by means of work, knowledge, righteousness,
and holiness, and to subdue the earth under God. When man not
only forsakes God but also forsakes his calling and becomes a
slothful, idle creature, the result is a radical deformation of man.
The judgment of God then casts man into a deep sleep, an
indifference and judicial blindness to reality which destroys him.
The Septuagint version makes clear a further meaning of the
original: idleness makes man effeminate; it is a renunciation of
manhood.
No civilization has yet existed which has not despised or
condemned idleness, and yet in every culture many men, including
those who condemn idleness, dream of attaining it. Why this
schizophrenic perspective? Hatred of the so-called idle rich, who,
while real, exist more often in men’s imagination than in reality, is
as old as mankind; but that hatred has as often been prompted by
1. W. J. Deane and S. T. Taylor-Taswell, “Proverbs,” in Spence and Exell, The
Pulpit Commentary (New York: Randolph, n.d.), 368.
131
envy not only of the wealth of the rich, but also of their ability to
be idle. Men see something unmanly and unbecoming in idleness,
and yet they long for it. The root of this confusion lies in man’s
faulty dream of the Sabbath. “The Sabbath was made for man”
(Luke 6:5). The Sabbath was made for man in the sense that it not
only had a theocratic purpose, but an anthropocentric one as well.
Man’s nature calls for a Sabbath, for a triumphant rest in, and from,
his labors. Man requires the opportunity to rejoice in and celebrate
his work under God; the Sabbath is an occasion for happy
confidence in the fact that our “labour is not in vain in the Lord”
(1 Cor. 15:58). Christ is Lord of the Sabbath not only as very God
but also as very man, as the one who brings us as His members into
a Kingdom where total success is inescapable, in that all things
work together for good in God for those who love Him and are the
called according to His purpose (Rom. 8:28). Everything in man’s
being calls for God’s Sabbath, for triumphant rest and celebration.
For the ungodly, this hope poses a problem. Being under the
curse because of the Fall, work for them is also under the curse
(Gen. 3:17-19), as are all man’s activities and efforts outside of
God. For them, since work is a curse (as are all things), and since
in work, man’s daily lot, the frustration of the curse comes into
continual focus, escape from work into idleness becomes the
humanist’s Sabbath hope. Modern man thus has turned his back on
God’s Sabbath in favor of idleness, which he prefers to call leisure.
He deludes himself into believing that leisure is somehow creative,
whereas what he means by leisure activity is usually not only not
creative activity, but also not even play: it is idleness. The word he
applies to this idleness, leisure, is very revealing: it comes from the
Old French leisir, be permitted, which in turn comes from the Latin
licet, it is lawful. In effect, man is saying that God’s Sabbath is no
longer needed and that man’s flight from work (and dominion)
into idleness is legal and allowable.
One of the many differences between the Sabbath and modern
leisure of idleness is that the Sabbath requires a community
rejoicing in God’s salvation and government, whereas leisure is
inevitably solitary. A man in his leisure time may go to a baseball
game with 40,000 people, but he goes and comes as an isolated
Idleness and Revolution 133
person; he enters into no community with all those other men
present. A man who goes to worship God with thirty people, or
who reads Scripture and rests with his family, does so as an
individual in community or corporate life. He is able to be in
community with people on the Sabbath because he has been at
work under God. Those who gather together on the Sabbath
without having seen each other during the week, have still been a
community at work together for the glory of God.
Isolation in “rest” (in leisure activity) goes hand-in-hand with
isolation in all things else; society has then given way to atomistic
mass man. Mass man has nothing in common with those crowding
around him except proximity, he is “the lonely crowd,” alone even
when group-oriented, because the foundations of community, life
under God and in His calling, are lacking. Mass man is alone in a
crowd and trusts no one.
A medieval thinker, John of Segovia, held that authority in all its
forms depends upon credibility and trust, upon a fundamental faith
which unites men. Where men are united in their faith in God, they
are more ready to trust one another and to live peaceably together.
He held, he said, “that no state could exist without the mutual trust
of men in each other, in those matters which are not seen... and
human society is unable to exist, unless mutual trust is present.”2
Without committing ourselves to every aspect of Segovia’s
thought, we can agree that it is an established religious authority, a
godly authority, which makes for a social climate of peace, trust,
and growth. It is not necessary for men to be humanists, believing
in man’s supposed goodness, to have a climate of mutual trust. On
the contrary, humanism, by putting its trust in man rather than in
God’s authority, erodes society and authority and leads to distrust
and trouble between man and man.
Guilt, moreover, reinforces isolation, in that the guilty man is
marked by, first, a flight from men, in that he is anxious to escape
detection. This isolation is psychological; the guilty man may be
part of a crowd; he may talk or confess compulsively, but he still
2.
Anthony Black, Monarchy and Community, Political Ideas in the Later Conciliar Con-
troversy, 1430-1450 (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Cambridge University Press,
1970), 30.
remains isolated and lonely. Guilt before God not only isolates a
man from God, but also from other men. Second, guilt paralyzes the
ability of man to work effectively, so that it aggravates his
discontent with life, himself, and all things. Third, there is, as we
have seen, no forgiveness of sins with a computer; data banks
relentlessly compile a man’s records. Was he treated for venereal
disease, or for drug addiction, at a military hospital? It is, then, a
part of his data bank file, and there is no grace to wipe out that
record, or his inner guilt over his past, apart from God.
Sabbath and paradise are related ideas; man seeks, then, in his
flight, his Sabbath and paradise in idleness. In its modern,
evolutionary form, primitive man supposedly had this paradise in
the days before religion gave him guilt. As one Italian writer on
folklore, Giuseppe Cocchiara, has observed, “Before being
discovered, the savage was first invented.” The so-called savage in
turn believes that he long ago lost a primitive paradise.3 All sinners
hope that this paradise will somehow become available when man
is able to be idle and self-indulgent. If only men can be freed for
idleness and self-indulgence, then paradise will somehow return.
The return to paradise in the humanistic view means the death of
history. History is the story of struggle, conflict, and progress, but
there is no development towards a goal, a basic aspect of history,
in the ant-hill and beehive. The ant-hill and beehive have only
economics, a program of work, not history. The humanistic dream
of paradise has as a major stage an ant-hill society, the reduction of
society to economics. Increasingly, however, the goal is that
beyond this state of economic perfection there will be a society
beyond economics, a world of perfect idleness and delight. Some
versions of this hope hold that automation will give birth to this
work-free world; others are not as specific, as witness Henry Miller
and others who expect this humanistic utopia to arrive by massive
copulation rather than by economics.
All this has given humanistic man an ambivalent attitude towards
history. Eliade makes some important observations on modern
man’s interest in history:
3. Mircea Eliade, Myths, Dreams and Mysteries (New York: Harper Torchbooks,
1967), 39, 43.
We need only instance one of the most specific features of our
own civilization — namely, the modern man’s passionate,
almost abnormal interest in History. This interest is
manifested in two distinct ways, which are however related:
first, in what may be called a passion for historiography, the
desire for an ever more complete and more exact knowledge
of the past of humanity, above all of the past of our Western
world; secondly, this interest in history is manifested in
contemporary Western philosophy, in the tendency to define
man as above all a historical being conditioned, and in the end
created, by History. What is called historicism, Historismus,
storicismo, as well as Marxism and certain existentialist schools
— these are philosophies which, in one sense or another,
ascribe fundamental importance to history, and to the historic
moment.
Let us now look at this passion for history from a standpoint
outside our own cultural perspective. In many religions, and
even in the folklore of European peoples, we have found a
belief that, at the moment of death, man remembers all his
past life down to the minutest details, and that he cannot die
before having remembered and relived the whole of his
personal history. Upon the screen of memory, the dying man
once more reviews his past. Considered from this point of
view, the passion for historiography in modern culture would
be a sign portending his imminent death....
It is in trying to estimate this anguish in the face of Death —
that is, in trying to place it and evaluate it in a perspective other
than our own — that the comparative approach begins to be
instructive. Anguish before Nothingness and Death seems to
be a specifically modern phenomenon. In all the other, non-
European cultures, that is, in the other religions, Death is
never felt as an absolute end or as Nothingness: it is regarded
rather as a rite of passage to another mode of being; and for
that reason always referred to in relation to the symbolisms
and the rituals of initiation, rebirth, or resurrection. This is not
to say that the non-European does not know the experience
of anguish before Death; the emotion is experienced, of
course, but not as something absurd or futile; on the contrary,
it is accorded the highest value, as an experience indispensable
to the attainment of a new level of being. Death is the Great
Initiation. But in the modern world Death is emptied of its
religious meaning; that is why it is assimilated to Nothingness;
and before Nothingness modern man is paralyzed.4
We can dissent from this brilliant analysis by citing the views of
ultimate nothingness in Far-Eastern philosophies and religions. In
these faiths, life itself is regarded as meaningless, and death is as a
result an escape and a relief from karma. Western thought still
retains a Biblical love of life, and, as a result, death is a threat to it.
History, however, is seen by the humanists as a brief and recent
episode in a cosmic blindness. History is studied for a clue to
provide meaning or escape, and history is also resented, because,
from a humanistic perspective, it culminates in certain death and a
cosmic silence. There is thus an intense concern about history and
a desire to end history and institute an anti-historical and
revolutionary regime which prevents life from moving and
disappearing, which arrests time into a paradise of idleness.
Because history means conflict and struggle towards a goal, it
means freedom to pursue or to renounce that goal; it means good
and evil, rewards and punishment. This, however, is not to the taste
of those who forsake manhood for idleness. They do not want
freedom: they want the perfection of a sinner’s paradise, where
there is no judgment, no consequences, no work, and no death,
only idleness in which to experience pleasures.
A psychologist, Dr. John H. Pflaum, gives us his version of this
utopia in his Delightism. He declares that “The world is coming to a
beginning,” a new genesis, the age of delight. It will involve the
group enjoyment of sensuality. He provides us with many
aphorisms (a thousand alone in the back of his book) to summarize
the wisdom of this new age: “Good is feeling good.... Sex has
become safer than Ping-Pong.... Pornography inspires delight....
The way you smell is as important as what you think.” He
prescribes “orgy therapy” and fun as a cure for man’s ills and as a
means to reaching the age of delightism.5
4. Ibid., 233-236.
5. John H. Pflaum,
Delightism (Prentice-Hall), from a review by Richard Ar-
mour, “The organization of Mankind,” Los Angeles Times Calendar, 14 May 1972,
50. Not surprisingly, the same number of the Calendar has on p. 48 a review of
A. Alvarez, The Savage God: A Study of Suicide (Random House); suicide and
self-indulgent “delightism” are alike common aspects of a humanistic world.
Because the world of delightism, post-historical man, utopia, or
whatever else humanists choose to call it, lacks any sense of history,
it is out of touch with reality. It belongs to the realm of fantasy and
dreams; it is the world of idle imagination.
Such a state of mind is also revolutionary. The revolutionist is
intensely absorbed in history: he rages against its meaning and
direction, its problems and tensions, and he studies history with a
passionate rage. At the same time, he wants to destroy history; he
is insistent that the world of purpose and consequence can be
wiped out and nullified and replaced by a revolutionary regime
which is dedicated to the dream of paradise as idleness.
Thus both idleness and the dream or hope of idleness put man
out of touch with the world of reality and imbue him with a
revolutionary hostility against it.
Revolutionary movements are uniformly hostile to religion and
are dedicated especially to militant hostility against Biblical
revelation. There is a necessary reason for this: Revelation is the
communication to man of God’s will and purpose, and it is set
down in the enscriptured word. This revelation not only declares
God’s sovereign claims on man but also charts the purpose of God
for man in history. Man is to exercise dominion and to subdue the
earth under God by means of God’s law-word. For man to do this
means that man must believe that God is, “and that He is a
rewarder of them that diligently seek him” (Heb. 11:6).
The revolutionist, however, begins by denying God and God’s
declared meaning of history. The meaning and the rewards are of,
by, and for man. Revolution is the communication and attempted
imposition by man of man’s own determined meaning on the
world and time. It seeks to arrest history by means of revolution
and impose man’s will on a seemingly blind and meaningless flux.
The revolutionist denies God and is at war with God. The
alternative to God is logically a blind and meaningless flux or
change, and the revolutionist is in turn at war against that. Against
God and Chaos, he asserts man and man’s world. He seeks like
God to possess aseity, self-being, to be the only lord and creator and
to be self-existent. Very quickly his grandiose world of aseity
becomes delightism, idleness, and suicide. As Christ, speaking as
Wisdom, declared long ago, “He that sinneth against me wrongeth
his own soul: all they that hate me love death” (Prov. 8:36).
The implication, moreover, of the Septuagint version of
Proverbs 19:15 is correct: there is a deeply rooted cowardice and
flight from life in idleness; it is an unwillingness to accept life
because it has problems. This unwillingness has its roots in the
refusal to accept the basic problem, man’s sin. When man refuses
to accept the fact of his sin, he thereby precludes salvation from
that sin.
By his sin, man was cast out of paradise and separated from
God’s Sabbath, because he had denied the work God had called
him to perform. With the calling of a chosen people, the Sabbath
was reintroduced into history together with the law and the
establishment of a plan of dominion.
Man’s dreams of a paradise of idleness are futile efforts to
reenter Eden which in reality become a storming of the gates of
hell, where man indeed has idleness, and isolation as well.
A seventeenth century English broadside ballad, “An Invitation
to Lubberland,” satirized the dreams of paradise held by the idle:
There’s nothing there but holy days,
with music out of measure;
Who can forbear to speak the praise
of such a land of pleasure?
There you may lead a lazy life,
free from all kinds of labour,
And he that is without a wife
may borrow of his neighbour.6
The point is well made. The idle are parasites, and, in a real
paradise, the human parasites have no place. Moreover, Levin is
correct in stating that “The Edenic impulse... has been at odds with
the Utopian impetus.” Eden as a social goal in American life has led
to work; the Utopian impulse is a flight from work into parasitism.
Levin cited also Thoreau’s distaste for the book of a German
6. Harry Levin, “Paradises, Heavenly and Earthly,” in The Huntington Library

Quarterly, vol. XXIX, no. 4 (August 1966): 310.
technocrat, J. A. Etzler’s The Paradise Within Reach of All Men,
because it offered salvation and paradise by means of labor-saving
devices. Thoreau, very much the Puritan at this point, commented:
This is Paradise to be Regained, and that old and stern decree
at length reversed. Man shall no more earn his living by the
sweat of his brow. All labor shall be reduced to “a short turn
of some crank,” and “taking the finished articles away.” But
there is a crank, — oh, how hard to be turned! Could there not
be a crank upon a crank, — an infinitely small crank? — we
would fain inquire. No, alas! not. But there is a certain dim
energy in every man, but sparingly employed as yet, which may
be called the crank within, quite indispensable to all work.
Would that we might get our hands on its handle! In fact, no
work can be shirked. It may be postponed indefinitely, but not
infinitely. Nor can any really important work be made easier by
cooperation or machinery.7
7. Ibid., 323.
XV
The Intellect as Savior
In 1921, an interesting and anonymous commentary on the

world scene was titled, The Glass of Fashion. The English author, in
a preface to Americans, observed that, “With you, as with us, the
fashion of daily life is set by those who have sacrificed to a false
science, almost without thought, the one great secret of joy,
namely, faith in a creative purpose, faith in man’s immortality.”
The reason for the deepening world crisis and decay the writer
ascribed to Darwinian and evolutionary thought.
The mob believes in Darwinian evolution, believes that the
universe is an accident, life is an accident, and beauty is an
accident. It has made up its mind on hearsay, and incorporated
into its moods, without realisation of the logical
consequences, a theory of existence which is as false as it is
destructive. And this mob, composed of all classes, carries the
destinies of the human race.1
Commenting later on the reversal of standards, the author noted
that in pagan antiquity, “Philosophy sought to elevate the moral
character by improving the intellect; Christianity reversed the order.”2
Clearly, this is a discerning comment. It must be recognized, first,
that the implicit dualism of pagan thought made possible a
separation of mind and body, so that the intellect could be isolated
from the total life of man. Greek philosophers, like Socrates, could
discourse on justice, virtue, and truth while involved in
homosexuality. This schizophrenic position was possible because
of the isolation of the intellect from man’s material, historical, and
moral life. The redemption of the material world was held to be
possible only by means of the application of reason to the
problems of man. The intellect of man was thus man’s hope of
salvation.
1. The
Glass of Fashion, Some Social Reflections, by A Gentleman with a Duster (New
York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1921), viii, x.
2. Ibid., 174.
141
Second, pagan philosophy, Greek and Roman in particular, held
that a man’s decisions are governed by his reason, so that, to appeal
to reason was to appeal to the decisive agency of government in
man. Man was held to be a rational animal whose approach to life
is governed by reason. To enlighten a man’s reason is therefore to
provide him with the tools for coping with his problems.
The Bible directly contradicts this thesis again and again. Man is
seen as a religious creature, created in the image of God. Man
reacts to events, not primarily in terms of reason, but essentially in
terms of his relationship to God.
The prophet Jeremiah gives us dramatic evidences of this. His
witness to Jerusalem and Judah was so clearly not only of God, but
also compelling to the mind, that there can be little doubt that on
logical grounds alone his prophecies should have persuaded men,
if men could be persuaded by reason. The reaction of King
Jehoiakim to Jeremiah’s prophesy was to hear it and to burn it
contemptuously (Jer. 36:20-32). The same was true with the last
king of Judah, Zedekiah (Jer. 37-39). Zedekiah recognized the truth
of Jeremiah’s declarations, but he decided against Jeremiah’s
counsel, which offered hope, in favor of total ruin and shame,
because he lacked the moral courage to stand in terms of the truth
and to confess that he had been wrong (Jer. 38:19). Zedekiah’s
decision was not logical; it was not governed by rational
considerations but by his moral character. The failure of his
intellect was grounded in the failure of his moral character.
Third, moral character is itself a product of something else, of a
religious commitment or faith. As much as man’s mind is shaped
by his character, so much is his character a product of his faith. The
religious presuppositions which govern a man do govern him
indeed, in that his mind and character are alike expressions of that
basic faith, which is the heart of a man’s life.
This in itself, however, is not enough. The religious
presupposition may be false, and it may thereby create a whole
chain of deadly consequences. Thus, with the Enlightenment, man
came to believe in the natural goodness of man, particularly the
natural goodness of non-Christian man. To attain that desired end
The Intellect as Savior 143
meant peeling off the layers of Christian faith and culture from
Western man to penetrate to the essential and pure man. For
example, Mrs. Aphra Behn (1640-1689) gave us very early, in
Oroonoko: or, The Royal Slave (1688), a portrait of this imagined
natural man as the natives of Surinam in the West Indies.
According to her,
And these people represented to me an absolute idea of the
first state of innocence, before man knew how to sin. And ‘tis
most evident and plain that simple Nature is the most
harmless, inoffensive, and virtuous mistress. ‘Tis she alone, if
she were permitted, that better instructs the world than all the
inventions of man. Religion would here but destroy that
tranquillity they possess by ignorance; and laws would but
teach ‘em to know offense, of which now they have no
notion.... They have a native justice, which knows no fraud;
and they understand no vice, or cunning, but when they are
taught by the white men. They have plurality of wives; which,
when they grow old, serve those that succeed ‘em, who are
young, but with a servitude easy and respected; and unless
they take slaves in war, they have no other attendants.3
The goal for Western man, because of the false premise which
Aphra Behn illustrates, became a studied primitivism, a
renunciation of Christian civilization in a quest for the supposed
innocence of natural man. Innocence thus meant, not a purgation
of sin and guilt through the atoning blood of Jesus Christ, but a
purgation of Christianity and a return to an imagined primitivism.
Innocence was to be gained by ridding one’s self of the Christian,
middle class work-ethic in favor of a morality of immorality, living
beyond good and evil. Innocence meant sinning with contempt for
morality; thus middle class sexual morality and immorality has been
despised for its consciousness of sin, whereas revolutionary
humanism tries to fornicate on the principle that it is both good
and a mark of liberation. In Africa in 1965, women in Zambia
greeted the revolutionary guerrillas with shouts of “Free love for
3. Cecil
A. Moore, editor, Restoration Literature, Poetry and Prose, 1660-1700, First
edition (New York: F. S. Crofts & Co., 1947), 409. Behn, like Rousseau, was
anti-Christian, of dubious moral character, and ready to call evils virtue provid-
ed that Christians did not practice them.
the freedom fighters.”4 The guerrillas were supposedly beyond
good and evil, and innocence covered their actions.
Primitivism is today used to justify a multitude of sins in sexual
relations, art, politics, religion, and literature. It is a
pseudo-innocence and purity which is only believable because a
prior act of faith has determined that it must be so. Clearly, it is not
enough to say that religious presuppositions must govern
character, because the wrong presupposition can lead to a
deformed character.
It must be held then, fourth, that the religious presupposition
must be true. With the Westminster Divines, we must hold
That truth is in order to goodness; and the great touchstone
of truth, its tendency to promote holiness; according to our
Saviour’s rule, “by their fruits ye shall know them.” And that
no opinion can be either more pernicious or more absurd,
than that which brings truth and falsehood upon a level, and
represents it as of no consequence what a man’s opinions are.
On the contrary, they are persuaded that there is an
inseparable connection between faith and practice, truth and
duty. Otherwise it would be of no consequence either to
discover truth, or to embrace it.5
If truth does not undergird man’s character and mind, then he is
not only self-deceived, but his ostensibly noble professions are also
a mask for evil. The illusion of humanism is that, because it wants
a world of peace, justice, and prosperity, its desire constitutes
virtue, and necessary accomplishment will follow. On June 1, 1938,
a vice president of the French Chamber of Deputies delivered an
address before a distinguished audience which included Frederic
and Mme. Joliot-Curie, Louis Cazamian, Arthur Honegger,
Fernard Leger, Le Corbusier, and many, many other men and
women of note. The speaker declared,
Ladies and Gentlemen,
I have just sketched before you the broad outlines of a human
society which tomorrow will be a world-wide reality.
4. Harold
Soref and Ian Greig, The Puppeteers (London: Tandem Books, 1965),
76.
5. Westminster Standards: The Form of Government, Chapt. 1, sect. IV.
These profound transformations will be written into fact—
No, man will not be eternally opposed to himself.
No, man will not be eternally forced to waste his energy in
class struggles and war.
No, man will not see poverty eternally rising out of abundance.
No, man will not be eternally a wolf for man.
Whatever is said, whatever is done, nothing will halt the march
of history.
Nothing will prevent, finally, the establishment of a society of
harmony of work and progress, a society born of science....
If we all desire it, and we all must desire it, the country of
Descartes will remain the country of reason triumphant.6
The speaker, Jacques Duclos, was a Communist, as were most of
his listeners. He was by no means ignorant of “the crimes of
Stalin,” nor were his listeners. For them, the “noble” goal justified
the means of Russia, just as in their own private lives they were
ready to declare themselves just and noble men because they
believed in “a society born of science” and in “reason triumphant.”
This self-delusion is not limited to Marxists; it marks humanists
of every stripe, and it is most easily discerned in politicians.
Columnist Jim Bishop, commenting on President John F.
Kennedy, called attention to the discrepancy between the
handsome, idealistic young President and “the cursing, merciless
politician behind the scenes.” Moreover, “People who were not
willing to help further the ambitions of the Kennedys for nothing
were criminally motivated” in the eyes of the Kennedys. Thus,
Kennedy, despite “a greatness within him,” Bishop concludes, “in
spite of the fact that I admired him personally, I still think of him
as more of a gutter politician than a lofty statesman.”7 Bishop to
the contrary, Kennedy was no more than “a gutter politician,” and
the same is true of other recent political leaders. Nobly phrased and
high sounding intellectual concepts cannot efface the fact of sin.
No more than the computer can forgive sins and regenerate man,
can the mind of man make a new man out of the old.
6. Jacques Duclos, Communism, Science and Culture (New York: International Pub-
lishers, 1939), 43f., 46.
7. Jim Bishop, “Kennedy in Retrospect,” Los Angeles Herald-Examiner, 4 May
1972, A-14.
It is, however, the belief of many that intelligence can remake
man and the world. John Dewey, in The Quest for Certainty,
contrasted the Christian belief in regeneration and change by
God’s grace and the redeemed man’s activity with change by means
of intelligence in action. He clearly favored “the method of
changing the world through action” by man’s intelligence as against
“the method of changing the self in emotion and idea.”8 This is
essentially the position of humanistic man: by adopting intelligence
as his guide to action, he plans to remake the world. This belief has
deep roots in the Thomistic and Arminian belief that, while man’s
appetites and will are fallen, his reason remains undamaged by sin
and is still able to function intelligently and accurately. In terms of
this faith, there is hope for social reconstruction, whether a man be
Christian or not, wherever reason is applied to the problems of
society and man. Against this heresy, John Calvin was eloquent in
opposition, and it is consistent Calvinism which alone offers
effective opposition to it. Socialism in all its forms is simply the
political application of the belief that man’s salvation lies in the
application of intelligence to man’s problems.
To believe in the immunity of reason to the effects of the Fall is
to insist on its sufficiency as man’s guide and savior. Such a belief
runs directly counter to Biblical faith. It is an assertion that paradise
can be regained by means of reason, by man’s intelligence.
Pre-Christian religions, humanistic in all cases, in varying forms
asserted man’s sufficiency, holding that man’s wisdom could
remake the world and man. Since then, humanism in philosophy,
politics, education, and religion has propagated this same faith.
According to Rosenheim, this belief in the ability of man, and the
possibility of reconciling Christianity with classical philosophy (as
with Arius), was a threat to the Christian empire. This was the
reason why Justinian, determined not to allow even the declining
Academy of Athens to perpetuate this false and subversive hope,
closed the Academy in A. D. 529:
8. Joseph Ratner, editor, Intelligence in the Modern World (New York: Modern Li-
brary, 1939), 275.
By royal decree the teaching of philosophy — that is to say, every
attempt to connect the Mystery of Golgotha in any way with
the wisdom taught in the pre-Christian Mysteries and schools
of thinking as did the Gnostics, the Manichaeans, the Sabeans
and the Neo-Platonists, henceforth was strictly prohibited in
the entire realm of Roman jurisdiction.9
In the twentieth century, the essence of the faith of man is his
trust that reason or intelligence, divorced from the inhibitions of
Biblical faith and morality, can liberate man and lead him into a
“brave new world.” Intelligence for these humanists means
viewing the world without the framework of religious and moral
values. According to Skinner,
But those who observe cultures do not see ideas or values.
They see how people live, how they raise their children, how
they gather or cultivate food, what kinds of dwellings they live
in, what they wear, what games they play, how they treat each
other, how they govern themselves, and so on.10
Against Skinner, it can be argued with assurance that all these
things he speaks of are expressions of “ideas or values.” Skinner
and others are convinced that the answer to man’s problems lies in
the scientific use of intelligence by a small elite group which is
alone capable of using reason scientifically and intelligently. The
trust in the intellect as savior thus becomes a trust in some men as
saviors, self-appointed saviors who feel that their use of
intelligence is alone valid because it is systematically hostile to the
God of Scripture. Trust in man’s intellect thus leads to a radical
elitism. In the name of man and democracy, the people are to be
ruled by an intellectual elite whose word is to be accepted as from
God. The Saint-Simonist socialists held that “only the ‘small
number’ of those who devote their lives to the investigation of
social sciences will be able to analyze the dogma scientifically,” and
the masses will have to accept it as they accepted religious doctrines
9.
Richard Rosenheim, The Eternal Drama (New York: Philosophical Library,
1952), 85.
10. B. F. Skinner, Beyond Freedom and Dignity (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1971),
127.
in the past.11 The reason of the elite thus becomes a new revelation
from a new god.
As against this, the Christian has a sure foundation. Jesus Christ
declared, “I am the way, the truth, and the life” (John 14:6). He is
the truth in whom all truth subsists. He is the ground of true
character and true reason, the only “true Light, which lighteth
every man that cometh into the world” (John 1:9).
11. J. L. Talmon, Political Messianism, The Romantic Phase (New York: Frederick
A. Praeger, 1960), 86.
XVI
Salvation by Love and Hate
To speak of salvation by love and hate will be offensive to those

who proclaim themselves the people of love, “love children,”
“friends of man,” or any other term to set forth their belief in
redemption by love. It is, however, necessary in all honesty to
couple the terms love and hate. If we love truth, we will hate a lie; if
we love righteousness, we will hate evil. If we love “mankind,” we
will hate all those whom we believe to be enemies of mankind; our
humanism will make us militant in our hatred of orthodox
Christianity. Precisely because of their intense dedication to love,
the “love people” have been the most dedicated and passionate
haters of the 1960s and 1970s.
Moreover, hate in the thinking of the champions of love is not
only a therapeutic catharsis but also a mark of the redeemed.
During the 1950s, it was a sign of election to the heaven of
liberalism to hate Senator Joseph McCarthy; since then, various
other symbols of election have been affirmed, i.e., hatred for
Senator Barry Goldwater, for the war in Vietnam and the cause of
South Vietnam, for South Africa, for President Richard M. Nixon,
Governor George Wallace, and so on. Similarly, conservatives
have had their objects of hate, and each particular conservative
group can sometimes be identified in terms of their enemies, the
people they love to hate.
There is nothing necessarily wrong with hate, nor anything
necessarily right with love. Hate is wrong, if we hate righteousness,
and love is wrong, if we love evil. However, the contrary is not
necessarily true. It is not necessarily right to love righteousness, nor
necessarily right to hate evil, in that both can be a means of
phariseeism. Our Lord made this clear in the Parable of the
Pharisee and the Publican:
10. Two men went up into the temple to pray; the one a
Pharisee, and the other a publican.
149
11. The Pharisee stood and prayed thus with himself, God, I
thank thee, that I am not as other men are, extortioners,
unjust, adulterers, or even as this publican.
12. I fast twice in the week, I give tithes of all that I possess.
13. And the publican, standing afar off, would not lift up so
much as his eyes unto heaven, but smote upon his breast,
saying, God be merciful to me a sinner.
14. I tell you, this man went down to his house justified rather
than the other: for every one that exalteth himself shall be
abased; and he that humbleth himself shall be exalted (Luke
18:10-14).
This parable is very commonly turned into a caricature by
misinterpretations of the Pharisee and his prayer. As a result,
Jewish scholars have been active in correcting the record and
insisting on the importance and character of the Pharisees.1
Moreover, Christ’s parable is very fair to the Pharisees. First, there
is no hint that the Pharisee is lying; Christ presents him at face
value. The man is a moral person who fasts religiously and tithes
very conscientiously. He is a man of very high standards and
dedicated faith. Second, there is no evidence that this Pharisee was
merely doing these things simply out of a sense of necessity and
duty. While all the details of pharisaic legislation often became a
“burden” and a “yoke” (Acts 15:10; Gal. 5:1), they were also seen
as a privilege and a pleasure because of the moral stability and the
freedom that they gave. Every good thing in life has its
burdensome aspects as well as its joys. The ability to sing
beautifully, or to play the violin with mastery, alike involve many
hours of often wearisome practice as well as the pleasures of
performance. Rabbi Klausner gives us a telling statement of the
Jewish attitude towards all the Sabbath regulations of old, and of
orthodox Judaism today:
To be sure, whoever reads all the Sabbath laws in the Mishnah
or Tosephta can easily come to the point of despair because of
the multiplicity of restrictions in them. Yet it is well known
that the Jews enjoyed the Sabbath and were not pained by it; also
today there is no more common expression among the Jews
1. SeeLouis Finkelstein, The Pharisees, 2 vols, Third edition, revised (Philadel-
phia: The Jewish Publication Society of America, 1962).
Salvation by Love and Hate 151
— even among the simplest of them — than the phrase
“enjoyment of the Sabbath.” This is the case to such an extent
that Ahad Ha-Am, one of the most liberal minded of Jews, yet
with all his liberalism a defender of historic Judaism, could
express the following sentiment: “To a greater extent than
Israel has kept the Sabbath has the Sabbath kept Israel.”2
We can agree fully with this without touching the meaning of the
parable. Sociologically, the Pharisee was right; sociologically, he
represented a far higher standard and was accurate in his
self-portrayal; sociologically, the Sabbath did keep Israel, so that
Israel’s keeping of the Sabbath had more than a religious
significance.
The point remains, however, that God was not pleased with
either the Pharisee or with Israel’s Sabbath-keeping, but His
displeasure did not thereby condemn as such tithing, morality, or
Sabbath-keeping. Finkelstein’s defense of the Pharisees is
humanistic, and the subtitle of The Pharisees is “The Sociological
Background of Their Faith.” The sociological importance of the
law cannot be denied: it is of God’s ordination. The primary
reference of the law, however, is to God, and, in God, then to man.
Phariseeism saw the value of the law to man, and it made that
paramount.
Because the Pharisee in the parable saw himself and the publican
sociologically and humanistically, he could see himself quite
logically as superior, and the publican as inferior; he was therefore
grateful and content. The publican, however, saw himself in terms
of the sovereign God and His requirements, and he therefore had
a relationship to God that the Pharisee lacked. The publican came
for grace and salvation, not for sociological justification but theistic
justification, which he received.
By turning to the twentieth century scene, we can understand
both Phariseeism gone to seed and the belief in salvation by love
and hate more clearly. Sweden has carried further than any other
country the socialization of man after the manner of Aldous
Huxley’s Brave New World, as Huntford demonstrates. It has taught
2. Joseph Klausner, From Jesus to Paul (New York: Macmillan, 1943), 500.
its people to love the collective and to hate individualism. It has
unified the people in their love for and contentment with Sweden
by depicting the United States as the wicked and evil monster of
the world. A ritual of hate and protest is thus regularly encouraged.
Huntford states that
Swedish conscience is, in fact, catharsis through ritual hate. It
is akin to the “two minute hate” of Nineteen Eighty-Four.
Indeed, during the Vietnam war, the popular Swedish dislike
of President Johnson had something of the grotesque fury
against Goldstein in Orwell’s novel. “I feel so emancipated,” a
Swedish housewife once said in a newspaper interview after a
particularly violent demonstration before the American
embassy in Stockholm3
This is phariseeism which would have put the Pharisees to shame.
It is, however, a logical development of the humanistic and
sociological frame of reference. Something less than God is made
the center and the standard, in this case the Swedish socialist state.
The enemy and sin are then defined, not in terms of God, but in
terms of the new standard. Justification, then, comes in doing the
will of the new god and hating the enemies of that god. The
Swedish housewife, in taking part in a planned demonstration
against the United States, was affirming her love of the Swedish
socialistic state and her hatred of the United States. As a result, she
felt “emancipated,” freed and clean: she had experienced briefly an
emotional justification.
In this, she was very little different from many people all over the
world who find their justification in similar ritual hatred. “Mental
health” always improves in a popular war, and suicide declines,
because people find a pseudo-salvation in love of country and in a
hatred for the enemy.
For socialists, a good man loves socialism and hates capitalism.
For conservatives, a good man hates communism and loves
capitalism. For the “liberal,” “populist,” and champion of
“democracy,” the good man loves “the people” and hates all
“special interests.” The “good man” in all three definitions may be
3.Roland Huntford, The New Totalitarians (New York: Stein and Day, 1972),
341.
dishonest, sexually immoral, and a liar, but he is on the right side
and is therefore in the camp of the redeemed, despite his faults,
whereas the hated enemy may be honest, chaste, and a man of his
word, but he is still a bad man because the standard of love and
hate so orders it.
The Pharisees, at least, had a more moral judgment. Their
standard, however, even where most faithful to Scripture in the
outward sense, still used God’s law for its humanistic and
sociological value. The criterion present in both Pharisees and
non-Pharisees was clearly stated by Caiaphas, the high priest, who
brought the disputing factions to unity by bringing their ultimate
standard into focus: “it is expedient for us, that one man should die
for the people, and that the whole nation perish not” (John 11:50).
At this point, the Pharisees and the Swedish housewife meet.
Those who shouted to Pilate against Jesus, “Crucify him, crucify
him” (Luke 23:21), may well have gone home feeling
“emancipated” for their eloquent witness for the peace and
freedom of Israel.
Some champions of love will protest that we have not touched
on their position, which calls for a more erotic and physical
exercise of love. Brown believed that man must be regenerated, i.e.,
he must become a child again. According to Freud, “childhood
remains man’s indestructible goal.” The child is the man of the
future. “Wisdom directs us to childhood — not only to the
immortal wishes of childhood for the substance of things hoped
for, but also to the failure of childhood for the cause of our
disease.” Moreover, “Culture originates in the denial of life and the
body,”4 so that a return to life means a denial of culture and an
affirmation of the body. The death of culture was predicted by
Henry Miller, the death of the city, the nation state, the machine,
and much else; and in its place, the occult and the erotic will find
full expression in man.5 Brown felt that “Utopian speculations,
such as these of Henry Miller, must come back into fashion,” if
man is to solve his problems.6
4.
Norman O. Brown, Life Against Death, The Psychoanalytic Meaning of History
(New York: Random House, 1959), 32, 110, 297.
5. Henry Miller, Sunday After the War (New York: New Directions, 1944), 154f.
Henry Miller, the champion of sexual love, is eloquent in his
hatred. On the second page of Tropic of Cancer, he declared,
This then? This is not a book. This is libel, slander, defamation
of character. This is not a book in the ordinary sense of the
word. No, this is a prolonged insult, a gob of spit in the face
of Art, a kick in the pants to God, Man, Destiny, Time, Love,
Beauty.... what you will. I am going to sing for you, a little off
key perhaps, but I will sing. I will sing while you croak, I will
dance over your dirty corpse.7
Miller looks for the rebirth of man through a moral erotic love. He
calls for the ruthless destruction of all the past, of religion, morality,
and culture, to make way for freed man.8 Like Walt Whitman, he
looks for a world where man will be free to eat, drink, “love,” or
copulate as placidly as the animals.
Is this possible? Can man attain this state of undiluted love
(whether interpreted sexually or not), and have the moral
unconcern he desires? As long as man sees himself and his love as
ultimate and determinative, so long will he also be consumed with
hate, unremitting hate. The reason is a simple one: when man
makes himself ultimate, he has no Sabbath. When man claims to be
ultimate, he cannot disengage himself from the world and partake
of Sabbath rest. His world is then his handiwork supposedly, and
it becomes his burden.
However, when man bows before the sovereign God as ultimate,
as Lord and Creator, man then can sabbath. He can disengage
himself from the world and from men, knowing that it does not
depend on him. It is not man’s love or hate, man’s work or
supervision, or man’s planning and government which ultimately
govern and determine reality. Man has his place in the government
of things under God. It is God’s love and hate which are unceasing
and also determinative.
The humanist thus has an intensity to his love and hate: he
cannot disengage himself and rest. Everything depends upon him.
Moreover, because man as a false god can never dominate and
6. Brown, op. cit., 305.
7. Henry Miller, Tropic
of Cancer (New York: Grove Press, 1961), 2.
8. Ibid., 254ff.
control the world, he will therefore always divide it into two realms,
one to love and one to hate, in order to have an enemy to blame
for his failures. If Henry Miller’s dream world were realized,
mankind would be only the more unrestrained and savage in
tearing at itself by designating a new segment as the enemy.
A true Sabbath can only exist in a world created by the God of
Scripture, for only then can man disengage himself from the world
in the happy confidence that its government is absolutely secure.
Where faith in the sovereignty of God and in His victory in time
and in eternity is lacking or is defective, the Sabbath among
Christians shrivels into a monastic withdrawal and retreat from the
world. Among the ungodly, it disappears. Not surprisingly, Aldous
Huxley, who saw the direction of humanistic civilization, proposed
some years ago a new kind of Sabbath, the drug experience.
The drug experience is closely tied to humanism, to “a new faith”
whose essential belief is that “God is Man.”9 Charles Baudelaire, in
his drug experience, felt, “I am a God!”10 Thus, under drugs,
although the fears and the doubts can often run riot, the hope of
the humanist to be his own god also finds expression. At the same
time, the drug experience removes the man from the world he
claims to be god over, and as a result he finds it a substitute for the
Sabbath, a disengagement from the world. A “bad trip” means that,
instead of disengagement, conflict took possession of the man.
The lack of a Sabbath haunts the humanist. Sometimes the
results are ludicrous. Rousseau said, of the place where he first met
Madame de Warens, “Often have I moistened it with my tears and
covered it with kisses. Why cannot I enclose with gold the happy
spot, and render it the object of universal veneration? Whoever
wishes to honor monuments of human salvation would only
approach it on their knees.”11 What had meaning for Rousseau was
of necessity “universal,” because man is ultimate and is his own
universal. Therefore, all men must venerate as a monument of
9. William
Braden, The Private Sea, LSD and the Search for God (Chicago: Quad-
rangle Books, 1967), 17.
10. David Ebin, editor, The Drug Experience (New York: The Orion Press, 1961),
37.
11. Whit Burnett, editor, The Scarlet Treasury of Great Confessions (New York: Pyr-
amid Books, 1958), 62.
human salvation a fact of purely personal and erotic significance to
Rousseau. The Romantic movement was thus given to
universalizing private lusts into cosmic facts. All the same, the
Romantics, however much dedicated to “eternal love,” were
notable for the short duration of their loves. We are told of Liszt
and Lola Montez, that “In Dresden, she got Liszt, the great lover
of the age, and so wore him out that one night he locked her in a
hotel room and fled, leaving a substantial sum to pay for the
furniture he knew she would break.”12 Whether the reasons have
been physical or emotional exhaustion, human relations of all kinds
have suffered at the hands of humanism, in that no disengagement
short of a break is possible where the Sabbath is lacking. The
Sabbath disengagement prevents us from expecting too much of
ourselves, or others, or of the world. The Sabbath, by requiring our
disengagement, compels us to recognize that only God is sovereign
and absolute, and therefore to expect too great a hope from man
and the world is to demand of them what they cannot give. Under
God and within the framework of the Sabbath, we and others, and
the world around us, can be rich in joy and fruition, but only as we
see all these things under God.
In the modern era, humanism has turned to one area of life after
another with messianic hopes therein, only to be disillusioned. One
writer described his sexual activities with a woman he called “L” in
these terms:
With L. the battle was joined; she wanted normal sexual
relations as something morally desirable as well as
romantically wonderful; but she was incapable of being
satisfied, by the many men also who preceded me. Sexually she
liked toughs; she regarded like many of her class and
background orgasm as the fruit of affectionate violence-, she
later developed overt masochism. She had wonderful
intellectual conceptions of sexual apotheosis, the despair of
her lovers. She was reduced to becoming the impotent pilgrim
of the orgasm, and an extraordinary example of
12. Brad Darrach, “Beautiful and Be Damned,” a review of Ishbel Ross, The Un-
crowned Queen, in Time, vol. 99, no. 20, 15 May 1972, 86.
socio-experiential retribution against “over-
spiritualization.”13
To deny the Sabbath, and the Lord of the Sabbath, is to over-
value some aspect of human experience or person and to demand
some kind of apotheosis of man’s choosing. The denial or neglect
of the Sabbath is the over-valuation of man and man’s activities. It
gives to man’s love and hate an importance they do not merit, a
decisiveness they cannot have, and a burden they cannot carry. The
Sabbath is the festival of the redeemed: on that day he can rejoice,
not only in the happy results of what he does (1 Cor. 15:58), but
also in the final determination of all things by the sovereign and
omnipotent God.
13. Burnett, op. cit., 264, from the memoirs of Philip O’Connor.
XVII
Buddhist Salvation
The Buddhist plan of salvation, or, more accurately, escape, is

self-consciously or unconsciously a present factor in the mind of
Western man. It is of importance, therefore, that it be analyzed and
understood. Its essential faith is this: “All existence involves
suffering; suffering is caused by desire, especially the desire for
continuance of existence; the suppression of desire therefore will
lead to the extinction of suffering.”1 In brief, the will to live must
be suppressed so that man can be delivered. The evil for Buddhism
is not sin: it is suffering, and because suffering arises from the
desire to live, the will to live must be suppressed.
It is important to know that Gautama Buddha, the founder of
Buddhism, was a prince, born to luxury. He lived in a civilization
of considerable wealth and ease. Both his culture and Gautama the
man held a pessimistic view of life, regarded the world as illusory
or an illusion, and life as a burden to be escaped rather than as a
gift to be enjoyed. Moreover, the most prominent fact in the life of
Gautama Buddha was his overwhelming sense of self-pity because
life involved the possibility of suffering. The idea that suffering and
deprivation can exist at all was for him intolerable; life and God
had to be renounced for permitting or ordaining even a single cry
of pain.
Since the time of Rousseau, this same impulse has been very
strong in Western man. A telling example of this is Fyodor
Dostoyevsky, who wrestled against this impulse to self-pity in
himself and gives us some ugly portraits of its implications in his
novels. This self-pity leads to an existential fury against suffering
which is murderous.
In Ivan Karamazov, Dostoyevsky vividly portrayed this intense
self-pity and absorption with suffering. Ivan cites case after case of
1. C. A. F. Rhys Davids, “Buddha,” in James Hastings, editor, Encyclopaedia of

Religion and Ethics, vol. II, 882.
159
monstrous examples of evil, especially against helpless children, in
order to indict God and life. Ivan declares,
Listen! I took the case of children only to make my case
clearer. Of the other tears of humanity with which the earth is
soaked from its crust to its centre, I will say nothing. I have
narrowed my subject on purpose. I am a bug, and I recognise
in all humility that I cannot understand why the world is
arranged as it is. Men are themselves to blame, I suppose; they
were given paradise, they wanted freedom, and stole fire from
heaven, though they knew they would become unhappy, so
there is no need to pity them. With my pitiful, earthly,
Euclidian understanding, all I know is that there is suffering
and that there are none guilty; that cause follows effect, simply
and directly; that everything flows and finds its level — but
that’s only Euclidian nonsense, I know that, and I can’t
consent to live by it. What comfort is it to me that there are
none guilty and that cause follows effect simply and directly,
and that I know it — I must have justice, or I will destroy
myself. And not justice in some remote infinite time and
space, but here on earth, and that I could see myself.... 2
In brief, the universe must meet Ivan’s standard, because Ivan’s
autonomous mind reserves the right to pass the ultimate judgment
on all things. There should be no suffering in Ivan’s world,
especially no suffering by any innocent person or child:
What do I care for a hell for oppressors? What good can hell
do, since those children have already been tortured? And what
becomes of harmony, if there is hell?... I don’t want the mother
to embrace the oppressor who threw her son to the dogs! She
dare not forgive him! Let her forgive him for herself, if she
will, let her forgive the torturer for the immeasurable suffering
of her mother’s heart. But the sufferings of her tortured child
she has no right to forgive; she dare not forgive the torturer,
even if the child were to forgive him! And if that is so, if they
dare not forgive, what becomes of harmony? Is there in the
whole world a being who would have the right to forgive and
could forgive? I don’t want harmony. From love for humanity
I don’t want it. I would rather be left with the unavenged
suffering. I would rather remain with my unavenged suffering
2.Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Brothers Karamazov (New York: The Modern Li-
brary, 1937), 252f.
Buddhist Salvation 161
and unsatisfied indignation, even if I were wrong. Besides, too
high a price is asked for harmony; it’s beyond our means to pay
so much to enter on it. And so I hasten to give back my
entrance ticket, and if I am an honest man I am bound to give
it back as soon as possible. And that I am doing. It’s not God
that I don’t accept, Alyosha, only I must respectfully return
Him the ticket.3
Ivan wants ultimately a universe of harmony, but only if there is
total harmony all the way. He wants justice, but not hell. He wants
no forgiveness of sins, because he refuses to allow sin and suffering
to exist in the world, and, because it exists, it is beyond forgiveness.
Ivan’s one real consideration is not the “love of humanity” he
professes, but, behind the cloak of humility, a love of himself and
an intense self-pity because he must suffer any indignity, evil, or
just recompense. No man should ever experience suffering or
frustration, and, because these things exist, Ivan rejects God and
turns in his “ticket” to heaven. It is a part of Ivan’s inability to
accept reality that he imagines that he has a “ticket” to turn in. Ivan
Karamazov is very much an expression of apostate Western man’s
humanistic mentality, and he is very much a Buddhist.
Turning again to Buddhism, let us examine the implications of
Srimekundan, “The Holy Drama of Tibet,” a religious “Passion”
play of Buddhism. The Great King and Queen of Nepal rule over
a vast realm with sixty kings subject to their power. The King has
500 wives and 1500 “other comforters.” To the King a marvellous
child is born, Srimekundan, who grows up to manifest remarkable
wisdom and gives evidence of becoming a Boddhisattva, a future
Buddha, one on the way to perfect knowledge. Srimekundan vows
one day that he will “never... refuse the wish of any living creature.”4 This,
of course, is really the kind of world that Ivan Karamazov was
demanding from God.
The consequences of Srimekundan’s decision are devastating.
His father’s enemy asks for the surrender of an enchanted jewel
which fulfils all wishes and desires. He is asked for his last morsel
3. Ibid., 254.
4. Richard Rosenheim, The Eternal Drama (New York: Philosophical Library,
1952), 36.
of food and gives it. He is asked for his children, and he surrenders
them (apparently without regard for their wishes), and he is asked
for his eyes and submits to being blinded.
Srimekundan goes through untold hardships of self-denial for
many years as he struggles to become “the Blameless One who
never asks anything for himself.” After eleven years in the desert,
he is tempted to return to Nepal. He answers,
If you wish to return, return.
I will remain until the hour strikes twelve.
Thus I have sworn.
I have to drink the chalice to the dregs.
I have no fear of death.
What is composed of parts will not endure.
I shall not give away what I have wrought from countless
incarnations.
Were I to listen to the smallest selfish wish just now,
The fruit of all I have endured,
My righteous coming back to God would be at once forfeited.
The Great Adversary repents and returns the stolen jewel, and the
Brahman who is used to gain the jewel from Srimekundan kneels
before him, now a blessed Boddhisattva, saying,
You are the reborn Buddha — blessed be he yesterday, today
and in eternity!
You are the Way, that leads all creatures on the eight-fold
pathway of redemption!
You are the Light, that fills the world!
You are the Chariot, that carries man from life to life!
You are the Sword, that shall destroy the six transitional stages
of existence and becoming!
O Thou, whose is the Power and the Glory and the Kingdom,
I worship Thee!5
Srimekundan, then, gets back everything he lost, his eyes, children,
and his princely rights, and he is then transported to Nirvana.
This religious play tells us, in a religion without God, what man
demands that God should be, one who “never refuses the wish of
any living creature,” one who rights every wrong precisely as man
5. Ibid., 37f.
Buddhist Salvation 163
would have it, and one “who never asks anything for himself” but
is a God entirely concerned with gratifying man. This is a
consummate humanism and an intense self-pity which demands
that the whole of creation to be reordered in such a way that man
is never hurt or offended.
God must be remade in the image of man. This was, of course,
a basic impetus of the Romantic movement, of Rousseau and the
sentimental religion of pity he fostered. This belief was clearly
stated in one of William Blake’s Songs of Innocence, “The Divine
Image”:
To Mercy, Pity, Peace, and Love
All pray in their distress;
And to these virtues of delight
Return their thankfulness.
For Mercy, Pity, Peace, and Love
Is God, our father dear,
And Mercy, Pity, Peace, and Love
Is Man, his child and care.
For Mercy has a human heart,
Pity a human face,
And Love, the human form divine,
And Peace, the human dress.
Then every man, of every clime,
That prays in his distress,
Prays to the human form divine,
Love, Mercy, Pity, Peace.
And all must love the human form,
In heathen, turk, or jew;
Where Mercy, Love, & Pity dwell
There God is dwelling too.
Here is no sovereign God, but a god made after man’s imagination,
in terms of man’s self-pity and his self-pitying sense of need.
Biblical terminology is invoked for an anti-Biblical conclusion.
Now as in Buddha’s day, humanism begins by declaring that man
shall be his own god, and ends in self-pity and a fear of life.
The God of Scripture, however, makes it clear that not only is
He the maker of heaven and earth and all things therein, but He
also fully ordains all the terms and conditions of life. In Zechariah
10:1-5, God declares why the Jews were suffering so grievously (v.
2). They had forsaken God for false gods, and as a result were in
serious trouble. They were asked to pray to God, who controls
nature totally, and He promised to send them rains to relieve their
drought (v. 1). God made clear His anger against the false
shepherds of His people, and His principle of judgment is
summarized thus by Moore: “They who are first in crime, will be
first in punishment.”6 God promises to deliver His repentant
people, with leaders from their own midst, and to destroy their
enemies (v. 5). This deliverance, as well as the judgment, is entirely
from God and His anointed, out of whom come all their leaders,
their oppressors, and their deliverance. The ultimate and absolute
determination of all things is in the hand of God. Man is
responsible, and God is sovereign. The mystery of predestination
is a great one, but the alternatives are monstrosities. When man
retreats from that sovereign God in self-pity, he retreats from life
and reality. Buddha’s way has meant the centuries-old bondage of
Asia and its inability to live with reality. It has meant the suicidal
retreat of self-pity and the inability to function for lack of direction.
A world in which no living creature is ever refused anything is a
world of anarchy and ruin. Those who hunger for such a world are
asking for death.
6.Thomas V. Moore, A Commentary on Zechariah (London: Banner of Truth

Trust, 1958), 160.
XVIII
Degradation
In Genesis 3:1-5, we have, very plainly stated, Satan’s plan of

salvation. Its essence is basically this: man can become his own
god, independent from God the creator, and man can decide for
himself what constitutes good and evil. God the creator is trying to
prevent his creatures, men and angels, from realizing that they
possess God’s powers and can strike out on their own and create
their own world of law and also live forever in spite of what God
has declared. This program has not changed. As against God, man
sets himself up as his own god. Philip Blair Jones has commented
on this, pointing out that
Cant and equivocation aside, the world’s battle is being fought
between two armies. On the one side is the Religion of
Humanity; on the other is Christianity in its splendor,
Calvinism.
“He who believes in God without reserve, and is
determined that God shall be God to him, in all this
thinking, feeling, willing — in the entire compass of his life
activities; intellectual, moral, spiritual — throughout all his
individual, social, religious relations — is, by force of that
strictest of all logic which presides over the outworking of
principles into thought and life, by the very necessity of the
case, a Calvinist.”
So spoke Dr. B. B. Warfield in 1909 at Princeton Seminary for
the four hundredth anniversary of the birth of John Calvin.
Substitute the words “man” for “God” and “humanist” for
“Calvinist” in the above quote and the followers of
Humanity’s Religion are contrasted with their opponents.1
Moreover, as against God’s law, man proclaims his freedom from
law, and his right to make his own law. Basic to the satanic faith is
1. Philip Blair Jones, “Christ and His Pretender,” Westminster Chapel (Houston,
Texas), 22 May 1972.
165
the denial of any validity to God’s law; the only valid law is that
which a man makes for himself, the law of his desires and wishes.
Again, “Ye shall not surely die” is still Satan’s plan. Men are
certain that, with sufficient scientific advance, death will be
overcome and God’s decree nullified. All that man needs is enough
time, and he shall rival and surpass the God of Scripture.
Very clearly also, Satan insisted that God was a liar, selfishly and
jealously guarding His Godhood to prevent anyone else from
realizing their own divinity. “Yea, hath God said, Ye shall not eat
of every tree of the garden?... Ye shall not surely die: For God doth
know that in the day ye eat thereof, then your eyes shall be opened,
and ye shall be as gods (or, as God) knowing good and evil” (Gen.
3:1, 4-5).
This same point is again made by Satan to God with respect to
Job:
9. Doth Job fear God for nought?
10. Hast not thou made an hedge about him, and about his
house, and about all that he hath on every side? thou hast
blessed the work of his hands, and his substance is increased
in the land.
11. But put forth thine hand now, and touch all that he hath,
and he will curse thee to thy face. (Job 1:9-11)
Satan’s indictment of Job is really an indirect indictment of God.
First, Satan is indicating that God is wrong about Job (Job 1:8) and
Job’s character. Satan clearly professes to have greater insight into
reality than does God. Implicit in Satan’s contempt for Job is a
greater contempt for God. Second, Satan’s charge is that Job, like
every other man, is only concerned with self-interest. There is no
morality or righteousness in Job’s stand, according to Satan; having
been richly blessed by God, Job is simply being pragmatic and
selfish in worshipping God, because that honor accorded to God
serves Job’s self-interest. Remove protection and blessing from
Job, Satan declares, and “he will curse thee to thy face.” Satan, of
course, proves to be radically wrong: Job, while perplexed at the
calamities which befall him, still retains his faith and trust in God:
“Though he slay me, yet will I trust in him” (Job 13:15). It was the
Degradation 167
false idea of God and God’s justice held by his friends that Job
protested against.
Third, what Satan says about Job he is really saying about God, in
whose image man is made. Satan confuses aseity, self-being, with
egoism and selfishness. In speaking to Eve, he had plainly accused
God of lying to man to prevent man from becoming a god. God
was supposedly jealously and selfishly guarding divinity and life as
though He alone had an unrestricted right to them. For Satan, Job
was selfish and egocentric, and God was as well. “Skin for skin, yea,
all that a man hath will he give for his life. Put forth thine hand
now, and touch his bone and his flesh, and he will curse thee to thy
face” (Job 2:4-5). Satan was here projecting his own views on to
God and to Job. For Satan, the goal was and is to be his own god,
his own universe, and his own determiner of good and evil, and this
is his program for all men. Let all “do their own thing” without any
interference from God.
To prove his point about God, it was necessary for Satan to
degrade Job, to prove that Job was only capable of raw self-interest,
and to prove thereby that God was wrong both about Job and
about His own being. For the same reason, Satan was the accuser
of Joshua, trying to make of that high priest’s sins an evidence of
apostasy and a common cause with Satan (Zech. 3:1-5). Similarly,
the temptation of our Lord by Satan was consistently an appeal to
self-interest, power, and prestige; surely, Jesus would succumb to
so masterly an appeal to His self-interest!
It is clear that many theologians have been radically wrong in
their interpretation of Satan (and, accordingly, of God) by failing
to see the meaning of his appearance in Job. Consider these absurd
and blasphemous comments of E. S. P. Heavenor concerning
Satan in Job 1:6-12:
We are not to look for any “full-dress” doctrine of Satan as
depicted in orthodox theology. He does not appear as a fallen
angel but has regular access to heaven (i. 6, ii. 1). The name
Satan (6) is preceded by the definite article and is rendered by
“the adversary” in Moffatt. Prof N. H. Snaith summarizes his
role by saying: “He is God’s Inspector-of-man on earth and
man’s adversary in heaven.” He is a divine agent whose duty is
to give the closest attention to human virtue and vice. He
appears as the supreme cynic of the heavenly court.2
The purpose of Satan’s actions against Job was to degrade Job to
Satan’s level, to reduce Job to a person whose only and entire
motive was self-interest and egoism. All the calamities visited upon
Job had no other purpose than to force Job to reveal that he was
really no more different from Satan than any of Satan’s cohorts.
Their purpose was to demonstrate that both Job and God operated
purely in terms of self-interest, each his own world and law, only
conceding to others what self-interest dictated. Job, Satan wanted
to prove, did not serve God for nought: he expected the rewards
and paid God in worship and praise. God in turn blessed Job in
order to have the satisfaction of Job’s bowing and scraping,
whereas Satan’s plan is honest freedom for every man to be his own
self-centered world and law.
Satan’s purpose, then, is to prove his point by degrading a saint
of God before God and man, to demonstrate that what God and
His servants regard with horror is the reality of things and simply
to be accepted and enjoyed.
Jacques Barzun gives us a vivid example of this delight in
degrading. Wordsworth’s serious and moralistic life and poetry are
an offense to most humanistic scholars, and, judging by their
classroom comments, many find such evidences of character an
offense in any great literary figure. When it was discovered in the
twentieth century that Wordsworth had an illicit relationship in his
youth which led to an illegitimate daughter, a Harvard scholar,
according to Barzun, received the news with the comment, “It
makes him seem like one of us.”3 The thesis is, let us all be bastards
together; why pretend to something more than a man bent on
getting all he can, in contempt of God and man?
Politicians thus appeal in moralistic terms to the mob that they
often despise, for the people want nobility and morality to cloak
their naked self-interest. Privately, they commonly express
2. E. S. P. Heavenor, “Job,” in F. Davidson, A. M. Stibbs, and E. F. Kevan, ed-
itors, The New Bible Commentary (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Eerdmans, 1953),
388f.
3. Jacques Barzun, The House of Intellect (New York: Harper, 1959), 43.
Degradation 169
cynicism concerning moral absolutes. Man’s basic motive is held to
be, “What’s in it for me?” This certainly is largely true of fallen
man, who has adopted Satan’s hypothesis. It is still a deformation
of man’s true nature and a burden upon it. Sin is a disease, a moral
disease, a cancer in man which dooms him to death. It is not the
nature of his original being, but a cancerous growth within it.
Barzun calls attention also to this aspect of the novel, a product
of the modern world and usually very humanistic: from its earliest
years, says Barzun, the novel “has persistently made war on two
things — our culture and the heroic.”4 Education has also been at
war with our Christian culture and against excellence. Increasingly,
in the twentieth century, teaching has been aimed at producing a
mind cynical of the past and its great men, a mind sitting always in
a judgment seat as a god over all else. Barzun, in pointing to the fact
that, in our society, “the notion of excellence” is fading, observes,
This is surely the result of spurring the critical spirit while
leaving it undirected, of “thinking for oneself ” without
encountering the objections of a better thinker. I once had
occasion to tell a group of graduate students that any of them
would be lucky to achieve the fifth or sixth rank among
historians. The remark was prompted by their dissatisfaction
with all they knew: Gibbon was a bore, Macaulay a stuffed
shirt, Hegel and Michelet were fools, Carlyle and Buckle
frauds — this from students who could not write ten pages of
readable and properly documented narrative. Pointing out that
even second and third-rate men, such as Milman, Bancroft, or
Grote, were the superiors of these students’ own instructors,
who were by definition superior to the students themselves,
was a sobering thought quite foreign to their experience.5
Our concern, however, is more directly with the undiluted urge
to degrade. It is well known that perverts are usually intensely
concerned with involving others in their offenses, both by
seduction and by a reinterpretation of the actions of others. Thus,
some reputed scholars have held that everyone has homosexual
impulses and phases; others make similar claims in terms of their
4. Ibid.,
74.
5. Ibid., 126n.
own predilections. One man, a lecher and an atheist, spoke proudly
of his honesty: all men, he held, are secretly lechers, and all men in
their hearts know that God is a myth, and only he was honest
enough to admit to both. Thus, all men are, according to him, as
bad as he is, so that there is nothing wrong with his position, since
it is normal. Moreover, by his “honesty,” he had given himself a
position of eminence over all others! This is, in essence,
self-righteousness. Self-righteousness is an assertion that righteousness is
self-derived and that it is man's own accomplishment in terms of his own
standards. This means that self-righteousness involves a prior claim
to be one’s own arbiter over right and wrong. The temptation of
Satan (Gen. 3:5) was thus the essence of self-righteousness.
Self-righteousness is thus at war against God’s righteousness and is
an indictment of God’s law in favor of man’s own do-it-yourself
law. It will seek to degrade man by proving to man that God’s law
is not possible of attainment, that it is in reality a frustration and a
limitation of man, and that man must recognize that total egoism
(such as Max Stirner advocated) is the true and healthy way of life.
Klossowski has pointed out that, for the Marquis de Sade, God
was a necessity to justify his evil: “To the extent that God can be
viewed as the original guilty party who attacked man before man
could attack him, to that extent man has acquired the right and the
strength to attack his neighbor.” For Sade, the source of all evil was
God, and evil is a freedom to be one’s own god and to cut the
restrictions on man’s development imposed by God. The goal of
Sadean man is “the exaltation of the ego to its height.”6 The aseity
of God requires for the satanist the aseity of man; man must be his
own god, dependent completely on his own will, his own
potentiality, and his own desires. For man to bow to any will or law
outside of himself is to sin against his own being. God, it is thus
held, is the great egoist, and therefore man can be no different.
Whether it be Job, or a girl or boy next door or a man or woman
seeking to obey God’s law, they must be proven to be hypocrites:
“Skin for skin, yea, all that a man hath will he give for his life” (Job
6.
Pierre Klossowski, “Nature as Destructive Principle,” in Austryn Wainhouse
and Richard Seaver, editors, The Marquis de Sade: The 120 Days of Sodom and other
Writings (New York: Grove Press, 1966), 67, 86.
Degradation 171
2:4). They must be degraded in terms of their moral goals, or else
they and that moral law stand as an indictment of these satanists.
There is an intensity to Satan’s remarks about Job: the man was an
offense to Satan, because Job’s God was an offense to Satan. His
goal was to make Job curse God to His face, to throw over God’s
law and righteousness, and to manifest an open and unbridled
egoism. There is more than testing of Job in Satan’s mind: there is
hatred.
Men who fail to recognize such hatred may well share it.
XIX
Judgment
In 2 Chronicles 36, we have a brief but vivid account of the

collapse of Judea and its destruction by the armies of Egypt and
then Babylon. With less caution than a blindfolded man in a
strange place, staggering wildly because doubly blinded by
drunkenness, the Southern Kingdom blundered to destruction.
Governed by the will to death which marks the sinner, Judea
unerringly did the wrong thing in each crisis and invited its own
death. The Chronicler gives us a blunt commentary on the disaster:
11. Zedekiah was one and twenty years old when he began to
reign, and reigned eleven years in Jerusalem.
12. And he did that which was evil in the sight of the LORD
his God, and humbled not himself before Jeremiah the
prophet speaking from the mouth of the LORD.
13. And he also rebelled against king Nebuchadnezzar, who
had made him swear by God: but he stiffened his neck, and
hardened his heart from turning unto the LORD God of
Israel.
14. Moreover all the chief of the priests, and the people,
transgressed very much after all the abominations of the
heathen; and polluted the house of the LORD which he had
hallowed in Jerusalem.
15. And the LORD God of their fathers sent them by his
messengers, rising up betimes, and sending; because he had
compassion on his people, and on his dwelling place:
16. But they mocked the messengers of God, and despised his
words, and misused his prophets until the wrath of the LORD
arose against his people, till there was no remedy.
17. Therefore he brought upon them the king of the Chaldees,
who slew the young men with the sword in the house of their
sanctuary, and had no compassion upon young man or
maiden, old man, or him that stooped for age: he gave them
all into his hand.
18. And all the vessels of the house of God, great and small,
and the treasures of the house of the LORD, and the treasures
of the king, and of his princes; all these he brought to Babylon.
173
19. And they burnt the house of God, and brake down the
walls of Jerusalem, and burnt all the palaces thereof with fire,
and destroyed all the goodly vessels thereof.
20. And them that had escaped from the sword carried he
away to Babylon; where they were servants to him and his sons
until the reign of the kingdom of Persia.
21. To fulfil the word of the LORD by the mouth of Jeremiah,
until the land had enjoyed her sabbaths: for as long as she lay
desolate she kept sabbath, to fulfil threescore and ten years. (2
Chron. 36:11-21)
In analyzing this account, certain things can be noted. First, the
reign of Zedekiah is described as “evil in the sight of the LORD.”
Commentators and historians usually speak of Zedekiah as a good
but weak man. Zedekiah, referred to as a “brother” or kinsman of
Jehoiachin, was the son of Josiah, the brother of Jehoiakim, and the
uncle of Jehoiachin (1 Chron. 3:15; 2 Kings 24:17). He was thus
closer to the godly standards of King Josiah. Ball wrote of
Zedekiah, that “Zedekiah was not personally unfavorable to the
prophet Jeremiah, and consulted him more than once; but he was
too weak and timorous to stand by the prophetic counsel, in
defiance of his princes who were intriguing with Egypt.”1 Ball was
right in his account, which makes all the more important God’s
verdict. In God’s sight, weakness and cowardice are evil. Zedekiah’s
evil is contrasted to the word of God from the mouth of Jeremiah,
and we are told that Zedekiah refused to humble himself “before
Jeremiah.” For a king to admit sin and bow before the word of a
prophet of relatively humble origin did require humility, but that
humility would be to God and His word. As against this, Zedekiah,
in his evil pride, pitted his own wishes and word. The weakness of
Zedekiah sprang from evil.
Second, Zedekiah, in swearing loyalty to Nebuchadnezzar, swore
by God. We are told that “Nebuchadnezzar made him swear by
God,” but this involved no coercion. It was the necessary
condition to accepting the kingship. Nebuchadnezzar quite
logically wanted a prince who would not ally himself rebelliously
1. C. J. Ball, “II Chronicles,” in C. J. Ellicott, editor,

Commentary on the Whole Bi-
ble, vol. III (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Zondervan, n.d.), 452.
Judgment 175
with Egypt. Zedekiah accepted those terms and then was faithless
to them. As Ball noted,
When Nebuchadnezzar appointed Zedekiah vassal-king of
Judah, he would naturally make him swear fealty to himself by
the God of his fathers. The fact is not specially recorded in
Kings; but the prophet Ezekiel makes it the point of a
prophecy against the king and his grandees (Ezek. xvii. 11-21;
comp. especially verse 17 “mine oath that he hath despised.”).2
The importance of this oath in God’s sight is very clearly brought
out by Gardiner in his commentary on Ezekiel 17:15 and 19:
The faithlessness of Zedekiah and his court to his own sworn
covenant was an act, in addition to all his other wickedness,
especially abominable to God. The sanctity of an oath had
always been most strongly insisted upon in Israelitish history.
It must be remembered that even when, as in the case of the
Gibeonites (Josh. ix.), the oath had been obtained by fraud,
and centuries had passed since it was given, God yet sorely
punished the land for its violation (2 Sam. xxi. 1, 2) and in this
case the king had been more than once Divinely warned
through the prophet Jeremiah of the danger of his treachery....
Zedekiah’s oath and covenant to Nebuchadnezzar are called
the Lord’s, because made in the Lord’s name, and also because
He had commanded them. Rebellion against Nebuchadnezzar
was, therefore, under the circumstances, apostasy from the
Lord Himself.3
The implications of this are very important. Oaths and vows
confront us in many areas of life, in marriage, civil government,
and in the church. The meaning clearly is that in every case our
oath and vow are, first of all, to God, and, second, to the persons
and institutions involved. Social order is primarily of God’s
ordination and purpose, however much it is to man’s advantage.
Every violation of an oath made in terms of that order is thus
apostasy from God Himself. Zedekiah is thus arraigned as an
apostate both by Ezekiel and the Chronicler. This apostasy was
2. Ibid.
3. F. Gardiner, “Ezekiel,” in Ellicott, Commentary on the Whole Bible, vol. V, 248f.
also manifested in the pollution of the temple “after all the
abominations of the heathen.”
Third, we are told that God warned His people repeatedly,
“because he had compassion on his people, and on his dwelling
place.” The mercy of God and His concern is thus not only
extended towards people, but towards His temple, and, as is later
apparent, towards the earth itself. Because the people “despised his
words” and abused God’s prophets and messengers, God’s anger
“arose against his people, till there was no remedy.” As Ball points
out, the Hebrew word for remedy is literally healing. “God is said to
heal, when he averts calamity” (2 Chron. 30:20).4 Here again we see
how closely interrelated health, deliverance, victory, and salvation
are. At this point, there was neither any health in the people, nor
healing for them, so that “the wrath of the LORD arose against his
people, till there was no remedy.” The sickness of sin precipitated
the wrath of God. “There was no remedy” for their sin when
God’s anger arose, because their only remedy at any point was the
favor and grace of God. No other remedy exists. Their contempt
of God was thus their contempt of their only remedy or salvation.
The consequence was the destruction of the kingdom, the people,
and the temple.
Fourth, the captivity was of seventy years duration in fulfilment
of Jeremiah’s prophecy (Jer. 25:9-12; 29:10), during which time the
land “enjoyed her sabbaths.” The Hebrew word for enjoyed can be
rendered “made good” or “discharged,” as a debt.
The meaning is that during the long years of the exile, the land
would enjoy that rest of which it had been defrauded by the
neglect of the law concerning the sabbatical years (Lev. xxv.
1-7). The following words, “as long as she lay desolate she kept
sabbath” (literally, all the days of the desolation she rested) are taken
from Lev. xxvi. 34, 35.5
A strict reckoning would mean that the law of the sabbath of the
land was not observed for 490 years (seventy times seven), or ever
since the institution of the monarchy in Israel (490 + 588 = 1,078
B.C.). The reckoning of the seventy years is from the fourth year
4. Ball,
op. cit., 453.
5. Ibid.
Judgment 177
of Jehoiakim, when Jeremiah declared the judgment (Jer. 25:1, 12),
to the first year of Cyrus, and the return under Zerubbabel in 536
B.C., from 606-536 B.C. There may have been local and individual
observances, but, as a national legal requirement, the law was
apparently neglected from the beginning of the monarchy.
The goal of the captivity was thus the restoration of the land,
and, after judgment, of the people of the land. Thus, the
catastrophe of the Fall of Jerusalem was both a culminating
judgment in the history of Judah to that date, and also the
restoration or redemption of the land. The judgment itself, and the
captivity which ensued, were important steps in the redemption of
Judah. Here again we have the coincidence and necessary
interrelationship of judgment and salvation. God’s redemptive
purpose has the land in view as well as the people of the land. The
high estate of man under God, celebrated in Psalm 8, does not in
the least obscure God’s concern for the land and its creatures.
Let us now examine the relationship of the oath to the
redemption of the land. When the covenant was first made, all
Israel vowed before the Lord, saying, “All that the LORD hath
spoken we will do” (Ex. 19:8). When Moses renewed the covenant
with the younger generation before the entry into Canaan, not only
was the law restated, but the oath of allegiance also invoked curses
and blessings (Deut. 27, 28). This oath was not set aside by Christ’s
covenant but rather assumed. The choice of twelve disciples for
the twelve tribes of Israel, and the insistence at every point of
continuity with the old covenant, make it clear that, instead of
setting aside the covenant and its law, the purpose of Christ was to
put it into force (Matt. 5:17-19).
Because the goal of salvation is total, judgment is also total. The
resurrection of the body, the new creation, and the total
regeneration of all things requires that judgment be total also, so
that only that which is totally redeemed inherits the Kingdom of
God. The extent of a judgment is thus an indication of the extent
of the restoration in view, unless no remnant remains to be
restored.
In this case, the number seventy represented both a literal span
of time in captivity, actually fulfilled, and also a symbol of fulness.
“Symbolically the number, as the multiple of seven and ten,
represents the highest measure of completeness (comp. Matt. xviii.
22).”6 The Fall of Jerusalem under Zedekiah was thus a sign
pointing to Jerusalem’s greater fall in the Jewish-Roman War of
A.D. 66-70. It meant that the setting aside of the old Israel for the
new was under way. The Chronicler points to this in the conclusion
of his history:
22. Now in the first year of Cyrus king of Persia, that the word
of the LORD spoken by the mouth of Jeremiah might be
accomplished, the LORD stirred up the spirit of Cyrus king of
Persia, that he made a proclamation throughout all his
kingdom, and put it also in writing, saying,
23. Thus saith Cyrus king of Persia, All the kingdoms of the
earth hath the LORD God of heaven given me; and he hath
charged me to build him a house in Jerusalem, which is in
Judah. Who is there among you of all his people? The LORD
his God be with him, and let him go up. (2 Chron. 36:22-23)
1 Chronicles 1:1 reads, “Adam, Sheth, Enosh.” The Chronicler
began his history with the first man and concluded with a world
empire serving God. The Fall is thus in process of being undone
even as the consequences of the Fall unfold in history. Otto
Zockler commented on this very ably, stating that
It is of no small consequence that the Old Testament
Chronicles, the most comprehensive work of sacred literature,
closes with such universalistic views of Israel’s call of salvation
to all nations, and of the future union of all in faith in Jehovah
as the one and only true God. Its end thus turns to its
beginning. Setting out from the first Adam, the author
concludes his work with the consoling expectation of the
future and not far distant, but rather, in the reconstruction of
the theocracy promoted by the edict of Cyrus, already
guaranteed and necessarily involved restitution of the blessed
kingdom of the second Adam, the Redeemer of the world.7
6. E. H. Plumptre, “Jeremiah,” in
Ellicott, Commentary on the Whole Bible, vol. V,
86.
7. John Peter Lange, Commentary on the Holy Scriptures, Chronicles (Grand Rapids,
Michigan: Zondervan, n.d.), 278.
Judgment 179
The point in this rather involved statement is a very important one.
The reconstruction of the temple pointed ahead to the true temple,
Jesus Christ. The first Adam is supplanted by the last Adam, and
the Fall of Jerusalem and its temple foreshadowed their
replacement by the true Israel of God and His Son.
While the seventy years was symbolic of total judgment, the
actual Fall of Jerusalem and the subsequent captivity was not a total
judgment. Calvin, in commenting on Jeremiah 25:11, called
attention to this aspect of mercy:
And that a time of seventy years was fixed, it was a testimony
of God’s paternal kindness towards his people, not
indiscriminately towards the whole multitude, but towards the
remnant of whom he had spoken elsewhere. Then the
Prophet means, that however grievously the Jews had sinned,
yet God would execute only a temporary punishment; for after
seventy years, as we shall see, he would restore them to their
own country and repair what they had lost, even the
inhabitation of the promised land, the holy city, and the
Temple.8
Judgment thus is not only the other side of the coin to salvation,
but it is also an act of grace and mercy to the people of God.
However devastating the Fall of Jerusalem was to the faithful
remnant, without that fall no remnant would have remained.
8.
John Calvin, Commentaries on the Book of the Prophet Jeremiah and the Lamentations,
vol. III, John Owen, translator (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Eerdmans, 1950),
256.
XX
Change
In Hebrews 11:10, we are told that Abraham “looked for a city

which hath foundations, whose builder and maker is God.” Few
passages have been subjected to more platonistic interpretation
than this, especially as it continues to declare of the saints of old,
that
13. These all died in faith, not having received the promises,
but having seen them afar off, and were persuaded of them,
and embraced them, and confessed that they were strangers
and pilgrims on the earth.
14. For they that say such things declare plainly that they seek
a country.
15. And truly, if they had been mindful of that country from
whence they came out, they might have had opportunity to
have returned.
16. But now they desire a better country, that is, an heavenly:
wherefore God is not ashamed to be called their God: for he
hath prepared for them a city. (Hebrews 11:13-16)
The reference here is to Abraham, Sarah, Isaac, and Jacob: they
knew that the promises included a material realm, the Promised
Land, but also much more. They died in faith, confident that God
would keep His word concerning the possession of Canaan, their
growth into a nation, and universal blessings through their race.
They rejoiced in that fulfilment from afar, and they saw it as the
counsel of God. Because they did not yet possess Canaan, they
were strangers and pilgrims on earth. By their confession of their
pilgrim estate, “they acknowledged that they were in a foreign land:
as ‘sojourners’ that they had no permanent possession, no rights of
citizenship.” They saw that their citizenship was in heaven. “The
fulfilment of the promise in its highest form is set before us as
social and not simply as personal. God prepared for His chosen not
a home but a ‘city,’ a Divine Commonwealth.”1
1. B. F. Westcott, The Epistle to the Hebrews (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Eerdmans,
1952), 364.
181
The patriarchs felt no disdain for the earth and the flesh; to them
it was good, and a blessing of God’s ordination. They regarded
with faith and joy the promises of God concerning this earth and
the triumph herein of the people of the covenant. Their desire for
heaven was not a contrast of heaven and earth, with earth as the
illusory realm, but a complement of the one to the other. There is
no hint of a platonic matter and form dialectic here, but rather of
a journey from one area of God’s Kingdom to another. The one is
fallen and therefore beset with many problems; the other has not
been affected by the Fall; their hope for the earthly arena meant in
part the undoing and eradication of the Fall. The contrast is thus
not between the material and the spiritual but between the fallen
and the unfallen.
Furthermore, the contrast is not between the changing and the
unchanging. The world’s problem is not change but sin. In fact, a
love of permanency is very frequently an aspect of man’s sin.
It is necessary to analyze the main perspectives of religions and
culture towards change in order to understand the significance of
Biblical faith and salvation. First, a major perspective can be best
described by reference to the Greek view of change. Aristotle, for
example, regarded perfection as self-sufficiency and permanence. A
city-state should be able to sell to others without needing to buy.
Its constitution should be inflexible and unchanging as far as was
humanly possible, and changes should aim at achieving an
unchanging state. The appeal of communism to the Greek mind
was largely due to the fact that it offered a “final” order in which
the structure was fixed by the rulers and little left to the vagaries of
individuals. For the Greeks, the purpose of law was to fix things
into a measured permanency. The static and the immutable were
regarded as higher than that which fluctuates and changes. In fact,
the real is unchanging and permanent, whereas the changing is
associated with the unreal. As Baker observed,
The Greeks had resolved the problem of evil into terms of
permanence and change. In general, their position was that
matter, which is unstable, is evil; that reason, which enjoys an
Eleatic permanence, is good. Evil is not a creation of man’s
perverted will but merely a characteristic of matter. Following
Change 183
Parmenides, they had consistently held matter in opprobrium
as the very antithesis of reason, Idea, Form, conceptual reality.
In Neoplatonism, an earth-fleeing philosophy, the derogation
of matter had reached its apex — and it was from
Neoplatonism that Augustine learned most about the
perfection of pure insubstantial being, about the wickedness
(that is, the nonentity) of matter. “For in Matter,” said
Plotinus, “We have no mere absence of means of strength; it
is utter destitution — of sense, of virtue, of beauty, of pattern,
of Ideal principle, of quality. This is surely ugliness, utter
disgracefulness, unredeemed evil.”
This view of matter resolves a dualism into a monism: evil,
that is, matter, becomes of no consequence metaphysically
because it has no existence. Anything that can rightly be said
to exist exists by participating in the very source and center of
being; and whatever does not has no existence. Matter,
unillumined by being, is uncreated, and its evil is of
deprivation and deficiency.2
Still under the influence of neoplatonism when he wrote his
Confessions, St. Augustine concluded, concerning things, that “as
they are, they are good; therefore whatsoever is, is good.”3 Much
later, Alexander Pope, in his An Essay on Man, held that “Whatever
is, is right.” In the twentieth century, Lenny Bruce declared, “Truth
is, ‘what is’.”4
Such a view negates progress, because reality as it exists is good
and right. Nothing, then, logically requires changing. The decay
and collapse of Greek civilization was not accidental: it was a
product of its philosophical resistance to change and growth.
A second perspective which is very prominent in the modern
world is a belief in change for the sake of change. Change is
identified with growth, and it is therefore welcomed and courted.
Every change is countered with another change to prevent
permanency and to maintain the principle of change as the solvent
and solution of society. The result is perpetual warfare against the
2.
Herschel Baker, The Image of Man (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1961),
163f.
3. Augustine, Confessions, Bk. VII, ch. xii.
4. Lenny Bruce, “How to talk dirty and influence people,” Playboy, vol. XI, no.
1., January 1964, 182.
existing situation because it represents “the establishment” and
hence an element of permanency and order.
However, where there is no principled change, the old proverb
is clearly true, that, the more things change, the more they are the
same. Where change is exalted, the result is revolution for the sake
of revolution. The changes become meaningless and faddist.
Society becomes like a rudderless ship: it cannot drive to a goal, but
is rather driven by the winds. Instead of direction, drift governs.
The Biblical perspective is hostile to both the Greek and modern
views. The essence of any philosophy which ascribes permanency
and changelessness to anything or anyone other than God is to
arrest history and handicap or suppress growth and development.
However, precisely because man and the world are fallen, change is
a social and personal imperative. For man to resist change means to
resist growth and progress. It means that man has frozen into a
virtue an aspect of the fallen order and has thereby precluded its
correction.
Change, however, must be principled or else, like Greek
concepts of permanency, it gives to a fallen order a stamp of
approval in its sin. To say that whatever is, is good and right, is to
deify the fallen world. To assume that there is a virtue in the
changing forms of sin is to say that man and the world have
inherent in them the ability to undo the Fall. This is, of course, the
thesis of revolution.
The modern era has made revolution respectable and even
noble. This has been due to its humanistic view of society, which,
as Seaman pointed out, enabled revolutionists “to rally to their side
men who in other centuries would have shunned them as
criminals.”5 The most fundamental of the propositions of this new
faith was “the perfectibility of man.” This was an anti-Christian
and revolutionary faith, because Christianity denies that man apart
from God can either regenerate or perfect himself in, or beyond,
history. As Seaman has so well stated it, the revolutionaries held
that
5.L. C. B. Seaman, From Vienna to Versailles (New York: Coward-McCann,

1956), 33.
Change 185
The factors which alone prevented man from becoming
perfect were the superstitions of the Church and the tyranny
of kings, which between them condemned man to spiritual
and temporal slavery. As Rousseau had put it in the explosive
first sentence of the first chapter of his Social Contract, “Man is
born free and is everywhere in chains.” If the rest of
Rousseau’s Bible of Revolution consisted largely of verbose
obscurities, the direction in which he pointed was clear
enough for his like-minded contemporaries and successors.
The end result of proclaiming the doctrine of human
perfectibility to a generation who were simultaneously told
that they were free men condemned to slavery, but that they
were slaves whose liberation was at hand, was the point of
view which Shelley expressed and others acted on: that the
world would be a perfect place as soon as the last king had
been strangled with the guts of the last priest. It was to be as
easy as that.6
Seaman is right: they did and do believe that it is “as easy as that.”
Revolutionists advocate change away from Christianity as the
answer to all their problems. The abolition of God and of good and
evil will supposedly usher in the golden age. If it does not arrive,
the answer is to execute, destroy, and change, because change will
somehow lead to perfection. The belief of revolutionists, as
Seaman adds, was that “social and political wrongs, whatever they
were, could be put right by a communal act of violence.” It was and
is a faith that “through revolution man could find a short cut to a
paradise on earth.”7
This is an unprincipled faith in change, in that no principle
governs change; it is a principled theory of change in that change,
all by itself, becomes the principle.
In this respect, faith in change or revolution is closely connected
with the theory of evolution, which, well before Darwin, found
expression in Hegel and others before him. For evolution, change
is a working towards a new and higher form, so that every
departure from a norm is a potential step forward. Deviation or
change then becomes a new normality, and, in terms of this,
6. Ibid.,
34.
7. Ibid., 36f.
Durkheim, in The Rules of Sociological Method, could write “On the
Normality of Crime.” The criminal was for him a social pioneer,
establishing a new normality and the next step in man’s social
evolution. “How many times, indeed, it is only an anticipation of
future morality — a step toward what will be!” Crime, therefore,
“must no longer be conceived as an evil that cannot be too much
suppressed.” In fact, “If crime is not pathological at all, the object
of punishment cannot be to cure it, and its true function must be
sought elsewhere.” It follows then that, for sociology to be a true
science of things, “the generality of phenomena must be taken as
the criterion of their normality.”8
Evolution thus tends to deify change for its own sake. It is by
faith committed to the belief that things evolve or move forward
and upward. The means to this progress is change, and continual
change by random selection produces the new and higher form. As
a result, only by welcoming or permitting all change can the
progressive change emerge. By faith, evolution holds to random
experimental change as the means to progress. This means that by
faith it denies devolution. Why should not change as readily lead
downward as upward? There is no inherent reason why, in a
universe of chance variations, change should always be beneficial.
On the contrary, it is more likely that change will be destructive
where chance variations occur. Evolutionists have thus denied
God while retaining a strong faith in the providence of God
governing all things. As a result, evolutionists are implicitly
revolutionaries.
They are, moreover, to all practical intent, devolutionists in the
consequences of their thinking. How long can a doctor maintain
living patients if his prescriptions are made on the basis of chance
selection, or the roll of dice? How long can a society based on such
a faith remain alive? Will it not rather produce a society of criminals
and Marquis de Sades, dedicated to the perpetual destruction of all
law and order? Order remains in the modern world only insofar as
8. Emile Durkheim, “On the Normality of Crime,” from The Rules of Sociological
Method (Glencoe, Illinois: The Free Press, 1950), 65-75. Reprinted in Talcott
Parsons, Edward Shils, K. D. Naegele and J. R. Pitts, editors, Theories of Society,
vol. II (Glencoe, Illinois: Free Press, 1961), 874-875
Change 187
an older religious faith still governs the minds of many peoples.
Destruction has become the faith of modern man, to change by
destroying.
The third perspective towards change is the Biblical one. Devout
Christians have often been guilty of the infection of Greek
philosophy and have regretted or bewailed change, whereas
modernistic churchmen have shared an evolutionary faith in it. The
Rev. Henry Francis Lyte, in his beautiful hymn, “Abide With Me”
(1847), held to this element of platonism as a virtue, writing,
Change and decay in all around I see;
O Thou who changest not, abide with me.
Why should change and decay be a matter of inevitable grief, any
more than a matter of inevitable joy? It must be held that, in a fallen
world, change and decay must come in order to shake the world out
of its sin. Nothing could be more horrible and evil than a fallen
world which neither changes nor decays, but continues securely in
its sin. The purpose of the expulsion from the Garden of Eden,
and then later of the Flood, was to prevent man from having
security in sin, in lawlessness, and the purpose of change was and
is to ensure man’s continual shaking and crisis. Change, therefore,
cannot be condemned as such, although change in itself is
meaningless, in that perpetual change can be purposeless or
misguided.
For the orthodox Christian, permanence and changelessness
belong to the sovereign God, who declares, “I am the LORD, I
change not” (Mal. 3:6). This unchanging God gives to man His
infallible word as the principle whereby men and societies must be
changed. Regeneration is the work of sovereign grace, and only the
regenerate man can make effectual changes. Changes are made by
the redeemed man in terms of the law of God, to bring man and
society ever into closer conformity to God’s standard.
Thus, the Christian must affirm permanence and changelessness,
but never with respect to the creation or any aspect thereof. He
must affirm change, but never with respect to God and His word.
There can never be growth and progress without changes which
are governed by the law-word of God. The Christian will thus
conserve that which is godly and conforms to the law of God,
working always to reform it in terms of that word. He will uproot
whatever is not of God, not by revolution but by reconstruction.
The Christian thus cannot in principle require changelessness
from the social order. He is not a reactionary. For him past and
present represent in varying degrees the situation of a fallen world.
His standard is the word of God and the reconstruction of all
things in terms of it. He will thus be oriented to the future and to
the new creation.
The patriarchs were men who moved forward as pilgrims and
sojourners. They did not exalt the past or present, but looked
forward to the promises of God concerning the possession of
Canaan by their descendants, and, ultimately, to the possession of
all the earth by their heirs in faith. They rejoiced that death would
gather them to their fathers in God’s heaven, wherein they would
be beyond sin and death. Their faith made them recognize that the
present orders must go, because God’s order must replace them.
They died in this faith, the confidence that God would in His own
time accomplish these things, and, in terms of that faith, they were
pilgrims and strangers, looking for that city “which hath
foundations, whose builder and maker is God” (Heb. 11:10).
The Christian, thus, is not at war with change but with sin, which
wants to change all else but not itself. The Christian must welcome
and work for all change which has as its principle the word of God.
Without true principles, change is merely destructive. Regeneration
is more than change: it is a new creation. The regenerate man can
work out the meaning of salvation in his life and society only by
means of principled change. A Biblical doctrine of salvation will
thus be essentially tied to a belief in change in terms of God’s law.
XXI
Salvation by Slavery
St. Paul, in Galatians 2:1-9, reviews certain aspects of the

opposition to himself by certain “false brethren,” or, in Lenski’s
translation, “pseudo-brethren.” These men presented Paul as a
perverter of the faith and as one under condemnation by the
apostles in Jerusalem. They were thus deliberately falsifying the
decisions of the Council of Jerusalem (Acts 15), whereby Paul
stood approved. These opponents of St. Paul are commonly called
Judaizers and Pharisees within the church. Much more was at stake
than these names imply. Their theology called for justification by
law, and St. Paul resolutely opposed their misuse of law; the law has
its place as the way of sanctification, not justification. In a
non-Biblical religion we would expect a non-Biblical way of
salvation, but for professed Christians to offer another way of
redemption has a greater offense to it. The hostility of the
Pharisees had at least the merit of consistency. For one to profess
Christ while denying Him is clearly a greater offense than simple
hostility, in that it strikes not only at Christ but also aims at
destroying His flock.
Lenski’s translation of Galatians 2:3-5 brings out Paul’s
contention concerning these people bluntly:
But not even Titus, the one with me, although he was a Greek,
was compelled to be circumcised even on account of the
pseudo-brethren sneakingly brought in, such as sneakingly
come in to spy out our liberty which we have in Christ Jesus
in order that they might completely enslave us; to whom we
yielded no, not for an hour by way of the submission (they
demanded) in order that the truth of the gospel might
continue on for you.1
St. Paul contrasts two conditions here, Christian liberty versus
slavery. He states, moreover, that the purpose of the enemies of the
1. R. C. H. Lenski, The Interpretation of St. Paul’s Epistle to the Galatians, to the Eph-
esians, and to the Philippians (Columbus, Ohio: The Wartburg Press, 1946), 74.
189
gospel is complete enslavement. This is strong language. Is it St.
Paul’s interpretation of the actions of his opponents, colored by his
feelings and beliefs, or is it an accurate description of their
intentions? All who believe in the inerrant authority of Scripture
will hold that St. Paul gives us an accurate description.
The question then arises, why should anyone believe in slavery
as a way of salvation? Can and do people actually believe in slavery
as salvation? Clearly, the answer is, yes, in most of history, men
have clung to slavery, but it must be recognized that they have
rarely been honest enough to call their choice slavery.
Let us examine the matter theologically to begin with. A
common question and complaint asks, why does God allow so
much evil to prevail? Why does He not simply make impossible
many of these enormities and horrors which are so common to
man’s history? To analyze the implications of these questions is to
discover at once their hostility to freedom. To ask God to create a
world in which man cannot sin, nor suffer for his sins, is to say that
God should not create man at all but simply automatons. A
creation in which there is no possibility for man to reap the
whirlwind of retribution for his sins is a world in which no man
exists, for man, created in the image of God, is created with the
possibility of presuming that this image is the reality of godhood
rather than its communicable attributes. Some will object, but God
predestined man to be what he is as we know him; could He not
have predestined man to be man without evil and without suffering
and death? God did indeed predestine man in terms of His
sovereign counsel. In terms of His foreknowledge, God knew the
potentialities and possibilities of man both to sin and to obey.
There are possibilities inherent in a creature who bears the image
of God but is in no sense a god, but entirely a creature. From all
eternity, God’s predestination and foreknowledge have been
operative, and “whom he did foreknow, he also did predestinate”
(Rom. 8:29). As Hodge observed, “Believers are called in
accordance with a settled plan and purpose of God.” Moreover,
“The predestination follows, and is grounded in the
foreknowledge.”2 All the possibilities inherent in creation are there
2. Charles Hodge, Commentary on the Epistle to the Romans, Revised edition (New
York: A. C. Armstrong and Son, 1893), 445, 447.
Salvation by Slavery 191
because of God’s purpose; reality is what God created it to be, and
no other possible reality exists. There are no possibilities outside of
God. The foreknowledge, therefore, had no reference to any
possibilities within man which God supposedly recognized. Calvin
stated this clearly:
But the foreknowledge of God, which Paul mentions, is not a
bare prescience, as some unwise persons absurdly imagine, but
the adoption by which he had always distinguished his
children from the reprobate. In the same sense, Peter says that
the faithful had been elected to the sanctification of the Spirit
according to the foreknowledge of God. Hence those, to
whom I have alluded, foolishly draw the inference, — That
God has elected none but those whom he foresaw would be
worthy of his grace. Peter does not indeed flatter the faithful,
as though every one had been elected on account of his merit;
but by reminding them of the eternal counsel of God, he
wholly deprives them of all worthiness. So Paul does in this
passage, who repeats by another word what he had said before
of God’s purpose. It hence follows, that this knowledge is
connected with God’s good pleasure; for he foreknew nothing
out of himself, in adopting those whom he was pleased to
adopt; but only marked out those whom he had purposed to
elect.3
To see the implications of a contrary position, let us also examine
Sanday’s comment on Romans 8:29. Sanday said in part:
Predestinate. — This is the term which seems most to
interfere with human free-will. Foreknowledge does not
interfere with free-will, because the foreknowledge, though
prior in point of time, is posterior in the order of causation to
the act of choice. A man does not choose a certain action
because it is foreknown, but it is foreknown because he will
choose it. Predestination (the word is not adequately
translated) appears to involve a more rigorous necessity. All we
can say is that it must not be interpreted in any sense that
excludes free-will. Free-will is a postulate on which all the
superstructure of morals and religion must rest.4
3. John Calvin, Commentaries on the

Epistle of Paul the Apostle to the Romans (Grand
Rapids, Michigan: Eerdmans, 1948), 317f.
4. W. Sanday, “Romans,” in C. J. Ellicott, editor, Commentary on the Whole Bible,
vol. VII (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Zondervan, n.d.), 238.
Sanday at least made his choice with his eyes open: he knew the
meaning of predestination, but he made not the triune God the
postulate, but the supposedly sovereign free-will of man. If God
and everything in “morals and religion” are “superstructures” to
free-will, then man has become ultimate and is his own god. For
Sanday, the world of possibility is man’s world, which is exactly
what those who cry out against God’s world, with its possibility of
sin, suffering, and grief, are asking for, a world made after man’s
imagination. For the orthodox Christian, the only possibilities open
to man are created and foreordained possibilities, nothing more.
Man’s freedom is a secondary and creaturely freedom, never the
freedom of ultimacy and sovereignty.
Ultimately, the world of possibilities rests entirely on God’s good
pleasure. In terms of God-given presuppositions, we can interpret
and understand the implications of things, and their coherency and
direction, but in their origin they rest on God’s good pleasure
entirely.
Here we come to an amazing irony. Those who resent God’s
sovereignty and find His world of possibilities, with its evil and
suffering, untenable in terms of their hopes, are to all practical
intent claiming to be their own god. They want a world made in the
image of man’s imagination. This means also insisting on man’s
ultimate freedom to be his own god and to establish his own
universe of possibilities in terms of his own will. From such a world
these men would exclude sin, suffering, and death. The only
possibilities must be good ones.
Man cannot, however, become a god merely because he insists
on playing god. In no way can he ever become a god; he is and
always will be a creature. His attempt to play god is sin (Gen. 3:5),
and sin is slavery. Not surprisingly, the sinner’s idea of salvation
looks very much like slavery, because it is slavery. In seeking to be
his own god, he is not only denying the true God, but also falling
into slavery to sin and death. This “spirit of bondage” of slavery
(Rom. 8:15) is then manifested in all his life and thought. The
sinner believes in slavery, although he may call it by other names.
Salvation by Slavery 193
One socialist from a communist state expressed his belief in
slavery with rare candor to Tyrmand:
“I do not want freedom,” a visitor from Eastern Europe told me
in Paris. “I’m afraid of it. I feel old and tired. Freedom means
choice, the possibility of estimating and the necessity to select.
It also means constant effort in judging and evaluating life’s
ways, attitudes, and stands. It opens the perennial question:
‘Who am I and where go I?’ which can be answered in so many
ways that it gives me a headache. In Communist Eastern
Europe, I’m perfectly aware of who I am and what I can or
cannot do, which is the perimeter of my functions and desires.
My telephone is bugged, but I know it; it’s a blessed certitude,
and I’m not exposed to improper temptations of intimacy.
Freedom here is a nauseous multitude of shampoos among
which I have to choose. I don’t want so many! I want one
under government control, very difficult to find and obtain.
My needs and wishes then make sense. This we call peace of
mind.”5
This is an honest statement of a feeling which many share, but few
voice. For all too many people, salvation is slavery in some form,
to a state, to a controlling spouse, group, or overlord of some sort.
Paul was thus right. His opponents had as their gospel the
overthrow of “our liberty which we have in Christ Jesus in order
that they might completely enslave us.” On the one hand, they
were denying the sovereignty of God in salvation, and, on the
other, they were enslaving men to human ordinances as their
salvation. The hostile intent of these men to Christ’s liberty for His
people is expressed in the words, “came in privily to spy out our
liberty which we have in Christ Jesus” (Gal. 2:4). These men were
offering justification by works of the law, and, as Paul makes clear,
“by the works of the law shall no flesh be justified” (Gal. 2:16).
Their goal, however, was not God’s law, however wrongly applied,
nor was it their man-made ideas of law. St. Paul tells us plainly that
their purpose was “that they might bring us into bondage.” (Gal.
2:4). The instrument at the time was their misinterpretation of the
law. The purpose, more important than the instrument, was enslavement. In
5.Leopold Tyrmand, Notebooks of a Dilettante (New York: Macmillan, 1970),
120f.
other eras, other instruments have been used, and are being used,
but the purpose remains: enslavement. Dostoyevsky’s Grand
Inquisitor is thus a telling insight into this purpose.
Man wants to play god and yet be a slave, to claim the dignity and
power of absolute freedom and yet have all the advantages and
irresponsibilities of slavery. The goal is slavery, and he achieves it
readily and continuously, but with no happiness. The world of
possibilities is not of his making, and none of God’s possibilities
match man’s imagination in its call for all the benefits of paradise
in the precincts of hell.
XXII
Outlaw Cultures
Just before entering the promised land, Moses “called all Israel,
and said unto them,”
1. Hear, O Israel, the statutes and judgments which I speak in
your ears this day, that ye may learn them, and keep, and do
them.
2. The LORD our God made a covenant with us in Horeb.
3. The LORD made not this covenant with our fathers, but
with us, even us, who are all of us here alive this day. (Deut.
5:1-3)
There are some very interesting implications in this last verse.
Waller undermines them by his interpretation:
Not... with our fathers, but with us. — That is, according to
the usage of the Hebrew language in drawing contrasts, not
only with our fathers (who actually heard it), but with us also,
who were in the loins of our fathers, and for whom the
covenant was intended no less than for them; and, in fact,
every man who was above forty-two at the time of this
discourse might actually remember the day at Sinai.1
Wright’s comment is an assumption of not only continual
contemporaneousness for the covenant, but also ritual renewal:
It would appear more likely that the words here were derived
from a liturgy used in a service of covenant renewal, or at least
reflect liturgical practice in which the covenant was renewed
with each generation, so that the latter identified itself with the
original group at Horeb. All biblical worship has as its center
this element of historical memory, participation, and
identification.2
F. W. J. Schroeder, in Lange, made a statement free of the dubious
aspects of such an analysis while emphasizing contem-
1. C. H. Waller, “Deuteronomy,” in C. J. Ellicott, editor, Commentary on the Whole
Bible, vol. II (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Zondervan, n.d.), 22.
2.G. Ernest Wright, “Deuteronomy,” in The Interpreter’s Bible, vol. II (New
York: Abingdon, 1953), 363.
195
poraneousness: “But Moses intends to say, not the fathers,
whoever they may be, but we are the people, whom it concerns,
whose faith and obedience comes into view (iv. 4).”3 Thomas Scott
held to a similar emphasis:
The Sinai-covenant was different from that made with
Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob; for that was personal, and related
mainly to spiritual blessings; this was national, and especially
stated the terms, on which the possession of the promised
land, and other privileges, would be continued to Israel. But
this language may also mean, that the covenant made at
Horeb, was as obligatory on the generation whom Moses then
addressed, as on those who were immediately present, when
the law was delivered, and the covenant ratified. For they were
a collective body, incorporated by charter, the obligations and
advantages of which descended to the successors of those to
whom it was first conceded.... Thus all, favored with
revelation, are bound to submit to it, equally with those to
whom it was first given.4
All of this is true enough, but it overlooks the plain statement of
Moses that “The LORD made not this covenant with our fathers,
but with us, even us, who are all of us here alive this day” (Deut.
5:3). It is not continuity which is stressed but discontinuity; the
original covenant at Sinai was not with the generation then present
at Sinai. Von Rad recognizes this discontinuity while still trying to
bridge it:
In view of Deut. 2. 14ff. we are surprised by the remark that
this covenant was made not with an earlier generation but with
those who are now alive. Even though the death of the Sinai
generation had occurred meanwhile and lay outside the
speaker’s view, his intention is clear enough. He wants to bring
the event of the covenant-making which already belongs to
the past vividly before the eyes of his contemporaries (cf. a
similar procedure in Deut. 29. 13f.).5
3. John Peter Lange, Commentary on the Holy Scriptures: Numbers, Deuteronomy

(Grand Rapids, Michigan: Zondervan, n.d.), 88.
4. Thomas Scott, The Holy Bible, with Explanatory Notes, vol. I (Boston: Samuel
T. Armstrong, 1830), 532f.
5. Gerhard Von Rad, Deuteronomy (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1966), 55.
Outlaw Cultures 197
This does violence to the text: the covenant was not made with the
generation at Sinai, but with the generation standing before Moses.
How are we to understand this? The generation at Sinai was
physically present when the covenant was made; now only Moses,
Joshua, and Caleb survived of that older generation. If the
covenant was not made with the generation which perished, with
whom was it made?
To understand this, let us review a few aspects of the covenant.
First, a covenant is a treaty between two powers or kings. In this
case, the covenant is an act of grace by the sovereign God for a
people with whom He makes a treaty, binding both to certain
responsibilities. Treaties or covenants in antiquity were normally
between equals. The fact that God made a covenant with man was,
and is, an act of grace, in that the transcendent and omnipotent
creator and Lord of all things bound Himself by law to man. Adam
by his sin broke the covenant; God by His grace renewed it with
His chosen people, and finally was obedient unto death to the
terms of the covenant in the person of Jesus Christ, His only
begotten son, in whom both God and man fulfilled the law of the
covenant. This latter fact must be stressed. Jesus Christ, very God
of very God and very man of very man, represented both parties
to the covenant, and He fulfilled the legal obligations of both. The
covenant was thus put into force by Christ, and hence also His
affirmation that He had come, not to destroy the law of the
covenant, but to fulfil it, to put it into force (Matt. 5:17-19). Second,
treaties or covenants are a form of law and are therefore subject to
all the conditions of law. Obedience to the covenant, treaty, or law
means normal and open relations, whereas a violation of and
contempt for a covenant means not only a severing of
communications, but also warfare. Disobedience to covenant law
is a form of warfare against the other party in the covenant. All
men are either covenant-keepers or covenant-breakers, in that God
established the covenant originally with Adam, so that all men in
fallen Adam are at war with the covenant God, even as all men who
are in Christ are at peace and in communion with the covenant
God. Third, a law-breaker who assumes the guise of an honest
citizen, votes, and outwardly appears to be a pillar of righteousness
in the community, is an outlaw still. Outlaws rarely go about
labelling themselves outlaws; rather, they seek escape by presenting
the appearance of a law-abiding citizenry. The generation of Sinai,
even while the law of the covenant was being given, was busy in
idolatry of a fertility-cult nature (Ex. 32). They were clearly outlaws,
at war with God. The covenant and its law was thus not a pact or
treaty with them, but a declaration of war against them. For the
sake of their elect children, they were brought out of Egypt and
preserved in the wilderness. Because of their outlaw status, they
were kept out of the Promised Land and all perished in the
wilderness. A covenant is a peace pact and a mutual assistance
treaty: no such peace existed between God and the reprobate
generation. Such privileges as they had, and they were many, for
Jacob’s sake, were countered by a firm judgment and sentence of
death against them as outlaws.
When Moses came down from Mount Sinai, it was because God
ordered him to go down to a people who had “corrupted
themselves” with a “molten calf.” God’s declaration of sentence
against them was death, His purpose being “to consume them” and
make out of Moses alone, and his posterity, “a great nation” (Ex.
32:7-10). Moses pleaded for the promised nation to come through
these reprobates, and, as a result, instead of immediate total
destruction, three thousand men were killed (Ex. 32:28), and the
rest perished later in the wilderness. We can assume that, if all of
the outlaw generation had been slain, their children would have
been reckoned as of the tribe of Moses (or of Levi) as far as a
central authority was concerned.
The subsequent history of the Sinai generation underscores their
reprobate nature. They complained about God’s provisions for
them (Num. 11), about the difficulties of taking Canaan (Num. 14),
were rebellious under Korah (Num. 16), used every difficulty as a
reproach against God and Moses (Num. 20-21), quickly adopted
the fertility cult sexual prostitution of Moab (Num. 25:1-6), and, in
many other ways, manifested their outlaw nature. With these open
offenses, God furthered the purge of the outlaws begun at Sinai.
Briefly, there is no covenant, nor covenant peace and
communication, where there is no covenant faith and obedience.
Outlaw Cultures 199
This is the premise of covenant life, peace, and prosperity, as
Moses made clear:
32. Ye shall observe to do therefore as the LORD your God
hath commanded you: ye shall not turn aside to the right hand
or to the left.
33. Ye shall walk in all the ways which the LORD your God
hath commanded you, that ye may live, and that ye may
prolong your days in the land which ye shall possess. (Deut.
5:32-33)
At this point, Von Rad is right: “The breaking of the tables was, of
course, more than an act of emotional disturbance. Moses (in his
office as mediator of the covenant) regards as broken the covenant
which has only just been made, so that the tables handed to him
have become meaningless.”6 Clearly, an antinomian Christian is an
impossibility. Just as clearly, God is at war with every outlaw, and to
deny this by telling sinners that “God loves you” is to join the
outlaw in his lawlessness. God is ready to love the repentant outlaw,
but, as long as he remains an outlaw, unredeemed by the atoning
work of Christ, he is under the wrath of God and sentence of
death. An incident on Sunday, June 25, 1972, in Pontiac, Michigan,
makes clear how deeply outlaw religion has infected the church:
“God loves you,” the preacher said to the youth who stood on
the church alter pointing a gun at his head.
“I hope so,” the bandit replied as he pocketed money from
collection plates in a Sunday holdup at the Christ in Christian
Union Church in downtown Pontiac.
The stickup left the Rev. James Ray Nesselroad and 40
parishioners $400 poorer.
“We weren’t scared,” said 64-year-old parishioner Cecil B.
Tupper. “We seemed to feel that there was someone looking
after us other than ourselves.”
Toward the end of his sermon, the Rev. Mr. Nesselroad said, a
youth in his late teens and another in his early 20s barged
through a side entrance.
6. Von Rad, op. cit., 78.

One of them pulled a pistol and fired a shot into the ceiling.
“This is a holdup, everybody stay in your seats and everybody
get out your money,” one said.
One gunman stood at the entrance guarding the congregation
and the other, brandishing two pistols, walked up to the pulpit
and asked where the collection plates were.
The youth found money in Sunday school offering plates, then
“one of them laid an Army .45 by the side of my head,” the
minister said, and took his wallet.
“Then he took up a collection,” he said. “People held out their
money and he walked down the center aisle taking it.”
The gunman returned to the front of the church and climbed
onto the altar.
The Rev. Mr. Nesselroad said he looked the gunman in the eye
and told the youth, “You know, God loves you.”
“I hope so,” the bandit replied, stuffing money in his pockets.
The minister turned to his congregation, which stood up and
prayed, “Dear God, help these poor boys to realize where a
life of crime will lead them.”
One parishioner said the bandit on the altar “was really
shaking, he could hardly stand up when we started praying.”
While the parishioners were praying, the minister said the
robber who had held him at gunpoint “jumped down and told
us not to follow him. Then he joined his partner and out the
door they went.”
Police are investigating, but the Rev. Mr. Nesselroad and
members of the congregation said they would rather not
prosecute.
“Someone forgot to show them the way to God,” said the
minister.7
It is very clear that we have here a radical antinomianism. We also
have a denial of responsibility, in that Nesselroad felt plainly that,
not the thieves, but “someone” who “forgot to show them the way
7.“Gunman Confronts Praising Minister,” San Gabriel Valley (California) Tri-
bune, 26 June 1972, A3.
Outlaw Cultures 201
to God” was responsible. If man is God’s creature, then God has
given to every man an inescapable sense of responsibility, so that
every irresponsible man is a sinner before God. If man is man’s
creature, then some other man, as his parent, teacher, governor,
molder, or maker must implant responsibility in him. The Christian
cannot affirm this: he recognizes that men can prod or stimulate
responsibility in themselves and others, but they cannot create it,
nor are they the essential key to it. The first and basic guilt in a thief
is always the thief ’s. A thief is an outlaw; as such, he is at war with
God and man, and God is at war with him, even if the Rev. Mr.
Nesselroad is not. A thief may be reconciled to Nesselroad and his
idea of god, but he still remains at war with the living God. The
present prevalent practice of many evangelists of assuring every
reprobate that “God loves you” merely marks them also as outlaws.
Clearly, the covenant is a covenant of salvation. Apart from this
fact, the covenant and its law is a death sentence against all
covenant-breakers. The world outside the covenant is an outlaw
world, a world at war with God and God’s people. Its every aspect
manifests an outlaw character.
To illustrate, the family outside the covenant ceases to be a
covenant institution. Thus, Ray E. Baber defines the family in these
terms, as a social institution:
family. The basic social institution. One or more men living
with one or more women in a socially-sanctioned and more or
less enduring sex relationship, with socially-recognized rights
and obligations, together with their offspring. The four
general forms (or types), in their order of known frequency,
are: monogamy, polygyny, polyandry, group marriage.8
Many simple-minded and heedless parents and pastors see nothing
wrong in youth being taught this kind of definition. After all, they
will argue, this statement does recognize that monogamy is the
most common form of family life. The definition is radically false,
because, first of all, it fails to cite the central fact that the family is a
religious institution and has always been so. Only in the decay of a
8. Ray
E. Baber, “family,” in Henry Pratt Fairchild, editor, Dictionary of Sociology
(New York: Philosophical Library, 1944), 114.
culture, when the religion of humanism de-emphasizes the family
and its religious nature, do we find anything but a religious meaning
in family life. Indeed, all too commonly, the family has had an
undue and false religious emphasis, as in ancestor worship.
According to Zimmerman, the major subject of great world
religions has been the family. Without the religious faith, there is a
“breaking-up of familism.” Adultery, divorce, and homosexuality,
said Zimmerman, are not the cause but symptoms of “a basic
system of negative causation — the lack of faiths and beliefs in the
social system strong enough to enable the social system to continue
to function.”9 Religion and the family are distinct, but inseparable.
As Engels saw, the destruction of religion means the destruction
also of the family.
Second, the family is a basic, and often the basic, law institution. It
is a law-order which most extensively and successfully rewards and
punishes its members; it protects them and also judges them, and
family law has been basic to every society known to man. To define
the family without reference either to religion or to law is to define
an outlaw institution such as humanism envisages.
Third, with reference to “sex relationships,” the Dictionary of
Sociology again misrepresents the facts by finding their legitimacy in
social sanctions. This is a humanistic emphasis on the ultimacy of
man and society as against the ultimacy of God. The sanctions for
sex have been sought in all past civilizations, except in their
collapse, in a supernatural order. Even in the most debased fertility
cults, sexual practices have not been grounded on a social sanction
but on a belief that the nature of the universe required them. In
Biblical religion, sexual regulations are entirely the work of God’s
law, and the goal is not conformity to social sanctions but to the
righteousness of God.
Fourth, the “rights and obligations” in marriage are not “socially
recognized,” but religiously grounded, as is the place and duty of
the “offspring.” Here again the Dictionary of Sociology is not defining
a social reality, but a social goal, not the history of the family, but
the future family as envisaged by humanistic sociology. Its goal
9. Carle C. Zimmerman, Family and Civilization (New York: Harper, 1947), 782.
Outlaw Cultures 203
thus is to establish an outlaw family, the family as an institution
outside the law and governed by personal and social tastes and
predilections. The outlaw family can choose its form or type:
monogamy, polygyny, polyandry, or group marriage, or any other
variation it may imagine. It becomes entirely a matter of taste.
The same is true of the state where it is not a covenant
institution. Turning again to the Dictionary of Sociology for a good
example of humanism, we are given this definition:
state. That agency, aspect, or institution of society authorized
and equipped to use force, i.e., to exercise coercive control.
This force may be exerted in the way of control of the
members of the society or against other societies. The voice of
the state is the law, and its agents are those who make and
enforce the laws. These agents constitute the government.
State and government should be carefully differentiated; the
former includes traditions, political instruments, such as
constitutions and charters, and the whole set of institutions
and conventions that have to do with the application of force.
The latter is a group of individuals entrusted with the
responsibility and equipped with the authority to carry out the
purposes of the state.10
First, it is again apparent that religion is left out of this definition,
this despite the fact that the state has often been (and again is) the
central religious institution in a society, with its officers, rulers, and
its being invested often with divine powers or authority. Second, the
state is essentially defined as force or coercive control, and we are
in fact told that it is the agency of society so authorized and
equipped. This is an absurd statement. That the state has coercive
power is true, but churches and temples have often had coercive
power as well. Even more, historically, the family has exercised
more coercive power than the state in the lives of men. Consider
alone the power of the family in ancient Rome, in India, China, and
Japan until recently, and in many other societies. More people have
experienced physical coercion at the hands of their parents than at
the hands of the state, and a more continuous coercion is exercised
by the family than by any other institution. Third, the Dictionary is
10. Fairchild, op. cit., 307.

gracious enough to include law in its definition of the state, but a
purely humanistic idea of law. What is in view is thus not a
historical definition of the state, but an ideal definition in terms of
a humanistic faith. The state is freed from any law but its own and
is given sanction to pursue its course as an outlaw institution, at war
with God and His covenant people.
The definition of church is only slightly better:
church. (1) An outward organization of an association, or
associations, of believers in a common, dogmatically set,
religious ideal. (2) A building in which Christ is worshipped
and Christianity taught, notably Protestant, the Roman
Catholic being called also Cathedral and Chapel. (3) An
institution which, through symbolic acts and/or ethical
prescriptions, purposes to keep its members constantly aware
of the necessity of religion and its promise — in the Christian
church specifically of redemption through grace and salvation;
which also administers the religious life of the community and
distributes means of healing and comfort.11
This supposed definition requires more criticism than we can here
give to it, but a few comments must be made, in passing. First, until
now, the word “church” has been an exclusively Biblical term, so
that the non-Christian applications of the term in definitions one
and three are not legitimate. Second, since the term “church” is a
Biblical term, the Biblical definition of the Church as the Body of
Christ, the family of God, and the general assembly of the
first-born of God should at least be noted. Third, the marks of a
true church, i.e. a body of worshippers, have been defined for
centuries as the faithful preaching of the word of God, the faithful
administration of the sacraments, and the application of Biblical
discipline. Without these things, we are not talking about the
church in any historical or theological sense. Instead, a purely
humanistic ideal of a denatured church is given us. Such a church
is simply a part of the City of Man and an outlaw institution at war
with the City of God.
11. Joseph H. Bunzel, “church,” in ibid., 40.

Outlaw Cultures 205
The school today is also humanistically-oriented and is anti-law,
anti-god, and anti-family. It is an antinomian and outlaw institution
and is in intent and function revolutionary.12
Vocation is defined by the Dictionary of Sociology as “The
permanent activity which guarantees one a livelihood, and
membership in his particular occupational group.”13 The word
“vocation” comes from the Latin voco, call. Its religious reference is
thus clear. Man’s work is a calling from God, and man is called by
God to work to subdue the earth and to exercise dominion under
God. When man sinned, i.e., when he became a covenant-breaker,
he hid from the voice of God as it called man in the cool of the day
(Gen. 3:8): man had abandoned his calling. Man the
covenant-breaker thinks of work only as a guarantee of a
livelihood, not as a calling from God. Not surprisingly, fallen man
gives an outlaw definition of vocation.
All of this should not surprise us, since fallen man’s definition of
himself is lawless. Turning again to the Dictionary of Sociology, we are
told that man is “The human species as distinguished from
sub-human organisms. Homo sapiens.”14 Instead of defining man
in terms of the image of God, man is defined in terms of his
differences from “sub-human organisms.” There is neither God
nor God’s absolute law in this definition of man. Man is simply a
higher animal. Since there is no God above man, making and
defining man, there is thus no law above and over “homo sapiens.”
He is an outlaw to God and beyond good and evil in his own sight.
An outlaw man will create only outlaw institutions and social
agencies in every realm of life.
Existentialism is an outlaw philosophy, in that it wants life
without the conditions of life. It wants no influence from God or
man to color existence, as though existence were man’s world and
territory. Even existence, however, is God-given and God-created,
so that existence has inherent to it all of God’s terms and law. Not
12. See R. J. Rushdoony, Intellectual Schizophrenia (Philadelphia: Presbyterian and

Reformed Publishing Co., 1966) and R. J. Rushdoony, The Messianic Character
Of American Education (Nutley, New Jersey: The Craig Press, 1972).
13. Ephraim Fischoff, “vocation,” in Fairchild, op. cit., 334.
14. Fairchild, ibid., 182.
surprisingly, existentialism finds itself readily overwhelmed by
pessimism and frustration. The nearest thing to the outlaw estate
that man can achieve is hell, wherein man has no communion with
God and other men, and where he lives only out of his own
frustration and self-contradiction.
In this world, the outlaw, while denying God, affirms God by
mimicry. It has been aptly said that Satan is the ape of God, a
ridiculous imitation who seeks to duplicate God’s work in terms of
the creature’s autonomy. As a result, while a demonic impulse
towards an outlaw world, a world in revolt against God, marks the
covenant-breaker, at the same time there is an urge to imitate
God’s world and God’s law in terms of man’s autonomy. There is
thus an aped law, a law which seeks both to destroy God’s law and
also to supplant it with an imitation of it.
A very brief examination of the Ten Commandments will
indicate the truth of this. The first commandment is, “Thou shalt
have no other gods before me” (Ex. 20:3). This is an assertion of
ultimate and absolute sovereignty; God alone is Lord. As maker of
heaven and earth and all things therein, He alone is absolute
commander of man’s being. All other allegiances are secondary and
are tenable only insofar as they serve Him. The word sovereign
probably comes (through the French) from the Latin super, above;
it is a religious word and its political usage was also religious.
Sovereignty has long been claimed by the state, but it is legitimately
an attribute only of God. The Puritans in America wisely reserved
its use to God and avoided ascribing sovereignty to the state. It is,
however, a theological necessity for an outlaw culture to ascribe
sovereignty to some aspect of the created order, to man or the
state. By denying God, the humanist or atheist does not thereby
deny sovereignty; he merely transfers it to some aspect of his life
and experience. Sovereignty is thus made a very powerful factor in
man’s apostate life and an oppressive force in his social existence,
because that sovereignty is no longer in the supernatural order but
crowding him in the natural order.
The second commandment forbids the worship of graven images,
and their service (Ex. 20:4-6). The outlaw culture creates numerous
idols wherein, as in all idolatry, man bows down to himself and
Outlaw Cultures 207
finds that he is enslaved to other men. Democracy is one such
popular idol. In a declaration of World War II, issued by seventeen
prominent thinkers (whose number included G. A. Borgese, Van
Wyck Brooks, Hans Kohn, Thomas Mann, Lewis Mumford,
Reinhold Niebuhr, and Gaetano Salvemini), it was declared:
Universal and total democracy is the principle of liberty and
life which the dignity of man opposes to the principle of
slavery and spiritual death represented by totalitarian
autocracy. No other system can be proposed to the dignity of
man, since democracy alone combines the fundamental
characteristics of law, equality, and justice.15
The freedom and dignity of man were made more basic and
essential to man than anything else. Man’s relationship to Christ
was apparently regarded as not fundamental to the life of man, but
a matter of personal preference and taste. Democracy was defined,
moreover, as “rational theocracy,” the apotheosis of man:
Democracy, therefore, must be redefined: no longer the
conflicting concourse of uncontrolled individual impulses, but
a harmony subordinated to a plan; no longer a dispersive
atomism, but a purposive organism. It is not a sequence of
shibboleths, a pharisaic lip-service to the disembodied slogans
of freedom and justice. It is the plenitude of heart — service
to a highest religion embodying the essence of all higher
religions. Democracy is nothing more and nothing less than
humanism in theocracy and rational theocracy in universal
humanism. 16
The highest religion is thus the religion of man, humanism, whose
political form is the “City of Man,” or democracy. Clearly, this is
idolatry!
The third commandment forbids taking the name of the Lord in
vain (Ex. 20:7). Their dream, said the framers of The City of Man, A
Declaration on World Democracy, is “God’s Kingdom on earth.” The
supernatural and eschatological Kingdom of God is not meant by
this, nor heaven, “For any religion or doctrine cloaking injustice
15.
Herbert Agar, etc., The City of Man, A Declaration on World Democracy (New
York: The Viking Press, 1941), 27.
16. Ibid., 33.
and misery on earth under the promise of some transcendent bliss
to come deserves the scorn of Marx, who called them ‘the opium
of the people.’” The signers of this Declaration affirmed a
Joachimite third-age idea of the Kingdom, the age of the Spirit in
which all religions are one, and their goal in humanity and
democracy militant and triumphant.17
The goal again is the sabbath rest of the fourth commandment, an
order ensuring world peace, freedom, and prosperity for man. This
world sabbath of man has no reference to Christ, however. The
work of man towards that sabbath is, moreover, redemptive work,
work as man’s salvation, because, for the City of Man, man is his
own savior.
The fifth commandment requires man to honor his father and
mother (Ex. 20:12), but, for the City of Man, the true family is The
Family of Man. (A sentimental book of photographs by Edward
Steichen entitled The Family of Man, has long been in print and is an
eloquent witness to this new faith. Instead of family portraits,
humanistic man has a marked preference for pictures of his
religious family, humanity.) War is waged against the God-created
family in the name of the family of man. The promise of God’s law
is long life; the promise held out to humanity if it unites in the
family of man is world peace and a better and longer life.
The sixth commandment declares that “Thou shalt not kill” (Ex.
20:13), i.e., that man has no right to take life, except as God’s word
allows or requires. This is totally denied by humanists. In their
outlaw culture, man takes life, or allows it, entirely in terms of
humanistic presuppositions. Thus, the unborn babe is murdered by
abortion, and the murderer’s life is spared by a horror for capital
punishment as required by God.
The seventh commandment declares that “Thou shalt not commit
adultery” (Ex. 20:14). For the outlaws, adultery is a matter of
private decision and of no social concern, let alone theological
concern. In a world beyond good and evil, adultery is seen as
simply a form of sexual practice normal to man.
17. Ibid., 34ff., 49, 58.

Outlaw Cultures 209
The eighth commandment forbids theft (Ex. 20:15), but the
outlaw culture makes theft against God and man a basic premise,
in that it exalts the needs of man above law as its guiding premise.
But theft from the state is forbidden!
False witness is forbidden by the ninth commandment (Ex.
20:16), but the outlaw culture bears false witness concerning all
things because it rejects Christ who is the truth (John 14:6).
Similarly, the tenth commandment (Ex. 20:17), which forbids
seizure of what is rightfully our neighbor’s, is set aside by every
outlaw culture because no law can have authority over the will of
man. Man, having claimed that which belongs to God, will not
hesitate to claim that which belongs to his neighbor.
Granted that, outside of hell, no outlaw culture has ever been
entirely true to its presuppositions, nor has any attained full
epistemological self-consciousness, still, the attempts to establish
an outlaw culture have been and are notable in their intensity and
menace.
The outlaw is very readily a fanatic, because he so easily identifies
himself with the new humanistic and entirely immanent
sovereignty. The humanistic intellectuals, according to Massey, are
the new fanatics. Since there is for them no truth beyond man, the
man of intellect is the best judge of and witness to truth. “The
intellectuals do not feel that they are imposing their will on the
country because they believe their aim is the Perfection of the
country’s institutions and traditions.”18 Massey gives an interesting
account of the origins of the heresy of the intellectuals:
Mankind, liberated from poverty by the advent of the age of
technology, saw no limit to what man might achieve. But war,
depression, and other social dislocations blunted this
optimism so that men began to doubt that they alone, or in
combination, could be masters of their own fates. So men
sought a new way. They could not turn to religion, though this
had been their solace when they were so poor that the next
world was the only hope. They still hoped that science and
technology meant a good life for them, even if they could not
18. William
A. Massey, The New Fanatics (New York: National Putman Letters
Committee, n.d.), 3. Reprinted from Mankind Quarterly, December 1963).
achieve this by themselves. Here appeared the ideologies, the
religions of this world. Just as the usual religions offer
certainty and comfort about the next world, the ideologies
offer certainty and comfort about this one. Religions depend
on training, man’s fears of the next world, and on faith. In a
similar way the ideologies depend on indoctrination, man’s
need for security in this world, and on faith. Faith is important.
Even though ideologies are started by men they must not
appear to be mere creations of man. They must appear to have
a scientific, a divine, or an ethical origin that lifts them above
the foibles of mankind. Only in this way can man have faith in
them.19
Massey’s account is not Christian, but it is correct in seeing the
religious roots of our outlaw culture. He fails to see that “the new
fanatics” exceed all others because of their certainty that science
validates their course of action, and because there is for them no
God nor law to judge them for their transgressions. But men do
want a new religion, one which justifies their outlaw status. Ever
since Satan seduced mankind into playing God (Gen. 3:5), men
have created new religions to incorporate their play-acting and to
justify it. Cavell has commented on this quest for a new religion in
twentieth century culture:
This aspect of religion as celebration and play, the Divine
Comedy, Christ as the Fool of God rather than the Tragic
Hero, is the theme of many of the most interesting books in
theology published not only in America but elsewhere in
recent years. Robert Neale’s In Praise of Play remarks on the fact
that the root of “illusion” is “ludere,” meaning “to play,” which
Neale defines as the full and easy use of all our capacities as
human beings — “play” in something like the sense that we
speak of the play of water in a fountain and of ourselves as
playing musical instruments. (The slang expressions “groove”
and “grooving” perfectly express this sense of grace, of a
fitting into what one is doing.)20
19. Ibid., 23.

20. Marcia Cavell, “Visions of A New Religion,” Saturday Review, 19 December
1970, 13.
Outlaw Cultures 211
Such a new religion is an expression of an outlaw mind, at war with
God and His law. Of necessity, it will deny any responsibility to
God. Increasingly, it now also denies guilt:
The students I have spoken with generally find the idea of
guilt unacceptable in every way. They deny the possibility that
they may feel it without being aware that they do; they are
convinced that the guilt they do feel is nothing but the
projection into their consciousness of a false moral system;
and they think that in a healthy society we would be
guilt-free....
The young, like the rest of us, don’t like to feel guilty. They
need to hope. They want to love and be loved. But granted
that society often extracts too much in the way of instinctual
repression, and that our guilt is often excessive and misplaced,
still, the insight of religion in the West that our capacity for
remorse is bound up with our capacity for love seems to me
an important one. For guilt, it says, is the only way we have of
recognizing, with feeling, that we have hurt, or have wished to
hurt, someone we love. And love itself never was easy.21
Cavell gives us a humanistic rationale and justification for guilt; her
students give an equally humanistic condemnation of guilt. Both
ignore its theological significance. Man’s word is the only word in
their world of ideas.
Commenting on the remarks of the murderer, Charles Manson,
Cavell observed:
Manson protests that since the law is not absolute, not divine,
it results in the fiction that guilt can be assigned to one
individual, rather than to society as a whole. Taking up the
argument, Rolling Stone commented:
The court must proceed as if events took place isolated
from the society in which they took place, and once that
fiction has been established, it is easy to find villains in
individuals.... Our legal system is guilty of just what Manson
claims; it is a form of theater in which real victims are found
for sacrifice.
21. Ibid., 44. Cavell is a university professor of philosophy.

The revolutionary’s conviction that only societies, not
individuals, are culpable blends with the claim of man’s
religions that in a certain sense the individual is not real and
that reality is one. The moral and religious insight that man is
not God and that human things are always less than perfect is
turned on its head to read: No one is to blame. What begins
as a plea for the individual ends as a voiding of that concept
altogether, for there are no agents — the plea continues —
only victims.22
The outlaw denies God to make himself god; he denies God’s law
to create his own anti-law concept of law; he denies that in this he
is guilty because all men are guilty. The individual is absolved from
guilt only to make all individuals collectively guilty for all offenses
ever committed! The outlaw culture seeks to free man from God,
but it only binds him oppressively to man.
God, whose patience is great with every outlaw culture, is also
finally merciful: He destroys them, thereby ending their agony and
their flight from life (Prov. 8:36).
22. Ibid., 43.

XXIII
Works
One of the resounding declarations of St. Paul is his affirmation

concerning salvation by the grace of God through faith:
8. For by grace are ye saved through faith; and that not of
yourselves: it is the gift of God:
9. Not of works, lest any man should boast. (Eph. 2:8-9)
Hodge has this to say concerning “works”:
The apostle says works, without qualification or limitation. It is
not, therefore, ceremonial, as distinguished from good works;
or legal, as distinguished from evangelical or gracious works;
but works of all kinds as distinguished from faith, which are
excluded. Salvation is in no sense, and in no degree, of works;
for to him that worketh the reward is a matter of debt. But
salvation is of grace and therefore not of works lest any man
should boast. That the guilty should stand before God with
self-complacency, and refer his salvation in any measure to his
own merit, is so abhorrent to all right feeling that Paul assumes
it (Rom. 4:2) as an intuitive truth, that no man can boast
before God. And to all who have any proper sense of the
holiness of God and of the evil of sin, it is an intuition; and
therefore a gratuitous salvation, a salvation which excludes
with works all ground of boasting, is the only salvation suited
to the relation of guilty men before God.1
It is very important for us to understand what works mean in
order for us to understand fully what St. Paul says. Curiously,
Biblical dictionaries and encyclopedias are on the whole silent on
the subject, or else confine themselves to good works. But, as Scott
noted, this is a different thing entirely:
The term “good works,” is never used, in the New Testament,
for ritual obedience, or moral virtue as practiced by
unbelievers, or for any other works than “the fruits of the
Spirit.” If any one doubt this, let him consult a good
1. Charles Hodge, A Commentary on the Epistle to the Ephesians (Grand Rapids,
Michigan: Eerdmans, 1950), 118f.
213
concordance. The only text, which seems an exception, is
Rom. 13:3, and that means “works good before God,”
primarily, though perhaps not exclusively.2
This, then, is the first point which must be noted: Scripture
distinguishes between works and good works (or faith with works),
between things done to justify man and things done because man
is justified. Works seek to be the cause of salvation, whereas good
works are clearly the effect of salvation. The attempt to gain
justification by works is clearly what St. Paul speaks of in Romans
9:32, Galatians 3:10, and Ephesians 2:9. The first two of these
references, as well as Galatians 2:16, and 3:2, 5 describe it as works
of the law.
Thus, a second aspect of works appears: it can be works of the law,
which are attempts to use the law for justification, rather than the
means of sanctification, to make it the cause rather than the effect
of salvation. This is emphatically condemned. No man can claim
heaven by means of morality, nor by ritual. No rite, however
beautiful and however faithful to Scripture outwardly, can save
man. Similarly, no meticulous obedience to the moral law of God
can redeem the fallen man. St. Paul is emphatic here:
Knowing that a man is not justified by the works of the law,
but by the faith of Jesus Christ, even we have believed in Jesus
Christ, that we might be justified by the faith of Christ, and not
by the works of the law; for by the works of the law shall no
flesh be justified. (Gal. 2:16)
However, very quickly, a third aspect must be noted, namely, that
the fallen, unregenerate man does not normally obey God’s law,
nor does he recognize God’s law as binding on him. As our Lord
said of the Pharisees, who, of all sinners in history, professed most
to obey God’s law,
6. Thus have ye made the commandment of God of none
effect by your tradition.
7. Ye hypocrites, well did Esaias prophesy of you, saying,
2. Thomas Scott, The Holy Bible, with Explanatory Notes, vol. VI (New York: Arm-
strong, 1830), 306.
Works 215
8. This people draweth nigh unto me with their mouth, and
honoureth me with their lips; but their heart is far from me.
9. But in vain they do worship me, teaching for doctrines the
commandments of men. (Matt. 15:6-9)
Even when professing to obey God’s law, the Pharisees were
rendering it “of none effect”; Moffatt renders it thus: “So you have
repealed the law of God to suit your own tradition.” Thus, while
even a careful obedience to God’s law will not effect salvation,
normally the works of the unregenerate involve a repeal of the law
of God, according to our Lord. To emphasize this fact, even
without a repeal of God’s law, the unregenerate man’s works are
unable to save him, but the fact is that a basic aspect of his works
is the repeal of God’s law. Works are thus anti-God and also
antinomian. The Epistle of Jude gives us a vivid account of the
depravity of the reprobate, both of those outside the fold and those
who have “crept in unawares” (Jude 4) into the church. These all
“walk after their own ungodly lusts” (Jude 18). Thus, while it can
be said that by no means all unregenerate men commit adultery,
and only a few murder people, this does not make them obedient
to the law of God.
Thus, we must say, fourth, that while works can be so defined as
to include a seeming conformity to the law of God, the direction of
works is to repeal the law of God and to replace it with another law, man's law.
The Pharisees whom our Lord charged with repealing the law of
God had replaced it with their “tradition,... the commandments of
men.” From the Tower of Babel on, this has been the goal of the
politics of reprobation. A new kind of law governs man’s works, a
humanistic law. Man’s salvation is seen in terms of political,
intellectual, educational, religious, scientific, and other works.
These areas of man’s activities are seen as areas of redemptive
action, as means whereby man can remake his world and save
himself from the scourges of war, poverty, crime, disease, and
death. Virtually every area of modern life is an area of works, an area
of redemption in action. Man proudly assumes that his actions
constitute a vital step in the conquest of all human ills, and that,
with time, man shall overcome all things, entirely on his own.
Budget cuts are fought by politicians, educators, churchmen,
scientists, and others as a threat to man’s salvation and welfare. If
indeed their work is redemptive, budget cuts are a threat to the
salvation of man.
Fifth, it must be noted that all such humanistic activities are
described by Scripture as dead works:
Therefore leaving the principles of the doctrine of Christ, let
us go on unto perfection; not laying again the foundation of
repentance from dead works, and of faith toward God. (Heb.
6:1)
How much more shall the blood of Christ, who through the
eternal Spirit offered himself without spot to God, purge your
conscience from dead works to serve the living God? (Heb.
9:14)
The first verse speaks of the Christian duty of progress, the
requirement of growth. The first principles of the doctrine of
Christ need not be endlessly repeated, nor is there need for a
continual repentance from dead works, or a continual stress on the
necessity of beginning with faith. Instead, growth towards mature
Christian responsibility is required. More specifically, we can
understand what is meant by analyzing the meaning of dead works,
all the activities of the unregenerate man which aim at redemption.
Westcott’s comment is good:
From the analogy of these usages (Matt. viii. 22; Luke ix. 60;
xv. 24, 32, John v. 25; Eph. v. 14) it is possible to give a precise
sense to the phrase “dead works.” Dead works are not vaguely
sins which lead to death, but works devoid of that element
which makes them truly works. They have the form but not
the vital power of works. There is but one spring of life, and
all which does not flow from it is “dead.” All acts of a man in
himself, separated from God, are “dead works” (comp. John
xv. 4ff.).3
3. B. F. Westcott, The Epistle to the Hebrews (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Eerdmans,

1952), 144.
Works 217
Political, intellectual, educational, religious, scientific, and other
activities in Christ are good works and are necessary. We are
summoned, in Moffatt’s rendering of Hebrews 6:1, to “pass on
then to what is mature, leaving elementary Christian doctrine
behind, instead of laying the foundation over again....” Instead of
dead works, now abandoned, good works are required of us and are
the mark of growth and maturity.
The whole point of salvation is the restoration of man to a
covenantal relationship with God as God’s faithful and obedient
man, serving God and exercising dominion in His name. As
Hebrews 9:14 makes clear, the blood of Christ purges our
conscience from dead works and releases us into the service, by
good works, of the living God. Westcott commented that
The action of the blood of Christ is not to work any outward
change but to communicate a vital force. It removes the
defilement and the defiling power of “dead works,” works
which are done apart from Him who is “the life.” These stain
the conscience and communicate that pollution of death
which outwardly “the waters of separation” was designed to
remove. The Levitical ritual contemplated a death external to
the man himself: here the effects of a death within him are
taken away.4
Calvin noted, of the words “to serve the living God,” that “This,
we must observe, is the end of our purgation; for we are not
washed by Christ, that we may plunge ourselves again into new
filth, but that our purity may serve to glorify God.”5
Sixth, it is clear, from some aspects of Phariseeism, that works
are done by some men to commend themselves to God. There is a
belief that man can put God into his debt and therefore earn
salvation by merit. It is this idea which is most commonly
associated with the idea of a works religion. As we have seen,
however, the idea of works has implicit in it a revolt against God.
It is a do-it-yourself religion, man made, and its logic soon reveals
that a man-made god is also required. As a result, while this aspect
4. Ibid., 262.
5. John Calvin,
Commentaries on the Epistle to the Hebrews, John Owen translation
(Grand Rapids, Michigan: Eerdmans, 1947), 205.
of works must be noted, it must not be over-stressed. All men seek
justification, and all men apart from Christ do in varying degrees
trust in their works; it must be noted that to seek justification does
not necessarily mean seeking it from God. Man the sinner seeks
self-justification. Moreover, such men trust in man’s work and look
to man’s work for salvation in implicit or explicit preference to
God’s work.
This means, seventh, that for the covenant-breaker there is an
inherent efficacy in his own works, in man’s works. Because for
humanism man is god, the word of man is the creative word, and
the acts of man are creative acts.
Eighth, works cannot be defined without a goal. The goal of
humanistic works is the City of Man. If the goal of good works is not
the City or Kingdom of God, then there are no works, only pious
bleatings. The impotence of Christendom has been due to its
failure to define its Scriptural goal. It has faced an enemy,
self-consciously dedicated to building the City of Man, with only a
negative gospel, a mystical escapism, and a vague idea of the goal
of salvation. St. James declared, “For as the body without the spirit
(‘the breath of life,’ according to Moffatt) is dead, so faith without
works is dead” (James 2:26). There is no evading this judgment.
XXIV
Truth
The relationship of truth to salvation is a necessary one. If there

is an essential coherency in reality, then the truth is not separable
from assurance, judgment, perfection, salvation, and God. In a
world of chance, there is no coherency; in God’s world there is full
coherency. For many people, chance is ultimate, and therefore for
all such men there is no necessary correlation between truth and
salvation. Thus Nietzsche held that a lie could be as important to
man’s salvation as the truth. He held that “The question is...how far
an opinion is life-furthering, life-preserving, species-preserving,
perhaps species-rearing; and we are fundamentally inclined to
maintain that the falsest opinions...are the most indispensable to
us.”1
An earlier era, still under the influence of Christianity, had valued
truth and had widely held to a secularized version of John 8:32,
“And ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free.”
The truth was to these men the hard facts of the natural world; as
man came to know the reality of the natural world, he would gain
power by this knowledge and also freedom. The modern university
is established on this premise. Many, like Harvard, once began with
a standard and seal dedicated to truth, “Veritas,” in a Biblical sense,
the truth as Christ, and then moved to an anti-Christian definition
of truth. The new meaning of truth was set forth by Oliver Wendell
Holmes in a famous sonnet which gave his anti-Christian version
of “Veritas.” As Williams noted, “Oblivious of the millennial effort
of the historic community of scholarship which had endeavored to
vindicate Christian learning and strengthen reason despite the fall
through intensified obedience to the God who had exiled
disobedient Adam from Paradise, Holmes wrote with impish glee:”
1.Friedrich W. Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, in The Philosophy of Nietzsche

(New York: Modern Library, n.d.), 4.
219
1643 “Veritas” 1878
Truth: So the frontlet’s older legend ran,
On the brief record’s opening page displayed;
Not yet those clear-eyed scholars were afraid
Lest the fair fruit that wrought the woe of man
By far Euphrates — where our sire began
His search for truth, and, seeking, was betrayed
Might work new treason in their forest shade,
Doubling the curse that brought life’s shortened span.
Nurse of the future, daughter of the past,
That stem phylactery best becomes thee now:
Lift to the morning star thy marble brow!
Cast thy brave truth on every warning blast!
Stretch thy white hand to that forbidden bough,
And let thine earliest symbol be thy last!2
For Holmes, the “sin” of man as Scripture declared it was in reality
the beginning of “his search for truth.” Truth is of necessity to be
found outside of God for Holmes, and the same is true of
salvation. The implication is that the great lie is God, and man’s
deliverance is his emancipation from God into the course
proposed by Satan to Eve (Gen. 3:5).
In his poem, “The Moral Bully,” Holmes attacked orthodox
Christianity with intense contempt, and, in “Wind-Clouds and
Star-Drifts,” he declared,
This is the new world’s gospel: Be ye men!
......................................................................
Your prophets are a hundred unto one
Of them of old who cried, “Thus saith the Lord”;
They told of cities that should fall in heaps,
But yours of mightier cities that shall rise
Where yet the lonely fishers spread their nets,
Where hides the fox and hoots the midnight owl!
The tree of knowledge in your garden grows
Not single, but at every humble door;
Its branches lend you their immortal food,
That fills you with the sense of what ye are
..........................................................
2.
George Huntston Williams, “Theology and the Integrity of the University,”
in George Huntston Williams, editor, The Harvard Divinity School, Its Place in Har-
vard University and in American Culture (Boston: The Beacon Press, 1954), 241f.
Truth 221
Look on this world of yours with opened eyes!
Ye are as gods! Nay, makers of your gods, —
Each day ye break an image in your shrine
And plant a fairer image where it stood.3
Holmes thus openly espoused Satanism as the new gospel of
liberty. Holmes’ writings became a part of the public school
curriculum and his ideas became commonplace to the academic
community. Intellectual prestige and respectability meant for the
new scholarship anti-Christianity.
The universe of Holmes was, however, still God’s universe. His
world was made up of borrowed materials, the hard realities of
creation by the Biblical God. Underneath all impressions and
sensations, Holmes held that a hard core of reality existed, not
illusion, but a material reality. In The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table,
he wrote:
It is not easy, at the best, for two persons talking together to
make the most of each other’s thoughts, there are so many of
them....
When John and Thomas, for instance, are talking together, it
is natural enough that among the six there should be more or
less confusion and misapprehension....
I think, I said, I can make it plain to Benjamin Franklin here,
that there are at least six personalities distinctly to be
recognized as taking part in that dialogue between John and
Thomas.
Three Johns.
1. The real John; known only to his Maker.
2. John’s ideal John; never the real one, and often
very unlike him.
3. Thomas’s ideal John; never the real John nor
John’s John, but often very unlike either.
Three Thomases.
1. The real Thomas.
2. Thomas’s ideal Thomas.
3. John’s ideal Thomas.
3.
Oliver Wendell Holmes, The Poet at the Breakfast Table, vol. II (Cambridge,
Massachusetts: Riverside Press, 1890), 330f.
Only one of the three Johns is taxed; only one can be weighed
on a platform-balance; but the other two are just as important
in the conversation.4
For Holmes, a real John and a real Thomas could exist because he
still assumed, without affirming, the real creation of the real God.
For Oriental thought, that world, with its Johns and Thomases, is
all illusion. In terms of the philosophy of Hume, no real world nor
real persons can demonstrably be proven to exist: there are only
sensations of these things. For a fellow New Englander, Mary
Baker Eddy, only universal mind existed; death did not exist for
her, because neither matter, pain, sickness, nor persons existed; all
were for her illusions. Mrs. Eddy was more logical than Holmes;
having denied the God of Scripture, she also denied His world. The
“hard realities” of Holmes crumbled in the minds of his
successors, and “the real John” disappeared as a hard fact, as did all
reality. To those for whom God is dead, the world itself is soon
dead, and man is dead. The death of man philosophy follows on
the heels of the death of God faith. In the twentieth century,
America has seen the spread of Zen Buddhism and the Krishna
cult in its midst, both of which reduce the world to illusion. The
only noteworthy aspect of their presence is that the effect of
Christianity has been so pronounced in America that it took both
cults a century or more after Holmes and Emerson to appear, and
then both only to a limited degree and in a watered-down form.
The academic world has struggled to hold on to truth as a reality,
as hard fact, while indulging in the luxury of an unbelief which
denies the possibility of truth and fact. The claim of the university
is that knowledge is power, and that the educated and educators are
the rightful rulers of the world. The university’s “doctoral” gown,
as at Harvard, is “actually the ‘magisterial’ gown.”5 It indicates
authority to rule and to judge, and it has as its origin the authority
which knowledge of God’s law-word gives to the Christian man.
By denying Scripture its authority, the university has become, as
4. Oliver Wendell Holmes, The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table, Reprinted from the
Atlantic Monthly, as it appeared from November 1857, to October 1858 (New
York: The Mershon Company, n.d.), 52f.
5. George Huntston Williams, “The Three Recurrent Conflicts,” in Williams,
op. cit., 4.
Truth 223
Clark Kerr saw clearly, a multiversity; it has replaced a universe of
truth and law with a multiverse of possibilities in a world of chance
and brute factuality. The man wearing a doctoral gown no longer
has a universe of hard reality in which he is master over a sector,
but a realm of nothingness in which he is a master destroyer.
The world apart from God has seen a steady deterioration and
destruction of the concept of truth. The Greek philosophers were
intensely concerned with preserving truth, but truth without God.
For them the universe was one of form and matter, form or ideas
being the realm of universals and truths. God was no more than an
impersonal and technical first cause in a system which still required
a first cause. The fact that universals were separated from God
clearly indicated that God was meaningless in their system of
thought. Aristotle held that a first cause was necessary in order to
assure knowledge, since infinite causes meant that knowledge was
impossible. Not only was an infinite regress anathema to
knowledge, but also, Aristotle held,
Again, if the kinds of causes were infinite in number it would
still be impossible to acquire knowledge; for it is only when we
have become acquainted with the causes that we assume that
we know a thing; and we cannot, in a finite time, go completely
through what is additively infinite.6
The function of the first cause was to ensure the possibility of
knowledge by giving the universe a unity of meaning and causality.
Aristotle would have rejected the idea of a multiverse pragmatically,
because it would have undercut knowledge and truth. For Aristotle,
the universal is that which can be predicated of the many, so that a
common reality can be ascribed to them. Earlier Greek thought
had seen ideas or forms as the universals; ideas were the nature,
form, mode, class, or species of things. For Plato, the ideas were
timeless; they were the organic essence of things and were dynamic
and creative archetypes of existence. Since Kant, ideas have
become all the more important to philosophy, but no longer as the
essence of things in a real world outside of man, but as the creative
6. Aristotle, Metaphysics,
Books I-IX, Hugh Tredennick translator (London: Wil-
liam Heinemann, 1956), 93f.
universals of the autonomous mind of man whereby the world is
“known” and “made” into an aspect of man’s existence. The
implicit existentialism of Greek philosophy has come to fruition.
The real world of truth and knowledge has disappeared from the
outer world to become an aspect of the experience of the inner
world of autonomous man.
In the process of this transition, various theories of truth have
been propounded. First, as we have noted, there is the
correspondence theory of truth. According to this theory, a
statement of proposition is true if there is a fact to which it
corresponds. Truth is thus descriptive of a hard reality; it is a report
on what is. Such a theory assumes a number of things which it finds
difficult and impossible to assume as it departs from the
presupposition of the God of Scripture. What assurance is there
that either our sense impressions are valid reports of reality, or that
our minds are valid analysts of such reports? What assurance is
there that there is any truth, law, or order in the world around us,
a world of brute factuality? Are not these things projections of
man’s mind onto a meaningless world? How can any knowledge be
possible in a world of infinite facts without an exhaustive and
infinite investigation, inventory, and classification thereof? As Van
Til has observed,
If one does not make human knowledge wholly dependent
upon the original self-knowledge and consequent revelation
of God to man, then man will have to seek knowledge within
himself as the final reference point. Then he will have to seek
an exhaustive understanding of reality. And then he will have
to hold that if he cannot attain to such an exhaustive
understanding of reality he has no true knowledge at all of
anything. Either man must then know everything or he knows
nothing. This is the dilemma that confronts every form of
non-Christian epistemology.7
Another fallacy of the correspondence theory of truth is that it is
valid only where we already have a knowledge of the truth. To
illustrate, the proposition that two plus two equals four is only valid
7. CorneliusVan Til, A Christian Theory of Knowledge (Philadelphia: Westminster

Theological Seminary, 1954), 5f.
Truth 225
for someone who already knows what two plus two means, and
also what four means; it is a useful tool for someone who already
has the basic knowledge. The more knowledge we have of
mathematics, the more validity and utility it has for us. To face a
difficult problem in trigonometry without a considerable
knowledge of trigonometry is an exercise in futility. In brief,
knowledge opens to knowledge, and truth unfolds to those who
know the truth. The correspondence theory of truth breaks down
for those to whom all sides of the cognitive equation are a mystery
and a question mark.
A second theory as to the nature of truth is the coherence theory.
As Baylis has defined it,
According to the coherence theory (see H. H. Joachim: The
Nature of Truth), truth is systematic coherence. This is more than
logical consistency. A proposition is true insofar as it is a
necessary constituent of a systematically coherent whole.
According to some (e.g., Brand Blanshard, The Nature of Truth),
this whole must be such that every element in it necessitates,
indeed entails, every other element. Strictly, on this view, truth,
in its fullness, is a characteristic of only the one systematic
coherent whole, which is the absolute. It attaches to
propositions as we know them and to wholes as we know
them only to a degree. A proposition has a degree of truth
proportionate to the completeness of the systematic
coherence of the system of entities to which it belongs.8
We can readily agree that truth is systematic and coherent, but the
problem begins when we define what it is coherent to. Is the
coherence derived from the ostensibly autonomous mind of man,
acting as its own god and establishing a system conforming to this
principle, or is the coherence determined by the sovereign God
through His enscriptured word? In either case, we have a very
different kind of consistency to deal with; both are consistent to
their starting point, and both are radically at odds with each other.
To hold to a coherence theory of truth is not enough: we must
define what it is that establishes the coherency. If it is the
supposedly autonomous mind of man that establishes the absolute,
8. Charles A. Baylis, “Truth,” in Dagobert D. Runes, editor, Dictionary of Philos-
ophy, 15th edition, revised (New York: Philosophical Library, 1960), 321f.
and then coheres all truth to it, we must say again that truth of the
cognitive equation is presupposed, and then proven on the basis of
the presupposition. An act of faith is confused with logical proof.
The third theory of truth is the pragmatic; truth is what works. As
we have seen, Nietzsche held that a lie very often works best of all.
In a pragmatic or instrumental concept of truth, the truth and
meaning of a proposition is its total consequences. Such a theory
abandons any idea of an objective truth, or any world of good and
evil other than a relative one. The problem then confronting man,
as with John Dewey, is that certain goals, such as the Great Society,
are called good, but, until they are realized, we cannot validly call
them good or true. The cognitive equation must come up with an
answer; the only proof of the validity of that answer is its
usefulness, not its validity in terms of any objective standard. Thus,
murder can be the truth of a situation, i.e., the true answer to it, if
the consequences are helpful, or it can be a false answer if its
consequences are pragmatically unsound. We cannot prejudge the
act of murder until we see its consequences. There is thus no
propositional truth such as “Thou shalt not kill” for the pragmatist,
only an instrumental, after-the-fact judgment.
But, for the Christian, truth is propositional because God exists;
He is. Reality therefore is coherent, and the cognitive equation has
validity. As Van Til noted,
the argument for Christianity must therefore be that of
presupposition. With Augustine it must be maintained that
God’s revelation is the sun from which all other light derives.
The best, the only, the absolutely certain proof of the truth of
Christianity is that unless its truth be presupposed there is no
proof of anything. Christianity is proved as being the very
foundation of the idea of proof itself.9
Truth thus disappears in non-Christian systems of thought, and,
with it, knowledge.
Turning to the Bible, we find that truth is propositional because
language itself is propositional; it is a judgment; it has subject and
predicate, and it is a statement or communication of certain things.
9. Van Til, op. cit., 224.

Truth 227
Language ceases to be language if it is not propositional. The poetic
and symbolic use of language is possible only because of the
substructure of clear-cut propositional meaning. Thus
non-propositional language is a contradiction in terms, because it
permits no communication with another person, nor indeed any
self-knowledge. Behind words are ideas, propositions, and all
thinking is propositional. At all times, the Bible communicates to
us the word of God. That this word is not stated in abstract,
philosophical terms does not mean that its abstract and
philosophical meaning is at all diminished.
Several words are translated as truth in the Bible. In the Old
Testament, the principal word comes from a verb meaning to
support, to sustain. “The noun a pillar (2 Kings 18:16) illustrates
clearly the significance of the root. For the ethical idea connected
with it we have analogies in... made firm, fixed, hence morally directed
aright; steadfast; and... stable, true...”10
Whereas, then, in OT “truth” is mainly thought of as a quality
inherent in God or in men, especially the quality of
steadfastness or fidelity, it is used commonly in NT in a more
detached and larger sense for the real, that which indeed is,
and which it is the proper function of the mind of man to
occupy itself with and to apprehend. At the same time, this
“truth” does not appeal solely to the intellect. That it may be
received, the moral dispositions of men must correspond with
it; and its reception will further take effect upon character. In
conforming himself to it in his life lies man’s only security for
well-being. The associations which the word had acquired
through OT usage helped to secure for the conception those
elements to which this deep moral and religious significance is
due.11
Without agreeing with Stanton’s idea that truth in the New
Testament is a “more detached” term, we can assent to his
observation that it has a moral and religious significance. For
philosophy in the Hellenic tradition, a dialectical presupposition
with dualistic implications prevails. This means that body and mind
10. V.
H. Stanton, “Truth,” in James Hastings, editor, A Dictionary of the Bible,
vol. IV (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1919), 816.
11. Ibid., 819.
are commonly divided, and also morality and knowledge. Such a
view is untenable for a Biblical faith and philosophy. Man’s
knowledge is not gained in aseptic isolation from his moral and
religious character. Knowledge is not neutral; the world of
factuality is a world of created facts, God-created facts which
witness wholly to their maker. There are no neutral facts in the
universe, only God-created facts.12 The cognitive equation is not
separable from the moral and religious equation.
But this is not all. For Scripture, truth is not an abstract universal.
Jesus Christ declared, “I am the way, the truth, and the life: no man
cometh unto the Father, but by me” (John 14:6). The Trinity
provides us not only with the first cause, but also with absolute
persons, and the ultimate particulars and the ultimate universals.
Truth is, in its ultimate sense, Jesus Christ; the triune God is the
living and absolute truth, the ground and pillar of all creation, the
maker out of nothing of all things. Because God is the creator of
all things, the truth of all things is known insofar as God is known.
Godless men know a limited degree of truth because they operate
on borrowed premises. They deny God and His ultimate decree in
favor of a world of meaningless and brute factuality, a world of
chance; then, however, as they operate scientifically, they quietly
assume the universe of law which they have denied. They use
theistic premises secretly, while affirming antitheistic premises
openly. Such a schizophrenic position ultimately breaks down into
a denial of truth and knowledge, as one of their own number has
testified.13
St. Paul wrote, in Colossians 2:8-10,
8. Beware lest any man spoil you through philosophy and vain
deceit, after the tradition of men, after the rudiments of the
world, and not after Christ.
9. For in him dwelleth all the fullness of the Godhead bodily.
10. And ye are complete in him, which is the head of all
principality and power.
12. See
R. J. Rushdoony, The One and the Many (Nutley, New Jersey: The Craig
Press, 1971), 192-196.
13. Gunther S. Stent, The Coming of the Golden Age, A View of the End of Progress
(Garden City, New York: The Natural History Press, 1969).
Truth 229
It is not philosophy as such which is condemned, but, in Moffatt’s
rendering, “a theosophy which is specious make-believe, on the
lines of human tradition, corresponding to the Elemental spirits of
the world and not of Christ.” All truth has its source in Him by
whom all things were made, “and without him was not any thing
made that was made” (John 1:3).
Because of the integral relationship between knowledge and
faith, between character and truth, salvation not only opens the
doors of knowledge, but also of truth. The famous sentence used
by educators concerning truth is a misquotation because it does not
cite the precondition of being made free by the truth. What Jesus
said was this: “If ye continue in my word, then are ye my disciples
indeed; And ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you
free” (John 8:31-32).
The world of the twentieth century is in revolt against Christ, and
its revolt is heavily governed by a pragmatic view of truth. In John
Dewey, this pragmatic view of truth has become an educational
philosophy which has permeated education. For pragmatism, truth
is only apparent in the results of an act. Lie and murder first, and
then the truth of the act will be apparent if it works, if it
accomplishes the desired end. The evaluation of the truth of an act,
or a social or personal experiment, follows the act or experiment.
The moral and practical consequence of this is that action precedes
thought. The action can only be truly evaluated when all the results
are in. As a result, a generation reared in terms of Dewey’s
“progressive education” is prone to revolutionary action without
any coherent thinking: the thought must follow the act in their
faith. Truth is not an absolute in terms of which all thought and
action must be weighed in advance, but a consequence in terms of
how it works for man.
Truth thus is not only relative to the situation, but also to the
person. A lie told by John may work (and be the truth) for John,
but it is a disaster and therefore not the truth for Thomas. This
relativism has been summed up in a popular phrase of the 1960s:
“Do your own thing.” When every man has his own truth, and his
own universe, then we have a multiverse and polytheism. The
non-Biblical world has always drifted into a practical polytheism
because of this relativism. Every man does that which is right in his
own eyes, and, in terms of himself as god and judge, calls it truth.
XXV
Facts
A conservative booklet, far superior to many, carries this title:

The Facts That Will Save America (1963). The title is an apt one in that
it expresses a faith common to most people in the modern age. It
is believed that the mind of man is good and untainted by sin, or at
least neutral. All that man’s mind needs in order to stand for the
truth is a knowledge of the facts. In any crisis, therefore, the great
need is for the facts to be made known.
In order to understand what is involved in this false and
dangerous opinion, let us begin by defining a few words. A fact,
according to Feibleman, is an “actual occurrence. An indubitable
truth of actuality. A brute event. Sym. with actual event.”1 He
defines knowledge thus:
Relations known. Apprehended truth. Opposite of opinion.
Certain knowledge is more than opinion, less than truth.
Theory of knowledge, or epistemology, is the systematic
investigation and exposition of the principles of the possibility
of knowledge. In epistemology: the relation between object
and subject.2
It would appear that Feibleman reflects the opinion of the modern
age that facts are truth, i.e., the brute facts of the natural world are
truth in and of themselves, and knowledge is our apprehension of
these facts. Lenny Bruce stated the matter on everyman’s level:
“The religious leaders are ‘what should be!’... Let me tell you the
truth. The truth is ‘what is.’ If ‘what is’ is, you have to sleep eight,
ten hours a day, that is the truth. A lie will be: People need no sleep
at all. Truth is ‘what is.’”3 In terms of this, the Kinsey Reports have
tried to give us the truth about sex, i.e., what is, what people are
1. James
K. Feibleman, “Fact,” in Dagobert D. Runes, editor, Dictionary of Phi-
losophy, 15th edition revised (New York: Philosophical Library, 1960), 107.
2. Feibleman, “Knowledge,” in ibid., 161.
3. Lenny Bruce, “How to talk dirty and influence people,” Playboy, vol. II, no.
1, January 1964, 182.
231
actually doing; there is for them no truth beyond the natural world
and its facts.
There is a paradoxical sense in which the Christian can agree
with this position. Truth is indeed “what is,” but the Bible makes
it clear that only one fact can be so identified, God. God declared
to Moses that His name is “I AM THAT I AM” (Ex. 3:14), or, He
Who Is. Only God is self-existent; this is not true of any other fact,
person, or thing in the universe. I cannot legitimately say, “I am,”
because I have not honestly described or identified myself thereby.
To identify myself as “I am,” is to lie, because the reality of the
matter is that I am a creature, born in time, called to serve God,
destined to die, and required to meet my Maker as also my Judge.
I cannot be identified in terms of myself as “I am.” I am a creature,
a son, a husband, father, pastor, writer, and much else, all in terms
of God’s sovereign purpose. What I am depends on God’s electing
and creating power and grace.
To identify the facts of creation as “brute facts” is thus to deny
God’s sovereignty over the creation of all things. It means that
every fact is self-contained and in effect self-created, so that it is to
be known as a thing in itself, not by reference to God. How deeply
this perspective has saturated the modern world is apparent in the
common complaint of young and old alike that they do not want
to be seen or understood in terms of their calling as son or
daughter, father or mother, husband or wife, student or workman,
but only in terms of themselves, what they are in and of
themselves. This is an existentialist viewpoint. It is an insistence
that we are all brute facts and can only be known as brute facts.
Salvation becomes deliverance from all binding ties into a position
of brute factuality. “Know me only as I am,” means know me
existentially, as a brute fact, totally unrelated to God or man. Not
surprisingly, such a perspective is suicidal, because man can only be
known in terms of God, and can only exist under God and in
relationship to God’s creation. To sever these ties is to deny life.
To be a brute fact is to be meaningless, because man is not God,
and man cannot remake himself and reality in terms of his
imagination. Facts are what God made them, and the meaning of
all things, including the meaning of our lives, can only be known in
Facts 233
terms of God. A brute fact is a thing in itself, an unrelated fact, and
when man seeks to be an unrelated fact, understandable only in
terms of himself, he is seeking not only meaninglessness but also
total isolation. An existential fact is entirely in and of itself, so that,
for Sartre, other people are the problem; they are the devil, because
he is, as the brute, existential fact, god, or at least a god in process
of becoming god. The cry “Know me only as I am,” is a demand
for brute, existential status, but, at the very same time, it is a denial
of it. God is self-contained; He needs nothing and no one. The cry
to be understood in terms of ourselves is an anti-existential cry,
even as it demands recognition as a brute fact, because it asks for a
relationship and despairs for lack of it. But a fact which needs
relationship to other facts and/or persons is not a brute fact but a
created and interdependent fact. Existentialists are thus deeply
schizophrenic. There can be no continuity, relationship, or
meaning between fact and fact in a world of brute factuality, only
accidental connections. By denying God and all continuity of
relationships and meanings under God, they are denying reality and
are in flight from it.
Not surprisingly, insanity has been a major factor in modern
thought, among philosophers and among artists and writers. These
madmen include Nietzsche, Friedrich Holderlin, Donizetti, Gerard
de Nerval, Robert Schuhmann, Nikolaus Lenau, and many others.
Madness became a popular subject in the modern era because it
gained a philosophical significance. Charles Nodier, the teacher of
Victor Hugo and Alfred de Musset, held that insanity represents an
upward step in the evolution of consciousness:
Lunatics...occupy the highest degree of the scale that separates
our planet from its satellite, and since they communicate to
this degree with a world of thought that is unknown to us, it is
only natural that we do not understand them, and it is absurd
to conclude that their ideas lack sense and lucidity, since they
belong to an order of sensations and comprehensions which
are totally inaccessible to us, with our education and habits.4
4.
Frecerio V. Grunfeld, “Shockingly Mad, Madder Than Ever, Quite Mad!”,
Horizon, vol. XIV, no. 3 (Summer 1972): 77.
R. D. Laing views madness as a bid for liberty, which it indeed is,
liberty from God and man, freedom to be an unrelated and brute
fact, yet one which the world depends on, rather than a fact
interrelated to all other facts. Alan Harrington, in his study,
Psychopaths, points out that psychopathic traits have assumed moral
value. In Maddocks’ report,
One notes an appetite for absolute freedom — to do what one
wants when one wants to. One registers the preference for
disconnected, spontaneous living. One senses the weakening
of social contract — of responsibility to any community
except the community one improvises from day to day.
Harrington seems half thrilled, half horrified at the prospect
of a mental Big Bang. “It’s not so easy, not even good enough,”
he writes, “to take an overly righteous stand against the
psychopath.” Perhaps, he suggests, history, frantically looking
for its transition to the future, can find no other solution. His
not very happy conclusion: “Perhaps a mad god is better than
none.”
For all his old-fashioned moderation in presenting his theme,
for all his sneaking admiration for the psychopath (he is, at
times, a sort of fellow traveler), Harrington is finally panicked
by the subject that confronts him. The comparison springs to
this mind for a horde of turned-on psychopaths: Genghis
Khan’s Mongols. Yet Harrington also knows how fatigued,
how bored the reasonable have become with their
reasonableness.
And so the world teeters between a scream and a yawn.5
Madness has an appeal, because it offers a pseudo-world wherein
man becomes a supposedly existential fact. The lure of madness,
and the readiness of the modern mind to fall into it, will only
increase as long as the existential mentality prevails. The illusion of
humanistic conservatives is that the world is controlled by
high-level conspirators with highly sophisticated and rational plans.
It must be asserted, as against this, that the various conspiracies
reveal instead, whenever any aspect of them is uncovered, an
5. Melvin Maddocks, “The Changing Nature of Man,” i Los Angeles Herald-Ex-

aminer, 27 July 1972, B-4.
Facts 235
existential madness. This same madness prevails in politics, among
the people, in youth, and in every sector of society. Especially since
Darwin, man has felt unrelated to God and has been sped into his
world of brute factuality and existential madness. In all of this, man
has had a vivid foretaste of hell.
Psychoanalytic, psychiatric, and psychological studies are
increasingly existentialist in their approach. In a 1956 study,
Ludwig Binswanger wrote that
the existential research orientation in psychiatry arose from
dissatisfaction with the prevailing efforts to gain scientific
understanding in psychiatry.... Psychology and psychotherapy
as sciences are admittedly concerned with “man,” but not at
all primarily with mentally ill man, but with man as such. The
new understanding of man, which we owe to Heidegger’s
analysis of existence, has its basis in the new conception that
man is no longer understood in terms of some theory — be it
a mechanistic, a biologic or a psychological one.6
The study of “man as such” means man as a brute fact and an
unrelated fact, a thing in itself. It becomes apparent, once we
recognize this governing presupposition, why parents, teachers,
pastors, and the older generation are so readily blamed for the
problems of individual man. Among other reasons, very clearly, an
important one is that all these persons insist on a relationship to the
individual, and this is a central aspect of their sin. If they want a
relationship, they can only be wrong.
Existential philosophy, we are told, “determines the worth of
knowledge not in relation to truth but according to its biological
value contained in the pure data of consciousness when unaffected
by emotions, volitions, and social prejudices.”7 An existentialist
psychology must therefore regard all such influences as
relationships which are harmful to the individual’s freedom and
development. A major influence in the development of
existentialist psychology was Kierkegaard, of whom May wrote:
6. Cited
by Rollo May, “The Origins and Significance of the Existential Move-
ment in Psychology,” in Rollo May, Ernest Angel, and Henri F. Ellenberger,
editors, Existence, A New Dimension in Psychiatry and Psychology (New York: Basic
Books, 1958), 3.
7. Sigmar von Fersen, “Existential Philosophy,” in Runes, op. cit., 102.
The central psychological endeavor of Kierkegaard may be
summed up under the heading of the question he pursued
relentlessly — how can one become an individual?8
Precisely. Moreover, to “become an individual” meant for
Kierkegaard to become a brute fact, an unrelated fact; Kierkegaard
did succeed in becoming a psychopathic fact. In Concluding
Unscientific Postscript, Kierkegaard wrote,
When the question of truth is raised in an objective manner,
reflection is directed objectively to the truth, as an object to
which the knower is related. Reflection is not focused upon
the relationship, however, but upon the question of whether it
is the truth to which the knower is related. If only the object
to which he is related is the truth, the subject is accounted to
be in the truth. When the question of the truth is raised
subjectively, reflection is directed subjectively to the nature of
the individual’s relationship; if only the mode of this
relationship is in the truth, the individual is in the truth, even
if he should happen to be thus related to what is not true.9
May saw the point clearly:
It would be hard to exaggerate how revolutionary these
sentences were and still are for modern culture as a whole and
for psychology in particular. Here is the radical, original
statement of relational truth. Here is the fountainhead of the
emphasis in existential thought on truth as inwardness or, as
Heidegger puts it, truth as freedom.10
Truth as inwardness or truth as freedom means that truth is
severed from its objective reference in favor of an inward
reference. It explains, too, why revolutionary youth can disdain to
study the facts because of its existential confidence that it is truth
in action. In the existentialist world of Sigmund Freud, the problem
of man is that his id, ego, and superego have all been conditioned
by the past and by the world around him.
The goal of existentialist psychology is to free man from his past
and from society into the freedom to become himself in terms of
8. Rollo May, ibid., 24f.

9. Cited by May, ibid., 25.
10. Ibid., p. 26.
Facts 237
his own being. A first goal is thus “the ‘I-am’ experience,” to use
May’s term. However, “the ‘I-am’ experience is not in itself the
solution to a person’s problems; it is rather the precondition to
their solution.” When May uses the term “I-am,” he does so
self-consciously, knowing that he is citing Exodus 3:14; he is thus
making man the new “I-am” and the new ultimate fact with the
power to become or to be divine.11 When man accepts his being,
his existence, as the ultimate fact, he also recognizes then
that being is a category which cannot be reduced to introjection
of social and ethical norms. It is, to use Nietzsche’s phrase,
“beyond good and evil.” To the extent that my sense of
existence is authentic, it is precisely not what others have told
me I should be, but is the one Archimedes point I have to
stand on from which to judge what parents and other
authorities demand. Indeed, compulsive and rigid moralism arises in
given persons precisely as the result of a lack of a sense of being. Rigid
moralism is a compensatory mechanism by which the
individual persuades himself to take over the external
sanctions because he has no fundamental assurance that his
own choices have any sanction of their own.12
The Biblical standards of good and evil require a relationship to
God and man; they are indeed rigid, because they are unchanging.
May and other existentialist psychologists regard adherence to
God’s law as a denial of man’s being and cowardice on the part of
a man. For May, the ultimate law is a real one, but it is an inner law,
the requirement to be free of God and man and to make one’s
freedom ultimate. Moreover,
My sense of being is not my capacity to see the outside world,
to size it up, to assess reality; it is rather my capacity to see
myself as a being in the world, to know myself as the being who can
do these things. It is in this sense a precondition for what is called
“ego development.” The ego is the subject in the subject-object
relationship; the sense of being occurs on a level prior to this
dichotomy.13
11. May, “Contributions

of Existential Psychology,” in ibid., 43, 43n, 44.
12. Ibid., 45.
13. Ibid., 46.
How can man, a creature born to die, make himself the end or
purpose of his being? Strangely, the fact of death is used to make
“the individual existence real, absolute, and concrete”:
The existential analysts... hold that the confronting of death
gives the most positive reality to life itself. For “death as an
irrelative potentiality singles man out and, as it were,
individualizes him to make him understand the potentiality of
being in others (as well as in himself), when he realizes the
inescapable nature of his own death.” (Werner Brock) Death
is, in other words, the one fact of my life which is not relative
but absolute, and my awareness of this gives my existence and
what I do each hour an absolute quality.14
Paul Tillich has said that “The self-affirmation of a being is the
stronger the more non-being it can take into itself.”15
At this point, the existentialists begin to play games with
themselves. Their world is circumscribed by “I-am,” but suddenly
they increase the world to include the outside world, possibly other
things in themselves. According to May,
we cannot describe world in purely objective terms, nor is
world to be limited to our subjective, imaginative participation
in the structure around us, although that too is part of
being-in-the-world.
World is the structure of meaningful relationships in which a person exists
and in the design of which he participates.16
Thus we have introduced here a possibly hard and real world which
exists apart from man and which has a design man never made, in
which he merely “participates.” God, after being denied in favor of
pure existence, is sneaked in the back door under the names of
“world” and “design.” With an amazing lack of epistemological
self-consciousness, existentialists, after beginning with the bare
“I-am” of Descartes’ philosophy, reintroduce by stealth the whole
of God’s world while still denying God. May does not forsake his
existentialism in reintroducing the world, “For to be aware of one’s
14. Ibid.,
49.
15. Ibid.,
50.
16. Ibid., 59.
Facts 239
world means at the same time to be designing it.”17
The world is
still there, but it is in process of being absorbed into the being of
man, who becomes its shaper and designer.
The origin of all this is in the Socratic counsel, “Know thyself.”
Man as the key to the universe means ultimately that the universe
is reduced to man, because only that which man’s “I am” can
comprehend is finally possible in that world. But man’s “I am” is
absurd, and the conclusion of the matter is the disintegration of
man and his philosophy.
The declaration of St. John in 1 John 2:20 is a radical denial of
the existentialist premise: “But ye have an unction from the Holy
One, and ye know all things.” The word know is in Greek oida,
which “suggests fulness of knowledge.”18 For this reason, Moffatt
rendered it, “Now, you have been anointed by the Holy One, and
you possess all knowledge.” When men are redeemed by Christ’s
atoning work, they have the illumination of the Holy Spirit to
overcome the darkness of sin, and they know in principle the
meaning of all things, i.e., that they are God’s handiwork and are to
be understood in terms of Him. Calvin commented,
It hence follows that men are not rightly made wise by the
acumen of their own minds, but by the illumination of the
Spirit; and further, that we are not otherwise made partakers
of the Spirit than through Christ, who is the true sanctuary
and our only high priest.19
Since God is the maker of all things, nothing can be truly known
apart from Him. The Fall of Man was not only a fall from
righteousness into sin, but also a fall from knowledge into
ignorance and blindness. From the knowledge that God is “I AM
THAT I AM,” He Who Is, man fell into the illusion that he himself
is god, able to order the world after his imagination and to
determine what constitutes good and evil in terms of his own will
(Gen. 3:5). Man made himself the “I am,” the ultimate and
17. Ibid., 60.

18. W. E. Vine,
An Expository Dictionary of New Testament Words, vol. II (New
19. John Calvin, Commentaries on the Catholic Epistles (Grand Rapids, Michigan:
Eerdmans, 1959), 194.
determining fact of the universe, and then he proposed to save all
creation by means of this fact, man as ultimate, man as the supreme
fact. The history of fallen man is the development of the
implications of this presupposition, and their ruinous
consequences.
God alone is the “I AM,” the brute and existential reality of the
universe, deriving His eternal being from no one, needing no one,
and totally self-sufficient in all His ways. God requires us to know
Him as He is, not merely in terms of our need of Him. This means
that we must know the ontological as well as the economical
aspects of the Trinity. It means also that Arminianism is
blasphemous, because it treats God as a creaturely fact rather than
the sole existential fact. The saying, “God has no hands but ours to
use,” reduces God to a creaturely fact, a fact dependent on and
requiring other facts, men, to accomplish His purposes. Not
surprisingly, Arminianism (and Thomism) lead to an existentialism
which makes man the new god of creation and seeks to abolish the
God of Scripture.
XXVI
Evil
Before analyzing the relationship of evil to salvation, it is

necessary to begin with some definitions. The original, 1828
edition of Noah Webster’s dictionary gives us a summary
statement:
Evil is natural or moral. Natural evil is anything which produces
pain, distress, loss or calamity, or which in any way disturbs the
peace, impairs the happiness, or destroys the perfection of
natural beings.
Moral evil is any deviation of a moral agent from the rules of
conduct prescribed to him by God, or by legitimate human
authority: or it is any violation of the plain principles of justice
and rectitude.
There are also evils civil, which effect injuriously the peace or
prosperity of a city or state; and political evils, which injure a
nation, in its public capacity.
All wickedness, all crimes, all violations of law and right are
moral evils. Diseases are natural evils, but they often proceed
from moral evils.
2. Misfortune; mischief; injury.
There shall no evil befall thee. Ps. xci.
A prudent man forseeth the evil, and hideth himself.
Prov. xxii.
3. Depravity; corruption of heart, or disposition to commit
wickedness: Malignity.
The heart of the sons of men is full of evil. Eccles. ix.
4. Malady; as the king’s evil or scrophula.
A Christian must hold that all evil is a product of the Fall, of the
breach between God and man whereby the purpose and function
of creation has been affected and diseased. The English word evil
comes from the Anglo-Saxon and Gothic; it may be related to the
word over, and its basic idea is transgressing.
241
In the Dictionary of Philosophy, Feibleman defines evil thus:
Negation of the extrinsic elections of things. In practice, the
positive effects of such negation. The morally bad. Hostility to
the welfare of anything. Absence of the good. Opposite of
goodness.1
This definition simply covers a variety of philosophical
possibilities, that evil can be seen as mere negation, a lack, or an
active hostility; it cannot be all of these. This definition thus
highlights the inability of modern man to define and recognize evil.
According to the mythology of modern man, primitive man,
being ignorant, projected a perversity onto the natural order and
personified it as evil spirits and the devil. According to the
Unitarian John H. Dietrich, “Ignorance gave birth to fear, and fear
wed to superstition gave birth to the Devil, or rather to devils, for
at this early period it was not one devil or bad god, but a thousand;
for everything that seemed to possess independent power was
personified and believed to be a god. And if this power was
destructive, then it was an evil god or Devil.” Thus, the ideas of evil
and the devil were products of ignorance and impotence. Salvation
came to mean deliverance from evil, the Devil, and hell. “And so
the Devil, as Mr. Ingersoll suggested, has been the mainspring of
theology, and hell the cornerstone of the universe. Take these two
things out of Christianity, and it becomes an entirely different
religion.”2 This is true enough, but we will return to the matter
later, and on different grounds than Dietrich does.
How then are we to explain the existence of evil? A word in
regard to this is necessary to round out my discussion. Evil, of
course, is simply those natural processes and social activities
and individual behavior which are horrible, unpleasant, and
undesirable to man. This does not mean that there is any such
thing as evil in the universe, it only means that there are certain
things which from the standpoint of man’s welfare we call evil.
So modern knowledge denies not only the existence of a
Devil, but any necessity for him. It denies the real existence of
1. James
K. Feibleman, “Evil,” in Dagobert D. Runes, editor, Dictionary of Phi-
losophy, 15th edition, revised (New York: Philosophical Library, 1960), 101f.
2. John H. Dietrich, The Humanist Pulpit, A Second Volume of Addresses (Minneap-
olis, Minnesota: The First Unitarian Society, 1928), 68, 71f.
Evil 243
evil; that is, it denies that evil is a real entity, a substance, either
in the world about us, or as sin in man. To put the whole thing
in one word, what we call evil is nothing more nor less than
maladjustment. And in the time left I can only suggest what I
mean by that. I have treated this subject of evil before so I
need not go into detail. At the outset of this explanation notice
the meaning of life. Life means simply this: A human
organism, man or woman, in the midst of, surrounded by, and
related to the real facts of the universe. When he is rightly
related or properly adjusted to these facts, then the man finds
security, health, happiness. When wrongly related or
maladjusted he finds calamity, sickness, disturbance. This one
principle explains evil, both physical and moral.3
None of these ideas were original with Dietrich. His value is as a
faithful echo chamber to the thought of his day, which stressed evil
as maladjustment and salvation as adjustment. A generation was
reared to believe that adjustment was the answer to man’s ills and
problems. Educators talked of the well-adjusted child as the goal of
education, and psychologists worked to produce a well-adjusted
personality. The result has been a group-directed person. More
recently, the word, also used by Dietrich, “relate,” is more popular.
People are asked “to relate” to certain things or movements, or the
times.
Dietrich saw evil receding as knowledge and adjustment
increased:
... All physical evil is maladjustment between man and his
conditions. Increasing knowledge is slowly disarming these
evils. In other words, we enjoy security and happiness in
proportion to our knowledge of natural law and our
adjustment to it.
The same is true in regard to what we call moral evil. The
unfolding history of humanity reveals nothing more plainly
than that there are great and universal conditions on which
alone man can attain social welfare and happiness, and these
conditions can be understood and formulated into laws of
justice and equity and fair-dealing, which we speak of as moral
laws. Within these conditions or laws is what we call goodness
3. Ibid., 77.
because it contributes to man’s welfare. Breaking these laws we
call evil because it results in man’s injury and destruction. And
so without going into detail, I lay down the principle that
moral evil is only moral or social maladjustment — a man’s
getting out of right relationship with his fellowmen or with
himself. Our knowledge of the best modes of behaviour for
the good of mankind is as yet very meagre, but man’s interest
has recently been enlisted in this direction, and I believe that
we shall rapidly gain light through the new sciences of
psychology and sociology and all those social sciences which
devote themselves to a study of human nature and human
relationships. Knowledge then is the Devil-killer and the
exterminator of evil.
The Devil then is not the author of evil. It is only human
maladjustment to physical and social conditions in which man
is compelled to live. The Devil is a dream of the night and
darkness of the past. Let him be relegated to the museum of
theological curiosities, mummies, and skeletons, that the
coming ages will study to find out what men were thinking of
long ago.4
Since for Dietrich “all physical evil is maladjustment between man
and his conditions,” and “increasing knowledge is slowly disarming
these evils,” it follows for him that “security and happiness” are
enjoyed “in proportion to our knowledge of natural law and our
adjustment to it.” It would be difficult to support that contention.
Since 1928, the increase in knowledge of natural conditions has
greatly accelerated, but man’s security and happiness have not.
There is definitely no necessary correlation between knowledge of
the natural world and security and happiness.
Moreover, Dietrich’s definition of moral evil is totally
humanistic. “Moral evil is only moral or social maladjustment — a
man’s getting out of right relationship with his fellowmen or with
himself.” Thus, since moral evil is social maladjustment, and
physical evil is “maladjustment between man and his conditions,”
it follows that the good is adjustment. How do you adjust to an
earthquake or tornado? You can prepare for it, or build in terms of
protection against it, but none of it makes an earthquake or
4. Ibid., 78f.
Evil 245
tornado good. Similarly, if all of a society, or most of it, is made up
of immoral men, i.e., liars, adulterers, thieves, and murderers, is it
good to adjust to it? In terms of Dietrich, adjustment or
conformity is good.
Since Dietrich’s day, men, after working for adjustment and
conformity, have decided that society itself is maladjusted, and
hence to adjust to it is evil. The result has been rebellion and an
insistence on the moral value of non-adjustment to society and an
adjustment, both moral and physical, to nature. One result has
been the ecology movement. Nature has become the norm for
adjustment. But how can we assume that nature is normative?
What is the criterion for assuming that anything is normative?
Since knowledge disarms and abolishes evil, how can we know,
short of an exhaustive knowledge of the universe, how to judge
anything as normative?
The humanist, by denying the reality of evil, has also denied the
reality of the good. By denying hell, he has also denied heaven. If
good and evil are simply relative to man’s security, health, and
happiness, then they are really beyond definition, because there is
no reason to assume that anything conducive to man’s health is of
necessity conducive to his security and happiness also. A man may
be happier eating a coconut cream pie than a lettuce salad, but this
does not make it conducive to his health. A man may also find
more security in saving his short supply of money instead of taking
a vacation which may further his health and happiness, and to
assume that spending the money makes for security because it
makes for happiness is absurd.
To make good and evil relative to man is to make man the
ultimate standard or norm in the universe. Since man is obviously
neither the creator nor governor of all things, to make good and
evil relative to a created and relative fact is to falsify good and evil.
Without a true definition of good and evil, there can be no
possibility of salvation. For some, life is itself evil, and therefore
death is good; it is deliverance and salvation. For Dietrich, Biblical
faith represents superstition and hence evil; man’s salvation
requires deliverance from it.
This is not all. A relative idea of good and evil means a relative
idea of salvation, and, in a world in which all things are relative,
nothing has any validity. For some romantic poets, the supreme
good, and salvation from their distress, meant the love of some
woman. Very commonly, soon thereafter, salvation meant escape
from the love of the same woman. Their grandiloquent world of
good and evil had all the dignity of a bedroom farce.
The Westminster Larger Catechism (Q. 24) defines sin thus: “Sin is
any want of conformity unto or transgression of any law of God,
given as a rule to the reasonable creature.” Because of man’s fall,
the world is also fallen, to prevent man in his sin from enjoying
creation in its perfection. Thus, moral and physical evil are in origin
personal; they come from man’s rebellion against God and man’s
attempt to be his own god, determining good and evil for himself
and in relation to his desires (Gen. 3:5). The penalty for sin, the
moral evil, was death, the epitome of physical evil (Gen. 2:17). Man
was led into sin by another creature, Satan.
Of Satan, Hughes observed,
Nothing could be more unscientific or unphilosophical than
to doubt the existence of Satan, a personal spirit of evil. To
talk about a “principle of evil” is to talk meaningless rubbish,
and to use sounds absolutely devoid of sense. Principle of evil
indeed! Who ever heard of such a thing? Who can really
imagine such a thing? All moral good and all moral evil of
which we have any conception is always, and must always be,
personal.5
In contradiction to Hughes, we can say that there is a principle of
evil precisely because a personal God exists against whom men are
in rebellion, and the principle, or essential character, or essence, of
evil is man’s desire to be his own god, and this was Satan’s desire
also. In agreement with Hughes, we must deny that any platonic or
Manichaean principle of evil exists.
It must then be stressed that the role of Satan must not be
overemphasized. A serious and Manichaean error with regard to
5. Rev. Hugh Price Hughes, Ethical Christianity, A Series of Sermons (New York:
E. P. Dutton, 1892), 131. Hughes was a pastor in London, England.
Evil 247
Satan assumes that he is omnipresent and is everywhere tempting
all men into sin. Satan, however, is not God: he is a creature. His
presence is a purely local one. Just as I, if I am in California, cannot
be in Virginia at the same time, nor know the mind of anyone in
Virginia unless they choose to write or to telephone me, so Satan
too has a purely local presence. Only God is omnipresent, and to
ascribe omnipresence to Satan is to become a Satanist.
Similarly, Satan lacks omniscience. He cannot know what is in
my mind, or the mind of any man, except by analogy. He can
assume that, because I am a creature, and, although redeemed, still
subject to some of the infirmities of the fall, I will share with him
some common impulses and desires. With the unregenerate, he has
full rapport by analogy. However, to know exactly what our
unexpressed thoughts are is beyond him.
By recognizing the local nature of Satan and all devils or fallen
angels, we thereby recognize their limited power and influence. We
are compelled to recognize the centrality of our own moral
decision. It is a part of our sin to say that Satan led us astray when
we ourselves willingly plunged into it, enticed by our own sinful
nature. Very wisely, John Donne, in his poem, “The Litany”
(XVII), prayed that we might be delivered “From tempting Satan
to tempt us.” In “Holy Sonnets,” XV, Donne stated the case to
God:
Reason your viceroy in me, me should defend,
But is captiv’d, and proves weak or untrue
Yet dearly I love you, and would be loved fain,
But am betroth’d unto your enemy:
Divorce me, untie, or break that knot again,
Take me to you, imprison me, for I
Except you enthral me, never shall be free,
Nor ever chaste, except you ravish me.
To overrate Satan means also to underrate God. It means ascribing
a major share of God’s power and sovereignty to Satan and thereby
surrendering a part of reality to the devil. Many who do this end up
by limiting salvation to the soul and surrendering the world to the
devil.
St. Paul, in Romans 6:20-23, declared in Arthur S. Way’s version,
When you were thus thralls to sin, you were, in relation to
righteousness, free men — it had no control over your life. I
ask you, then — what harvest did you reap in those days from
actions at the memory of which you now blush? None — for
the goal to which those things led was death! But now, you
have been emancipated from sin, you have become thralls to
God: you are reaping a harvest of your own — its ingathering
shall be holiness: the goal shall be life, eternal life. Ah, the
pittance-wage that sin doled out to you was death; but the
lavish bounty of God is life eternal, involved in your union
with the Messiah, with Jesus our Lord — ours!6
Sin, moral evil, results in physical or natural evil, the culmination of
which is death. Salvation leads to sanctification, to holiness, to
moral good or righteousness, which instead is productive of “life,
eternal life.” It has results here and now, and it culminates in a life
without either sin or death.
When Oliver Wendell Holmes defined sin as comparable to
disease, “an occurrence absolutely necessary, inevitable, and as one
may say, normal under certain given conditions of constitution and
circumstance,” he was confident that he had abolished both the
medicine man and the clergyman. He held that “Sin, like disease, is
a vital process.”7 In reality, he abolished progress from the liberal
vocabulary. In time, it became apparent that a “normal” condition
was not one which man could legitimately war against. Sin was thus
domesticated and made man’s normal condition in the twentieth
century.
6. Arthur S. Way The Letters of St. Paul, Seventh edition (London: Macmillan,
1935), 123f.
7. Oliver Wendell Holmes, The Poet at the Breakfast Table, vol. II (Cambridge,
Massachusetts: Riverside Press, 1890), 433.
XXVII
Progress and Providence
The Enlightenment, while expressing great faith in reason, was

unable to see the triumph of reason as very likely. Because of its
strongly classical orientation, it shared the pagan cyclical view of
history. As Gay noted, the philosophers “pictured civilization as
individuals, with a distinct life cycle ending in decay and death.”1
In the nineteenth century, the idea of progress came into its own
as a secular concept. Previously, it had been a Christian doctrine.
With the merging of the evangelical and pietistic movements with
the Enlightenment, to produce secular, nationalistic, and
naturalistic views of progress, men began to see a predestined
progress in history while rejecting both God and His
predestination. Oliver Wendell Holmes again gives us a naive and
confident expression of the new faith:
Did you ever read what Mr. Bancroft says about Calvin in his
article on Jonathan Edwards, — and mighty well said it is too,
in my judgment? Let me remind you of it, whether you have
read it or not. “Setting himself up over against the privileged
classes, he, with a loftier pride than theirs, revealed the power of a
yet higher order of nobility, not of a registered ancestry of
fifteen generations, but one absolutely spotless in its
eschutcheon, preordained in the council chamber of eternity.”
I think you’ll find I have got that sentence right, word for
word, and there’s a great deal more in it than many good folks
who call themselves after the reformer seem to be aware of.
The Pope put his foot on the neck of kings, but Calvin and his
cohort crushed the whole human race under their heels in the
name of the Lord of Hosts. Now, you see, the point that
people don’t understand is the absolute and utter humility of
science, in opposition to this doctrinal self-sufficiency. I don’t
doubt this may sound a little paradoxical at first, but I think
you will find it is all right. You remember the courtier and the
monarch. — Louis the Fourteenth, wasn’t it? — never mind,
1. Peter Gay, The Enlightenment: An Interpretation, vol. II (New York: Alfred A.

Knopf, 1969), 100.
249
give the poor fellows that live by setting you right a chance.
“What o’clock is it?” says the king. “Just whatever o’clock
Your Majesty pleases.” says the Courtier.2
Holmes was a naive believer in hard facts; the world around him
was made up of hard facts which were a part of a grand law order
governed by determined laws. Only fools disputed that reality. “But
there are people, and plenty of them, today, who will dispute facts
just as clear to those who have taken pains to learn what is known
about them, as that of the tide’s rising. They don’t like to admit
these facts, because they throw doubts upon some of their
cherished opinions.”The “facts” Holmes referred to were the
theoretical constructs of evolutionary geology, which represented
a faith, not an observed and tested body of data.3 Moreover,
Holmes assumed a predestination without God, and the new elect
people as scientists. With full assurance and arrogance, Holmes
spoke of “the absolute and utter humility of science”; Holmes
himself was a man of science! If what Holmes displayed was
“absolute and utter humility,” perhaps we can call the attempts of
scientists more recently to control men, by brain implants and by
denying freedom to all men save a group of scientists who will
control mankind, a hint of developing pride! No kings or priests of
old showed as much arrogance and aimed at so great a power over
man as have modern scientists.
A non-Christian scholar, in surveying the modern world, has
noted that,
Through the corruption of progress ideology, brought on by
the very attempt to live up to it, the pursuit of truth is replaced
by the quest for power. Power is the chief goal of all
progress-oriented societies. The reason for this lies deep in the
structure of human nature. To understand the phenomenon
of power, then, presupposes an inquiry into the foundations
of human nature. Social scientists qua scientists are ambivalent
as to whether there is any such thing as human nature at all. In
this book I assume there is.4
2. Oliver Wendell Holmes, The Poet at the Breakfast Table, vol. II (Cambridge,
Massachusetts: Riverside Press, 1890), 262f.
3.
Ibid., 263-264
4. Lionel Rubinoff, The Pornography of Power (New York: Ballantine Books,
1969), 2.
Progress and Providence 251
Rubinoff thus reflects a Biblical recognition that man’s nature (in
its fallen estate) aims at power (to be as God). The problem thus is
that man corrupts what he aims at by his lust for power. As
Rubinoff introduces his problem,
I am concerned with two central ideas: progress and power,
both of which have had a deep and profound influence on the
course of Western history. With the idea of progress came the
idea of identifying value with pragmatic and hedonistic goals,
goals which can be pursued only through the exercise of
power. The hedonistic dimensions of the pursuit of power are
what make this phenomenon such a potentially dangerous
one. But it is dangerous for still another reason. Progress
posits a belief in transcendental goals which both direct and
supply the sense of history.
But the irony is that the ideology of progress surreptitiously
conspires to introduce the very opposite belief, namely, the
relativistic notion that truth is whatever happens to satisfy the
needs of the moment. And wherever these needs conflict,
power is again invoked as the sole arbiter.5
Rubinoff has seen the problem clearly, but at no time does he
consider the Biblical answer. Instead, he seeks a
pseudo-transcendence through evil imagination:
I am therefore concerned, in this book, with the
self-destructive potential of power as it affects man’s
primordial tendency to evil; and with man’s inherent capacity
to transcend himself through the creative use of the
imagination. The main thesis of this book is that the most
effective antidote for the performance of evil is the
imagination of evil, and that the most viable therapy for the
pathological abuse of power is, accordingly, an imaginative
critique of power.6
By becoming pathological, we will supposedly regain health and
exorcise our “primordial tendency to evil.” For Rubinoff, “man is
himself the source of the evil against which he is constantly
struggling.”7 This evil is inherited from man’s animal past. For the
5. Ibid.
6. Ibid.,
4.
7. Ibid., 193.
way of transcendence, Rubinoff looks to Nietzsche, Jean Genet,
and Norman Mailer:
What is lacking in our world is not violence, terror, and death
but creativity and life. Thus, Mailer concludes, if one is to
make one’s way back to life and restore creativity to the world,
the violence and irrationality from which we now flee must
somehow be passed through, and digested, instead. In short,
says Mailer, the way to transcend violence is to commit it; to
get it out of your system once and for all. The decision is “to
encourage the psychopath in oneself ”....
But how does one commit violence? Not in fact; for to commit
it in fact is to surrender to it. To enter it through the
imagination, however, is to transcend it. The existential
moment is therapeutic precisely because it is imaginative.8
This is the gnostic principle that man as divine can give body to
aspects of his being and expel them from his own being. The poet
William Blake was an advocate of this principle in milder form. Just
as God created all things by His sovereign act, so man supposedly
by his imagination creates all the possibilities of his inner world and
then chooses to abolish some possibilities which he has now
supposedly transcended.
The salvation of our age, then, lies in nothing less than the
speed with which the imaginative celebration of evil can
supersede the pornographic enjoyment of evil through the
exercise of power.9
Did this work for Mailer, or did not the act follow his imagination
where his wife was concerned? And did not the imagined evils of
the nineteenth century lead to the enacted evils of the twentieth
century?
But, to present Rubinoff as clearly as possible, let us see more
fully the alternatives as he presents them:
Faced with such possibilities, to be expected whenever the
nature of man is violated by an excessively rationalized
humanism, realists like the Grand Inquisitor and B. F. Skinner
8. Ibid.,
199f.
9. Ibid., 201.
have argued that the only solution to the paradox of the
human condition is to bring mankind under a benevolent
dictatorship which will satisfy his need for security and
authority while preserving the illusion of freedom; while
Freud, on the other hand, favors a more open society which
controls aggression by sublimating it into productive and
creative activities.
Looked at in this way, the institution of a scientifically ordered
system of social control, whether of the Skinnerian or
Freudian variety, or else the institution of a religion of
authority, as favored by the Grand Inquisitor, does indeed
seem far preferable to the risk of annihilation through the
pornographic pursuit of evil. But in fact these are not our only
options. It is almost certain that by pretending to be angels we
shall surely become devils. At the same time, however, no real
victory is achieved by so arranging conditions that men are no
longer permitted to pursue evil. Denying to men both the
right and the opportunity to be evil is as much a negation of
their humanity as pretending they are thoroughly virtuous.
The possibility of real virtue exists only for a man who has the
freedom to choose evil. It is only for the man who has first
“lived through” (imaginatively or otherwise) the choice of evil
that the real meaning of virtue is disclosed for the first time.
But the first stage in the dialectic of human redemption
through the imaginative encounter with evil is learning to
refuse all illusions: whether it be the illusion of man as an angel
led astray by wicked forces from afar, or the illusion of man
wholly driven by demonic forces from within. Man exists at
the center of a contradiction which can be resolved only by
“living through,” in imagination and understanding, all of his
intrinsic possibilities. It is only, to repeat, through the
imaginative transcendence of evil that the future of mankind
can be secured.10
Rubinoff sees a “rationalized humanism” as responsible for our
plight. By its view of man as naturally good, it has given man room
and freedom to be freely evil. As one of the critics of “rational
humanism,” he says, “for God’s sake let us stop pretending that we are
angels or we shall surely become devils!”11 At times, Rubinoff seems to
10. Ibid.,
137f.
11. Ibid., 109.
say, let us pretend to be devils, by giving full expression to our evil
imagination, so that we can become angels, or at least good men.
Virtue, he holds, is only possible if man is free to choose evil. We
can agree that responsibility is basic to man’s freedom, but his
freedom is the freedom of a creature, not of a god, a secondary, not
a primary, freedom. Rubinoff never sees God’s law as the test of
man’s freedom; for him, man’s freedom is primary, and it must
therefore be totally uninhibited in its exploration of evil. His
position is that it is necessary that we sin (“imaginatively or
otherwise,” so that even the act is admissible for Rubinoff) in order
to have the freedom to be good by exorcising evil from our nature.
We cast out the evil, but where? In commenting on Genet,
Rubinoff writes:
Sartre makes the point that Genet’s writings are therapeutic.
By infecting us with his evil, Genet delivers himself from it.
Each of his books is a cathartic act of possession, a
psychodrama. With each work he masters increasingly the
demon that possesses him. And so, says Sartre, his years of
literature are equivalent to a psychoanalytic cure.12
But what are the consequences of Genet “infecting” his many
readers? And where is there any evidence that Genet has delivered
himself from his evil? Has he not rather indulged it freely, because
his indulgence has gained respectability among existentialists? Is it
not more accurate to say that Genet has remained evil and has
infected others with his evil?
Where in all of this has Rubinoff found any transcendence? Do
we get rid of hatred by indulging hatred, and do we transcend
ourselves by indulging ourselves? If Rubinoff is right, the way to
transcend love is to love!
Rubinoff wants progress, but what is progress? Clark, in
analyzing the contemporary meaning of progress, sees it as “the
denial of providence.” It is closely linked to evolutionary ideas, is
held to be natural and inevitable, to be a natural law, and to be
12. Ibid., 196.

13
beyond the ability of man to block. A common modern proverb
has been, “You can’t stop progress.”
Beard held that, while “progress” is an idea and not a natural law,
the rise of scientific technology insures progress, because
“technology by its intrinsic nature transcends all social forms, the
whole heritage of acquired institutions and habits... it cannot be
monopolized by any nation, class, period, government, or people.
In catholicity it surpasses all religions.” It is thus “significant for the
idea of progress.”14 But even as Beard wrote, Stalin was busy in
Russia using technology to create a new barbarism, and Hitler was
soon to do the same; others later followed suit. Since Beard’s day,
many secular scholars, as witness Gunther Stent’s The Coming of the
Golden Age: A View of the End of Progress (1969), have surrendered all
belief in progress, because man without God is also man without
either meaning or hope.
Bury defined the non-Christian view of progress thus:
This idea means that civilisation has moved, is moving, and
will move in a desirable direction. But in order to judge that
we are moving in a desirable direction we should have to know
precisely what the destination is. To the minds of most people
the desirable outcome of human development would be a
condition of society in which all the inhabitants of the planet
would enjoy a perfectly happy existence. But it is impossible to
be sure that civilisation is moving in the right direction to
realise this aim.15
It is also impossible, without a transcendental standard, to judge
what happiness or progress is. The idea of progress is simply the
doctrine of providence divorced from God.
The first three articles of the Westminster Confession’s Chapter V,
“Of Providence,” give us a summary statement of the doctrine:
I. God, the great Creator of all things, doth uphold, direct,
dispose, and govern all creatures, actions, and things, from the
13. Gordon H. Clark, Historiography, Secular and Religious (Nutley, New Jersey:
The Craig Press, 1971), 117ff.
14. Charles A. Beard, “Introduction” to J. B. Bury, The Idea of Progress, An Inquiry
into its Origin and Growth (New York: Macmillan, 1932), xxiii.
15. Bury, Ibid., 2.
greatest even to the least, by his most wise and holy
providence, according to his infallible foreknowledge, and the
free and immutable counsel of his own will, to the praise of the
glory of his wisdom, power, justice, goodness, and mercy.
II. Although, in relation to the foreknowledge, and decree of
God, the first cause, all things come to pass immutably and
infallibly, yet, by the same providence, he ordereth them to fall
out according to the nature of second causes, either
necessarily, freely, or contingently.
III. God, in His ordinary providence, maketh use of means,
yet is free to work without, above, and against them, at His
pleasure.
The Shorter Catechism states the matter even more succinctly:
Q. II. What are God’s works of providence?
A. God’s works of providence are his most holy, wise, and
powerful preserving and governing all his creatures, and all
their actions.
St. Paul, in Romans 8:28, gives a magnificent statement of the
doctrine of providence: “And we know that all things work
together for good to them that love God, to them who are the
called according to his purpose.” There is meaning, progress, and
salvation only because God is, and because His providence
absolutely and totally encompasses and governs all things.
In a universe ruled by God, the future is assured. Every fact is a
God-created fact and moves to a God-ordained purpose. Nothing
is futile, nor by chance. In a universe ruled by chance, victory is
only an accident, and meaning an illusion. Matthew Arnold
expressed this aspect of the loss of faith in his writings, as witness
these lines:
And though thou thinkest that thou knowest sure
Thy victory, yet thou canst not surely know.
For we are all, like swimmers in the sea,
Poised on the top of a huge wave of fate,
Which hangs uncertain to which side to fall.
And whether it will heave us up to land,
Or whether it will roll us out to sea,
Back out to sea, to the deep waves of death,
We know not, and no search will make us to know;
Only the event will teach us in its hour.16
Arnold’s point was, not that the future is unknown to us, but that
it is governed by a blind and meaningless fate. Life for him, as he
wrote in “Dover Beach,”
Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,
Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain.
In “The Scholar-Gypsy,” Arnold saw what the loss of faith was
doing to scholars like himself. Their faith being gone, their
“intellectual throne” was unproductive, save of frustration and
misery:
... and we,
Light half-believers of our casual creeds,
Who never deeply felt; nor clearly willed,
Whose insight never has borne fruit in deeds,
Whose vague resolves never have been fulfilled;
For whom each year we see
Breeds new beginnings, disappointments new;
Who hesitate and falter life away
And lose to-morrow the ground won to-day —
We, these faithless scholars, Arnold recognized, learn only
disillusionment. Wisdom comes to be disillusionment,
hopelessness, and despair.
What Arnold saw very early, Gunther Stent documented a
century later. Progress as a faith failed because it was divorced from
God’s providence. The great secular dream of natural and
inevitable salvation gave way to cynicism and the return of the old
pagan belief in a cyclical view of history, of a meaningless and
endless return to nothingness and death. With the decline and
collapse of the idea of progress, reason also went into eclipse. An
irrational universe and a meaningless life cannot long sustain a
belief in the validity of reason. Moreover, as men lost faith in
reason because of their growing belief in the ultimacy of chance
and meaninglessness, their belief in occultism arose. Men do not
16.
Matthew Arnold, Sohrab and Rustum, With Other Poems (Boston: Ginn and
Company, 1906), 14.
readily live with a lack of meaning: they find it easier to believe that
the universe is essentially demonic than that it is barren of
meaning. If they deny God, they will soon affirm the devil.
XXVIII
Providence and the End
The providence of God gives direction to history and makes

progress possible because it defines the goals of history and gives
it meaning. People do not normally associate the doctrine of
salvation with the rescue of meaning and definition, but the fact
remains that, without the defined goal of salvation, and historical
and personal advance to the regeneration of all things as declared
by God, history soon loses its focus and meaning. History
becomes, then, to cite the offhand remark of a philosopher, “just
one damned fact after another.”
The refreshing cynic, Charles Fort, demonstrated the inability of
science to define or to prove in a series of studies on the
dogmatism of science.
What is a straight line? A straight line is the shortest distance
between two points. Well, then, what is a shortest distance
between two points? That is a straight line. According to the
test of ages, the definition that a straight line is a straight line
cannot be improved upon. I start with a logic as exacting as
Euclid’s....
I shall be scientific about it. Said Sir Isaac Newton — or
virtually said he — “If there is no change in the direction of a
moving body, the direction of a moving body is not changed.”
“But,” continued he, “if something be changed, it is changed
as much as it is changed.” So red worms fell from the sky, in
Sweden, because from the sky, in Sweden, red worms fell.
How do geologists determine the age of rocks? By the fossils
in them. And how do they determine the age of the fossils? By
the rocks they’re in. Having started with the logic of Euclid, I
go on with the wisdom of a Newton.1
The thing to do was to accept it in its day, but Darwinism of
course was never proved:
1. Charles Fort, Lo!, in The Books of Charles Fort (New York: Henry Holt, 1941),
544, 547f.
259
The fittest survive.
What is meant by the fittest?
Not the strongest; not the cleverest —
Weakness and stupidity everywhere survive.
There is no way of determining fitness except in that a thing
does survive.
“Fitness,” then, is only another name for “survival.”
Darwinism:
That survivors survive.2
The function of God is the focus. An intense mental state is
impossible unless there be something, or the illusion of
something, to center upon.3
Fort’s last statement barely opens the door to the fundamental
issue. Life and thought alike need a focus, a focus of meaning. Men
can briefly find a focus in humanistic goals, in wealth, power,
status, sex, and experiences, but these soon pall if life itself has no
meaning. In the barest sense, history is movement in time, but if
neither life nor movement have any meaning to man, then there is
no focus for history nor any cause for movement and progress
towards a goal. Guardini is right: “The end determines all that
precedes it.”4 Where there is a faith in God’s providence directing
all history towards the triumph of the covenant people in exercising
dominion over all the earth, towards the regeneration of men and
the inclusion of all nations into God’s covenant, and towards
heaven, the resurrection of the body, and the new creation, there
men will move and progress eagerly towards reconstructing all
things in Christ and awaiting God’s glorious fulfilment. Both
history and thought find their meaning and focus in God. It is the
end which determines all that precedes it.
Without a valid end, thinking turns on itself and can define
nothing. Knowledge proceeds from knowledge, not from
ignorance. The child learns because a body of knowledge exists,
and it exists because the world is God’s handiwork and is
2. Fort, The Book of the Damned, in ibid., 24.
3. Fort, Wild Talents, in ibid., 1001. For a
study of Fort, see Damon Knight,
Charles Fort, Prophet of the Unexplained (Garden City, New York: Doubleday,
1970).
4. Romano Guardini, The Last Things (Notre Dame, Indiana: University of
Notre Dame Press, 1965), 12.
Providence and the End 261
undergirded by His purpose, its meaning declared by His word, and
His goals predestined and declared as immutable. Without the
presupposition that the universe is an established and God-given
order, man cannot relate fact to fact nor fact to meaning.
A straight line as the shortest distance between two points is an
assertion which presupposes a universe of law and meaning reliably
known by man in the framework of trustworthy mental processes
and meanings. In a world of chance, the statement is meaningless.
We have no problem with the statement that a straight line is the
shortest distance between two points because we come to it with a
vast body of presuppositions concerning reality. Moreover, we
assume that, if someone should demonstrate that the statement is
not necessarily true, it will only be in terms of another and
profounder insight into the nature of reality. We presuppose a
universe of law and meaning in terms of which definition is
possible. To define is to determine precisely, to bring out the limits
or outlines of something. There can be no definition unless God is
either recognized, or covertly presupposed while outwardly denied.
Van Til has said,
Suppose we think of a man made of water in an infinitely
extended and bottomless ocean of water. Desiring to get out
of water, he makes a ladder of water. He sets this ladder upon
the water and against the water and then attempts to climb out
of the water. So hopeless and senseless a picture must be
drawn of the natural man’s methodology based as it is upon
the assumption that time or chance is ultimate. On his
assumption his own rationality is a products of chance. On his
assumption even the laws of logic which he employs are
product of chance. The rationality and purpose that he may be
searching for are still bound to be products of chance....
Christian theism, which was first rejected because of its
supposed authoritarian character, is the only position which
gives human reason a field for successful operation and a
method of true progress in knowledge.5
Let us return now to Fort’s comments about the definition of a
straight line. What Fort was pointing out was that scientists indulge
5. Cornelius VanTil, The Defense of the Faith (Philadelphia: Presbyterian and Re-
formed Publishing Company, 1955), 119.
in circular reasoning. Van Til, in affirming circular reasoning, has
this to say:
It thus appears that we must take the Bible, its conception of
sin, its conception of Christ, and its conception of God and all
that is involved in these concepts together, or take none of
them. So also it makes very little difference whether we begin
with the notion of an absolute God or with the notion of an
absolute Bible. The one is derived from the other. They are
together involved in the Christian view of life. Hence we
defend all or we defend none. Only one absolute is possible,
and only one absolute can speak to us. Hence it must speak to
us at different places. The Bible must be true because it alone
speaks of an absolute God. And equally true is it that we
believe in an absolute God because the Bible tells us of one.
And this brings up the point of circular reasoning. The charge
is constantly made that if matters stand thus with Christianity,
it has written its own death warrant as far as intelligent men
are concerned. Who wishes to make such a simple blunder in
elementary logic, as to say that we believe something to be true
because it is in the Bible? Our answer to this is briefly that we
prefer to reason in a circle to not reasoning at all. We hold it
to be true that circular reasoning is the only reasoning that is
possible to finite man. The method of implication as outlined
above is circular reasoning. Or we may call it spiral reasoning.
We must go round and round a thing to see more of its
dimensions and to know more about it, in general, unless we
are larger than that which we are investigating. Unless we are
larger than God we cannot reason about him any other way,
than by transcendental or circular argument. The refusal to
admit the necessity of circular reasoning is itself an evident
token of opposition to Christianity. Reasoning in a vicious
circle is the only alternative to reasoning in a circle as discussed
above.6
Men either reason from God to God-given and God-interpreted
facts, or they reason from man to man-made interpretations of
brute factuality. All reason is circular reasoning. Man, as he claims
autonomy from God, assumes that he can gain an infinite, an
6.
Cornelius Van Til, In Defense of the Faith, Vol. II: A Survey of Christian Epistemol-
ogy (Nutley, New Jersey: Presbyterian and Reformed Publishing Company,
1969), 12.
exhaustive view of things, that he can, in brief, reason like God
rather than as man. He then reasons in a vicious circle. He must
then say, if he is honest, that he cannot define straight, or line, or
distance, or anything else; every item in his vicious circle hangs in
mid-air on nothingness and is hence meaningless. His statement
conveys meaning only because both he and his hearers presuppose
the God of scripture and His law-order, whether they admit this
fact or not. Reasoning is by presuppositions, whether men admit
them or not. Autonomous man is anxious to gain an objective and
God-like ability to see the totality of things exhaustively, and thus
he denies the borrowed theistic presuppositions of his thought,
whereas his professed presupposition of autonomy destroys the
possibility of knowledge unless exhaustive knowledge is possible.
If reality is what autonomous man claims it is, he can know
nothing, unless he knows everything. If reality is simply a product
of chance, then it has no meaning or direction, nor does it have
something about it that can be understood. It is then subject to no
law, nor amenable to any control or use, because it lacks the
character of consistency.
However, if all reality, all the facts of nature and of history, are
the product of God’s total and predestinating plan, then all reality
is already known by God, who ordains it, controls it, and
predestines it, and it is potentially knowable to man truly and
accurately, though not exhaustively. Reality is then knowable
because it is not chance but pattern; it is governed by a purpose and
person, and it is knowable to minds made in God’s image. We then
reason by presupposition to valid knowledge. As Van Til has
pointed out,
To admit one’s own presuppositions and to point out the
presuppositions of others, is therefore to maintain that all
reasoning is, in the nature of the case, circular reasoning. The
starting-point, the method, and the conclusion are always
involved in one another.7
Since “the starting-point, the method, and the conclusion are
always involved in one another,” to avoid circular reasoning from
7. Van Til, The Defense of the Faith, 118.
God, to God-given facts, and thence to conclusions, is to avoid
reasoning at all, unless one covertly borrows the premise of God’s
order while denying it. To begin with nothing and go to nothing
adds up to nothing. Not surprisingly, the conclusion of
autonomous philosophies is a despair of the possibility of
knowledge. As Van Til has said, “the world, to exist at all, must
exist as a theistic world.” Moreover,
The only alternative to “circular reasoning” as engaged in by
Christians, no matter on what point they speak, is that of
reasoning on the basis of isolated facts and isolated minds,
with the result that there is no possibility of reasoning at all.
Unless as sinners we have an absolutely inspired Bible, we
have no absolute God interpreting reality for us, and unless we
have an absolute God interpreting reality for us, there is no
true interpretation at all.
This is not to deny that there is a true interpretation up to a
point by those who do not self-consciously build upon the
self-conscious God of Scripture as their ultimate reference
point. Non-believers often speak the truth in spite of
themselves. We are concerned to indicate that the absolute
distinction between true and false must be maintained when a
self-consciously adopted nontheistic and a self-consciously
adopted theistic point of view confront one another.8
Guardini was thus right: “The end determines all that precedes
it,” in reason as well as in life. The doctrine of progress fades when
it is separated from the providence of God.
Earlier, the first three sections of the Westminster Confession of
Faith, Chapter V, “Of Providence,” were cited. The remainder of
that chapter is relevant to our present purpose:
IV. The almighty power, unsearchable wisdom, and infinite
goodness of God, so far manifest themselves in his
providence, that it extendeth itself even to the first fall, and all
other sins of angels and men, and that not by a bare
permission, but such as hath joined with it a most wise and
powerful bounding, and otherwise ordering and governing of
them, in a manifold dispensation, to his own holy ends; yet so,
8.
Cornelius Van Til, An Introduction to Systematic Theology (Philadelphia: West-
minster Theological Seminary, 1952), 152f.
as the sinfulness thereof proceedeth only from the creature,
and not from God; who being most holy and righteous,
neither is, nor can be the author or approver of sin.
V. The most wise, righteous, and gracious God doth
oftentimes leave for a season his own children to manifold
temptations, and the corruption of their own hearts, to
chastise them for their former sins, or to discover unto them
the hidden strength of corruption and deceitfulness of their
hearts, that they may be humbled; and to raise them to a more
close and constant dependence for their support upon
himself, and to make them more watchful against all future
occasions of sin, and for sundry other just and holy ends.
VI. As for those wicked and ungodly men, whom God as a
righteous judge, for former sins, doth blind and harden, from
them he not only withholdeth his grace, whereby they might
have been enlightened in their understandings, and wrought
upon in their hearts; but sometimes also withdraweth the gifts
which they had, and exposeth them to such objects as their
corruption makes occasion of sin; and withal, gives them over
to their own lusts, the temptations of the world, and the power
of Satan: whereby it comes to pass they that harden
themselves, even under those means which God useth for the
softening of others.
VII. As the providence of God doth, in general, reach to all
creatures; so, after a most special manner, it taketh care of his
Church, and disposeth all things to the good thereof.
As Clark has pointed out, the doctrines of predestination and
providence both show God’s controlling power over all things.
Predestination declares the foreordination of all things by God,
and it is specific and particular. Providence declares the care
exercised by God over all the universe and the ordering of all things
in terms of His glorious purpose. Neither doctrine can be confused
with fatalism, which denies “that the universe has a purpose.
Natural processes seem not to be directed to any foreseen end.”9
Fatalism sees a mindless, purposeless regularity to things. In the
popular view of fatalism, man can do nothing to avert the things
9.
Gordon H. Clark, What Presbyterians Believe, An Exposition of the Westminster
Confession (Philadelphia: Presbyterian and Reformed Publishing Company,
1956), 23.
which shall come to pass. As against this, providence and
predestination teach the responsibility of man and the necessity for
action by man.
Providence is a doctrine which assures us that those who believe
in God through grace, and who obey God’s law, have the assurance
and certainty of His glorious victory. The end established by God
also determines all that precedes it, in their lives and in all things
around them. In terms of that end, victory in time and eternity, a
new creation, and the resurrection of the body, the believer moves
providentially. He is future-oriented; he knows what his destiny is,
and he cannot live only in terms of the hour.
If this faith is denied, man reacts logically to death as the end. St.
Paul cited the attitude common in his day: “what advantageth it me
if the dead rise not? let us eat and drink; for tomorrow we die” (1
Cor. 15:32). The end logically determines all that precedes it, and,
despite efforts of men to forestall the logic of the end by positing
a different way thereto, the end soon casts its shadow of
meaninglessness over all their lives.
The poet James Thomson (1834-1882) came to believe that
The world rolls round forever like a mill;
It grinds out death and life and good and ill;
It has no purpose, heart or mind or will.
Believing this, he consistently and logically refused to believe that
life could add up to any meaning. Instead, he faced it with the
conviction and
The sense that every struggle brings defeat
Because Fate holds no prize to crown success;
That all the oracles are dumb or cheat
Because they have no secret to express;
That none can pierce the vast black veil uncertain
Because there is no light beyond the curtain;
That all is vanity and nothingness.10
Not all who shared Thomson’s belief in an ultimate nothingness
were as logical as he, but, sooner or later, an epistemological
10. Cited in T. M. Parrott and W. Thorp, editors, Poetry of the Transition,
1850-1914 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1932), 186f.
self-consciousness set in, an awareness of what their faith implied.
If “there is no light beyond the curtain,” then indeed “all is vanity
and nothingness.” The history of civilizations and cultures amply
demonstrates that indeed “the end determines all that precedes it.”
The Biblical doctrine of salvation thus is not only an assurance of
future bliss, but also of present strength, hope, and victory.
Let us eat and drink, said the cynics of the Roman Empire, for
tomorrow we die. Earlier, the proverb had been, let us eat, drink, and
merry, for tomorrow we die, but now even merriment was disappearing
from life. The economics of this proverb was an economy geared
to quick consumption without concern for the future, and this
meant the erosion of tomorrow.
A similar attitude prevails in the twentieth century. In 1909, C.
W. Eliot, for many years president of Harvard, said in a
commemoration address: “The Religion of the Future should
concern itself with the needs of the present, with public baths, play
grounds, wider and cleaner streets and better buildings.”11 Living
for the moment means surrendering any hope for the future. It
means an economy, in Roepke’s words, in which it is “a virtue to
contract debts and...foolishness to save.” Moreover, “It is no
accident that Keynes — and nobody is more responsible for this
tendency among economists than he — has reaped fame and
admiration for his equally banal and cynical observation that ‘in the
long run, we are all dead.’”12 This is a philosophy of suicide: its
desired and expected end is death.
11. Cited by Wilhelm Roepke, A Humane Economy, The Social Framework of the Free
Market (Chicago: Regnery, 1960), 109.
12. Ibid., 99f., 100.
XXIX
Fate
The alternative to Biblical theism is, logically, a belief in chance

as ultimate. Either the sovereign and absolute God of Scripture
created, ordained, and governs all things, or chance prevails. These
are the logical alternatives, but until full epistemological
self-consciousness comes, few men are logical. Men may profess to
believe in chance, but, in some form or another, fate,
necessitarianism, or determinism is introduced to avoid either the
consequences of chance or the necessity of avowing God.
Dorner observed:
The idea of Fate is found only in conditions where some
attempt has been made to trace all phenomena of human life,
to an ultimate unity. Fate, indeed, is precisely this unity
apprehended as an inevitable necessity controlling all things; it
is absolutely inscrutable power to which all men are subject,
and may be either personified or represented as impersonal. It
is a conception which prevails wherever the mind of man is
unable to frame the idea of rational necessity or of a supreme
purposive will, and it survives so long as either of these,
though within the field of consciousness, is imperfectly
realized. Further, men tend to fall back on the idea of Fate
when, at a higher level of intellectual development, they begin
to doubt of a rational order, or a rational end, in the universe.1
The doctrine of Fate is a recognition of the uniformity of nature
and the unity of law which it manifests. It is an admission that the
processes of nature manifest and order development and necessity,
which belies any idea of chance. Whether in the ancient religions of
China, India, Egypt, the Teutons, Babylonians, or Greece and
Rome, the idea of Fate is present. This, however, is not true of
self-consistent Christian faith, for
1. A. Dorner, “Fate, Introductory,” in James Hastings, editor, Encyclopaedia of

Religion and Ethics, vol. V, 771f.
269
Christianity repudiates on principle all belief in Fate. The
Christian religion regards the Supreme Power of the world as
a rational Will by which all things are made to promote the
ends of the Kingdom. Here omnipotence is not arbitrary, but
is one with the all-wise Will; nor is necessity blind, but rational,
and like-wise identical with the all-wise Will — the Will which
always acts as a moral stimulus to the freedom of man. Only
when freedom and necessity are recognized as being one in
the Deity is it possible for Destiny to give place to Providence;
only when man realizes his freedom as that which lays upon
him the obligation of self-determination in the sphere of
conduct does he cease to resort to the occult arts; and only as
he knows that all things can be utilized for the highest ends
does he finally break with the idea of Fate. These beliefs,
however, constitute in essence the Christian point of view.2
The purpose of the idea of Fate is to give man God without God,
that is, the advantages of God’s government and order without
God Himself. Man, however, not only opens the door to a
schizophrenic state of mind by adopting the idea of Fate, but he
also lets in occultism, the powers of darkness and irrationality.
Citing Dorner again, we find him, despite a defective theology,
aware of the many implications of Fate:
As a matter of fact, the belief can be finally extirpated only by
this recognition of a rational Good Will determining the
natural order with reference to an end, and harmonizing
therewith the law of necessary physical causality....
This brings us, however, face to face with the subjective
conditions in which the belief in Fate subsists, and in which,
again, its elimination is possible. So long as man feels himself
simply impotent in relation to Nature, and thinks of himself as
a mere atom in the universal order, he remains subject to Fate,
to necessity. So long as he regards his position and lot as
something given, to which he must adapt himself, he cannot
rise above the notion of Fate; nor is any deliverance possible,
in spite of all attempts to improve his position, so long as he
is disposed to eudaemonism, and, consequently, dependent
upon circumstances or upon Nature. Eudaemonism, making
pleasure the end of life, strikes at the springs of moral energy;
2. Ibid., 774f.
Fate 271
it makes men the thrall of the things which promise
enjoyment, and which Fate is supposed to bestow or deny.
The man who, on the other hand, regards it as his task to
realize a divinely ordained moral ideal will judge of all things
in reference to their possible utility for that purpose. For such
a one there exists no blind destiny, no arbitrary will, to paralyze
his energy; for him all things are ordered by God with a view
to their subserving his Divinely ordained ethical task; and just
because it is God who so orders the world, all thought of an
aimless destiny or any arbitrary will is done away.3
The modern term for fate and fatalism is determinism. James K.
Feibleman defines it thus:
Determinism: (Lat. de + terminus, end). The doctrine that every
fact in the universe is guided entirely by law.... The doctrine
that all the facts in the physical universe, and hence also in
human history, are absolutely dependent upon and
conditioned by their causes. In psychology: the doctrine that
the will is not free but determined by psychical or physical
conditions. Syn. with fatalism, necessitarianism, destiny.4
The word “determinism” indicates the problem; the word means
of or concerning the end; it posits a purpose or goal, as well as an
ordered and rational development towards that goal. It thus
assumes the mind of God while denying God. Because of the
hostility to anything indicative of purpose in the universe,
determinism has lost some of its earlier appeal. Naturalistic
determinism posited a universe without God, but with all the order
and purpose which only God could provide. To speak of a
mindless purpose or goal is a contradiction in terms. Purpose and
goal are products of a working, planning mind. Thus, determinism
as a halfway house between God and chance ran into very serious
problems which it could not resolve.
The alternative was the probability concept. Probability is
another name for chance, but it is also another name for
determinism. As a university student, I heard a professor explain
3. Ibid.,
777.
4.
James K. Feibleman, “Determinism,” in Dagobert D. Runes, editor, Dictio-
nary of Philosophy, 15th edition, revised (New York: Philosophical Library, 1960),
78.
probability thus: “It is probable that the sun will rise in the east
tomorrow and set in the west, but, lacking exhaustive knowledge
of all factuality, we cannot say that it is a matter of determinism that
it shall do so. To say that the sun will rise in the east is potentially
provable by future events, and the presumption is thus valid that it
shall do so. It is, however, a matter of probability rather than a
question of determinism.” This answer has the merit of
sidestepping or postponing a resolution of the choice between
chance and God. Since exhaustive knowledge of every sunrise is
impossible, and even theoretically out of the question until the end
of the world, a decision is thus avoided by these mental gymnastics.
This evasion of the problem does not diminish it, but rather
intensifies it, since no acrobatic stance is more than briefly tenable.
Determinism offered a mindless necessity which still bore traces
of an end or purpose. The probability concept aims at an even
more mindless universe. Confronted with a mindless universe,
man can either attempt to play god over it, or recoil in horror at the
totality of mindlessness. Man does both. He acts as god, but, mind
having been devalued by his own philosophical conclusions
concerning the universe, man sees his own thinking as worthless
and unimportant. There is an abdication of philosophy and of the
mind. Man becomes a mindless god.
This was apparent as early as Charles Darwin, who both affirmed
chance and denied it, who read God’s design into the processes of
nature while denying God and design. In a letter to W. Graham,
July 3, 1881, Darwin wrote:
Nevertheless you have expressed my inward conviction,
though far more vividly and clearly than I could have done,
that the Universe is not the result of chance. But then with me
the horrid doubt always arises whether the convictions of
man’s mind, which has been developed from the mind of the
lower animals, are of any value or at all trustworthy. Would any
one trust in the convictions of a monkey’s mind, if there are
any convictions in such a mind?5
5. Francis Darwin, The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, vol. I (New York: Basic
Books, 1959), 285.
Fate 273
To a considerable degree, Darwin’s comment was due to his habit
of sidestepping any intellectual issue which opened up the
possibility of self-contradiction. There was, however, a significance
in his evasion: he appealed to the absurdity of all thought in terms
of man’s origin. He would not have made this appeal, or allowed it,
to invalidate his theory; he did use it to invalidate problems,
because he recognized the force of the argument. In Darwin’s
world, the mind of man is as meaningless as the world is. Man’s
mind is an adaptation to his environment, supposedly, and only
time will tell whether or not it is a sound adaptation. Beyond that,
it has no validity.
This overpowering sense of meaninglessness has led to a
growing mental problem. According to the psychiatrist, Dr. Viktor
E. Frankl,
A cross-sectional, statistical survey of the patients and the
nursing staff was conducted by my staff in the neurological
department at the Vienna Poliklinik Hospital. It revealed that
55% of the persons questioned showed a more or less marked
degree of existential vacuum. In other words, more than half
of them had experienced a loss of the feeling that life is
meaningful.
This existential vacuum manifests itself mainly in a state of
boredom. Now we can understand Schopenhauer when he
said that mankind was apparently doomed to vacillate eternally
between two extremes of distress and boredom. In actual fact,
boredom is now causing, and certainly bringing to
psychiatrists, more problems to solve than is distress. And
these problems are growing increasingly crucial, for
progressive automation will probably lead to an enormous
increase in the leisure hours of average workers. The pity of it
is that many of them will not know what to do with all their
newly acquired free time.
Let us think, for instance, of “Sunday neurosis,” that kind of
depression which afflicts people who become aware of the
lack of content in their lives when the rush of the busy week
is over and the void within themselves becomes manifest. Not
a few cases of suicide can be traced back to this existential
vacuum. Such widespread phenomena as alcoholism and
juvenile delinquency are not understandable unless we
recognize the existential vacuum underlying them. This is also
true of the crises of pensioners and aging people.6
In the older terminology, Fate was sometimes called Destiny, and
by Destiny was meant inevitable necessity, fortune, or doom. Fate,
Destiny, determinism, and probability all concern an impersonal
and mindless dealing with man and the universe. Everything in
man is contradicted by this mindless necessity. Man’s goodness and
works are confounded and rendered futile; man’s evil can be
rewarded or punished without any logic, because no logic exists in
mindless necessity, which is a determination by remote,
meaningless, and arbitrary forces. For this reason, Fate or Destiny
is always a horror to the mind of man.
Providence and predestination, however, undergird man by
manifesting that everything in the universe is under the total
control of the mind of God. Not an impersonal necessity, but a
personal purpose governs all things. This government is not in
contradiction to, but in unity with the mind of man. The secondary
causality and freedom of man are in unity with and under the
jurisdiction of the primary causality and freedom of God.
Thus, St. Peter could say, in full assurance,
9. But ye are a chosen generation, a royal priesthood, an holy
nation, a peculiar people; that ye should shew forth the praises
of him who hath called you out of darkness into his
marvellous light:
10. Which in time past were not a people, but are now the
people of God: which had not obtained mercy, but now have
obtained mercy. (1 Peter 2:9-10)
These words recall such Old Testament passages as Exodus 19:5-
6; Deuteronomy 7:6-7; Isaiah 43:10, 20; 44:1-2, and others, and
carry their promises to a new degree. The priesthood of the Old
Testament was not royal. Only in Melchizedek (Heb. 7:1, etc.) do
we find the royal priesthood, not in Israel. St. Peter tells us,
according to Lenski, that
6. Viktor E. Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning, An Introduction to Logotheraphy (New

York: Washington Square Press, 1966), 168-170.
Fate 275
we occupy so high a position that no man can be higher in this
life: as a “Priesthood,” a body that is made up entirely of
priests, no man stands between us and God, and as a body of
“royal” priests no man stands over us in our relation to God.
The adjective as well as the noun reveal in a double way the
exaltation of our position and our function, the constant direct,
immediate contact with God.7
Man, we are told, is linked in a royal and priestly way to God and
to the ultimate purpose which governs every atom of the universe.
Man is not only vitally linked to the ultimate meaning of all things,
but also, in all God’s creation, man is the creature who is central to
that purpose and meaning. The humanists claim to be interested in
the dignity of man, whereas they are its destroyers. Both in man’s
obedience and apostasy there is a dignity unknown in a
meaningless universe. In his obedience, man is a basic aspect of a
glorious purpose which encompasses all reality. In his
disobedience, man is at war with that purpose and has the dignity
of a combatant, rather than the emptiness of an existential vacuum.
The word used by St. Peter, “chosen” or “elect” is eklektos,
chosen out, selected, with the idea of grace, love, and eminence
involved in the choice. Instead of a mindless fate and an implicit
world of chance, the word chosen carries the meaning of a totally
mindful, gracious, and providential concern for a person by the
Supreme Person.
The word “peculiar” is in the Greek peripoiesis, an obtaining, an
acquisition, or a possession. In 1 Peter 2:9 it means “God’s own
Possession.”8
We are thus emphatically in a mindful universe.
7. R.
C. H. Lenski, The Interpretation of the Epistles of St. Peter, St. John and St. Jude
(Columbus, Ohio: Wartburg Press, 1945), 100.
8. W. E. Vine, An Expository Dictionary of New Testament Words, vol. III (New
XXX
The Antithesis
A basic aspect of Christian faith is its assertion that there is an

antithesis or division in the world that man must recognize and
reckon with. Historically, Calvinistic circles have been those which
have developed the doctrine of the antithesis, and they have
located it in mankind.
The term antithesis is a new term for an old doctrine. Scripture
makes a distinction, at the very beginning, of the antithesis between
the sons of Seth, the people or sons of God, and the line of Cain,
the reprobate race of men, the sons of men (Gen. 6:2).
Covenant-keepers and covenant-breakers are seen throughout
Scripture as two humanities with differing destinies. St. Augustine
set forth this contrast in The City of God as between two kingdoms,
the City of God versus the City of Man. The term antithesis came
into use in the last century as a reaction to the influence of Hegel.
In Hegelian philosophy, the dialectical process characterizes
reality. All being was originally one primordial being, which, as it
developed or evolved, moved from its first stage, thesis, to a
second stage, antithesis and thesis, wherein seeming contradiction
exists. The antithesis seems to deny the thesis. But antithesis, as the
second phase of the dialectical process, while apparently very
different from and in contradiction to the first stage, thesis, is in
fact, like the thesis, an evolving and partial truth. The third stage is
the synthesis, wherein the partial truths of the thesis and antithesis
are blended to form a new level of being which transcends both
thesis and antithesis. The roots of this Hegelian doctrine are very
old; they were well developed when Joachim of Flora developed
his theory of the three ages of history, the age of the Father or of
law; the age of the Son, or of grace; and the age of the Spirit, when
all peoples and faiths will find unity on a new level. “Third Age” or
“Third World” thinking is still very much with us. With the
Enlightenment, and such thinkers as Turgot and Comte later, the
277
third era came to mean the age of science.1 The Hegelians from
Max Stirner, Karl Marx, and Friedrich Nietzsche on, held
emphatically that God was now dead and man must live beyond
good and evil. Against this anti-christian faith in synthesis,
Calvinists in the Netherlands began to assert the doctrine of
antithesis or division.
Because the doctrine of the antithesis so clearly sets forth a basic
aspect of Scripture, Neo-orthodoxy has felt it necessary to pay
some kind of lip-service to the doctrine while effectively negating
it. Henry Van Til gave a good summary of these efforts:
According to Existentialism, the antithesis is vertical, that is,
between God and man, as creature. Man as creature is placed
under the judgment of God. This is also the position of K.
Barth and Paul Tillich, but Calvinists reject this construction
which denies the revelation of Scripture. For the Bible tells us
that God made this world good with all that is in it, that he
took delight in his creatures, man included. The judgment of
God, according to Scripture, is against man as sinner, for his
wrath is revealed against all unrighteousness, and his
punishment fell upon the human race on account of sin (Gen.
3; Rom. 1:18; 2:2; 5:12, etc.). But for Barth and the
Existentialists in general, eternity stands in judgment against
time, and God declares an absolute “NO” against all history;
God is her judgment, her crisis.
Calvinism also rejects the idea of an eternal dualism, namely,
between God and Satan, Spirit and Matter, Being and
Non-Being, or between two principles, one good, the other
evil. This tension in eternity is usually carried over into the
created world as one existing between creation, which is good,
and das nichtige, or the principle of evil. Even though some
thinkers deny a dualism and intend to keep an ultimate
principle of the Good, or God, as predominant, in effect the
antithesis is no longer a biblically oriented idea but becomes a
philosophic construction as in the case of Paul Tillich.2
1. Peter Gay, in The Enlightenment: An Interpretation, vol. II (New York: Alfred A.

Knopf, 1969),109n, states that, “There is an interesting anticipation of Turgot’s
stages in Roger Cote’s preface to the second edition of Newton’s Principia.”
2. Henry R. Van Til, The Calvinistic Concept of Culture (Grand Rapids, Michigan:
Baker Book House, 1959), 179f.
The Antithesis 279
Henry Van Til’s point is a very important one. To place the
antithesis in eternity is to absolutize evil, Satan, or whatever else is
involved in the antithesis, and to place it on an equality with God.
The result is dualism. Thus, if we assert an antithesis between God
and evil which is metaphysical and originates in eternity, we have
elevated evil to an eternal principle which is on an equality with
God. Evil, however, is ethical or moral, not metaphysical. The
whole of God’s creation both in time and in eternity (the creation
of angelic beings) is wholly good. Evil is the revolt of the creature
against the Creator and is the creature’s attempt to be his own god
and to define good and evil in relation to himself (Gen. 3:5). The
righteousness of God, of which His law is the expression, is an
aspect of His absolute and eternal being, but the moral response of
the creature, whether good or evil, is on an entirely different and
historical level. Thus the antithesis must be biblically oriented first
of all, that is, as it is set forth in Biblical history, and it is not
primarily philosophical, because it is an ethical, not a metaphysical,
fact.
A metaphysical antithesis leads to dualism, to Zoroastrianism
and Manichaeanism. A metaphysical antithesis, however, destroys
the moral antithesis. If the universe is made up of two equal and
opposing principles and beings, light and darkness, a good God
and an evil God, love and hate, yang and yin, or any other version
of the metaphysical antithesis, the result is that there is an equality
not only between the two forms of being, but also between their
moral attributes. Evil is then equal to God. The medieval and other
Manichaeans thus did not hesitate to perform any of the actions
they condemned because all actions were a matter of choice and all
were equal. The preferred way might be no sexuality at all, but
incest, adultery, and marital relations were all equally bad and
equally good because all sex and all non-sex had an equal
metaphysical and moral ultimacy. Ascetics of India and ancient
China could, in terms of the same equal ultimacy concept, deny sex
or choose it as their way of life.
When God created man, He immediately told man of the
antithesis between obedience, the good, and disobedience, evil.
16. And the LORD God commanded the man, saying, Of
every tree of the garden thou mayest freely eat:
17. But of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, thou
shalt not eat of it: for in the day that thou eatest thereof thou
shalt surely die. (Gen. 2:16-17)
Man was thus presented with a moral choice, and also an
epistemological choice, i.e., a choice as to how he would seek to
know reality, in terms of obedience to God, or in terms of his own
claim to an autonomous knowledge, a knowledge particularly in
independence from God. Dr. Cornelius Van Til has given eloquent
and telling expressing to the meaning of this:
We know that sin is an attempt on the part of man to cut
himself loose from God. But this breaking loose from God
could, in the nature of the case, not be metaphysical; if it were,
man himself would be destroyed and God’s purpose with man
would be frustrated. Sin is therefore a breaking loose from
God ethically and not metaphysically. Sin is the creature’s
enmity and rebellion against God but is not an escape from
creaturehood.
When we say that sin is ethical we do not mean, however, that
sin involved only the will of man and not also his intellect. Sin
involved every aspect of man’s personality. All of man’s
reactions in every relation in which God had set him were
ethical and not merely intellectual; the intellect itself is ethical.
What then was the result as far as the question of knowledge
is concerned of man’s rebellion against God? The result was
that man tried to interpret everything with which he came into
contact without reference to God. The assumption of all his
future interpretation was the self-sufficiency of intracosmical
relationships. This does not signify that man would
immediately and openly deny that there is a God. Nor does it
mean that man would always and everywhere deny that God
is in some sense transcendent. What he would always deny, by
implication at least, would be that God is self-sufficient or
self-complete. At best he would allow that God is a correlative
to man. He might say that we need God to interpret man but
he would at the same time say that in the same sense we need
man to interpret God. He might say that the temporal cannot
be interpreted without reference to the eternal but he would
at the same time say that the eternal cannot be interpreted
The Antithesis 281
without reference to the temporal. He might say that we need
God in order to obtain unity in our experience, but he would
at the same time say that God needs the historical many in
order to get diversity into his experience. All these forms of
correlativity amount in the end to the same thing as saying that
the finite categories are self-sufficient. For that reason we can
make a very simple and all comprehensive antithesis between
the knowledge concept of all non-Christian philosophies and
the Christian view. Scripture says that some men worship and
serve the Creator; they are the Christians. All other men
worship and serve the creature rather than the Creator.
Christian-theism says that there are two levels of thought, the
absolute and the derivative. Christian-theism says that there
are two levels of interpreters, God, who interprets absolutely
and man who must be the re-interpreter of God’s
interpretation. Christian-theism says that human thought is
therefore analogical of God’s thought. In opposition to all this,
non-Christian thought holds in effect that the distinction
between absolute and derivative thought must be wiped out....
Thus the Christian concept of analogical thought and the
non-Christian concept of univocal thought stand over against
one another as diametrical opposites.
Non-Christian thought holds to the ultimacy of the created
universe. It holds therefore to the ultimacy of the mind of man
itself and must in consequence deny the necessity of analogical
thought. It holds to the normalcy of the human mind as well
as to its ultimacy. It holds to the normalcy of the human mind
as it holds to the normalcy of everything else in the world.3
The antithesis is thus epistemological as well as moral. Men know
things differently in terms of their religious and moral
commitment. In principle, “the natural man has epistemologically
nothing in common with the Christian.” Only after the
consummation of history does this principle become fully a reality,
when the natural man is left wholly to himself and to his principle.4
It is the purpose of Satan to deny and to destroy this antithesis.
In fact, he denies that it exists. It is his contention that God is
3. Cornelius Van
Til, The Defense of the Faith (Philadelphia: Presbyterian and Re-
formed Publishing Company, 1955), 63-65.
4. Ibid., 189, cf. 260.
concealing the truth concerning reality in order to compel man to
continue in an unwarranted submission to God. All men are on a
par with God as themselves potential gods, and all are able to
determine for themselves what constitutes good and evil (Gen.
3:5). Man must thus rise above the antithesis and come to a
synthesis. Man must recognize that the next stage of being and
knowledge, as well as the next stage of ethics, is to live beyond
good and evil, to recognize that good and evil are relative to man
and cannot be used to divide men.
The Tower of Babel was thus man’s first great act of synthesis.
The structure of the tower suggested a ladder, steps reaching to
heaven, degrees in the ascent of being and knowledge, whereby
man transcended the limitations of his past and made synthesis
between God and man (Gen. 11:1-4). The philosophy of the
Tower of Babel is perpetuated in arrested form by freemasonry,
with its degrees, and by every philosophy which denies the Biblical
antithesis. The goal of covenant-breakers has always been to deny
the antithesis and to overcome their sense of guilt at their
disobedience. Thus, many attempts are made at eliminating the
antithesis or division. Men speak of the Fatherhood of God and
the brotherhood of man, of the Family of Man, of the oneness of
all men as men, and so on.
If men could be left to themselves, they would soon forget the
antithesis, and they would soon lose even the memory of God’s
requirement of obedience and of their disobedience. Men cannot
forget or overcome the antithesis, because, first of all, they are
God’s creatures and the requirement of His law and their rebellion
against Him resound through every fiber of their being. Men can
forget their names, become irrational and foolish, but they cannot
erase the fact that every atom of their being is a God-created fact
and witnesses to its Maker.
Second, God’s judgment compels recognition of the antithesis.
According to Genesis 3:14-15,
14. And the LORD God said unto the serpent, Because thou
hast done this, thou art cursed above all cattle, and above every
The Antithesis 283
beast of the field; upon thy belly shalt thou go, and dust shalt
thou eat all the days of thy life:
15. And I will put enmity between thee and the woman, and
between thy seed and her seed; it shall bruise thy head, and
thou shalt bruise his heel.
This judgment is both upon the creature who allowed himself to be
used, and upon Satan, also a creature, who used him. Moreover, the
enmity is an age-long one; after the serpent and Eve are gone, it will
persist, and it is supremely an enmity between Christ, the seed of
the woman, and Satan.
This is of paramount importance. The goal of Satan is to obscure
and destroy the antithesis, to deny any line of division between
covenant-keeper and covenant-breaker, between obedience to
God and man’s wilful insistence on his own autonomous way. This
false peace or synthesis is impossible, however much men may seek
it. In spite of themselves, enmity is written into their lives. Satan
and all godless men would like to have a peace with God and man
to go their own way and to practice their own moral premises
without hindrance, but they cannot. Because they are God’s
creatures, their attempt places them at war with God and with
themselves. Because of God’s judgment, the covenant-breakers
cannot live in peace with covenant-keepers: they war against them.
Sin is cursed; it is, both by its moral warfare against God and by
God’s judgment, incapable of ever attaining its goal. These first
two reasons make it clear why the ungodly cannot overcome the
antithesis.
A third factor is the calling of the godly. As Henry Van Til noted,
The doctrine of the antithesis maintains that all who are in
Christ, the second Adam, are alive unto God and are therefore
called to the spiritual warfare of which the Bible speaks (Eph.
6:10ff.; Rom. 7:15-25; 1 Cor. 1:18-30; 2:6-16; 16:22; 2 Cor.
4:3-6; 6:14-18; 10:3-6). Christ is the Covenant-Keeper, the
Restorer of the law, he is the root of restored humanity, for
through him man is restored to God’s fellowship and service,
which is life.
On the other hand, that part of fallen humanity which was not
restored through Christ, continues its existence in apostasy
from the living God. As a consequence, there is in this world
a great opposition between the life lived in apostasy and the
life lived in obedience to the covenant, a life which through
Christ was restored to the fellowship of God. And, since this
antithesis roots in the heart, it does not merely affect the
periphery, but the whole of a man’s life under the sun. Not a
single aspect of life, even the seemingly most neutral, lies
outside this antithesis of godliness versus godlessness.5
A fourth factor which prevents any destruction of the antithesis is
precisely the fact that both the godly and the godless will, if true to
their faith, work for conquest. The very unity of the human race in
Adam leads men to seek a unified order, but the godly seek the
Kingdom of God, and the godless, the Kingdom of Man. The clash
between the two is inescapable. The doctrine of creation gives men
a common origin and a common framework of purpose. In the
regenerate, this means dominion over the earth under God; in the
unregenerate, this means dominion over all things in defiance of
God. Conquest is thus a common goal but with very differing
programs, two radically different kinds of kingdoms.
While the antithesis represents a division in mankind, it is not in
man, as such, or in his fact of humanity. Here again, Henry Van Til
has glorified the matter:
Of course, no one contending for the comprehensiveness and
pervasiveness of the antithesis (absolute antithesis) would be
so foolish as to say that believers and unbelievers now have
nothing in common. It has already been observed that they
have a common human nature, they are image-bearers of God,
and fell into sin in common, and they have the external
preaching of the gospel in common, and the whole of the
physical world in time and space, and the cultural mandate and
urge, the terrain in which to work and the tools also in
common. In short, the whole metaphysical situation is
common, but the antithesis is a matter of faith, and the
knowledge of faith. Antithesis is not in the object but in the
subject of knowledge and faith. It is a question of allegiance.
Here it is impossible to temporize. One is either for or against
the Christ. “Ye cannot serve God and Mammon!” To deny the
absoluteness (all-pervasiveness) of the antithesis is to deny the
absoluteness of the work of regeneration, which is an act of
5. Henry Van Til, op. cit., 182f.

The Antithesis 285
God through his Spirit. Absolute does not imply perfection,
for the regenerate is still following after sanctification, without
which no man shall see the Lord (Heb. 12:14). But sin now
dwells in the saint against his will. Neither is the unregenerate
sinner perfect in wickedness; he is not absolutely but totally
depraved.6
To be redeemed means to move from one side of the antithesis
to the other, from one plan of conquest to the other, and from one
kind of knowledge to a radically different kind. When our Lord
declared, “Think not that I am come to send peace on earth: I came
not to send peace, but a sword” (Matt. 10:34), He was setting forth
the antithesis and its necessary warfare. When He declared to His
disciples, “Have salt in yourselves, and have peace one with
another” (Mark 9:50), He was setting forth their preserving and
conquering power in the world, and their peace as His people and
Kingdom.
6. Ibid., 187.
XXXI
The Harmony of Interests
The doctrine of the harmony of interests is central to the free

market economy and has been ably expounded by such scholars as
Ludwig Von Mises. Mises speaks of “the theorem of the harmony
of the rightly understood interests of all members of the market
society,” and the fact that it rests on, first, “the preservation of the
social division of labor, the system that multiplies the productivity
of human efforts,” and, second, “that in the market society
consumers’ demand ultimately directs all production activities.”1
The exposition by Von Mises is an excellent but strictly economic
analysis. The concept of the harmony of interests goes deeper. It is
a moral response to a metaphysical fact.
We can understand the religious roots of the doctrine by
examining also its alternate, the theory of the conflict of interests,
economically stated as “the class struggle.” Mises, in a telling
paragraph, comments on the idea of an “irreconcilable conflict”:
Such is the almost universally accepted social philosophy of
our age. It was not created by Marx, although it owes its
popularity mainly to the writings of Marx and the Marxians. It
is today endorsed not only by the Marxians, but no less by
most of those parties who emphatically declare their
anti-Marxism and pay lip service to free enterprise. It is the
official social philosophy of Roman Catholicism as well as of
Anglo-Catholicism; it is supported by many eminent
champions of the various Protestant denominations and of
the Orthodox Oriental Church. It is an essential part of the
teachings of Italian Fascism and of German Nazism and of all
varieties of interventionist doctrines. It was the ideology of the
Sozialpolitik of the Hohenzollerns in Germany and the
French royalists aiming at the restoration of the house of
Bourbon-Orleans, of the New Deal of President Roosevelt,
and of the nationalists of Asia and Latin America. The
antagonisms between these parties and factions refer to
1. Ludwig Von Mises, Human Action, A Treatise on Economics (New Haven, Con-
necticut: Yale University Press, 1949), 670.
287
accidental issues — such as religious dogma, constitutional
institutions, foreign policy — and, first of all, to the
characteristic features of the social system that is to be
substituted for capitalism. But they all agree in the
fundamental thesis that the very existence of the capitalist
system harms the vital interests of the immense majority of
workers, artisans, and small farmers, and they all ask in the
name of social justice for the abolition of capitalism.2
Mises cites the documents of various religious groups which
espouse and further a belief in the conflict of interests. Pope Pius
XI gave it status in Quadragesimo anno (1931). William Temple
expounded it as Archbishop of Canterbury in Christianity and the
Social Order in 1942. Emil Brunner in Justice and the Social Order
(1945), as a Neo-orthodox theologian, advocated the same theory,
as did the Russian Orthodox thinker Nicolas-Berdyaev in The
Origins of Russian Communism (1937). A World Council of Churches
draft report of September, 1948, on “The Church and Disorder of
Society” also championed this concept.3
This faith in conflict was, of course, basic to the position of Karl
Marx, who hailed the publication of Darwin’s Origin of Species as
basic to the triumph of socialism. In 1860, he wrote to Engels, on
first reading Darwin, “This is the book which contains the basis in
natural history of our view.” A few weeks later, Marx wrote to
Lassale, “Darwin’s book is very important and serves me as a basis
in natural science for the class struggle in history.”4 With Darwin
the idea of an irreconcilable and necessary class conflict had found
a biological (and implicitly metaphysical) basis.
The theory of evolution has given emphatic tenability to the
theory of the conflict of interests. Life is a struggle for survival,
with every species of animals and plants struggling to survive at the
expense of all others. The early Social Darwinists used this theory
to justify a ruthless form of monopolistic private enterprise; they
assumed a conflict of interests and acted as cut-throats against one
another and against labor. The socialists disagreed in that they,
2. Ibid., 671.
3. Ibid., 671n.
4. John N. Moore, Evolution, Marxism, and Communism, Creation Research Soci-
ety pamphlet, 3.
The Harmony of Interests 289
while assuming the same conflict of interests as natural, deplored it
and believed that the state is the necessary agency to arbitrate and
resolve that conflict by continual coercion. Thus, while the “robber
barons” welcomed the conflict as Darwinists confident of victory,
the socialists believed in the conflict but sought victory for the
proletariat by capturing the state and turning it against the
“exploiters.” In both cases, Darwinism and the theory of evolution
were and are basic to the dogma of the conflict of interests.
But the theory of evolution is itself an expression of a
metaphysical presupposition and a religious faith which goes back
through Hegel to Greek philosophy. It rests on dualistic and
dialectical presuppositions. If reality is divided into two basic
substances which are irreconcilable, then either the world is sharply
divided into two warring aspects, or, if dialectical tension holds
reality together, conflict is written into all being as a metaphysical
necessity. There is war between light and darkness, mind and
matter, law and love, the gods and the devils, and so on. This
conflict is metaphysical; a difference in being forever separates the
two realms.
For the Bible, reality is very different. God is uncreated being, all
the universe and man, created being. The conflicts in the world of
created being, in the universe, are not metaphysical but moral. Man
has chosen to rebel against the sovereign God and to defy His
law-word. Because God created all things “very good” (Gen. 1:31),
this war against God is unnatural; it means a violation of man’s
own being, a deformation and a torturing of himself to wage war
against God. Conflict is a moral choice by man, and it is an
unnatural and forced course of action. It is suicidal (Prov. 8:36:
“But he that sinneth against me wrongeth his own soul: all they that
hate me love death”). Conflict is thus an immoral, unnatural, and
suicidal choice by man.
However, if a man holds to a Manichaean, neoplatonic, or
dialectical philosophy, he will hold metaphysically to a belief that
the life of the universe is a conflict of interests. Western philosophy
and religion have been largely dominated by a belief in dialecticism.
The Greek dialectic of form or ideas versus matter gave way to the
Scholastic nature-versus-grace dialectic, an adaptation of Aristotle.
This in turn gave way to the nature-versus-freedom dialectic of the
modern era. Dooyeweerd has analyzed these various dialectics.5
His followers, unfortunately, follow too commonly the conflict of
interests theory because of the implicit dialecticism of their
position. Their doctrine of common grace leads them back to a
Thomistic form of natural law and a restatement of the Thomistic
dialectic.
The doctrine of the conflict of interests manifests itself in every
area of life, so that its implications are more than economic. One
example of this theory is the idea of the war between the sexes.
Supposedly men and women have goals and natures which put
them in conflict with one another, so that the best one can hope
for is an armed truce. An almost Manichaean hostility to the other
sex guides and motivates men and women. The other sex is seen as
the source of irrationality, corruption, and sin. In The Arabian
Nights, as in other Moslem writings, women appear clearly as the
source of evil and as the corrupters of men and society. Feminist
writings, however, are prone to making the same conclusion about
men. Where such attitudes prevail, a normal relationship between
men and women is impossible. On principle, war is waged, or, at
the least, suspicion prevails. Men and women work to take
advantage of each other on the premise that, if they do not, they
will become themselves the victims.
Another area in which the idea of the conflict of interests affects
our everyday life is in the so-called generation gap, and the war
between old and young. We are assured that adolescence is a period
of biological rebellion, whereas in most societies adolescence is a
time of the closest imitation of, and association with, the older
generation. Our humanistic and evolutionary culture fosters
rebellion. When every aspect of life is at war with every other
aspect, and all creation is in a state of struggle and war, then it is
natural to assume that a younger generation will assert itself at the
expense of the older generation. The idea of this inevitable conflict
5. See H. Dooyeweerd, Transcendental Problems of Philosophic Thought (Grand Rap-
ids, Michigan: Eerdmans, 1948); A New Critique of Theoretical Thought, vols. I-IV
(Philadelphia: Presbyterian and Reformed Publishing Company, 1955-1958);
In the Twilight of Western Thought (Philadelphia: Presbyterian and Reformed Pub-
lishing Company, 1960).
saturates our evolutionary culture, and it is not surprising that our
youth have absorbed it.
The idea of conflict extends to every area of life. It becomes the
principle of action, and also of prayer. Man feels that, in praying,
he is coaxing God to give man something against God’s will, as
though a conflict of interests exists between God and man.
However, the more a man grows in faith and obedience, the greater
will his harmony of interests with God become, so that prayer is
increasingly the communication of a harmony of interests rather
than an argument between two wills in conflict.
As already indicated, the doctrine of the harmony of interests, a
doctrine unknown outside of Christendom, rests on the fact that
God made all things “very good” (Gen. 1:31), in harmony with His
purpose and calling. The Fall of Man was a declaration of war
against God by man and an assertion that conflict between God
and man is inescapable because of God’s jealousy (Gen. 3:1-5), and
necessary for man to prosper. The thesis of Satan was that God is
jealously hostile to man, and is lying to man. God is man’s
oppressor and deceiver, according to Satan: “Yea, hath God
said...?” (Gen. 3:1). God is a liar (Gen. 3:4), trying to prevent man
from realizing his own potential divinity (Gen. 3:5). The way to
success and blessings for man is by conflict with God, by a defiance
of God’s will. This was the satanic thesis, the conflict of interests.
After the Flood, the covenant of God with Noah, “and with your
seed after you, And with every living creature that is with you, of
the fowl, of the cattle, and of every beast of the earth with you; for
all that go out of the ark, to every beast of the earth,” was “an
everlasting covenant” (Gen. 9:9-10, 16). It includes every man born
since then, and every living creature, as well as “the earth” itself
(Gen. 9:13). The rainbow was given as the sign of the covenant, a
most remarkable fact. There is no evidence of rain prior to the
Flood, but rather a dew (Gen. 2:5-6), and semitropical conditions
from pole to pole. No doubt, for many generations, as long as the
memory of the Flood was fresh, every raindrop which fell was a
fresh reminder of the horror of the Flood and of God’s war against
man in his sin. Now the rain led to a fresh reminder of God’s
covenant of peace (Gen. 9:13-17). Whatever judgments which
would occur in times to come, prior to the end of the world, would
be partial judgments, and their purpose would be to recall man to
obedience to God. The Flood and the rainbow would be reminders
that the only tenable kind of life is in harmony with God, and
man’s calling is to a harmony of interests with God.
A covenant is a contract, and a failure to abide by its terms (Gen.
9:1-7) was, and is, punishable by judgment, capital punishment for
murder. The heart of the covenant, however, is the fact that it
declares that man’s way to life and prosperity, as well as the welfare
and advantage of all animal life, rests on harmony with God. The
nature of creation is such that man flourishes and abounds under
God when he walks in harmony with God and His covenant law.
The purpose of that law is not to frustrate man nor to introduce
trouble into the world, but to bless and prosper man.
The universe is God’s law-order. Man’s prosperous and
successful functioning therein requires that man’s interests be in
harmony with God and His law. Man, as he faces the universe,
responds to it in terms of an ethical presupposition. If he believes
that God, or an evolving universe, is trying to frustrate man in
man’s legitimate development, and if he believes that reality is
basically hostile to man, then his response to the world will be in
terms of a belief in the conflict of interests. His morality will be one
of egoism and a dog-eat-dog philosophy. He will assume that the
gains anyone makes will be at the expense of someone else. His
perspective will thus be implicitly or explicitly atheistic, because he
denies that any sovereign God orders all reality in terms of a holy
and personal goal in which all creation will find its glorious liberty
(Rom. 8:18-28). Economically, he will be an interventionist or a
socialist, politically, a statist.
However, if a man believes that the sovereign God is working
with absolute and predestined certainty for the glorious liberty of
all creation (Rom. 8:21-22) by Christ’s redemption and in His law-
order, then that man will see God-ordained purpose and harmony
as the dominant and growing fact in the universe. He will be
neither a statist nor a socialist. He will recognize that, while
conflicts exist, they are the results of moral choices, not
metaphysical necessities. Basic to reality is the great variety of all
things, whereby God uses each and every person and creature in
terms of His sovereign purpose to further the harmony of interests
which ties all reality together.
If the doctrine of the harmony of interests is limited to
economics and the market place, it perishes, because it is rootless.
Only when grounded in the sovereign purpose, calling, and goal of
the triune God for creation does the doctrine flourish and function
in terms of its moral implications.
Political conservatism in the twentieth century, being greatly
influenced by evolutionary and neo-Hegelian thought, is largely
rootless and schizophrenic. A classic example of this is the John
Birch Society oriented book by Gary Allen, None Dare Call It
Conspiracy (1972), which strongly asserts the conflict of interests
philosophy. Not surprisingly, the Los Angeles Free Press, a leftist
newspaper, gave it a good review, as John Schmitz, a Birch leader
and 1972 American Party Candidate for president of the United
States, stated in a Free Press interview.6 The Marxists and the
rightists have come to agree on the supposed fact that a conflict of
interests is basic to our society, and that a capitalist conspiracy is at
the heart of that conflict.
6. Earl
Ofari and Ron Ridenour, “Rightist Leader John Schmitz Interviewed,”
Los Angeles Free Press, vol. 9, no. 36, issue 425, 8 September -18, 1972, 6.
XXXII
Suicide
Suicide has a long and complex history in non-Christian cultures.

It has been recommended by some religions,1 regarded as heroic
under certain circumstances by republican Rome,2 and has been
very common in some cultures, as in Japan.3 In Japan, the criminal
law permitted self-execution to members of the royal family and
other prominent persons except in cases of high treason. Suicide is
often resorted to in Japan as the honorable way of avoiding
disgrace, humiliation, or, in war, capture.
Biblical faith from the earliest days was against suicide as a form
of murder, and banned by the commandment, “Thou shalt not
kill.” In Midrash Rabbah, 34, the prohibition of suicide is grounded
also on Genesis 9:5, “And surely your blood of your lives will I
require; at the hand of every beast will I require it, and at the hand
of man; at the hand of every man’s brother will I require the life of
man.” “And surely your blood” was understood to include
suicide.4
More than once, in the decline of a culture, men have viewed
death as a release from the corruption of the world and as a form
of salvation. In an Egyptian document, translated by J. H. Breasted,
death is presented as a thing to be desired as against life, which is
intolerable:
Death is before me to-day
(Like) the recovery of a sick man,
Like going forth into a garden after sickness.
Like the odour of myrrh,
Like sitting under a sail on a windy day.
1. H. J. Rose, “Suicide (Introductory),” in James Hastings, editor, Encyclopaedia

of Religion and Ethics, vol. XII, 22.
2. A. W. Mair, “Suicide (Greek and Roman)” in ibid., 31.
3. Tasuku Harada, “Suicide (Japanese),” in ibid., 35-37.
4. G. Margoliouth, “Suicide (Jewish),” in ibid., 38.
295
Like the odour of lotus flowers,
Like sitting on the shore of drunkenness.
Like the course of a freshet,
Like the return of a man from the war-galley to his house.
Like the clearing of the sky,
Like a man “fowling therein toward” that which he knew not.
As a man longs to see his house
When he has spent years in captivity.5
There have been many such expressions in pagan cultures.
However, there is a marked difference between such suicides and
modern suicide. In pagan cultures, death offered some kind of
alternative, however pale; for the modern atheist, death ends
everything. Moreover, since Christianity virtually eliminated suicide
for centuries in Western Europe and the Middle East, making it a
relative rarity, modern suicide is a break not only with personal life
but also with Christian standards and tradition. There is thus a
radical character to modern suicide which sets it apart from pagan
self-destruction.
Masaryk spoke of modern suicidism as a social ailment peculiar
to modern civilization, to the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
Moreover, “in many cases misery is not the deciding factor,”
Masaryk held, having studied the statistics.6 Many who commit
suicide have material resources and other advantages that quite a
number of people envy.
The suicidism of the nineteenth century was preceded by a loss
of the will to live in the eighteenth century. Gosse wrote, of the
poet Thomas Gray (1716-1771),
He never henceforward habitually rose above this deadly
dulness of the spirits. His melancholy was passive and under
5. George A. Barton, “Suicide

(Semitic and Egyptian),” in ibid., vol. XII, 39.
6. T. G. Masaryk, Modern Man and Religion (London: George Allen and Unwin,
1938), 21.
Suicide 297
control, not acute and rebellious, like that of Cowper, but it
was almost more enduring. It is probable that with judicious
medical treatment it might have been removed, or so far
relieved, as to be harmless. But it was not the habit of men in
the first half of the eighteenth century to take any rational care
of their health. Men who lived in the country, and did not
hunt, took no exercise at all. The constitution of the
generation was suffering from the mad frolics of the preceding
age, and almost everybody had a touch of gout or scurvy.
Nothing was more frequent than for men, in apparently
robust health, to break down suddenly, at all points, in early
middle life. People were not in the least surprised when men
like Garth and Fenton died of mere indolence because they
had become prematurely corpulent and could not be
persuaded to get out of bed. Swift, Thomson, and Gray are
illustrious examples of the neglect of all hygienic precaution
among quiet middle-class people in the early decades of the
century.7
The deep melancholia which possessed the men of the eighteenth
century infected the most privileged classes, those most informed
and most influenced by the spirit of the times. The same is true
today. As Masaryk observed,
Modern psychosis is just as peculiar as modern suicidism.
Statistics show that this psychosis is becoming stronger in
so-called advanced countries; the principal centres of culture
and civilization are also its endemic centres.... Suicidism is
more intensive in cities. Why does this answer come so glibly,
and what does it signify? This: that in the very centres of
modern life there is more psychosis and there are more
suicides.... Here scientific analysis confirms what we
continually hear today from all sides — that people are
becoming more nervous, more sensitive and more
hypersensitive, more exasperated and more irritable, that they
are more or less weak, tired, wearied, unhappy and saddened.8
The roots of suicidism Masaryk found in boredom, a reproachful
conscience, and the loss of faith and meaning. The attitude of
modern man he summed up thus:
7. Edmund W. Gosse, Gray

(New York: Harper, n.d.), 13f.
8. Masaryk, op. cit., 23f.
Is there a God? — We do not know. Is there a soul? — We do
not know. Is there life after death or not? — We do not know.
Is there any purpose in life? — We do not know. Why am I
living? — We do not know. Am I living, do I really exist? —
We do not know. What, then, do we know? Is it possible for
us to know anything at all? — We do not know. And this
systematic “We do not know” is called science! And people
clap their hands above their heads and cry exultantly: “The
progress of the human mind is incomprehensible! We no
longer need even faith in God, for science has observed that
water boiling in a pot lifts the lid, and that rubbed resin attracts
straw....”9
Men are filled with restlessness and discontent; their being lacks
unity. Masaryk found a connection between modern suicidism,
alcoholism, and prostitution. Moreover, where Christianity is
weakest, there suicidism is strongest. “The statistics of suicides
vary with the spiritual and moral religious atmosphere; cateris paribus
suicidism is strongest wherever the old religious life is most
undermined.”10 Suicidism is also linked to revolution; it is a part of
a defiance of authority, a war against the past, and an attempt to
dethrone God. In suicidism, man is his own god, and is thus
intensely subjective. Subjectivistic man, after a certain point,
“solves” his problems by suicide. Where men have faith, their rage
and despair is more likely to find an objective target, in murder.
The statistics of suicide have long since made it clear that there
are very few cases in which men killed themselves after having
committed a murder. If we think deeply and intensively, we
shall see why. A man, when he murders, is not subjective, but
objective. Hence there are so few cases in which people first
avenged themselves by murder and then killed themselves.
Statistics show that in countries in which, relatively speaking,
there are more murders (for instance in Italy), there are,
comparatively, fewer suicides, and vice versa. It was only in
this century that the tendency to suicide developed. That is,
man became, if I may say so, subjective, having, before that,
been objective.
9. Ibid., 28.
10. Ibid., 38.
Suicide 299
The modern man, then, is in a peculiar manner, subjective. It
may be said that he takes upon his own shoulders the whole
guilt of life, he reproaches himself; but it may also be said that
his suicide is as it were a delirium of subjectivity, an
annihilation of objectivity, as though he were destroying the
object that irritated him. This he does just through
subjectivity, and modern subjectivity.11
The goals of modern life are subjective: happiness for mankind. As
Masaryk noted, “The modern educated man chases happiness, but
catches death.”12 The “flower-children” or hippies of the 1960s
have had a high suicide rate. Their parents usually gave them little
or no Christian training, in the great majority of cases, and, as a
subjectively oriented generation, these youth dedicated themselves
to the pursuit of happiness, and found death, disillusionment, and
a vast emptiness. Every man in the modern mood is a castaway on
a desert island, with no hope of rescue and only a waiting for the
end, an apocalyptic end to destroy a world in which every fair haven
becomes a deserted island, and man “enisled” in meaninglessness
and despair. William Empson has expressed this mood in these
words:
Shall we go all wild, boys, waste and make them lend,
Playing at the child, boys, waiting for the end?
It has all been filed, boys, history has a trend,
Each of us enisled, boys, waiting for the end.
History’s “trend” is to “enisle” man, to isolate him from meaning
and from other men. The longing thus is for an apocalyptic end or
judgment. Without faith in God, there is no God to bring forth
judgment, so that “history” or man must produce this judgment,
end, or suicide. Fiedler’s mournful conclusion is that, with the
masses of men, this is impossible. Rather, “it is not Armageddon
which confronts us... only a long slow decadence... there is no
end.”13 This is the new horror, that life will go on. In the words of
the modern Greek poet, Constantine Cavafy, the uneasiness of
modern man is due to the fact that hope is gone
11. Ibid., 48.

12. Ibid., 34.
13. Leslie A. Fiedler, Waiting for the End (New York: Stein and Day, 1968), 248f.
Because it is night and the barbarians have not come,
And some men have arrived from the frontiers and they say
that there are no barbarians any longer. 14
Humanism itself is dying, and this is an important factor. The
religion of modern man has failed him. As Fiedler noted,
There is a weariness in the West which undercuts the struggle
between socialism and capitalism, democracy and autocracy; a
weariness with humanism itself which underlies all the
movements of our world, a weariness with the striving to be
men. It is the end of man which the school of Burroughs
foretells, not in terms of doom but of triumph.15
The religious aspect of suicidism was not more than indicated by
Masaryk and thus requires further attention. The sin of man is his
attempt to be his own god and to determine good and evil for
himself and in terms of his own will (Gen. 3:5). Man sees his sin as
the way to life (Gen. 3:4), whereas God declared that it would begin
the processes of death in him, “for in the day that thou eatest
thereof, dying thou shalt die” (Gen. 2:17). Sin thus is suicidal: it
begins the workings of death in all our being, in mind and body,
and it works to the radical destruction of the will to live. William
Hazlitt (1778-1830) recorded an interesting example of sin:
Anthony Codrus Urceus, a most learned and unfortunate
Italian, born 1446, was a striking instance (says his biographer)
of the miseries men bring upon themselves by setting their
affections unreasonably on trifles. This learned man lived at
Forli, and had an apartment in the palace. His room was so
very dark, that he was forced to use a candle in the day time;
and one day, going abroad without putting it out, his library
was set on fire, and some papers which he had prepared for
the press were burned. The instant he was informed of this ill
news, he was affected even to madness. He ran furiously to the
palace, and stopping at the door of his apartment, he cried
aloud, “Christ Jesus! what mighty crime have I committed?
whom of your followers have I ever injured, that you thus rage
with inexpiable hatred against me?” Then turning himself to
the image of the Virgin Mary near at hand, “Virgin” (says he)
14. Ibid.,
247.
15. Ibid., 168. The reference is to the writer, William Burroughs.
Suicide 301
“hear what I have to say, for I speak in earnest, and with a
composed spirit. If I shall happen to address you in my dying
moments, I humbly entreat you not to hear me, nor receive me
into heaven, for I am determined to spend all eternity in hell.”
Those who heard these blasphemous expressions
endeavoured to comfort him, but all to no purpose; for the
society of mankind being no longer supportable to him, he left
the city, and retired, like a savage, to the deep solitude of a
wood....
Almost every one may here read the history of his own life.
There is scarcely a moment in which we are not in some
degree guilty of the same kind of absurdity, which was here
carried to such a singular excess.16
Urceus retired or withdrew from men as well as God, from life as
well as heaven. What the fire triggered was his own basic faith, that
his will was ultimate and God’s function should be to overrule
Urceus’ own carelessness. This man wanted life and the world on
his own terms, or not at all. This is the heart of suicidism.
How does the suicide justify his act in modern suicidism? Very
simply, he sees evil in God, man, and the environment, and he sees
himself as the man who is too good for this world to tolerate. Many
of the Romantic poets and writers have given us the philosophy of
suicidism. Lord Byron, a famous minor poet, is an excellent
example of the romantic and masochistic pursuit of suicide in both
his life and poetry. The Byronic hero is always too good for this
world; he bears a burden of loneliness, because he is somehow
more than common clay, and a burden of romantic guilt which is
somehow God’s fault. An unbridled egoism marks many of the
Byronic heroes. Thus, Manfred says to the Seven Spirits,
Slaves, scoff not at my will!
To mind, the spirit, the Promethean spark,
The lightning of my being, is as bright,
Pervading, and far-darting as your own,
And shall not yield to yours, though coop’d in clay!
16. William
Hazlitt, “Mind and Motive,” in his book of essays, Winterslow (Ox-
ford: Oxford University Press, 1931), 82f.
Manfred (1817) is a drama of suicidism. Manfred says that “it is my
fatality to live.” The comfort of Christianity is for peasants, he
holds, and he rejects the counsel of Christian patience with
contempt:
Patience and patience! Hence — that word was made
For brutes of burthen, not for birds of prey:
Preach it to mortals of a dust like thine —
I am not of thine order.
When the Chamois Hunter tells Manfred, “My prayers shall be for
thee,” Manfred answers, “I need them not, but can endure thy
pity.” This is very revealing: the appeal of the romantic hero, of the
suicide, is to pity, because he himself is consumed with the cancer
of self-pity. The romantic hero, like Manfred, rejects both God and
man:
I said, with men, and with the thoughts of men,
I held but slight communion.
Manfred’s only contact with other men is to dramatize himself
before them in an appeal for pity. Manfred’s self-pity makes it
impossible for him to live in the present: he lives only in the past,
and in the realms of imagination:
We are the fools of time and terror: days
Steal on us and steal from us; yet we live,
Loathing our life, and dreading still to die.
...................................................................................
In life there is no present.
Manfred’s suicidal self-pity is seen as evidence that “this man is of
no common order,” a theme made familiar earlier by Goethe.
Manfred’s sufferings separate him from the mass of men, and his
self-imposed isolation from humanity, his contempt for the masses,
is proof of his superiority:
I disdain’d to mingle with
A herd, though to be leader — and of wolves.
A lion is alone, and so am I.
Manfred in death rejects God by saying that he, not God, would be
the cause of his death, declaring to God,
Suicide 303
I have not been thy dupe, nor am thy prey
But was my own destroyer, and will be
My own hereafter.
The fact that Manfred then “expires” by self-will avoided the taint
of suicide while affirming his god-like ability to be lord of life and
death.
In Sardanapalus: A Tragedy (1821), Byron deliberately chose the
last king of Assyria, a degenerate and effeminate monarch, and
then presented him as a world-weary, life-weary man too good for
this world. Sardanapalus is seen as a peace-maker who knows the
futility of life and man. His sensuality and debauchery are based on
this “higher wisdom”: “Eat, drink, and love; the rest’s not worth a
filip.” Sardanapalus’ degeneracy is seen as proof of his greatness
and sensitivity. Sardanapalus observes,
Must I consume my life — this little life —
In guarding against all may make it less?
It is not worth so much! It were to die
Before my hour, to live in dread of death,
Tracing revolt; suspecting all about me,
Because they are near; and all who are remote,
Because they are far. But if it should be so —
If they should sweep me off from earth and empire,
Why, what is earth or empire of the earth
I have loved, and lived, and multiplied my image;
To die is no less natural than those
Acts of clay! ‘Tis true I have not shed
Blood as I might have done, in oceans, till
My name became the synonyme of death —
A terror and a trophy. But for this
I feel no penitence; my life is love:
If I must shed blood, it shall be by force.
Till now, no drop from an Assyrian vein
Hath flow’d for me, nor hath the smallest coin
Of Nineveh’s vast treasures e’er been lavish’d
On objects which could cost her sons a tear;
If then they hate me, ‘tis because I hate not:
If they rebel, ‘tis because I oppress not.
On, men! ye must be ruled with scythes, not sceptres,
And mow’d down like the grass, else all we reap
Is rank abundance, and a rotten harvest
Of discontents infecting the fair soil,
Making a desert of fertility, —
I’ll think no more.
With these lines, Byron sets the development theme. Sardanapalus
is a secular and godless St. Francis, a man of peace and love, too
good for this world. Byron has Zames declare of Sardanapalus,
…all voices bless
The king of peace, who holds a world in jubilee.
Sardanapalus is thus compared also to Christ by Byron! When men
who appreciate his worth kneel before Sardanapalus, hailing him
“the god Sardanapalus,” his reply is, “I seek but to be loved, not
worshipped.” The glory of this new god is then tied to
homosexuality, as Sardanapalus requests “a song of Sappho.” But,
sadly, the world is not made to appreciate such greatness, and, “All
are the sons of circumstance.” Those who seek pleasure rather than
brutal power are made the victims of God and man. Sardanapalus,
in self-pity, says,
This, too —
And this too must I suffer — I, who never
Inflicted purposely on human hearts
A voluntary pang!
This debauched St. Francis releases a man before his end
approaches, saying,
Let him go free. — My life’s last act
Shall not be one of wrath.
Sardanapalus, as death by suicide nears, gives a neoplatonist
soliloquy in which he looks forward to his soul’s departure from
“the gross stains of too material being.” As he mounts the funeral
pyre, Sardanapalus, the saintly victim, declares,
Adieu, Assyria!
I loved thee well, my own, my fathers’ land,
And better as my country than my kingdom.
I sated thee with peace and joys; and this
Is my reward; and now I owe thee nothing,
Not even a grave.
Suicide 305
Byron, as himself a guilt-ridden and suicidal man, deliberately
chose as vicious an example as Sardanapalus for glorification in
order to show that, unknown to the common herd, the debauched
villain is really the hero. Moreover, he uses Manfred, Cain, and
Sardanapalus as vehicles to express his own suicidal self-pity. In
Byron’s world, the function of man is to pity the suicidal hero and
to confess how little they have understood his greatness. The
function of God is to bring down judgment on Byron and his
heroes for their sins, so that their self-pity can be justified and
increased. Byron’s suicidal heroes, and Byron himself, revelled in
feeling misunderstood and abused; they spurned friendly
understanding, because to be understood placed them within the
reach of mere mortals. The perversity of suicidism is its refusal to
be understood, its insistence on being a god in a completely
self-centered universe. Judgment is interpreted (as in Cain) as the
jealousy of God for a rival god. Dostoyevsky’s Kirilov, in The
Possessed, was thus logical in his suicide: its purpose was to confirm
his status as a god: it was an act of salvation. The logic of unbelief
concludes, finally, in the act of suicide as humanistic salvation
XXXIII
Death
When men fear death, death has great power over them. If they
see death as the mockery of life and meaning, and as the reduction
to absurdity of all man’s hopes and plans, then death for them is
the great evil rather than sin. The result is a radical inversion of the
order of reality. To understand this, let us examine St. Paul’s
statement in Romans 5:11-13.
11. And not only so, but we also joy in God through our Lord
Jesus Christ, by whom we have now received the atonement.
12. Wherefore, as by one man sin entered into the world, and
death by sin; and so death passed upon all men, for that all
have sinned;
13. (For until the law sin was in the world; but sin is not
imputed when there is no law).
St. Paul here declares (in v. 11) that, being reconciled to God, we
glory or rejoice in Him. In Hodge’s words, “Salvation is begun on
earth.” Sin invaded “the world” through Adam. “Sin existed before
the fall of Adam. It can only mean the world of mankind. Sin entered
the world; it invaded the race.” The penal consequence of sin was
death. All the race is subject to penal evils on account of Adam.
How was this possible, when as yet the law had not been given
through Moses? A basic principle of law is that, where there is no
law, there is no legal offense. Paul recognizes this. Until the law of
Moses was given, there was, however, sin in the world. This means
that there was, clearly, a law, because otherwise “sin is not imputed
when there is no law” (v. 13). As Hodge noted, “If men were
sinners, and were treated as such before the law of Moses, it is
certain that there is some other law, for the violation of which sin
was imputed to them.”1 The antinomians have long used this verse
to impugn the law, whereas it confirms the law. God imputed sin to
Cain, and to the entire world, outside of Noah’s family, in the
1893), 219, 228, 245.
307
judgment of the Flood. Clearly, there was not only an oral
revelation already given to men, but also the fact that, because man
is God’s creature, the law, like God’s total witness, is made known
to man in every aspect of creation and in every atom of man’s being
(Rom. 1:18-21). Thus, in every age and place, when man has
sinned, he has sinned with knowledge, and the consequence has
been death and judgment.
Man, however, refuses to see his sin as sin; he may groan
inwardly because of the judgment of sin, but, outwardly, sin for
him is freedom, freedom from God. Thus, in the eyes of fallen
man, it is not sin which is evil, but rather death. It is death, not sin,
which fallen man fears, because death looms as judgment on his
sin, and death puts an end to all his attempts to play god. Age and
death place a limitation on his ability to commit physical sins, such
as adultery, and age and death remind him of the futility of all his
hopes, of his very life.
Since fallen man sees death as the great evil for himself, he also
sees death as the way of salvation to rid him of his enemies. If death
is the greatest evil for himself, it is surely so for his enemies also.
Thus, the way to confound his enemies is to kill them, and the way
to triumph is to stay alive while killing one’s enemies.
In such thinking, death acquires a double meaning. It is the great
and final evil where it affects one’s self; it is salvation when it
eliminates one’s enemies. Death looms all the larger when it
assumes this double role.
A very simple illustration of this will show what results. An
earnest conservative admitted that, during the 1930s and the early
1940s, he believed very strongly that most of the world’s problems
could be eliminated, and the world made a vastly better place, if
death suddenly took three men, Stalin, Hitler, and Franklin Delano
Roosevelt. Stalin, as the communist dictator, was murdering
millions of Russians and guiding the massive subversion of all
other countries. Hitler was a threat of war, had revived and fanned
racial hatred, and was leading Germany to barbarism. Roosevelt
was seducing the United States into socialism and worldwide
interventionism, and was likely to use war as a way out of the
Death 309
Depression and as an opportunity to become a world leader.
Without in any degree having any desire to be an assassin, this man
all the same longed for the death of these men as his answer to
world problems.
It was no small shock to this man to find, when all three men
were dead, that the world not only did not improve, but also was
far worse and yet very happy with its wayward course. He
remarked, “I finally gave up hoping death would settle world affairs
when it dawned on me that it would mean the death of practically
all men, and maybe myself!”
Death as an answer to man’s problems is an idea which has long
been familiar to suicides and murderers. It has been a
commonplace idea in every quarter. The short story writer, Hector
Hugh Munro (“Saki”), 1870-1916, had a character in one of his
stories observe, “Waldo is one of those people who would be
enormously improved by death.” One of George Herbert’s
Outlandish Proverbs of 1640 speaks of “waiting for dead men’s
shoes.” Death as a means of advantage has long been prominent in
men’s thoughts. Add to this a belief that life is meaningless, and
human life becomes trivial in the roll call of death. Laurence Sterne
depicted this, as a father meditates on his son’s death in The Life and
Opinions of Tristram Shandy:
Philosophy has a fine saying for every thing. — For Death it
has an entire set; the misery was, they all at once rushed into
my father’s head....
‘Tis an inevitable chance — the first statute in Magna Charta
— it is an everlasting act of parliament, my dear brother, —
All must die.
If my son could not have died, it had been matter of wonder,
— not that he is dead.
... What is become, brother Toby, of Nineveh and Babylon, of
Cizicum and Mitylenaie? The fairest towns that ever the sun
rose upon, are now no more; the names only are left, and
those (for many of them are wrongly spelt) are falling
themselves by piece-meals to decay, and in length of time will
be forgotten, and involved with every thing in a perpetual
night: the world itself, brother Toby, must — must come to an
end....
... What flourishing towns now prostrate upon the earth! Alas!
Alas! said I to myself, that man should disturb his soul for the
loss of a child, when so much as this lies awfully buried in his
presence — Remember, said I to myself again — remember
thou art a man. — 2
The life of a child is nothing, when cities and civilizations in great
numbers have died. Even more, when millions have been brutally
killed, and have been buried and forgotten by history, their pain
and meaning are alike gone, and, in this view, it is nothing if other
men suffer today, if some advantage accrues to someone. People
are there to be used by such a man. Principles mean nothing to the
man for whom life means nothing.
It is significant that both Stalin and some of his associates had
been double agents before (and, in some cases, during) the Russian
Revolution. They worked for the tsarist secret police, and for the
Revolution, enjoying the power and the destructive potential in
their dual role. It is more than likely that, however much the cause
of Marxism meant to them, the power their role gave them over
other men was even more compelling. If and when the records of
subversion within the Soviet Union become a matter of public
record, they will no doubt demonstrate the ease with which
prominent communists have played a double role in order to
enhance their power over men’s lives.
Stalin’s daughter has recorded the fact that Beria had a long
history as a double agent during the Civil War in the Caucasus.
He was a born spy and provocateur. He worked first for the
Dashnakists (the Armenian nationalists) and then for the Reds
as power swung back and forth. Once the Reds caught him in
the act of treason and had him arrested. He was in prison
awaiting sentence when a telegram arrived from Kirov, who
was chief of all operations in the Caucasus, demanding that he
be shot as a traitor. Just then, however, the fighting started up
again, and he was such a small fry that nobody got around to
2. Laurence Sterne, The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman & Senti-
mental Journey through France and Italy, vol. I (London: Macmillan, 1900), 319f.
Death 311
dealing with him. But all the Old Bolsheviks in the Caucasus
knew of the telegram’s existence — and Beria himself knew of
it. Isn’t it perhaps here that one should seek an explanation of
Kirov’s murder many years later? It was right after Kirov’s
murder in 1934, after all, that Beria began his climb to
prominence and power.3
There is a very revealing letter from Stalin to his daughter, a tender
note to “Dear Svetochka,” which reads in part:
Take care of yourself. Take care of your daughter, too. The
state needs people, even those who are born prematurely....
Your little Papa.4
This affectionate letter is all the more telling in that it reveals how
deeply imbued Stalin was with an instrumental view of man: “The
state needs people.” When men are seen as instruments of the
state, they are very readily used, because it is the function of an
instrument to be used.
Samuel Foote (1720-1777) wrote in The Minor, “Death and dice
level all distinctions.” Death and dice are thus linked, implying that
chance rules all, and all distinctions and meaning are wiped out by
death. If after death man has no meaning, why should he have
meaning before death?
Death thus represents the great evil, and the great power; it is
both damnation when it strikes the godless man, and salvation,
when he himself employs it. Death rather than sin is for him the
greatest evil to befall a man. In terms of this faith, it is better to be
Red than dead, better to be conquered alive by the worst enemy
than to risk death resisting him. Where death rather than sin is the
great evil, there pacificism will flourish, since man would rather risk
slavery than death. Similarly, war will flourish most where death is
the greater evil than sin, because death will represent a culminating
power which men will as readily use as they will readily deplore.
This, then, is the dual role of death for the unregenerate, to be
the greatest evil, and also to be a means of salvation, to be dreaded
3.
Svetlana Alliluyeva, Twenty Letters to a Friend (New York: Harper & Row,
1967), 137f.
4. Ibid., 199.
personally, but desired intensely for others. A thoughtless and
immoral man, who had long been faithless to his wife and
contemptuous of her faith and patience, was suddenly laid low by
a stroke. Knowing that he would die, he screamed pornographic
insults at his wife, resenting the fact that she would live and would
with freedom enjoy his wealth. The dying man had one prayer, that
he would become suddenly well long enough to kill her before he
died. An ancient Greek verse, an inscription for the tomb of
Timon, gives us the same mood:
Ask neither my name nor my country, passers-by:
My sole wish is that all of you may die.5
St. Paul’s order is the right one: it puts the problem in
perspective: by sin came death. Christ came to overthrow the
power of sin, and rendered perfect obedience to the law of God,
and He then overthrew the power of death in His resurrection.
Man in Christ is called to obey the law of God and by means of it
to establish dominion over the earth. Christ shall reign, in and
through His people, and shall put all His enemies under His feet,
in subjection to Himself and to His saints. Then the last or final
enemy, death, shall be destroyed at the end, and the fulness of the
new creation ushered in (1 Cor. 15:24-26). Prior to that time, “he
shall have put down all rule and all authority and power.” Sin shall
have been destroyed in principle by His atoning death and
resurrection, and in its controlling power by the sanctification of
men and nations. Death, then, as the final or remaining enemy,
shall be destroyed.
5. Dudley Fitts, translator, More Poems from the Palatine Anthology, In English Para-
phrase, no. 18. (Norfolk, Connecticut.: New Directions, 1941).
XXXIV
Hell
Some years ago, Emory Storrs observed that “When hell drops
out of religion, justice drops out of politics.”1 Justice also drops out
of religion when the doctrine of hell is denied.
D. P. Walker had noted that “There is only a limited number of
possible ways of eliminating eternal torment. The simplest is to
deny personal immortality.... All the other ways involve universal
salvation.”2 Walker is right, and his alternatives are clear cut. First,
hell as a present problem disappears whenever man holds that
death ends all, and that there is no life beyond the grave. The
possibility of eternal punishment is then exchanged for the
certainty of death and the reduction of all life to meaninglessness.
Clearly, however, many men prefer a final and everlasting negation
of life to a judgment on man by a sovereign God. The appeal of
everlasting death and a universal meaninglessness is preferred to
the acceptance of a universe of meaning in which not man, but
God is sovereign. To accept universal death as ultimate is a form
of intellectual suicidism, but it is preferable for many to life on
God’s terms. For such men, salvation means in essence salvation
from God and His claims on men, so that heaven and hell are
equally resented as evidences of that hateful dominion. For a
runaway murderer, salvation is escape from the police; for the
proud and angry sinner in flight from God, salvation is escape from
God into an ostensibly everlasting death and meaninglessness.
True, to believe in everlasting meaninglessness and death is to
believe that reality moves to the negation of man, but, far more
important to such a man, it means also the ostensible negation of
God and His claims on man. As one man, frankly unhappy because
his Puritan heritage gave him a bad conscience about God and sin,
remarked, concerning his atheism and his belief in eternal death,
1. Cited
by Harry Buis, The Doctrine of Eternal Punishment (Philadelphia: Presby-
terian and Reformed Publishing Company, 1957), 122.
2. D. P. Walker, The Decline of Hell, Seventeenth Century Discussions of Eternal Torment
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1964), 67.
313
“It’s the finish for God also!” By dying himself, Kirilov, in
Dostoyevsky’s Possessed, declared that he also “killed” God. Men
proclaim the death of man as a means of effecting the death of
God.
Second, hell can be turned into an extended purgatory, so that
ultimate salvation is assured for all men. Ultimate and universal
salvation can also be asserted by means of reincarnation, to make
atonement for past sins, or by spiritualism and a belief in a universe
of spirits whose primary quality is immortality rather than
responsibility to a sovereign God. By whatever means hell and its
meaning are evaded, the result is antinomianism. Justice and law
both begin to depart from man’s moral universe when the doctrine
of eternal punishment is surrendered. When the doctrine of hell
was dropped in certain circles of English thought in the
seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the result was
antinomianism. In some, reason as autonomous and ultimate
gained sway; in others, experientialism led to new revelations.
Those who had new truths from their god were soon confounded
by others with still newer revelations from their god of love. This
proved to be the fate of the Rev. Richard Roach, who found Mary
Keimer spouting new revelations from the “the God of Love”:
K. Consider thou O Man! I will confound thee, yea & bring
thy Lofty, thoughts down; I will lay thee even with the Dust.
Who are thou O man that exaltest thyself ? Who art thou? I am,
I am! How durst thou presume to speak unto me? I can this
moment strike thee dead... I am, I am, I am, I am.... and ye shall
know that I have spoken: for quickly Judgments shall be usherd
in. Then wilt thou know who has spoken, & who now does
speak. ‘Tis the God of Love....3
Mary Keimer held that she had been commanded to go to France
(this was in 1712) and speak to the King, “who should upon his
Disobedience be immediately struck dead by her mouth.” Her
brother, Samuel Keimer, wrote,
I have seen my sister, who is a lusty young woman, fling
another Prophetess on the Floor, and under Agitations tread
3. Ibid., 258.
Hell 315
upon her Breast, Belly, Legs etc., walking several Times
backwards and forwards over her, and stamping upon her with
violence. This was adjudgd to be a sign of the Fall of the Whore
of Babylon.4
This is a very significant aspect of antinomianism. The God of
justice is denied in the name of love, but, immediately, the people
of love become champions of judgment and violence. Mary
Keimer wanted to strike dead Louis XIV if he dared disobey her;
she was contemptuous and ready to judge the Rev. Richard Roach,
and she brutally stomped on “another Prophetess.” This is not
surprising; having denied justice to God, man takes it upon himself
to play god and mete out justice on his own terms. Having
eliminated God’s hell from the world to come, man must provide
a hell here for those who offend him. As hell has departed from
man’s beliefs concerning the world to come, it has been made a
reality of modern politics. By coddling criminals, waging total war,
making total claims on citizens, and generally playing god, the
modern state is determined to play god and create and administer
hell to all who offend it.
Marx, of course, called for precisely this. One class should be
labelled the oppressing class, or the devils of society, and
consigned to hell on earth.5 Thus, Marx’s system called for a savior,
“the liberating class,” a devil, “the oppressing class,” a judgment,
the revolution, and hell, the enslavement and punishment of the
oppressors and their allies. The communist utopia would become
heaven on earth. Where hell is denied to the other world, it
becomes an aspect of this world, and all men are steadily recruited
as its inhabitants because of their resistance to the will of the
philosopher-kings; and, because the communist heaven never
arrives, the guilt for its non-realization is laid upon the people, who
must make atonement for it by living in hell on earth.
To deny hell is to become antinomian in every area. Thus, John
Lacy, who in the early 1700s was one of those who denied eternal
4. Ibid.,
259.
5.
Karl Marx, “Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right,” in
Early Writings, T. B. Bottomore, translator, editor (New York; McGraw-Hill,
1963), 56.
punishment, in c. 1711 defended abandoning his wife and taking “a
Prophetess to his bed” after he failed to convert his wife to his
views. He held that a “Supernatural voice” threatened him “with
Hell-fire and eternal destruction,” if he did not do so.6 Lacy thus
conveniently used hell to make it a threat from his god to force him
into antinomianism!
We may thus say that, when hell disappears from religion, it
reappears in politics and social morality. It becomes necessary then
for ultimate moral judgments and dispositions to be made on earth,
because there is no other court for a final reckoning. If there is no
God who can say, Vengeance is mine, and I will repay or
recompense (Deut. 3:35; Ps. 99:8; Isa. 3:8; Jer. 50:15; Ezek. 24:25;
Nahum 1:2; 2 Thess. 1:8; Rom. 12:19, etc.), then it is necessary for
man and the state to assume this role of judgment and judge.
Whenever and wherever man creates a hell on earth, he is
oppressive and harsh to the extreme. In the hell created by God,
men who choose to live apart from God are allowed to do so
eternally, living in that total self-isolation, which is hell in its truest
sense. The tyranny of man is bad enough when it is supposedly an
exercise of power in the name of God; it is far, far greater when
man sees himself as his own god. There is, then, no restraint on
him, and his lust for power requires him to consign every man to
hell who opposes him. Wurmbrand has graphically described the
kind of treatment meted out by his communist oppressors:
For fourteen years of prison, our food was horribly bad.
Prisoners were forced to eat their own excrements and drink
urine. For much of the time, we ate cabbage and unwashed
intestines.
In our cells, Christians were tied to crosses. Every day the
crosses were put on the floor. Then dozens of other prisoners
were obligated to fulfill their bodily necessities upon the faces
and upon the bodies of the crucified ones. Then the crosses
were erected for the amusement of the Communists who
stood around jeering: “Look at your Christ; how beautiful He
is!”7
6. Walker, op. cit., 259.
7. Richard Wurmbrand, The Wurmbrand Letters (Pomona, California: Cross Pub-
lications, 1967), 40, 42.
Hell 317
Stafford, in describing communist torture, speaks of the sadistic
motives of the communist lords and adds,
Thus the sadist is not content to debase his victim but must
make him beg for further humiliation, still further outrage.
The beaten are made to kiss the rod. Sexual impulse is
transposed into deliberate torture for political ends.8
Hell is not evaded by being denied. If men hold, first, that death
ends all, or, second, to a universal salvation beyond the grave, then
hell is transferred to this world, intensified, and every effort made
to concentrate an eternity of torment into the hour.
The third alternative is to accept the Biblical doctrine of hell. Hell
is the destiny of the wicked (Ps. 9:17; Prov. 5:5; 7:27; 9:18; Matt.
23:15; 25:41). It is the habitation of “the devil and his angels”
(Matt. 25:41). Our Lord described it as “a furnace of fire: there shall
be wailing and gnashing of teeth” (Matt. 13:42). The imagery is
derived both from the parable He was analyzing, of tares burned
so that their seed would not reseed the fields, and the word for hell,
Gehenna, taken from the Valley of Hinnom, the Jerusalem dump,
where fires continually burned the discarded rubbish. Gehenna or
Hinnom was also a place of worms, in that much which was not
consumed by fire was devoured by worms. Mark 9:43-44 speaks of
hell as the place “where their worm dieth not, and the fire is not
quenched.” These images were recognized to be figurative through
the centuries, typifying the burning of conscience and the gnawing,
devouring force of memory. There are no torturers in hell, only
self-willed self-torture. In a rubbish heap, or a city dump, all facts
are unrelated facts; they are in a limited sense brute factuality, in
that they have been separated from a context and meaning. It is the
world of autonomous man realized. In a home, all facts are related
facts: things are brought in, made, and placed in terms of a meaning
to us, so that there is a community of things in terms of our
purpose. So, too, in the Kingdom of God, all things are interrelated
in terms of the total meaning and purpose of God’s plan and order.
Man, having denied God, denies himself because man is the
8. Peter Stafford, Sexual Behavior in the Communist World (New York: Julian Press,
1967), 89.
handiwork of God and cannot deny his Maker without denying at
the same time the meaning and direction of his own life. His life
then collapses into meaninglessness and, finally, into hell.
The sinner, however, sees salvation as separation from God and
an attempt by man to be his own god (Gen. 3:5). Hell is thus the
culminating state of sin and insanity, of apostasy and separation
and non-communication from other men. Since the goal of man’s
original sin is for man to be his own god and universe, then hell is
for the sinner his existential paradise. There is no community in
hell: every man is his own god and universe. In this respect, C. S.
Lewis’ Great Divorce errs, among other things, in depicting
conversations and community in hell; he is on the right track in
describing the people in hell as unable to recognize that they are in
hell. He is right also in declaring that “my will be done” is the
essence of hell.9
Milton was right.... The choice of every lost soul can be
expressed in the words “Better to reign in Hell than serve in
Heaven.” There is always something they insist on keeping,
even at the price of misery. There is always something they
prefer to joy — that is, to reality. Ye see it easily enough in a
spoiled child that would sooner miss its play and its supper
than say it was sorry and be friends. Ye call it the Sulks. But in
adult life it has a hundred fine names — Achilles’ wrath and
Coriolanus’ grandeur, Revenge and Injured Merit and
Self-Respect and Tragic Greatness and Proper Pride.10
This same mood is expressed in the familiar kind of remark of
people who refuse to be comforted: “Don’t try to talk me out of it.
If I want to be miserable, I have a right to be miserable, and nothing
you say will change my mind.”
To read the goals of existentialist philosophy is to find there a
non-Christian description of hell as a social philosophy and goal.
The isolation and futility of hell are also ably described by
existentialists. Their goal is clearly hell, but they rage at God, and
resent bitterly any mention of God’s creation of hell. Logically,
they should be highly pleased that their goal has God’s imprimatur
9. C. S. Lewis,
The Great Divorce (New York: Macmillan, 1946), 69.
10. Ibid., 66.
Hell 319
and design, and that heaven, which is hell to them, will drain off the
offensive people of God. Logically, all this should delight them,
but it does not, because it manifests a determining will other than
their will and a sovereign purpose other than their purpose. Hell is
offensive to the reprobate because God thought of it first. To be at war with
God because He is God is a first premise of the reprobate mind.
To cite an illustration of this mentality, a man, secretly guilty of
continuous adultery, was particularly resentful of his wife’s patient,
thoughtful, and efficient attention to his needs because it rubbed
raw his conscience. He went home prepared to be angry because
hamburger or some cheaper cut of meat was going to be served to
him, a hard-working, well-deserving husband, only to find that she
had so managed the budget that week that the best of steaks was
theirs for dinner! His anger was only greater, now, for her
supposed lack of economy. It was repeated instances of a will to
find fault that alerted her to his guilty conscience. He was
determined to find fault and be at war with his wife to prove her
guilty, because the alternative was to admit that he was guilty.
This is man’s premise as he seeks hell psychologically,
philosophically, and religiously. To surrender his existential
self-torture and isolation is to admit that he needs fellowship with
God and community with God and His people. To admit this is to
confess that he is a sinner, and that he is not a god but a fool. It
means submitting to God’s plan of salvation rather than to man’s.
A good example of hell as a philosophical goal is Sartre’s Being
and Nothingness. Man is to be his own god, living out of his own
being exclusively and out of his own self-definition and
self-existence. This isolation, in which other men have no real
place, does leave man a “futile passion,” a vain and meaningless
thing in an ocean of nothingness, but, rather than being
abandoned, this isolation is all the more zealously championed.
Heaven and hell thus represent two plans of salvation, and two
differing concepts of paradise. The tempter’s plan as proposed to
Eve was for the improvement of paradise. God, he maintained,
was lying to man and trying to keep man from the true
paradise-life, and only by the course of independence and a
declaration of self-deity could man attain that true life and glory
(Gen. 3:1-5). The course of action promised material fulfilment
and mental awakening; it was “to be desired to make one wise”
(Gen. 3:6).
The course of Biblical history is the development of these two
rival plans of salvation, with their two rival goals. The Kingdom of
God has as its goal the new creation; the Kingdom of Man has as
its goal a creation which can only be described as hell. Revelation
19, in depicting the destiny of Babylon the Great, the Kingdom of
Man, sees it culminating in a feast of vultures, the accompaniment
of anarchy and collapse; it is the product of a situation where there
is such ruin and isolation that none care for their dead. The
culmination of the New Jerusalem, or the Kingdom of God, is
depicted as the epitome of happy community, a marriage feast. The
doctrine of hell is the recognition of another plan of salvation, and
the evidence of its impossibility and collapse.
By means of hell, God grants to the reprobate their idea of
paradise as the most fitting and devastating punishment they can
have. Hell is the longed-for paradise of the reprobate, their goal
and their dream; it is also their damnation.
As against hell, heaven and the new creation tell us of our rest
and peace in Christ, as well as our joy in the fact that our “labour
is not in vain in the Lord” (1 Cor. 15:58) but is rather always
rewarding and fruitful (Rev. 22:1-3). The paradise of God and His
people is both city and garden (Rev. 21:1-22:6); it is both the
perfection of community and the full self-realization of the
individual. It is the end of grief, pain, and death (Rev. 21:4). The
saints of God “shall reign for ever and ever” (Rev. 22:5) in a new
creation which is in its every aspect promise and fulfilment. This is
their life in Christ.
XXXV
The Forgiveness of Sins
Without the forgiveness of sins, hell would be the basic and

ultimate state of all men. The torment of the burden of sin and guilt
would not only gnaw at the entrails of all men but also make them
past-bound and past-oriented. The guilty man endlessly rehearses
the past, telling himself, I should have done thus and so, and he
makes himself impotent in coping with the present. When men are
guilt-ridden, and a culture is dominated by guilty and unregenerate
men, history bogs down into an impotent longing for past glory
and a futile, back-biting rehearsal of past and present sins.
In some men, the outcroppings of guilt are more dramatic than
in others. Lord Byron, for example, dramatized and justified his sin
and guilt. Although a man tormented with guilt and “the
oppression of... conscience,” Byron sought to assuage his guilt by
holding that “he must be wicked — is foredoomed to evil —
compelled by some irresistible power to follow this destiny, doing
violence all the time to his feelings.” Byron, in fact, chose his
course gladly; it was not sin he objected to but the sense of guilt
which followed sin. He justified his sin and his war against God on
the ground that he had been cursed with a deformed foot.
Although singularly blessed in all other ways and rich in
advantages, “he expressed a wish to revenge himself on Heaven for
this malformation, and to consider himself justified in doing so by
every kind of impiety.” Byron was an injustice collector who
wanted every possible excuse to justify his resolution to “defy
Heaven and earth to the last — that as he had lived, so he died —
that he asked no mercy etc. — with many blasphemous
expressions.”1
Not all sinners are as demonstrative as Byron in the expression
of their guilt, but, with all, it is a crippling force which results either
in inaction and paralysis on the one hand, or the destructive action
1. Malcolm Elwin, Lord Byron’s Wife (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World,
1963), 270, 281, 283, 346.
321
of rage and hatred on the other. It does not lead to long-range and
successful action.
Freud clearly recognized that, as long as all men feel the burden
of guilt, men will look to religion for relief from that guilt. The
basic motive in Freud’s work was to undercut this power of
religion by offering a scientific answer to this key problem in all
psychological ailments, guilt.2 If men looked to the scientist for the
answer to guilt, then God and religion would become obsolete.
Grotjahn has called attention to some correspondence of Freud
with Oskar Pfister on this subject.
After publication of The Future of an Illusion (1927), Freud
wrote that he had great understanding of the words: “Your
sins are forgiven you. Arise and walk.” He wondered what
would happen if the patient were to ask, “How do you know
that my sins are forgiven?” Freud could not simply answer, “I
am the Son of God. I forgive you.” He would have to say, “I,
Professor Sigmund Freud, forgive you your sins,” which, he
admitted, would not work very well.
This letter (Nov. 25, 1928) concludes with a remarkable
paragraph:
I do not know whether you have guessed the secret bond
between “Lay Analysis” and “Illusion.” In the first one, I
want to protect analysis against physicians; in the other one,
against priests. I would like to hand it over to a profession
which does not yet exist, a group of worldly physicians of
the soul, who do not need to be physicians and who should
not be allowed to be priests.3
Freud recognized the need: forgiveness of sins. He recognized that
it required a God-ordained Savior to pronounce that forgiveness
authoritatively. What people with psychological problems want is
someone to say, “Son, thy sins be forgiven thee.... Arise, and take
up thy bed, and walk” (Mark 2:5, 9). What they do not want is the
confession of sins, and the confession of their need for Christ as
their Savior. They prefer to go to a Freud rather than to Christ,
2. See
R. J. Rushdoony, Freud (Philadelphia: Presbyterian and Reformed Pub-
lishing Company, 1968).
3. Martin Grotjahn, M.D., “Sigmund Freud and the Art of Letter Writing,” in
JAMA, vol. 200, no. 1 (3 April 1967): 122.
The Forgiveness of Sins 323
although both they and Freud know that the real need is for
forgiveness of sins by Jesus Christ.
Lord Byron was a Freudian before Freud, in that he too sought
the cure to his guilt by ascribing it to something in his past history.
Byron blamed his Calvinistic nurse, his mother, his heredity, and
finally God, rather than face up to the fact that he delighted in sin
and only regretted the guilt-pangs and consequences of sin. He
placed the guilt in the past and on others, and he became
progressively incapable of living successfully in the present.
For a man to seek forgiveness of sins from Jesus Christ requires
Christ’s prevenient grace. It means a readiness to face the present
and to live in terms of the future. Instead of seeing sin in our past,
our heredity and environment, we see it essentially in ourselves
here and now. We are the problem, not others; it is our love of sin,
our desire to be our own god and to reorder reality and morality in
terms of our will, which brings on us the burden of guilt and
remorse.
To seek forgiveness of sins from Jesus Christ means not only
dealing with our unregenerate and sinful past but also with our
present and future. It is a serious error to see the forgiveness of
sins, however real its relationship to our past, only in terms of that
past burden of guilt. The fifth petition of the Lord’s Prayer requires
us always to pray, “Forgive us our debts, as we forgive our debtors”
(Matt. 6:12). This means more than the fact that we sin daily and
are daily in need of grace, true though this is. The Larger Catechism
of the Westminster Standards is to the point:
Q. 194. What do we pray for in the fifth petition?
A. In the fifth petition (which is, Forgive us our debts, as we forgive
our debtors) acknowledging that we and all others are guilty both
of original and actual sin, and thereby become debtors to the
justice of God; and that neither we nor any other creature can
make the least satisfaction for that debt; we pray for ourselves
and others, that God of his free grace would, through the
obedience and satisfaction of Christ apprehended and applied
by faith, acquit us in his Beloved, continue his favor and grace
to us, pardon our daily failings, and fill us with peace and joy,
in giving us daily more and more assurance of forgiveness;
which we are the rather emboldened to ask, and encouraged
to expect, when we have this testimony in ourselves, that we
from the heart forgive others their offences.
First of all, this makes it clear that forgiveness removes the
burden of past sins through the atoning work and satisfaction of
God’s justice by Jesus Christ; “By the obedience of one shall many
be made righteous” (Rom. 5:19). We are “justified freely by his
grace through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus: Whom God
hath set forth to be a propitiation, through faith in his blood, to
declare his righteousness for the remission of sins that are past,
through the forbearance of God” (Rom. 3:24-25). God, who made
all things, remakes us by His sovereign grace, forgiving us our sins
and giving us the freedom of a clear conscience.
Second, forgiveness has a present reference, in that it fills us with
peace and joy and gives us increasingly the assurance of
forgiveness. As St. Paul said, “Now the God of hope fill you with
all joy and peace in believing, that ye may abound in hope, through
the power of the Holy Ghost” (Rom. 15:13). In this benediction,
St. Paul twice uses the word hope. God, once only a God of
judgment to the sinner, is now even more the God of hope who
makes us to abound in hope, so that we not only have joy and
peace in the present, but also have a present hope concerning a
future glory. The power of the Holy Ghost underlies our peace,
joy, and hope.
Third, forgiveness has a present and future reference, not only in
the fact of hope, but also in the active imperative to forgive others
their offenses: “Forgive us our debts, as we forgive our debtors.” The
word for debtor in the Greek is opheiletes, “one who owes anything
to another, primarily in regard to money.... It is used
metaphorically,” among other things, “of those who have not yet
made amends to those whom they have injured, Matt. 6:12.”4 It is
sometimes translated as “trespasses,” which does justice to one
side of its meaning, but “debtors” does justice to its basic
reference, namely, to the jubilee. The jubilee is the year of
4. W. E. Vine, An Expository Dictionary of New Testament Words, vol. I (New York:

Revell, 1966), 277f.
redemption, the time of cancellation of all debts, the repossession
of forfeited lands, and the end of servitude for bond-servants (Lev.
25:8-55). Our Lord referred to debts and plainly reminded His
people that they are to pray for the jubilee and to institute the
jubilee here and now. When Christ forgives us our sins, we are
thereby in the jubilee time in relation to Him: our debts are
cancelled, our slavery to sin terminated, and the repossession of the
earth as our dominion under God begun. Other men are brought
into the jubilee time by God’s regenerating act. Our duty is to
extend to all God’s people that same forgiveness, so that, as
citizens of God’s Kingdom and heirs of the jubilee, we do not
become guilty of denying the jubilee release to those whom God
has ordained thereto.
Fourth, this makes it clear that forgiveness is not only a personal
act, one in which God has the initiative, and man in Christ
manifests the same grace to other persons, but also a social act, in
that it manifests the grounds of the jubilee society. Guilt, Freud
had to say to his patients, is a psychological relic of acts of
parricide, incest, and cannibalism committed by primitive man; it is
merely a vestigial psychological factor which we must recognize as
invalid though present and oppressive. Instead of divine
forgiveness, Freud offered self-forgiveness; recognize that you are
merely echoing a primitive past; understand and live with your
guilt. The guilty man, already preoccupied with his guilt, is even
more locked into himself, in that now he comes to believe, after
Freud, that his guilt does not involve objective offenses against
God and man, but simply a subjective and psychological fact. If I
am guilty in relationship to my neighbor, I have at least an objective
tie and responsibility to my neighbor. If, after Freud, my guilt is a
vestigial psychological inheritance from primitive man, then my
responsibility to my neighbor, negative though it was, is terminated
and replaced with self-absorption.
Christ’s forgiveness, however, alters my relationship to God and
requires me to alter it in relation to men. I am to forgive as I have
been forgiven. I am a part of the jubilee world, and I must extend
the boundaries of that jubilee by forgiving others, exercising
dominion and bringing one area after another under the sway of
Christ the King, and by repossessing men, callings, institutions, and
all things for the jubilee kingdom.
The past century and a half has seen a steady and happy growth
in “lay” activities by Christians. Where once the clergy alone acted,
now countless Christians are assuming responsibilities and acting
as God’s royal priesthood. One of the unhappy aspects of this
semi-democratic movement has been the increasing freedom with
which all Christians judge rather than forgive one another. In
earlier generations, the amount of criticism and comment was
remarkably limited. Grotjahn cited a letter of November 7, 1939,
by Mrs. Martha Freud, written after the death of her husband,
Sigmund Freud, in which she observed to Ludwig Binswanger,
How good, dear Dr., that you knew him when he was still in
the prime of his life, for in the end he suffered terribly, so that
even those who would have most liked to keep him forever
had to wish for his release! And yet how terribly difficult it is
to have to do without him. To continue to live without so
much kindness and wisdom beside one! It is small comfort for
me to know that in the fifty-three years of our married life not
one angry word fell between us, and that I always sought as
much as possible to remove from his path the misery of
everyday life. Now my life has lost all content and meaning.5
This type of reserve and gentleness was once common to middle
class culture. It was common, two and three generations ago in the
United States, for husbands and wives never to address or refer to
one another in public, and even among friends, except as Mr. and
Mrs. so-and-so. This same reserve was common to private
relations. One aged woman, whose years spanned approximately
the time from 1860 to 1940, said that in her youth, and in her strata
of society, one or two occasions for sharp words between husband
and wife meant a major crisis in the marriage; in most situations,
husband and wife were forbearing and patient. Granted that this
type of reserve is an extreme and has its drawbacks, it must still be
recognized that the increasing democratization of life has made
everyone judge over everyone else. The major and overwhelming
problem of church life is this conflict of persons created by a too
5. Grotjahn, op. cit., 124.
ready criticism of one another. It is also the major reason for
pastoral changes.
The fifth petition of the Lord’s Prayer is thus urgently necessary.
It does not ask us to overlook heresy and flagrant sin. It does ask
us to be the people of grace, who, because we have been forgiven,
are able to extend forgiveness to others. It does require us, as the
people of the jubilee, to manifest the joy, freedom, and release of
the jubilee to one another.
XXXVI
Effectual Calling
The doctrine of effectual calling asserts the priority of God in

our redemption. We do not save ourselves: it is the work of God.
Christ stated it clearly: “Ye have not chosen me, but I have chosen
you, and ordained you, that ye should go and bring forth fruit, and
that your fruit should remain: that whatsoever ye shall ask of the
Father in my name, he may give it you” (John 15:16). While these
words are addressed to the disciples, their application is more
general. In 2 Thessalonians 2:13-14, St. Paul declared to all the
Christians of the Thessalonian Church and all others generally, that
“God hath from the beginning chosen you to salvation through
sanctification of the Spirit and belief of the truth: Whereunto he
called you by our gospel, to the obtaining of the glory of our Lord
Jesus Christ.” “Before the foundation of the world” (Eph. 1:4),
“before eternal ages” (2 Tim. 1:9), God chose His people. From all
eternity the Holy Spirit was ordained to sanctify us, and to provide
for our reception of the truth. God chose us, and His choice was
timeless, i.e., it preceded time.
The initiative and the power are entirely from God. This point is
very important, because, while man wants salvation, man the
sinner wants it on his terms. Those terms are really the essence of
original sin, to be as god, to determine not only good and evil for
one’s self, but “destiny” as well (Gen. 3:5). Man not only seeks to
play god in his own life, but also in the lives of others. Let us
examine this lust for power in areas of obvious sin, and then in
religion. As one scholar has noted, with respect to prostitution, the
sale of sex is only one side of the transaction:
It is not sex the prostitute is really made to sell: it is
degradation. And the buyer, the john, is not buying sexuality,
but power, power over another human being, the dizzy
ambition of being lord of another’s will for a stated period of
time — the euphoric ability to direct and command an activity
presumably least subject to coercion and unquestionably most
329
subject to shame and taboo. This is a very considerable
impression of power to purchase for ten or fifteen dollars.1
A prostitute noted this same fact, that, while men could pick up any
number of available women in bars, they chose instead the
prostitute, because it meant the purchase of irresponsible power
over a woman. Sex they could have had freely: what the prostitute
provided was an opportunity for power in an intimate and
forbidden area and way, in sin and in violation of both the law and
the personality of a woman who was now treated as a thing to be
used. This prostitute commented,
There are lonely women all over New York, women sitting in
bars, who would go with a guy, take him back to their place,
make it with him, treat him well too — and be glad to do it.
But instead men go to prostitutes on Seventh Avenue,
Fifty-Seventh Street, and Broadway, because there are no
strings attached to a whore. And if you’re married, that’s a
consideration. There isn’t even that much chance that she’ll be
clean if she’s from the street. But there are no strings,
absolutely no strings attached....
But what they’re buying, in a way, is power. You’re supposed
to please them. They can tell you what to do, and you’re
supposed to please them, follow orders. Even in the case of
masochists who like to follow orders themselves, you’re still
following his order to give him orders. Prostitution not only
puts down women, but it puts down sex — it really puts down
sex.2
This same prostitute preferred her life to marriage, or to being a
mistress for some of her admirers, because a meaningful
relationship meant a relationship of responsibility and affection
which gave another person a psychological hold and power over
her. In prostitution, she held,
I felt I was the boss because I could say no to the deal. I didn’t
want even the involvement of being a kept woman because it’s
control again. When you’re living with someone — when I
1. Kate Millett, “Prostitution: A Quartet for Female Voices,” in Vivian Gornick
and Barbara K. Moran, editors, Women in Sexist Society, Studies in Power and Pow-
erlessness (New York: New American Library, 1972), 88f.
2. Ibid., 92, 96.
Effectual Calling 331
was living with someone, that’s when I really felt controlled.
Then you can’t refuse. People I’ve lived with — I really felt
that they had power because I couldn’t say no to them.
Because then I could lose them and, if I did, I would lose my
whole life — lose my whole reason for living... I felt freer of
men as a prostitute than I would as a wife or a mistress or a
beloved.3
The prostitute can engage in her activities with “no involvement
at all,” this woman held, and this made it attractive; the man was
then to her “a trick” to be used and exploited.4
This lust for power appears in various forms. With some parents,
it is a desire to have a total hold on a child. One woman, who
developed mental problems, boasted that she and her daughter
were “inseparable.” She added, “She wouldn’t buy a pair of
stockings without me.” The daughter, however, held that her
mother was destroying her family life and her privacy.5 Pauline B.
Bart noted, of her research,
The interviews dispelled any of my doubts about the validity
of inferences from the hospital charts that these women were
overprotective, conventional, martyrs. Even though they were
patients and I was an interviewer and a stranger, one Jewish
woman forced me to eat candy, saying, “Don’t say no to me.”
Another gave me unsolicited advice on whether I should
remarry and to whom, and a third said she would make me a
party when she left the hospital.6
This drive for power, illegitimate and radical power over others,
is very much a part of a fallen world, and especially of our time. We
have a Black Power movement, Gay Power (or homosexual power),
Women Power, Student Power, Indian Power, and so on. These are
naked and obvious expressions of the lust for power, readily
identified and more easily condemned. The more serious drives for
power are often religious and disguised as Christian.
3. Ibid., 96, 98.

4. Pauline B. Bart, “Depression in Middle-Aged Women,” in Gornick and Mo-
ran, op. cit., 171.
5. Ibid., 180.
6. Ibid.
These drives for power ascribe omnipotence and ultimate power
to man and call it godly. At the same time, God is made powerless
and is reduced to a secondary position. Karl Barth held that the
Almighty is not God but the Devil, Chaos, Evil, power in itself.
“God and ‘power in itself’ are mutually exclusive. God is the
essence of the possible; but ‘power in itself’ is the essence of the
impossible.”7 However, it is not necessary to go to Barth to find
such a demotion of God. Arminian revivalism is full of it: it places
sovereignty in man’s hands and allows man’s vote to be decisive as
to whether God can enter his life or not. The “gospel hymn,”
“Jesus is Calling,” says, in its fourth verse,
Jesus is pleading; O list to His voice:
Hear Him today, hear Him today;
Those who believe on His name shall rejoice;
Quickly arise and away.
Calling, calling today, today,
Calling, calling today, today,
Jesus is tenderly calling today,
Is tenderly calling today.
Another hymn says, “Jesus is tenderly calling thee home, calling
today, calling today,” while another says, “Softly and tenderly Jesus
is calling, Calling for you and for me.” Jesus is portrayed as holding
out “promises for you and for me,” if we will only “come home.”
Not surprisingly, such blasphemous “evangelism” is very
successful. When the incarnate God is seen as begging sovereign
man to accept His bribes and “come home,” there is no true
surrender to a sovereign God, but rather an exploitation of another
resource by man the sinner. Such revivalistic additions to churches
are proud, contentious, and self-righteous sinners who expect the
church and pastor to submit to their will and to gratify them as they
have been taught God and Christ have supposedly gratified them.
The salvation peddled by Arminian hucksters is not of God. St.
John said, of all true converts, who are those who believe in Christ,
that they “were born, not of the blood, nor of the will of the flesh,
nor of the will of man, but of God” (John 1:13). It is the act of
7. Karl Barth, Dogmatics in Outline (New York: Philosophical Library, 1949), 48f.
God, not of man, that saves man. Biblical salvation is not
self-salvation. Chapter X, “Of Effectual Calling,” of the Westminster
Confession of Faith, declares,
I. All those whom God hath predestined unto life, and those
only, he is pleased, in his appointed and accepted time,
effectually to call, by his Word and Spirit, out of that state of
sin and death, in which they are by nature, to grace and
salvation by Jesus Christ; enlightening their minds spiritually
and savingly, to understand the things of God; taking away
their heart of stone, and giving unto them an heart of flesh;
renewing their wills, and by his almighty power determining
them to that which is good; and effectually drawing them to
Jesus Christ, yet so as they come most freely, being made
willing by his grace.
II. This effectual call is of God’s free and special grace alone,
not from any thing at all foreseen in man, who is altogether
passive therein, being quickened and renewed by the Holy
Spirit, he is thereby enabled to answer this call and to embrace
the grace offered and conveyed in it.
III. Elect infants, dying in infancy, are regenerated and saved
by Christ through the Spirit, who worketh when, and where,
and how he pleaseth. So also are all other elect persons, who
are incapable of being outwardly called by the ministry of the
Word.
IV. Others, not elected, although they may be called by the
ministry of the Word, and may have some common operations
of the Spirit, yet they never truly come to Christ, and therefore
cannot be saved; much less can men, not professing the
Christian religion, be saved in any other way whatsoever, be
they never so diligent to frame their lives according to the light
of nature, and the law of that religion they do profess; and to
assert and maintain that they may is very pernicious, and to be
detested.
The only “pleading” in our salvation is not by Jesus Christ, but by
man the sinner, and his pleading is itself the working of the Holy
Spirit in his life. Men are effectually called by the Spirit through the
word of God.
It must be added that, in this effectual calling, a distinction must
be made between regeneration and conversion. There must be
regeneration before there is any disposition to conversion.
Conversion is the reaction of man to regeneration.
As Hodge noted,
Regeneration is the effect produced by the Holy Ghost in
effectual calling. The Holy Spirit, in the act of effectual calling,
causes the soul to become regenerate by implanting a new
governing principle or habit of spiritual affection and action.
The soul itself, in conversion, immediately acts under the
guidance of this new principle in turning from sin unto God
through Christ. It is evident that the implantation of the
gracious principle is different from the exercise of that
principle, and that making a man willing is different from his
acting willingly. This first is the act of God solely; the second
is the consequent act of man, dependent upon the continued
assistance of the Holy Ghost.8
Effectual calling is a manifestation of God’s power. Just as
creation was God’s sovereign act, the calling into being out of
nothing of all things in heaven and earth, so re-creation or
regeneration is His sovereign act. “Ye have not chosen me, but I
have chosen you, and ordained you, that ye should go and bring
forth fruit, and that your fruit should remain” (John 15:16). Here
our Lord, while speaking primarily to His disciples, was speaking,
as we have already seen, to all His church. All are saved by His
choice and His sovereign power. Moreover, this sovereign choice
which ordained our effectual calling also ordains our effectual living: we
shall bring forth fruit, and our fruit shall remain. For this reason St.
Paul could with full assurance declare that “ye know that your
labour is not in vain in the Lord” (1 Cor. 15:58). The sovereign
power of God which calls us is now the sovereign power who
effectually works within us.
There is still another clause to this sentence: “that whatsoever ye
shall ask of the Father in my name, he may give it you” (John
15:16). This must not be misunderstood. As Lenski noted, “These
apostles are not to bear fruit ‘in order that the Father may do
whatever they ask’; nor did Jesus make his appointment ‘in order
8. Archibald Alexander Hodge, A Commentary on the Confession of Faith (Philadel-

phia: Presbyterian Board of Publication, 1869), 236.
that’ their petitions may be heard.” The fact is, as Lenski added,
“Jesus had appointed that the Father give them whatever they may
ask him. The words are really a great promise, one that is here
connected with fruit bearing, just as in 14:13 the same promise is
connected with the doing of the greater works.”9
As Ellicott noted, “Each one as a branch ever joined to Christ
was to grow away from Him in the development of his own work,
and was to bring forth his own fruit.” In the commission of that
which our Lord has chosen us to do, we are to pray in His name
(John 14:13; 15:7-8). The effectual calling of our God means effectual
living and effectual prayer when that prayer is directed in terms of our
calling and our particular work for the Lord. The condition, “in my
name,” means “as My representatives on earth, as persons doing
My work, living in My Spirit, seeking as I have sought to do the will
of the Father.”10 When God saves us by His sovereign grace, He
does not then abandon us to our resources until the time of our
entrance into heaven. Our effectual calling is followed by His
effectual power in our living and praying.
9. R. C. H. Lenski, The Interpretation of St. John’s Gospel (Columbus, Ohio: Luthe-

ran Book Concern, 1942), 1052f.
10. C. J. Ellicott, editor, Commentary on the Whole Bible, vol. VI (Grand Rapids,
Michigan: Zondervan, n.d.), 506, 512.
XXXVII
Justification
The need for justification is an intense and basic one. Man,

created in the image of God, needs to be able to stand before God,
before man, and before his own conscience in innocence and
confidence. The need for justification extends to more than an
acquittal of charges against man. Such an acquittal man needs.
Apart from it, man is doomed to self-justification in the form of
sadistic and masochistic activities.1 He will seek to lay his guilt
upon others who are around him, and to punish them, in
atonement for his guilt; he will savagely and zealously persecute the
“guilty” sin-bearer whom he chooses, in order to demonstrate his
supposed zeal for righteousness. Liberal and conservative
humanists, in their reform movements, are deeply infected by a
sadistic urge to justify themselves by finding guilt in their
appointed sin-bearer. With others, the urge to justification is more
masochistic, and self-punishing acts predominate. When a recent
survey among automobile drivers asked, who is guilty, if a car
across the highway, going in the opposite direction, crosses over
into your lane to hit you head on, more than a handful held that
they were guilty. The surveyors concluded that all too many drivers
had a heavy burden of guilt and a masochistic urge to make such
an answer possible. The need of the guilty for acquittal and
innocence is so great that sado-masochistic activities color, in
varying degrees, the activities of the unregenerate. They seek to pay
the price, to make atonement for their sins and absolve their guilt,
by a variety of sadistic and masochistic activities. In some, both
forms of self-justification will be present. Cruelty will always mark
a godless era, because “the tender mercies of the wicked are cruel”
(Prov. 12:10).
The need for justification extends to more than a need for
innocence. It is a requirement also for confidence that one is on the
1. See R. J. Rushdoony, Politics of Guilt and Pity (Nutley, New Jersey: The Craig
Press, 1970), 1-20.
337
right path and doing the right thing, that one is righteous and is
fulfilling the creation mandate to exercise dominion and to develop
the Kingdom of God on earth. Man feels a need to be in tune with
the heartbeat of the universe and to move in the direction of the
future. A guilty past ties him to yesterday: he cannot move freely,
because the guilty man feels the bondage of the past, which, like a
tether, permits him to go so far and no further. The exuberance of
life and dominion is then gone.
Prior to World War I, the Armenians, in their homeland, lived
under the tyranny of the Turks, with frequent massacres and
confiscations. Nonetheless, despite their sometimes defective
faith, they manifested an exuberance born of faith. It was a custom,
in some districts, for the father, on returning home from work and
being greeted by his family, to survey them and his home and
declare proudly and happily, “I am a lord!”
St. Peter speaks of the godly man and wife “as being heirs
together of the grace of life” (1 Peter 3:7). Life is not a burden of
sin and guilt to the godly but a joyful grace, a privilege and a wealth.
Justification thus does more than render a man’s past free from
the burden of sin and guilt. It justifies his life. The dictionary
defines justify thus: “1. To show to be just; vindicate; defend; also,
to make just and right. 2. To declare guiltless or blameless; show or
declare to have done justly or rightly; exonerate. 3. Theol. To regard
and treat as righteous on the ground of Christ’s mediatorial work.”
The third definition is called theological, but in reality all three are
theological. Justification through Jesus Christ means that we are
exonerated and declared guiltless. While very strictly the atoning
work of Christ on the cross effects our acquittal and does not
sanctify us, the separation of justification from faith, adoption, and
sanctification is a logical and analytical one. In life, these things are
synchronous to a great degree. Justification is the sovereign act of
God, while sanctification is a continuing process during one’s life on
earth, but in principle our sanctification is tied up with justification,
saving faith, and adoption, and sanctification manifests the power
of our new life in Christ progressively extending itself into our lives
and activities, as we conform ourselves to the law-word of God.
Justification 339
The fact of justification thus sets a man on new ground in terms of
a new life.
The Last Judgment is intimately associated with justification, and
also with sanctification. There are three aspects to the Last
Judgment that are relevant to us here. First of all, it is a court and a
judgment wherein, before all creation, that judgment which Christ
rendered for His elect on the cross, fulfilling their punishment
vicariously and acquitting them of the burden of sin and death, is
rendered publicly and plainly (Jude 6; 2 Peter 2:4; 2 Cor. 5:10; Eccl.
12:14; Rom. 2:16; 14:10, 12; Matt. 12:36-37 etc.). The ungodly will
receive their public sentence, and the people of Christ will be
openly exonerated, defended, and justified in the face of all their
enemies and in the presence of all the saints. Second, the saints
receive a reward in terms of their sanctification (Rom. 9:23; Matt.
25:21; Rom. 2:5-6). The Second Coming and the Last Judgment are
their vindication before the universe and their time of full reward.
They are saved by faith, and rewarded according to their works.
Third, the Second Coming and the Last Judgment are a time of
revelation, when even the ungodly are compelled to see. “The Lord
Jesus shall be revealed from heaven with His mighty angels, in
flaming fire taking vengeance on them that know not God, and that
obey not the gospel of our Lord Jesus Christ” (2 Thess. 1:7-8). Those
who know God, who have been justified by the atoning work of
Christ, obey the gospel; their judgment was in Christ, and that
judgment is now confirmed before all men, and their obedience
rewarded. What the ungodly refused to see when it was an evangel,
they now see as a sentence: St. Luke, in speaking of the fall of
Jerusalem, saw it as a judgment which is a type of the Last
Judgment, “And then shall they see” (Luke 21:27). Judgment is a
revelation to the ungodly, but it does not justify them: it is their
sentence. For the elect, their judgment in Christ is also their
justification. They die in Christ and are born again in Him. The
expectation of the Last Judgment is “for the greater consolation of
the godly in their adversity,” according to the Westminster Confession
of Faith (Chapter XXXIII, sec. III).
Having now shown how justification is synchronous with more
than acquittal, and that it is closely linked with the Last Judgment,
it is important and urgently necessary to isolate the fact of
justification in order to understand it more clearly. If we do not
isolate the fact of justification, we run into the very dangerous error
of ascribing to Christ’s sovereign act aspects of man’s reaction and
man’s psychology. Psychologically, salvation for man means more
than acquittal: it means adoption, the confidence of the sons of
God, and the ability to face the problems of the world in terms of
the law of God and in the power of the Holy Ghost. For man,
justification means transfer from a death cell to a room in the royal
mansion: this is its effect. Theologically, the term justification means
to acquit and to declare legally righteous; it has reference to a
judicial fact, a juridical transaction which is strictly separate from
its psychological consequences. A judicial pronouncement of
sentence always affects us strongly, but the sentence and its effect
are two separate facts, although inseparably linked.
The Westminster Confession of Faith, Chapter XI, “Of Justification,”
states the matter powerfully and clearly:
I. Those whom God effectually calleth, he also freely
justifieth: not by infusing righteousness into them, but by
pardoning their sins, and by accounting and accepting their
persons as righteous: not for any thing wrought in them, or
done by them, but for Christ’s sake alone: not by imputing
faith itself, the act of believing, or any other evangelical
obedience to them, as their righteousness; but by imputing the
obedience and satisfaction of Christ unto them, they receiving
and resting on him and his righteousness by faith; which faith
they have not of themselves, it is the gift of God.
II. Faith, thus receiving and resting on Christ and his
righteousness, is the alone instrument of justification; yet is it
not alone in the person justified, but is ever accompanied with
all other saving graces, and is no dead faith, but worketh by
love.
III. Christ, by his obedience and death, did fully discharge the
debt of all those that are thus justified, and did make a proper,
real, and full satisfaction to his Father’s justice in their behalf.
Yet, inasmuch as he was given by the Father for them; and his
obedience and satisfaction accepted in their stead; and, both,
freely, not for any thing in them, their justification is only of
Justification 341
free grace; that both the exact justice, and rich grace of God,
might be glorified in the justification of sinners.
IV. God did, from all eternity, decree to justify all the elect; and
Christ did, in the fulness of time, die for their sins, and rose
again for their justification: nevertheless they are not justified,
until the Holy Spirit doth, in due time, actually apply Christ
unto them.
V. God doth continue to forgive the sins of those that are
justified: and although they can never fall from the state of
justification, yet they may by their sins fall under God’s
fatherly displeasure, and not have the light of his countenance
restored unto them, until they humble themselves, confess
their sins, beg pardon, and renew their faith and repentance.
VI. The justification of believers under the Old Testament
was, in all these respects, one and the same with the
justification of believers under the New Testament.
Justification is, as we have seen, synchronous with regeneration
and effectual calling, but it is, very strictly, the judicial act of
acquittal, the legal or judicial aspect of our redemption. Clark has
observed, of this legal aspect of salvation, that
The imputation of our guilt to Christ and of his righteousness
to us, together with his satisfying divine justice, is disparaged
and belittled as a mere legal and commercial transaction.
Something repulsive is supposed to attach to a “merely legal”
atonement. Would an illegal atonement be more attractive?
What is really repulsive about this doctrine is its view of man
as a depraved sinner and of salvation as altogether by God’s
grace. Sinful men hate the doctrine because it prevents them
from earning heaven by their own merits. But repentant and
humble sinners gladly accept God’s gift.2
This strictly legal aspect is not only basic to our salvation, but also
basic to the fact of a moral universe and justice. Morality is more
than a matter of choice, a question of taste and lifestyle, and justice
is more than social convention. They are expressions of the
righteousness of God. Remove the legal aspect of salvation, and
2.
1956), 50f.
morality and justice in any objective sense disappear from the
world. The legal aspect of salvation anchors salvation in the act of
God and relates salvation inescapably to God and His absolute law.
The consequences of a non-juridical doctrine of justification
appear if we examine its implications and developments in Greek
thought. Aristotle defined the highest or “final good” as
self-sufficiency. This made the highest good and salvation a purely
man-centered thing. For Aristotle himself, this posed a problem,
because his basic orientation, while man-centered, was politically
man-centered. As a result, Aristotle added,
By “self-sufficient” is meant not what is sufficient for oneself
living the life of a solitary but includes parents, wife and
children, friends and fellow-citizens in general. For man is a
social animal. A self-sufficient thing, then, we take to be one
which on its own footing tends to make life desirable and
lacking in nothing. And we regard happiness as such a thing.
Add to this that we regard it as the most desirable of all things
without having it counted in with some other desirable thing.
For, if such an addition were possible, clearly we should regard
it as more desirable when even the smallest advantage was
added to it. For the result would be an increase in the number
of advantages, and the larger sum of advantages is preferable
to the smaller.
Happiness then, the end to which all our conscious acts are
directed, is found to be something final and self-sufficient.3
The highest or final good is thus linked firmly with happiness, a
subjective emotion, and with self-sufficiency in an anthropocentric
sense. At the most, a statist interpretation is possible, and, in terms
of the logical direction of self-sufficiency, a purely personal
interpretation of the highest or final good, and every other good,
is alone possible. Justice and morality are thus not abstract
universals beyond man but logically merely projections of man’s
ideas. Gary Wills has spoken of “the Aristotelian idea of perfection
as self-sufficiency.”4 In this universe of self-sufficiency, there is no
place for an absolute God and His sovereign law. Justice and
3. J. A. K. Thomson, translator, The Ethics of Aristotle (Harmondsworth, Middle-
sex, England: Penguin Books, 1955), 37.
4. Gary Wills, “Sex and the Single Priest,” Playboy, vol. 19, no. 7, July 1972, 195.
Justification 343
morality become mere conventions. Wherever justification as a
legal transaction is denied, there justice and morality have been
denied anything more than a humanistic and relativistic status.
The pagan hope of salvation as self-sufficiency means,
practically, independence for God, man, and things. Not
surprisingly, pagan ascetics took to the desert (as did churchmen
influenced by Hellenism). Stoicism fostered a belief in the virtue of
total independence from people and things, and Aristotle’s pupil,
Alexander the Great, was unhappy about his need for food, and for
women, and tried to avoid any strong urge toward either.
In the modern hippie culture, the same idea prevails. Salvation is
“dropping out from the rat race” of the quest for things. The goal
is to be independent of family and material possessions; rags and
an unkempt appearance are deliberately cultivated. To avoid the
dependency that marital love establishes, sex is treated as a casual
and lightly regarded matter, and anyone who has strong feelings
about anything, and a deep love for anyone, has a “hang-up.”
Quite logically, “the drug culture” developed in this context;
Aldous Huxley, in an intense quest for pagan salvation, was a leader
of this movement to find escape from people and things and bliss
in independence of them by means of drugs. In the private world
of every man, salvation was to be realized. Existentialism has been
a clear-cut expression of pagan self-sufficiency as salvation.
The doctrine of justification makes it clear that creation is
inseparably bound by God’s law, so that for man to be saved
requires the satisfaction of God’s law. This satisfaction God the
Son renders by His perfect life and atoning death as our vicarious
sacrifice, our substitute who as our federal head undertook the
death penalty for us. In the world of Aristotle, this aspect of
vicariousness is impossible. All men are autonomous, and all men,
therefore, to find their happiness and their final good must pursue
self-sufficiency as a goal. Aristotle offers us the hope of statism
while giving us the possibility of anarchism. No covenant is
possible in Aristotle’s world, nor a true vicariate and federal head
for mankind, or for the church. Aristotle could be concerned with
the need for a first cause in physics and metaphysics, but not an
Adam, because his world began with an atom, and it retained as its
essential units only atoms. A federal head for humanity was thus
out of the question for Aristotle. Despite its strongly statist drive,
Greece produced only atomistic states, city-states, not a united
state or empire. Its religion moved into neoplatonism, and its
morality into asceticism, because self-sufficiency and atomism
were its religious and social goals. The city-states imagined by
Aristotle and Plato again were governed by this goal of self-
sufficiency: the rest of the world, and the neighboring states, are
unessential to their ideal states.
With respect to the Westminster Confession statement on
justification, A. A. Hodge wrote:
These Sections teach the following propositions:
1st. All those and only those whom God has effectually called
he also freely justifies.
2d. This justification is a purely judicial act of God as Judge,
whereby he pardons all the sins of a believer, and accounts,
accepts and treats him as a person righteous in the eye of the
divine law.
3d. That this justifying act proceeds upon the imputation or
crediting to the believer by God of the righteousness of his
great Representative and Surety, Jesus Christ.
4th. That the essential and sole condition upon which this
righteousness of Christ is imputed to the believer is, that he
exercise faith in or on Christ as his righteousness.
5th. That this faith is itself a gracious gift of God.
6th. That no other grace, neither love nor hope nor obedience,
sustains the same relation to justification that faith does as its
essential condition or instrument; yet this faith is never alone
in the justified person, but is always, when genuine,
accompanied with all other Christian graces, all of which have
their root in faith.5
The legal action of justification is God’s act. The faith which is the
sole condition upon which Christ’s righteousness is legally imputed
5. Archibald Alexander Hodge, A Commentary on the Confession of Faith (Philadel-
phia: Presbyterian Board of Publication, 1869), 245f.
Justification 345
to the believer is itself the gift of God and is entirely of grace. At
no point is there a foothold for Aristotle’s self-sufficient and
autonomous man. At every point, the initiative, power, and
determination with respect to salvation belong solely to God. If
this sovereignty of God with respect to salvation, as of all things, is
to any extent compromised, then Aristotle’s autonomous man
reemerges and God is denied. In pseudo-Christian theology, the
goal is to gain the benefits of sovereign grace while retaining
sovereign man; the result is a radical failure.
Justification is synchronous with subjective changes in man, and,
while in a sense inseparable from them, is still very much a distinct
fact, in that it is the purely legal aspect of salvation. Without the
legal acquittal or justification of man in God’s court, no salvation
would be possible, nor would the God-given calling and faith be at
all possible. Hodge, in discussing the second of the six
propositions concerning justification, wrote:
As to its nature, this justification is a purely judicial act of God
as Judge, whereby he pardons all the sins of a believer, and
accounts, accepts and treats him as a person righteous in the
eye of the divine law. This includes two subordinate
propositions:
(1) Justification is a judicial act of God, whereby he declares us
to be conformed to the demands of the law as the condition
of our life; it is not an act of gracious power, making us holy
or conformed to the law as a standard of moral character....
The true sense of justification stated above is (a) always used
to express an act declaring a man to be square with the
demands of the law, never to express an act making him holy.
Gal. ii. 16; iii. 11.
(b) In Scripture, justification is always set forth as the opposite
of condemnation. The opposite of “to sanctify” is “to pollute,”
but the opposite of “to justify” is “to condemn.” Rom. viii.
30-34; John iii. 18.
(c) The true sense of the phrase “to justify” is clearly proved
by the terms used in Scripture as equivalent to it. For example:
“To impute righteousness without works”; “To forgive
iniquities”; “To cover sins.” Rom. iv. 6-8. “Not to impute
transgression unto them.” 2 Cor. v. 19. “Not to bring into
condemnation.” John v. 24.6
Shaw summarized the matter clearly: “Justification is a judicial
act of God, and is not a change of nature, but a change of the
sinner’s state in relation to the law.” Moreover, “No man can be
justified before God, in whole or in part on the ground of a
personal righteousness of any kind.”7
Arminians maintain that faith itself, or the act of believing, is
accepted as our justifying righteousness. In opposition to this
our Confession teaches, that God does not justify us “by
imputing faith itself, the act of believing, as our
righteousness.”...Faith is not righteousness. Righteousness is
the fulfilling of the law.
Neonomians allege, that though we cannot fulfil that perfect
obedience which the law of works demanded, yet God has
been graciously pleased for Christ’s sake to give us a new law;
according to which, sincere obedience, or faith, repentance, and
sincere obedience, are accepted as our justifying
righteousness. It may be here remarked, that the Scripture
nowhere gives the slightest intimation that a new and milder
law has been substituted in place of the law of works originally
given to man. Christ came “not to destroy the law, but to fulfil
it.” The Gospel was never designed to teach sinners that God
will now accept of a sincere instead of a perfect obedience, but to
direct them to Jesus Christ as “the end of the law for
righteousness to every one that believeth.” The idea of a new
law, adapted to the present condition of human nature, reflects
the greatest dishonour both upon the law and the Lawgiver;
for it assumes that the Lawgiver is mutable, and that the law
first given to man demanded too much.
The righteousness of Jesus Christ is the sole ground of a
sinner’s justification before God. It is not his essential
righteousness as God that we intend, for that is
incommunicable; but his mediatory or surety- righteousness,
which, according to our Confession, consists of his
“obedience and satisfaction.”8
6. Ibid., 246f.
7. Robert Shaw, An
Exposition of the Confession of Faith of the Westminster Assembly
of Divines (Philadelphia: Presbyterian Board of Publication, 1846), 147-148.
8. Ibid., 150f.
Justification 347
Justification sustains the law of God: it does not nullify it or
displace it. If the law were subject to change, or replacement, then
it was futile for Christ to die, if the law given to Moses has no
permanently binding character. Where the law is denied,
justification is eventually denied, because an antinomian religion
has no need of a judicial act of God to effect salvation. Such an
antinomian religion cannot make sense of the Westminster Larger
Catechism, when it declares:
Q. 70. What is justification?
A. Justification is an act of God’s free grace unto sinners, in
which He pardoneth all their sin, accepteth and accounteth
their persons righteous in His sight; not for any thing wrought
in them, or done by them, but only for the perfect obedience
and full satisfaction of Christ, by God imputed to them, and
received by faith alone.
An antinomian religion will tend to bypass or underplay the word
justify in favor of saved, i.e., to look at the results rather than the only
way to those results. Instead of answering, I know I am saved,
because Christ died for my sins, and, apart from any good thing in
me, or faith in me, by His sovereign grace pardoned my sins and
redeemed me, the Arminian or antinomian will say, “I know I am
saved, because I believe in Jesus Christ as my personal Lord and
Saviour.” The ground of salvation is made the personal choice of
an autonomous man who has appropriated another resource in
order to achieve his happiness or final good. With Arminianism or
antinomianism, Aristotle’s autonomous man reappears in a
pseudo-Christian guise.
Not surprisingly, Socinians, Arminians, and antinomians reduce
justification to the pardoning of sins. When pardon is separated
from justification, or when the forgiveness of sins is separated
from the unchanging law of God, then forgiveness is reduced to an
emotional change in the forgiver, and an emotional release in the
forgiven. However, as Hodge noted,
Justification is not mere pardon; it includes pardon of sin, and
in addition the declaration that all the claims of the law are
satisfied with respect to the person justified, and that
consequently he has a right to all the immunities and rewards
which in the covenant of life are suspended upon perfect
conformity to the demands of the law.
Pardon (a) relaxes the claims of law, or waives their exaction in
a given case. (b) It is an act of a sovereign in the exercise of
pure prerogative. (c) It is free, resting upon considerations of
mercy or of public policy. (d) It simply remits the penalty of
sin; it secures neither honours nor rewards.
On the other hand, justification (a) is the act of a judge, not a
sovereign. (b) It rests purely upon the state of the law and of
the facts, and is impossible where there is not a perfect
righteousness. (c) It pronounces the law not relaxed but
fulfilled in its strictest sense. (d) It declares the person justified
to be justly entitled to all the honours and advantages
suspended upon perfect conformity to all the demands of
law.9
Only because we have been vicariously justified by the atoning
work of Christ, whereby the full weight of the law stands, are we
personally pardoned for our sins.
While we are the elect of God from all eternity, we are only
justified when we are effectually called. Antinomians hold that
election means justification, so that they insist that predestination
cancels justification. There is no ground for this opinion, in that it
is an attempt to say that history is meaningless, if God is sovereign.
Meaning for history is taken to mean primary determination by
history. This is the same as saying that I cannot be a man unless I
am also a god. Predestination simply says that God is sovereign,
and that I am a creature, that God is the primary determiner of all
things and not I. I do not thereby unman myself, but rather affirm
that I am a man. Of the elect, Shaw declared,
The righteousness by which they are justified was perfected in
Christ’s death, and the perfection of it was declared by his
resurrection, and they may be said to have been virtually
justified when Christ was acquitted and discharged as their
head and representative; nevertheless, they are not actually and
9. Hodge, op. cit., 248.

Justification 349
formally justified until they are vitally united to Christ by
faith.10
Finally, once saved, always saved. Justification is a single and final
act. There is “no condemnation to them that are in Christ Jesus” (Rom.
8:1). The same justification redeemed believers before Christ as
that which redeems them now. St. Paul cited the example of
Abraham to illustrate how the elect of every age are justified (Rom.
4:3). Justification thus establishes our salvation in the grace of God
and confirms at the same time the law of God. It does not permit
that antinomianism Clark refers to as he cites the “parody” of a
gospel song,
Free from the law, O blessed condition,
I can sin as I please and still have remission.11
Unfortunately, this is not a parody. One famous American preacher
has declared, “You can blaspheme, commit adultery, drink, smoke,
tie one on, etc. and the Lord has to forgive you on the ground of
grace.” This is antinomianism with a vengeance; it asserts the
sovereignty of man: God “has to” do what we require. Not
surprisingly, this view leads to a pragmatic concept of salvation:
“what’s in it for me?” What does God have to offer as against the
world? God and Satan are reduced to bidders for man’s favor, with
man as sovereign, so that God is made into a tempter, trying to
bribe man into salvation with enticing offers and pleadings. This is
blasphemy.
10. Shaw,
op. cit., 158.
11. Clark, op. cit., 51.
XXXVIII
Adoption
The doctrine of adoption is an important aspect of our salvation.

Adoption, both civil and religious, involves, first, an act of law,
whereby the status of a person is changed from one condition to
another, and, second, a change of family, a transfer from one family
and name to another. It is thus closely connected with justification,
in that it is in large measure a juridical transaction. A third aspect of
adoption is the fact that it involves a change of worship. This was
an important part of the legal aspect of adoption in Roman law.
Since St. Paul specifically wrote in the Roman Empire and to
subjects and citizens thereof, the Roman law of adoption was
obviously in mind. Had he written of practices of adoption in
contradiction to Roman law, he would have specified the
differences. S. E. Johnson has said, of the relationship of the
Roman law to St. Paul,
The important point is that in Roman law the adopted son
became the member of the new family just as if he had been
born of the blood of the adopter. He was in all respects a real
son: he underwent a change of family and potestas, of name and
domicile, and acquired all the privileges and responsibilities of
sonship; and he did not participate in the worship of the old
family but in the sacra privata of the new.1
In the early church, the clear awareness of the heirship which
civil law gave by adoption gave believers a vivid and joyful
knowledge of the meaning of adoption in Christ. As Sollier pointed
out,
Baptism, the laver of regeneration, became the occasion of a
spontaneous expression of faith in our adopted sonship. The
newly baptized were called infantes, irrespective of age. They
assumed names which suggested the idea of adoption, such as
1.
S. E. Johnson, “Adoption,” in James Hastings, editor, F. C. Grant, H. H.
Rowley, revisers, Dictionary of the Bible (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons,
1963), 11.
351
Adeptus, Regeneratus, Renatus, Reigenitus, Theogonus, and
the like. In the liturgical prayers for neophytes, some of which
have survived even to our own day (e.g., the collect for Holy
Saturday and the preface for Pentecost), the officiating prelate
made it a sacred duty to remind them of this grace of
adoption, and to call down from Heaven a like blessing on
those who had not yet been so favoured.2
The Council of Trent made it clear, however, that the celebration
of adoption at baptism could not separate it from justification. In
fact,
The Council first identifies justification with adoption: “To
become just and to be heirs according to the hope of life
everlasting” is one and the same thing. It then proceeds to give
the real essence of justification: “Its sole formal cause is the
justice of God, not that whereby He Himself is just, but that
whereby He maketh us just.”3
Adoption is, like justification, entirely of God and is an act of
grace. We are predestined to adoption (Eph. 1:5), and this is not
because of any foreseen merit, but according to the good pleasure
of God’s will. Mueller thus declared,
Therefore, the adoption is an act of God’s free grace and
excludes all human merit; it is absolutely sola gratia. As
believers have been redeemed purely by grace, so also they
have been adopted purely by grace. Thus, God heaps grace
upon grace in electing, redeeming, and adopting His elect
saints.4
In the tradition of Calvin, adoption, while following justification,
and closely connected with it, is not required by it. Adoption is of
grace, not of necessity. As Beckwith held,
The only essential sonship is that of Christ primarily as the
eternal Son, and secondarily as his humanity shares this
prerogrative through union with the divine nature. Through
adoption the elect in Christ become partakers of Christ’s
2. J.
F. Sollier, “Adoption,” in The Catholic Encyclopedia, vol. I (New York: The
Encyclopedia Press, 1913), 149.
3. Ibid.
4. J. TheodoreMueller, “Adoption,” in Carl F. H. Henry, editor, Basic Christian
Doctrines (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1962), 222.
Adoption 353
sonship. Adoption is grounded neither in justification nor in
regeneration, but in God’s free and sovereign grace alone.
Through justification the legal and judicial disabilities caused
by sin are removed; through regeneration the nature is
changed so as to become filial. Thus a basis is laid for a
distinction between the state of adoption and the spirit of
adoption.5
The fact of adoption is again synchronous with other aspects of
our redemption and yet distinct. “Adoption in a theological sense
is that act of God’s free grace by which, upon our being justified by
faith in Christ, we are received into the family of God; and entitled
to the inheritance of heaven.”6 Salvation is an indivisible unity, even
more than a man is an indivisible unity, yet even the eye of a man
has its distinct aspects which cannot be confused with one another.
Webb, while strictly affirming the one and indivisible natures of
grace and of salvation, pointed out that not only are there various
facets to salvation, but these can also be classed variously:
The items of redemption fall apart into two classes — those
which are external, and those which are internal, that is, those
things which being done for sinners affect their legal standing
before God, and those things which are done in them, affect
their subjective and internal moral natures. There are two
changes which grace makes in the sinner’s relation to God —
the one change is effected by justification and the other by
adoption, the one (justification) confirming him as a member
of the kingdom of God, and the other (adoption) confirming
him as a member of the family of God. And there are likewise
and correspondingly two changes in his nature — the one
effected by regeneration and the other by sanctification; the
one initiatory of a new and holy life, and the other
(sanctification) gradually developing what is begun in
regeneration into a completeness which has nothing short of
the character of God as its model and goal. In Scripture these
objective elements of redemption are symbolized by blood,
and these subjective factors are symbolized by water.
5. Clarence
Augustine Beckwith, “Adoption,” in The New Schaff-Herzog Encyclo-
pedia of Religious Knowledge, vol. I (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Baker Book House,
1969), 48.
6.
“Adoption,” in John M’Clintock and James Strong, Cyclopaedia of Biblical,
Theological and Ecclesiastical Literature, vol. I (New York: Harper & Brothers,
1895), 78.
Theological science has long ago vindicated the distinction
between regeneration and sanctification; it would be
conducive to clearness if the distinction between justification
and adoption could be as distinctly recognized.7
The doctrine of adoption is of no concern to liberals in the
church, because they affirm the Fatherhood of God and the
brotherhood of all men as the sons of God. At this point, the
liberals have a seemingly Biblical basis for their position. In Malachi
2:10, we read, “Have we not all one Father? Hath not one God
created us?” There is no ground in this text for an application to all
men, because it clearly is applied to members of the covenant, to
Israel, for Malachi continues, “why do we deal treacherously every
man against his brother, by profaning the covenant of our fathers?”
The sins of the covenant people, the sons of God by grace, are the
subject of Malachi’s concern, and the covenant people alone are
spoken of.
The other relevant text is Acts 17:28-29, “For in him we live, and
move, and have our being; as certain also of your own poets have
said, For we are also his offspring. Forasmuch then as we are the
offspring of God, we ought not to think that the Godhead is like
unto gold, or silver, or stone, graven by art and man’s device.”
Paul’s ideas in Acts 17:28 are common to several Greek poets:
Cleanthes, a Stoic philosopher (300-220 B.C.), and Aratus (c. 310-c.
240 B.C.)of Soli in Cilicia, who wrote, “Ever and in all ways we
enjoy Jupiter, for we are also his offspring.” On other occasions also (1
Cor. 15:32, where Menander is quoted, and Epimenides of Crete,
Titus 1:12), Paul cited Greek poets to reenforce a point made to a
Greek-speaking cultural milieu. Paul’s point in Acts 17:28-29 is to
compel what should be a self-evident conclusion, that is, that
God’s own offspring should know better than to attempt to reduce
God to a visible person who can be depicted by a sculptor. “Paul
intends to say that the Athenians should certainly have touched
and found God sufficiently, so that they would know that as the
One in whom we live, move, and are, no images of gold, silver, or
stone, a thing fashioned by the creature could in the least be like
7. Robert Alexander Webb, The Reformed Doctrine of Adoption (Grand Rapids,
Michigan: Eerdmans, 1947), 22.
Adoption 355
8
god.” Paul’s appeal thus is to the fact of our creation in the image
of God, not to any liberal or pantheistic doctrine of sonship. He is
not trying to make a point about the divinity of man, which he did
not believe, but about man’s inescapable knowledge of God by
virtue of man’s creation in God’s image. His point is similar to that
of Romans 1:18-21. Bruce makes clear St. Paul’s meaning:
We are, then, the offspring of God, says Paul: not, of course,
in the pantheistic sense intended by the Stoic poets, but in the
sense of the Biblical doctrine of man, as a being created by
God in His image and after His likeness. There is, indeed, a
mighty difference between this relation of men to God in the
old creation and that redemptive relation which men of the
new creation enjoy as sons of God “through faith, in Christ
Jesus” (Gal. 3:26). But Paul is dealing here with the
responsibility of all men as God’s creatures to give Him the
honour which is His due. And this honour is certainly not
given if men envisage the divine nature in terms of plastic
images. Here he echoes the perpetual Jewish polemic against
image-worship which has its roots in such OT passages as Isa.
44:9ff. Even if pagan philosophers rationalize the images as
mere symbols of the invisible divinity, the great bulk of the
worshippers pay divine homage to the images themselves.9
Very early in history, the people of God were distinguished from
the sons of men as the sons of God (Gen. 6:2). Israel was called
God’s “first born” (Ex. 4:22).
However, while the argument of the brotherhood of all men as
the sons of God is asserted to influence Christians, in reality the
argument has virtually no weight among those who assert it.
Instead of emphasizing divine sonship, the agnostics and atheists
speak instead of alienation. They are alienated from God, man, and
themselves. But this is not all. In terms of existentialism, these men
feel it necessary to develop and aggravate their alienation as an act
of liberation.
8. R.
C. H. Lenski, The Interpretation of the Acts of the Apostles (Columbus, Ohio:
The Wartburg Press, 1944), 737.
9. F. F. Bruce, Commentary on the Book of the Acts (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Eer-
dmans, 1954), 360f.
Thus, as Krutch points out, critic Susan Sontag, in reviewing Jack
Smith’s film, Flaming Creatures, which deals with group rape,
on-screen masturbation, oral sensuality, and, apparently, is
homosexual in nature, commented,
Flaming Creatures is outrageous and it intends to be. But it is a
beautiful film... a triumphant example of an esthetic vision of
the world and such a vision is perhaps always, at its core,
epicene.10
Krutch asks why “an esthetic vision of the world” must perhaps
always at its core be homosexual. Why must it take “the road to
perdition?” Krutch then adds:
If Miss Sontag does not explain why an esthetic vision must be
epicene, she does undertake to explain why modern art must
be “outrageous”: “Art is always the sphere of freedom. In
those difficult works of art we now call avant-garde, the artist
consciously exercises his freedom.” This argument is
obviously parallel with that favorite of the Sartrian
existentialists, namely, the contentions that: (1) the
unmotivated act is the only positive assertion of freedom; and
(2) the best unmotivated act is one of arbitrary cruelty. 11
Why should the existentialist, seeking independence from God and
man, find his best expression of freedom in arbitrary cruelty?
There are many reasons for such a championing of cruelty as
freedom, but, for our purposes, we must concern ourselves with
the heart of the matter. First, existentialist freedom requires an
independence from God and man, and arbitrary, unmotivated
cruelty certainly emphasizes a radical kind of independence. Second,
existentialist man wants to be his own god. A central aspect of the
power of God is set forth in Hannah’s song: “The LORD killeth,
and maketh alive: he bringeth down to the grave, and bringeth up”
(1 Sam. 2:6). Man has no power to create life; he cannot create a
world out of nothing, nor can he call into being again a life that is
dead. What man can do is to kill, and, as a result, existentialist
10.
Joseph Wood Krutch, “Must Writers Hate the Universe?” in Ned E.
Hoopes, editor, Who Am I? Essays on the Alienated (New York: Dell Publishing
Co., 1971), 199.
11. Ibid., 200.
Adoption 357
freedom, as it seeks an expression of power, will seek it in
lawlessness, in fornication, homosexuality, cruelty, and murder. For
such people, as for Susan Sontag, the beautiful vision of life is the
epicene vision, man as the brutal degenerate. As against adoption,
the existentialist chooses alienation and warfare.
For the Biblical view of salvation, the culminating act of grace in
salvation is our adoption, with all that it implies of heirship in time
and eternity. For the existentialist, the mark of existentialist “grace”
or freedom is unmotivated, arbitrary cruelty, which demonstrates
that one is disinherited and at best a bastard. Not surprisingly,
thinkers in the existentialist tradition see themselves as
disinherited, as bastards, and as enemies of God and man, whereas
believers in Christ see themselves in terms of adoption.
Of adoption, William Laughton wrote,
The word adoption occurs only in five instances (in Scripture),
Ro. viii. 15, 23; ix. 4; Ga. iv. 5; Ep. i. 5; but the subject is often
referred to elsewhere, and is presented under a variety of
aspects. On God’s part, adoption is represented — (1) As
having its origin in his eternal counsel and purpose, Ep. i. 4-5.
(2) As flowing immediately from Christ and the union of his
people with him, Jn. i. 12; Ga. iii. 26; iv. 4-5. Hence the parallel
between the relation of the Father to Christ and to his people,
Jn. xx. 17; — Christ is their elder brother, Ro. viii. 29; they are
joint-heirs with him, Ro. viii. 17. (3) As sealed by the work of
the Holy Spirit, producing in them the character and
disposition of children, Jn. i. 12-13; Ro. viii. 14-16; Ga. iv. 6. (4)
As consummated at the resurrection, Ro. viii. 23. On the other
hand, the privilege of sonship, as enjoyed by God’s peoples,
include — (1) The love and favour of God in a special and
pre-eminent degree, I Jn. iii. 1; Ep. v. 1; Jn. xvii. 23, 26. (2)
Fatherly provision, protection, and discipline at God’s hand,
Mat. vi. 31-33; x. 28, 30; He. xii. 5-8. (3) Access to God with
filial confidence, Ro. viii. 15, 26-27; 1 Jn. v. 14; Mat. vi. 8-9. (4)
The inheritance of future glory and blessedness, Ro. viii. 17-
18; Re. xxi. 7; 1 Pe. i. 4.
Christian adoption is to be distinguished — (1) From the
sonship of Adam, who is spoken of as the son of God, Lu. iii.
38, because, as the first man, he derived his being immediately
from the hand of God, and was made in God’s image and
likeness; this was the sonship of creation. (2) From the
sonship ascribed, in a still more limited sense, to the whole
human family. They are all the offspring of God, because in
him they live, and move, and have their being, Ac. xvii. 28-29.
(3) From the sonship or adoption ascribed to the ancient
people, Ex. iv. 22-23; Je. iii 19; Ro. ix. (4) This, as regarding the
nation at large, and the earthly inheritance which they enjoyed,
was only a typical adoption — the shadow, and not the
substance. The true saints of God, indeed, in Old Testament
times had a spiritual sonship, essentially the same as that which
is enjoyed under the gospel; though, in the measure of its
manifestation to them, and of their present enjoyment of it, it
fell far short of the Christian privilege, Ga. iv. 1-7.12
The sonship of Adam (Luke 3:38) was of grace, as are all things
from a sovereign God.
The emphasis on grace in adoption is very clearly brought out by
Shaw:
Adoption, being a change of state is completed at once, and is
equally the privilege of all that truly believe in Christ. Gal. iii.
26, 28. Some of the children of God may excel others in gifts
and gracious qualities; but the filial relation to God is the same
in all. This high privilege entirely flows from the free and
sovereign grace of God... “Behold, what manner of love the
Father hath bestowed upon us, that we should be called the
sons of God.” I John iii. 1.1.13
The privileges of this adoption are best summarized by Shaw. They
are, first, that the adopted ones obtain a new name. They “are called
by a new name, which the mouth of the LORD hath named” (Isa.
62:2); they are now “My sons and daughters, saith the Lord
Almighty” (2 Cor. 6:18). Second,
They receive the spirit of adoption, Rom. viii. 15; Gal. iv. 6.
The Spirit implants in them the disposition of children, and
transforms them into the image of God’s dear Son. He
witnesses with their spirits that they are the sons of God; he
12. William Laughton, “Adoption,” in Patrick Fairbairn, editor, Fairbairn’s Impe-

rial Standard Bible Encyclopedia, vol. I (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Zondervan,
1957), 106f.
13. Robert Shaw, An Exposition of the Confession of Faith of the Westminster Assembly
of Divines (Philadelphia: Presbyterian Board of Publication, 1846), 161f.
Adoption 359
seals them to the day of redemption, and is the earnest of their
inheritance until the day of redemption of the purchased
possession. Rom. viii. 16; Eph. i. 13-14.14
Third, adoption gives access to the throne of grace with boldness,
so that prayers are heard (1 John 5:14). Fourth, the adopted ones are
the objects of God’s fatherly compassion (Ps. 103:13). Fifth, they
enjoy the Father’s protection (Ps. 34:7; Heb. 1:14). Sixth, they are
provided for by their heavenly Father, by His providential favors
(Matt. 6:30-34; Ps. 34:9-10) and by His word (Phil 4:9). Seventh, this
parental care includes correction and chastisement (Heb. 12:6; Ps.
89:30-34; Ps. 94:12; Ps. 119:67, 71; Job 5:17). Eighth, adoption
means eternal security in the state of sonship, so that the adopted
cannot totally and finally depart from the Father (Jer. 32:40). Ninth,
adoption means heirship in all the promise of God (Heb. 6:12, 17).
Tenth, this heirship makes the adopted the heirs of heaven, of
salvation, of the grace of life, and of the Kingdom of God’s
promises, to cite some of Scripture’s statements (1 Peter 1:4; Heb.
1:14; 1 Peter 3:7; James 2:5; Rom. 8:17).
Justification means a changed legal relationship to God, a change from
condemnation to justification. Simultaneously, there is a change of
nature by regeneration. The effect of regeneration and its consequent
act is faith. Sanctification is progressive growth in the new life by means
of obedience from the heart to God’s law. Adoption is the new
creature in his new relations. “Justification effects only a change of
relations. Regeneration and sanctification effect only inherent
moral and spiritual states of soul. Adoption includes both. As set
forth in Scripture, it embraces in one complex view the
newly-regenerated creature in the new relations into which he is
introduced by justification”15
To use an image cited by Gordon H. Clark, a pardoned criminal is
released from prison, but not thereby accepted into society in his
previous status. Justification gives us both pardon and acceptance.
Adoption witnesses to the objective change of relationship and the
subjective change of character. Our King not only pardons us, but
14. Ibid., 162.
15. Archibald Alexander Hodge, A Commentary on the Confession of Faith (Phila-
delphia: Presbyterian Board of Publication, 1869), 261.
He also accepts us as His adopted children and as heirs of His
Kingdom.16
16.
1956), 56.
XXXIX
The Forgiver
Theologians, quite rightly, in discussing the order of salvation,

give priority to things other than forgiveness. Essentially, it is the
divine initiative which at every point is prior in time, authority, and
determination.
Joseph Bellamy, in An Essay on the Nature and Glory of the Gospel of
Jesus Christ (1762), summarized his analysis of the gospel in three
propositions:
Proposition 1. The great God, the Creator, Preserver, Lord,
and Governor of the world, is an absolutely perfect, an
infinitely glorious and amiable being, the supreme good,
infinitely worthy of supreme love, and honor, and universal
obedience, from his creature man.
Prop. II. The divine law, which requires this of us, on pain of
eternal death, is holy, just, and good, a glorious law, worthy to
be magnified and kept in honor in God’s government.
Prop. III. The design of the mediatorial office and work of the
Son of God incarnate, was to do honor to the divine law, and
thereby open a way in which God might call, and sinners
might come to him, and be received to favor, and entitled to
eternal life, consistent with the honor of the divine
government.1
We have seen the significance of the forgiveness of sins in
relationship to the fact of hell; it is now necessary to look behind
the doctrine of forgiveness to the Forgiver. Man is so easily
absorbed with the fact of guilt and the need for absolution that he
overlooks the offense and the offended one. A particularly vicious
woman once remarked bitterly of her husband, “Why doesn’t he
forgive me? Doesn’t he realize how much I’m suffering?” This
question itself was a manifestation of sin; her concern was entirely
with herself, her misery, her suffering, her burden of guilt. There
1. The Works of Joseph Bellamy, D.D., vol. II (Boston: Doctrinal Tract and Book
Society, 1853), 448.
361
was no repentance, only regret; there was no awareness of the
sufferings of her husband and parents, nor any change in her self-
justification, but only a desire to be absolved of guilt, not to forsake
sin.
There can be no forgiveness without a forgiver; contrary to the
modern belief, there is nothing automatic or necessary about
forgiveness. Forgiveness is not inevitable and mandatory. God, as
the offended one, has absolute right to establish the terms of
forgiveness and to hold the sinner to those terms. The guilty party
cannot, either in relation to God or to man, establish and ordain
the terms of his forgiveness. The humanist regards himself as the
center of the world; as such, if he admits God into his universe, he
requires God to provide him with forgiveness, help, and whatever
else man wants on demand. “Ilico” very aptly described this
perspective:
The present generation is not morally serious enough to
believe in hell; it can scarcely understand Calvin’s words,
“Without judgment there can be no God”; it has sympathy
with the gibe of Heine, “The good God will pardon me, for
that’s His job.”2
An attitude not too far different from Heine’s is prevalent in
fundamentalist circles, where the emphasis is so heavily on
personal salvation, a humanistic centrality, rather than the glory of
God and His righteousness. God is there to save man, in this
perspective, whereas it is clearly the reverse priority which is true.
Man’s calling is to glorify God and to enjoy Him forever. The
salvation of man is important, but far from primary. To put the
emphasis on man’s need, whether that need is for salvation, for
food, or for pleasure, is to lose perspective on life. The world does
not operate for man’s benefit nor to satisfy man’s needs. If we make
man’s needs central, we are in principle in agreement with those who
make man’s way central. Bellamy summed up the matter ably:
To say, “It is no matter what man’s principles be, if their lives
are good,” is the same as to say, “Paganism and
2. Ilico, No More Apologies (London: The Religious Book Club, 1941), 76f.
The Forgiver 363
Mahometanism are as safe ways to heaven as Christianity,”
which is downright infidelity.
To say, “good men may differ; there are more ways to heaven
than one, all equally safe; it is needless to be at pains to look
things to the bottom,” is much the same as to say, “Let every
one sincerely live up to his own scheme, and he will be safe,”
which again will land one on the shores of infidelity.3
In every area of thought, the first premise must be that the God
of Scripture is, and that He is all that Scripture infallibly declares
Him to be. Implied in the gospel is the fact that, as Bellamy
summed it up,
God is considered as the moral Governor of the world; that
man is considered as a proper subject of moral government;
that God’s law is considered as holy, just, and good; that man
has broken it, is without excuse, stands guilty before God,
already condemned; and is so far from penitence, that he is
dead in sin, an enemy to God, and at enmity against his law
and government.4
Consequently, some very important things are involved before we
can think about the forgiveness of our sins. First of all, a person has
been offended, God Himself. Every sin, whether directly against
God or primarily against another man, against an animal, or the
earth, is essentially against God and His law-order. As a result, God
is rightfully offended by every sin. David, after his adultery with
Bathsheba, declared, “Against thee, thee only, have I sinned, and
done this evil in thy sight” (Ps. 51:4). As Leupold commented on
this, “All sin is seen to be great when it is understood as having
been directed against none less than God, no matter how much
man may have been wronged by it.”5 Sin pits man’s will against
God’s will, and man’s dream of bending reality to his will against
God’s purposes and God’s reality. Thus, sin is not only committed
by a person, but it is also essentially against the person of God.
3. Bellamy, op. cit., 272.

4. Ibid., 281.
5. H. C. Leupold, Exposition of the Psalms (Columbus, Ohio: The Wartburg Press,
1959), 402.
Forgiveness is thus an aspect of relationships between persons.
If there is no God, and only an impersonal universe surrounds us,
then forgiveness is also devalued. In an impersonal universe reality
is essentially impersonal, and answers to problems are sought in
heredity, environment, sociology, naturalistic psychologies, and the
like. The key then is sought apart from forgiveness and in terms of
various adjustments and changes. Forgiveness is seen as an empty
formula, an oral expression which clearly cannot change the past or
alter the future.
Because we live in an atheistic era which bypasses God and
forgiveness, we are infected by its impersonality, and forgiveness is
less basic or central to our relationships with one another. The
result is that people are a major problem to one another, and for
less reason, in a way unknown in more Christian eras. In other eras,
men fought more and forgave more: they were more personal.
Today, men fight less readily and forgive even less readily. Freud
was right: the answer needed by the people on his couch was, “Son
thy sins be forgiven thee.... Arise, take up thy bed, and walk” (Mark
2:5, 9). However, the patients on Freud’s couch did not believe in,
nor want God any more than Freud did; as a result, they were there
for a scientific and an impersonal answer. Their id, ego, and
superego were to blame, their ancient ancestry and their recent
environment. They wanted the benefits of forgiveness, but never
the Forgiver.
An impersonal age will have personal problems, because it will
recognize neither the centrality of forgiveness to the nature of man
nor the permeating scope of forgiveness in the life of man.
Personality clashes are common to every era; it was a problem in
the Philippian Church, and St. Paul wrote, “I beseech Euodius, and
beseech Syntyche, that they be of the same mind in the Lord” (Phil.
4:2). Then, as now, women (and men) have personality clashes, but
in an age of impersonalism there is less ability to remedy that fact.
Second, not only is the person of God offended by sin, but also
His law and His order. God’s peace is broken by sin, and His
Kingdom claimed by rebellion. The penalty for this offense is
death. God’s law must stand. As Bellamy so powerfully stated it,
The Forgiver 365
The law supposed that God was really by name God, an
absolutely perfect, an infinitely glorious Being, as it required us
to consider and treat him as such. Our revolt was a practical
declaration, that he was not by nature God, nor worthy to be
glorified as God. To give up the law in favor of his rebellious
creature, must therefore be the same, in effect, as for God to
give up his own divinity, and ungod himself in the sight of all
his dominions, to gratify a rebel.
Again, the law also supposed, that as God was the Creator,
Lord, and owner of the universe, and by nature God; so he was
possessed of supreme authority, an authority infinitely
binding, and infinitely worthy to be revered. To give up the
law, therefore, was in effect the same as to resign his authority
in favor of those who had despised it, give quitclaim of the
universe, and tolerate a general revolt. As if God should say,
“The universe is not mine, nor have I any authority over it;
angels, men, and devils, are all at liberty; there is no king, and
so every one may do what is right in his own eyes.” For to hold
his authority merely on the footing of the voluntary loyalty of
his subjects, so that whenever any revolt, they are at liberty; no
longer to obey; to do this only in one instance, is in effect to
relinquish all claim to authority over any, as founded in his
Godhead and Lordship; which is, in effect, the same as to quit
his claim to his own divinity and to his own world, to gratify
those who would gladly ungod him and dethrone him. In a
word, for God to give up the law, which requires us to love and
obey him with all our hearts, is practically to declare to his
rebellious creatures, “Your disaffection to my character, and
rebellion against my authority, is no crime; for I am not worthy
to be loved and obeyed with all your hearts; for I am not by
nature God, an absolutely perfect, an infinitely glorious and
amiable being, your Creator, sovereign Lord and King, as in
my law I claimed to be.”
And to alter and abase the law, and bring it down to the taste
and good liking of an apostate world, who were enemies to
God and his government, enemies to the order and harmony
of the universe, must be much the same as for God to give up
his law and authority entirely. For he must quit his supremacy,
give up the rights and honors of the Godhead, justify their
revolt, turn to be on their side, turn enemy to God, and to his
law, and employ his infinite wisdom and almighty power to
promote the schemes they have laid in consequence of their
revolt; schemes suited to the taste of apostate creatures. And
thus they must become as gods, as Satan said, and the
Almighty become their true and faithful servant; for nothing
short of this would suit an apostate world. But this is even
worse than merely to quit his claim to the universe, and resign
his government over it; as it would be bad for King George to
quit his throne for the Pretender, and fly his country; but
worse to become the Pretender’s servant, and be obliged to
employ all his power to promote the Pretender’s interest.6
Clearly, the law must stand, or God is not God. The law declares
that all men in Adam are sinners and are sentenced to death. This
law is just, wise, and holy, and the enormity of man’s sin in violating
it is in proportion to the majesty and importance of God’s law. If a
presumptuous relative tells me that to believe in God is stupidity,
and orders me to forsake my faith, there is no wrong in disobeying
his foolish commandment, because it is no law; the sin would be in
obeying it. If, however, someone with authority commands me to
do something which I am lawfully obligated to do, then I am clearly
guilty if I disobey him. The greater the authority, and the more
important the commandment, the greater is my culpability if I
disobey. Thus, to disobey God is the ultimate in guilt. The proper
and necessary sentence for violating God’s law-order is death.
Third, restitution and restoration are then necessary. This
restitution can take the form of death; man having broken God’s
law is himself broken by death and damnation. This is a negative
aspect of restitution. Positively, the broken order must be restored.
This man is unable to do, and this God does, by His sovereign
power and grace, through Jesus Christ, who, as “very God of very
God and very man of very man,” perfectly keeps God’s law,
recreates a new humanity by means of His atoning and
regenerating work, pays the penalty for the redeemed ones by His
death as their substitute, and gives them a new life as their bread of
life. As the second and last Adam, Christ undoes the work of the
first Adam and begins the dispossession of the fallen race from the
world and the reestablishment of the earth as the Kingdom of God
under His new race.
6. Bellamy, op. cit., 293f.
The Forgiver 367
Jesus Christ as true God is the Forgiver; as true man and the
second Adam, He is also the forgiven, and we are forgiven in Him.
There is no forgiveness in separation from Him. “Christ hath
redeemed us from the curse of the law, being made a curse for us:
for it is written, Cursed is every one that hangeth on a tree” (Gal.
3:13). Christ was “made a curse for us,” unforgiven and
condemned to death, that He might destroy the power of death
over us and bring us forgiveness. The requirement of the law held
us under a curse, unforgiven and doomed to die. Out of this,
“Christ redeemed us,” or bought us, becoming a curse for us, on
our behalf. As Alford noted, Christ became “a curse (not accursed,
concrete, but a curse, abstract, to express that he became not only a
cursed person, but the curse itself, coextensive with the disability
which affected us).”7 Lenski’s comment brings this out very
clearly:
The expression is powerful; it is not “became accursed” but
“became a curse.” Not some part of our curse affected him
through his contact with us, but our whole curse was on him
so that he was all curse. The expression used in 2 Cor. 5:21 is
still stronger: God Himself made the Sinless One “sin in our
stead.” Isa. 53:6; 1 Pet. 2:24. It is said truly, “Christ became the
embodiment of our curse.” He became this voluntarily; he
gave himself. (Gal. 1:4; 2:20).8
In Christ “dwelleth all the fulness of the Godhead bodily” (Col.
2:9). In some similar sense, the fulness of the elect humanity, fallen
but predestined for salvation, dwelled in Christ, the fulness of their
sin and guilt being borne by him so that He might fully make
atonement for them.
Fourth, man’s response to God’s grace in Jesus Christ must be,
among other things, an obedience to the law of God, and a
manifestation of His forgiving grace. The law must be obeyed,
because the purpose of our restoration is to establish us in our
calling to exercise dominion and to subdue the earth under God as
His Kingdom. The mark of the redeemed is their calling to this
7. Henry Alford, The New Testament for English Readers, 1176.
8. R. C. H. Lenski, The Interpretation of St. Paul’s Epistle to the Galatians, to the
Eph-
esians, and to the Philippians (Columbus, Ohio: The Wartburg Press, 1946), 151.
task, their prayers and activity in terms of it. It is also forgiveness:
“forgive us our debts, as we forgive our debtors” (Matt. 6:12). We
reveal our state of forgiveness by our application of it to those
around us. The terms of forgiveness are those laid down by the
Forgiver.
XL
The Forgiven
Because we are, due to the Fall, given to a radically false premise

that we are our own gods (Gen. 3:5), our approach to the matter of
forgiveness is usually off balance. When we think of forgiveness,
we too often think of the problem of forgiving other people, of their
offenses, and of our displeasure at their offenses. With great ease,
we can look around us and catalogue the offenses of everyone we
know, and we can feel self-righteous at our occasional patience
with them. Every approach to the subject of forgiveness is thus
humanistic unless we begin with this fact: we are the forgiven. St. Peter
was on the road to understanding when he asked, “Lord, how oft
shall my brother sin against me, and I forgive him? till seven
times?” (Matt. 18:21), in that he had become aware of the
continuing nature of forgiveness. All the same, he phrases his
question wrong, in that he saw himself first of all as the forgiver.
The question is best understood if we phrase it thus: “How oft
shall I sin against God, and against man when I break God’s law,
and still be forgiven? till seven times?” Forgiveness is a theological
and God-centered fact. It is a legal fact. God forgives us as
sovereign Lord and Judge, and our forgiveness of others is our
response to His grace in terms of His law-word. Forgiveness
begins and ends with God and His word. If we see ourselves as the
forgiver in any primary sense, we are guilty of a humanistic heresy
and have usurped God’s office.
Before we are the forgiven, however, there must be the effectual
calling of God and His justifying grace, and our response, faith. The
Larger Catechism has this to say about faith:
Q. 72. What is justifying faith?
A. Justifying faith is a saving grace, wrought in the heart of the
sinner, by the Spirit and Word of God, whereby he, being
convinced of his sin and misery, and of the disability in himself
and all other creatures to recover him out of his lost condition,
not only assenteth to the truth of the promise of the gospel,
369
but receiveth and resteth upon Christ and his righteousness
therein held forth, for pardon of sin, and for the accepting and
accounting of his person righteous in the sight of God for
salvation.
Q. 73. How doth faith justify a sinner in the sight of God?
A. Faith justifies a sinner in the sight of God, not because of
those other graces which do always accompany it, or of good
works that are the fruits of it; nor as if the grace of faith, or
any act thereof, were imputed to him for justification; but only
as it is an instrument, by which he receiveth and applieth
Christ and his righteousness.
For our purposes here, a few things with respect to faith must be
stressed. First of all, faith is not merely belief on the part of man,
but rather God’s work in man’s life, “a saving grace, wrought in the
heart of the sinner, by the Spirit and Word of God.” The
importance of the Word, of Scripture, was stressed by St. Paul in
Romans 10:17, “So then faith cometh by hearing, and hearing by
the word of God.”
Second, faith recognizes at once man’s condemnation in God’s
sight, because faith assents to God’s law and the judgment of that
law. As Bellamy declared,
Saving faith consists in looking to free grace, through Jesus
Christ, for salvation; thus viewing God’s law, and your own
case, as they really be; and he that thus believeth, shall be
saved.1
The Greek word pistis, and the English word faith, alike fail to carry
the full sense of the Biblical usage as it appears in context. It is
belief, trust, a firm persuasion, conviction, and much more.
Repeatedly, Scripture makes clear that the contrast between
unbelief and faith is between death and life. Bellamy stressed the
fact of being dead and under condemnation, and then alive and
delighting in God and His law. Faith opens our eyes to the sentence
of God’s law, and faith humbles us to place our every hope in Christ
and His atoning grace and mercy.
1.
Joseph Bellamy, “Theron, Paulus, and Aspasio; or Letters and Dialogues,” in
The Works of Joseph Bellamy, D. D., vol. II (Boston: Doctrinal Tract and Book
Society, 1853), 248.
The Forgiven 371
Third, faith, as we have seen, is more than belief, and more than
knowledge: it is a God-given life and boldness. When it is reduced
to an act of will or an act of intellect, it is made man-centered and
weak, or, rather, invalid. Means, who saw faith in these terms,
finally saw religion in purely anthropocentric terms, holding to the
centrality of “Personality” and the interaction of personalities as
basic to religion.2 True faith begets strength and boldness in the
believer. Bellamy stressed this factor, writing,
Saving faith consists in that entire trust, reliance, or
dependence on Jesus Christ, the great Mediator, his
satisfaction and merits, mediation and intercession, which the
humbled sinner has, whereby he is imboldened to return
home to God in hopes of acceptance, and is encouraged to
look to and trust in God through him for that complete
salvation which is offered in the gospel. The opposite to
justifying faith, is a self-righteous spirit and temper, whereby a
man, from a conceit of, and reliance upon, his own goodness,
is imboldened and encouraged to trust and hope in the mercy
of God, (Heb. x. 19, 23. Luke xviii. 9, 14) and accordingly,
when such see how bad they really are, their faith fails; they
naturally think that God cannot find in his heart to show
mercy to such.
Faith imboldens the heart. In a legal humiliation, which is
antecedent to spiritual light, the sinner is brought to a kind of
despair. The things which used to imbolden him, do now
entirely fail: he finds no good in himself; yea, he feels himself
dead in sin; and upon this his heart dies within him. “I was
alive without the law once; but when the commandment came,
sin revived, and I died.” And by spiritual light, in evangelical
humiliation, his undone state, in and of himself, is made still
more plain. But now faith imboldens the heart, begets new
courage, lays the foundation for a new kind of hope — a hope
springing entirely from a new foundation. “Having, therefore,
brethren, boldness to enter into the holiest, by the blood of
Jesus, let us draw near with a true heart, in full assurance of
faith.” By faith the heart is imboldened, 1. To return home to
God, in hopes of acceptance.... 2. Faith in Christ imboldens
the heart to look to and trust in the free grace of God through
him, for all things that just such a poor sinner wants. “Let us,
2. Stewart Means, Faith: An Historical Study, 330.
therefore, come boldly to the throne of grace, that we may
obtain mercy and find grace.”3
Fourth, this boldness of faith lies in the assurance of being
forgiven and accepted by God in Jesus Christ. “There is therefore
now no condemnation to them which are in Christ Jesus”; these are
they “who walk not after the flesh, but after the Spirit” (Rom. 8:1).
When we know that we are the forgiven, that we have been released
from the prison-house of sin and guilt and the totality of death,
then we are empowered by the holy boldness of faith.
A basic aspect of this holy boldness is the exercise of dominion;
another aspect of it is the exercise of forgiveness. To analyze
forgiveness in this respect, we must note, first of all, that when we,
having been forgiven, forgive others, we thereby demonstrate faith.
The world as God’s realm is subject totally to God; “he that
cometh to God must believe that he is, and that he is a rewarder of
them that diligently seek him” (Heb. 11:6). The commandment to
forgive is best stated in the Lord’s Prayer, “And forgive us our
debts, as we forgive our debtors” (Matt. 6:12). As we have seen,
this has reference to the jubilee. Man by his sin brought death and
disintegration into the world. Jesus Christ, by His atoning act and
His forgiveness of our sins, reestablishes man into dominion under
God and institutes the proclamation of the jubilee. In Isaiah 42:1-
4, the Servant of God is described as one who brings judgment or
justice to the Gentiles: “He shall not fail nor be discouraged, till he
have set judgment (or, justice) in the earth: and the isles shall wait
for his law” (Isa. 42:4). Our Lord was this Servant, come to issue
the great proclamation of the jubilee (Matt. 12:14-21). Even more
plainly, Isaiah 61:1-3 declares the messianic work, the proclamation
of the jubilee, which the Messiah will institute:
1. The Spirit of the Lord GOD is upon me; because the
LORD hath appointed me to preach good tidings unto the
meek; he hath sent me to bind up the broken-hearted, to
proclaim liberty to the captives, and the opening of the prison
to them that are bound:
3. Bellamy, “True Religion Delineated,” in Works, vol. I, 338f.

The Forgiven 373
2. To proclaim the acceptable year of the LORD, and the day
of vengeance of our God; to comfort all that mourn;
3. To appoint unto them that mourn in Zion, to give them
beauty for ashes, the oil of joy for mourning, the garment of
praise for the spirit of heaviness; that they might be called
trees of righteousness, the planting of the LORD, that he
might be glorified. (Isa. 61:1-3)
The jubilee means liberty, healing, comfort, joy, beauty, and
forgiveness to the redeemed of the Lord, and vengeance to God’s
enemies. The purpose is that God might be glorified. When our
Lord read these verses in the synagogue (Luke 4:16-20), He
concluded by declaring, “This day is this scripture fulfilled in your
ears” (Luke 4:21), which was the beginning of His open declaration
to them that He was the Messiah. The proclamation of the
Kingdom of God and of the jubilee were one and the same thing,
and the prelude was the remission of sins (Mark 1:3-5; Matt. 3:1-6).
If we lack faith in God, in His Kingdom and its glorious jubilee
world, then we shall also lack faith in the meaning and centrality of
forgiveness. The jubilee realm is one of cancellation, the
cancellation of debts, slavery, sin, and death. With those who are
the people of God we share this jubilee grace, forgiveness.
Forgiveness thus is a bold step into God’s future, into the world of
the jubilee. “Through faith we understand that the worlds were
framed by the word of God, so that things which are seen were not
made of things which do appear” (Heb. 11:3). Through forgiveness
we assume the reality of a world and a heavenly city, a new creation
and the King thereof, and we institute the reign of that world here
and now, although we see it only through a glass darkly.
A second aspect of forgiveness is that it is an act of law. Where
God’s law is broken, man’s required penalty and restitution are
made by Jesus Christ, our federal head. The violation of God’s law,
however, involves God primarily, and, secondarily, men and earth.
Hence, there must be restitution; the sabbath year has as its
purpose in part the restoration of the earth. Man must yield to the
earth its due, for having taken from the earth. This aspect is more
strictly restitution than forgiveness, because forgiveness is
personal; however, the sabbath rest, being a duty performed to God
primarily and to the earth secondarily, is definitely personal in this
respect. Restitution and forgiveness are essentially interrelated and
virtually identical concepts. Forgiveness is not only an act of law,
but also, as we have seen, an act of grace and of faith. The grace we
have received, we share.
A third aspect of forgiveness is the holy boldness which is
synchronous with forgiveness, productive of it, and a product of
forgiveness. A world in which forgiveness is a reality is a world in
which, not Karma, impersonal and unrelenting, governs, but a
personal God whose grace unto salvation was revealed in the
atoning sacrifice of His only begotten Son, Jesus Christ. St. Paul
wrote, “For by grace are ye saved through faith; and that not of
yourselves: it is the gift of God: Not of works, lest any man should
boast” (Eph. 2:8-9). The world of Karma is a crushing, impersonal
world in which man is nothing. God’s world encourages the
boldness of faith. We are summoned to boldness in relationship to
God (Heb. 10:16-22); if boldness is possible in relationship to the
Almighty through Christ, how much more so in relationship to
men and circumstances?
The forgiven are thus the redeemed of God. They are given the
power and the privilege of boldness through faith. A central area
for the exercise of their boldness is in relationship to other men, to
forgive, as we have been forgiven.
XLI
Forgiveness
Forgiveness in pagan antiquity and in modern humanism is an

emotional change, an attitude of dismissal and acceptance, and is
not related to law. In this respect, forgiveness is an antinomian and
anti-theological fact, in that the terms of forgiveness or the refusal
to forgive are determined by man without respect for God or His
law. Man forgives if he believes in love, or he refuses to forgive if
the offense is one which continues to grate on him. In either case,
the motive is humanistic and the act of forgiveness is an offense to
God. In all sin, it is God’s law which is offended, and forgiveness
must be granted or withheld in terms of God’s law.
Theologically, there are two kinds of forgiveness. First,
forgiveness is a cancellation of charges or debts because
satisfaction has been rendered. There are various usages of the
word forgive in Scripture, but each varying usage has as its
background the fact of the atonement, the fact that God in Christ
has forgiven us our sins because satisfaction has been rendered by
Jesus Christ and His atonement. Second, “there is also a forgiveness
which consists solely of a temporary suspension of the charge or
of the sentence.”1 When our Lord said, “Father, forgive them; for
they know not what they do” (Luke 23:34), He was asking that God
defer the charges against the soldiers who were crucifying Him, to
give them time for repentance and an awareness of their act.
There is, however, not only theological or religious forgiveness,
but also civil forgiveness. Civil forgiveness is granted where a
law-breaker “pays his debt to society,” but paying that debt does
not mean going to prison for a stated period of time. The essence
of religious forgiveness is restitution and restoration. Because Jesus
Christ makes restitution for man, and because He both pays the
penalty of death for our treason and perfectly obeys the law, He
restores us to communion with God and to the status of
1. K. Schilder, Christ Crucified (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Eerdmans, 1948), 134.
375
covenant-keepers. By His regenerating grace, He restores us to the
position of God’s covenant man, His vicegerent who is called to
exercise dominion and to subdue the earth. In civil forgiveness,
restitution is necessary also. The man who steals must restore what
he stole, plus at least an equivalent and as much as a five-fold fine
or penalty. He must, then, be restored to his status as a citizen. If
he has murdered, he pays with his life. Forgiveness is thus the key
to God’s order, religious and civil.
Quanbeck wrote,
Forgiveness is the removal of the barriers between God and
man. Sin is covered, expiated; it is sent away, removed, wiped
away; God has cast it behind his back (Isa. 38:17), or into the
depths of the sea (Mic. 7:19). Forgiveness renews fellowship
with God, who is the source of all holiness and life. His mercy
and favor replace his wrath and judgment, so that the entire
environment of human life has new possibilities. The created
world is sanctified to man again; and new relationships
become possible in community and family. Terror of
conscience and dread of judgment give way to peace. Man’s
soul is healed, the powers of his personality restored and
strengthened.2
Quanbeck added, “Forgiveness is not something men gain by
punctilious performance of the proper rituals; it is the free and
sovereign gift of the loving God.” The first aspect stressed here is,
rightly, sovereign grace. God is not obligated to forgive; indeed,
without His grace, there could be no forgiveness, because man
cannot claim God’s forgiveness by right. Second, “The chief
instrument for the realization of forgiveness is the sacrificial
cults.”3 In the Old Testament era, this meant the sacrificial system;
in the New, its fulfilment is in Jesus Christ. Basic to grace, and to
sacrifice, as Quanbeck stated it plainly, is the covenant relationship to
God. The covenant is an act of grace and it establishes a
relationship of law. The third element in the realization of
forgiveness, according to Quanbeck, is repentance.
2. W.
A. Quanbeck, “Forgiveness,” in The Interpreter’s Dictionary of the Bible, E-J
(New York: Abingdon Press, 1962), 315f.
3. Ibid., 316.
Forgiveness 377
Forgiveness means “the renewal of holiness” and “the
restoration of divine favor and the overcoming of God’s wrath.”
Forgiveness heals the soul and restores strength and power
because it takes away the barriers of sin and guilt and reestablishes
man in God’s grace and blessing.4
Forgiveness is a legal fact. As Bellamy said,
For the law required perfect obedience on pain of eternal
damnation; as it is written, “Cursed is every one that
continueth not in all things written in the book of the law, to
do them.” But all have sinned, and so the whole world stands
guilty before God, according to the law, which all the world are
under. (Rom. iii. 9-10.) This law, therefore, (Rom. iii. 9, 19.)
which was ordained to life, can now be only unto death. (Rom.
vii. 10.) And there is no other law; so there is no law which can
give life. This rendered the obedience and atonement of Christ
absolutely necessary in order to prevent the universal ruin of
the human race; for the law, being holy, just, and good, must
not be set aside. Heaven and earth shall pass away, but not one
jot or tittle of the law must fail; it must be all fulfilled. (Matt. v.
17-18.) Could men have answered the demands of the law,
Christ’s obedience and death had been needless; for if
righteousness come by the law, Christ is dead in vain. So that
this was the end of Christ’s death, and that, but for which he
never would have died, his death being needless and in vain on
any other account, according to St. Paul.5
God acts in terms of His law, which is an expression of His nature
and righteousness. The forgiven man is a man who recognizes the
charges of the law against him, and assents to those charges. Again
citing Bellamy,
We cannot from the heart look to God for pardon in the name
of Christ, only as we in our hearts feel that we are to blame,
and deserve to be punished according to the true import of
law and gospel. But cordially to come into this view of
ourselves, so as from the heart to say with the publican, “God,
be merciful to me a sinner,” is true repentance. It is the
4. Ibid.,
316f.
5.
Joseph Bellamy, “An Essay on the Nature and Glory of the Gospel of Jesus
Christ,” in The Works of Joseph Bellamy, D. D., vol. II (Boston: Doctrinal Tract
and Book Society, 1853), 248f.
character of an impenitent sinner to hide and cover his sins;
but he that confesseth and forsaketh them shall have mercy.
So far as one is cordial in his confession, so far he does actually
give up his sins, and begins to forsake them. No impenitent
sinner from the heart will own himself to blame in the sense
in which he is charged by God in his law, nor in the sense the
gospel supposes, when it calls him to repent and offers
pardon. And while one will not cordially own himself to blame
as he is charged, nor own he needs the pardon which is
offered, he cannot from the heart look to God for it, much
less look in the name of Christ. To say otherwise, evidently
implies a contradiction. (Compare 1 Kings viii. 46, 50, with
Acts xx. 21)6
Forgiveness presupposes the centrality of the forgiver, so that a
Biblical doctrine of forgiveness is God-centered, whereas a
humanistic doctrine of forgiveness is man-centered. Very plainly,
the question of forgiveness resolves itself into a very simple
question: Does God forgive man, or does man forgive God?
For Thomas Hardy, the essence of life was that innocent man
was continually frustrated by a perverse universe. His novel, Tess of
the D'Urbervilles, was carefully designed to portray an innocent girl
totally the pawn of perverse fate. In 1893, defending his artistic
purpose, Hardy wrote, “The best tragedy — highest tragedy in
short — is that of the worthy encompassed by the inevitable. The
tragedies of immoral and worthless people are not the best.”7
Hardy was in this respect in the line of Greek tragedy. Elizabethan
“tragedies” had aspects of the Renaissance revival of humanism,
but, even more, they were closely linked to medieval morality plays.
The morality play dealt with sin, retribution, grace, and salvation.
The tragedy is concerned with stating man’s case against the
universe and whatever gods may be. The innocence of the doomed
hero or heroine is made one with which all viewers can identify, so
that the audience in a tragedy is an audience which believes in its
innocence and in God’s perversity. Thomas Hardy did not write
6. Ibid.,
376f.
7.
“Hardy in Defense of his Art: The Aesthetic of Incongruity,” in Morton
Dauwen Zabel, Craft and Character in Modern Fiction (New York: Viking Press,
1957).
Forgiveness 379
about his or his hero’s sins; instead, he presented a case against the
universe. Consider, for example, his poem, “Hap”:
If but some vengeful god would call to me
From up the sky, and laugh: “Thou suffering thing,
Know that thy sorrow is my ecstasy,
That thy love’s loss is my hate’s profiting!”
Then would I bear it, clench myself, and die,
Steeled by the sense of ire unmerited;
Half-eased in that powerfuller than I
Had willed and meted me the tears I shed.
But not so. How arrives it joy lies slain,
And why unblooms the best hope ever sown?
— Crass Casuality obstructs the sun and rain,
And dicing Time for gladness casts a moan...
Those purblind Doomsters had as readily strown
Blisses about my pilgrimage as pain.
The best interpretation possible for Hardy was a vengeful,
perverse, and demented god bent on frustrating man and laughing
at man’s grief; in reality, Hardy said, the world is senseless chance,
a meaningless horror, which metes out to the innocent an
unmerited frustration. In “New Year’s Eve,” Hardy is again the
innocent man, this time confronting an idiot god who does not
know why he created the world and man, or to what purpose. In
this poem, two stanzas give this god’s answer to Hardy’s moral
question:
Then he: “My labours — logicless —
You may explain; not I:
Sense-sealed I have wrought, without a guess
That I evolved a Consciousness
To ask for reasons why.
“Strange that ephemeral creatures who
By my own ordering are,
Should see the shortness of my view,
Use ethic tests I never knew,
Or made provision for!”
Hardy has an ostensibly moral man confront an amoral god with a
moral test and judgment, and the result is self-evident: Hardy
cannot forgive God! In humanism, there is much talk about
forgiveness and love by men who will not love God and who
believe that it is their moral prerogative to refuse to forgive God.
Humanists, in calling for the forgiveness of man, are really asserting
that man is beyond forgiveness, i.e., does not require it, because
man is the offended one rather than the offender. If the tragic view
of life is correct, man is the offended person, not God. Man is the
innocent victim of a perverse universe who nobly bears his
oppressive wrongs, according to the humanistic view. Thus, the
humanist, however much he may talk about forgiveness, will not
forgive God, and he plainly assumes that it is his right to judge and
condemn God, rather than to be judged by Him.
It is, however, God who is the offended one, and it is God who
forgives or judges man. There are limitations to this forgiveness.
Thus, as Quanbeck wrote,
That Jesus understood his work as the act of God is shown
also by his words: “Whoever blasphemes against the Holy
Spirit never has forgiveness, but is guilty of an eternal sin”
(Mark 3:29). The words are his response to the scribes who
asserted that his exorcism of demons was a manifestation of
Satanic power. The sin is unforgivable, not because it is too
shocking or heinous for God to forgive, but because it labels
as diabolical the deeds by which God acts in his anointed
servant. This is a perilous misuse of theology: in the name of
piety to reject the approach of the merciful God.8
Not only are there limitations to forgiveness, but also to prayer. In
one of the greatest declarations of the efficacy of prayer, St. John
also defines its limits:
14. And this is the confidence that we have in him, that, if we
ask anything according to his will, he heareth us:
15. And if we know that he hear us, whatsoever we ask, we
know that we have the petitions that we desired of him.
16. If any man see his brother sin a sin which is not unto death,
he shall ask, and he shall give him life for them that sin not
unto death. There is a sin unto death: I do not say that he shall
pray for it. (1 John 5:14-16)
8. Quanbeck, op. cit., 318.

Forgiveness 381
God, we are assured, answers prayer. The condition is that we pray
“according to his will.” If a fellow believer sins (a “brother”), the
Christian must ask, he shall ask, i.e., it is his duty to pray for his
restoration. This prayer will be heard. To pray for those who “sin
unto death” would be, Alford commented, “it is implied, an act
savouring of presumption — a prescribing to God, in a matter
which lies out of the bounds of our brotherly yearning.”9
An important aspect of forgiveness concerns our relationship to
fellow believers and to unbelievers. How are they to be forgiven,
and is there a distinction between them? Religious or theological
forgiveness can only be extended to fellow believers. Our Lord
declared that men’s sins can be loosed or bound by the church, and
by Christians (Matt. 18:18; John 20:23), but this binding and
loosing must be in terms of God’s word. Man has no power
independently from God, and, this power being conferred by
Christ, must be extended to all men who make restitution in terms
of God’s law-word (Ex. 22:1-15). Restitution restores men to
citizenship and to their status as law-abiding neighbors. Normally,
civil forgiveness is a part of religious forgiveness, i.e., a thief must
make restitution before he can expect God’s forgiveness. Where
civil society does not require restitution, the church, as far as is
possible, should require it, and the early church did. Even more, St.
Paul said that former thieves should now be marked by charitable
giving above and beyond their normal tithes and gifts (Eph. 4:28).
However, in the case of the woman taken in adultery, the death
penalty was no longer enforced. Our Lord extended to her
religious forgiveness, but this did not alter her problem, that there
might be some kind of civil penalty, i.e., divorce (John 8:1-11). The
Council of Elvira (A.D. 300) shows that the church imposed
penalties where the state did not. Canon 12 forbad communion
even in death to mothers who prostituted their daughters; canon
52 pronounced anathemas against persons guilty of libel, and
canon 65, mindful of the vulnerability of churchmen to slander,
forbad communion even in death to one who falsely accused of
crime a bishop, priest, or deacon. Canons 63 and 64 forbad
9. Henry Alford, The New Testament for English Readers, 1755.

communion even in death to adulteresses who destroyed (or
aborted) their children, or who continued in adultery up to the time
of their last illness. While this council was more rigorous than
most, the church as a whole did impose various penalties where the
state did not, to indicate the necessity of recognizing that society
could not overlook violations of God’s law. Someone placed under
several years penance for an offense was paying a social or civil
penalty within the framework of the Christian community; this
social penalty did not mean that God’s salvation was denied them,
nor that Christ’s forgiveness did not remit their sins in relationship
to God. It did mean that their works were defective and that
chastening was their due. Both church and state have an obligation
to chasten. In the early church, the chastening had to supply the
defects of the state.
Sin has both social and religious consequences, and the same is
true of forgiveness. If the forgiveness is merely an overlooking of
the offense, an agreement to forget it, then the problem of sin is
not dealt with. It remains, to create problems afresh on another
occasion. If there are social penalties, then there are also
possibilities of social stability, i.e., if a thief must restore what he
stole and also pay a fine, he will have undone the wrong and will
have paid a penalty for his breach of God’s order. If, on top of that,
the thief is also regenerated by God’s grace, not only is there a
restoration of order but also a development therein, in that a
redeemed man now works to further man’s dominion under God.
Thus, forgiveness is an essential aspect of personal and social
renewal. It is basic to the jubilee. The jubilee means that forgiven
men forgive. It means that believers exercise grace and forbearance
towards one another. Our Lord said, “Forgive us our debts, as we
forgive our debtors” (Matt. 6:12), and added,
14. For if ye forgive men their trespasses, your heavenly Father
will also forgive you:
15. But if ye forgive not men their trespasses, neither will your
Father forgive your trespasses. (Matt. 6:14-15)
Forgiveness 383
We are commanded, moreover, “When ye stand praying, forgive, if
ye have ought against any: that your Father also which is in heaven
forgive your trespasses” (Mark. 11:25).
God’s law gives us the terms of forgiveness where His law is
concerned. Unfortunately, the area of life where, daily, forgiveness
comes with most difficulty, is in the area of personal relationships
where no great law is at stake, or no law at all. It is in matters of
thoughtlessness, pride, and small selfishness where we most
frequently offend one another, and none of us are free from these
offenses. It is in these critical areas where, most of all, grace and
forbearance are required. Husbands and wives frequently grate on
one another with their set and determined ways, but, with love,
these very minor but very real faults are not only bearable, but also
sometimes amusing and endearing. Within the family of God,
where love abounds, it does indeed cover “a multitude of sins” (1
Peter 4:8). St. Peter makes it clear that it is mutual love that covers
sins. Solomon saw that “Hatred stirreth up strifes: but love
covereth all sins” (Prov. 10:12). If we find ourselves dwelling upon
and exploiting the sins of others, it means clearly that our attitude
is sinful also, and that our sin is hatred of a fellow believer and a
desire to stir up strife.
Our Lord said, “trespasses” when he dealt with the terms of
God’s forgiveness. Scripture never uses words idly. Just as debts
refers to the jubilee, and encompasses sins and trespasses, and
much more, so trespasses is used with intent rather than sins. The law
provides the way of dealing with the forgiveness of sins: restitution.
The word for trespasses is different: it is paraptoma, “primarily a false
step, a blunder.... lit., a ‘fall beside,’ used ethically, denotes a
trespass, a deviation, from uprightness and truth.”10 This is the
area where Christians most commonly offend one another. Our
trespasses are most offensive to others and least discernible to
ourselves. We are regularly offended by the trespasses of people we
cannot accuse of an out-and-out violation of God’s law, and we
regularly offend others in the same way. Here we must manifest
forgiving grace. As we forgive, we are forgiven, and if we do not
forgive others, God does not forgive us our trespasses.
10. W. E. Vine, An Expository Dictionary of New Testament Words, vol. IV (New
XLII
Regeneration
The problem of personal and social renewal is the most

persistent problem of civilization. Again and again, as one culture
has succeeded another, each with vigor and promise offering man
hope for a stable, happy, and growing society, disillusionment has
set in. Sin and frustration erode the cultural hope, and men turn on
their society and rend it asunder. Sometimes, before the end
comes, many flee to the hills and deserts, or abandon the
established forms of society in protest, because man has found his
greatest obstacle to be man himself. The decline of both Greece
and Rome saw the rise of ascetics and non-conformists, and the
decline of Christendom in the fourteenth century meant the rise of
disaffiliates, men whose essential position was dissent from and
war against the established order. In the nineteenth and twentieth
centuries, Bohemians of the various schools of arts, nihilists,
beatniks, and hippies are only a few of the many disillusioned
groups who protest against existing society.
For some the hope lies in revolution. Somehow, revolution will
create regeneration. The roots of this faith are deep in the old
chaos cults, in the belief in the energizing and fertilizing power of
chaos, and that personal and social regeneration requires the chaos
of revolution. This hope, however, has always been very bitterly
disillusioning, in that revolution not only destroys the hopes of its
believers, but also is normally a force of reaction and greatly
aggravates the evils it is supposed to eliminate.1 The result of
revolution is that man is more deeply mired in the morass he
sought to escape from.
The various religious and political efforts to escape from the
burden of sin and guilt and find personal and social renewal alike
1. See Jacques Ellul, Autopsy of Revolution (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1971).
385
end in disaster.2
Not surprisingly, a recurring factor in human
thought has been the despair of man and of history.
When man loses faith in the future of man, and when he despairs
of any meaning in history, then his hope becomes severely
localized in terms of the present and the available, and his life
becomes trivialized. Civilization gives way to trivialization. Man’s
concern, then, becomes social status, the right kind of foods and
wines, in brief, taste refined to a religion, and nothing irritates him
more than other people. Man can, then, neither live with or
without other people, and his life is a long complaint over their
presence as well as their absence. In Ionesco, we find this kind of
mood, expressed realistically and with humor:
My contemporaries irritate me. I detest the neighbor to my
right. I detest the neighbor to my left. Above all, I detest the
one on the floor above me. Just as much, anyway, as the one
on the ground floor. (Say! I live on the ground floor myself!)
Everyone is wrong. I envy people whose contemporaries were
alive two centuries ago.... No: they are still too close to us. I can
be indulgent only to those who lived well before Jesus Christ.
And yet when my contemporaries die, I feel terribly distressed.
Distressed? Afraid rather, tremendously frightened. That is
understandable. I feel more and more alone. How can I
manage without them? What am I going to do, living on with
all “the others”? Why is it “the others” did not die instead of
them? I wish I could make the decision myself and choose
those who should remain.3
Such an attitude leads also to self-hate. However, because
trivialization has conquered, and because man has rejected ultimate
meaning in favor of purely existential interests, the self-hate is also
trivial. A man or woman looks into the mirror and does not say, “I
am a sinner, and I need to submit to God’s word and meaning, and
I need to relate my daily concern with ultimate meaning and
purpose, or else my life becomes meaningless and trivial.” Rather,
the look into the mirror is a trivial, surface look. My hair doesn’t set
2.
See. R. J. Rushdoony, The Biblical Philosophy of History (Nutley, New Jersey:
Presbyterian and Reformed Publishing Company, 1969), 40-44.
3. Eugene Ionesco, Notes and Counter Notes (New York: Grove Press, 1964), 232.
Regeneration 387
right; my skin looks bad, or, age lines are beginning to show; will
clothes make the right impression, or, will I look as poorly as I feel?
Men hate themselves for trifling reasons, and they adore
themselves for ungodly reasons. Despair with respect to history
leads to a flight from history and meaning and an absorption with
the moment. The roots of that flight are in sin; man despairs over
history because it fails to yield him his desired meaning, and he will
not accept God’s. Like the Rich Fool (Luke 12:13-21), he makes the
world equal no more than his interests.
When men and cultures fail, they long for an opportunity to start
over again. They rebel against an empty maturity in favor of a new
start. Since they cannot become young again, they seek to destroy
the forms of age. The old dress like the young and childishly seek
to recapture the freshness and opportunity of youth. Culturally,
this means a turning away from the established and mature norms
to a worship of primitivism. As Baird observed, “Cultural failure
accelerates primitivism, whatever the type.” The myth of the noble
savage predominates, and the more backward a people, the more
they are idealized and romanticized. “Authentic primitivism is a
mode of sentence, a creed springing inevitably from a state of
cultural failure. It represents one attempt of Western man to
restore the symbolism of human existence.” The paintings of Paul
Gauguin, prior to his departure for Tahiti, show a greater mastery
of technique and goal and are superior to his later works, but they
are clearly not so regarded by the world of art. The reason is
religious. Gauguin was “as though he had grimly determined to
compel Tahiti into Paradise.” He spoke of Tahitian women as “not
beautiful, properly speaking,” but as having an indefinable quality
“of penetrating the mysteries of the infinite.”4 Those who delight
in Gauguin’s Tahitian paintings are men who share in Gauguin’s
yearning for the primitive, and his hope of a new beginning
through primitive man. Such men, like their culture, die sick,
diseased, and lonely. The self-conscious primitivist not only
corrupts what good he may already possess, but also those whom
he idealizes. The primitivist is not interested in the African, the
American Indian, the Negro, or the Polynesian, but in himself. He
4. James Baird, Ishmael, A Study of the Symbolic Mode in Primitivism (New York:
Harper Torchbooks, 1960), 3, 16, 149.
is afraid of death and judgment, and he seeks a non-theistic
regeneration in “primitive” man’s ways and culture. He uses the
“primitive” man for his own purposes with a radical callousness,
both culturally and personally.
Thus, Pablo Picasso regularly stole his son’s clothing, to wear it
himself and thereby steal his son’s youth. The boy’s mother
commented,
I finally became convinced that Pablo hoped by this method
that some of Claude’s youth would enter into his own body. It
was a metaphorical way of appropriating someone else’s
substance, and in that way, I believe, he hoped to prolong his
own life.5
This kind of primitivism marks, not a new beginning, but a certain
end; it is a sign of approaching cultural and intellectual death.
Others, also aware of the cultural crisis, seek renewal by means
of a rigorous legalism. Their hope is that a highly disciplined law-
order can bring about social renewal. Clearly, law is important, but,
in and of itself, it can accomplish nothing. Some of the strictest
laws of the Western World have been passed in the last century,
and man’s decline into lawlessness has not been checked thereby.
Severe laws against pornography did not check its spread and
proliferation. The place of law in society cannot be usurped by love
or psychotherapy, but neither can law replace grace and
regeneration. Law can never regenerate society; it can greatly
develop and further a society of regenerate man and is essential to
growth. But before growth can begin, there must be life, and this
the law cannot provide.
Moreover, when a society is declining into pessimism and doubt
with respect to the future, it has far more faith in primitivism than
in law. Law suggests discipline and tradition; whereas a dying world
wants the antithesis of order: it wants the raw blood of birth; it is
thus drawn to primitivism. The appeal of primitivism is in part the
belief that “primitive” man is somehow before and beyond the law; he
is outside the world of culture and its problems. Supposedly, the
5. Francoise Gilot and Carlton Lake, Life with Picasso (New York: McGraw Hill,
1964), 232.
Regeneration 389
“primitive” man lives and dies without any effete and civilized
self-consciousness, as a child of nature. To return to that world
before history means to return to the world before church, state,
family, and religion, a world before morality. This means, in the
myth about “primitive” man, a return to the world of the orgy.
Modern pornography is an attempt to reestablish the “free” world
of the orgy, and to abolish the world of law and morality. Its basic
function is rebirth by means of the systematic abandonment of all
known scruples and laws of every society in recorded history with
respect to sex. By means of this total plunge into sexual chaos, man
will supposedly find freedom, and society a new birth. The appeal
of pornography is to a large measure religious. People who are
disillusioned with religion and society and anxious to escape the
inexorable workings of a law-universe hope by pornography to
step back into and re-create a timeless world of sexual ecstasy and
regeneration. The great myth of all pornography is the dream of
cosmic coition, the sex act which brings mystical release from the
past and a blinding, soaring bliss to the initiate.
Ernest Hemingway’s insane For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940), gives
us this magical sex, and it is a telling bit of evidence of the extent
of the belief in salvation by the act of cosmic coition that so few
laughed at the book. The earth is portrayed as moving “out and
away from under,” a copulating couple as they are born again in
this magical sexual act. Pornography is turgid and poor writing and
tiresome and difficult reading: it is the mystical and religious aspect
of its nature which draws its devotees, just as the tasteless and
absurd obscenities of perverse sexuality draw people who hope
that by their violation of moral law they have also breached the
claims of life, death, and God against them.
Whether by mysticism or by pornography, or by any other
means, man does not escape God, nor does he escape time and
history. Salvation eludes him as long as he seeks to elude God. All
his efforts at instituting a regeneration by man or by the state end
up in failure. This failure was very much present in the mind of
Nicodemus, “a man of the Pharisees.... a ruler of the Jews” (John
3:1). Nicodemus lived in an era that was very much aware of these
issues. Greece, Rome, and Judea were alike concerned over social
and personal regeneration. Greek culture was well known to all in
Judea, and koine, a form of Greek, was their second language. The
coinage of the Roman Empire carried the language and hope of
regeneration. Not too long before Nicodemus, Virgil (70-19 B.C.)
had expressed this common hope in the emperor as the
regenerator in his Fourth Eclogue, declaring in part:
Now is come the last age of the Cumaean prophecy: the great
cycle of periods is born anew.... Now from high heaven a new
generation comes down. Yet do thou at that boy’s birth, in
whom the iron race shall begin to cease, and the golden to
arise over all the world, holy Lucina, be gracious; now thine
own Apollo reigns. And in thy consulate, in thine, O Pollio,
shall this glorious age enter, and the great months begin their
march: under thy rule what traces of our guilt yet remain,
vanishing shall free earth for ever from alarm. He shall grow
in the life of gods, and shall see gods and heroes mingled, and
himself be seen by them, and shall rule the world that his
fathers’ virtues have set at peace. But on thee, O boy, untilled
shall earth first pour childish gifts, wandering ivy-tendrils and
foxglove, and colocasia mingled with the laughing acanthus:
untended shall the she-goats bring home their milk-swoln
udders, nor shall huge lions alarm the herds: unbidden thy
cradle shall break into wooing blossom. The snake too shall
die and die the treacherous poison-plant: Assyrian spice shall
grow all up and down.6
Augustus saw himself as the fulfilment of this prophecy of world
renewal. In Stauffer’s vivid words,
Augustus took his prophet at his word. He gave official
sanction and fulfilment to the politicizing of the ancient hope
of a saviour. In the year 17 B.C., when a strange star shone in
the heavens, he saw that the cosmic hour had come, and
inaugurated a twelve-day Advent celebration, which was a
plain proclamation of Virgil’s message of joy: “The
turning-point of the ages has come.” From documents known
of old, as well as from some which have recently been
discovered, from historians, poets, inscriptions, monuments
and coins we have more reliable information about these days
6.
Virgil’s Works, J. W. Mackail, translator, C. L. Durham, introduction (New
York: Modern Library, 1934), 274.
Regeneration 391
and their official significance than of almost any other
happening of ancient history.
Heralds traversed Italy with their star-studded shields and the
blessed wand of Hermes, and announced the invitation to the
ceremonies. The Roman college of priests, with Augustus
himself at their head, distributed holy incense to the masses
for purification from past guilt. The people brought the fruits
of the land for sacrifices to the chief gods of the festival
Apollo and Diana. The emperor inaugurated the ceremonies
in the night preceding June 1, a night of full moon. As divine
and human mediator between heaven and earth, and the high
priest of the Roman people, the emperor approached the altar
in order to make a blood offering to the goddesses of fate,
with the prayer, “I beseech you to grant the Roman people
perpetual invulnerability, victory and prosperity and be ever
gracious to me and my house.”7
By the time of Nicodemus, the hopes of Augustus for world
regeneration had died with him, and the new mood was cynicism
and contempt. For Nicodemus, as a Pharisee, there was already a
radical disbelief in all the pagan efforts at regeneration, as well as
despair, as a ruler of the people, over the prospects in Judea and
Galilee. The administration of the law had kept neither Pharisees
nor Sadducees from corruption, and the common people had only
a formal regard for the law, especially the Galileans.
Nicodemus approached Jesus with two opinions clearly in mind.
First, as he told Jesus, “Rabbi, we know that thou art a teacher
come from God: for no man can do these miracles that thou doest,
except God be with him” (John 3:2). Nicodemus knew that God
had, every few centuries, sent prophets and leaders to His people,
and that these men had manifested God’s power in miracles. Here,
clearly, was another such man. Nicodemus’ “we know” was a
discreet veiling of the reality of his opinion: “I know.” Second, the
futility of history was only aggravated by these periodical
appearances, because history did not seem to be altered, nor
regeneration to follow. The Kingdom of God was plainly the
religious goal of history: how was it to be obtained? The quest to
7. Ethelbert Stauffer, Christ
and the Caesars, K. and R. Gregor Smith, translators
(Philadelphia: The Westminster Press, 1955), 83.
Nicodemus seemed futile. How could men attain that Kingdom?
“Jesus answered and said unto him, Verily, verily, I say unto thee,
except a man be born again, he cannot see the Kingdom of God”
(John 3:3). This was clearly the solution, to be born anew,
regeneration. Nicodemus recognized both its necessity and its
impossibility. “Nicodemus saith unto him, How can a man be born
when he is old? can he enter the second time into his mother’s
womb, and be born?” (John 3:4). Because Nicodemus was a ruler
and a religious leader, he was sharply aware of the problem. How
can mature men change their lives and directions short of being
born again, each from his mother’s womb? Any realistic look at
men even in Christian circles indicates how greatly the old ways still
prevail within us, so that at times a sight of Christian nature is far
from encouraging. For Nicodemus, the problem was a grim one:
he wanted a regenerated person and society, and, short of being
born afresh from one’s mother’s womb, with a full knowledge of
past sins and the power to be a new creature, how could a man
avoid the disheartening cycle of sin and decay? When Augustus
with all his power could not alter the oppressive cycle of birth, sin,
and despairing death, how could any man do more? Was not all
history evidence of the hopelessness of the quest? Was there
anything more possible beyond that which the Pharisees hoped
for, the yoke of the law to keep men in check?
5. Jesus answered, Verily, verily, I say unto thee, Except a man
be born of water and of the Spirit, he cannot enter into the
kingdom of God.
6. That which is born of the flesh is flesh: and that which is
born of the Spirit is spirit.
7. Marvel not that I said unto thee, Ye must be born again.
8. The wind bloweth where it listeth, and thou hearest the
sound thereof, but canst not tell whence it cometh, and
whither it goeth: so is everyone that is born of the Spirit. (John
3:5-8)
Man’s rebirth must be, Jesus said, by water, symbolizing purification,
and the Spirit, symbolizing quickening, or making alive. The words
“carry back the thoughts of hearer and reader to the narrative of
creation (Gen. i. 2), and to the characteristics of natural birth, to
Regeneration 393
which St. John has already emphatically referred (i. 13).” More
specifically, as Westcott pointed out further,
The water and the spirit suggest the original shaping of the
great Order out of Chaos, when the Spirit of God brooded on
the face of the waters; and at the same time this new birth is
distinctly separated from the corruptible element (blood)
which symbolizes that which is perishable and transitory in
human life.8
Man is related to two spheres of being, one called “flesh,” that
which is born of Adam, and the other, called “spirit,” that which is
born of God (John 3:6). He must be born again of the Spirit of
God, made a new creation by Him. Jesus did not say, “We must be
born again,” but “Ye must be born again” (v. 7), exempting Himself
as the creator.9
Just as the wind is real and yet unseen except in its effects, so is
the man who is born of the Spirit. “Notice that it is not the Spirit
but the man born of the Spirit who has the wind’s mysterious
character.” The wind is an outside force which acts upon trees and
waters; so, too, the regenerate man is an outside force to the degree
that he is in Christ and obedient to His law-word. There is thus far
more to history than history: there are regenerate men, and, supremely,
the regenerating and sovereign God. When men view history only
in terms of history, their only recourse is to despair. Nicodemus’
problem was that he saw no factor as determinative in history, save
that which was born of history; “the Jewish rabbis were not
expecting anything new.”10 As a result, Nicodemus could visualize
nothing new. He was as of that moment yet without faith.
Faith, however, establishes men in a new kind of knowledge and
power. As Machen noted, “far from being contrasted with
knowledge, faith is founded upon knowledge.”11 Moreover,
8. B.
F. Westcott, The Gospel According to St. John (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Ee-
rdmans, 1954), 49. Westcott’s interpretation is in error in its reference to cre-
ation “out of Chaos.”
9. Ibid., 51.
10. J. Stephen Hart, A Companion to St. John’s Gospel (Melbourne, Australia: Mel-
bourne University Press, 1952), 64.
11. J. Gresham Machen, What Is Faith? (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Eerdmans,
1946), 46.
“Faith” the author of Hebrews says, “is the substance of
things hoped for.” The word here translated “substance” is
translated in the American Revised Version “assurance.” But
the difference is not important. The point in either case is that
by faith future events are made to be certain: the old
translation merely puts the thing a little more strongly: future
events, it means, become through faith so certain that (it) is as
though they had already taken place; the things that are
promised to us become, by our faith in the promise, so certain
that it is as though we had the very substance of them in our
hands here and now. In either case, whether the correct
translation be “substance” or “assurance,” faith is here
regarded as providing information about future events; it is
presented as a way of predicting the future. 12
Faith is a witness to the fact of regeneration and its goal.
Regeneration (palingenesia in the Greek; palin, again, genesis, birth) is
both personal and cosmic. In Matthew 19:28, “regeneration” is
clearly cosmic; in Titus 3:5, it is personal: “according to his mercy
he saved us, by the washing (or, laver) of regeneration, and
renewing of the Holy Ghost” (cf. John 1:12, 2 Cor. 5:17; Eph.
4:22-24; James 1:18; 1 Peter 1:23; 1 John 3:1-3; 5:1).
All too often men are discouraged, as they view history, by the
fact of judgment and decay. They see an unregenerate world, and
are unwilling to see it perish. The presence of decay and death, and
every grim reminder of judgment, instead of encouraging them
with respect to the certainty of God’s government and triumph,
disheartens them. Like Lot, they grieve too much for Sodom.
Regeneration requires that the old man and the old world perish,
so that the new may be born. Regeneration occurs within history,
but its origin and determination is from God.
12. Ibid., 231.

XLIII
Repentance
The doctrine of repentance is one of very great personal and

social consequences and is future-oriented. The common
misunderstanding of repentance makes it a melancholy cataloguing
of past sins and is past-oriented. In Scripture, repentance fixes our
attention on the future, calls for action, and is associated with the
Kingdom of God. Thus, in Acts 3:19, “Repent ye therefore, and
turn again, that your sins may be blotted out, that so there may
come seasons of refreshing from the presence of the Lord” (ERV,
1881). In Luke 3:7-14, this same fact is again apparent, as it is in the
normal usage of repentance: it prepares the man for action today
and tomorrow. Chamberlain wrote,
The reason which John and Jesus both give for repentance is
not that the Kingdom of heaven may come near, but that it has
drawn near. Repentance does not bring the Kingdom; it
prepares men to participate in it. Repentance is not a device
for escaping hell; it is a preparation for cooperating with God’s
will on earth.1
Two Greek words are translated as repentance. Metamelomai
means remorse (Matt. 21:29, 32; 27:3), as in Judas’ case, whereas
metanoeo (metanoia) means that change of mind wrought by God’s
regenerating power.2
Ungodly repentance looks backward: it is sorry for its sins
because it regrets the consequences. Such repentance is marked by
self-torture and misery and a preoccupation with the past. All too
often, when we demand that someone repent, we have this kind of
repentance in mind. We want them to see the consequences of
their acts and to suffer for them. We tend to equate true repentance
with deep misery and a past-oriented suffering. There is such a
1. William
D. Chamberlain, The Meaning of Repentance (Philadelphia: The West-
minster Press, 1943), 19.
2. Julius R. Mantey, “Repentance and Conversion,” in Carl F. H. Henry, editor,
Basic Christian Doctrine (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1962), 193.
395
thing as godly sorrow for sin, for, while “Godly sorrow may lead
to repentance, (it)... is in no sense identical with it.”3 “For the
sorrow that relates the sorrower to God works out a repentance
that leads to salvation such as is never regretted, while the world’s
sorrow issues into death” (2 Cor. 7:10 Berkeley Version).
John A. Broadus has called the use of the English words
“repent” and “repentance” the “worst translation in the New
Testament.” The true meaning of the Greek word is “a complete
change in mental outlook and of life design.” It is reformation, a
change which is durable and has consequences. The early church
was aware of this meaning. Thus, Lactantius, in The Divine Institutes
(Bk. VI, ch. xxiv.), spoke of repentance as a “return to right
understanding.” Of the converted and repentant man, Lactantius
said, “he returns to a right understanding, and recovers his mind as
it were from madness.” This idea is in mind in the parable of the
Prodigal Son; we are told that “he came to himself” (Luke 15:17);
“he saw himself and God in a new light. This is repentance.”4
Clearly, what we all too often require of people is remorse, not
reformation. In so doing, we chain the church and its work to the
past instead of looking to the future, and we see more virtue in the
miseries of hell than in the grace of God.
The word repentance is associated with penance and thus has the
wrong orientation. Restitution is an aspect of forgiveness, but
repentance in Scripture means to change from bad to good, from
sin to righteousness, and it means a change of mind and purpose
which results in changed actions. The Old Testament Hebrew
word is similar in meaning. Thus, it speaks of God “repenting”
(Gen. 6:6; Ex. 32:14), by which is meant that God’s attitude
towards a person or people is changed from wrath to grace. When
men are involved, the repentance of man involves a turning from
sin to God; the use of the word repentance involves sin because
man is a sinner, but the word itself does not require the fact of sin
and can thus be used to indicate a change in God’s workings which
involves neither sin nor neglect, but simply a radical change in the
3. Ibid.,
25.
4. Ibid., 17, 31, 37.
Repentance 397
treatment of a people. For man, repentance means reformation; for
God, it means a turn from judgment to grace.
In men, repentance is “a preparation for the future, rather than
a mourning over the past.”5 This is why repentance is so closely
linked with the Kingdom of God: “it prepares men to participate
in it.” This fact appears early in the gospels, in the ministry of John
the Baptist, who summoned men to prepare for the Kingdom, “As
it is written in the book of the words of Esaias the prophet, saying,
The voice of one crying in the wilderness, Prepare ye the way of the
Lord, make his paths straight” (Luke 3:4). We are then told,
7. Then said he to the multitude that came forth to be baptized
of him, O generation of vipers, who hath warned you to flee
from the wrath to come?
8. Bring forth therefore fruits worthy of repentance, and begin
not to say within yourselves, We have Abraham to our father:
for I say unto you, That God is able of these stones to raise up
children unto Abraham.
9. And now also the ax is laid unto the root of the trees: every
tree that bringeth not forth good fruit is hewn down, and cast
into the fire.
10. And the people asked him, saying, What shall we do then?
11. He answereth and saith unto them, He that hath two coats,
let him impart to him that hath none; and he that hath meat,
let him do likewise.
12. Then came also publicans to be baptized, and said unto
him, Master, what shall we do?
13. And he said unto them, Exact no more than that which is
appointed you.
14. And the soldiers likewise demanded of him, saying, And
what shall we do? And he said unto them, Do violence to no
man, neither accuse any falsely, and be content with your
wages. (Luke 3:7-14)
According to Matthew 3:7-12, what Luke ascribes as “advice” to all
the multitude was directed to the Pharisees and Sadducees more
specifically (Luke 3:7-9, 16-17). Clearly, our Lord felt that people
and leaders were very much alike. The occasion of these words is
described by Lenski: “This address was made on the occasion
when a lot of Sadducees and Pharisees came to John’s baptism (as
5. Ibid., 40.
Matthew says) and asked also to be baptized but confessed no sins
as did the other people whom John baptized.”6 Repentance, John
declared, meant a changed life, a membership in the Kingdom
which involved sharing our abundance with needy fellow believers,
honesty in all our dealings, and contentment. Each group is told to
deal with its besetting sin and problem by means of a radical
change of action. The Pharisees and others were living unto
themselves: they were ordered to share with others. The publicans
or tax collectors were ordered to stop their unjust exactions.
Soldiers, much given to intimidating people with threats of
violence, using false accusations to avenge themselves, and
chronically dissatisfied with their wages and consequently using
their power to force the government to pay more, are ordered to
be content, to accuse none falsely, and to do violence to no man.
John asked no man to make a public confession of sins, or to make
a show of sorrow for them, but rather that each man change his
mind, purpose, and action in conformity to the word of God. If
they were good trees, they would bring forth good fruit. If they
were God’s planting rather than a generation of vipers, they would
manifest that fact by their changed lives.
Thus, while in the background of all repentance by man there is
a “godly sorrow” over sin (2 Cor. 7:10), and there can be no true
repentance by man without first of all a godly sorrow for sin,
repentance itself is the turning from sin to God with a new
obedience. St. Paul said to the believers, “Being then made free
from sin, ye became the servants of righteousness” (Rom. 6:18).
This is the emphasis: to serve righteousness, to become dedicated,
working members of God’s Kingdom. By means of repentance, we
participate in the work of the Kingdom. The summons preached
by the disciples, when the Lord sent them forth to announce the
Kingdom (Matt. 10:7), was to repentance: “And they went out, and
preached that men should repent” (Mark. 6:12).
There is very little about repentance in St. Paul’s epistles, because
he is writing to Christians, to men already changed.7
6. R.
C. H. Lenski, The Interpretation of St. Luke’s Gospel (Columbus, Ohio: The
Wartburg Press, 1951), 185.
7. Chamberlain, op. cit., 70.
Repentance 399
Repentance is the work of God in man. “The human and ethical
side, however find expression in the idea of faith, which here (Jn.
3:8) as in the NT in general, implies an active turning from sin to
God (Jn. 4:7ff; 9:38, 1 Jn. 1:8).”8
Quanbeck, in discussing repentance, speaks of its negative aspect
as “turning away from sin” and its positive aspect as “turning back
to God, the beginning of a new religious or moral life.”
The new element in Jesus’ preaching of repentance appears at
this point. The prophets know that God must give the sinner
a new heart and spirit. Repentance in the deepest sense is
beyond human powers. They look forward to the time when
God will perform the miracle of raising men from the valley
of dry bones (Ezek. 37). Jesus announces that the time has
come: “The time is fulfilled, and the Kingdom of God is at
hand: repent, and believe in the gospel” (Mark 1:15).
Repentance is no longer only demand: it has become
possibility, for what is impossible with men is possible with
God (10:27). Repentance is completed by FAITH. Return to
God is now no longer response to law but to a person; it is
discipleship. Jesus points to himself with magisterial
confidence as the fulfilment of the Law and the Prophets.
Repentance and faith are two sides of the same coin. There
can be no genuine repentance which is not also the acceptance
of the divine promise spoken in Jesus of Nazareth.9
Despite an element of antinomianism, there is much to commend
in Quanbeck’s comment. Repentance is God’s work in man’s life,
and it is inseparable from faith.
Repentance is, moreover, inseparable from responsibility.
Mantey’s comment, “The only normal man is the converted
man,”10 means that, since Adam in Eden was the normal man, all
men by virtue of the Fall are abnormal. Christ restores men to the
normal estate, although, since sanctification is not complete in this
world, we are only normal to the degree that we are sanctified. In
8. W. Morgan, “Repent, Repentance,” in James Hastings, editor, A Dictionary of

the Bible, vol. IV (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1919), 226.
9. W.
A. Quanbeck, “Repentance,” in The Interpreter’s Dictionary of the Bible, R-Z
(New York: Abingdon Press, 1962), 34.
10. Mantey, op. cit., 197.
his fall, Adam went from responsibility to irresponsibility, indicting
both God and Eve for his sin (Gen. 3:12). The mark of true
repentance is in part the restoration of responsibility, and this
means responsibility not only for one’s sins, but also responsibility
in terms of a calling under God, an active service to Him and His
Kingdom.
The parable of the rich man and the beggar Lazarus gives us a
vivid picture of irresponsibility and an unrepentant mind. The rich
man in hell has no real desire to leave it: the substance of his
remarks is to indict Lazarus and God. His first plea is, “send
Lazarus, that he may dip the tip of his finger in water, and cool my
tongue; for I am tormented in this flame” (Luke 16:24). The
self-pity in this statement is intense, but so is the indictment:
Lazarus was at my gate and received nothing; if now he gives me
nothing, then how is he any better than I, or more deserving of
heaven than I? The rich man’s words are preciously contrived to
make his request excessively modest, only the tip of the finger dipped
in water, to cool his tongue, in order to render any refusal excessively
wicked. Both Abraham and Lazarus are thus vindictively indicted:
the purpose of these words is not relief, but accusation.
The rich man then indicts God: “I pray thee, therefore, father,
that thou wouldest send him to my father’s house: for I have five
brethren; that he may testify unto them, lest they also come into
this place of torment” (Luke 16:27-28). The obvious inference is
that the rich man went to hell only because God did not prove
conclusively to him that his course of action would lead there.
Salvation, says the rich man, should be by knowledge and by sight,
by scientific verification. God should have warned me; I am
suffering needlessly, and, being truly noble at heart, I want to spare
my five brothers the same suffering. The rich man’s real concern
was not his brothers, but finding a means of indicting God by
trying to show that he was more concerned with soul-saving than
was God. God should spare no means to convince people into
heaven, even to sending them one from the dead. Then “they will
repent” (Luke 16:30). He even uses the right word for repent,
metanoeo. Abraham’s answer is, “If they hear not Moses and the
prophets, neither will they be persuaded, though one rose from the
Repentance 401
dead” (Luke 16:31). Thus, though the rich man uses the right word,
his basic perspective is past-bound: he is determined to justify
himself and his past and thereby to indict God. False repentance
seeks to change the past; true repentance works to change the
future because it is itself changed by the grace of God.
The significance of all this is very great. It means that, with
pietism in particular, and revivalism, the church has stressed
remorse rather than that change of mind and action which is
repentance. It has been past-bound rather than future-oriented.
Godly sorrow is important, but it is not the same as repentance, the
change of direction. Restitution and forgiveness are important, but
they are still something other than repentance: the ungodly can
make restitution, but they cannot make that change of mind and
action which is true repentance. The word repentance is of Latin
origin, re and poenitere, or poena, meaning indemnification,
recompense, retribution, satisfaction, expiation, punishment,
penalty, or price. This is an entirely false orientation for metanoia. It
makes repentance into a kind of self-atonement, a means of
satisfying God and repaying man by means of remorse and
suffering. This is humanism of a sort. It leads thus to a lacrimose
piety; it makes a virtue of the shedding of tears rather than a
changed mind and action. The modern call to repentance is thus a call to
sickness. God, however, in speaking to Solomon, spoke of both
godly sorrow and repentance, and separated them as distinct,
declaring, “If my people, which are called by my name, shall
humble themselves, and pray, and seek my face, and turn from
their wicked ways; then will I hear from heaven, and will forgive
their sin, and will heal their land” (2 Chron. 7:14). To turn from
their wicked ways meant to turn their hearts, minds, and lives into
obedience to God’s law and the establishment of it as their way of
life as a people and as a nation. The evidence of godly sorrow is that
one brings forth “fruits worthy of repentance” (Luke 3:8).
Repentance means changed thinking and action. Where there is
godly repentance, there is action. Ungodly repentance is like the
weeping and wailing over the past which is the mark of hell. For a
church to summon people to hell is reprobate indeed.
XLIV
Sanctification
The prophet Zechariah gives us a vision of sanctification in the

Kingdom of God which is radically different from the usual ideas
of sanctification. In his culminating and final vision, we have,
instead of people palpitating with charismatic manifestations, bells
and pots as “holiness to the LORD.”
20. In that day shall there be upon the bells of the horses,
HOLINESS UNTO THE LORD; and the pots in the
LORD’s house shall be like the bowls before the altar.
21. Yea, every pot in Jerusalem and in Judah shall be holiness
unto the LORD of hosts: and all they that sacrifice shall come
and take of them, and seethe therein: and in that day there shall
be no more the Canaanite in the house of the LORD of hosts.
(Zech. 14:20-21)
Lowe says that these words tell us
that in that day there will be a general elevation of everything
in sanctity. Even “the bells upon the horses” will, like the plate
of gold on the mitre of the high priest, have inscribed on them
“HOLINESS TO THE LORD” (Exod. xxviii. 36, & c.). The
pots of the sanctuary in which the “peace offerings” were
cooked will be raised to the grade of sanctity of the bowls in
which the blood was caught; and the ordinary pots will be
raised to the grade of sanctuary pots.
These verses have nothing to say about either the retention or
termination of the Mosaic ritual: their purpose is to set forth the
future holiness in terms of then current standards.1
Hengstenberg said, of v. 20, “The meaning therefore is this: in
that day the Lord will adorn the horses with the symbol of holiness,
which has hitherto been borne by the high priest alone.” Then
Hengstenberg goes to the heart of the vision, its meaning in terms
of God’s ultimate purposes:
1. W. H. Lowe, “Zechariah,” in C. J. Ellicott, editor, Commentary on the Whole Bi-

ble, vol. V (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Zondervan, n.d.), 592.
403
The distinction between sacred and profane originated with
the fall. To abolish this distinction, and re-establish the sole
supremacy of holiness, was one of the ultimate designs of the
divine economy of salvation; whilst, on the other hand, the
prince of this world endeavoured to exterminate altogether
the other of the two, namely, everything holy. In order to
secure his purpose more perfectly at last, the Lord allowed the
two to exist for a long period side by side, that the points of
contrast might be more and more conspicuous. He set apart
for himself a holy nation in comparison with which all other
nations were profane; and to this nation he gave a law, in
which the distinction between sacred and profane was
universally maintained in things small as well as great. He was
satisfied for a time that only a certain outwardly defined
territory should be kept sacred as his own; since, otherwise, if
the two opposing principles were mixed up together, the evil
would completely swallow up the good. With the first coming
of Christ, the ultimate purpose of God drew nearer to its
realization. The outward distinction between sacred and
profane fell into the background, because a much stronger
support and aid were communicated to the former by the
spirit of Christ. Nevertheless, the two antagonistic elements
still continue, and even in the believer the good does not attain
to complete and sole supremacy in this present life. The day
will come, however, when the Lord will be all in all, and when
every distinction between the holy and the unholy, every
corrupt admixture of the two, and all differences of degree in
the holy itself, will come to an end.2
Everything that Adam did in Paradise prior to the Fall was
holiness to the Lord: it had as its purpose the service of the
Kingdom of God. Thus, Adam’s pots, his hoe, and shovel, were all
sanctified in terms of Adam’s obedience to God and the dedication
of all things to God’s service. Their holiness was no less than that
of sanctuary vessels in the days of Aaron and Abiathar. The
distinction between the sacred and the profane (profane meaning
outside the temple, outside the realm of God), and between good
and evil, was then a potential rather than an actual one. With the
Fall of Man, that distinction became actual, with the evil, profane
2. E. W. Hengstenberg, Christology of the Old Testament and a Commentary on the Mes-

sianic Predictions, vol. IV (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Kregel, 1956), 134f.
Sanctification 405
world apparently in power. The world was now in warfare. The
purpose of the forces of revolt was, and is, to redefine reality and
to place everything beyond good and evil, to abolish the antithesis
entirely, and to declare that the truly holy and pure is that which is
profane or outside of God. Especially since Christ has come, the
world has intensified its efforts to live beyond good and evil,
because it is increasingly aware, as the implications of the word of
God are sharpened, of the death sentence against itself. Wars very
often are most bitterly fought when the end approaches, because it
is then that the loser begins to fight with desperation in an attempt
at a final thrust to victory.
God, however, also purposes to eliminate the actual distinction
between the sacred and the profane, perfectly in the new creation,
and to a high degree in time. God allows evil to destroy that which
has been already profaned, so that He can, by regenerating men
and nations, bring about true holiness. As Hengstenberg wrote of
Jeremiah 31:38-40, inward profanation is followed by outward
profanation:
This inward victory must, according to divine necessity, be
followed by the outward one. The covenant-people which,
inwardly, had submitted to the world, which, by its own guilt
had profaned itself, was, outwardly also, given up to the world,
and was profaned in punishment. And this profanation,
inflicted upon it as a punishment, again manifested itself just
at that place, where the profanation by the guilt had chiefly
manifested itself, viz., in the holy city, and in the holy temple.
It is with a view to the former manifestation of the victory of
the world over the Kingdom of God, that here the victory of
the Kingdom of God is described; and the imagery is just
simple imagery. To the outward holiness of the city and of the
temple, the outward unholiness of the places around
Jerusalem is opposed. While the victory of the world over the
Kingdom of God had been manifested by the profanation of
these places, the victory of the Kingdom of God now appears
under the image of the sanctification of these formerly unholy
places.3
3. Hengstenberg, Christology of the Old Testament, vol. II, 448f.

The profane cannot attain their goal; their inward profanation is
always followed by outward profanation. Instead of gaining utopia
by abolishing God and His law, people gain instead a lawlessness in
which they are the victims. Thus, in 1972, the growth in crime
meant so great an increase in private guards and police that,
“Private guards and ‘special police’ working under commercial
contract already outnumber regular cops in both San Francisco and
Detroit.”4 Moreover, stricter law enforcement still does not offer
too great a hope:
The nationwide game of cops and robbers is only beginning,
of course, and even the police are beginning to acknowledge
that fact. “If law enforcement catches more criminals, the
prisons fill up, criminals are paroled sooner, then probation
officers are flooded and the criminal gets back into trouble,”
says Capt. John W. Start of the Compton, Calif., police.5
The economic cost of crime, whether in a tribal, jungle society, or
in a modern state, is a major form of decapitalization and social
regression. Liberals who tell us how much war costs should also
investigate the cost of crime to a society; the cost of crime steadily
inhibits the ability of a society to advance. Even more, however, it
forces an antithesis onto every society, a division between good and
evil, law and crime, which a society cannot ignore. This new
antithesis is an unprincipled one. As Frank Rizzo, mayor of
Philadelphia, observed: “You know what a conservative is? That’s
a liberal who got mugged the night before.”6 All the same, society
cannot ignore the difference between the sacred and the profane.
It may try to live beyond good and evil, but it cannot. Community
in holiness is possible; indeed, the more people grow in grace and
holiness, the more easily they can live together. The more profane
a society becomes, the less it is able to live in community, so that,
this side of hell, sanctification or holiness is a social necessity. Hell
is not a community, but a place of isolation, each man pursuing the
goal of sin, to be his own god and universe, and knowing only total
4. “Living With
Crime, U.S.A.,” Newsweek, 18 December 1972, 34.
5. Ibid., 36.
6. Ibid., 31.
Sanctification 407
frustration, weeping, wailing, burning, and gnashing of teeth, in
that pursuit.
A totally profane society is impossible, but a totally holy society
is not only possible, but also inevitable. The more people grow in
holiness, the more readily they live in community, and the more
ably so. Communism aims at community and only accentuates the
isolation of man from man, whereas in the Kingdom of God men
are most fully themselves and the most fully so in community. It is
sin which thwarts man’s desire to live peacefully and happily with
others, but it is also sin which makes it most difficult for man to
live alone, because he is as much a torment to himself as he is to
others, and much more so.
The inner becomes the outer: this is the Biblical premise. Our
Lord said, “that which cometh out of the mouth, this defileth a
man” (Matt. 15:11). Profanation is from the heart, and the inner
profanation leads to an outer profanation. God allows the
actualization of the potential, so that man is forced into an
epistemological self-consciousness of both holiness and profanity.
The modern environmentalist temper seeks to change the outer
first; it gives priority to the outer as determinative, whereas in
Scripture the reverse is true. Before Adam and Eve ate of the fruit,
they had inwardly considered the possibility of independence from
God as an advantage. A major aspect of the significance of history
is this, that it is an actualization of the potential, so that all potential
profanation and profanity is realized and developed by man as he
explores the potentiality of independence from God. This means
the Marquis de Sade, Lenin, Stalin, and communism; it means every
form of degeneracy and perversion in every area of life.
But it means much more than that. It means the realization and
actualization of the potentiality of holiness, also. In every area of
life and activity, the potentialities of the sacred will be developed in
history and worked out to their logical consequences. This means,
among other things, the actualization of dominion under God. The
triumph of redeemed man in every area of life and activity, means
that the development of holiness, the full exploration and
establishment of the sacred, will characterize all the arts and
sciences. Every calling, the very “bells of the horse,” the
ornamentation of life, will be “holiness to the Lord” and an area of
holy dominion. Man, knowing full well the implications of
profanity, will turn on it and crush its head under its feet, in terms
of God’s promise (Gen. 3:15, Rom. 16:20).
In God’s Kingdom, Zechariah tells us, there will be no
Canaanites “in the house of the Lord of hosts.” Many
commentators wrongly limit the meaning of the word
“Canaanites” to tradesmen, and they cite our Lord’s cleansing of the
Temple of moneychangers as its fulfilment. The cleansing of the
Temple was a symbolic fulfilment, but the meaning is far more
extensive. The Temple or “house of the Lord of hosts” was more
than a church: it was the seat of God’s civil government and of all
authority. Just as Isaiah 1:10 speaks of the nation’s princes as
“rulers of Sodom,” and the nation as “people of Gomorrah,” so
Zechariah here calls all authorities who are outside of Christ, all
profane authorities, Canaanites. In God’s Kingdom, all authority
shall be godly authority, in every area of life. As Leupold noted,
One might call this one of the passages that operates on the
principle of the proverb, Ex ungue leonem, “you recognize the
lion from the mere claw.” One seemingly trifling incident is
recorded in order to indicate what the whole situation must be
at this blessed future time. When it is said that even such trivial
things as bells on the harness of horses shall be holy to the
Lord and shall bear an inscription to that effect even as the
high priest wore a gold band on his official cap with these very
words inscribed on it (see Exod. 28:36-38), that is the
equivalent of saying that such a complete state of
sanctification or consecration shall mark the life of God’s
people that nothing shall be exempt from its all-pervading
influence.7
Holiness is total in its extent: it is the dedication of man and the
world to God, and their separation to Him. Inanimate objects can
be holy if they are dedicated to a holy use. Sanctification means that
our life is defined, not in terms of ourselves, our children, or our
husband or wife, but in terms of God. Sanctification involves our
relationship to one another, so that our relationship to our children
1956), 276.
Sanctification 409
and family members is an aspect of sanctification, but it can never
be limited or reduced to that level. We cannot say that our life ends
when children leave us, or a loved one dies, because the meaning
and purpose of our lives can only be defined in terms of God.
Everything must be related to God and His Kingdom. Nothing is
too trifling to be omitted. As Moore commented,
The “bells of the horses” were those bells that were fastened
to them partly for ornament and partly to make them easily
found if they strayed away at night. They were not necessary
parts of the harness, and trifling in value. When, therefore it is
said that even they should have the inscription that was
engraved on the breastplate of the high priest, this declares the
fact that even the most trifling things in this future state of the
Church should be consecrated to God, equally with the
highest and holiest.8
This means that there is no area of neutrality, that every area must
be brought into subjection to God and His law. The means of
holiness or sanctification is the law of God, whereby man,
strengthened by the Holy Spirit, serves God in terms of God’s
appointed way and seeks holiness in terms of the only possible
means. To be antinomian is to be profane; it is living outside of
God and His righteousness.
John Murray has rightly called attention to the fact that the
common objection to the doctrine of justification by grace,
received by faith, complete, perfect, irrevocable, and entirely the
work of God, is that it “is inimical to the interests of holy living”
and that it removes “the need for and incentive to good works.”9
However, as Murray pointed out, this charge can only be met if the
Biblical doctrine of sanctification is upheld, with its requirement of
good works (of the law) as the test of faith.
Sanctification is both definitive and progressive. Our dedication
to God is an accomplished fact by our union to Christ. St. Paul
speaks of believers as those who “are sanctified in Christ Jesus” (1
8. Thomas V. Moore, A Commentary on Zechariah (London: The Banner of Truth
Trust, 1958), 235.
9.
John Murray, “Sanctification (The Law),” in Carl F. H. Henry, editor, Basic
Christian Doctrines (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1962), 227. Curi-
ously, despite his title, Murray does not discuss the law.
Cor. 1:2). “Ye are washed... ye are sanctified... ye are justified in the
name of the Lord Jesus, and by the Spirit of our God” (1 Cor. 6:11).
This is definitive sanctification, as Murray has pointed out, and
“Union with Christ is the pivot on which the doctrine turns,
specifically union with Him in the meaning of His death and the
power of His resurrection.”10
To hold only to definitive sanctification leads to a false
perfectionism and is untenable. We must recognize that, in our
union with Christ, in our life as new creatures in Christ, there is
growth in the principle of that new life. This is progressive
sanctification. The life of the believer “must be one of progression,
a progression both negative and positive, consisting, thus, in both
mortification and sanctification.”11
The agency in progressive sanctification is the triune God,
especially the Holy Spirit. The means, way, and rule of
sanctification is the law of God.
The goal of sanctification is to bring all things under the
authority of Jesus Christ, the King of creation. As Moore noted,
“When there shall be universal holiness, there shall also be
universal happiness.”12 This does not mean that all men are
converted, but that all men shall serve God and be under His
authority. In this respect, St. Paul made it clear that even the
unbelieving are in an outward sense “sanctified” (1 Cor. 7:14).
The result of the sanctification of all things to God in Christ is
well described by Moore:
All shall be happy because all shall be holy. Sorrow shall cease
because sin shall cease. The groaning earth shall be mantled
with joy because the trail of the serpent shall be gone, and the
Eden of the future makes us cease to look back with longing
at the Eden of the past. If then a man would have the
beginnings of Heaven, it must be by this absolute consecration
of everything to God on earth.... 13
10. Ibid., 228.

11. Ibid., 229.
12. Moore, op.
cit., 238.
13. Ibid., 236.
XLV
The Incarnation
Some theologians have tried to relate the incarnation to our

redemption by developing a so-called incarnation theology, the
essence of which is to posit a divinization of the world. Nothing
could be further from the reality of the incarnation: its purpose is
not to divinize man and the universe, but to restore man to his
God-ordained humanity. This so-called incarnation theory would do
better to renounce the restraints of Christian terminology and
openly espouse Roman imperial theology. It was classical antiquity
which held to the doctrine of the divinization of heroes and rulers,
and took for granted as a presupposition of faith that a continuity
existed between the human and the divine, whereas Biblical faith
asserts a radical discontinuity bridged only in the unique
incarnation. The emperor Domitian (A.D. 81-96) ordered the
Roman procurators to use the written formula, Dominus ac Deus
noster hoc fieri jubet (Our Master and Our God bids that this be
done).1 Greek and Roman mythology could readily ascribe all
kinds of vices to the gods because there was no essential difference
of kind between gods and men, only a difference in the degree of
power. If man sinned, then the gods sinned; if man lusted, then the
gods lusted also: there was a common being in both of them.
The mystery and miracle of the incarnation is that the perfect
and uncreated being of God was brought into union without
confusion with the created being of man. This miracle is set forth
in Matthew 1:1-2:23, and in Luke 1:26-2:20, but these are not the
only references to it. As Robinson has pointed out, it is the
presupposition of several statements in the New Testament. For
example, St. Paul speaks of the birth of Jesus in Romans 1:3,
Galatians 4:4, and Philippians 2:7. The Greek verb, gennao, “born,”
“has the connotation of begotten and is often rendered ‘begat.’” St.
1.
Suetonius, “Domitian,” The Lives of the Twelve Caesars (New York: Book
League of America, 1937), 355; and Douglas Edwards, The Virgin Birth in His-
tory and Faith (London: Faber & Faber, 1943), 16n.
411
Paul uses instead “forms of the verb ginomai, which means born in
the sense of come into being, become, made. The King James
Version renders this word ‘made’ in each case.” Recent versions
translate both words as “born.” Where gennao is used, it implies a
human father unless, as in Matthew 1:16, 20, it is specified “that
this was a begetting of the Holy Spirit, not by a human father.” St.
Paul assumes knowledge of the virgin birth. “Both Paul and his
predecessors taught that Jesus was made or born of a human
mother, but never suggested a begetting by a human father. As he
had no divine mother, so also he had no human father.2
A very important reference to our Lord’s miraculous birth is St.
Paul’s reference to him in 1 Cor. 15:45 and 47 as the second or last
Adam or man, i.e., as the new head of a new humanity. St. Luke
refers to this same analogy in Luke 3:38, where the miraculous
birth of Adam is brought into focus after the miraculous birth of
Christ is told. Paul also spoke of Adam as a type of “Him that was
to come” (Rom. 5:14). As Edwards points out, it is important to
know in what sense Adam, “in whom all die” (1 Cor. 15:22), and
“through whose disobedience the many were made sinners” (Rom
5:19), could be the type “of the obedient, sinless, death-defying
Christ.”3
For observe, it is not enough to say that Christ is the Second
Man because He gave us a fresh start. Nor will it do to say that
He is the Last Adam because, like Adam, He was the Head of
a new race. To speak in this way is to suppose that what makes
Christ the Last or Final Adam is His Godhead. The real
question is how, being Man, He Himself got the fresh start, or
again how He could be the Head of a race, of which (if born
like others), He was but, with us, a fellow member. On the
other hand, if — as all the evidence goes to show — the Virgin
Birth was an integral part of Christian doctrine from the first,
then (for St. Paul and his readers) Adam was a type of Christ
that was to come.
Just because he was “the man” (which is what the word Adam
means) Adam’s actions involved us all; and because he sinned,
2. William Childs Robinson, “The Virgin Birth — A Broader Base,” Christianity
Today, vol. XVII, no. 5, 8 December 1972, 238-240.
3. Edwards, op. cit., 106.
The Incarnation 413
we suffered. So also, just because He was “the Man” (which is
what the title “the Son of Man” means) Christ’s actions
involved us all; and because He was obedient we gained. This
indeed is precisely the connection in which the remark that
Adam is a type of Christ was made.4
Both Adams entered history by the direct act of God. However,
whereas the First Adam and his every descendant originated from
the dust (Gen. 2:7) and was made a “living soul” by God’s power,
the Second Adam originated from Heaven and was made “a
quickening spirit” (1 Cor. 15:45).
Genuinely, completely human as it was, Christ’s body was a
Spirit-body — a body created in holiness for the Divine Man
by the overshadowing of the Holy Ghost — and therefore
beyond the touch of the corruption that is the heritage of sin.
Adam’s body, on the other hand, was only a soul-body — as
also is that of every single one of his descendants.5
The descendants of the first Adam inherit death. The
descendants by faith of the second Adam inherit life, as men who
have become the sons of God by adoption in Jesus Christ.
According to St. John,
12. But as many as received him, to them gave he power to
become the sons of God, even to them which believe on his
name:
13. Which were born, not of blood, nor of the will of the flesh,
nor of the will of man, but of God. (John 1:12-13)
These words clearly presuppose the virgin birth of our Lord, who
was “born, not of blood, nor of the will of the flesh, nor of the will
of man, but of God.” The virgin birth of Christ establishes the type
or pattern for the rebirth of all members of the new humanity.
Even as Christ’s birth was supernatural, so our rebirth is
supernatural. Even as Christ, through the Virgin Mary, was related
to the old humanity of Adam and a member thereof, so we too are
members of that old humanity, but are now by God’s regenerating
power made members of the new humanity of Jesus Christ.
4. Ibid.,
106f, the reference in the last sentence is to Rom. 5:14.
5. Ibid., 113f.
Jesus Christ is the perfect new man or second Adam. St. John
makes it clear “that the human traits of Jesus are reproduced in the
lives of those (and of those only) who believe on His Divine
Name.”6 Just as Adam’s traits were passed on to his seed, so the
traits of Jesus Christ are implanted in His new race. Jesus identifies
Himself with His people, so that, in confronting St. Paul on the
road to Damascus, He challenges Paul, “Saul, Saul, why persecutest
thou Me?” (Acts 22:7; 26:14). In persecuting the Christians, Christ
told Paul, he was persecuting also and essentially their Lord Jesus.
This is a telling example of the extent to which Christ identifies
Himself with His people. It is also a reminder to Christians that
they must identify their lives with Christ by faith, obedience, and
service. We must manifest His self-sacrificing love towards one
another: “Hereby perceive we the love of God, because he laid
down his life for us: and we ought to lay down our lives for the
brethren” (1 John 3:16). The lives of Christians are to manifest the
redeemed humanity of which they are members, and the example
of Christ, who is their federal head and Lord. Moreover, “as he is,
so are we in this world” (1 John 4:17). We can therefore face the
Day of Judgment with boldness, and we can live in the confidence
of His grace and power.
St. John tells us in 1 John 1:8-2:2 that none of us are without sin;
the godly man commits acts of sin, but he does not go on sinning
habitually and deliberately. Ross, in commenting on 1 John 3:9,
renders its meaning thus and comments:
“Everyone who has been made a child of God and remains so
does not go on sinning, because His seed abideth in him: and he
cannot go on sinning, because he has been made a child of God
and remains so.” That is a very strong and an utterly
uncompromising statement, to be understood, however, in the
light of the interpretation already given of v. 6. The germ of
the new life has been implanted in the soul of the child of God
and it grows, is certain to grow — a gradual process and
subject to declensions from time to time, but it assuredly
grows from more to more. The incorruptible seed of the
Word of God, implanted in the soul by the Holy Spirit, has
6. Ibid., 117.
The Incarnation 415
brought to the soul the new life of the children of God (1 Pet.
1:23). The man to whom that has happened cannot live
habitually in sin, though there may be lapses into acts of sin,
he cannot revel in sin, because he has been born of God and
remains a child of God. He can say with Paul: “It is not I (the
real ‘I,’ in whom the seed of God abides) who do the deed, but
sin that dwells within me” (Rom. 7:17, Moffat), for sin is still
there in his soul, though not now dominant. “The believer’s
lapses into sin,” says Dr. David Smith, “are like the mischances
of the weather which hinder the seed’s growth. The growth of
a living seed may be checked temporarily,” but, after that
temporary check, it begins again, and it goes on until the time
of harvest arrives.7
In 1 John 5:18, we are told that whoever has been born of God
does not sin (i.e., continually and deliberately sin), because “he that
is begotten of God keepeth himself (or, him), and that wicked one
toucheth him not.” The one who was “begotten of God” is Christ
Himself, the virgin-born Son of God.
The Eternally Begotten keeps him who is begotten by grace.
We find some confirmation of this interpretation in the fact
that the second of John’s phrases, He that was begotten of God, is
the same form of expression that we have in the old Nicene
Creed, “begotten of the Father,” where the reference is to the
eternal generation of Him who is “God of God, Light of
Light, Very God of Very God.”8
The incarnation thus, while a unique act, is not an isolated fact. It
is essentially related to every member of the new humanity. Christ
as true man and very God, has given us a new birth by His
regenerating power. God, “according to his abundant mercy hath
begotten us again unto a lively hope by the resurrection of Jesus
Christ from the dead” (1 Peter 1:3). He has made us heirs of all
things and summoned us to exercise dominion and to subdue the
earth as members of the new humanity of Jesus Christ.
But this is not all. St. John says of the believer, “that wicked one
toucheth him not” (1 John 5:18). This does not mean that the godly
7. Alexander
Ross, The Epistles of James and John (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Eer-
dmans, 1954), 185.
8. Ibid., 223.
do not suffer physically at the hands of evil men who are the
servants of Satan. St. John wrote when persecutions were already a
reality, and he very obviously was aware of what was happening all
around him. The reference cannot be understood without recalling
Eden. Those who are born again by the grace of the Lord, He who
is “begotten of the Father,” cannot, like Adam, be touched in their
calling. Adam was called to exercise dominion and to subdue the
earth as the Kingdom of God. “That wicked one” did touch Adam.
Touch (hapto) means “primarily, to fasten to, hence, of fire, to
kindle,” also having the meaning of to cling, lay hold of, adhere to,
or to assault and sever from, as in 1 John 5:18.9 Adam was severed
from God’s calling and obedience. We cannot be so severed; we are
beyond the reach of Satan. We are secure in our calling. Man, now
reestablished in his calling to dominion, will prosper therein, and
he shall persevere therein, until “The kingdoms of this world are
become the kingdoms of our Lord, and of his Christ; and he shall
reign for ever and ever” (Rev. 11:15).
9. See W. E. Vine, An Expository Dictionary of New Testament Words, vol. IV (New

XLVI
Perseverance
The doctrine of perseverance means that those whom God has

redeemed in Christ can neither totally nor finally fall away from the
state of grace, for by the sovereign decree of God, they shall
persevere therein to their life’s end, and shall be eternally saved. As
we have seen, in 1 John 5:18, we are told that
We know that whosoever is begotten of God sinneth not; but
he that was begotten of God keepeth himself, and the evil one
toucheth him not. (ERV, 1881)
In the state of grace, we are not immune to sin, but we are immune
to the power of Satan insofar as any severing of ourselves from the
grace and calling of God are concerned. We have been redeemed
and restored to our calling to exercise dominion and to subdue the
earth. As far as being touched in our calling is concerned, Satan
cannot touch or sever us from it: we have an immunity by the grace
of God.
Two things are at once apparent. First, the doctrine of
perseverance cannot be reduced to a merely personal victory
against Satan. It is clearly that, but it is also much, much more. In
neither its personal nor its social implications is the doctrine of
perseverance a “grin-and-bear-it, and you will survive” philosophy.
The root meaning of perseverance, from the Latin through the
French, means to persist in a purpose, to continue striving (per,
through; severus, strict). The word perseverance appears in Ephesians
6:18, but not in the doctrinal sense. The word there used is
proskarteresis, meaning, to continue steadfastly in a thing and give
unremitting care to it, as in Romans 13:6, where it is translated
“attending.” The doctrine thus is not readily expressed in any single
word but is set forth throughout Scripture in a number of
sentences and assumptions. Thus, in Jeremiah 32:36-44, it means
that God will use His saints to accomplish His purpose of
restoration and reconstruction, although Jeremiah’s reference is to
417
the limited restoration after the Babylonian Captivity and before
Christ’s first coming. In Isaiah 54:10-17, it clearly has reference to
the triumph of all believers and their establishment on earth under
God. Our Lord and St. Paul also stressed the aspect of our
indefectibility, which is a central facet of the doctrine:
And I give unto them eternal life; and they shall never perish,
neither shall any man pluck them out of my hand. My Father,
which gave them me, is greater than all; and no man is able to
pluck them out of my Father’s hand. (John 10:28-29)
Being confident of this very thing, that he which hath begun a
good work in you will perform it until the day of Jesus Christ.
(Phil. 1:6)
Who shall lay anything to the charge of God’s elect? It is God
that justifieth. Who is he that condemneth? It is Christ that
died, yea rather, that is risen again, who is even at the right
hand of God who also maketh intercession for us.... For I am
persuaded that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor
principalities, nor powers, nor things present, nor things to
come, Nor height, nor depth, nor any other creature, shall be
able to separate us from the love of God, which is in Christ
Jesus our Lord. (Rom. 8:33-34, 38-39)
God’s grace is sovereign, irresistible, and indefectible. It is a
significant fact that those who, like Blunt, deny the doctrine of
indefectible grace to the redeemed, replace it with the doctrine of
the indefectibility of the church. As Blunt defined this, it meant
(1) the perpetuity of the Church, by which it is free from
failure in succession of members. (2) the inerrancy and
infallibility of the Church, by which it is free from failure in
holding and declaring the Truth.1
As so stated, it is on the one hand at least meaningless, and, on the
other, very mischievous. It declares that there will always be a true
church on earth, and that the true church will never be faithless to
its Lord or err in the faith. This true church in this sense cannot be
identified with any historical church but is the invisible and elect
body at its best and most faithful service. So viewed, the doctrine
1.Rev. John Henry Blunt, editor, Dictionary of Doctrinal and Historical Theology
(London: Longinans, Green, 1891), 340.
Perseverance 419
means that, from the perspective of eternity there is always an
indefectible and faithful church, but it is never a particular church.
The danger is that infallibility is made by this doctrine an attribute
of an historical institution which is in processes of development,
growth, decay, and reform. An attribute of God and His word is
transferred to an aspect of history and process. Blunt (and others)
have added inerrancy and infallibility to indefectibility. The
practical consequence has been arrogant churchmanship: the
theological consequence has been a neoplatonic idealization of the
church. The Biblical grounds for the doctrine of the church’s
inerrancy and infallibility are not valid ones; it would be as easy, in
terms of a like misuse of texts, to justify a doctrine of the state’s
inerrancy and infallibility from Romans 13:6, “for they are God’s
ministers, attending continually upon this very thing.”
Blunt’s argument against indefectible grace to the elect is that it
denies free-will.2 In any absolute and primary sense, it clearly does;
Scripture reserves sovereignty and primary freedom and causality
to God, for they are the attributes of God. Blunt denied the
doctrine to man, to preserve man’s free will, as his own god, and
ascribed indefectible grace to the church, to exalt the church.
Let us examine a declaration of our Lord, which speaks of the
church and is relevant to perseverance, Matthew 16:15-19:
15. He saith unto them, But whom say ye that I am?
16. And Simon Peter answered and said, Thou art the Christ,
the Son of the living God.
17. And Jesus answered and said unto him, Blessed art thou,
Simon Bar-jona: for flesh and blood hath not revealed it unto
thee, but my Father which is in heaven.
18. And I say also unto thee, That thou art Peter, and upon this
rock I will build my church; and the gates of hell shall not
prevail against it.
19. And I will give unto thee the keys of the kingdom of
heaven: and whatsoever thou shalt bind on earth shall be
bound in heaven: and whatsoever thou shalt loose on earth
shall be loosed in heaven.
2. Ibid., 341.
Among other things, our Lord here declares that Peter’s free and
voluntary confession of faith represented also the primary will and
purpose of God the Father. He declared Simon’s name to be Peter
because of this confession, i.e., of the rock, God, and on this rock,
God the Son, and man’s confession of Him, He would build His
church. Morgan commented:
Once more reminding ourselves that He was speaking to
Hebrews, it is of great significance that if we trace the
figurative use of the word “Rock” throughout the Hebrew
Scripture, we find it is never used symbolically of man, but
always of God. The Hebrew word is the word Tsur, and we
find it occurring at least forty times figuratively in the Old
Testament. Twice it is used of false gods in Deuteronomy 32,
as they are put into contrast with the Rock of Israel, Who is
the living God. In every other instance the figurative use of the
word applies to God.
The Rock therefore is the living God, and those forming the
Church are such as are built into Him, as Peter presently puts
it in one of his letters, such as are “partakers of the Divine
nature.” The intention is very clearly revealed as we take the
words of Peter once again, beginning at the end. First, “the
living God,” then One Who is “the Son of the living God”;
and finally, that One, the Messiah. Jesus said, “On that Rock I
will build My Church,” that is, on God manifest in time in His
Son, and administering the affairs of the world through the
Son as Messiah. Peter had found the foundation, the petra, and
by being brought into living touch with Him, had become
petros, of the Rock nature.3
The triune God is the Rock, and Peter and all believers are of that
Rock when they confess Christ as Lord and Savior. The same point
was made by Aelfric (955-1022), in a homily, “Of the Apostle
Peter”:
Jesus then said, “What say ye that I am?” Peter answered him,
“Thou art Christ, the living God’s Son.” The Lord to him said
for answer, “Blessed art thou, Simon, dove’s child,” & c.
***Bede the expounder unveils to us the deepness of this
lesson*** The Lord said to Peter, “Thou art rocken.” (Literally
3.G. Campbell Morgan, Peter and the Church (London: Pickering & Inglish,
1937), 17f.
Perseverance 421
stonen, having the same relation to stone as rocken to rock,
golden to gold, earthen to earth, & c.) — For the strength of
his faith, and for the firmness of his confession, he received
that name; because he joined himself with steadfast mind to
Christ who is called a Rock by the Apostle Paul.
“And I will build my church upon this rock”; that is, upon the
faith which Thou confessest. All God’s convocation is built
upon the rock; that is, upon Christ; because he is the
ground-wall of all the structures of his own church.
All God’s churches are accounted as one convocation; and this
is built with chosen men, not with dead stones; and all the
building of those lively stones is laid upon Christ; because we
are, through faith, accounted his members and he our “aller”
head. Who(soever) builds off the ground-wall, his work shall
fall, to (his) great loss.
Jesus said, “The gates of hell shall not have power against my
church.” Sins and erroneous doctrine are hell’s gates, because
they lead the sinful (man) as it were through a gate into hell’s
torment. Many are these gates; but none of them shall have
power against the holy convocation, which is built upon the
firm rock, Christ; because the believer, through Christ’s
protection, escapes the perils of the devilish temptations.4
Going back even earlier, we find that Tertullian distinguished
between “the doctrine of apostles and their power.” The keys of the
Kingdom meant the power to interpret the law faithfully: where
God’s law was faithfully set forth, men’s sins were bound or loosed
in heaven because the earthly action set forth God’s law and reality.
Of Acts 15:7-11, Tertullian wrote, “This sentence both ‘loosed’
those parts of the law which were abandoned, and ‘bound’ those
which were reserved.” The true church, the church faithful to the
law-word of God, thus alone has this power:
And accordingly “the church,” it is true, will forgive sins: but
(it will be) the church of the Spirit, by means of a spiritual man;
not the church which consists of a number of bishops. For the
right and arbitrament is the Lord’s, not the servant’s; God’s
Himself, not the priest’s.5
4. E.Thomson, editor, Select Monuments of the Doctrine and Worship of the Catholic
Church in England Before the Norman Conquest (John Russell Smith, 1875), 95-99.
Clearly, our Lord’s point is that He is the church Himself, and
that we are of the church when we confess the triune God and the
incarnate Redeemer, Jesus Christ. Our Lord also clearly declared
that the elect cannot be plucked out of His hand (John 10:28-29):
they are indefectible. Now, in speaking of the church as the elect
(Matt. 16:17), He then declares (v. 18) that “the gates of hell shall
not prevail against it.” The word prevail is in the Greek katischuo, to
be strong against. It means here that “the gates of hell” cannot hold
out against the true church, the people of God. The image is clearly
one of defensive structures, designed to prevent intrusion and
conquest. Our Lord thus portrayed His people, those confessing
His name, as besieging, conquering, and destroying “the gates of
hell.”
The doctrine of perseverance is thus clearly what can be called a
“postmillennial” doctrine. It means that 1) the elect are
indefectible, and that 2) their perseverance culminates in the defeat
and destruction of the enemy’s forces and their triumph in Christ.
“The God of peace shall bruise Satan under your feet shortly”
(Rom. 16:20). Satan shall be crushed under the feet of God’s elect.
Second, it is apparent that the doctrine of perseverance has, as a
result of pietistic influences, been limited to the victory of the
individual believer, and then only negatively, against sin, not
positively in exercising dominion and subduing the earth. But our
Lord made it clear that the enemy cannot “prevail,” withstand, or
hold out against the attack of the people of God, that is, the church
as a congregation and as elect persons rather than as an institution.
Older hymns still reflected a vision of conquest. In 1864, W. W.
How wrote,
Guard the helpless; seek the strayed;
Comfort troubles; banish griefs;
In the might of GOD arrayed,
Scatter sin and unbelief.
Be the banner still unfurled,
5.
The Writings of Quintus Sept. Flor. Tertullianus, in Tertullian, “On Modesty,” An-
te-Nicene Christian Library, vol. XVIII (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1870), 116-
120.
Perseverance 423
Still unsheathed the SPIRIT’S sword,
Till the kingdoms of the world
Are the Kingdom of the LORD.
This sings of perseverance unto conquest. Where the element of
triumph is eliminated from the doctrine of perseverance, two
things then ensue. First, the doctrine of perseverance withers and
begins to disappear, because it has become merely a matter of
suffering unto death. The difference between a perseverance unto
martyrdom and a perseverance unto victory is sharply defined by
the difference between John Knox and other men of his day. As
Ridley has seen it, Knox had almost nothing to say about the
horrors of being a galley slave. All the available accounts make it
clear that the torments of such slaves were very great.6 Yet Knox
does not tell us about his own sufferings.
But Knox had suffered for his faith in the galleys. The
sixteenth century, like the twentieth century, was an age of
propaganda, and stories about the sufferings of martyrs and
prisoners played an important part in the propaganda. Martyrs
like Anne Askew, Hooper, and others wrote simple and
moving accounts of their sufferings in prison, of the tortures
to which they were subjected, and the mockery and insults
which they endured. Bale and John Foxe published these
stories, and roused the pity and indignation of their protestant
readers. Knox might have written an account of the sufferings
of a galley slave which, nearly two hundred years before
Marteilhe, would have stirred the anger of Protestant Europe
at the treatment of Protestants in the French galleys. He did
not do so. In the whole of Knox’s writings, there are only a few
short references to the “torments of the galleys”; and in his
History there is nothing about torments. The references are to
resistance, to caps kept on during religious ceremonies, to the
throwing of the statue of the Virgin in the river, to threats by
the prisoners to “stick” the priest at mass. It is not an account
of the sufferings of a martyr in a lonely prison cell, but a mass
resistance by prisoners of war. As with some modern
reminiscences of prisoners of war, the reader is almost sorry
for the guards. Knox makes no attempt to arouse the reader’s
pity for himself.
6. See Edwin Arber, editor, The Torments of Protestant Slaves in the French King’s Gal-
leys, and in the Dungeone of Marseilles, 1686-1707 A.D. (London, 1907).
Knox may have been lucky enough to have had a relatively
mild souscomite, to have been allowed his rest after a reasonable
shift, and never to have felt the whip on his bare shoulders as
he pulled the oar; but there must have been, at least, many
insults and humiliations which had to be borne, many
instances of bullying, and taunting, and the raucous bawling of
orders in the international language of the sea, with the
dreaded shout of “Arranque! Arranque!” to make the galley
slaves row faster. Not even for the sake of Protestant
propaganda was Knox prepared to let the world know about
them. He saw himself as trampling on his enemy, not writhing
under his enemy’s foot, and if there were moments in the
galleys when he was trampled on, he was eager to forget them
and to tell no one else. Many Protestants gloried in their
sufferings, and seemed almost to be seeking martyrdom.
Knox did not want martyrdom; he wanted victory.7
Knox exemplified a victorious perseverance, clearly. Deny this
element of victory, and perseverance means finally the ability or
grace to maintain the faith under suffering unto death. It means
then that the grace of God unto the elect is effectual only in the
limited sense of maintaining the faith, and not with respect to
perseverance in faith and in the creation mandate to exercise
dominion and to subdue the earth. These two things are
inseparable. We are redeemed in order to continue in that calling
which Adam abandoned. The purpose of our salvation is not
merely to save us from hell, but to reestablish us in God’s purpose
for man and to prosper us therein. The meaning of perseverance is
that God ordains that we persevere in that faith and calling. In its
pietistic sense, the doctrine of perseverance has a purely personal,
human reference. In its Biblical sense, it has that personal sense,
but it is firmly tied to the sovereign purpose and calling of God.
Second, when the element of triumph is eliminated from the
doctrine of perseverance, not only does the doctrine fade away, but
it is also transferred elsewhere, wherever the note of victory is
sounded. The claimants to perseverance include both church and
state. Whenever theology has grown weak and heretical, there the
institutional church has added to its powers. Where the believer
7. Jasper Ridley, John Knox (New York: Oxford University Press, 1968), 82.
Perseverance 425
becomes weak, there the church as protector makes itself strong.
Doctrines of the indefectibility of the church have abounded in
ages of apostasy.
Similarly, the state has also claimed indefectibility. The Marxist
theory asserts that the processes of history assure the infallible and
indefectible nature of the dictatorship of the proletariat. Victory is
thus supposedly inevitable. In the democratic theory, the Great
Society represents the indefectible order which assures the triumph
of man and his hopes.
St. John, however, tells us that the evil one cannot sever us from
our membership in Christ and our creation mandate in Him. The
Adam from above has established us, His new humanity, in God’s
original calling, and we shall persevere therein unto victory. How
far-reaching that victory shall be, Scripture makes very clear:
1. The wilderness and the solitary place shall be glad for them;
and the desert shall rejoice, and blossom as the rose.
2. It shall blossom abundantly, and rejoice even with joy and
singing: the glory of Lebanon shall be given unto it, the
excellency of Carmel and Sharon, they shall see the glory of
the LORD, and the excellency of our God.
3. Strengthen ye the weak hands, and confirm the feeble knees.
4. Say to them that are of a fearful heart, Be strong, fear not:
behold, your God will come with vengeance, even God with a
recompence; he will come and save you.
5. Then the eyes of the blind shall be opened, and the ears of
the deaf shall be unstopped.
6. Then shall the lame man leap as an hart, and the tongue of
the dumb sing: for in the wilderness shall waters break out,
and streams in the desert. (Isa. 35:1-6)
XLVII
Incarnation and Indwelling
As we have seen, some churchmen have stressed the inerrancy

and infallibility of the church, an invalid concept, rather than the
perseverance to victory of the people of God. These ideas have
been linked also to a belief in the church as a continuation of the
incarnation. The rationale is that, because Jesus is the incarnate Son
of God, the church, as His mystical body, is the extension of that
incarnation into continuing history.
A major expression of this faith appeared in 1957 in Donald M.
Baillie’s The Theology of the Sacraments. Baillie’s presupposition is that
we have “a sacramental universe.” Earlier, Tillich had argued in
favor of nature as “a sacramental element.”1 It is clear that the
word “sacrament” is used in a very different sense by these men
than with most Christians. The Westminster Shorter Catechism gives us
a succinct definition of the term:
Q. 92. What is a Sacrament?
A. A Sacrament is a holy ordinance instituted by Christ;
wherein, by sensible signs, Christ and the benefits of the new
covenant are represented, sealed, and applied to believers.
So, to limit the meaning of sacrament is not to regard nature as
outside of God and salvation, and to call the universe sacramental is
to say much more than that nature is included in the history of
salvation: it makes nature a bearer of grace, supernatural grace, to
man. Tillich spoke of nature as “bearer and an object of
salvation.”2 How does nature “bear” or bring salvation to man?
Nature, like man, is fallen and needs restoration; to make it the
“bearer” of salvation is to make it in effect one with Christ or a
continuation of the incarnation. Because of his belief in a
sacramental universe, Baillie found “something akin to what we
mean by ‘sacramental’ in most religious traditions, including the
1. Paul
Tillich, The Protestant Era (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1948),
112.
2. Ibid., 102.
427
most primitive,” since all such religions are expressions of the
world of nature.3 Moreover, Baillie added,
Some writers go further in developing the connection
between nature and sacrament. Dr. Lampert, of the Eastern
Orthodox tradition, maintains, as a general basis of the
sacraments, that there is something holy and theandric in
nature itself, and even that in some mystical sense there is a
natural connection between baptism and water.4
Theandric means relating to, or existing in terms of, the relationship
of the divine and the human. Nature is theandric and holy, i.e., it
has inherent in it both the divine and the human. Both Lampert
and Tillich limit the church sacraments to the Biblical ordinances,
but they insist on reading a sacramental nature into the universe. A
“sacramental universe” means more than that the universe was
created by God; it means that the universe is somehow a
continuation of the incarnation.
Baillie saw the sacraments as an extension of the incarnation;
others have seen the church also as an extension of the incarnation.
Baillie was not ready to agree with that: “now the relation of Christ
to the Church is not that of the soul to the body, but rather of the
head to the body. It is quite a different idea from that of Christ
being incarnate in the Church.”5 Because of his Calvinist heritage,
Baillie was aware of the difference, and he described it clearly:
If we are to work out soundly the relation of Church and
sacraments to the historic incarnation, we must take seriously
the New Testament doctrine of the Holy Spirit. This doctrine
is wholly dependent on the fact of the historic incarnation of
God on earth, but it is also wholly bound up with the idea that
the incarnation did not go on for ever, but came to an end, and
that since then the divine Presence is with us in a new way
through the Holy Spirit working in the Church through Word
and sacraments.
That excludes the idea that Christ is actually incarnate in the
Church. But of course it excludes the idea, which sometimes
3. Donald M. Baillie, The Theology of the Sacraments (New York: Charles Scribner’s
Sons, 1957), 43.
4. Ibid.,
44.
5. Ibid.,
65.
Incarnation and Indwelling 429
seems to lurk in certain sacramental theologies, that we are
concerned with a dead Christ who lived and died long ago and
whose grace has to come to us across the centuries as it were
through an unbroken sacramental channel. That is an even
more fatal way of saying that there is an extension of the
incarnation through the ages in the Church and sacraments.
I do not mean that any church or any respectable school of
theologians really holds this crude position. But it seems to be
implied in the way in which people sometimes talk of the
apostolic succession through the laying on of hands of
bishops, as if it were a channel called grace, flowing through
the centuries from the incarnate Christ; a stream that would be
lost if there were any break in the succession, or any break in
the pipeline that runs through the ages. On this view, at its
crudest, the Church with its sacraments becomes a kind of
supernatural installation instituted by God for the purpose of
transmitting to all future time the grace that came into the
world with the incarnation. Such a theory forgets that grace is
not a transmissible substance but a living personal
relationship; and it also seems to imply a dead Christ whose
grace has to be transmitted as it were horizontally through the
ages. Whereas we ought to think of the living Christ who is
with His people in every age through the Holy Spirit, and who
establishes with us through His Church, His Word and
sacraments, that personal relationship which is the very
meaning of grace.6
Baillie still held out for a “continuity” and an extension of the
incarnation in the sacraments. “But if we are to be at all true to the
New Testament, we must make this continuity, this extension of
the incarnation wholly dependent on the Word and the Spirit.”7
Baillie thus rejected both the Catholic and the Protestant positions.
Among the errors which mark Baillie’s position is the fact, first,
that he linked the sacraments primarily to the incarnation rather
than the atonement. He could therefore declare that we are saved
by God “through faith, and therefore partly through sacraments,
which He uses to awaken and to strengthen our faith. Thus the
sacrament of the Lord’s Supper is indeed a means of grace, an
6. Ibid.,
65f.
7. Ibid., 66.
instrument of salvation.” The sacrament of the Lord’s Supper is
the celebration of our redemption and our renewal therein, not a
means of salvation. Not surprisingly, Baillie has nothing to say
about propitiation, substitution, and atonement: his doctrine of
salvation points to a deification rather than a redemption of man,
although he shrank from any such conclusion. When Baillie does
refer to Calvary, it is to call it “an eternal sacrifice,” whereas
Scripture gives us a single act of total power and validity. Baillie
confused Christ’s intercessory work with His atonement and called it
“a continual offering of Himself to God on behalf of men.”8
Second, the concept of a sacramental universe has no ground in
Scripture. It implies that nature either must be overcome by grace
to be tolerable, or is itself inherently the domain of grace. In terms
of Scripture, neither view is tenable. “Nature,” even in its fallen
estate, witnesses to its Creator; this is not a sacramental but an
epistemological witness; it is a question of knowledge rather than
grace. Nature’s future, like man’s, is restoration.
Third, Baillie wanted neither the infallible word of God, the
Bible, and the sovereign, predestinating power of God, of
Calvinism, on the one hand, nor the incarnate church with its
inerrant, indefectible, and infallible powers, as in Catholic doctrine,
on the other. Baillie wanted the freedom of autonomous man, and
yet he wanted available grace, on tap when the free person of man
chose to receive it. This is what he meant by keeping it “personal.”
A letter delivered to me from a distance by the agency of the post
office is no less a personal letter, however, and the grace of God
delivered through an apostolic succession is no less personal.
Baillie has missed the point here, because he has chosen to. The
question is, which position is Biblical? All are in some sense
personal. Which, moreover, preserves the divine initiative? Baillie
would give us an extension of the incarnation which is a
momentary thing. For Barth, the Bible is the word of God, not in
any objective sense, but in the subjective sense that it speaks to me
personally at the moment of hearing, in my experience. This indeed
is personal, but it is more than that. It exalts the person to the
8. Ibid., 101f., 116-117.

throne of God: it gives priority in revelation to man’s experience,
and it reduces the sacrament to an experience of immanence, to a
form of mysticism rather than a celebration of our new life through
the atonement and our common new humanity with Christ our
Lord. The Catholic doctrine limits God’s initiative; Baillie’s
doctrine eliminates it.
The doctrine of an extended incarnation is not new. Before the
church adopted it, the state had already proclaimed it. The state
was an extension of the deity inherent in being, and its officers,
offices, or the state itself, were extensions and developments of a
concretization or incarnation of that divinity. This same power was
claimed for the individual by some philosophers.
The doctrines of Baillie and Tillich reopen the door to a
divinized state, a sacramental social order in which politics is a
means of grace and a manifestation of God incarnate. Their ideas
are thus far more radical than those of churchmen who limit the
continuation of the incarnation to the Church. The whole universe
of things and institutions is open to incarnation. If, in terms of the
theanthropic heresies of some Eastern theologies, the waters of the
earth have a natural sacramental significance, why not all wines
also? Then every alcoholic could grow in grace as he indulged
himself.
Then, too, the sexual act, as in some religions, would also be
sacramental and a means of grace. In fact, in such a perspective, all
things save Christ’s ordinances are made sacramental.
If we have a sacramental universe, all things as such are holy, and,
therefore, whatever is, is right.
When Scripture speaks of incarnation, it is only of the unique
incarnation of God in Christ. The term to be used for all else is
indwelling. St. Paul declares,
16. Know ye not that ye are the temple of God, and that the
Spirit of God dwelleth in you?
17. If any man defile the temple of God, him shall God
destroy; for the temple of God is holy, which temple ye are. (1
Cor. 3:16-17)
19. What? know ye not that your body is the temple of the
Holy Ghost which is in you, which ye have of God, and ye are
not your own?
20. For ye are bought with a price: therefore glorify God in
your body, and in your spirit, which are God’s. (1 Cor. 6:19-20)
The Temple in Jerusalem was standing when St. Paul wrote these
words, and to every Hebrew reader, there was an immediate
association of the glory of that temple with their bodies. Moreover,
every Hebrew and Gentile reader was well aware of the
magnificence of the pagan temples of Corinth, Athens, and other
cities; these too came to mind. A second image also came to mind,
especially with all Hebrew readers, the Shekinah or Glory of God
indwelling in the Holy of Holies.
These images are brought to focus in both passages on the
believer’s body. In 1 Corinthians 3:16-17, there can be a reference
to the individual believer as well as to the church; in vv. 5-10, the
reference is to the church; in vv. 11-15, the reference moves from
the building done by Paul, Apollos, and the leaders in Corinth to
every man; both the church and also every believer laboring therein
are the temple of God in 1 Corinthians 3:16-17. In 1 Corinthians
6:19-20, it is clearly every believer’s body. Shore’s comment on 1
Corinthians 3:17 is very much to the point on the significance of
indwelling in a temple:
If any man defile. Better, If any man destroy — the opposite of
“building up.” Which should be the work of the Christian
teacher; the architectural image being still in view.
Which temple ye are. — Literally, the which are ye, “which”
referring rather to holy than to the temple; the argument being
that as they are “holy” by the indwelling of God’s Spirit,
therefore they are the temple of God. As God commanded
the punishment of death to be inflicted on whoever defiled the
actual Temple (see Ex. xxviii. 43; Lev. xvi. 2), because it was
holy unto the Lord, and His presence dwelt there; so they,
having the same Spirit in them, were a temple also holy unto
the Lord, and God would not leave him unpunished who
destroyed or marred this spiritual temple.9
Any profanation of the church is a direct offense against God. The
holiness of God’s temple, the church or our bodies, is not by virtue
of anything in or of the church or our bodies but by virtue of God’s
indwelling Spirit. Profanation thus means that God’s vengeance is
directed against the church as a whole, or its leaders, or a profane
party therein. This vengeance is also directed against us if we
profane our bodies.
Turning now to 1 Corinthians 6:19-20, which deals exclusively
with our bodies, it is important to recognize that ownership of our
bodies belongs to God. As Hodge noted, of v. 19,
There are two things characteristic of a temple. First, it is
sacred as a dwelling-place of God, and therefore cannot be
profaned with impunity. Second, the proprietorship of a
temple is not in man, but in God. Both these things are true
of the believer’s body. It is a temple because the Holy Ghost
dwells in it; and because it is not his own. It belongs to God.
As it is a temple of the Holy Ghost, it cannot be profaned
without incurring great and peculiar guilt. And as it belongs in
a peculiar sense to God, it is not at our own disposal. It can
only be used for the purposes for which he designed it.10
Shore’s comment on these two verses is also telling:
There are two reasons why we are not our own. (1) The Spirit
which has possession of our bodies is not our own, but given
us “of God.” (2) We have been bought with a price, even the
blood of Christ; it is a completed purchase (I Pet. i 18, 19). Our
bodies not being our own to do as we like with, we have no
right to give them over unto sin.11
There is a very great difference between incarnation and
indwelling. First, in an incarnation, there is a union of two things,
God and man, in perfect unity without confusion: it is not possible
either to commingle and confuse the two natures or to separate and
isolate them: they are in perfect union. Thus, one nature cannot sit
9. Rev.
T. Teignmouth Shore, “The First Epistle to the Corinthians,” in C. J.
Ellicott, editor, Commentary on the Whole Bible, vol. VII (Grand Rapids, Michigan:
Zondervan, n.d.), 297.
10. Charles Hodge, An Exposition of the First Epistle to the Corinthians (Grand Rap-
11. Shore, op. cit., 306.
in judgment on the other as a separately functioning thing. If the
church is an extension of the incarnation, then the church must
have the same immunity from our judgment as Christ, and it must
possess the same infallibility as Christ. The doctrine of the church’s
infallibility is a logical development of the doctrine of the church
as an extension of the incarnation. If the universe is sacramental,
then an element of divinity is channelled through the universe, and
the groundwork is laid for a view of the world of nature as God
manifest and incarnate.
Second, with indwelling as with incarnation, there is no confusion
of either deity or humanity, deity or the natural, created order.
However, there is no perfect unity or an incorporation, and,
whereas we cannot separate the earthly person of Jesus Christ from
the second person of the Trinity and declare that this much was
God, and that much was not, where indwelling is concerned, the
line of division is very clear and obvious. The indweller, moreover,
judges the one indwelled. God the Son never judges Jesus of
Nazareth: the idea is an impossibility. God the Son does judge the
church, and He does judge the believer. To call persons, officers,
the church, or the state extensions of the incarnation is to place
them beyond the criticism of God and man alike. This Scripture
does not allow us to do. Rather, that which is indwelled is most
severely judged for profaning its privileges and glory. In fact,
“judgment must begin at the house of God: and if it first begin at
us, what shall the end be of them that obey not the gospel of God?”
(1 Peter 4:17). Although the believer has the hope of redemption,
whereas the reprobate do not, the believer is most quickly judged.
That which is indwelled has a high privilege, but it is also subject to
judgment for abuse of privilege.
Third, the Christian can be God’s temple, and the church also.
Clearly, too, the godly state in the Old Testament also could be
indwelled by God’s Spirit. The Civil pentecost12 was a witness to
this, as well as the anointing of kings. The Christian state can be
indwelled, as can the Christian family, school, and place of
12. SeeR. J. Rushdoony, Institutes of Biblical Law (Nutley, New Jersey: Presbyte-
rian and Reformed Publishing Company, 1972), 242ff.
business. God will house where He is honored and His law-word
obeyed. He calls rulers who obey him his “shepherds” (Jer. 23:4).
Fourth, the concept of indwelling on the one hand keeps God
and man separate, as Scripture requires, and, on the other, brings
them together in terms of man’s faith and obedience. It means that,
as man grows in his reconstruction of all things in terms of God’s
word, he enjoys more clearly the comfort, glory, and power of the
indwelling Spirit. It means also that he is in all things, places, and
institutions under the jurisdiction of God’s Spirit and God’s
law-word. He cannot separate himself at any point from God, nor
from God’s indwelling Spirit, nor isolate any vocation, institution,
or function of his life from the requirement of holiness.
It means, moreover, that the church is the body of Christ only
insofar as it is holy and obedient to the Lord. It does not incarnate
a status and guarantee itself an irreversible destiny by virtue of
being called a church. As our Lord said of one church, “So then
because thou art lukewarm, and neither cold nor hot, I will spue
thee out of my mouth” (Rev. 3:15).
Men, in analyzing the Bible for its doctrines of the church and of
the state, have been consistently annoyed at the paucity of data.
The reason is an obvious one. The non-Christian world has always
been heavily institutionalized. It looks to a network of institutions
to provide the binding and sustaining element in society. Scripture,
however, sees the binding and sustaining element as God’s law,
which men and institutions must serve. There is a marked
difference between a society dominated by institutions and one
dominated by the law of God. The institutional society seeks to
divinize itself. The law society of God rejoices in the indwelling
Spirit.
XLVIII
Predestination
Few things are more often deliberately misunderstood than the

doctrine of predestination. Because so much is at stake in this
doctrine, every attempt has been made to obscure and distort the
basic issues. In order to understand what is involved, certain things
need to be brought into focus.
First, predestination is an inescapable concept. It is the doctrine
of ultimate, absolute, and controlling power and law governing all
things. The alternative to predestination is a belief in chance, that
nothing save total and absolute randomness prevails. Things are
and occur without order, meaning, aim, choice, or law; all things
are accidental and casual, and an undetermined probability, which
is total possibility, alone exists. This belief has not been held by any
religion or philosophy, although it has been nominally professed as
a means of undermining some particular faith. Polytheism in the
ancient world held to the passing of the gods, but, behind the gods
was all-controlling fate and a governing cycle of an eternal
recurrence of all things. For Hinduism and Buddhism, the universe
might be mindless, and nothingness ultimate, but law and karma
still governed all things. God was absent from these and other
systems of thought, but not predestination. The fact of God and of
moral accountability to Him has been consistently denied in the
history of apostate thought, but the reality of God has been
admitted in some adulterated form, so that predestination without
God has been affirmed.
Second, the doctrine of predestination is only truly theistic in its
Biblical form. While related to God in some faiths, as in
Mohammedanism, it also tends to become therein a blind,
mechanical fate. Historically, thus, the doctrine is not necessarily
theistic. It can be a blind karma; it can be dialectical materialism,
naturalistic determinism, Spinoza’s pantheism, or any one of a
number of other doctrines, but in every case it still affirms an
ultimate and absolute law and order. In the overwhelming majority
437
of cases, the doctrine, as we encounter it in the history of thought,
is not theistic. Metaphysically, we can affirm that the concept of an
absolute and ultimate government and order is illogical and
impossible without God, but historically we must recognize that it is
normally separated from God and given other names.
Third, when the doctrine of predestination is denied, it does not
disappear. Where denied to God, predestination then accrues to
some other agency, nature, man, or the state. The doctrine cannot
be denied: it can only be transferred, so that it is important,
wherever we meet a denial of it, to ask immediately where the new
locale of ultimacy of determination has been established. The
common objection to the doctrine as “the horrible decree” is to
God’s predestination. There is less objection to it when it is called
naturalistic determinism: it is then a good scientific doctrine. The same
is true of dialectical materialism: Marxist predestination is hailed by
many as a liberating doctrine. The doctrine is seen as oppressive
only when theistic.
Fourth, this means, plainly, that the issue at stake in the doctrine
of predestination is a very simple one, namely, who is truly God,
the God of Scripture, or man? The doctrine is “horrible” when
ascribed to God because the goal of sinful man is to be his own
god, determining for himself what constitutes good and evil (Gen.
3:5). God’s predestination is an affront to man, who chooses to be
his own predestinator. Henley’s Invictus is to the sinner beautiful
sentiment and a fine creed, but God’s word is an affront, because
fallen man is determined to be his own god. Determination of all
things is thus taken from God by the philosophers of autonomous
man, and placed in “nature,” whose crowning voice and expression
is man. Therefore, man now makes himself, is his own
predestinator, defines his own essence, in Sartre’s language, and
becomes his own law and government. No power beyond man is
permitted.
Fifth, as is thus obvious, man is made lord, so that the logical step
is predestination by man. Orton saw, though dimly, the connection
between the decline of the Puritan faith in Providence and the rise
of a new providence and predestination by the state:
Predestination 439
There is an interesting connection between the rise of direct
democracy and the increasing centralization of power. It is not
wholly due to the technological factor. Perhaps some of the
attitudes people used to assume towards an
anthropomorphous deity or the Puritan “Providence” have
been transferred to the modern state simply because it is big,
powerful, and remote, and some sort of faith is still needed.
The fact that state action minutely affects everyone does not
dispel the psychological distance, because while the doings
may be ubiquitous, the doer remains remote and (often
literally) inaccessible. “Providence” was rather like that —
remote, majestic, a little grim, but nonetheless supposed to be
minding everybody’s business.1
This is more than “an interesting connection”; it is a necessary one.
Fallen man is the creature who wills to be god and therefore to
govern and determine all things. By whatever agency he displaces
God’s government, man will thereby seek to establish his own
ultimacy and absolute government. Fallen man is unwilling, in
Calvin’s words, “to leave to God his whole power untouched.”2
Indeed, as Sartre baldly states it, “man is the being whose project
is to be God.” To be God means to be the controller of all things
and the source of all possibilities. Sartre defines freedom thus: “For
freedom is nothing other than a choice which creates for itself its
own possibilities.”3 This is not creaturely or secondary freedom,
but an ultimate freedom that Sartre aims at: it is an integral aspect
of deity.
Sixth, salvation means predestination; the savior is the
predestinator, and vice versa. It is impossible to save man if one
cannot also protect man from all contingencies. If the savior is not
the predestinator, his salvation amounts to no more than saving a
man from one leaky, sinking lifeboat to place him into another no
better than the first; this is not salvation but mockery. Accordingly,
the modern savior state has made itself the modern predestinating
state. Having claimed to be man’s savior, it must of necessity
1.
William Aylott Orton, The Economic Role of the State (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1950), 17.
2. John Calvin, Commentaries on the First Book of Moses, Called Genesis, vol. II
3. Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness (New York: Philosophical Library,
1956), 566.
control all of life. This means total control over man. Not
surprisingly, this means control over man’s mind, his genetics, his
right to live or die, his family, education, vocation, religion, and all
things else. Predestination is thus not an irrelevant or obsolete
subject in the modern world: it is a central issue.
The predestination of the sovereign and triune God is
transcendental. This means that it is a control from beyond time and
history, beyond man. It is exercised by God from all eternity.
Having made all things in perfect harmony with His will and within
the framework of creation, there is no conflict of interests in God’s
sovereign counsel. As a result, there is no conflict between man’s
secondary freedom and responsibility and God’s primary freedom
and His determination of all things. The clockmaker does not have
a conflict between the hour hand and the minute hand he makes:
each serves his purpose. So all things in God’s creation serve His
purpose and find their own fulfillment therein. Man is not
frustrated nor constrained because God is God, but only when
man plays at being god. As the Westminster Confession of Faith
declares, in Chapter III, Section I,
God from all eternity did by the most wise and holy counsel
of his own will freely and unchangeably ordain whatsoever
comes to pass: yet so as thereby neither is God the author of
sin, nor is violence offered to the will of the creatures, nor is
the liberty or contingency of second causes taken away, but
rather established.
God has a plan from all eternity with respect to His creation, a
comprehensive plan which determines all things and which is not
conditional. “Known unto God are all his works from the
beginning of the world” (Acts 15:18). As A. A. Hodge noted,
The plan of God comprehends and determines all things and
events of every kind that come to pass.
This is rendered certain from the fact that all God’s works of
creation and providence constitute one system. No event is
isolated, either in the physical or moral world, either in heaven
or on earth. All of God’s supernatural revelations and every
advance of human science conspire to make this truth
conspicuously luminous. Hence the original intention which
Predestination 441
determines one event must also determine every other event
related to it as cause, condition or consequent, direct and
indirect, immediate and remote. Hence, the plan which
determines general ends must also determine even the
minutest element comprehended in the system of which those
ends are parts. The free actions of free agents constitute an
eminently important and effective element in the system of
things. If the plan of God did not determine events of this
class, he could make nothing certain, and his government of
the world would be made contingent and dependent, and all
his purposes fallible and mutable.4
St. Paul declared, God “worketh all things after the counsel of his
own will” (Eph. 1:11). God is absolute and sovereign in the
government of all things; moreover, His decree is from eternity and
is eternal. As Shaw clearly stated it,
To suppose any of the divine decrees to be made in time, is to
suppose the knowledge of the Deity to be limited. If from
eternity he knew all things that come to pass, then from
eternity he must have ordained them; for if they had not been
determined upon, they could not have been foreknown as
certain.5
Predestination by man and/or by man’s institutions and agencies is
immanent predestination. It is inherent to the world and is from
within the world. Whereas God’s predestination offers no violence
to the will of man, nor is the liberty or contingency of second
causes taken away or denied, but rather established, immanent
predestination does violence to the will of man and it does destroy
the liberty of second causes. Two powers cannot exercise equal and
identical authority within the same area, yet this is precisely what
immanent predestination involves. The state or some other human
agency seeks that determining power over man which properly
belongs to man; it seeks control over schools and churches, which
means the elimination of their self-determination. The
predestinating agency (now the state, but in other times the clan or
family, religious institutions, and other organizations) preempts an
4. Archibald Alexander Hodge, A Commentary on The Confession of Faith (Philadel-
phia: Presbyterian Board of Publication, 1869), 93f.
of Divines (Philadelphia: Presbyterian Board of Publication, 1846), 60.
area of life which under God is a separate and distinct area of law
and government. When an agency within creation claims absolute
powers, it must of necessity suppress and enslave all other agencies.
For a second cause to claim to be the first cause means that it must
war against all other second causes. There is, then, a denial of man’s
only freedom, secondary freedom. The state, when it seeks to
predestinate by cradle-to-grave control over man and by total
planning, cannot reach out into eternity and touch God, but it can
within time subjugate and enslave man.
When men deny God’s predestination, they then assert in one
form or another predestination by man. Predestination by man is
the fountainhead of all tyranny and slavery. However, as Boettner
has shown, predestination by God is a doctrine which has proven
to be a source of liberty and morality.6
A doctrine of salvation which is not grounded on predestination
proves to be quicksand and disaster. It does not offer salvation,
and, very quickly, another savior-predestinator appears. When the
churches abandoned the doctrine of predestination, they soon
began to drop the orthodox doctrine of salvation by Christ. The
state then presented itself as savior and predestinator, and most
churches were ready to hail it as such.
6. Loraine
Boettner, The Reformed Doctrine of Predestination Grand Rapids, Michi-
gan: Eerdmans, 1960).
XLIX
The Principle of Hilarity
In a very striking passage, the psalmist speaks of a fact of life

which modern man has forgotten about:
5. They that sow in tears shall reap in joy.
6. He that goeth forth and weepeth, bearing precious seed,
shall doubtless come again with rejoicing, bringing his sheaves
with him. (Ps. 126:5-6)
The reference is to a time of famine, still a common fact in many
parts of the world, although Western man, especially in America, is
only rarely aware of it. Whether occasioned by drought, war, or
royal tyranny, famine left men starving. For a farmer, then, to take
out of the meager store of remaining grain, seed for sowing was a
trying act. If the weather or enemy troops destroyed that seed as it
sprouted, he and his family were doomed to die of hunger. As a
result, through the centuries men have often sown in tears; they
have gone forth, weeping, “bearing precious seed,” knowing that
their hope of life was in that harvest, but also knowing that the
scattered seed shortened the number of days left for survival.
With respect to God’s Kingdom and calling, the psalmist says,
those who sow in this same way, with the same surrender of the
moment to God’s future, shall doubtless reap a rich harvest.
St. Paul refers to this in 2 Corinthians 9:6,
But this I say, He which soweth sparingly shall reap also
sparingly; and he which soweth bountifully shall reap also
bountifully.
A man cannot survive by a sparing or token sowing of grain;
halfway measures are futile. To eat the seed grain is an
abandonment of the future in favor of eating today and dying
tomorrow; so it is with the man who does not give to the Lord. To
give sparingly is comparable to being unable to live either for today
or tomorrow; it is a halting between two opinions. Only he who
sows bountifully can and shall reap bountifully. The future we have
443
is the future we plan for, either in terms of ourselves or in terms of
God.
The context of Paul’s comment is the collection for the poor in
Jerusalem. This was not a part of their tithe. Paul is asking for a
voluntary gift (2 Cor. 8:1-9:15). The tithe is not a gift: it is God’s
tax. We cannot regard this collection as a part of the poor tithe or
any aspect of their normal giving. Paul makes it clear that he cannot
command their giving: “I speak not by commandment, but by
occasion of the forwardness of others, and to prove the sincerity
of your love” (2 Cor. 8:8). The Berkeley Version renders this, “I am
not issuing an order, but I would test the genuineness of your love
by the readiness of others,” i.e., I am asking you to take a cue from
the readiness of others to give, and, if possible, to do still better.
Christians have a requirement of generosity laid upon them by
Christ, Who declared, “freely ye have received, freely give” (Matt.
10:8). “For ye know the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, that,
though he was rich, yet for your sakes he became poor, that ye
through his poverty might be rich” (2 Cor. 8:9). This has been ably
paraphrased thus: “But let me remind you of the great love of
Christ, who divested Himself of the riches of His glory and became
poor for your sakes, that by His self-denial and humility you might
inherit eternal salvation.”1
God is asking no man to give what he does not possess, or to be
prodigal in his giving. He is, however, asking for generous giving,
and God will provide for His faithful ones as He provided His
people with manna in the wilderness, i.e., He will providentially
care for them. Again, the paraphrase of 2 Corinthians 8:10-15 can
help us understand St. Paul’s argument:
(10) In saying this I am not laying a command upon you, for
you have already manifested the spirit and practised the duty
of giving this twelvemonth past. (11) Complete the offering
according to your means, (12) for the willing mind is shown by
gifts in accordance with your ability, and not by foolish
prodigality beyond it. (13) My purpose is not to make others a
burden upon you, (14) but to get you to supply what they lack,
1. J. R. Dummelow, editor, A Commentary on the Holy Bible (New York: The Mac-
millan Company, 1942), 937.
The Principle of Hilarity 445
and them to supply what you lack; (15) thus acting on the
principle of equality illustrated in the bestowal of the manna in
bygone days, that none should have too much, and none too
little.2
Paul’s reference in vv. 14 and 15, Plumptre pointed out, meant that
“A time might come in which their relative position would be
inverted, and then he would plead no less earnestly that Jerusalem
should assist Corinth.”3
Let us examine some of the implications thus far of what St. Paul
has said. First, tithing is not involved, but gifts apart from the tithe.
It is a voluntary gift, since no one can be commanded in God’s
name to give above his tithe, which is God’s tax. Second, while the
giving Paul speaks of is not mandatory, it is revelatory: “to prove
the sincerity of your love” (2 Cor. 8:8). The test of love is in action.
“So many suppose they really love God because they are conscious
of feelings which they dignify with that name; yet they do not obey
him. It is therefore by the fruits of feeling we must judge of its
genuineness both in ourselves and others.”4 To pay taxes to Christ
is one thing: to be ready and zealous in gifts is one aspect of love.
Third, the one we must love is not man primarily, but Christ. In
the next verse, 2 Corinthians 8:9, the love of Christ is cited to
remind us of the extent of His love, so that we might not be
niggardly in our giving. To love Christ is to love His people, also.
Our Lord made this clear in the Parable of the Last Judgment:
“Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my
brethren, ye have done it unto me” (Matt. 25:40). We are to prove
the sincerity of our love of Christ by ministering to the needs of
fellow believers.
Fourth, related to this is the common requirement of hospitality,
which is stressed in all of Scripture. Christians are required to “use
hospitality one to another without grudging” (1 Peter 4:9); but this
commandment also applies to strangers, and we should not be
2. Ibid.
3. E. H.
Plumptre, “The Second Epistle to the Corinthians,” in C. J. Ellicott,
editor, Commentary on the Whole Bible, vol. VII (Grand Rapids, Michigan:
Zondervan, n.d.), 392.
4. Charles Hodge, An Exposition of the Second Epistle to the Corinthians (Grand Rap-
“forgetful to entertain strangers” (Heb. 13:2). Church officers are
not only required, as a part of their qualification for office, to be
“given to hospitality,” but also to be known as “lovers” of doing so
(1 Tim. 3:2; Titus 1:8). Practically, this means today that the
Christian must be marked, not by a miserly spirit, but by a readiness
to entertain other Christians, to pick up the check when together,
to demonstrate, in brief, that the bonds of love between fellow
believers, and hospitality to a stranger, are more important than a
self-seeking prudence. A miserly man is clearly lawless, because
hospitality is a requirement for Christians and a manifestation of
grace.
Fifth, self-protection and self-advancement must give place to
the love of Christ and of His people. For the Christian, survival is
not the highest “law,” nor is it to be regarded as having priority
over God’s law. Men are not to harm themselves by giving
prodigally, but neither are they to be self-serving with their
property. Hodge ably sums up the meaning of 2 Corinthians.
8:13-15 thus:
The moral lesson taught in Exodus 16:18, is that which the
apostle had just inculcated. There it is recorded that the
people, by the command of God, gathered of the manna an
omer for each person. Those who gathered more retained
only the alloted portion; and those who gathered less had their
portion increased to the given standard. There was as to the
matter of necessity an equality. If any one attempted to hoard
his portion, it spoiled upon his hands. The lesson therefore
taught in Exodus and by Paul is, that, among the people of
God, the superabundance of one should be employed in
relieving the necessities of others; and that any attempt to
countervail this law will result in shame and loss. Property is
like manna, it will not bear hoarding.5
Lest anyone foolishly conclude that Hodge was a “radical,” let it be
noted that he was in his already comparatively conservative time an
arch-conservative, although he did cause grief and anger to his
Southern students and friends by his views in 1861.6 Hodge was
5. Ibid., 206.
6. Robert Manson Myers, editor, The Children of Pride (New Haven, Connecticut:
Yale University Press, 1972), 649ff.
being faithful to Scripture. The point in Exodus 16:18 and in 2 Cor.
8:13-15 does clearly state that in a Christian society there will be a
generosity of giving, whereby in matters of necessity such as food
there will be an equality. This is not communism. The whole of
Scripture emphatically stresses private property, but it also stresses
stewardship. It is not Biblical to accept the one without the other.
In a Christian society, the basic tax is the tithe. Above and over that,
the kind of giving St. Paul here sets forth as a test of our love of
Christ is an aspect of our stewardship. The man who takes the
private property emphasis of Scripture without accepting the tithe,
the law of hospitality, and the standard of St. Paul is marked by
self-justification rather than Christ’s justification.
Sixth, there is a law involved, St. Paul adds, a law of reward and
judgment. In 2 Corinthians 9:6-11, there is at the beginning and
end a reference to the sowing of seed (cf. Ps. 126: 5-6). Clearly, one
of the laws, not only of farming but also of our relationship with
men under God, requires a bountiful sowing, i.e., generosity,
hospitality, and a use of property to advance the cause of Christ
and His Kingdom rather than merely ourselves:
6. But this I say, He which soweth sparingly shall reap also
sparingly; and he which soweth bountifully shall reap also
bountifully.
7. Every man according as he purposeth in his heart, so let him
give; not grudgingly, or of necessity, for God loveth a cheerful
giver.
8. And God is able to make all grace abound toward you; that
ye, always having all sufficiency in all things, may abound to
every good work:
9. (As it is written, He hath dispersed abroad; he hath given to
the poor: his righteousness remaineth for ever.
10. Now he that ministereth seed to the sower both minister
bread for your food, and multiply your seed sown, and
increase the fruits of your righteousness;)
11. Being enriched in every thing to all bountifulness, which
causeth through us thanksgiving to God. (2 Cor. 9:6-11)
In His own way, God exacts vengeance on the miserly believer,
whereas He blesses those who give generously.
Seventh, this giving is as “every man... purposeth in his heart.” It
is a test, and the guidelines or answers are not revealed to us
precisely because it is we who are being tested. If we begrudge
giving, or being hospitable, and if we justify ourselves with endless
good reasons (all excuses are good excuses when we make them),
we have indeed been tested and found wanting. Tithing is a matter
of law; failure to tithe is a sin. Hospitality is a commandment, but
the measure of hospitality and the extent of voluntary giving is a
test of man.
Eighth, the word “cheerful,” like other English words, has
weakened in its meaning since the King James Version was
translated. The word cheerful in the Greek is hilaros, and it means a
readiness and a joyfulness which is prompt to do anything. St. Paul
tells us that “God loveth a cheerful (hilarious) giver.” This is not
new to St. Paul. Proverbs 22:9 declares, “He that hath a bountiful
eye (i.e., who is cheerful and a giver, LXX) shall be blessed; for he
giveth of his bread to the poor.” This is a beatitude. If we give
because we feel that we must, we avoid judgment but gain no
blessing. It is the joyful, the hilarious giver whom God loves, the
man who delights in opportunities to serve and help in Christ’s
name. The grudging giver gains nothing.
Normally, the time of sowing is a time of joy. The tears described
in Psalm 126:5-6 refer to times of disaster. At all other times,
sowing was a joyful occasion, and, until recent years, preceded in
much of the world by a variety of religious festivals and rites.
Sowing and reaping were holy or sacred times and were celebrated
as such The word holyday has become holiday, and holidays have
become man’s new sabbaths. Holidays now are more and more
geared, in one country after another, to nationalistic events and less
and less to God’s time. Except for Christmas, Easter, and three
hours on Good Friday, little is left of holy days, and even these
have been made humanistic in emphasis. The weekly Lord’s Day is
now justified on humanistic grounds almost entirely. The emphasis
in earlier holy days, in terms of Scripture, was rejoicing in God’s
bounty and in the certainty of His government.
Thus, when St. Paul speaks of sowing bountifully, he speaks of
the joy of the sower in anticipating a bountiful harvest. The
calendar originally marked time religiously. It was “not the ‘civil,’
but the ecclesiastical year; not the time measurer, but the
significance of salvation appearing in time.”7 Every step of godly
man in the fulfillment of his calling is an aspect of the reconquest
of all things in Christ. To sow seed, or to give joyfully to the Lord,
and to do our daily work in the confidence that nothing is in vain
in Christ, means casting our bread (rice seed) upon the waters in
the confidence of finding it, after many days, returning to us
bountifully (Eccl. 11:1). Giving, like sowing, is an act of faith in the
future, faith that a harvest will come. Hence, the man of faith is
joyful or hilarious in giving.
Ninth, 2 Corinthians 9:8 tells us that, when we are hilarious
givers, “God is able to make all grace abound toward you; that ye,
always having all sufficiency in all things, may abound to every
good work.” The word sufficiency is in Greek autarkeia (autos, self;
arkeo, sufficient). We have the same word translated as
“contentment” in 1 Timothy 6:6, “Godliness with contentment is
great gain.” Sufficiency, autarkeia, was the ideal of Stoicism, to be
free of men and of needs. Autarkeia is also the ideal of modern
anarchism, or autarkism. The infallible word of God here tells us
that the way to “all sufficiency (autarkeian) in all things” is not by
miserly, niggardly ways, nor by Stoic and anarchistic practices, but
by hilarious giving. This is the declaration of the God whose word
is truth. We had better heed it. Our salvation means in part the new
autarkeia of Jesus Christ, a trust in Him as our sufficiency, and a
readiness to trust that His commandments are for our blessing.
7. Gerardus Van Der Leeuw, Religion in Essence and Manifestation (Macmillan,

1938), 386.
L
The Holy Spirit and the Redeemed Man
The redeemed man is indwelled by the Holy Spirit. What does

this mean?
By examining the Biblical word, spirit, we can see something of
its implications. The Hebrew word translated as spirit is ruah, which
is also translated very often as wind, air in motion. When man was
created, “the breath (ruah) of life” (Gen. 2:7) was breathed into
him. As Howard has written,
Any unusual manifestations of power or energy could be
described as having or showing more “spirit.” This was often
used in relation to God-given vitality for some special purpose
(e.g. Gen. x1i. 38, 39, Judges xv. 14, etc.). What is important to
note is that in every instance to be filled with “spirit” implied
action. Indeed, one could go so far as to say that to be filled
with “spirit” and not engaged in some activity, not performing
some action, is a contradiction in terms.1
The Holy Spirit clearly was not unknown in the Old Testament,
but the prophets spoke of a fulness of His manifestation and power
in the era of the Messiah. His presence was clearly with the
disciples before the death and resurrection of our Lord, because
Christ declared, “ye know him; for he abideth with you, and shall
be in you” (John 14:17). After His resurrection, the gift of the Spirit
is given to the assembled followers. This is to be distinguished
from the later gifts of the Spirit at Pentecost. When the disciples
were assembled in a closed room, Jesus came and stood in their
midst:
21. Then said Jesus to them again, Peace be unto you: as my
Father hath sent me, even so send I you.
22. And when he had said this, he breathed on them, and saith
unto them, Receive ye the Holy Ghost:
1.
Dr. James Keir Howard, “The Concept of the Soul in Psychology and Reli-
gion,” in the Journal of the American Scientific Affilliation, vol. 24, no. 4 (December
1972): 150.
451
23. Whosesoever sins ye remit, they are remitted unto them;
and whosesoever sins ye retain, they are retained. (John
20:21-23)
First of all, this remarkable event was clearly a reenactment of the
creation of man. “And the LORD God formed man of the dust of
the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and
man became a living soul” (Gen. 2:7). God the Son, having
regenerated His people, now breathes on them and gives them the
indwelling Spirit. The word, breathed (emphusao), is a Greek word
used nowhere else in the New Testament, but familiar to John and
his readers as the word used in Genesis 2:7, in the Septuagint. The
parallel to Genesis 2:7 is thus deliberate. The people of Christ are
the new creation, the new humanity, for a new world order. As
against the old humanity, in revolution against God, Christ creates
a new people by His creative act. He declares to them, “Receive ye
the Holy Ghost.” Holy Ghost in the Greek is pneuma hagion.
Pneuma is usually translated “spirit” but it can mean “mind,” as in
Acts 19:21 (“Paul purposed in the spirit” can mean in his mind, or
in the Holy Spirit, but in either case purpose and thought is
intended), and 2 Corinthians 2:13 (“I had no rest in my spirit,” or,
in the Berkeley Version, “I enjoyed no peace of mind”). In
Philippians 1:27, Paul asks the church to “stand fast in one spirit
(pneumati), with one mind (or soul, psyche) striving together for the
faith of the gospel.” Spirit and soul are here equated. “In
conjunction with soma (body) it denotes the totality of human
personality (1 Cor. v. 3-5, vii. 34).”2
The Holy Spirit thus indwells as the new mind, spirit, or soul of
the believer, as his essential life and motivating purpose. He is the
breath or rushing wind, the energy of the new man, and yet He is
also the third person of the Triune God, reigning in all eternity.
Jesus Christ regenerates man; as Christ’s new creation, the new
man has the indwelling Spirit. Christ regenerates or re-creates man,
and man now must reconstruct the world in terms of God’s law-
word. Our Lord said, “Verily, verily, I say unto you, He that
believeth on me, the works that I do shall he do also; and greater
works than these shall he do; because I go unto my Father” (John
2. Ibid., 150.
The Holy Spirit and the Redeemed Man 453
14:12). This promise is not limited to the disciples; it is to all who
believe in Christ. It cannot refer to miracles such as Christ worked;
the disciples alone performed such miracles, and theirs were not
“greater works” than our Lord’s. Its meaning is obvious: Christ,
God the Son incarnate, breathes on fallen men, dead in sin, and
makes them a new creation. Redeemed man breathes on the fallen
world and society of Adam; he infuses it with the energy, mind,
purpose, and power of Spirit-filled man, and makes it again the
Kingdom of God in faith and obedience. The “greater works” of
Christian man is thus the reconstruction of all things in terms of
the law-word of God, and this he does in the power of the
indwelling Spirit.
We have thus already indicated a second aspect of the meaning of
receiving the Holy Spirit. The prophets and saints of the Old
Testament who were filled with the Spirit were great and powerful
men. When Cleopas and his friend spoke of Jesus on the road to
Emmaus, they did so in Old Testament terms, in terms echoing the
power of the Spirit-filled seers: they spoke of Jesus as “a prophet
mighty in deed and word before God and all his people” (Luke
24:19). This was the impression Christ made on His times, a man
of “mighty works” (Matt. 11:20; 13:54; 14:2; Mark 6:2, etc.). The
people of his own country, however much offended, still
acknowledge something supernormal, if not supernatural, in Jesus:
“Whence hath this man this wisdom, and these mighty works?”
(Matt. 13:54)
The mark of the new man in Christ is the same. Because he is
indwelled by the Spirit, however humble his calling, his work is
marked by wisdom, energy, and power. To speak of impotent
Christianity is a contradiction in terms: no man indwelled by the
Spirit is impotent. True, many Christians have been brutally
tortured, imprisoned, and killed, but the world has struck at them
because it has recognized the power in them. The world is fearful
lest too many men of power stand up against it.
Of 200 million people in the U.S., about 120 million claim to be
Christians. Of these, it is estimated that 40 to 55 million are “Bible-
believing.” The 80 million who are modernists and/or nominal
Christians, we can rule out. But what can we say for the 40 to 55
million? A handful of communists and Fabian Socialists exercise
more power in the U.S. than do all these “Christians.” But, as
Howard said, in terms of Scripture, “to be filled with ‘spirit’ implied
action. Indeed, one could go so far as to say that to be filled with
‘spirit’ and not engaged in some activity, not performing some
action, is a contradiction of terms.” Moreover, Howard was not
here discussing the Holy Spirit, but simply the Biblical word ruah,
spirit, breath. Where the Holy Spirit is present, the action and
rushing power are very great. To speak of impotent Christians is
thus a contradiction. To assume that 40 to 55 million Christians
exist in the U.S., and accomplish very little, is blasphemy. Men
indwelled by the Holy Spirit are men of action and power: they
reconstruct all things in terms of God’s word. However humble
the believer’s calling or talents, there is a work of conquest and
reconstruction under way wherever a believer is at work.
“And he that sat upon the throne said, Behold, I make all things
new. And he said unto me, Write: for these words are true and
faithful” (Rev. 21:5). An important part of the way in which Christ
makes all things new is by means of His people through the
indwelling Spirit. Our Lord said, “Wherefore by their fruits ye shall
know them” (Matt. 7:20). A profession of faith is essential, but
faith without works is dead (James 2:26). It is a Hellenistic heresy
to assess men by an intellectual profession only. It reduces the
meaning of redemption to nonsense to talk about millions of
impotent Christians allowing a country to slip into the hands of the
enemy. To say that some of these millions are good, moral people
means little; they are living on an inherited discipline, not in terms
of faith, and that discipline is rapidly eroding. Either a professing
Christian is a part of the mighty work of world conquest and
reconstruction, or he is not a Christian. However humble the
Christian’s calling and station, either that domain is turned into an
outpost of the Kingdom of God, or there is no faith. A housewife,
a farmer, worker, or any other person can make his or her calling
an area of dominion under God. Moreover, in a very real sense, we
are all required to do more than we are capable of doing normally,
because more is involved in the acts of Christians than themselves.
The indwelling Spirit is the key factor.
The Holy Spirit and the Redeemed Man 455
Third, the power of the Christian is tied to the Spirit and the word
of God. Hendriksen translates John 20:22-23 thus:
And having said this, he blew, and said to them, Receive the
Holy Spirit. If you forgive the sins of any, they are forgiven
them; if you retain (those) of any, they are retained.3
Jesus sends them into the world, even as the Father sent Him, to
do the work commissioned, in absolute obedience and faithfulness.
Toward this end, Christ breathed or blew, giving them the Holy
Spirit by His creative act. The wind or breath of heaven, the third
person of the Trinity, now is the person driving them from within.
“The ungodly are not so: but are like the chaff which the wind
driveth away” (Ps. 1:4). The ungodly are driven from without. The
godly are drivers, driven from within by the indwelling Holy Spirit.
The gift of the Holy Spirit includes a ministerial and declarative
power. The believer knows the word of God, and he can declare
that which God makes known. He has no independent power, but
he does have power in the knowledge of the word and in the fact
that what the word declares is valid in heaven. In terms of that
word, he can declare that a man’s sins are forgiven or retained
insofar as the terms of the word of God are met. Hendriksen to the
contrary, this power is not limited to church officers. Any parent,
teacher, or other believer can assure a sinner of the forgiveness or
retention of sins. Whether the declaration is made by the humblest
believer or the greatest statesman of the church, it is only valid
insofar as it is faithful to Scripture. There is no independent power.
Church officers have authority to rule, but they have no more and
no less power to bind or to loose than the humblest believer. If a
church member sins against a brother, and is chastised by the
church, he can make restitution to his brother, who can absolve
him before God at once. This is a valid absolution. Absolution by
the church officers is a formal necessity for the life of the church,
but it does not mean that the church member had no absolution
prior to its formal, public pronouncement. To so limit the power
of the keys is to hold that the legal processes of the church are
more valid than the realities of actual restitution and forgiveness.
3. William Hendriksen, New Testament Commentary: Exposition of the Gospel Accord-

ing to John, vol. II (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Baker Book House, 1954), 461.
However necessary the ecclesiastical acts, they cannot be confused
with the original actions. It is not excommunication that binds a
man; a man is excommunicated because the word of God declares
that his actions bind him. It is not ecclesiastical absolution that
releases a man; such an absolution is declarative and declares that
a man has been forgiven by his brother, having made restitution to
him.4
Fourth, as has already been indicated, the Holy Spirit indwelling
in the believer makes him a new man in Christ, the new Adam. As
the new humanity of Adam, the indwelled believer now has the work
of Adam to do, to develop the implications of the image of God,
knowledge, righteousness, holiness, and dominion, and to subdue
the earth in terms of it. The indwelling Holy Spirit means the
personal power of God in action in, and through, man. Nothing
short of this can be called Christian.
4.
Ibid., 461f. Hendriksen is right that, “Without authority, chaos reigns su-
preme!” (462). The authority is first of all in God and His word, and in those
who act in terms of it. Matt. 18:15-20 emphatically makes it clear that the bind-
ing and loosing begin on the personal level and are then carried to the church
level. “If he shall hear thee, thou hast gained a brother,” means that repentance,
restitution, and absolution are accomplished on a person to person basis.
LI
The Return to Reality
Hadas, in his introduction to the translation of Three Greek

Romances, commented:
What the serious reader finds most objectionable in the Greek
novels is their shrieking implausibilities. There is no logical
nexus between event and event or between event and
character. But in a world where the links of causality are
broken and Fortune has taken control of the affairs of men it
is the very incalculability of events that absorbs interest. Logic
is supplanted by paradox and emotion becomes
sentimentality, to be savored for its own sake. The cavalier
attitude to probability is not a mark of indifference but a true
reflection of current beliefs. Consequently, by making virtue
triumph in the end as they regularly do, our authors are
consciously arguing that, appearances to the contrary
notwithstanding, there is a divine power which does guide and
protect its special charges. If An Ephesian Tale is an absorbing
tale of love and improbable adventure, it is also a tract to prove
that Diana of the Ephesians (who was equated with Isis) cares
for her loyal devotees.1
Hadas’ term, “their shrieking implausibilities,” is an excellent one.
This is even more true of much of Asia’s literature, of pre-Christian
European tales, and of the legends and stories of other continents.
Moreover, because of the deep influences of neoplatonism, much
of European literature during the “Middle” Ages is marked by the
same “shrieking implausibilities”; it is dominated by an idea, often
an idea of love, rather than reality.
In the world of Hadas’ three novels, Diana of the Ephesians and
other gods and goddesses still insured a happy ending, but, before
long, the fate of the gods was also to pass away, with Fate and
Fortune toppling all things. Then as now, another kind of shrieking
implausibility developed, a determined view that held that the
1.
Moses Hadas, translator, Three Greek Romances (Garden City, New York:
Doubleday Anchor Books, 1953), 7f.
457
universe was causeless, perverse, and meaningless. Again, in this
view, “the links of causality are broken,” and events are as
incalculably frustrating and perverse as they were before
incalculably lucky or fortunate. In either case, causality is
meaningless. The universe, or multiverse, is not penetrable by
reason, because it is irrational and meaningless. The results of any
action are the products of chance, and for reason to confront utter
irrationality is frustration compounded. Men, however, have not
been ready to accept the logical conclusion of their world view.
This implicit and explicit denial of all causality and rationality has
never been systematically adhered to. When men have no Goddess
Fortuna, or Lady Luck, to appeal to as a remedy against chaos, then
they turn to such answers as occultism, the spirits or powers who,
in alliance with man, introduce a new principle of power and rule
into the universe.
Modern literature, films, and television reveal the same
“shrieking implausibilities” because they have a common premise.
In the Roman era, Seneca wrote in Hippolytus, “The shifting hour
flies with doubtful wings; nor does swift Fortune keep faith with
anyone.” A medieval French proverb held that “Fortune has no
reason.” Similar ideas prevail today. The recurring theme of much
literature is simply the perversity and irrationality of life and also
the irrationality of the mind itself. Another era will remark on the
studied and “shrieking implausibilities” of modern writers. One of
the dangers of continuous exposure to modern art forms is the
influence of their shared philosophy, so that the implausible
becomes the plausible for us. However much man may rail against
the irrationality and perversity of the world, he will still, as a
creature created in God’s image, seek to comprehend that world by
means of a system of thought, i.e., to impose rationality on
irrationality as a means of coping with it.
However, the regenerate man is delivered not only from sin but
also from this world of “shrieking implausibilities.” His universe is
now a realm of causality and meaning, and, like himself, it is God’s
creation. As a result, his growth in grace is a heightened awareness.
He becomes progressively more knowledgeable about God, man,
The Return to Reality 459
law, and the universe. He is living in terms of reality, not
imagination.
All men, whether they like it or not, live in a real world; however,
not all men are ready to live in terms of reality, which, supremely,
means that God is sovereign and that the universe, God’s
handiwork, moves in terms of His law. Salvation in part means
conformity to this reality.
St. Paul, in Romans 2:12-16, gives us a sharp perspective on this
matter:
12. For as many as have sinned without law shall also perish
without law: and as many as have sinned in the law shall be
judged by the law;
13. (For not the hearers of the law are just before God, but the
doers of the law shall be justified.
14. For when the Gentiles, which have not the law, do by
nature the things contained in the law, these, having not the
law, are a law unto themselves:
15. Which shew the work of the law written in their hearts,
their conscience also bearing witness, and their thoughts the
mean while accusing or else excusing one another;)
16. In the day when God shall judge the secrets of men by
Jesus Christ according to my gospel.
For many people, statements like this one are a problem. How can
St. Paul, the champion of salvation by God’s grace through the
atonement of Jesus Christ, speak of justification by law: “the doers
of the law shall be justified”? This sounds very much like James
2:17-26:
17. Even so faith, if it hath not works, is dead, being alone.
18. Yea, a man may say, Thou hast faith, and I have works:
shew me thy faith without thy works, and I will shew thee my
faith by my works.
19. Thou believest that there is one God; thou doest well: the
devils also believe, and tremble.
20. But wilt thou know, O vain man, that faith without works
is dead?
21. Was not Abraham our father justified by works, when he
had offered Isaac his son upon the altar?
22. Seest thou how faith wrought with his works, and by works
was faith made perfect?
23. And the scripture was fulfilled which saith, Abraham
believed God, and it was imputed unto him for righteousness:
and he was called the Friend of God.
24. Ye see then how that by works a man is justified, and not
by faith only.
25. Likewise also was not Rahab the harlot justified by works,
when she had received the messengers, and had sent them out
another way?
26. For as the body without the spirit is dead, so faith without
works is dead also.
James says that “by works a man is justified, and not by faith only.”
St. Paul, however, also tells us in Ephesians 2:4-5, 8-9:
4. But God, who is rich in mercy, for his great love wherewith
he loved us,
5. Even when we were dead in sins, hath quickened us
together with Christ, (by grace ye are saved).
8. For by grace are ye saved through faith; and that not of
ourselves: it is the gift of God:
9. Not of works, lest any man should boast.
This is emphatic: salvation is the work of God, and it is entirely of
grace. None of these statements, however, are in contradiction.
The initiative, determination, and ordination in our redemption is
entirely of God. But man is not a puppet, nor an automaton. His
response to God’s grace and his manifestation of the grace of God is
by faith, and faith reveals itself in works. The just live by faith; they
place their whole trust in the saving grace of God, and they show
that trust by their works. A dialectical or a dualistic view of man’s
nature has long haunted our view of man, and, as a result, the unity
of man’s actions evades us, even as it escaped St. Paul’s Greek
audiences. For a Biblical psychology, the unity of mind and body,
and of faith and works, is the inescapable fact. As a result, the
problem is not one of reality, but of ideas imposed on reality.
There is still another aspect to be considered, St. Paul’s statement
that “the doers of the law shall be justified.” Let us analyze what St.
Paul tells us in Romans 2:12-16. First of all, the term “without law”
(or, without the law) means without God’s law revealed in
Scripture, not without any law whatsoever. Those who are within
the law, i.e., within the tradition of the Biblical faith and the
revelation therein of God’s law, shall be judged by that law. Second,
those who are Gentiles and unbelievers shall also be judged and
perish “without law,” or, outside the terms of Biblical law. The
standard of their judgment, as vv. 14 and 15 make clear, is still the
law of God as written into the nature and constitution of all reality
and man. Hodges’ comments on the doctrinal import of these
verses is of particular interest:
The responsibility of men being very different in this world,
their rewards and punishment will, in all probability, be very
different in the next. Those who knew not their Lord’s will,
shall be beaten with few stripes. And those who are faithful in
the use of ten talents, shall be made rulers over ten cities, vs.
9, 10.
The heathen are not to be judged by a revelation of which they
never heard. But as they enjoy a revelation of the divine
character in the works of creation, chap. i. 19, 20, and of the
rule of duty in their own hearts, vs. 14, 15, they are
inexcusable. They can no more abide the test by which they
are to be tried, than we can stand the application of the severer
rule by which we are to be judged. Both classes, therefore,
need a Savior, ver. 12.
The moral sense is an original part of our constitution, and not
the result of education, ver. 14.
Jesus Christ, who is to sit in judgment upon the secrets of all
men, must be possessed of infinite knowledge, and therefore
be divine, ver. 16. 2
This failure of the ungodly, and it here means those who never
heard or read the Bible, i.e., the pagans of antiquity and those of
today who are outside of the realm of Christian missions, is a
failure judged in terms of the revelation of God’s law in them and
around them. The millions who have never heard the gospel still
have this general revelation, according to Romans 1:8-21, and they
suppress it or “hold” it down in unrighteousness. Murray feels that
“holding down” is not an accurate rendering of the Greek, and
1893), 88f.
offers as the accurate sense “hinder,” or “restrain,” “hold back,” so
that the truth is restrained or denied.3 These have the law of God,
although not in its enscriptured form, and they are judged by the
law given to them.
Those who have heard the gospel, or are inside the pale of
special revelation, are judged accordingly. As Murray so ably states
it:
The judgment of those inside the pale of special revelation,
who rejected the gospel, will be executed in terms of three
criteria, all of which were applicable to them (a) the criterion
of law naturally revealed which, of course, applies to all men,
(b) the criterion of law specially revealed which did not apply
to the preceding class, and (c) the criterion of the gospel which
likewise did not apply to the preceding class. They will be
judged by the gospel because they rejected it, that is, they will
be condemned for gospel unbelief. It is a capital mistake to
think, however, that unbelief of the gospel will be the only
condemnation of such. It would violate all canons of truth and
equity to suppose that the sins against law naturally revealed
and specially revealed would be ignored. By faith in the grace
of the gospel sins are blotted out but other sins are not waived
by unbelief of the gospel. Hence law in the utmost of its
demand and rigour will be applied to the judgment of those in
this category — they will be judged according to their works.
This also is expressly stated in verse 12 — “as many as have
sinned with the law shall be judged through the law.”
Judgment according to works, therefore, applies to all who will
be damned.4
This still does not answer the question as to v. 13, “For not the
hearers of the law are just before God, but the doers of the law shall
be justified.” Negatively, we have already seen that “specially
revealed law is not the precondition of sin — ‘as many as have
sinned without the law.’ Because such are sinners they will perish.”5
Thus, negatively, the law condemns. But Paul also says, positively,
3. John Murray, The Epistle to the Romans, vol. I (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Eerd-
mans, 1959), 36f.
4. Ibid., 78.
5. Ibid., 70.
that the law in some sense justifies. How is this to be understood
in terms of justification by God’s grace?
Let us consider again Moses Hadas’ comment about the
“shrieking implausibilities” of classical Greek novels: “There is no
logical nexus between event and event or between event and
character.” In the world outside of Christ, there is no logical nexus
between anything; things fall apart, and there is no center. It is an
exercise in patience sometimes to read such literature, because the
logical nexus is missing. Modern literature tries to find a logical
nexus outside of God, and it thereby reveals its Christian
background as well as its apostasy. The nexus is sought in such
things as man and his psychology, and in the proletarian
revolution, but in these and other instances the nexus is artificial
and is imposed on events. A university student, an intelligent and
practical girl, summed up in disgust her reaction to two courses on
ancient epics and sagas: “They are fairy tales.” There was no logical
nexus which tied them to reality.
This lack of logical nexus is impossible for the orthodox
Christian. All things having been created by God have their
meaning also from Him. Salvation does not sunder reality: it
cleanses and purges it. Faith, knowledge, law, grace, and works are
not in contradiction to one another but in harmony under God.
Remove the triune God and no nexus remains. Redemption
reunites man to God, so that God’s saving act means our response
of faith and our obedience to the law. Gnostics, neoplatonists, and
Manichaeans will separate these things, but the Christian will hold
to the primacy of God’s determination of all things and its
responding harmony in all of man’s being. Because God redeems
us through Christ’s atoning work, we respond with faith, and our
works are in terms of the law. Supremely and centrally, most
essentially, we are justified by the law in the person of Jesus Christ,
who kept the law perfectly for us. “For we have not an high priest
which cannot be touched with the feeling of our infirmities; but
was in all points tempted like as we are, yet without sin” (Heb.
4:15). We fell by Adam’s sin; we are redeemed by Christ’s atoning
sacrifice in our stead and His perfect law-keeping. In both cases,
we are judged in terms of a representative man, the Adam of the
old humanity and the Adam of the new humanity. In the old Adam,
we sinned. In the new man, Jesus Christ, we keep the law. Our life
outside of Christ reflected Adam’s declaration of independence
from, and war against, God. Our life in Christ reflects our trust and
dependence on Him and our obedience to His law-word. We do
not reflect Christ’s perfect obedience in this life, but we are now
the people of Christ, the people of the law. We are doers of the law,
because Christ is the doer of the law, and we cannot be His people
if we deny Him by unbelief and by disobedience. For us, the logical
nexus has been restored. We neither wrongly divide the word of
God, nor do we wrongly divide reality.
Ours is not a world of “shrieking implausibilities,” but the
glorious handiwork of God.
LII
Work
The dictionary (Funk & Wagnalls) tells us that “Work is the

generic term for any continuous application of energy toward an
end.” It may be hard or easy, physical or mental, but it is
continuous application of energy towards a goal or purpose.
Because of this purposive nature of work, it is inseparable from
religion, and yet, historically, it has often been divorced from it.
Van Der Leeuw’s study of Religion in Essence and Manifestation, a
phenomenological study, has much to say on festivals and rites
surrounding work, but nothing on work as such. The same is true
of Hastings’ Encyclopaedia of Religion and Ethics. Biblical dictionaries
rarely say much on the subject, since all too often their perspective
is neoplatonist, Arminian, or Modernist.
Outside the Biblical tradition, i.e., the Christian and Jewish
world, work has been something despised, done only out of
necessity, and regarded as the province of slaves. In many cultures,
mental work has been the duty of underlings and slaves. Arabic
science waned and disappeared when Christian slaves and their
children no longer provided a captive group of intellectuals. In
Babylon, the wise men, as the Book of Daniel gives us evidence of,
were commonly the captive elite of conquered aristocracies; the
Babylonians themselves preferred to exercise power rather than
intellect. The Turkish Empire rested on slave labor, conquered
people as its bureaucracy and builders, and a levy of boys for its
elite troops, the janizaries.
In the modern world, examples of the same contempt for work
are many. Ethiopia is nominally Christian, but its people have little
knowledge of the meaning of the faith. Among the elite Amharic
people, O’Callaghan reported in 1961 that many parents still
regarded it as a disgrace for a daughter to become a typist or a
nurse, but thought nothing of apprenticing them to a brothel at the
age of thirteen or fourteen. “The custom is traditional with both
men and women of Amhara that they will never do any work that
465
involves using their hands. That is why there are still so few
Amhara doctors, nurses, typists or shopkeepers in Ethiopia.”
Government jobs are preferred by the men, and prostitution is the
route for the women. Prostitution is not seen as a disgrace, nor a
bar to marriage when the girl reaches twenty-one and is too old for
the brothel. She has, after all, been a “lady” and commanded a slave
or two, black slaves, of course. The same is true of the Arab. “He
is a proud man, too proud to do any menial work. From time
immemorial there were slaves for that type of work, and as long as
the Arab has money to buy them he will do so.”1
A similar attitude prevails among African negroes, for,
... although the African male is attached to the soil, he does
nothing to cultivate it. This is left to the women and children.
They are beasts of burden, the motor power for all agricultural
operations. Women in the African tribes are treated as little
better than cattle; indeed in some tribes, like the Mash, the
cattle are considered more valuable.2
O’Callaghan noted further:
It is thought that when some of the Africans became
detribalized this practice would cease, and that they would
adopt the white man’s ways when they moved to the cities.
Instead the position became worse. They got jobs as taxi
drivers, or in garages or as house-boys, and probably for the
first time owned some money. Saving this, the African went
back to his tribe, and with it bought a wife. He brought her to
the city, installed her in a shack, and rented her out to his
friends, who could not afford a wife. Soon he had the money
to buy another wife which he duly did. He rented her out, and
bought a third. In the course of a few years he had acquired
nine or ten wives, all of whom were earning him a steady
income. I know several taxi drivers in Nairobi, who have
several wives acquired in this way. They say proudly that there
is now no need for them to work but the taxis are useful for
1.
Sean O’Callaghan, The Slave Trade Today (New York: Crown Publishers,
1961), 59, 97, cf. 112ff.
2. Ibid., 135.
Work 467
ferrying clients from the centre of Nairobi to the brothel
districts of Eastleigh.3
The modern liberal is very fond of idealizing the various
backward peoples of the world, and he consistently portrays the
Christian as the despoiler and the ravager of the simple paradise of
“primitive” cultures. Our concern here is not with the sexual and
other depravities of these cultures, but simply their attitude
towards work. It needs to be said, however, that the various
idealizations of these backward cultures are works of fiction.
The often idealized Tuaregs of North Africa, who still regard
themselves as a white race, leave all their work to their slaves, the
Bela people.
... These Bela, men, women, and children, belong to their
masters body and soul. I have lived in these Tuareg camps, and
I have seen these slave girls and slave women working from
dawn until dusk. I should explain that among the Tuareg
women fatness is considered a sign of great beauty, and so the
Tuareg women are not allowed to do any work, even if they
want to. So there they lay, rather like sea lions in the zoo after
feeding time, watching their slaves from behind the folds of
their indigo veils, and doing nothing. Moreover, the Tuareg
caste of nobles refer to and think of themselves as nobles; and
nobles do not work — nobles in the Sahara, I mean to say! No
Tuareg noble would think of handling a spade, erecting a tent
or carrying a gourd of water. And so they have these great
herds of slaves, exactly as they have always had great herds of
sheep; and in the great wastes of the Sahara they have been
able to preserve this institution of slavery some 65 years after
the French occupation put an end to slavery.
I have lived in these camps and seen these little skinny boys,
with bellies horribly distended from malnutrition, going out in
the morning, before dawn, with the herds; and I have known
that, until they came back in the evening, they would be in the
desert without anything to eat or drink. And when they got
back after the Tuareg nobles had eaten, and after their wives
had had their ration of milk, if there was anything left they
would get it. I have seen the marks of cruelty on their bodies.
If they were disobedient, or if they lose an animal by neglect,
3. Ibid., 136f.
they are tied to a tree and lashed until they lose consciousness
— and sometimes they do not recover and are just left to die.4
The goal of life, in non-Christian societies, is to reach a position
in life where work is unnecessary and where others can be
commanded to work for you. With the departure of Western man
from the faith, a similar attitude has developed among Westerners.
The goal of life becomes vacations and retirement for all too many.
The result of any such view, over a span of time, is a decline of
productivity, a collapse in the standard of living, and an erosion of
moral character.
The attitude of the Hebrews, still surviving to a degree among
many Jews, was that a man who did not teach his child two things,
the law of God, and how to work a trade, taught him to be a thief
because of his neglect. Because of a like grounding in the law of
God, the Puritans held to this same standard.
A parent had to provide for his children, because they were
unable to provide for themselves. If he was ever to free
himself of the obligation, he must see to it that they knew how
to earn a living. “If you’re careful to bring them up diligently
in proper business,” Benjamin Wadsworth advised parents,
“you take a good method for their comfortable subsistence in
the World (and for their being serviceable in their Generation)
you do better for them, than if you should bring them up idly,
and yet leave them great Estates.” According to law every
father had to see that his children were instructed “in some
honest lawful calling, labour or employment, either in
husbandry, or some other trade profitable for themselves, and
the Commonwealth if they will not or cannot train them up in
learning to fit them for higher improvements.”5
The goal in rearing children was how to make them “serviceable in
their generation.” Work was not the duty of slaves but the calling
4. Ibid.,
176f. The above is from a statement in parliament by Lord Shackleton
(Robin Maugham). For a detailed account of what Maugham discovered in his
study of slavery, see Robin Maugham, The Slaves of Timbuktu (New York: Harp-
er & Brothers, 1961).
5.
Edmund S. Morgan, The Puritan Family, Religion & Domestic Relations in Seven-
teenth-Century New England, Revised edition (New York: Harper & Row, 1966),
66.
Work 469
of God’s elect. It is not surprising that slavery soon disappeared
from New England and from other areas affected by Puritanism.
As Puritanism moved South after 1770, it created an anti-slavery
element in the South whose strength and influence has never been
sufficiently appreciated. The Puritan standard thus represented a
break with the Cavalier and aristocratic tradition and meant that,
instead of work, idleness was now the evil.
Puritan boys and girls were routinely placed in other homes as a
part of their education. This was something more than the old
apprenticeship idea, for it was done when there was educational
advantage, and it was done with girls as well as boys. Morgan’s
comments on this are excellent. The parents knew how great their
love for their children was, and how easy it is to indulge one’s child.
They held that a child learned better manners and work habits in
another home than his own. Taking seriously God’s law that an
incorrigibly disobedient or delinquent child deserves death, they
took pains to avoid fostering an ill-mannered and undisciplined
child.6 It is not at all surprising that the Puritan culture is spoken
of today as a work ethic, as production-oriented rather than
consumption-governed.
In terms of the modern mentality, it has become the mark of the
new elite to be given to conspicuous consumption, to spend money
casually and freely, to use and discard styles and possessions
quickly and carelessly. This has also become a middle class goal. As
Bell commented,
If “conspicuous consumption” was the badge of a rising
middle class, “conspicuous loafing” is the hostile gesture of a
tired working class. In many machine plants, as sociologist
Donald Roy describes it, workers play the “make-out” game,
i.e., working at a breakneck pace to fulfill one’s piece-work
quota so that one can be free for the rest of the day.7
There is a marked flight from work; work is seen as a curse, and
idleness as a blessing, a goal to be attained, and a state of bliss. Men
work in order to be free from work and to be idle. Idleness is seen
6. Ibid., 77f.
7. Daniel Bell, Work and Its Discontents (Boston: Beacon Press, 1956), 15f.
as the reward for, and deliverance from, work. To cite again Bell’s
perceptive analysis:
The most significant form taken by the flight from work is the
desperate drive for “leisure.” Work is irksome, but if it cannot
be evaded, it can be reduced. In modern times, the ideal is to
minimize the unpleasant aspects of work as much as possible
by pleasant distractions (music, wall colors, rest periods) and
to hasten away as quickly as possible, uncontaminated by work
and unimpaired by its arduousness. A gleaming two-page
advertisement in Life magazine shows a beautiful Lincoln car
in the patio-living room of an elegantly simple house, and the
ad proclaims: “Your home has walls of glass. Your kitchen is
an engineering miracle. Your clothes and your furniture are
beautifully functional. You work easily, play hard.”
The themes of play, of recreation, of amusement are the
dominant ones in our culture today. They are the subject of the
“hard sell.” Sports clothes, travel, the outdoor barbecue, the
portable TV set all become the hallmarks of the time. In this
passivity, there are already the seeds of decay.8
The reward for work is dominion and achievement. To tell men
that the reward for work is leisure or idleness is the same as saying
that the reward for sex is castration. The purpose of rest is not
escape from work, but a rest in the Lord, and a refreshing before
return to work.
Today, in both the Western nations and the Marxist states, work
is increasingly seen as a burden and a curse. The greater the
departure from Christian faith and a free economy, the greater the
flight from work and the less the dominion exercised by man.
However comfortable his circumstances, leisured man is still a
slave; he is an heir of the bread and circus mobs of Rome.
Ironically, however, both under capitalism and socialism, work
has been held out as a great ideal and as man’s hope. Lenin, for
example, believed intensely in the necessity for work, and he was
profoundly influenced by the American assembly line, and by the
efficiency expert, Frederick W. Taylor. In June of 1919, he
introduced piecework and Taylorism into the Soviet Union,
8. Ibid., 36.
Work 471
stating, “The possibility of socialism will be determined by our
success in combining Soviet rule and Soviet organization or
management with the latest progressive measures of capitalism.
We must introduce in Russia the study and teaching of the Taylor
system and its systematic trial and adoption.”9
For Marxists and capitalists alike, work rather than Jesus Christ
had become the means of salvation. This was very clearly in
evidence in Henry Ford’s, My Philosophy of Industry. Ford was
essentially a “funny money” man; he also believed in statist
industries and public works to relieve unemployment. Religiously,
his position was pragmatism: “We know when we have reached
Truth. We are on the right road toward Truth when the things that
we are doing make men a little freer than they are. We may also
know when we are on the right road by examining what our
motives are.” (This is self-righteousness, as well as pragmatism!)
Moreover, “Morality is merely doing the sound thing in the best
way.”10
Ford’s vision of the future was summed up in a chapter heading:
“Machinery, the New Messiah.” Because of mechanization,
individual farms would be replaced by corporate farms. Men will,
by mental powers newly developed, communicate with other
planets, and will perhaps visit them. In every area of life, the
machine will give man dominion and salvation:
Machinery is accomplishing in the world what man has failed
to do by preaching, propaganda, or the written word. The
airplane and radio know no boundary. They pass over the
dotted lines on the map without heed or hindrance. They are
binding the world together in a way no other systems can. The
motion picture with its universal language, the airplane with its
speed, and the radio with its coming international programme
— these will soon bring the whole world to a complete
understanding. Thus may we vision a United States of the
World. Ultimately, it will surely come!11
9. Ibid., 41.
10. Henry Ford,
My Philosophy of Industry (New York: Coward-McCann, 1928),
28, 36, 97-101.
11. Ibid., 18f.
In the 1920s, the men who worked for Ford were farm folk and
immigrants. They were work-oriented and simple, trusting
Christians. The machine and the assembly line were to them things
of beauty, and they talked freely of the increased “horsepower” the
machine provided. (I recall vividly as a boy, in Detroit during most
of the 1920s, hearing workers talk with pride of their work and
enlarge with voices filled with awe on what the machine enabled
man to do in the way of more work. For these workers, it was a
status symbol to be a man engaged in a work which was changing
the world.) Today, while we can agree with Kristol that talk of
alienated workers is nonsense and “faded neo-Marxism,”12 it is still
true that, for most workers, “it’s a job.” The old zeal for work is
gone.
The reason is religious. Bell recognized the link between Biblical
faith and work. Secular thinkers like Tolstoy and A. D. Gordon
could preach about salvation through work, but if life is
meaningless, work is also meaningless. Freud saw work as the chief
means of binding an individual to reality, but if a man finds reality
unpleasant, he will run from it into liquor, leisure, drugs, or some
other means of escape.
As Bell noted, for the Protestant reformers, “all work was
endowed with virtue.” Luther said that “A housemaid who does
her work is no farther away from God than the priest in his pulpit.”
For Zwingli and Calvin, “work was connected with the joy of
creating and with exploring even the wonders of creation.”13
Now, with the loss of faith, dominion is replaced by domination,
and work by leisure. As Bell stated,
In the last century or more, with the decline of religious faith,
this belief in death as total annihilation has probably increased.
One may argue, parenthetically, that here is a case of the
breakthrough of the irrational which is such a marked feature
of the changed moral temper of our times. Fanaticism,
violence and cruelty are not, of course, unique in human
history. But such frenzies and mass emotions were displaced,
12. Irving Kristol, “Is the American Worker Alienated?,” The Wall Street Journal,
18 January 1973.
13. Bell, op. cit., 54-56.
Work 473
symbolized, drained away and dispersed through the religious
sphere. But now there is only this life, and with it the
realization that domination on earth means an assertion of
self. One can challenge death by emphasizing the
omnipotence of a movement, like the “inevitable” victory of
communism, or overcome death, like the “immortality” of
Captain Ahab, through the triumphal domination over others.
The modern effort to transform the world solely or chiefly
through politics (rather than the transformation of the self)
has meant that all other institutional ways of mobilizing
emotional energy would necessarily atrophy. In effect, sect and
church became party and social movement.14
Bell’s point is excellent. Irrationalism and violence are especially
potent forces in our time and have appeared where they should
least appear, in student circles and in the middle class youth.
Precisely because meaninglessness and irrationalism have captured
these areas, what was once the province of reason has become the
domain of unreason. With the enthronement of a faith in universal
meaninglessness, the standard of work and dominion has been
replaced by the new standard, leisure and domination. The goal
now is to dominate over others, often with brutality and murder.
The standard in family relations is the same, domination. The
old-fashioned father of some years ago exercised far more
authority and dominion than the father of today, but he was not
domineering. His dominion was protective, not oppressive.
Similarly, the state has moved from a protective to an oppressive
role.
Capitalist and Marxist alike begin by seeing work as the means of
redemption and have alike problems now with a generation given
to violence and idleness. This transition is not new. The family of
Cain began by trying through work to re-create paradise. They
worked to build a walled city, and to develop arts and crafts (Gen.
4:16-26), but they also at the same time developed a strain of
violence. Violence replaces work, over and over again in history, as
the means of attaining one’s goals. The consequence is a drift into
the politics of violence, socialism.
14. Ibid., 55f.

St. Paul made clear the standard for Christians in writing to the
Thessalonians:
6. But we charge you, brothers, in the name of the Lord Jesus
Christ, to withdraw from every brother who, instead of
observing the instruction you received from us, is walking out
of step.
7. For you know yourselves how you should follow us, because
we did not live neglectful of duty among you,
8. neither did we eat anyone’s food without pay; instead, we
did hard and heavy work night and day, so as not to impose on
any of you.
9. Not that we did not have the right to it, but to furnish you
ourselves as an example which you should follow.
10. For while we were with you, we gave you this charge, “If
anyone does not want to work, then he should not eat either.”
11. We are hearing, however, that some of you live neglectful
of your duty, not busily working but busy in other folks’
affairs.
12. Such persons we direct and charge in the Lord Jesus Christ
that, doing their work quietly, they eat their own food. (2
Thess. 3:6-12, Berkeley Version)
In a Greek city, St. Paul set an example of a new way of life. He
worked with his hands, and worked with his mind as their teacher.
This he did both to gain an independence from them, and also, as
he stated, to furnish them with an example to follow. Greek culture
was not given to an appreciation of work. Even mental work was
treated as a hobby by some, not as work. Failure to work St. Paul
termed “walking out of step,” or walking in a “disorderly” manner.
The Christian has a goal, and his life is a “continuous application
of energy toward an end,” and this is dominion of which work is a
part.
LIII
Justice
The doctrine of propitiation is basic to Scripture and is

inseparable from the Old Testament rituals and practices.
Propitiation means the covering of sin by cleansing and forgiveness.
The sin in the situation is with reference to God, and the covering
is God-ward in its reference, and it is also by an act of God’s
sovereign grace. In the New Testament, propitiate also has the
meaning of to placate, pacify, appease, or conciliate. As Murray
summed up the meaning of propitiation,
Propitiation presupposes the wrath and displeasure of God,
and the purpose of propitiation is the removal of this
displeasure. Very simply stated the doctrine of propitiation
means that Christ propitiated the wrath of God and rendered
God propitious to his people.1
This doctrine encounters more than a little distaste among many
men, because of its emphasis on God’s justice and wrath. There is
a good reason for this. The sinner is as little interested in justice as
the thief; where his victims are concerned, he does not want justice
for them. Men are interested in justice for the affronts they suffer,
but not for their own effrontery and crimes. Justice is something
we invoke on our own behalf, not in behalf of those whom we
offend. As a result, the justice of God is for man a most painful
subject. Man, who constantly violates God’s justice, finds all
discussions thereof in bad taste. The subject of justice, God’s
justice, is then a threat to us, and we find it far more to our taste to
talk about the love of God, as though our talking could alter reality.
The doctrine of propitiation is thus basic to any discussion of
salvation. As Murray stated it,
The antipathy to the doctrine of propitiation as the
propitiating of divine wrath rests, however, upon failure to
1.John Murray, Redemption — Accomplished and Applied (Grand Rapids, Michi-

gan: Eerdmans, 1955), 36.
475
appreciate what the atonement is. The atonement is that
which meets exigencies of holiness and justice. The wrath of
God is the inevitable reaction of the divine holiness against
sin. Sin is the contradiction of the perfection of God and he
cannot but recoil against that which is the contradiction of
himself. Such recoil is his holy indignation. “The wrath of
God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and
unrighteousness of men who hold the truth in
unrighteousness” (Rom. 1:18). The judgment of God upon sin
is essentially his wrath. If we are to believe that the atonement
is God’s vicarious dealing with the judgment upon sin, it is
absolutely necessary to hold that it is the vicarious endurance
of that in which this judgment is epitomised. To deny
propitiation is to undermine the nature of the atonement as
the vicarious endurance of the penalty of sin. In a word, it is
to deny substitutionary atonement.2
There must be a reconciliation between God and man. God is
alienated from man by man’s sin. “This alienation on the part of
God arises indeed from our sin; it is our sin that evokes this
reaction of his holiness.”3
Redemption requires a ransom, as our Lord indicated (Matt.
20:28; Mark 10:45). “Ransom presupposes some kind of bondage
or captivity, and redemption, therefore, implies that from which
the ransom secures us.”4 We are redeemed from the curse of the
law, its sentence of death against us (Gal. 3:10, 13). We are
redeemed from the guilt and the power of sin, and are justified,
forgiven, and delivered from the defilement and power of sin
(Rom. 3:24; Eph. 1:7; Col. 1:14; Heb. 9:15).
Atonement is thus inseparable from justice. It is the satisfaction of
God’s justice, not either its bypassing or its death. We are not
redeemed to be freed from God’s law and justice, but to be
brought into line with it again. Christ, who died to meet the justice
of the law, does not permit his atonement to be an excuse for the
contempt of that law and justice. Those who deny God’s law and
justice are not of Christ.
2. Ibid.,
38f.
3. Ibid.,
40.
4. Ibid., 49.
Justice 477
There are, according to Deuteronomy 27 and 28, two
relationships to the law, those of curse and blessing. “Christ has
redeemed us from the curse of the law, being made a curse for us”
(Gal. 3:13). This means that the law is now a source of blessing to
the believer, so that, on obedience, it yields unto him a rich harvest.
“Now no chastening for the present seemeth to be joyous, but
grievous: nevertheless afterward it yieldeth the peaceable fruits of
righteousness unto them that are exercised thereby” (Heb. 12:11).
The discipline and chastening of God’s righteousness is His law,
and it yields to His sons a rich harvest.
The atonement, law, and justice are thus inseparable. Where they are
separated, serious consequences follow. Thus, the Modernists in
religion want to separate justice from both the atonement and
God’s law. As a result, their concept of justice becomes a form of
injustice. It is a variety of statism and socialism, with a highly
centralized and messianic state as man’s savior. Justice becomes
socialism and law is what the state does in the process of instituting
socialism. Modernist justice is thus a step towards greater tyranny
and is a means of enthroning man’s needs as the ultimate test for
all things.
In contrast, pseudo-evangelicalism and pseudo-orthodoxy both
lay heavy stress on the doctrine of the atonement, but they separate
it from God’s law and justice. The result is an abstract idea of
atonement for an abstract man living in an abstract world. The
bones are there, but the man is gone. If the atonement has
reference to God’s law and justice, then antinomianism is a
blasphemous denial of the gospel. If antinomianism is true, then
the atonement is false, and vice versa. The purpose of the law is not
merely negative, to condemn, but also positive, to establish an
order. The purpose of laws against theft is not merely to trap and
condemn thieves, but also, first and foremost, to protect our
property and possessions from the lawless hands of sinners. To
reduce the laws of theft to a merely thief-catching function is a
monstrously insane idea. To see the function of the law as merely
the condemnation of sinners is as monstrous and as insane. The
purpose of the law is to set forth the justice and the righteousness
of God as the only means for establishing true order and as,
therefore, the basic elements of God’s Kingdom.
Both the Modernist and the pseudo-Christian are antinomian
and egocentric. The Modernist wants justice for himself, but not
for God. The antinomian in the camp of “orthodoxy” wants
salvation but without any further mention of justice and law. The
result in both camps is sterility and decay.
Where the unity of atonement, law, and justice is denied, there
wrath, lawlessness, and tyranny prosper and abound. Dostoyevsky
foresaw the kind of world that unbelief was creating:
Tyranny will become first a habit and then a disease... Blood
intoxicates, and minds will be opened to the worst
abnormalities. Such degeneracy can take place that
abnormalities will seem like pure joys... The opportunity for
going on such a rampage often infects a whole people. Society
despises the hired executioner, but not one who is provided
with unlimited power.... 5
A world which denies God’s justice will very quickly deny men all
their rights and privileges and think nothing of it. Having denied
God’s justice, it will deny before long that such an idea as justice
has any meaning. Tacitus wrote of Nero, “Nero after having
butchered so many illustrious men, at last aspired to extirpate
virtue itself by murdering Thrasea Paetus and Barea Soranus.”6 To
war against God means, ultimately, to war against everything. Any
separation of the world of law and justice from God and the
atonement is either a surrender of the world to the enemy or a
joining of forces with him.
The doctrine of the atonement thus requires us to be concerned
with God’s law and justice, with the Kingdom of God and the rule
of God in and over every domain of life. When we think of the
atonement, therefore, we must think of the reinstitution of God’s
law and justice in and through His redeemed people.
5. Cited in Walter Mehring, The Lost Library (London: Secker & Warburg, 1951),
181.
6. Tacitus, “Annals 16:21,” in Moses Hadas, editor, Complete Works of Tacitus
(New York: Modern Library, 1942), 409.
Justice 479
Age after age, from the beginning of history, men have cried out
for justice. The whole of recorded history is one great longing for
justice. Nothing, however, has been more conspicuously absent
than justice, though kings and commoners have professed their
love of it. Neither the rulers nor the revolutionists have been able
to institute justice. Something clearly has been wrong. When the
demand for justice is so extensive, and the professed love of justice
so well-nigh universal, we can only conclude that either the
profession is hypocritical, or the idea of justice false, or both.
Clearly, humanistic attempts at gaining justice have been signal
failures. Justice has been defined in terms of man, not in terms of
God, and the result has been injustice. Only through the Biblical
doctrine of justice can men realize peace and order.
LIV
Christian Liberty
One of the great landmark statements of church history is

Chapter XX of the Westminster Confession of Faith, “Of Christian
Liberty, and Liberty of Conscience”:
I. The liberty which Christ hath purchased for believers under
the gospel consists in their freedom from the guilt of sin, the
condemning wrath of God, the curse of the moral law, and in
their being delivered from this present evil world, bondage to
Satan, and dominion of sin, from the evils of afflictions, the
sting of death, the victory of the grave, and everlasting
damnation; as also in their free access to God, and their
yielding obedience unto Him, not out of slavish fear, but a
child-like love, and a willing mind. All which were common
also to believers under the law: but under the New Testament,
the liberty of Christians is further enlarged in their freedom
from the yoke of the ceremonial law, to which the Jewish
Church was subjected; and in greater boldness of access to the
throne of grace, and in fuller communications of the free
Spirit of God, than believers under the law did ordinarily
partake of.
II. God alone is the Lord of the conscience, and hath left it
free from the doctrines and commandments of men which are
in any thing contrary to his Word, or beside it, in matters of
faith or worship. So that to believe such doctrines, or to obey
such commandments out of conscience, is to betray true
liberty of conscience; and the requiring of an implicit faith,
and an absolute and blind obedience, is to destroy liberty of
conscience, and reason also.
III. They who, upon pretence of Christian liberty, do practice
any sin, or cherish any lust, do thereby destroy the end of
Christian liberty; which is, that, being delivered out of the
hands of our enemies, we might serve the Lord without fear,
in holiness and righteousness before him, all the days of our
life.
IV. And because the powers which God hath ordained, and
the liberty which Christ hath purchased, are not intended by
481
God to destroy, but mutually to uphold and preserve one
another; they who, upon pretence of Christian liberty, shall
oppose any lawful power, or the lawful exercise of it, whether
it be civil or ecclesiastical, resist the ordinance of God. And for
their publishing of such opinions, or maintaining of such
practices, as are contrary to the light of nature; or to the
known principles of Christianity, whether concerning faith,
worship, or conversation; or to the power of godliness; or such
erroneous opinions or practices, as either, in their own nature,
or, in the manner of publishing or maintaining them, are
destructive to the external peace and order which Christ hath
established in the Church: they may lawfully be called to
account, and proceeded against by the censures of the Church.
The importance of this concept in our history cannot be
overstated. Too often we credit the modern liberal state, an enemy
of Christian liberty and of all liberty of conscience, with our
contemporary liberty of conscience. However, as historian L. John
Van Til has shown, this was a Puritan idea, derived from Scripture
and with difficulty imposed on the civil order by law.1 The modern
church and state are hostile to Christian liberty and are working to
destroy it. Clark has made this clear with respect to the church:
Some years ago a young man presented himself to a presbytery
for ordination. As he was known to believe that the boards
and agencies of that church were infiltrated with modernism,
he was asked whether he would support the boards and
agencies. He replied that he would support them insofar as
they were true to the Bible. This answer did not please
presbytery, and he was asked if he would support the boards
regardless of what they did. When the young man declined to
make any such blind promise, the presbytery refused to ordain
him.
One of his friends remarked that the difference between
modernism and Christianity might be stated thus: in
modernism you believe as you please but do what the officials
1. See
L. John Van Til, Liberty of Conscience, the History of a Puritan Idea (Nutley,
New Jersey: The Craig Press, 1972).
Christian Liberty 483
tell you; in true Presbyterianism you do as you please so long
as you believe what the Confession says.2
The issue in this matter was ultimate authority: did it reside in God
and His word, or in the church? If men deny the ultimate, absolute,
and infallible authority of God, then that authority accrues to some
human agency, institution, office, or group of men. In the case
cited by Clark, the infallibility of Scripture had been specifically
denied and the total authority of the church affirmed.
As Clark pointed out,
One of Christ’s most serious complaints about the Pharisees
was that they substituted the commandments of men for the
teachings of God (Mt. 15:9).3
This was not a peculiarity limited to the Pharisees. In every age,
whenever and wherever men deny God, they will then ascribe all
authority to man, or to some aspect of man’s life, or to an
institution established by men. The alternative to God’s authority
is never, “no authority,” but always some other authority, of either
anarchistic man or organized man. The ultimate and absolute
authority of God is simply transferred to another agency.
Clark commented further:
The twentieth century church in America seems to have fallen
into a curious self-contradiction. The lust for power and
control over men and organizations has produced an almost
papal claim to authority on the part of bureaucratic
ecclesiastical officials. When the majority speaks (and the
officials manipulate the majority) it is the voice of God. Yet
with all this unscriptural claim to authority, the officials and
their obedient servants are horrified at the thought of
censuring or excommunicating a minister who denies the
virgin birth or the resurrection. No doubt such a thought
strikes too close to home.4
2. Gordon H. Clark, What Presbyterians Believe, An Exposition of the Westminster

1956), 80.
3. Ibid. 81.
4. Ibid., 82.
With all due respect to Clark, no “self-contradiction” is involved
by a necessary and strict logic. Having denied the authority of God
and His word, such churchmen must assert some other kind of
authority, and in their case, it is the authority of the church as
controlled by them. Our Lord declared,
No man can serve two masters: for either he will hate the one,
and love the other; or else he will hold to the one, and despise
the other. (Matt. 6:24; cf. Luke 16:13)
Apostate churchmen are serving their new master, a church created
in their own image.
If God is our ultimate and absolute authority, then God is also
the source of our liberties, liberty of conscience, civil liberty,
religious liberty, and all things else. We are free only insofar as God
gives us freedom, and we are bound insofar as God binds us to
Himself.
Where the state is the ultimate authority, there the state sets the
boundaries of our freedom and retains the right to limit, to extend,
or to abolish them. Man’s conscience can only be bound then by
the state, and the state can compel man’s conscience as man’s
ultimate authority. If the church claims this power over men, then
man’s freedom and conscience are subject to the church and the
will of the church.
Apart from the Old Testament tradition, the ancient world knew
no freedom of conscience apart from the state and anarchistic
man. If a man denied the authority of the state to compel his
conscience or to restrict his actions, and protested, which rarely
occurred, he did it in terms of anarchism. Thus, Socrates opposed
to the authority of the state the voice of his own daemon or private
revelation. The Cynics took a position of radical anarchism as their
means of countering statist absolutism. It was thus the absolutism
of the individual as against the absolutism of the state. In Israel,
however, in the name of God, men could challenge kings and
priests, as Nathan did, when he confronted King David with his
sin, declaring, “Thou art the man” (2 Sam. 12:7). The whole history
of Old Testament prophecy is the history of such a continuing
challenge in the name of the Lord. Neither priests nor kings were
allowed to absolutize themselves and set their authority against the
word of the Lord.
Conflict between Christians and Rome was thus inevitable.
Rome allowed no independent conscience or religious liberty. For
Rome as for Greece, man was a creature of the state. Rome was
ready to be tolerant, and to license diverse religions, provided that
at all times the religious priority of the Genius of Rome was
granted. This the Christians could not accept. Ultimate authority
rests with God, not the state. In pleading their cause, the Christians
cited the fact that they were better citizens than their non-Christian
neighbors, more honest and loyal, and obedient in all other
matters. This plea Rome rejected: the ultimate authority of the
triune God could not be granted; Christ must submit to Caesar.
The fall of Rome did not end the battle. It entered a second
phase with Constantine the Great. The existence of the church as
an independent realm under Christ was more or less granted, but a
long conflict between church and state began, each claiming best
to express Christ’s ultimate authority and to represent God on
earth.
The third phase of the battle came with the Puritans. William
Perkins, an Elizabethan Puritan theologian, developed “a theology
of conscience.” He challenged the primacy of the state. The roots
of his position were in Calvin, and the essence of it was sphere
laws.5 Each area of life is a law sphere under God. Church, state,
family, school, vocation, mathematics, physics, etc., are
independent and interdependent law spheres, alike under God
rather than under the control of any one of them.
The essence of this position is that God’s ultimate and absolute
authority limits all human authorities, institutions, and spheres.
This means also that man himself is limited. Man cannot claim
absolute powers or liberties, because man, no less than church,
state, and all things else, is under the absolute government of God.
Both collectivism and anarchism are thus untenable from a
Christian perspective.
5. Van Til, op. cit., 16-25.

In the fourth phase of the battle, as Christian faith waned, the
state began to claim increasing power over every area and sphere
of life. Totalitarianism has arisen as faith has declined. Anarchism
has also flourished, the absolute individual claiming independence
from God and other men alike. These trends cannot be countered
by stressing the primacy of political action but by declaring the
primacy of God and faith in Him.
The issue at stake is authority. “The question of authority is crucial
in any view of conscience; in fact, the claim of conscience is no
better than the authority called upon.”6 If our authority is man or
the state, our only possible view of conscience or liberty is strictly
governed by the limitations of our principle of ultimacy. We have
only as much freedom of conscience and liberty as the state
chooses by its legislation to grant us, and no more. If our authority
is ourselves, anarchistic man, then we have no more authority,
power, and liberty than an individual man is able to assert in a
world of competing men. Our conscience is then a law unto itself,
but our power is the extent of our liberty, so that we are limited
indeed.
The implications of the Christian gospel were startling to the
Greco-Roman world. Both to new converts and to its enemies,
Christianity seemed to be lawless. Its enemies regarded it as
atheistic because of its denial of existing authorities. As a result, the
New Testament is full of commandments to submit to duly
constituted authorities. Thus, 1 Peter 2:13-19 declares:
13. Submit yourselves to every ordinance of man for the
Lord’s sake: whether it be to the king, as supreme;
14. Or unto governors, as unto them that are sent by him for
the punishment of evildoers, and for the praise of them that
do well.
15. For so is the will of God, that with well doing ye may put
to silence the ignorance of foolish men:
16. As free, and not using your liberty for a cloke of
maliciousness, but as the servants of God.
17. Honour all men. Love the brotherhood. Fear God.
Honour the king.
6. Ibid., 166.
18. Servants, be subject to your masters with all fear; not only
to the good and gentle, but also to the froward.
19. For this is thankworthy, if a man for conscience toward
God endure grief, suffering wrongfully.
We fail to appreciate the meaning of this statement if we do not see
that it was necessary for St. Peter and others to so command the
Christians. By declaring the prior authority of God and the
kingship of Messiah Jesus, the apostles had opposed to the claims
of ultimate authority by Caesar the ultimate authority of Christ.
They had to be warned against a misuse of their Christian liberty
(Gal. 5:13). It was necessary also to teach the Christians why
authorities should be obeyed. The Corinthians had been ready to
see even moral law dissolved by God’s higher authority. The
authorities, they were told, are ordained of God and are under His
judgment. The role of civil officers is to be a ministry of justice and
a terror to evil-doers (Rom. 13:1-8). Honor should therefore be
rendered to all authorities as a duty to God. The office, not the
man, is honored. The command therefore is to “submit yourselves
to every ordinance of man for the Lord’s sake.” St. Peter thus
requires obedience to the king as “supreme” in his realm, the state.
In v. 17, the verb timao, honor, is applied equally to “the
brotherhood,” i.e., fellow Christians, and to the king; the king thus,
while having a supreme authority under God in his realm, is no
more highly to be honored apart from that realm than are all our
fellow believers. We are, in v. 16, described as “free” or freemen, who
are called to use our freedom, not as a covering for maliciousness,
but as God’s bondmen, working to further God’s kingdom. We are
to honor all men, give to all men their due authority and dignity under
God (v. 17).
Our obedience is “to every ordinance of man” (v. 13), or,
literally, “to every human creation.” The word ktisis or “creation”
normally refers to every creative act of God. Only once does it
have a reference to human actions, in 1 Peter 2:13. Church, state,
vocations, families, etc. are human creations; they represent the
dominion of man as expressed through various channels. They are
human creations which are still the will and purpose of God in His
word and eternal decree. These ordinances or creations thus have
a special status. As Mason noted, St. Peter “does not say that we
are to submit to every law that men may pass.”7 Laws can be the
fiat creation of men and often are. We are not to disobey all such
laws, but all which would compel us to deny God or to sin. We thus
submit to the ordinances or orders, but not to all laws.
The Biblical method of social renewal is not either civil
disobedience or revolution, but regeneration. It is “the will of
God” that “with well doing” we make our reforms and also muzzle
or gag the critics who accuse us of being in principle rebellious
because we deny the ultimacy of man, the state, or any other
human agency.
Mason noted, with respect to v. 16 and its declaration of
Christian freedom and restraint:
This points at once to what was the gist of the accusation. The
Christian took up a position of complete independence
within, and professed himself in a certain sense to be above
the laws, by virtue of being a member of Christ’s kingdom.
This position of independence the heathen state resented, and
looked upon the Christian Church as a dangerous
organisation. Here, therefore, St. Peter both insists upon, and
defines that independent position. “This the Apostle adds,”
says Leighton, “lest any should so far mistake the nature of
their Christian liberty as to dream of an exemption from
obedience either to God or to man for His sake, and according
to His appointment. Their freedom he grants, but would have
them understand aright what it is.”8
Freedom is not to be used as “a cloke of maliciousness” or a
curtain for vice, but as servants or slaves of God.
The mark of grace, “for this is thankworthy” (literally, “for this
is grace”), is to be ready to endure wrong rather than create the
greater wrong of disobeying God. Where God requires obedience,
we must submit for the sake of conscience.
Christian liberty thus is grounded in the supreme authority of
God over every area of life, and in our necessary obedience to God.
7. A.
J. Mason, “I Peter,” in C. J. Ellicott, editor, Commentary on the Whole Bible,
vol. VIII (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Zondervan, n.d.), 406.
8. Ibid., 407.
Our necessary obedience to God means our necessary liberty
under God from rival claims of ultimacy and our necessary
disobedience where we must obey God rather than men.
LV
Christian Obedience
The Larger Catechism of the Westminster Assembly declares, with

respect to the duty of man,
Q. 91. What is the duty which God requireth of man?
A. The duty which God requireth of man is obedience to his
revealed will.
We have already seen, in discussing Christian liberty, the centrality
of the doctrine of authority and obedience to liberty. It is important
now to analyze more fully the significance of obedience.
According to Moses,
The secret things belong unto the LORD our God: but those
things which are revealed belong unto us and to our children
for ever, that we may do all the words of this law. (Deut. 29:29)
Moses had given God’s law to the people, and also prophecies
concerning the future. He made clear also the plain-speaking of
God’s law, its relevance to their daily life, and their knowledge of it:
11. For this commandment which I command thee this day, it
is not hidden from thee, neither is it far off.
12. It is not in heaven, that thou shouldest say, Who shall go
up for us to heaven, and bring it unto us, that we may hear it,
and do it?
13. Neither is it beyond the sea, that thou shouldest say, Who
shall go over the sea for us, and bring it unto us, that we may
hear it, and do it?
14. But the word is very nigh unto thee, in thy mouth, and in
thy heart, that thou mayest do it. (Deut. 30:11-14)
What God asked of man was nothing difficult or impossible, but
something practical and necessary to his welfare. His word was not
something requiring a search of the universe in order to be
discovered, but rather the word was revealed to them, the word was
close to them, the word was in their very hearts as a part of their
being. St. Paul declares that this word is known to those who have
491
never heard the revealed word; the unwritten word is a part of their
being, so that they are without excuse. They hold or suppress the
truth of God in unrighteousness (Rom. 1:17-21).
Turning back now to Deuteronomy 29:29, we find that, as
Wright noted, with respect to its import,
The secret things, i.e., the future, belong to God. In our limited
knowledge we cannot know them. Yet sufficient has been
revealed to us in the covenant that we may now live. We are to
do what we should while it is day, for the night belongs to
God.1
Man has been given the law, which he must obey. He has been told
what the consequences of obedience and disobedience are. More
than that, man does not need to know.
That which is revealed includes the law with its promises and
threats; consequently that which is hidden can only refer to the
mode in which God will carry out in the future his counsel and
will, which He has revealed in the law, and complete His work
of salvation notwithstanding the apostasy of the people.2
Man is more often prompted by curiosity than by obedience. St.
Paul describes this as “itching ears” which “turn away from the
truth” for fables (2 Tim. 4:3-4). For every question a pastor receives
about the details of God’s law, he normally receives several which
express little more than a curiosity about God, the life to come, and
other things which are aspects of “the secret things which belong
to God.” Curiosity wants a charted future. It says in effect, “If I do
thus and so, will God do thus and so and do it precisely when I
want it?” Curiosity is in essence asking two questions. First, what is
the secret will of God, and what is involved in it? Second, why am I
not consulted in the decreeing of that secret will, since it is so
important to my future? All this is an aspect of man’s original sin,
man’s desire to be his own god (Gen. 3:5). The regenerate and the
unregenerate are both barred from this kind of knowledge. The sin
of man was to be as God, knowing or determining good and evil
1.
G. Ernest Wright, “Deuteronomy,” in The Interpreter’s Bible, vol. II (New
York: Abingdon Press, 1951), 507.
2. C. F. Keil and F. Delitzsch, The Pentateuch, vol. III (Grand Rapids, Michigan:
Eerdmans, 1949), 451.
Christian Obedience 493
for himself. To determine good and evil is also to determine the
future, in that, if we can determine law, we can determine
consequences. Man, in making the claim, had to be severed
immediately from God and from life, from any remote ability to
establish his claim by living forever. Man had been told that
disobedience meant death, that, in the day he ate of the tree of the
knowledge of good and evil, he would begin to die, or, dying thou
shalt die (Gen. 2:17). As a result, he was cast out of the Garden of
Eden and separated from the tree of life, from any possibility of
both sinning, and living indefinitely (Gen. 3:22).
As against curiosity and a probing about “secret things,” we are
plainly commanded to obey God’s law and to recognize that the
law gives us a knowledge of the future which is legitimate.
Deuteronomy 28 and 29 call attention to this prophetic aspect of
law. The summons thus is to obedience. The unfolded or revealed
things are with us for all time, to the end that we may obey all the
orders of the law. The revealed word thus requires obedience. If we
are men of faith, we obey. If we are unbelievers, we demand
answers about “the secret things” as a condition of obedience.
Calvin said, of Deuteronomy 29:29,
To me there appears no doubt that, by antithesis, there is a
comparison here made between the doctrine openly set forth
in the Law, and the hidden and incomprehensible counsel of
God, concerning which it is not lawful to inquire.
It is a remarkable passage, and especially deserving of our
observation, for by it audacity and excessive curiosity are
condemned, whilst pious minds are aroused to be zealous in
seeking instruction. We know how anxious men are to
understand things, the knowledge of which is altogether
unprofitable, and even the investigation of them injurious. All
of them would desire to be God's counsellors, and to penetrate into the
deepest recesses of heaven, nay, they would search into its very
cabinets. Hence a heathen poet truly says,
Nought for mortals is too high;
Our folly reaches to the sky. Hor. Od. i, 3-37.
On the other hand, what God plainly sets before us, and
would have familiarly known, is either neglected, or turned
from in disgust, or put far away from us, as if it were too
obscure. In the first clause, then, Moses briefly reproves and
restrains that temerity which leaps beyond the bounds
imposed by God; and in the latter, exhorts us to embrace the
doctrine of the Law, in which God’s will is declared to us, as if
He were openly speaking to us; and thus he encounters the
folly of those who fly from the light presented to them, and
wrongfully accuse of obscurity that doctrine, wherein God has
let Himself down to the measure of our understanding. In
sum, he declares that God is the best master to all who come
to Him as disciples, because He faithfully and clearly explains
to them all that is useful for them to know. The perpetuity of
the doctrine is also asserted, and that it never is to be let go, or
to become obsolete by the lapse of ages.3
The purpose of the revealed things is to command our
obedience. The subject of obedience is important to an
understanding of Scripture. In analyzing Christian liberty, we have
seen that the world requires an obedience to itself as ultimate,
which would deny the sovereignty of God. Too often, as men
require obedience as a Christian virtue, they speak of it in terms
more like the claims of totalitarian humanism, as the absolute claim
of man over man.
To cite a specific example, St. Paul in Ephesians 5:24 declares,
“Therefore as the church is subject unto Christ, so let the wives be
to their own husbands in every thing.” This is commonly
interpreted to mean as total a subjection of women to their
husbands as of the church to Christ. This would be a justifiable
claim only if husbands were as perfect and sinless as Christ. Hodge,
commenting on this verse, makes clear the fallacy of the totalitarian
approach:
As verse 22 teaches the nature of the subjection of the wife to
her husband, and verse 23 its ground, this verse teaches its
extent. She is to be subject in every thing. That is, the subjection
is not limited to any one sphere or department of the social
life, but extends to all. The wife is not subject as to some
things, and independent as to others, but she is subject as to
3.
John Calvin, Commentaries on the Four Last Books of Moses, Arranged in the Form
of a Harmony, vol. I, C. W. Bingham translator (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Eerd-
mans, 1950),410f.
all. This of course does not mean that the authority of the
husband is unlimited. It reaches its extent, not its degree. It
extends over all departments, but is limited in all; first, by the
nature of the relation; and secondly, by the higher authority of
God. No superior, whether master, parent, husband or
magistrate, can make it obligatory on us either to do what God
forbids, or not to do what God commands. So long as our
allegiance to God is preserved, and obedience to man is made
part of our obedience to him, we retain our liberty and our
integrity.4
The men who demand a totalitarian obedience from their wives
forget that Sarah rebuked her husband Abraham, and God not
only backed her up (Gen. 16), but also made her a type of the godly
wife (1 Pet. 3:6). Moreover, these men are not ready to render unto
civil authorities (kings, presidents, governors, prime ministers, tax
collectors, etc.) any such obedience as they demand of their wives,
although the word of God uses the same word “obey” in both
instances (Rom. 13:1-8; 1 Pet. 2:13-17, etc.). Still further, servants
or employees are required to “be subject to your masters (or
employers) with all fear; not only to the good and gentle, but also
to the froward” (1 Pet. 2:18). “Servants” in Eph. 6:5 means
“slaves,” but in Peter the reference is plainly to paid employees.
How many men who demand a totalitarian obedience from their
wives render such an obedience to their employers? We cannot
have a pagan obedience in one realm and a Christian obedience in
another, requiring people to render us a pagan obedience while we
reserve the liberty of a Christian to ourselves. The degree of
authority in every sphere of life is at all times limited by the prior
authority of God. While the extent of the husband’s authority is
unlimited, i.e., he is the authority in every sphere of the marriage,
in every area it is also conditional in terms of the word of God. The
authority of God is absolute; the authority of man is always conditional.
Adam in Eden no doubt had at least one pet dog from the
moment of his creation as a mature man. He was created mature
into a mature creation. If all he needed was someone or something
to boss and to order to come at his whistle, or his beck and call, a
4. Charles Hodge, A Commentary on the Epistle to the Ephesians (Grand Rapids,
Michigan: Eerdmans, 1950), 314f.
dog would have been sufficient. But God said, “It is not good that
the man should be alone; I will make him a help meet for him”
(Gen. 2:18). A helpmate is not a doormat, but a subordinate and
necessary partner.
One of the problems with respect to obedience is that too many
commentators are still under the influence of a Medieval and
Reformation perspective which at this point is very faulty. This
influence is the divine right doctrine, which assumes that divinely
ordained authority is beyond questioning. The divine right of kings
gave way, for many, to the divine right of husbands, an equally
pernicious idea. Indeed, all legitimate authority is established by
God, but this does not entitle human authorities to the
unquestioning obedience God alone is entitled to. All human
authorities are to be obeyed in the Lord, i.e., in terms of a
questioning and devout attention to the word of God as prior to
man. The old divine rights doctrine is still promoted, as witness a
reprint of the worthy John Bunyan’s comments, which are
regrettably in this temper, in an evangelical periodical.5
Bunyan, however, is mild compared to most in the European
tradition. A totalitarian obedience to civil authorities, churches,
pastors and priests, employers, and husbands has deeply infected
the European tradition, and European groups have brought the
doctrine of divine rights to this country. (A liberal form is with us
politically as the divine right of the people, the democratic
consensus, etc.) In its every form, the doctrine takes a relative
authority and a relative obedience and absolutizes it to give man the
same authority as Christ or God. This is sinning in God’s name, or
blasphemy. We are indeed to obey all due authorities “for the
Lord’s sake” (1 Peter 2:13), not because man requires it. This
means that we subject all human orders to the scrutiny of God’s
word, because we are to have “none other gods” before Him, i.e.,
it is idolatry if we obey any human authority with the same
unquestioning obedience with which we obey God. Such
idolatrous obedience leads either to slavery or to resentment and
senseless rebellion and revolution.
5. John Bunyan, “Duties of Husbands and Wives,” in Sword and Trowel, vol. IV,
no. 12, December 1972, 1-2,. 9-10.
The requirement of unquestioning obedience by any human
authority is a sin and defiles the very intent of God’s word. The
unquestioning obedience which Scripture requires is only to God,
never to kings, rulers, employers, husbands, or parents. To render
unquestioning obedience is sin.
Obedience thus is basic to God’s plan for man, but all obedience
must be to the word of God: “those things which are revealed
belong unto us.” “The secret things” means essentially the hidden
things of the future, and the “revealed” means “the unfolded issues
of the day” in terms of the law-word of God (James Moffatt). In a
secondary sense, however, all that the word of God forbids to us
means not only the issues of the future, but also men and the things
of today. We cannot treat the world as something totally ours to
use: it must be used under God. We cannot treat people as our
creatures. Even in marriage, in its sexual relationship, the boundary
is sharply drawn. The menstruous woman cannot be taken (Lev.
18:19, 20:18): to do so is to treat her as totally man’s creature,
which no man can do. The woman was also guilty, if she permitted
it.6
“The secret things” of God extend to our own lives and persons.
We are not our own: our todays and tomorrows are totally under
the government of God, and, beyond our obedience to His
law-word, we have no right to demand special knowledge, reward,
or privileges. Precisely because God requires us to be obedient to
Him, He at the same time sets boundaries on our authority over
one another and our claims upon one another. We have Christian
liberty to the degree that we have Christian obedience.
In the European tradition, rulers were compared to God, and
husbands to Christ, employers to God, and priests and pastors to
Christ, without any real stress on the difference between absolute
and relative authority. In the American tradition, the Puritans
began by resisting authority in the name of God, and they
established a tradition of godly and relative authority as against idolatrous
and divine right authority. As a result, America has not had the
6. See R. J. Rushdoony, Institutes of Biblical Law (Nutley, New Jersey: Presbyteri-
an and Reformed Publishing Company, 1972).
revolutions and social upheavals so common to Europe. Too many
European groups in the U.S. today are reviving this dangerous
tradition, wherein rulers expect people to be unquestioningly
obedient, wives to be docile cows, employees to bow and scrape
before their employers, and church members never to question the
pastor or priest in his infallible wisdom. The result is either stupid
obedience or wild rebellion.
The Puritan wives were not given to servile obedience, and they
provided the strong-willed helpmeets necessary to the conquest of
a continent. The Puritan men held that the Kingship of Christ was
the only absolute power, and they acted on that principle.
Today, as anarchy and contempt for authority are spreading
everywhere, the worst possible answer is a blasphemous and
idolatrous doctrine of authority. The only valid answer to either of
these two crimes is godly authority.
The position of Elizabeth I of England, with respect to her royal
authority, has been summarized thus by Hume:
It was asserted that the queen inherited both an enlarging and
a restraining power; by her prerogative she might set at liberty
what was restrained by statute or otherwise, and by her
prerogative she might restrain what was otherwise at liberty;
that the royal prerogative was not to be canvassed, nor
disputed, nor examined; and did not even admit of any
limitation: that absolute princes, such as the sovereigns of
England, were a species of divinity: that it was in vain to
attempt tying the queen’s hands by laws or statutes; since, by
means of her dispensing power, she could loosen herself at
pleasure; and that even if a clause should be annexed to a
statute, excluding her dispensing power, she could first
dispense with that clause and then with the statute.7
The origins of this belief are in pagan antiquity and in emperor
worship. They rest in the belief in the immanent deity inherent in
earthly powers. This pagan concept has infiltrated and corrupted
the Biblical doctrine of obedience. It must be resisted, and the
people of God must be taught that it is a sin to require unquestioning
obedience, and a sin to yield it. We are not God: we cannot require
7. David Hume, The History of England, vol. IV (New York: Harper, 1852), 336f.
or expect for ourselves the absolute obedience due unto God. We
are not man’s creature: we cannot yield to any man the absolute and
unquestioning obedience due only unto God. The church must be
cleansed of the requirement of pagan obedience or it will continue
under the judgment of God.
LVI
Liberty of Conscience
Liberty of conscience is an important issue in the modern world.

There are many persons who claim this liberty, and there are many
nations that deny it. Liberty of conscience cannot be confused with
toleration. Toleration is a statist grant of exemption; it rests on the
premise that the state or civil authority has absolute and inalienable
prerogatives and that any liberties granted to certain persons or
classes of persons are a state grant and not a right. Thomas More’s
Utopia is often held up for admiration for a supposed defense of
religious liberty; on the contrary, all that More advocated was
toleration. King Utopus decreed what would and would not be
tolerated in the way of religious opinions.1 The presupposition of
tolerance is the prior right of the state to control the faith and
conscience of the people. This was the premise of ancient Rome;
its policy was to grant toleration to religions in terms of their utility
to social, political, and military policies. Its opposition to
Christianity was because Christianity had no intention of serving
the empire. We would expect a like hostility to have existed
towards the Jews, but, although there was some concern over
Jewish nationalism, the religion was tolerated. Guterman gives
evidence for the rationale of this toleration: “It was no idle boast
of Philo’s when in the middle of the first century he declared, in
answer to traducers, that the Jews considered whatever country
they inhabited as their real fatherland.” Some “sects existed which
assimilated the Jewish God to Jupiter, others to Jupiter Sabozius,
still others to Liber and to Saturn.”2
For the church to claim a freedom from the state, and Christians
a liberty of conscience, was to deny the fundamental unity of
ancient civilization, a unity which brought every aspect of life
1. William Dalian Armes, The Utopia of Sir Thomas More (New York: Macmillan,
1912), 190f. See L. John Van Til, Liberty of Conscience, the History of a Puritan Idea
(Nutley, New Jersey: The Craig Press, 1972), 6ff.
2. Simeon L. Guterman, Religious Toleration and Persecution in Ancient Rome (Lon-
don: Aiglon, 1951), 84f.
501
under the jurisdiction of the state. To deny this unity was to deny
the essential principle of the ancient state, and this is exactly what
the Christians did. As Guterman wrote,
The end of the ancient state coincides with the triumph of
Christianity. The triumph of Christianity marks the close of
the political and religious development of the classical
civilization. The dichotomy between church and state which
characterizes society since the fourth century makes its
appearance in the last age of the Roman Empire. “Render
unto Caesar what is Caesar’s and unto God what is God’s,” is
a rule which the ancient state knew not and could hardly
acknowledge.
This is not merely a coincidence; it is a consequence, as Fustel
de Coulanges has pointed out. The close integration of the
ancient gods with the classical community was of the essence
of the life of the ancient civilization. When this link
disappeared the vital part of the classical culture went with it. 3
To maintain the unity of ancient culture, Rome, ready enough to be
tolerant, felt that it was necessary to move against the church as a
treasonable and destructive agency. The letter of Pliny the Younger
(62-c.113) to the emperor (written c. A.D. 112) indicates clearly the
use of the death penalty against professing Christians and his
amazement at their “pertinacity and inflexible obstinacy” in
resisting the state, which alone was grounds for punishment. To
him, this constituted “madness.” Some recanted under pressure,
and Pliny was happy to report that the almost deserted temples of
the gods were again frequented, and the “contagion of this
superstition,” which “has spread not only in the cities, but in the
villages and rural districts as well.... seems capable of being checked
and set right.” From the recanters, Pliny made the following report
on Christian faith and life:
... They all worshiped your image and the statues of the gods
and cursed Christ. But they declared that the sum of their guilt
or error had amounted only to this, that on an appointed day
they had been accustomed to meet before daybreak, and to
recite a hymn antiphonally to Christ, as to a god, and to bind
3. Ibid., 158f.
Liberty of Conscience 503
themselves by an oath, not for the commission of any crime
but to abstain from theft, robbery, adultery, and breach of
faith, and not to deny a deposit when it was claimed. After the
conclusion of this ceremony it was their custom to depart and
meet again to take food; but it was ordinary and harmless
food, and they had ceased this practice after my edict in which,
in accordance with your orders, I had forbidden secret
societies. I thought it the more necessary, therefore, to find out
what truth there was in this by applying torture to two
maidservants, who were called deaconesses. But I found
nothing but a depraved and extravagant superstition, and I
therefore postponed my examination and had recourse to you
for consultation.4
Trajan thus had only a report of the superior morality of Christians;
clearly, the highest standards of citizenship were apparent in these
people. Later, Tertullian (c.160-240) stressed the fact that the
emperor had no better subjects than the persecuted Christians. The
significant fact to the empire was the denial of ultimate power and
sovereignty to the state, and the denial of the unity and
subordination of all life under the state. Tolerant Rome could not
tolerate this fundamental breach of the premise of its power.
The same position as that of antiquity is again the presupposition
of the modern state. Every area of life is held to be within the
jurisdiction of the state, and the religious “liberty” granted by the
state is not truly liberty but rather toleration.
The heart of the philosophy behind toleration and proscription
by state law is the exclusive and ultimate claims of the state to sovereignty over
man and the world. Only that which the state permits can have liberty:
all else is proscribed.
However, the philosophy of religious liberty and liberty of
conscience means the exclusive and ultimate claims of God to sovereignty
over man and the world. Liberty means the duty of all areas of life to
be godly, and their freedom under God to develop their
potentialities. State, church, school, family, vocation, the arts and
sciences, and all things else have an obligation to serve God and to
obey His law. All have a freedom from mutual interference and a
4. Henry Bettenson, editor, Documents of the Christian Church (New York: Oxford
University Press, 1947), 6f.
liberty to manifest their meaning under God. Ultimacy and
sovereignty belong to God, not to man or the state. Freedom,
therefore, is under God and in terms of His law.
The idea of absolute freedom is a myth. The Marquis de Sade,
who proposed a radical anarchism, still required, in the most
consistent statement of anarchism yet made, the abolition of
Christianity, of marriage, of the church, of all protection of life and
property, and much more.
Every philosophy of freedom has its areas of constraint. The
anarchistic constraints Sade made clear. With statism, the state is
free to do as it pleases, and the people are constrained and can at
best expect toleration for certain practices.
Liberty under God means that there is no liberty for murder,
theft, adultery, false witness, fraud, cannibalism, astrology,
witchcraft, and other practices contrary to God’s law. This does
not mean that all these are capital offenses, as has at times been
held, although some are. It does mean that every society must
proscribe certain things if it is to maintain the liberty of others.
Russell, in his study of medieval witchcraft, has given us an account
of some of the practices of the movement, its antinomianism,
human sacrifice, and much more. While we may hold that the
methods used to combat witchcraft were faulty or erroneous, and
court procedures sometimes unbiblical, still we must recognize that
society was faced with a major threat. Russell points out that
Now once again institutions are failing and men are being
thrust back upon their own formulations of symbolic order.
Once again, lacking the framework of a coherent rational
system, we are increasingly subject to propaganda, nihilism,
and mindless violence. Dogmatic and unreasoning ideologists
are preparing for us a new witch craze, couched now in secular
rather than in transcendental terms.5
The modern argument for liberty of conscience rests on a belief
in the sovereignty and inalienable rights of the individual. Such a
belief places the individual in the position of God and gives to his
5. Jeffrey Burton Russell, Witchcraft in the Middle Ages (Ithaca, New York: Cornell
every feeling an exemption from all laws of God and man. The
concern with liberty of conscience manifested by the New Left of
the 1960s and 1970s rests on this radical anarchism. It is a claim by
the sovereign individual to be his own universe and to the right to
veto all acts of God and man which go contrary to his will. It is an
assertion that man is lord of his conscience.
The statement of the Westminster Confession of Faith militates
against this anarchism as it does against statism. Neither man nor
the state is the lord of man’s conscience. To cite again the telling
Section II of Chapter XX of the Confession:
God alone is lord of the conscience, and hath left it free from
the doctrines and commandments of men which are in any
thing contrary to his Word, or beside it, in matters of faith or
worship. So that to believe such doctrines, or to obey such
commandments out of conscience, is to betray true liberty of
conscience; and the requiring of an implicit faith, and an
absolute and blind obedience, is to destroy liberty of
conscience, and reason also.
Only that which God requires can bind our conscience, and only
God can bind our conscience. For men or institutions to attempt
to bind our conscience apart from the word of God is an act of
usurpation and an arrogation of the powers of God. As Shaw
declared,
No person on earth can have authority to dictate to
conscience; for this would be to assume a prerogative which
belongs to none but the supreme Lord and Legislator. “There
is one Lawgiver, who is able to save and to destroy.” James iv.
12. Such a power was prohibited by Jesus Christ among his
followers: “the kings of the Gentiles exercise lordship over
them, but ye shall not be so.” Luke xxii. 25. It was disclaimed
by the inspired apostles: “Not that we have dominion over
your faith,” said the apostle of the Gentiles, “but are helpers
of your joy.” 2 Cor. i. 24.
From the principles laid down in this section, it manifestly
follows, that a right of private judgment about the matters of
religion belongs to every man, and ought to be exercised by
every Christian. Christians are expressly required to examine
and prove every doctrine by the unerring rule of the word of
God. Isa. viii. 20; 1 John iv. 1.6
Shaw’s point is very important. When the apostles themselves
refused to lord it over man’s conscience, certainly church and state
dare not do so without sin. Only God has dominion over our
conscience. The law can govern practices, and, in terms of the
word of God, forbid what God forbids, and forbid the propagation
of certain practices, but it cannot compel the mind of man. Thus,
cannibalism is against God’s law, quite obviously; we can
legitimately outlaw its practice, and all attempts to promote belief
in it, but we cannot attempt to enter the area of thought by forcing
other doctrines on those who practice cannibalism. It is an area for
education and conversion, not compulsion.
The extent to which conscience, and liberty of conscience, is
bound to the word of God, is apparent in Galatians 2:1-5.
1. Then fourteen years after I went up again to Jerusalem with
Barnabas, and took Titus with me also.
2. And I went up by revelation, and communicated unto them
that gospel which I preach among the Gentiles, but privately
to them which were of reputation, lest by any means I should
run, or had run, in vain.
3. But neither Titus, who was with me, being a Greek, was
compelled to be circumcised:
4. And that because of false brethren unawares brought in,
who came in privily to spy out our liberty which we have in
Christ Jesus, that they might bring us into bondage:
5. To whom we gave place by subjection, no, not for an hour;
that the truth of the gospel might continue with you.
The point here is a very telling one. Circumcision, the covenant rite
of the Old Testament, had been replaced by baptism. The mark of
membership in the Old Covenant was circumcision, in the New,
baptism. The Judaizers insisted on circumcision as a religious
necessity, holding that access to the Messiah was through Israel and
Israel’s covenant with God. Now the church retained many of the
practices of the Old Covenant, while making clear their voluntary

of Divines (Philadelphia: Presbyterian Board of Publication, 1846), 234f.
and instructional nature rather than their religious necessity. Thus,
the Armenian Church retained the practice of killing animals at the
door of the sanctuary and giving a portion to the clergy. The ritual
made it clear that this was now no longer law, and that its typical
character was a reminder of Christ’s work. Circumcision, similarly,
has been maintained among many Christians, for various reasons.
(The Coptic Church alone has kept it as a religious necessity.) A
respect for Scriptural precedent and its health values has led many
Christians to practice circumcision, but never, with the exception
of the Copts, as a religious necessity. St. Paul had been circumcised
on the eighth day (Phil. 3:5) and had circumcised Timothy, who had
a Jewish mother and a Greek father (Acts 16:1-3), but not Titus
(Gal. 2:3). He insisted that circumcision now had a symbolic or
spiritual meaning (Rom. 2:29; Col. 2:11). This symbolic meaning is
not an arbitrary one, but is central to Paul’s ministry. Its origin is in
the Old Testament, as witness Exodus 6:12, 30, Deuteronomy
10:16, 30:6, Leviticus 26:41, and Jeremiah 4:4, 6:10.
In view of the symbolic meaning of circumcision, it would have
been easy for St. Paul to accommodate his preaching to its practice
as a religious necessity. In doing so, he would have avoided trouble
with the Judaizers and still have enabled himself to bring out the
meaning of baptism, stressing its superiority to the ritual practice
of circumcision. But Paul is emphatic, in writing to the Galatians,
that he never considered such a compromise. There could be no
tenable requirement made of any Christian unless the word of God
requires it. Man’s conscience can only be bound by the word of
God, and the requirement of Scripture is now baptism, not
circumcision.
The same principle appears again in Galatians 4:9-10.
9. But now, after that ye have known God, or rather are known
of God, how turn ye again to the weak and beggarly elements,
whereunto ye desire again to be in bondage?
10. Ye observe days, and months, and times, and years.
Commentators often speak of the “days, and months, and times,
and years” as the Old Testament sabbaths and festivals. It is
difficult to see how the Judaizers could be promoting sabbath years
and the jubilee, which were not at all practiced by the Jews any
longer. The sabbath years had been practiced in Palestine in the
Maccabean and post-Maccabean periods, but the Jubilee Year had
been omitted entirely. The practice of the feasts by the Jews of the
Dispersion was limited, so that again it would be difficult to
imagine Judaizers demanding practices of the Christians in the
Dispersion which they had not practiced as Jews; to ask the same
of Gentile converts would have been doubly difficult.
Moreover, if St. Paul referred here to the Biblical days, months,
times, and years, he would have, had he set them aside as no longer
valid but completed in Christ, explained their symbolic meaning.
Instead, Paul calls them “weak and beggarly elements,” something
he would never call God’s law, even if it were a ceremonial law now
terminated. Moreover, he says they “observe” these things, or,
more literally, “observe scrupulously.” What was then observed
scrupulously by the Jewish Church was not the law of God but the
canonical and non-canonical feasts and fasts as their character had
been interpreted and altered by the Pharisees and Sadducees. Some
of these were beautiful and rich in meaning, such as the Feast of
Dedication, Hanukkah (Dedication), or Lights, the significance of
which our Lord applied to Himself (John 8:12).7 The Simhath Torah
was a festival in honor of the law and means Joy of the Law, again an
honorable purpose. Some of the communal fasts were
non-canonical also: one observed the burning of the Temple by
Babylon (2 Kings 25:8-9; Jer. 52:12-13), another the murder of
Gedaliah (Jer. 41).
Because these festivals and fasts, days, months, years, and times,
were weak and beggarly elements (“weakness and poverty,” as
Moffatt rendered it) as compared to the word of God, to return to
them was bondage indeed. Note Paul’s use of the phrase, “ye desire
again to be in bondage” to these “weak and beggarly elements.” To
have obeyed the word of God was never bondage; the bondage
was to non-canonical practices and non-canonical observances of
Biblical festivals.
7. See A. Edersheim, The Temple (New York: Hodder & Stoughton, n.d.), 333ff.
When in Galatians 4:3 Paul speaks of being, as children, “in
bondage under the elements (lit., rudiments) of the world, his
reference is to the rudiments of religious teaching, Gentile and
perhaps Jewish also, which were more ritual than meaning.”8 It
follows that his reference to bondage immediately thereafter, in
Galatians 4:9, has reference to something similar. The reference to
Hagar, a foreign woman, who is a type of the religion “which
gendereth to bondage” (Gal. 4:24), is in line with this. The Jewish
Church was not in the line of faith and promise, but of bondage. It
was not faithful to the word of promise, but had substituted a word
of bondage. It was bondage because it bound the conscience of
man to something other than the word of God. Men can only be
bound to the word of God, and only in the manner the word
requires.
Paul was not opposing immoral or evil practices and
observances. On the contrary, the practices were far from devoid
of meaning and had, when properly observed, a rich content. He
opposed them, however, for their claims on the conscience of man.
The church is of God’s ordinance, as is the state. Both alike have
a holy calling. However, neither can compel the conscience of any
man apart from the word of God. Herein is our liberty of
conscience: it gives us the ground whereon we can confront all
powers in the assurance that Christ has called us, not to bondage,
but to liberty. “Stand fast therefore in the liberty wherewith Christ
hath made us free, and be not entangled again with the yoke of
bondage” (Gal. 5:1). If church or state compel our conscience, they
are thereby claiming to be our lord and savior. Paul points to this
very plainly. In Galatians 5:2-4, he makes it clear that to follow the
Judaizers in their mandatory circumcision meant to believe in
salvation by the law rather than by Jesus Christ. It meant forsaking
Christ as Savior for circumcision, or, more plainly, the rules and
regulations of men in the place of the word of God. No doubt the
Judaizers would have denied this charge and would have claimed
the name of Christ equally with Paul, or, in fact, would have
claimed greater faithfulness. Paul, however, was right: in
8. W. Sanday, “Galatians,” in C. J. Ellicott, editor, Commentary on the Whole Bible,
vol. VII (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Zondervan, n.d.), 449.
commanding man’s conscience apart from the word of God, they
were offering another plan of salvation. The same is still true: all
who claim lordship over man’s conscience claim it as would-be
saviors.
LVII
Mercy
One of our Lord’s strongest indictments of the religious leaders

of His day is in Matthew 23; vv. 23 and 24 in particular declare:
23. Woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! for ye pay
tithe of mint and anise and cummin, and have omitted the
weightier matters of the law, judgment, mercy, and faith: these
ought ye to have done, and not to leave the other undone.
24. Ye blind guides, which strain at a gnat, and swallow a
camel.
This is a startling statement. The religious leaders are blind guides,
our Lord said, who strain out the gnat and swallow the camel.
Tithing is not only not condemned, but is separated from the other
matters of the law as an easier duty. The more weighty and difficult
obligations are justice, mercy, and faith. Tithing does not make us
great Christians or signal observers of the law: it is an elementary
obligation. It is the necessary tax of the Kingdom; payment
signifies citizenship, not a distinguished service medal. We are not
up to the level of the Pharisees, if tithing is the high point of our
faith: it is an elementary mark of faith, the abc’s of the Kingdom.
The Pharisees obeyed the law of the tithe as given in Leviticus
27:30 and elsewhere; in this particular requirement they surpassed
most who claim the name of Christian today. Justice, mercy, and
faith, however, were left “undone.”
Clearly, mercy is an important aspect of Christian faith and a
mark of the redeemed, of the blessed ones of God (Matt. 5:7). It is
necessary for us therefore to understand the meaning of mercy.
The Old and New Testament words translated as mercy and
sometimes compassion mean to show mercy or compassion, to be
gracious, and to pity. Achtemeier, however, gives us a very clear
meaning of what this involves by divorcing it from our usual
interpretation of these words to place mercy in its theocentric
context:
511
It has often been pointed out that one Hebrew word for
“mercy” or “compassion” derives from the stem meaning
“womb,” and that its original meaning was brotherly or
motherly feeling — i.e., the feeling of those born from the
same womb or the love of a mother for her child. Thus
Yahweh’s mercy has been defined in terms of such familial
love, and some OT passages support this reasoning: in Ps.
103:13; Isa. 63:15-16; Jer. 31:20, Yahweh is a father to Israel
(cf. Hos. 11); in Isa: 49:15 a mother; in Isa. 54:4-8 a husband
(cf. Hos. 1-3). As such, the Lord welcomes his sinful child or
wife back to him with overflowing yearning and love and
forgiveness.
It is a mistake, however, to define Yahweh’s mercy only in
terms of such familial affection, more of one to view it solely
as an inward feeling. God’s mercy in the OT, like his
faithfulness, his steadfast love, his righteousness, his
judgments (cf. Hos. 2:19), represents his continual regard for
the covenant which he has established with his chosen people,
Israel (cf. Exod. 33:19; Isa. 63:9). Not once is God’s mercy
granted to those outside the covenant relationship. Further,
although mercy signifies, more than the other terms listed
above, an affection or love within the divine person (cf. 2
Chron. 36:15), it is never described in the OT apart from its
concrete manifestation in some outward act by Yahweh within
history. It is, in general, a loving act of Yahweh by which he
faithfully maintains his covenant relationship with his chosen
people.1
The idea of mercy, unfortunately, has moved from this
God-centered and exclusively covenantal meaning towards a
man-centered interpretation wherein mercy is confused with charity
and the love of man. The Bible does give an important place to charity,
but it is not the same as mercy, and humanism has no place
whatever in Scripture.
In Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice, mercy still has a God-
centered orientation, and its relationship to salvation is openly
indicated. Mercy, it is stated, is a “must,” but not a matter of
“compulsion,” because
1.
E. R. Achtemeier, “Mercy, Merciful; Compassion; Pity,” in The Interpreter’s
Dictionary of the Bible, K-Q (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1962), 352.
Mercy 513
The quality of mercy is not strain’d;
It droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven
Upon the place beneath: it is twice bless’d;
It blesseth him that gives and him that takes:
‘Tis mightiest in the mightiest; it becomes
The throned monarch better than his crown;
His sceptre shows the force of temporal power,
The attribute to awe and majesty,
Wherein doth sit the dread and fear of kings;
But mercy is above this scepter’d sway,
It is enthroned in the heart of kings,
It is an attribute to God himself;
And earthly power doth then show likest God’s
When mercy seasons justice. Therefore, Jew,
Though justice be thy plea consider this
That in the course of justice none of us
Should see salvation: we do pray for mercy;
And that same prayer doth teach us all to render
The deeds of mercy. (Act IV, sc. 1.)
For Shakespeare, it was this quality that represented character. By
the nineteenth century, the picture had greatly changed. James
Henry Leigh Hunt (1784-1859), in “Abou Ben Adhem,” gave a
specifically and deliberately non-Christian interpretation of
greatness of character:
Abou Ben Adhem (may his tribe increase!)
Awoke one night from a deep dream of peace,
And saw, within the moonlight in his room,
Making it rich, and like a lily in bloom,
An Angel writing in a book of gold:
Exceeding peace had made Ben Adhem bold,
And to the presence in the room he said,
“What writest thou?” The Vision raised its head,
And with a look made of all sweet accord
Answered, “The names of those who love the Lord,”
“And is mine one?” said Abou. “Nay, not so,”
Replied the Angel. Abou spoke more low,
But cheerly still; and said, “I pray thee, then,
Write me as one that loves his fellow-men.”
The Angel wrote, and vanished. The next night
it came again and with a great wakening light,
And showed the names whom love of God had blessed, And
lo! Ben Adhem’s name led all the rest!
There is more of the Victorian era in this poem than much of what
passes for Victorian. Note that Abou Ben Adhem does not ask to
be listed among those who love the Lord; he specifically asks to be
listed as a lover of man. Note further that God blesses Abou Ben
Adhem above all others, thus making the love of man the greatest
grace and virtue. Implicitly, if this is true, we must not only love
man but also be merciful to man for man’s own sake. However, as
Thomas Randolph (1605-1635), a writer in the generation just after
Shakespeare, observed in the play The Muses’ Looking-glass,
He that’s merciful
Unto the bad, is cruel to the good.
Exactly so. Modern mercy is a form of warfare against the good by
making them the objects of wrath, while the bad become objects
of mercy.
Turning again to Achtemeier’s excellent statement, it must be
qualified at one point. He states that “Not once is God’s mercy
granted to those outside the covenant relationship.” While normally
God’s mercy is granted to the covenant people, it is also given at
times to the unregenerate for God’s own reasons. Thus, while
Ahab was plainly unregenerate, God heard his prayer and was
merciful to him (1 Kings 21:17-29). Ahab was outwardly one of the
covenant people, but plainly unregenerate and at war with the
covenant, and yet God extended mercy to Ahab when he humbled
himself.
God’s mercy is in terms of His law, and man’s mercy must be
likewise. For example, mercy towards the idolater (Deut. 13:8), the
murderer (Deut. 19:13), or the false witness (Deut. 19:21) is
forbidden by law. Mercy is not to be promiscuously given to
everyone, because mercy, being an aspect of grace, can no more be
antinomian than grace. The idea of antinomian grace and mercy is
not Scriptural.
Achtemeier, in speaking of “the structure of communal
relationships... which govern the limits and demands of mercy,”
wrote,
Mercy 515
The closest ties which the Hebrew knew were those of the
family. Within the family circle, mercy — help, love,
consideration of need — was not only expected; it was a duty.
Where a family was, there was mercy. Where mercy was
lacking, the familial ties were gone. Thus mercy was to be
rendered to the brother (Amos 1:11; Zech. 7:9).2
Mercy within the family could not be antinomian, however. The
incorrigible delinquent had to be cut off and denounced before the
authorities (Deut. 21:18-22).
The covenant people are to be regarded as the family of God and
as our brethren. Accordingly, the law stipulated,
17. Thou shalt not hate thy brother in thine heart: thou shalt
in any wise rebuke thy neighbour, and not suffer sin upon him.
18. Thou shalt not avenge, nor bear any grudge against the
children of thy people, but thou shalt love thy neighbour as thy
self: I am the LORD. (Lev. 19:17-18)
We are not permitted to say that what our neighbor does is of no
concern to us, or, conversely, that what we do is of no concern to
our neighbor. The key question here is, who is my neighbor? “The
rabbis took the reference to be to the fellow Israelite.”3 Our Lord
made it equally emphatic that it included the Good Samaritan and
more (Luke 10:29-37). There is no question that, in a primary but
distorted sense, the rabbis were right. The reference is to “the
children of thy people.” The calling of Israel, however, was to be
the witness of God to the world, and to proclaim God’s grace to all
nations. As such, they were to be what the Good Samaritan was,
the good neighbor whose mercy and law would alike be a
testimony to the nations. Solomon, in the dedication of the
Temple, had prayed specifically that God particularly answer the
prayers of foreign believers who came to the Temple in order to
strengthen their testimony, so “that all people of the earth may
know thy name, to fear thee.”
41. Moreover concerning a stranger, that is not of thy people
Israel, but cometh out of a far country for thy name’s sake;
2. Ibid., 353.
3. Nathaniel
Micklem, “Leviticus,” in The Interpreter’s Bible, vol. II (New York:
42. (For they shall hear of thy great name, and of thy strong
hand, and of thy stretched out arm:) when he shall come and
pray toward this house;
43. Hear thou in heaven thy dwelling place, and do according
to all that the stranger calleth to thee for: that all people of the
earth may know thy name, to fear thee, as do thy people Israel;
and that they may know that this house, which I have builded,
is called by thy name. (1 Kings 8:41-43)
Psalm 87 gives eloquent witness to the presence of Egyptians,
Babylonians, Philistines, Phoenicians, Ethiopians, and others in the
circle of the redeemed. Israel had a duty to the world to be the
witness to God’s law and mercy. Thus, when the Lawyer raised the
question concerning “eternal life,” our Lord asked, “What is
written in the law? how readest thou?” (Luke 10:25-26). The lawyer
answered, “Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart,
and with all thy soul, and with all thy strength, and with all thy
mind; and thy neighbour as thyself ” (Luke 10:27). Our Lord agreed
that this was indeed the mark of grace, of election. The practical
question which put the answer to the test was, “who is my
neighbour?” (Luke 10:29). It was at this point that our Lord
declared the failure of Israel by depicting the lack of mercy, in the
Parable of the Good Samaritan, of the priest and the Levite,
whereas the Samaritan, regarded as a false pretender to the
covenant, manifested godly mercy on the man who fell among
thieves and was left “half dead.”
In terms of the parable, Christians have long made their
missionary efforts works of grace and mercy. It can be argued with
justice that some aspects of this should be the work of a diaconate
mission, but it is still an aspect of the Christian mission. People in
pagan areas have known thereby that Christians are the people of
mercy, and the God of Christians is the God of mercy. Moreover,
wherever this mercy has been scriptural in nature, they have known
that it is not antinomian mercy. To cite an example, the Chinese
goddess of mercy, Kwan-yin, refuses to enter paradise, it is held, as
long as anyone remains outside the gates of paradise. To humanists
this sounds wonderful.4 The fact is that this sentimental and
antinomian mercy produced no mercy among its religious
Mercy 517
adherents, only more lawlessness. Where the word of God is
faithfully proclaimed on the mission field, the people know that
God’s law is declared, and that mercy is manifested. Why are not
the followers of Kwan-yin notable for mercy rather than
Christians? The faith of Kwan-yin is in a world in which evil is not
judged but triumphs; Kwan-yin waits outside the gates of paradise
for everyone to come in finally at their wish and on their terms.
There is no divine initiative nor grace operative, only a cosmic
indulgence. There are no absolutes outside of man, and the result
is freedom for man’s sin to express itself and to demand a cosmic
indulgence.
The Christian community is a law-community whose witness is
to the grace of God and whose requirement of itself and of others
is law-obedience, and whose character manifests mercy. Having
received mercy, the people of God reflect mercy, but never in any
antinomian sense and always as an aspect of Christian witness, not
as a sentimental gesture.
A notable area of mercy is with the orphans, the aged, widows,
and children. God is mindful of them (Ps. 72:12-13), and man is
required to manifest the same mercy:
9. Thus speaketh the LORD of hosts, saying, Execute true
judgment, and show mercy and compassions every man to his
brother:
10. And oppress not the widow, nor the fatherless, the
stranger, nor the poor; and let none of you imagine evil against
his brother in your heart. (Zech. 7:9-10)
This is presented in Zechariah, according to Leupold, as a
summary of the teaching of the prophets, who had set forth the
requirements of the law.5
The English word mercy, as Hastings pointed out, now has a
connotation missing in its original form and in the original Hebrew
and Greek. In the original languages, the words rendered mercy
mean compassion and pity, not pardon.6 Mercy is kindness,
4. Moncure Daniel Conway, My Pilgrimage to the Wise Men of the East (Boston:
Houghton Mifflin, 1906), 71.
1956), 136f.
consideration, and compassion. Mercy does not mean pardon, so
that, while it is closely associated with grace, it is still different, in
that grace redeems, and mercy spares. This does not mean,
however, that mercy and forgiveness cannot be extended together.
We are told that “The LORD is longsuffering, and of great mercy,
forgiving iniquity and transgression, and by no means clearing the
guilty, visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children unto the
third and fourth generation” (Num. 14:18). Mercy and forgiveness
are clearly tied together in Deuteronomy 21:8, 32:43. We may thus
say that, while grace always implies mercy, and redeeming grace
means forgiveness, mercy does not always mean forgiveness. The
mercy extended is evidence of this.
Mercy is an aspect of the redeemed man’s nature, and it
manifests and furthers his blessedness. “Blessed are the merciful:
for they shall obtain mercy” (Matt. 5:7). Mercy is required by God
(Matt. 9:13; 12:7; 23:23). God’s people must show compassion one
to another (Matt. 18:27; 1 John 3:17) and to all men in their grief
and troubles (Luke 10:37). Christians are reminded of their duty to
be merciful “with cheerfulness” (Rom. 12:8); to be in Christ means
to be merciful (Phil. 2:1); they are to “Put on therefore, as the elect
of God, holy and beloved, bowels of mercies, kindness,
humbleness of mind, meekness, longsuffering, forbearing one
another, and forgiving one another, if any man have a quarrel
against any: even as Christ forgave you, so also do ye” (Col.
3:12-13). Mercy is a part of the wisdom from above (James 3:17).
In pagan antiquity, mercy was something which, when
manifested, flows from the superior to the inferior. This is not the
case in the Kingdom of God. Paul was grateful for the compassion
of God’s people when he was in bonds (Heb. 10:34); their
common life in Christ made love and mercy flow in every
direction.
6.
J. Hastings, “Mercy, Merciful,” in James Hastings, editor, A Dictionary of the
Bible, vol. III (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1919). See also W. H. Ben-
nett, “Mercy,” in ibid., vol. II, 345f.
LVIII
Justice and Mercy
Our Lord, in Matthew 23:23, described the weightier matters of

the law as judgment (or justice), mercy, and faith. For Him, as for
all of Scripture, justice is inseparable from law and righteousness,
and justice, law, and righteousness are inseparable from the
covenant. Moreover, as Harrelson noted,
The time-honored distinction between the OT as a book of
law and the NT as a book of divine grace is without grounds
or justification. Divine grace and mercy are the presupposition
of law in the OT; and the grace and love of God displayed in
the NT events issue in the legal obligations of the New
Covenant.1
Moreover, the fact of Christ’s kingship is inseparably connected
with law, in that, in antiquity, the words of a king were law. The fact
that Christ, in discussing the Mosaic law, declared repeatedly, “I say
unto you” (Matt. 5:18, 20, 22, 26, etc.), is a clear indication that He,
as King, was declaring the meaning of His own law and his
intention of being unrelenting in its application (Matt. 5:18).
Not only were the words of a king law, but, without law, there
was no kingship. The modern idea of a king who reigns but does
not rule, i.e., who has the name of a king but whose kingship or
law-making power is transferred to parliament, did not exist in
antiquity. It cannot be read back into the Bible. The Biblical idea of
kingship is of a king whose word is law and whose rule is
inseparable from law. For this reason, Hebrew kingship differed
from all others. The true king of Israel was God: therefore, His
prophets could command His royal vicegerents in His name. The
Hebrew king could only rule in terms of God’s law, i.e., God’s
Kingship (Deut. 17:18-20). The sin of Israel was that it wanted a
pagan kingship, not God’s Kingship (1 Sam 8:7), and God gave
them Saul, who very quickly manifested his idea of an independent
1. W. J. Harrelson, “Law in the OT,” in The Interpreter’s Dictionary of the Bible, K-Q
(Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1962), 77.
519
kingship by offering sacrifices as a priest (1 Sam. 13:9ff.), and who
made judgments independently of God’s commandments (1 Sam.
15). The idea of kingship in Scripture has a necessary connection
with law and justice.
The idea of justice is also related to the Old Testament concept
of peace as wholeness, health, prosperity, security, and the spiritual
completeness of the covenant. All peace, like salvation and all
creation, is of God: “I form the light, and create darkness: I make
peace, and create evil: I the LORD do all these things” (Isa. 45:7).
The covenant is an everlasting covenant of peace (Ezek. 37:26),
and His peace is salvation (Isa. 52:7).2
Justice in the Bible means the righteousness of God; in man, it
means the moral and religious perfection of man, and the
application of that standard and way to all of life. Justice does mean
“just balances” (Lev. 19:36); it also means that “He that ruleth over
men must be just, ruling in the fear of God” (2 Sam. 23:3); it means,
too, that “Whatsoever is right I will give you” (Matt. 20:4). But, as
Banks noted, “In the main, Scripture refers only to absolute,
essential righteousness; in demanding this it demands all.” Justice
and mercy “are the two complementary aspects of holiness....
Justice as righteousness forms the solid substratum of moral
character in God and man, and must come first; but this point
being secured, mercy lifts us up to a higher stage.”3
There can be no mercy if there is no justice; mercy is not
antinomian but an aspect of the law, as our Lord makes clear in
Matthew 23:23. Not only is mercy inseparable from justice, but it
is also essentially an aspect of justice. It is of God’s mercy and
blessing that He gives His people the law. “Moses commanded us
a law, even the inheritance of the congregation of Jacob” (Deut.
33:4). In particular, for a fallen world to receive God’s law or justice
is not only an act of mercy but also an aspect of redemption.
The essential requirement God’s law makes of man is restitution.
The broken moral order must be restored, and man must make
restitution to God and to man. All things having been made good
2. E. M. Good, “Peace in the O.T.,” in ibid., 705f.
3. J. S. Banks, “Justice,” in James Hastings, editor,
A Dictionary of the Bible, vol.
II (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1919), 826.
Justice and Mercy 521
by God, the goal of justice is restitution, the restoration of all things
to their original goodness, with that goodness developed and
extended as an aspect of both restitution and the creation mandate.
Since man is incapable in his fallen estate of accomplishing this,
God enables man to do this through Christ. The goal of justice
being restitution, it follows that salvation and mercy are necessary
aspects of God’s justice, not exceptions thereof. Mercy and
salvation, where not antinomian in conception, are a fulfilment of
the requirements of justice. The righteousness of God requires a
creation in which righteousness has full and developed sway, so
that the purposes of justice require God’s mercy and salvation, and
man’s witness to that same salvation and mercy.
This relationship is very clearly in view in David’s prayer,
“Deliver me from blood-guiltiness, O God, thou God of my
salvation: and my tongue shall sing aloud of thy righteousness” (Ps.
51:14). The psalm has a “total vindication of God” and His justice,
and a “total indictment of man,” as Leupold pointed out.4 Because
God is the God of justice, David looked to Him also for salvation:
both God’s judgment and mercy move to the same end, the
fulfilment of justice in the restoration of all things, and this means
salvation.
In Isaiah 45:21, God indicts all idolatry and declares,
Tell ye, and bring them near; yea, let them take counsel
together: who hath declared this from ancient time? who hath
told it from that time? have not I the LORD? and there is no
God else beside me; a just God and a Saviour; there is none
beside me.
As Payne so clearly points out, the thought here is not, “A just God,
and yet at the same time a Saviour,” but rather a righteous, just, and
redeeming God, and therefore a Savior.5
Because restitution is so basic to God’s order, it must be basic to
the redeemed man’s order. “Learn to do well; seek judgment,
relieve the oppressed, judge the fatherless, plead for the widow”
1959), 402.
5. J.
Barton Payne, “Justice,” in J. D. Douglas, editor, The New Bible Dictionary
(Isa. 1:17). Of the righteous man, God declares, “He judged the
cause of the poor and needy; then it was well with him: was not this
known to me? saith the LORD” (Jer. 22:16). This is not socialistic
welfare but the personal activity of the redeemed man as he
manifests the justice of God in his community.
Achtemeier is right in stating that God’s “righteous judgments
are saving judgments.”6 Psalm 36:6 declares of God,
Thy righteousness is like the great mountains; thy judgments
are a great deep: O LORD, thou preservest man and beast.
The justice of God preserves man and beast and it also cleanses
His creation of iniquity. Moreover, “There are two sides to his
righteousness: salvation and condemnation; deliverance and
punishment.”
However, and this is an important point — Yahweh’s
righteousness is never solely an act of condemnation or
punishment. There is no verse in the OT in which Yahweh’s
righteousness is equated with his vengeance on the sinner, and
not even Isa. 5:16 or 10:22 should be understood in such a
manner. Because his righteousness is his restoration of the
right to him from whom it has been taken, it at the same time
includes punishment of the evildoer; but the punishment is an
integral part of the restoration. Only because Yahweh saves
does he condemn. His righteousness is first and foremost
saving. He is a “righteous God and a Savior.”7
God’s salvation is a covenant act, and justice thus is God’s
covenantal faithfulness and man’s obedient response to the grace
of the covenant.
Thus, when our Lord spoke of “judgment (justice), mercy, and
faith” as “the weightier matters of the law” (Matt. 23:23), He meant
exactly that. Justice, mercy, and faith are basic to God’s law, and
they are inseparable from salvation. Justice must be, the law
requires, without regard for the nature of a man’s estate, rich or
poor, alien or citizen, but it is not impersonal. God’s law expresses
the righteousness of a personal God, and it manifests His demand
6. E.
R. Achtemeier, “Righteousness in the OT,” in The Interpreter’s Dictionary of
The Bible, R-Z (Nashville, Abingdon Press, 1962), 83.
7. Ibid.
Justice and Mercy 523
that justice be done to Him and to all His creation. The goal of justice
is the restitution and restoration of God’s order and purpose; because mercy is
not antinomian, it serves to further both justice and restoration. The grace of
God unto salvation similarly has as its purpose restitution and restoration, and
Christ's atonement satisfied the requirements of justice and manifested God's
saving grace. To separate salvation from justice and the law is impossible: the
key to their unity is restitution and restoration.
LIX
Faith
Much can be said about faith, but our concern is a limited one,
to examine briefly the relationship of faith to salvation, and to law.
When our Lord declared that justice, mercy, and faith are the
weightier matters of the law (Matt. 23:23), He implied that all three
were not only matters of law, but also related to one another in that
they were aspects of the law.
We have seen that the law, like salvation, has restitution and
restoration as its function. Godly justice is inseparable from
restitution and restoration, and the function of mercy is to further
these things. Man cannot of himself meet the requirements of the
law, being a fallen creature, and so it is saving grace which restores
him to righteousness by imputation, and sanctifying grace which by
means of the law enables him to grow in righteousness and to
develop its requirements in terms of every vocation, calling, and
sphere of life.
Our concern now is with the relationship of faith to these things.
A comment by Machen on Bible reading in state schools in his
excellent study of the meaning of faith is relevant to our discussion:
The reading of selected passages from the Bible, in which Jews
and Catholics and Protestants and others can presumably
agree, should not be encouraged, and still less should be
required by law. The real centre of the Bible is redemption; and
to create the impression that other things in the Bible contain
any hope for humanity apart from that is to contradict the
Bible at its root. Even the best of books, if it is presented in
garbled form, may be made to say the exact opposite of what
it means.1
This principle is true also with respect to faith. Much that is true
concerning it becomes false when isolated from its central context,
redemption. Redemption, however, cannot be interpreted in its
1. J.
Gresham Machen, “What is Faith?” (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Eerdmans,
1946), 128.
525
narrow, pietistic, and humanistic sense as simply the salvation of
souls. It is that and much more. It is the restitution and restoration
of all things through Christ to their original righteousness and
purpose, so that, in terms of the creation mandate, God’s Kingdom
brings all things, developed and glorified in Christ, to their full
expression of potentiality.
We are told that, God having revealed His purpose to Abraham,
Abraham “believed in the LORD; and he counted it to him for
righteousness” (Gen. 15:6). The meaning of believed here is not only
believe or trust, in our sense of the word, but also, “said Amen
to.”2 The calling of Abraham was to establish a separate people as
God’s Kingdom and to become the channel for the coming of the
promised and God-given King, who was to be the destroyer of
Satan and the restorer of paradise and God’s Kingdom in power.
Abraham, by his trust, belief, and works, said Amen to God’s
declared purpose, and it was accounted for him as righteousness.
His seed should be as numerous as the stars, or the sand on the
seashore (Gen. 15:5; 17:6ff.); God’s Kingdom would triumph, and
“the earth shall be full of the knowledge of the LORD as the waters
cover the sea” (Isa. 11:9).
In the New Testament, faith is saying Amen to Christ and His
salvation; it means accepting the verdict of death on ourselves
which the law pronounces to law-breakers, and accepting the
atoning work of Christ as our vicarious substitute. It means also the
response of gratitude in the form of works of law, the obedience
of faith, as the means of setting forth God’s Kingdom. Leon
Morris says of faith:
Central to the New Testament is the thought that God sent
His Son to be the Saviour of the world. Christ accomplished
man’s salvation by dying an atoning death on Calvary’s cross.
Faith is the attitude whereby a man abandons all reliance in his
own efforts to obtain salvation, be they deeds of piety, of
ethical goodness, or anything else. It is the attitude of
complete trust in Christ, of reliance on Him alone for all that
salvation means. When the Philippian jailer asked, “Sirs, what
2. E. C. Blackman, “Faith, Faithfulness,” in The Interpreter’s Dictionary of the Bible,

E-J (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1962), 222.
Faith 527
must I do to be saved?” Paul and Silas answered without
hesitation, “Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ, and thou shalt be
saved” (Acts xvi. 30f.). It is “whosoever believeth in him” (Jn
iii. 16). Faith is the one way by which men receive salvation.3
It can be added that works is the way men manifest that they have
received salvation. Paul rightly condemned the law “as a system
whereby a man may merit salvation. For James the law is ‘the law
of liberty’ (Jas. ii. 12). His ‘works’ look uncommonly like ‘the fruits
of the Spirit’ of which Paul speaks.”4 Faith thus is more than mere
belief. It is the act of God’s grace in man, whereby “an entire
self-commitment of the soul to Jesus as the Son of God, the
Saviour of the world,” is effected.5
With this in mind, let us now examine the relationship of faith to
law, as declared by our Lord in Matthew 23:23. Our Lord
illustrated this relationship in a parable, whereby the relationship of
faith to the law was sharply set forth:
1. And he spoke a parable unto them to this end, that men
ought always to pray, and not to faint;
2. Saying, There was in a city a judge, which feared not God,
neither regarded man:
3. And there was a widow in that city; and she came unto him,
saying, Avenge me of mine adversary.
4. And he would not for a while: but afterward he said within
himself, Though I fear not God, nor regard man;
5. Yet because this widow troubleth me, I will avenge her, lest
by her continual coming she weary me.
6. And the Lord said, Hear what the unjust judge saith.
7. And shall not God avenge His own elect, which cry day and
night unto him, though he bear long with them?
8. I tell you that he will avenge them speedily. Nevertheless
when the Son of man cometh, shall he find faith on the earth?
(Luke 18:1-8)
3. Leon Morris, “Faith,” in J. D. Douglas, editor, The New Bible Dictionary

4. Ibid., 413.
5. B. B. Warfield, “Faith,” in James Hastings, editor, A Dictionary of the Bible, vol.
I (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1919), 831.
This parable is spoken to believers, specifically, in its context, to the
disciples, “unto them.” It is thus an illustration of perseverance and
triumphant faith to men of faith.
Our concern here is with the meaning of faith as an aspect of
law, as a weightier matter of the law, according to our Lord (Matt.
23:23). It is necessary first to define faith in theological terms, i.e.,
in relationship to God, in order that we might see more clearly the
relationship of faith to God’s law. According to the Westminster
Shorter Catechism,
Q. 86. What is faith in Jesus Christ?
A. Faith in Jesus Christ is a saving grace, whereby we receive
and rest upon him alone for salvation, as he is offered to us in
the gospel.
The Larger Catechism makes it clear that faith is of grace, i.e., it is not
of ourselves, but the gift of God. Faith does not justify but receives
justification:
Q. 73. How doth faith justify a sinner in the sight of God?
A. Faith justifies a sinner in the sight of God, not because of
those other graces which do always accompany it, or of good
works that are the fruits of it; nor as if the grace of faith, or
any act thereof, were imputed to him for justification; but only
as it is an instrument, by which he receiveth and applieth
Christ and His righteousness.
“The grace of faith,” as the Westminster Confession of Faith refers to it,
is instrumental; it is the gift of God whereby we receive and apply
Christ and His righteousness. There is thus an “obedience of faith”
(Rom. 1:5; Acts 6:7), whereby we respond to God and His law-
word. “Faith is not a dead assent, but the act of a quickening soul,
which possesses, like seed-corn, a germinating power.”6
With this in mind, let us turn to the parable as one spoken to
believers as a guide and instruction for the life of faith. It is called
the “Parable of the Unrighteous Judge” or “The Parable of the
6.George Smeaton, “Faith,” in Fairbairn’s Imperial Standard Bible Encyclopedia,

vol. II (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Zondervan, 1957), 275.
Faith 529
Unjust Judge,” as though the concern of the parable were with the
judge rather than the believer. The concluding sentence of the
parable asks, “Nevertheless when the Son of man cometh, shall he
find faith on the earth?” With respect to this question, certain
things need to be pointed out. First, as Hulse has so ably pointed
out, the language here is literal, and it means judgment, but “it must
not be assumed that the word 'cometh' applies only to the second
coming at the end of the world.” It applies to the Lord’s every
coming in judgment against men and nations. Older expositors,
such as the Puritans, saw this clearly.7 Our Lord had just been
warning the Pharisees concerning the coming of His Kingdom,
and then, to His disciples, spoke of past comings in judgment,
citing the Flood, and the destruction of Sodom, as comings in
judgment. He was warning them of the coming judgment upon
Jerusalem and Judea (Luke 17:20-37). As Hulse points out,
Jesus then continues to encourage his disciples to pray and
uses the parable of the widow and the unjust judge to describe
the kind of faith he requires. She did not despair. She kept
persevering until her petition was answered. Now whenever
Jesus comes, whether in judgment on a nation, or at the end
of the world, will he find faith of this character? Will he find
faith like that of the widow who persevered?8
Second, the point of this question is not cynicism. Our Lord is not
saying, “I will find no faith on the earth.” He had just declared that
some have always manifested faith, and, in the coming fall of
Jerusalem, His own would be preserved (Luke 17:31-36). Heretics
love to push this question away from themselves and to hold that
it has reference to a great supposed falling away from the faith
before the end of the world. The question, however, was asked of
disciples who would face the judgment on Jerusalem, and they were
asked as individuals to face up to this question, even as we are. This
question is not for the end time but for us now. As Hulse states it,
7.
Erroll Hulse, The Restoration of Israel (Worthing, Sussex: Henry E. Walter,
1968), 27. See also J. M. Kik, The Eschatology of Victory (Nutley, New Jersey: Pres-
byterian and Reformed Publishing Co., 1971), 127-135. See also R. J. Rush-
doony, Thy Kingdom Come (Presbyterian and Reformed Publishing Company,
1971) 238ff.
8. Hulse, op. cit., 28.
This question, “will he find faith” is calculated to stir up
self-examination. If he suddenly comes to call me into his
presence will I have faith; true persevering faith? That is a
question you and I must answer without delay.9
It must be noted, third, that this parable gives us an example, not
only of faith in the person of the widow, but also of triumphant
faith. The widow is avenged. Her adversary is judged and
compelled to make restitution. “I will avenge her,” the unjust judge
finally declares. In Scripture, “Vengeance is proper for man only in
the restricted sense of dispensing justice for a legally punishable
crime or sin, meted out in the prescribed manner.”10 This means
restitution, and it was this that the widow gained. Since the widow
is often pictured in Scripture as one who is exploited by ungodly
men, and the widow’s cause as very important to the Lord, we can
assume that such a reference is in mind here. The widow had been
defrauded, and the judge brought judgment against her adversary
and gained restitution for her.
Fourth, this parable is a stinging indictment of all weak faith that
does not work for and expect victory. Moffatt’s rendering of Luke
18:6-8 brings this out sharply:
“Listen,” says the Lord, “to what this unjust judge says! And
will not God see justice done to his elect, who cry to him by
day and night! Will he be tolerant to their opponents? I tell
you, he will quickly see justice done to his elect!”
If an unjust judge can on occasion grant justice, how much more
so the righteous God, who is judge over all? For the brigade of
snivelling churchmen to turn this parable into one of defeatism,
and to declare that the Adversary will triumph in time and history,
and Christ will find virtually no faith on His return, is not only a
blindness to the text, but also blasphemy. If the unjust judge will
give justice, how much more so the righteous and omnipotent
Judge? False eschatologies have turned a great parable of hope and
victory into a parable of despair. This parable requires us to be
zealous in prayer and confident that God will hear. It requires us to
9. Ibid.
10. Joshua
H. Shmidman, “Vengeance,” in Encyclopaedia Judaica, vol. 16 (New
York: Macmillan, 1971), 94.
Faith 531
expect more of God than of man, and it specifically declares that
God will see that justice is done to His elect. It is an act of unbelief
to deny what God has promised.
Fifth, our Lord asks, “when the Son of man cometh, shall he find
faith on the earth?,” or, more literally, will he find “the faith” on the
earth? Without agreeing with Geldenhuys’ pessimism about the
end times, or his reference of this question to the end, we can agree
that “the faith”
clearly refers to the faith that is here being discussed — faith
in Jesus as the Christ, the Messianic Son of Man, through
whom God will vindicate the cause of the elect. The Saviour
had Himself already answered this question in xvii. 26-37.11
Plummer also held that “The necessary faith, the faith in
question, (is) faith in Jesus as the Messiah and Saviour.”12
Sixth, this points plainly to the fact that “the faith” Christ
requires is not only in Himself as Messiah and Saviour, but in what
His redemption and kingship involves, namely, His protection as
law-giver of His covenant people, as the righteous Judge. What the
unrighteous judge can be prevailed upon to do, Christ will certainly
do. He is the supreme law-giver, and every true cry for vengeance,
for justice, is an appeal to Christ the King. Faith in this parable is
plainly related to the law, as Matthew 23:23 makes clear it must be.
Faith here means that we, as God’s covenant people and
law-keepers, are required to believe that God’s justice will prevail.
The widow was not resigned to injustice: she cried out against it and
triumphed despite the heartlessness and injustice of the judge. If
we hold to the faith, it means that we believe that our Savior and
Judge, Jesus Christ, will see to it that justice is done to His elect; He
will not be tolerant to our opponents. To have faith in Christ as our
Savior means also to have faith in Him as our righteous Judge and
Avenger, now and forever. This is clearly in mind in Hebrews 11:6,
where we are told that “without faith it is impossible to please him:
11. Norval
Geldenhuys, Commentary on the Gospel of Luke (Grand Rapids, Michi-
gan: Eerdmans, 1951), 449.
12. Alfred Plummer, A Critical and Exegetical Commentary on the Gospel According to
S. Luke (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1910), 415.
for he that cometh to God must believe that he is, and that he is a
rewarder of them that diligently seek him.”
Seventh, we “ought always to pray, and not to faint.” We must,
like the widow, refuse to accept injustice as a governing reality, but
must appeal to Christ the King as the governing reality. The widow
prayed incessantly to an unjust judge and triumphed. If we, with
the righteous Judge of all as our covenant Lord and Redeemer, fail
to “cry day and night unto him,” we get then the injustice we
obviously believe in, and not the justice of the God whom we
neglect.
Justice, mercy, and faith are indeed the weightier matters of the
law (Matt. 23:23). They clearly reveal whether men today, like the
Pharisees of old, are ready to observe the easier matters of the law,
like tithing, and neglect the essential aspects thereof. Unhappily,
too often today as then, men deny the faith while professing to
uphold it.
LX
“Just and Having Salvation”
That which our Lord declared in Matthew 23:23, i.e., that justice,
mercy, and truth are the weightier matters of the law, He set forth
in His entry into Jerusalem on Palm Sunday. The Triumphal Entry
was in fulfilment of prophecy, and the people knew it. However, as
Schilder observed, in his magnificent study, “The people are willing
to accept prophecy only in so far as it seems to be compatible with
their own notions.” This is true today, when men are busy studying
prophecy in terms of their own preconceived ideas. But, as Schilder
said, “To see Christ in our own light is to sin terribly, for it is to
deny Him the right to minister His threefold office to us.”1
Moreover, this misconstruing of the inner essence of Jesus’
activity soon reveals itself in its true colors. Luke, by his usual,
sensitively discriminating phrasing, tells us significantly that
the people “began to rejoice and praise God with a loud voice,
for all the mighty works that they had seen.” Their admiration,
you see, is based on the miracles. Moreover, they stop at the
visible things. That is Luke’s double emphasis: Jesus’ mighty
deeds appeal to the Jews; and, they accept these not for their
real meaning, but at their face value.2
The miracles, Schilder pointed out, all are eschatological and
prophetic: they are examples and moments of time in which the
Kingdom does “come.” They manifest a realm in which Christ’s
word and law prevails and all things bow before Him, are in
captivity to Him, and serve and magnify Him. Miracles thus point
us ahead to Christ’s reign; they point to a time when every knee
bows before Him, and every tongue swears by Him (Isa. 45:23).
Our Lord was filled with grief at the refusal of the people to accept
His coming in terms of His meaning and Kingdom. It was their
kingdom they thought of, and it was their desire to put Christ to
1. Dr.
K. Schilder, Christ in His Suffering (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Eerdmans,
1950), 120-121. In what follows in this chapter, this writer’s debt to Dr.
Schilder is obvious, and it is great.
2. Ibid., 122.
533
work in the service of their hopes. As Schilder so powerfully stated
it,
In addition, Christ also suffers on this “festival” because the
misguided people overemphasize the element of “might” in
Jesus’ work at the expense of the fundamental element in it:
namely, the restoration of justice. Christ comes to do mighty
deeds, yes; but He comes primarily to restore justice. The
redemption He wants to achieve is juridical first of all: just
because it is basically that, it is also dynamic. By His perfect
sacrifice and by His completely satisfying the law He wants to
lay a foundation of righteousness under the living temple of
grace, which is the church. After that, and only after it, the
living waters of salvation will flow from beneath the
temple-gate out into the world. Then the active energy of the
Spirit will proceed dynamically to all forms of spiritual and
material life; by it souls will be sanctified, the world will be
renewed, the earth be born again and actually wedded with
heaven.3
Very plainly, this is the meaning of the prophecy of Zechariah
9:9-10 concerning Christ’s coming. Zechariah declared, concerning
Christ’s Kingdom, and His entry into Jerusalem:
9. Rejoice greatly, O daughter of Zion; shout, O daughter of
Jerusalem: behold, thy King cometh unto thee: he is just, and
having salvation; lowly, and riding upon an ass, and upon a colt
the foal of an ass.
10. And I will cut off the chariot from Ephraim, and the horse
from Jerusalem, and the battle bow shall be cut off: and he
shall speak peace unto the heathen: and his dominion shall be
from sea even to sea, and from the river even to the ends of
the earth.
The first thing stressed by these sentences, as well as the last, is
that Christ is a King, the King of all kings, whose dominion shall
be world wide and total. Psalm 72:8 is clearly cited: “He shall have
dominion also from sea to sea, and from the river unto the ends of
the earth.” We are also told in that psalm, v. 11, “Yea, all kings shall
fall down before him: all nations shall serve him.” Moreover, v. 9
declares, “They that dwell in the wilderness shall bow before him;
3. Ibid., 123.
“Just and Having Salvation” 535
and his enemies shall lick the dust.” Very definitely, Christ’s
Kingdom shall triumph in time and history.
Second, we are told that “He is just, and having salvation.” Here,
as in Isaiah 45:21, “a just God and a Saviour,” justice is not set
against salvation but together with it in fulness of harmony.
Moore’s comment concerning the word “just” is particularly good:
He is “just.” The righteousness here referred to is not his
priestly, but his kingly righteousness, that rigorous justice of
his reign in virtue of which no good should be unrewarded
and no evil unpunished. In the unequal allotments of the
present, when the good so often suffer and the bad so often
escape, it is surely ground for rejoicing that the king, under
whose rule this dispensation is placed, is just, and will render
to every man according to his work. This attribute is assigned
to the Messiah also in Isa. 45:23; 53:11; Jer. 23:5; 33:15, & c.4
Moreover, despite all appearances of helplessness and defeat in the
Passion Week which followed, this just King already possesses
salvation for Himself, His Kingdom, and His people.5
Third, He is “lowly” and rides upon a humble animal, the ass, a
work animal. The usual exposition of this statement seriously
warps the meaning. It does not do justice to Christ’s Kingship, in
that all the stress is on humility and insignificance. Zechariah’s
meaning is very different, and it is associated with Christ’s
Kingship. The ass is an animal of work and peace, not of war and
prancing parades. We are told immediately, by way of contrast and
to show the meaning of riding on an ass, that Christ shall eliminate
the war-horse and chariot, and the weapons of war. Everything
connected with war shall be eliminated. The reality, apart from
Christ is, as Isaiah saw, idolatry, loot, war-horses, and chariots (Isa.
22:4-7), but in Christ, it shall be otherwise:
And he shall judge among the nations, and shall rebuke many
people: and they shall beat their swords into plowshares, and
4.
Thomas V. Moore, A Commentary on Zechariah (London: Banner of Truth
Trust, 1958), 146f.
1956), 174.
their spears into pruning hooks: nation shall not lift up sword
against nation, neither shall they learn war any more. (Isa. 2:4)
Lowly thus here means everyday, common, associated with the
ordinary routine of life as against pretentions or ostentations.
Fourth, despite this King’s deceptive appearance, His power is
such that He wages war successfully against all war, so that the very
weapons of war are abolished. He shall do so by speaking peace to
the nations, to the whole world. Moore observed that “War will
cease on earth only when wickedness ceases, and wickedness will
cease only when Christ’s universal empire begins.”6 Leupold
translated “I will cut off” as “I will exterminate.”7 War is
exterminated, and worldwide peace prevails.
Fifth, Christ rode into Jerusalem, as Zechariah prophesied, on “a
colt the foal of an ass,” with the she-ass trotting along. We are told
by Mark that the colt was one “whereon never man sat” (Mark
11:2); it was unbroken to saddle, and yet our Lord rode it easily, and
without any problems. Many strange interpretations of this fact
have been made.8 There is a simple and obvious fact here: To ride
an unbroken colt easily and without any problems is a remarkable
thing. Colts must be broken to harness or saddle. They fight against
the bridle. To ride a colt so perfectly as our Lord did has an element
of the miraculous to it. All miracles, Schilder said, are examples of
the Kingdom suddenly “come.” Here we see Christ as naturally
and perfectly Lord of all creation. It is His, and He made it, and it
serves Him without a hint of rebellion. This, too, is the fulness of
salvation. Augustine said, “Our hearts are restless till they rest in
Thee.” In the fulness of salvation, we are in a Sabbath peace in
Christ’s Kingdom. We respond perfectly and gladly to the royal law
and His Kingly rule. In His Kingdom,
10. Mercy and truth are met together; righteousness and peace
have kissed each other.
11. Truth shall spring out of the earth; and righteousness shall
look down from heaven. (Ps. 85:10-11)
6. Moore, op. cit., 151.
7. Leupold, op. cit., 163, 176.
8. See E. W. Hengstenberg, Christology of the Old Testament, vol. III (Grand Rap-
ids, Michigan: Kregel, 1956), 362ff.
LXI
The Resurrection and Man
At a lecture in which the question of the scientific conquest of

death was being discussed, the speaker observed that progress was
rendered very difficult by the fact of death. Men too often die
before their hard-gained wisdom can be applied to the problems of
man. The speaker observed, “It is hard to plan intelligently for the
future when we know that the men we are planning with will soon
be dead and that the task of education must be repeated with a new
generation.” A listener in the small audience commented, none too
quietly, “It is even harder to plan for a decent future if the people
now living will never die!”
Both points were well taken. The repetition of generations
seriously disturbs the continuity of development and tends to
produce a repetitive stagnation. An alumnus who visited his
university and attended some classes, to hear a newer set of
professors, declared with some dismay, “The students are still
asking the same stupid questions we asked forty-two years ago, and
the professors are still giving the same stupid answers!” Another
man remarked, “It’s punishment to see my boys go through the
same phase as I did of being a stupid ass.” Does man make no
headway?
However, progress is not furthered when and if a generation
remains on the scene indefinitely. The men who lived before the
Flood lived 900 years or more, and, instead of advancing morally,
they degenerated all the more spectacularly. Men do not improve
with time, but only by grace. Time only confirms a man in his basic
character and increases his opportunities to demonstrate his
hardened inabilities. The great impediment to lack of progress is
not the brevity of time, but the fact of sin.
It is sin that endlessly repeats the past and reenacts the Fall by
destroying its opportunities and vindicating its insanities. Solomon
stated it thus: “As a dog returneth to his vomit, so a fool returneth
to his folly” (Prov. 26:11). St. Peter echoed the same
537
condemnation, pointing out, with respect to unregenerate teachers
within the church, that they are “wells without water.” “While they
promise them liberty, they themselves are the servants of
corruption: for of whom a man is overcome, of the same is he
brought in bondage” (2 Peter 2:17-22). Moffatt translates 2 Peter
2:18-19 very powerfully:
By talking arrogant futilities they beguile with the same lure of
fleshly passion those who are just escaping from the company
of misconduct — promising them freedom, when they are
themselves enslaved to corruption (for a man is the slave of
whatever overpowers him).
2 Peter 2:1-22 is entirely devoted to this matter of false teachers,
and one of the emphatic points made is that, while these
unregenerate men talk grandly of ideals, they are themselves so
strongly governed by sin as to be insatiable for it: “Having eyes full
of adultery, and that cannot cease from sin” (2 Peter 2:14). Peter
then compares such men to dogs turning to their vomit.
Contrary to popular opinion, the Bible does not reflect a hostile
view of dogs; it does recognize that the dog is a scavenger, and their
very necessary function in ancient society included that. Man,
however, created in the image of God, and called to exercise
dominion and subdue the earth, becomes no more than a
scavenger through sin and is thus then compared to a dog. A
scavenger can be said to feed on the past; man was called by God
to create the future in terms of God’s calling and decree. Through
sin man becomes past-bound; he talks grandly about a glorious
future while reenacting a sin-sick past.
Unregenerate men can go so far in history and no further. They
are plagued by sin, so that their most eloquent dreams mock them
because man remains man in the process, and he pollutes
everything he touches. The mark of the liberal and radical is his
belief in the natural goodness or at least moral neutrality of man,
so that he sees evil in institutions and the environment rather than
in man. Change the world around man, and a perfect, happy, and
united humanity will result. George Sand held that this wise and
noble universal man would soon arrive. In a letter of April 23,
The Resurrection and Man 539
1848, Sand held that “the ideal expression of the sovereignty of all
is not majority but unanimity. The day will come when Reason will
get rid of its blinders, and the conscience of liberated people of all
hesitation. Not one voice will be raised in the Council of Humanity
against Truth.”1 When logically developed, this liberal belief leads
to the conviction that a universal reign of peace and prosperity will
immediately follow world revolution. Since all evil is concentrated
in the environment, call it by whatever name you will (capitalism,
Christianity, communism, etc.), it follows that the destruction of
that evil environment will release man into peace and prosperity.
The belief of Marxists and anarchists in the utopia of revolution is
a logical consequence of their presuppositions. Beginning with a
religious faith in man, they move systematically to purify the world
and man by destroying the source of evil, which is capitalism for
the Marxists and the state for the anarchists.
Marxism is often called a Christian heresy. This term is
profoundly in error, because heresy is a departure from a system of
doctrine which claims to be within that system. The heretic
declares himself to be a Christian, and, in fact, affirms that his
departures from orthodoxy constitute a return to true faith. In no
sense is Marxism Christian, nor does it claim to be; it is at war with
Christianity and seeks to destroy it, not to “correct” it. There is a
reason why, however, humanists have called Marxism a Christian
heresy, and, in the same sense, liberalism can be called the same. I
have called the term “Christian heresy” when applied to Marxism
a “profound” error. Profound means arising from the depths of
one’s nature or from the matter in question. The nature of the
humanist’s faith is his trust in man and man’s future. Man shall
prevail, man as autonomous, sovereign man, and man’s future will
be one of total victory without God. The belief in time involved
here is clearly borrowed from the Bible. Instead of paganism’s
cyclical view of history, the liberal and radical holds to a straight
line theory, history as progress. This faith has been borrowed from
the postmillennial eschatology of Scripture and secularized. This
faith, however, wanes and is succeeded by cynicism and despair
1.
Cited in Thomas Molnar, The Decline of the Intellectual (New Rochelle, New
York: Arlington House, 1973), 56.
because it is constantly frustrated by man’s depravity. The U.S.
district attorney for Massachusetts, George V. Higgins, is keenly
aware of the fact that crime does pay because most men as sinners
favor lawlessness. They may blame the consequences on others,
but, in reality, they are pushing the courts in the direction of
lawlessness.
But law enforcement agencies would have a better chance to deal
with crime, Higgins feels, if law was not used as an instrument of
social engineering.
“We make the courts decide social questions that we can’t
through our legislatures. For example, the laws against
prostitution, marijuana and homosexuality effectively have
been repealed. Even though some legislatures may never take
those laws off the books, it is clear in the courts that the
people don’t want them enforced.”2
As a result, Higgins expresses his “basic faith in human nature”
very succinctly: “I believe most people are dishonest.”3
When this kind of cynicism with respect to human nature sets in,
men become in time reactionary in their political outlook. The
viewpoint of the reactionary is not that of the Christian. Higgins
says, “I believe most people are dishonest.” The Scripture declares
that all men are fallen in Adam, and all men are without excuse, that
“There is none righteous, no, not one” (Rom. 3:10). This, however,
is not the whole story about man. Man was created with original
righteousness and in Christ is regenerated and set on the course of
sanctification towards the fulness of God’s Kingdom and His
righteousness. The reactionary becomes an elitist or a racist,
whether his politics is socialistic or monarchistic. To cite an
example of reactionary thinking, Revilo P. Oliver defines
Christianity without any mention of regeneration and identifies
Christianity with the white race. His summons is in essence a call
to racial purity, so that his book is anti-Christianity in the name of
Christ, regeneration by racial integrity and domination rather than
regeneration through God’s sovereign grace.4
2. Digby
Diehl, “Lingering Suspicion Confirmed: Crime Does Pay, says DA,”
Los Angeles Times Calendar, 8 April 1973, 59.
3. Ibid.
The reactionary, like Oliver and others, often maintains a
position of modified friendliness to Christianity, despite his
contempt for the infallible word of God, because, as Molnar noted,
“As a political force, the doctrine of original sin is profoundly
antirevolutionary.”5 The church is thus highly “usable” for many
reactionaries. Charles Maurras was in this sense a dedicated
Catholic, but, as Joseph Vialatoux wrote in 1927,
The conviction of Maurras is not that the Church ought to
become pagan, but that she is pagan... and that herein lies her
merit. Maurras does not think of assigning a new mission to
the Church; he accepts and approves her traditional mission.6
The liberal and radical seem to agree with Scripture with respect
to time; the reactionary (and conservative) seem to agree with
Scripture with respect to man’s nature. Both, however, are
essentially hostile to Scripture and are alike humanistic, with
varying emphases. Molnar’s comment is very good.
The conservative pursues the concept of order with the same
amorous expectation as the progressive pursues the concept
of change. It is interesting to compare the imagery of the two
types of thinkers, the figures by which they represent to
themselves the destiny of man. While the progressive uses
variations of the symbol of the straight line (the arrow or the
statistical curve), the conservative chooses in preference the
circle and the rhythmic, cyclical images of recurrence. In the
optimistic eighteenth and nineteenth century the history of
the human race was conceived as the flight of an arrow,
straight and aiming ever higher. Just before the First World
War the cyclical image reappears, indicating the alarm that
conservative philosophers felt about our destiny. The concept
of historical cycles of Joachim de Flore and Giambattista Vico
came to be studied with a perfected apparatus of research. Our
civilization was declared mortal (Paul Valery), declining
(Spengler), in a state of crisis but redeemable (Toynbee).7
4. Revilo P. Oliver, Christianity and the Survival of the West (Sterling, Virginia: Ster-
ling Enterprises, 1973). A similar work is Wilmot Robertson, The Dispossessed
Majority (Cape Canaveral, Florida: Howard Allen, 1972). Robertson’s contempt
for Biblical law is apparent on p. 383, n. 18.
5. Molnar, op. cit., 175.
6. Ibid., 172n.
7. Ibid., 173.
Nietzsche moved from a liberal to a reactionary stance as his hope
in man gave way to an intense hatred of man. Like all humanists,
his position in either case was elitist. When men turn from a radical
to a conservative position, the gain for Christianity is nil; in either
case, they remain the enemy, and radicals and reactionaries differ
only in their often changing view as to whether Christianity should
be destroyed or else chained and used as an instrument of state.
Both philosophies are self-conscious about their failures and
resentful (as well as cynical) of the declaration of Scripture that
God can regenerate man and, at the last, resurrect man. St. Paul
states the implications of the resurrection for man very clearly:
12. Now if Christ be preached that he rose from the dead, how
say some among you that there is no resurrection of the dead?
13. But if there be no resurrection of the dead, then is Christ
not risen:
14. And if Christ be not risen, then is our preaching vain, and
your faith is also vain.
15. Yea, and we are found false witnesses of God; because we
have testified of God that he raised up Christ: whom he raised
not up, if so be that the dead rise not.
16. For if the dead rise not, then is not Christ raised:
17. And if Christ be not raised, your faith is vain; ye are yet in
your sins.
18. Then they also which are fallen asleep in Christ are
perished.
19. If in this life only we have hope in Christ, we are of all men
most miserable.
20. But now is Christ risen from the dead, and become the
firstfruits of them that slept.
21. For since by man came death, by man came also the
resurrection of the dead.
22. For as in Adam all die, even so in Christ shall all be made
alive. (1 Cor. 15:12-22)
There is more than enough said here to fill several volumes of
analysis. For our purpose, we must note, first, that there is a
necessary connection between sin and death. All men die and all
men sin because there is a necessary connection between all men
and their forebear, Adam. Much effort has been expended by
theologians in trying to define that connection.8 Definitions,
however, are often elusive. We know what life is, but to define it
precisely is difficult, because, while we know we are alive, we do not
understand all that life means. The same is true of our relationship
with Adam. The old Puritan alphabet rhyme,
In Adam’s fall
We sinned all,
is clearly true to the Christian, but the why of the fact escapes us. The
fact, however, is that in Adam’s fall, sin and death became an aspect
of the life of humanity, a hereditary, cancerous growth on man’s
being. Thus, the second point is clearly an aspect of the first, namely,
that there is a necessary connection between all men and Adam, so
that all men are now born to sin and to die. There is thus no hope
for humanity “in Adam.” History is doomed to manifest man’s
frustration “in Adam,” not in a cyclical fashion, but as a maturing
and development of evil. The tares become more obviously tares
(Matt. 13:24-30). But for the grace of God, history would be a story
of progressive degeneration. The Second Law of Thermodynamics
gives us an account of cosmic decay, because the Fall has its effect
on all creation. Paradise has disappeared, and the original longevity
of man before the Flood is gone, although, by the grace of God, all
this will be reversed (Isa. 65:20). Thus, third, there is a necessary
connection between Adam, all men “in Adam,” and the whole
creation, which groans and travails, waiting for “the glorious liberty
of the children of God” (Rom. 8:19-23).
However, fourth, there is a necessary connection between Christ
and man, because, while sinless and, like Adam, a special creation,
He is not only God but also very man of very man. This necessary
connection is not an inevitable connection, in that only the elect
utilize that connection to gain deliverance. The connection
between all men and Adam is both necessary and inevitable. If no
connection between Christ and man existed, no salvation would be
possible. A thing is necessary if it is “such in its nature or conditions
that it must exist, occur, or be true.” The incarnation placed Christ
8.
See George P. Hutchinson, The Problem of Original Sin in American Presbyterian
Theology (Nutley, New Jersey: Presbyterian and Reformed Publishing Company,
1972).
in the necessary position as the second or last Adam (1 Cor.
15:45-47), the head and source of a new humanity. As sons of the
first Adam, we inherit his fallen nature; we sin and die. As members
of the last Adam, we are born again and we grow in terms of a new
nature, to obey God and to inherit eternal life. Therefore, fifth, to
deny the resurrection of the dead is to deny that Christ is risen; it
means that Christians have no hope of eternal life: they are
“perished.” The inevitable connection between the last Adam and
His new race is one that requires the resurrection of the dead.
Indeed, because Christ is also very man of very man, the
resurrection involves necessarily even the unregenerate, who
awake to “shame and everlasting contempt” (Daniel 12:2). Because
Christ is the true and greater Adam, in whose image Adam was
created, His word, life, death, and resurrection govern and judge all
men, so that all are without excuse before Him.
Sixth, our hope in Christ is both “in this life,” where the saints of
God shall prevail and shall judge or govern the world (1 Cor. 6:2),
and in the life to come, in eternity (1 Cor. 15:42-58). For this
reason, we can rejoice, knowing that our “labour is not in vain in
the Lord” (1 Cor. 15:58). Life, time, and history do not end in
frustration but realization.
Seventh, to deny the resurrection of man or of Christ is to
invalidate life, time, and history, “For if the dead rise not, then is
not Christ raised: And if Christ be not raised, your faith is vain: ye
are yet in your sins” (1 Cor. 15:16-17). Then man has no future. He
is doomed to the frustration of his own being, the nemesis of sin,
generation after generation. The resurrection of Jesus Christ is the
break with the past which is also in profound continuity with it.
The justice of God is satisfied; the law of God is again made the
life of man; the earth is made the Kingdom of God and
progressively brought under the sway of God’s law and purpose,
and man grows in grace and righteousness in Christ his redeemer.
The resurrection thus proclaims to the world the glorious future of
man in Christ: “now is Christ risen from the dead, and become the
firstfruits of them that slept” (1 Cor. 15:20). As the firstfruit, Christ
represents all men. He shall reign as King of Kings and Lord of
Lords (Rev. 19:16). All men shall rise again because of Him, “some
to everlasting life, and some to shame and everlasting contempt”
(Daniel 12:2). The future of man and of history is neither radical
nor reactionary: it is in Christ.
Modern man has seen how seriously man is limited by death, but
he refuses to treat the root of the problem, sin. As a result, his
frustration only increases. Apart from Christ and His regenerating
power, there is no remedy for sin and death.
LXII
The Daysman
One of the most remarkable statements in Scripture is Job’s

declaration on the futility of contending with God. Whatever
happens to man, Job recognized, ultimately comes from the hand
of God. The RSV renders the latter part of Job 9:24, “if it is not he,
who then is it?” God is omnipotent and omniscient; nothing
occurs apart from His will and decree. Moreover, a man cannot
justify himself before God and claim anything as his right from
God. God owes nothing to any creature. Therefore, “I know that
thou wilt not hold me innocent” (Job. 9:28). Then, in 9:30-35, Job
cries out that he needs a mediator:
30. If I wash myself with snow water, and make my hands
never so clean;
31. Yet shalt thou plunge me in the ditch, and mine own
clothes shall abhor me.
32. For he is not a man, as I am, that I should answer him, and
we should come together in judgment.
33. Neither is there any daysman betwixt us, that might lay his
hand upon us both.
34. Let him take his rod away from me, and let not his fear
terrify me:
35. Then would I speak, and not fear him; but it is not so with
me.
Job clearly recognized that salvation is only by God’s grace, but
he struggled with the need to make room for justice in the plan of
salvation. David, in Psalm 51:7, declares, “wash me, and I shall be
whiter than snow.” Job struggles with the other side of this
thought: “If I wash myself with snow water, and make my hands
never so clean, yet thou shalt plunge me in the ditch” (Job 9:30-31).
Job realizes that man cannot purify himself, but his concern is this:
does the sanctification or purification of the godly mean nothing?
Man is saved by grace, but why should grace eliminate justice, and
why should his righteousness be crushed by contradiction?
547
Job then raises the central point. God is so great and so far
beyond man that there is no comparison between God and man.
How, then, can God feel the agony of Job in his grief and misery?
Great, omnipotent, and omniscient as God is, He is still not man.
Samuel Terrien’s comment here, while not written from the
perspective of orthodoxy, is still very telling:
There is no meeting place between heaven and earth. God and
man may not come together in judgment, since he is not a man, as I
am (v. 32). The thought of God becoming man, of God made
flesh, does not possess the poet’s mind, but it enters there for
a fleeting instant. The noble Arabian prince is not a prophet
for the Christian mystery of the Incarnation, nor is he able to
glance at the “shocking” spectacle of a God Incarnate. Yet the
poet is desperately trying to bridge the awful gap which
separates Creator from creature, to fill the abyss which keeps
impure man apart from the holy God. Toying with the idea of
a human God for a short while, Job rejects it almost as soon
as it is conceived. But for a moment he dwells on the new
perspective thereby opened at the edge of his despair. He
cannot altogether abandon this impossible thought.
Obstinately he clings to his foolish fancy and goes groping in
the darkness of his theological thinking, spurred on by his
passionate search for a way to bring God and man face to
face.1
Orthodox commentators have felt that Job knew more than
Terrien is ready to recognize. Because for Job God as His ultimate
Lord and savior is very real, Job’s every word carries far more
meaning than a modern commentator can ascribe to it.
Moreover, as Douglas stated, with respect to the daysman,
Following the eastern practice, the daysman laid his hands on
the head of the disagreeing parties, thus stressing both his
judicial function and his desire to give an impartial verdict. Job
(ix. 33) declares that no man is worthy to question the
purposes of (literally ‘lay his hands on’) God.2
1.
Samuel Terrien, The Interpreter’s Bible, vol. III (New York: Abingdon Press,
1951), 984f.
2. J. D. Douglas, “Daysman,” in J. D. Douglas, editor, The New Bible Dictionary
The Daysman 549
A daysman was a third party in a dispute, the neutral observer, the
arbitrator or umpire. This, at least, is the definition given by most
commentators. There is a serious flaw in it, despite a superficial
element of truth. A modern arbitrator or umpire is a stranger to
both parties: this is not true of the daysman. In the familistic
society of the Near East, the daysman was a man known and
respected by both sides, akin to both, trusted by both, and with the
moral authority to require and bring about justice, peace, and
harmony. A modern arbitrator can walk away from both parties,
disliked by both, and never seeing either again. The daysman lived
with both sides continuously. By placing his hands upon the heads
of the disagreeing parties, he united them by means of his person,
his patriarchal dignity and authority. He placed all three, the two
disagreeing parties and himself, in communion. By his justice, he
blessed them both, because his hands on their heads were a sign of
blessing bestowed and blessing received. No modern umpire or
arbitrator even remotely resembles the daysman in this respect. His
office is impersonal, whereas the daysman’s office is highly
personal.
Job recognizes that no man can be a daysman between God and
man, but he feels the need for one, not because Job indicts God,
but because Job cannot understand God’s ways. What Job wants is
beautifully stated by Terrien:
The word applies to a person who decides, judges, and
convinces, sometimes corrects and rebukes. The astounding
significance of its use in this verse lies in the fact that it refers
here to some hypothetical being who would be different from
God and man, and who might lay his hand upon us both (v. 33b).
Since God is not a man, and a human God remains an
impossibility in terms, let there be someone else who might
understand the respective standpoints of both God and man,
who might terminate their mutual estrangement, make them
intelligible to one another, reconcile their differences, and
resolve their reciprocal antagonism into the unity of peace.3
Theologically, Job’s statement requires an insight and a knowledge
which requires that we acknowledge not only that the Book of Job
3. Terrien, op. cit., 985.
is a part of God’s infallible word, but also that Job himself a man
of wisdom and perception. Leathes rightly observed,
The light that has shined upon us was shining then in the heart
of Job, and shines forever in the pages of his book. Job felt, as
he had been taught to feel, that in himself there not only was
no hope, but no possibility of justification with God, unless
there should be an umpire and impartial mediator, who could
make the cause of both his own, and reconcile and unite the
two in himself. It is useless to inquire what other particular
form the aspiration of Job may have taken, or how far he
understood and meant what he said; but here are his words,
and this is what they must mean, and it is for us to adore the
wisdom by which they were taught accurately to correspond
with what we know has been given to us by God. We know
that a daysman has laid his hand upon us both; and while we
see that this is what Job wanted, we cannot but see more
plainly that this is what we want. It is to be observed that this
word daysman, or judge, is immediately connected with the
Scripture phrase, “the day of the Lord,” and St. Paul’s words,
“the day shall declare it” (I Cor. iii. 13).4
As Terrien noted, the call of Job is for an umpire, and the
framework of a daysman is a juridical settlement, but “the
overtones of the figure go beyond the realm of justice. A
conciliator who places his hands over the shoulders of two enemies
is more than a judge who imposes a verdict. He not only mediates
justice, he also fosters harmony and inspires love.”5 We have thus
in Job a remarkable idea of a mediator between God and man, but
it is not the only one the Old Testament gives us.
The office of priest was a mediating office. The priest
represented man before God and brought God’s appointed
sacrifices “to redeem, propitiate, and make atonement for sin
through faith in the Coming One.”6 The priest was chosen by God,
who named the tribe of Levi the priestly tribe, and the house of
Aaron in particular, and every aspect of his office and ritual was of
4. Stanley
Leathes, “Job,” in C. J. Ellicott, editor, Commentary on the Whole Bible,
5. Terrien, op. cit., 985.
6. Duane Spencer, Word Keys Which Unlock Calvary (San Antonio, Texas: Grace
Bible Press, 1973), 30.
The Daysman 551
God’s appointing. The priest was a substitute for God’s Coming
One, the great high priest, Jesus Christ.
The prophet was sent by God to speak his revealed word to the
people. His calling also was from God, not from man, and in Jesus
Christ the Great Prophet appeared, whose being and words
expressed God to man. The king was a type of Christ also, and, in
his required obedience to the law of God (Deut. 17:18-20), the king
mediated God’s order and administered it. Because of his
obligation to bring the people into conformity to the law of God,
the king had a mediatorial function in judging the nation, in acting
as the supreme court in all matters of law.
The primary reference of the office of daysman and of a
mediator is juridical; while it goes beyond law in Scripture, it is
firmly grounded in law. For this reason, the prophet, who declares
the law, and rebukes men and kings in terms of it, has a mediating
role, as does the king, who is the supreme judge of the nation. The
priest, by sacrifices of atonement, clearly has a mediating role. Of
necessity Christ, to be the great and one mediator between God
and men, combined in His person the offices of priest, prophet,
and king. “For there is one God, and one mediator between God
and men, the man Christ Jesus” (1 Tim. 2:5).
The Greek word for mediator in the New Testament is mesites, a
go-between. Christ fulfils this office because He has the nature and
attributes of both parties in the situation. He is “very God of very
God,” and “very man of very man.” Being both in perfect union,
He is able to represent the justice of God and also the need of man
for grace and mercy. As the sinless one, He was able to offer
Himself as the sacrifice of atonement for men, to satisfy God’s
justice. Also, because He represents both God and man, He can be
the surety for both (Heb. 7:22; 8:6; 9:15; 12:24). Thus, as God,
Christ can assure His elect that God’s salvation is assured from all
eternity, and no man can pluck His elect out of Christ’s hand.
Christ is emphatic on this point:
27. My sheep hear my voice, and I know them, and they follow
me:
28. And I give unto them eternal life; and they shall never
perish, neither shall any man pluck them out of my hand.
29. My Father, which gave them me, is greater than all; and no
man is able to pluck them out of my Father’s hand.
30. I and my Father are one. (John 10:27-30)
Man has the assurance of eternal security because his salvation
rests, not on his work, but on the perfect work of God incarnate.
God has the assurance in Christ that the elect will persevere in the
faith and in their calling in Christ, so that God’s Kingdom will
indeed be manifested and will triumph.
God and man are reconciled in Christ, but this work of
reconciliation is more than a restoration of communion. It is a
restoration from a covenant-breaking status to a covenant-keeping
status. Christ as mediator is our Savior. As our Savior, He not only
restores us to our calling, but also declares that, from all eternity,
the results of our calling are established. He shall reign over all
nations and shall smash the rebellious ones like a potter’s vessel
(Ps. 2). Therefore, we are told that Christ came “preaching the
gospel of the kingdom of God” (Mark 1:14). He declared unto His
church, “I appoint unto you a kingdom, as my Father hath
appointed unto me” (Luke 22:29).
Moreover, our Lord repeatedly and commonly spoke of Himself
as “the Son of man,” and He linked this name to His work as
mediator (Matt. 20:28), and His role as Messiah, King, and Judge
(Matt. 26:24). As Bavinck noted so ably, “The Kingdom of God
will in the true, full sense be a dominion, but that dominion will be
a human dominion, the dominion of the Son of man.” Bavinck said
further of Christ:
He is the perfect fulfillment of the whole Old Testament law
and prophecy, of all the suffering and all the glory which were
preparatory and foreshadowed in Israel, the counterpart of
the kings and priests in Israel, the counterpart of the people of
Israel itself, which had to be a priestly kingdom and a royal
priesthood. He is King-Priest and Priest-King, Immanuel,
God with us. Hence the Kingdom which He came to preach
and establish is at the same time internal and external, invisible
and visible, spiritual and physical, present and future,
particular and universal, from above and from below, coming
The Daysman 553
down from heaven and yet existing on the earth. And Jesus
will return. He came to preserve the world, to save it: He will
return to judge it.7
The New Testament speaks of Christ as the mediator of the covenant
(Heb. 7:22; 8:6; 9:15; 12:24, etc.). The covenant is a law-treaty
between God and man. Man transgressed the covenant, and its
penalties are death and the curse. Christ took upon Himself the
guilt of sinners and fulfilled the penalty of the law upon Himself in
order to reestablish men “to the right legal relationship to God.”8
He brought God and man together. He not only satisfied the
requirements of the law but also regenerated men into their new
estate. He intercedes for elect men with the Father, and, as their
mediator, is their voice at the throne of God.
God Himself provides the daysman or mediator, so that the bold
hope of Job is fulfilled by the provision from all eternity of the
triune God. We can speak, and He will hear us.
7. Herman
Bavinck, Our Reasonable Faith (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Eerdmans,
1956), 304.
8. Louis Berkhof, Systematic Theology (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Eerdmans,
1946), 282.
LXIII
Prophet, Priest, and King
The office or calling of Adam was to serve God as prophet,

priest, and king as God’s “friend-servant.” As Hoeksema pointed
out so clearly, these three “are not three separate offices, but rather
different aspects or functions of the one office.” Adam was called
to be the servant of the Lord and king over creation. As the
office-bearer of God, God’s image-bearer and representative in
creation, Adam, “From the viewpoint of his intellectual life,… was
prophet of God; from the viewpoint of his volitional life, he was
priest; and from the viewpoint of his active life in relation to the
world, he was king under God.”1
Through sin, however, the office-bearer of God became a
rebel. He became the office-bearer of the devil. From the
viewpoint of all three aspects of his office, — those of
prophet, priest, and king, — he was, subverted into the very
opposite of the position in which God originally created
him.... He became the friend-servant of the devil, and loved
the lie; he was priest of the devil, and consecrated himself in
enmity against God to the service of sin and iniquity; and he
was king under Satan, and the latter became prince of this
world through him.2
The role of man as prophet was an intellectual one, a calling to
interpret the world in terms of the law-word of God and to apply
that law of God to the development of the world. Man was
required to live by the law of God which is part of all creation in
that man and the world are created in the context of God’s law and
with that law in every atom of all creation. Man cannot be truly
himself unless he obeys the law of God, nor can the world around
1. Herman Hoeksema, Reformed Dogmatics (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Reformed
Free Publishing Association, 1966), 363f. In the development which follows,
this writer is deeply indebted to Hoeksema, and the reader is referred to the
fuller and excellent study by Hoeksema, pp. 363-397 in particular, as well as
other chapters. This does not mean that the thesis of this writer is necessarily
that of Hoeksema in every detail, nor that Dr. Hoeksema should be charged
with this writer’s eschatological “offenses.”
2. Ibid., 364.
555
man thrive unless it is fully governed in terms of God’s law. Man by
his fall rejected true knowledge and created not only a false
concept of knowledge, but also an anti-theistic idea of law.
Creation is inseparably set in the context of God’s law, but fallen
man seeks to act as a false prophet and to set creation in the
context of brute factuality, in isolation from God and his law. Man
as a false prophet proclaims a lie, and, as Hoeksema declared, “in
the world and throughout history there is a development of the lie
in the direction of and culminating in the false prophet that is
pictured to us in the book of Revelation.”3
The priestly office of Adam was a calling to dedicate the world
of God, to consecrate himself and all reality to the living God.
Instead of all things being profane, outside the temple, or outside
God, all things, having been created by God, are by nature holy or
sacred and must be used and seen only in terms of God’s holy
purpose. As St. Paul declares, “Unto the pure all things are pure:
but unto them that are defiled and unbelieving is nothing pure; but
even their mind and conscience is defiled” (Titus 1:15).
Man as a false priest insists on seeing all things as profane,
outside God, or, if he talks of the sacred, it is a false holiness; he
ascribes an innate holiness to all things apart from God. The
anti-Christian idea of holiness is a reversal of all Biblical norms.
Thus, in Howl, Allen Ginsberg sees the profanity of the world as
the judging law of God: for him, the world is de-sacralized and
desecrated because marijuana and homosexuality are condemned,
because certain practices are regarded as perversions and as evil.
God and His law are seen as “Moloch the heavy judger of Man!”
Because this “Moloch... entered my soul early,” Ginsburg feels that
his life was long clouded and he was “a consciousness without a
body... frightened out of my natural ecstasy!” As a result, Ginsburg
renounced God to declare, in Footnote in Howl, the total and
absolute holiness of fallen man, man as he is in his sins and
unbelief. This is Ginsburg’s idea of true reformation, and true
3. Ibid., 367f. Hoeksema’s interpretation of the significance of the false prophet

is amillennial; see Herman Hoeksema, Behold He Cometh, An Exposition of the
Book of Revelation (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Reformed Free Publishing Associ-
ation, 1969), 465-476.
Prophet, Priest, and King 557
holiness, and, in terms of this “America, I’m putting my queer
shoulder to the wheel.”4
To divorce the idea of the holy from God and His law is to assert
profanity as holiness, and this modern man is insistent on doing.
True priesthood works to reconsecrate every area of life to the
living God and to see every area as a sphere of holiness.
As king under God, Adam was called to rule over the world in
terms of God’s law and to develop all things to their full
potentiality under God, a task in which the priestly and prophetic
functions unite with the royal. God created the world as His
kingdom, and the glory of that creation was to be developed by
man in his threefold office.
Man, however, has by his fall rejected his calling under God in
favor of a Satanic concept of kingship. Man seeks to be his own
god and to assert an independent kingdom, one in which all things
serve man, not God, and in which all things are interpreted in terms
of man’s imagination rather than God’s word. The result is a
kingdom at war with God and at war against the people of God.
Jesus Christ came as the second Adam to reestablish His newly
created humanity in this threefold office under God. By His
regenerating power, Jesus Christ creates a new humanity. By His
atoning death and by His resurrection, He justifies His people
before God and removes them from the realm of sin and death
into life and righteousness.
Because Jesus Christ is “very God of very God” and “very man
of very man,” as prophet He is able to express the mind of God as
no prophet before Him could. By His government of the world as
King, and by His indwelling Spirit in the church, He continues to
speak for God to the world, bringing to light more and more the
wisdom and light of His word. The Westminster Shorter Catechism
declares that “Christ executeth the office of a Prophet, in revealing
to us, by His Word and Spirit, the will of God for our salvation”
(A. 24). Van Til states,
4. Thomas Parkinson, editor, A Casebook on the Beat (New York: Crowell, 1961),
3-15.
Now if we recall that man set for himself a false ideal of
knowledge when he became a sinner, that is, he lost true
wisdom, we may say that in Christ man was re-instated to true
knowledge. In Christ man realizes that he is a creature of God
and that he cannot seek for comprehensive knowledge. Christ
is our wisdom. He is our wisdom not only in the sense that he
tells us how to get to heaven; he is our wisdom too in teaching
us true knowledge about everything concerning which we
should have knowledge.5
As our priest, Jesus Christ is priest after the order of Melchisedec
(Heb. 7:1-3). The priesthood of Melchisedec was “without father,
without mother, without descent, having neither beginning of days,
nor end of life” (Heb. 7:3); in his person Melchisedec had descent,
parentage, and birth and death. His priesthood, however, coming
directly from God, had none of the limitations of a hereditary
priesthood, or one of man’s appointment. Moreover, this eternal
priesthood of Melchisedec combined in one person the priestly
and royal offices. As our priest, Jesus Christ made atonement for
our sins, and He reconciled us unto God. Man is reconciled to God
by God Himself through Christ. Of Christ’s priestly office, Van Til
points out,
Christ could not give us true knowledge of God and of the
universe unless he died for us as priest. The question of
knowledge is an ethical question at the root. It is indeed
possible to have theoretically correct knowledge about God
without loving God. The devil illustrates this point. Yet what
is meant by knowing God in Scripture is knowing and loving
God: this is true knowledge of God: the other is false.6
The Shorter Catechism, A. 25, declares, “Christ executeth the office
of a priest, in his once offering up of himself a sacrifice to satisfy
divine justice, and reconciles us to God, and in making continual
intercession for us.” In His intercessory work, Christ keeps us ever
before the Father and delivers us from our adversaries (Heb. 7:25).
In A. 26, the Catechism gives an especially telling statement of
Christ’s kingship:
5. Cornelius Van Til, The Defense of
the Faith, First edition (Philadelphia: Presby-
terian and Reformed Publishing Company, 1955), 33.
6. Ibid.
Prophet, Priest, and King 559
Christ executeth the office of a king, in subduing us to himself,
in ruling and defending us, and in restraining and conquering
all his and our enemies.
The postmillennial character of the Westminster Standards is clearly
in view here as elsewhere. As King, Christ conquers and subdues
us and all his enemies and ours. His great victory was the conquest
of sin and death by His atoning death and resurrection. We and all
other men are as nothing in view of that victory, and our conquest
is a small thing to Christ the King.
By His conquest of us, Christ restores us to man’s original
calling, to be priest, prophet, and king under God. As the second
or last Adam, He is the head of the new humanity which shall, in
and through Him, do that which the first Adam failed to do, to
make this world the Kingdom of God wherein God’s law and
peace shall prevail.
It is a grievous offence to regard Christ as an impotent king who
must surrender the world to the devil and retreat to eternity in
order to establish His realm. Time and eternity are alike His
domain. He governs both, and His purposes shall be everywhere
manifested. Man in Christ is reestablished in Adam’s calling; unlike
Adam, he has a battle to wage against the powers of darkness in the
world and in himself. Unlike Adam, he has an eternal security in his
calling, and the certainty of perseverance unto victory in his Lord,
Jesus Christ, the greater Adam.
LXIV
Pentecost and Responsibility
The ex-Jesuit, Malachi Martin, has written that the goal of Pope
John XXIII, and of the calling of Vatican Council II, was to spark
a unity of all men in a great overflowing of love, in a transcending
of creeds and institutions.
He had to gamble on the Spirit and on Chaos; so that what
lacked to man could shine out from among men, shine and
catch fire, melt and warm over the iced face of human society,
liquefy its members, and let all men of good will live just one
shattering moment and experience their unity as men. Just one
moment would suffice. This was Roncalli’s planned Event.1
On one occasion, Pope John remarked to Cardinal Tardini, “If we
could only step outside ourselves, outside our Latin, our kings, our
rulers, our protocol, our dignities and grades, and love and feel love
and act out that love, we would see our truth in fullness. All men
would listen.” What he longed for, according to Martin, was “a
mystical light” binding Christian and non-Christian in love and
bringing them all together in a new and redemptive world order.2
While this idea may be in part Martin’s dream and a reflection of
Jesuit humanism, it does appear clearly in the words and acts of
Popes John XXIII and Paul VI, whose visit to the United Nations
was in keeping with this dream.3 John’s encyclical of April 10,
1963, was in part addressed “to all men of good will, on
establishing universal peace in truth, justice, charity and liberty.”
His hope was clearly in a world community, and he expressed his
earnest hope that the United Nations Organization would create
that world community.4 Pope Paul’s encyclical, Ecclesiam Suam,
August 6, 1964, expressed the same hope as John’s Pacem in Terris.
1. Malachi Martin, Three Popes and a Cardinal (New York: Popular Library, 1972),
288.
2. Ibid., 298, 303ff.
3. For Jesuit modernism, see Farley Clinton, “Modernism is Alive and Well in
Brussels”, The Wanderer, vol. 106, no. 19, 10 May 1973, 1, 5-6.
4. The New York Times, Western edition, 11 April 1963, 7.
561
The evidence is very clear that Martin has not imposed his own
thinking on the popes: their hope was clearly, and the goal of Rome
still is, a worldwide humanistic pentecost in which the church will
play a key role. The World Council of Churches shares this same
humanistic dream.
The idea of a humanistic pentecost is not new. The poet
Siegfried (Loraine) Sassoon (b. 1886) gave beautiful expression to
it in his poem, written on the declaration of the Armistice at the
end of World War I in 1918, “Everyone Sang.” The joy of the news
of peace he saw as a song catching up all men in its delight:
O, but Everyone
Was a bird; and the song was wordless; the singing will never
be done.
The first Pentecost in Jerusalem has appealed to the imagination of
humanistic men, and, as a result, they have dreamed of another, a
second, pentecost, a humanistic pentecost to replace the Christian
Pentecost.
For the same reason, Pentecostalism and the so-called
charismatic movement have had a great appeal to humanists, and
neo-evangelicalism widely cultivates this imagined gift. For such
people, ignorance is bliss, ignorance, that is, of creeds and
problems, of differences and conflicts. The idea is to concentrate
on the bliss of their imaginary experience and “salvation,”
rhapsodize about it, love everybody, regard all insistence on truth
as unloving, and then work to catch up everybody in this bliss of
ignorance and irresponsibility. This, of course, is the key,
irresponsibility, intellectual and working indifference to the day by
day responsibilities of life. The plain fact is that men who are
caught up in this kind of movement are indifferent workmen, and
the women indifferent housewives. Some years ago, a leading
Pentecostal pastor admitted to me that the overwhelming majority
of people in his movement were continuously involved in
irresponsible and often immoral acts, and that the responsible and
moral element were those who had come in to the movement from
disciplined Calvinistic and Lutheran churches. His answer,
Pentecost and Responsibility 563
however, was to hope that “full submission” to the Spirit would
replace the need for discipline and create a “higher” responsibility.
The same thing is true of the love, sweetness, and light people.
They believe in “rising above” conflicts, intellectual and moral
problems, and creeds, with love. Practically, this means
irresponsibility, and their lives reflect it, the deeper they get
involved in the dream of the pentecost of love. Serious problems
and failures in their own lives and in their families usually drive
these people into either the neo-evangelical or the openly
humanistic love-and-joy religion, but the result is only to powder
and rouge over the surface of an ugly cancer, not to heal it. Their
irresponsibility is often greatly increased because they imagine that
their evasion by love is an answer to their problems.
All of these and other dreams of a humanistic pentecost are
radical misinterpretations of the Biblical Pentecost. First of all, the
meaning of the Feast of Pentecost is forgotten. Pentecost
celebrated the giving of the law of God through Moses on Mt.
Sinai. This was the meaning of Pentecost to the people in our
Lord’s day. In the Old Testament, it was a festival of joy after
harvest (Lev. 23:15ff; Ex. 34:22; Deut. 16:10), but it was held by the
rabbis to be the anniversary of the giving of the law and so
celebrated. It thus was a time of rejoicing in work accomplished,
and in the law of God. It was a festival which thus stressed the
responsibility and accomplishment of work, and joy of life in terms
of God’s law. It was clearly not an “escapist” holy day.
Second, the prophecy of the Christian Pentecost appears in Joel
2:28-32, which predicts that the old orders of the world, the
reigning powers (the “sun” and the “moon”), shall be darkened
and shaken as the new power emerges, a Spirit-filled people who
“call on the name of the LORD.” Our Lord made it clear what it
means to “call on the name of the LORD.” “Not every one that
saith unto me, Lord, Lord, shall enter into the Kingdom of heaven;
but he that doeth the will of my Father which is in heaven” (Matt.
7:21). God’s will is declared in His law. In Pentecost, according to
the whole of Joel’s prophecy, a faithless and lawless people are
judged and set aside and a new nation is created, as the new world
power. This new nation is a holy convocation which believes and
obeys. “Your sons and your daughters shall prophesy, your old
men shall dream dreams, your young men shall see visions” (Joel
2:28). In other words, the prophetic office as manifested in Moses,
Samuel, Elijah, and all the prophets, will be manifested in all the
people of God. When we look at the prophets from the standpoint
of Scripture rather than our own perspective, we see that their
essential function was to summon rulers and people to faith and
obedience, to uphold God’s law and to declare its judgments, and
to predict the consequences of apostasy and disobedience as well
as the results of faith and obedience. This was their task, and they
were inspired by the Spirit to fulfil it. Joel declares that, when all the
Lord’s people are prophets in the future, then it will mean the
darkening and destroying of the old powers and the deliverance
and establishment of God’s people. The vision of Joel is thus one
of the responsibility of the prophetic office’s being transferred to
all the people of God. No prophet ever cultivated experience for
experience’s sake, as these modern religious humanists do. The
prophet’s experience was a summons to action, highly responsible
action.
Third, the Christian Pentecost of Acts 2 is the first step in the
missionary work of the early church. Peter openly declared to the
crowd that gathered that this was the first step in the conquest of
all of God’s enemies:
32. This Jesus hath God raised up, whereof we are all
witnesses.
33. Therefore being by the right hand of God exalted, and
having received of the Father the promise of the Holy Ghost,
he hath shed forth this, which ye now see and hear.
34. For David is not ascended into the heavens: but he saith
himself, The LORD said unto my Lord, Sit thou on my right
hand,
35. Until I make thy foes thy footstool. (Acts 2:32-35)
This is plain language. God raised up Jesus Christ from the dead,
exalted Him to the throne of heaven, to sit by His side while His
people, as David prophesied, work to make all the enemies of God
into Christ’s footstool. This is a constant note in the psalms, as
witness Psalm 18:40, “Thou hast also given me the necks of mine
Pentecost and Responsibility 565
enemies; that I might destroy them that hate me.” Christ and His
people shall triumph. Peter at Pentecost declared that this day
marked the beginning of the victorious battle which should
culminate in the destruction of Christ’s enemies. This is the joy of
Pentecost: it is not an escapist experience but the prelude to battle
and to triumph through battle. The very next episode in Acts
shows the imprisonment of Peter and John as the battle begins, and
it declares their certainty of Christ’s reign and triumph (Acts
3:1-4:30).
Pentecost thus is inseparable from responsibility. The
humanistic pentecost is a dream of religious irresponsibility, and its
practical consequence is that in every area of life, man dreams in
terms of irresponsibility. Life is imagined as ideal, if it is a
continuous vacation. The best job is the one with the highest pay
and the least responsibility. The “new morality” is really a demand
for the right to call sexual irresponsibility moral. The appeal of
fornication and adultery is that they offer sex without
responsibility. For all too many, marital sex is dull and unappealing
because it is inseparable from responsibility.
The psalm Peter quotes at Pentecost is Psalm 110, a psalm
“quoted more often in the New Testament than is any other.”5
According to Psalm 110,
1. The LORD said unto my Lord, Sit thou at my right hand,
until I make thine enemies thy footstool.
2. The LORD shall send the rod of thy strength out of Zion:
rule thou in the midst of thine enemies.
3. Thy people shall be willing in the day of thy power, in the
beauties of holiness from the womb of the morning: thou hast
the dew of thy youth.
4. The LORD hath sworn, and will not repent, Thou art a
priest for ever after the order of Melchizedek.
5. The Lord at thy right hand shall strike through kings in the
day of his wrath.
6. He shall judge among the heathen, he shall fill the places
with the dead bodies; he shall wound the heads over many
countries.
5. H. C. Leupold, The Psalms (Columbus, Ohio: The Wartburg Press, 1959), 770.
7. He shall drink of the brook in the way: therefore shall he lift
up the head.
Christ is declared to be the great priest-king whose dominion goes
forth from Zion, where His earthly life was spent. It goes forth as
the word of power, the word of His redemption, is carried to all the
world by willing people, by an army of men with the power of
youth, the power of the future. “As dew in unnumbered gleaming
globules is born at each new dawn, so shall these warriors be,
numberless and continually fresh.”6
The humanistic pentecost dreamed of by Popes John and Paul,
and by humanists everywhere, within and without the church, is
armed with great money and human power. All the same, it
continually creates a fresh Babel rather than pentecost, because it
is godless, lawless, and irresponsible in its hopes.
The Pentecost of Christ, dedicated to bringing all things into
captivity to Christ and to subduing all His enemies by His power,
is at work and shall prevail.
6. Ibid., 772.
LXV
Salvation and Evangelism
The first summons of men after the resurrection to believe in

Christ as their Lord and Savior gives us the Biblical pattern of godly
evangelism. On the day of Pentecost, St. Peter declared in part,
22. Ye men of Israel, hear these words; Jesus of Nazareth, a
man approved of God among you by miracles and wonders
and signs, which God did by him in the midst of you, as ye
yourselves also know:
23. Him, being delivered by the determinate counsel and
foreknowledge of God, ye have taken, and by wicked hands
have crucified and slain:
24. Whom God hath raised up, having loosed the pains of
death: because it was not possible that he should be holden of
it.
36. Therefore let all the house of Israel know assuredly, that
God hath made that same Jesus, whom ye have crucified, both
Lord and Christ.
37. Now when they heard this, they were pricked in their heart,
and said unto Peter and to the rest of the apostles, Men and
brethren, what shall we do?
38. Then Peter said unto them, Repent, and be baptized every
one of you in the name of Jesus Christ for the remission of
sins, and ye shall receive the gift of the Holy Ghost.
39. For the promise is unto you, and to your children, and to
all that are afar off, even as many as the Lord our God shall
call. (Acts 2:22-24, 36-39)
The apostolic preaching followed this pattern. First, men are
declared to be sinners, under God’s wrath and sentence of death.
In varying forms, this judgment against man was plainly set forth,
so that men cried out, “What shall I do to be saved?” Second, God
as man’s only Savior through His incarnate Son, Jesus Christ, has
in grace and mercy provided the way of escape. The atonement and
the resurrection are proclaimed as man’s only hope. Christ is the
mediator and the captain of our salvation. Third, to be saved means
more than the release of the condemned, although it is clearly that.
567
It means baptism into Christ and His Kingdom; it means
obedience to His law, fellowship with His saints in the Church, and
a common service to the acknowledged King, and much more.
The evangelisms of then and now are diametrically opposed.
One young man, a campus worker, defended his methodology by
saying, “I use the soft sell, you use the hard sell,” referring in part
to the soft-pedalling of God’s indictment of sin and His wrath
against sinners. The difference is much deeper, although his
statement was revelatory in an important sense, in that the stress in
his evangelism was “the soft sell,” salesmanship. Here the heart of his
evil is exposed, as though Christ were on sale, and a commodity to
be appraised by sovereign man, the buyer.
Christ is not merchandise, to be presented to a sovereign buyer
as though He were a possible asset for the wise shopper to
consider. Merchandising involves appealing to the buyer, seducing
him into a favorable mood, presenting him with the favorable
aspects of purchase and soft-pedalling or concealing all problems
and liabilities.
Modern evangelism is salesmanship: it is also blasphemy. It
utilizes all the methods of modern selling to appeal to the buyer,
who is told that he needs Christ, and how much richer and happier
his life will be with his decision to “buy” Christ. In testimonial
meetings, liars parade their new merchandise and declare that,
since they accepted Christ, all their troubles are over, and their lives
are filled with joy and peace, and so on. St. Paul could not have said
that his troubles were over when he “accepted” Christ, or that life
thereafter was on some sweet “higher plane.” People are asked, is
your life flat and empty? Do you feel there is something more to
life than dirty dishes, parties, and hemorrhoids? Then buy Christ.
Come forward, and sign a decision card, and settle the matter of
time and eternity with your decision. Come now! So goes the sales
pitch.
True evangelism is more like a warrant for arrest on a death
penalty offense, with the possibility of pardon for the guilty. True
evangelism does not sell: it indicts, and those who submit to the
indictment also submit to the saving grace of God. To accept the
Salvation and Evangelism 569
indictment is thus to admit the justice of the death penalty against
us, and at the same time to accept the sovereign grace of God, who
gives us grace both to receive His warrant of death and His pardon,
and then to accept joyfully our drafting into His service. We are
baptized, and we become citizens of a community, the Kingdom
of God, members of His Church, workers in every area of our lives
in terms of God’s law, and, in all things, servants or slaves of
Christ, in whose will is our freedom.
Some aspects of this Biblical evangelism which appear clearly in
St. Peter’s words are, first, the first insistence on “the determinate
counsel and foreknowledge of God,” and also on human
responsibility. Man is not allowed to plead that God’s sovereignty
voids his responsibility. While man is a secondary cause, and his
freedom is a secondary freedom, a contingent one, it is no less real
for all that.
Second, this responsibility for sin is very plainly set forth. The
sinner must see himself as a sinner before God; his sin is not in a
vacuum, nor is it merely a sin against man, or against himself, true
as these aspects of sin are. We are ourselves commonly offended
by our sins and shortcomings. This is not enough. The central fact
is that they are offensive to God.
Third, the sovereign power and wisdom of God is so great that it
uses man’s sin to redound to the glory of God. The very sin of
Israel became the setting forth of Christ’s atonement and of His
power over death in the resurrection. Man cannot frustrate God.
As the psalmist declared, “Surely the wrath of man shall praise
thee: the remainder of wrath shalt thou restrain” (Ps. 76:10).
Fourth, if God can bring good out of our evil, how much greater
will be the good and the glory He will set forth through our
obedience.
Fifth, the summons is to repent, to be baptized “in the name of Jesus
for the remission of sins,” and to “receive the gift of the Holy
Ghost.” Peter does not here speak of the gifts of the Spirit, the
“charismatic gifts,” but the abiding gift of the Spirit.
Sixth, “the promise” is to us and to our covenant children. God
has ordained an elect people, “even as many as the Lord our God
shall call,” to be the citizens of His sovereign Kingdom and to do
His holy will. The summons to them is a marching order, a call
from the march to God’s gallows to service in His Kingdom as His
ambassadors, soldiers, witnesses, and a holy nation.
The Scripture gives us abundant evidence of the preaching
summons, as well as of the promise. Of the summons, for example,
we read:
Matt. 4:17. From that time Jesus began to preach, and to say,
Repent: for the kingdom of heaven is at hand.
Luke 24:47... repentance and remission of sins should be
preached in his name among all nations, beginning at
Jerusalem.
Acts 3:19. Repent ye therefore, and be converted, that your
sins may be blotted out, when the times of refreshing shall
come from the presence of the Lord.
The Scripture from beginning to end speaks of the promise, of
which two brief instances can be cited:
Isa. 60:3. And the Gentiles shall come to thy light and kings to
the brightness of thy rising.
Eph. 2:13. But now, in Christ Jesus, ye who sometimes were
far off are made nigh by the blood of Christ.
Clearly, Biblical evangelism is markedly different from the
salesmanship of modern evangelism. Olmsted, in 1860, gave a
vivid report of an Arminian preacher in the South preaching a
nagging, pleading, whining evangelistic sermon, and the language
is all too familiar. We have the same today. The sermon, cited in
part, was empty of Biblical content, devoid of intelligence, and
essentially a plea for fire insurance, to avoid hell by “buying” Jesus:
The speaker, presently, was crying aloud, with a mournful,
distressed, beseeching shriek, as if he were himself suffering
torture: “Oh, any of you fond parents, who know that any of
your dear, sweet, little ones may be, oh! at any moment
snatched right away from your bosom, and cast into hell fire,
oh! there to suffer torment for ever and ever, and ever and
ever — Oh! come out here and help us pray for them! Oh, any
of you wives that has got an unconverted husband, that won’t
Salvation and Evangelism 571
go along with you to eternal glory, but is set upon being
separated from you, oh! and taking up his bed in hell — Oh! I
call upon you, if you love him, now to come out here and join
us in praying for him. Oh, if there’s a husband here, whose
wife is still in the bond of iniquity,” etc., through a long
category.1
Preaching of this kind is in the name of Christ; some may be saved
by it, in spite of the preacher. But it is another religion: it is a form
of the neoplatonist flight from the world.
1.
Frederick Law Olmsted, The Cotton Kingdom (New York: Alfred A. Knopf,
1970), 209. Based upon three earlier volumes; first published 1860, reprinted
1953, etc.
LXVI
“The Kingdom of Heaven
Suffereth Violence”
One of our Lord’s more difficult statements is in Matthew 11:12.

It is set in the context of great praise for John the Baptist, Matthew
11:7-15, of which vv. 11-15 declare:
11. Verily I say unto you, Among them that are born of
women there hath not risen a greater than John the Baptist:
notwithstanding he that is least in the kingdom of heaven is
greater than he.
12. And from the days of John the Baptist until now the
kingdom of heaven suffereth violence, and the violent take it
by force.
13. For all the prophets and the law prophesied until John.
14. And if ye will receive it, this is Elias, which was for to come.
15. He that hath ears to hear, let him hear.
The Berkeley Version renders v. 12 thus:
But from the time of John the Baptist until now, the kingdom
of heaven has been rushed, and the impetuous seize it by
force.
Terry summarized seven ways in which this passage has been
interpreted.1 Essentially, these seven ways assume either a bad
interpretation for the seizing of the Kingdom, or a good one, or a
combination of both meanings. Some observations can be made
about the interpretation of v. 12. First, the context seems to
preclude a negative meaning. John the Baptist is praised as the
greatest of all men “born of women,” i.e., by natural birth. He is
thus placed second only to Himself by our Lord. John proclaimed
the coming of the Kingdom and was thus the new Elijah,
proclaiming not only judgment on a rejected kingdom, but also the
coming of a new kingdom, for which the old Elijah prepared a
1. Milton S. Terry, Biblical Hermeneutics (New York: Eton & Mains, 1890), 113-
117.
573
remnant. Second, in the glory of this new kingdom, the least is
greater than the great man of the ages, John the Baptist. Third, John
himself opened up this great pressing in of men to the kingdom by
his ministry in the wilderness, to which men crowded, in eagerness
to hear the word of the kingdom (Matt. 11:7-9). Because John
proclaimed the end of the old order, declaring that the ax had been
laid by God to the roots thereof (Matt. 3:7-12), men with urgency
sought the way of escape from the old and entrance into the new.
In such a situation, men distrusted the old institutions, and no
longer followed the old ways with the same unthinking acceptance.
John had declared that God’s ax and fire were the future of the old
order. Men in a burning building will use violence to save
themselves: they will break windows and resort to any measures
necessary to find their freedom. This means, fourth, that those who
took John’s preaching seriously were the violent ones, the
impetuous ones, who were seizing the Kingdom by force. At
Peniel, this had been Jacob’s own temper as he faced God, and also
the prospect of his brother’s vengeance, to take the Kingdom of
God by force, declaring, “I will not let thee go, except thou bless
me” (Gen. 32:26). This same spirit marked the true believers “from
the days of John the Baptist until now.”
Ellicott said of Matthew 11:12, “The words describe the eager
rush of the crowds of Galilee and Judaea, first to the preaching of
the Baptist, and then to that of Jesus. It was, as it were, a city
attacked on all sides by those who were eager to take possession of
it.”2 Lenski pointed out that the word rendered “violent” is found
in the secular Greek “in the sense of strong, courageous.”3
Johnson cites Rudolf Otto’s rendering as a possible interpretation
of the verse:
From John’s time until now, the kingdom is exercising its own
spiritual force, and men of spiritual force are able to lay hold
2.
C. J. Ellicott in C. J. Ellicott, editor, Commentary on the Whole Bible, vol. VI
(Grand Rapids, Michigan: Zondervan, n.d.), 66.
3. R. C. H. Lenski, Interpretation of St. Matthew’s Gospel (Columbus, Ohio: The
Wartburg Press, 1943), 438.
“The Kingdom of Heaven Suffereth Violence” 575
of it, for the law and the prophets were until John, but now the
new age has come.4
The merit of this reading is that it links the exercise of force with
the coming of a new era, the Kingdom of God.
Calvin’s comment is especially interesting:
I have no doubt that Christ speaks honourably of the majesty
of the Gospel on this ground, that many sought after it with
warm affection; for as God had raised up John to be the herald
of the kingdom of his Son, so the Spirit infused such efficacy
into his doctrine, that it entered deeply into the hearts of men
and kindled that zeal. It appears, therefore, that the Gospel,
which comes forward in a manner so sudden and
extraordinary, and awakens powerful emotions, must have
proceeded from God. But in the second clause is added this
restriction, that the violent take it by force. The greater part of men
were no more excited than if the Prophets had never uttered a
word about Christ, or if John had never appeared as his
witness; and therefore Christ reminds them, that the violent, of
which he had spoken, existed only in men of a particular class.
The meaning therefore is, A vast assembly of men is now
collected, as if men were rushing violently forward to seize the
kingdom of God; for, aroused by the voice of one man, they
come together in crowds, and receive, not only with eagerness,
but with vehement impetuosity, the grace which is offered to
them. Although very many are asleep, and are no more
affected than if John in the wilderness were acting a play which
had no reference to them, yet many flock to him with ardent
zeal. The tendency of our Lord’s statement is to show, that
those who pass by in a contemptuous manner, and as it were
with closed eyes, the power of God, which manifestly appears
both in the teacher and in the hearers, are inexcusable. Let us
also learn from these words, what is the true nature and
operation of faith. It leads men not only to give a cold and
indifferent assent when God speaks, but to cherish warm
affection towards Him, and to rush forward as it were with a
violent struggle.5
4.
Sherman E. Johnson, “Matthew,” The Interpreter’s Bible, vol. VII (New York:
5.
John Calvin, Commentary on a Harmony of the Evangelists, Matthew, Mark and
Luke, vol. II, William Pringle translator (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Eerdmans,
1957), 14f.
A fifth point makes it clear that this positive meaning was clearly
intended by our Lord: these “impetuous” or “violent” men do
seize the Kingdom; they do gain it, and it would be impossible to
assume that the ungodly in any way gain the Kingdom of God.
(Matthew uses “Kingdom of Heaven,” because, in writing for Jews,
he avoided the casual use of the name of, or word, God.)
Sixth, it is very clear that our Lord plainly relates and equates
salvation with an intense and zealous concern for the Kingdom of
God. There is no hint here either of an ascetic flight from the
world, or a Manichaean surrender of the world to the devil. The
entire framework of redemption is the Kingdom of Heaven or of
God. It is a realm ruled from Heaven by Almighty God, and its
laws are derived entirely from God and His word. However, the
Kingdom of God must be manifested on earth and must reign
among and over men. This appears clearly in the Lord’s Prayer.
The first petition is, “Hallowed be thy name” (Matt. 6:9), the
meaning of which has been beautifully summarized by Johnson:
Hallowed be thy name means approximately the same as “Father,
glorify thy name” (John 12:28), but here the passive form is
used, as in the Kaddish, to avoid a direct imperative. God is
asked to sanctify his name and to cause men to sanctify it. The
sanctification of the name is a rich and many-sided concept in
Jewish thought. God sanctifies his name by condemning and
opposing sin, by separating Israel from the world and giving it
his commandments and his love and grace. It is also Israel’s
task to sanctify God’s name by sanctifying itself, in keeping his
commandments and doing all other things which redound to
his glory. God’s name will be fully sanctified in the age to
come, when everything that opposes his will has been
removed and punishment is no longer necessary.6
Hallowing God’s name thus means believing in Him, obeying His
law, and uniting with God in “condemning and opposing sin.” It
means that we acknowledge God’s grace and law, and that we work
to bring all things into the state of salvation and sanctification
whereby man hallows God’s name in the totality of his life and
endeavor.
6. Sherman E. Johnson, in op. cit., 310f.

“The Kingdom of Heaven Suffereth Violence” 577
“Thy Kingdom come” is the second petition (Matt. 6:10): “Thy
Kingdom come. Thy will be done in earth, as it is in heaven.”
Christ, who taught us this prayer, knew Himself to be the Head of
the Kingdom, and, in requiring that we pray for that Kingdom,
made it clear what our priorities should be. In heaven, God’s will
is done to perfection, without any “variableness, neither shadow of
turning” (James 1:17). “That all wills on earth should be brought
into the same entire conformity with the divine will as their (the
hosts of heaven), is what we are taught to pray for.”7
Those who best hallow God’s name and best serve His Kingdom
do so in the driving force our Lord described. For them, the
Kingdom is a matter of urgency and life.
That this interpretation is not mere supposition is apparent from
Luke 16:16, where our Lord, in another context, makes a similar
statement, declaring,
16. The law and the prophets were until John: since that time
the kingdom of God is preached, and every man presseth into
it.
17. And it is easier for heaven and earth to pass, than one tittle
of the law to fail.
18. Whosoever putteth away his wife, and marrieth another,
committeth adultery: and whosoever marrieth her that is put
away from her husband committeth adultery. (Luke 16:16-18)
Vine notes that the meaning of the verb “biazo” (“suffereth
violence,” in Matthew 11:12, here “entereth violently”) “indicates
the meaning as referring to those who make an effort to enter the
Kingdom in spite of violent opposition.”8 The world seeks to
interpose the Kingdom of Man between man and God’s Kingdom.
It alters God’s law, or sets it aside, and it offers a substitute
kingdom and law. The people of God do violence to the Kingdom
of Man, and they enter God’s Kingdom only with a forceful activity
which demands that God’s order be recognized, and that the
kingdoms of this world submit to their Lord and Christ.
7. Ellicott, op. cit., 34f.

8. W. E. Vine, An Expository Dictionary of New Testament Words, vol. IV (New
LXVII
Godly Rule
In an important study of seventeenth century England, William

M. Lamont analyzes Godly Rule, Politics and Religion, 1603-1660.
Norman Cohn, in The Pursuit of the Millennium (1957), stressed the
millenarian aspects of revolutionary movements in medieval and
Reformation Europe, and many have assumed that millenarian
thinking is of necessity associated with peripheral and
revolutionary groups. Lamont shows that this was not the case.
Millenarianism was then common to virtually all Christian groups
in varying degrees. Premillennial thinking was predominant in
seventeenth century England, and, after that, postmillennial views.
Millenarianism was normal to Christian faith, and it was its absence
rather than presence which was notable. Scholars with an
inadequate knowledge of theological history, on finding it present
in certain radical groups, have assumed that it was peculiar to those
groups.
The dividing issue, however, was something different: it was the
question, how shall Christ’s rule be established? Lamont traces the
history of the answers to this question of godly rule. Four main
answers predominated: (1) the belief in a godly prince as the
instrument in inaugurating godly rule; (2) the belief that the answer
was in godly bishops; (3) the hope in a godly people; and (4) the
hope in a godly parliament as the instrument for godly rule.
Common to all these groups was a belief in Christendom, a belief
that England was a Christian realm whose essential problem was
organization and discipline to augment the development of godly
rule. As a result, the area of conflict among the varying groups was
a question of theological emphasis and methodology of
development.
A small group differed from this, in that they held that the policy
of excommunicating (or disciplining) a population whose real need
is conversion led to an unrealistic approach to the church’s problem.
For these men, too, the forces of antichrist had to be overcome,
579
and godly rule established, but the means to this goal were godly
preaching and an emphasis on conversion.1
The failure of this hope for godly rule, the millenarian
expectation, led to pietism, mysticism, Quietism, and other forms
of retreat from the conquest of the whole world by the people of God to the
emphasis on salvation as self-preservation, an emphasis on personal
salvation and personal morality. In some forms of pietism, the
echoes of godly rule were still strong, but essentially the outer world
was surrendered and the attempt now was to preserve the inner
world.
In one respect, there was a measure of progress, in that conversion
became the emphasis rather than discipline and excommunication. As a
result, the character of the church underwent a drastic change as
the necessity for facing up to the unconverted nature of many
churchmen came home to theologians. The undercurrent of
paganism in Europe, which had reappeared as magic and
witchcraft, was fought through much of the seventeenth century,
by Protestants and Catholics, as a civil and religious aberration on
the part of church members and citizens of the state. Whatever
some freethinkers may have concluded, eighteenth century
churchmen on the whole did not see these things as delusions, but
as real evils. The answer had changed, however, to a belief that the
crying need is conversion, not judgment and punishment.
However, the emphasis on conversion and salvation as self-preservation
from the judgment and wrath of God meant a negative emphasis. The
Christian man was no longer seen as the reborn destined lord of all the
earth, but rather as a man who had found safety and insurance
against the storm. The secularization of the world began, with
Charles II in England, Louis XIV in France, and so on, until the
French Revolution brought about the logical divorce between
Christianity and the state. In the seventeenth century, William
Barlow had seen some hint of the implications of the future in his
observation, “But RELIGION turned into STATISME, will soon
prove ATHEISME.”2 Since then, whether in Marxism, monarchy,
1. William M. Lamont, Godly Rule, Politics and Religion, 1603-1660 (London: Mac-
millan, 1969), 113ff.
2. Ibid., 157.
Godly Rule 581
fascism, republicanism, or democracy, the logical development has
continued: it is now the fallen man who seeks to conquer the whole
world. This has been the nature of fallen man since Eden, but now
he works with very little opposition, because the negative view of
conversion has led to a retreat of the church from its calling, and a
progressive deformation and denial of the real meaning of conversion.
One of the first heresies with respect to the new emphasis on the
inner man was Quietism. For the Quietists, conversion became
essential union with God. This meant that, first, there was virtually
no Christology in Quietism, because union replaced regeneration,
and the individual could effect that union directly. Second, this led
to the supposition that “the kingdom of Christ... (was) an earlier
and inferior dispensation, the reign of the Spirit the later and
perfect dispensation.” Moreover, “Quietism aims at an entire
abstraction from all externals, and seeks to put the spirit of man
into direct and immediate union with the very nature of the
Godhead.”3 This led to a pantheistic absorption of man into
universal being and a denial of activism and conquest. Man
withdrew from the world instead of conquering it. Union meant
perfection, and perfection meant no thought, wish, or hope, but
rather total passivity. The individual sought self-annihilation in the
universal being, or deification therein. Third, Quietism meant a
practical denial of ethics. Moral concerns are activist concerns. Any
philosophy of surrender or withdrawal is of necessity indifferent to
moral action. Eschatologies which do not emphasize victory and
conquest will also produce weaker moral character. Quite rightly,
Catholic theologians who were anti-Quietist recognized that it
represented an antinomian element in the church, and Molinos was
attacked for teaching antinomianism.
Rome was sorely beset by Quietist antinomianism, as was
Protestantism in pietist versions thereof, as witness the early
Moravians and other groups. Quietism as a moral attitude is still
very much with us. It is present wherever people refuse actively to
overcome their sins and shortcomings because they are waiting on
3.
“Quietism,” in John M’Clintock and James Strong, Cyclopaedia of Biblical, Theo-
logical and Ecclesiastical Literature, vol. VIII (New York: Harper & Brothers,
1894), 845-846.
the Spirit to do it for them. To cite two examples: a man who is
consistently guilty of adultery and fornication admits it is wrong,
but he will quit when the Holy Spirit takes away the desire from
him. Similarly, a man who is becoming an alcoholic holds to a like
opinion: he is praying that the Holy Spirit take away all desire for
liquor from him, but, until then, he continues to drink. In all such
cases, there is a denial of the reality of the individual’s will (except
in its fallen aspect) and an insistence that the only moral action is
supernatural action. The result is a practical immoralism, a denial
of the validity of moral action on man’s part. Revivalists of the
nineteenth century often opposed Christian schools and catechism
teaching as a false source of morality; for them, the only source of
morality was infused holiness through conversion. Thus, instead of
the Biblical doctrine of redemption by the objective work of God in
Christ, salvation now became essentially a subjective experience in the
heart of the believer. In Scripture, it is clear that our salvation is the
work of God in Christ on the cross and in His resurrection, i.e.,
outside our hearts and before our birth. In time, it becomes our
experience, but the objective fact is prior and determinative. This
subjectivistic view with respect to salvation was the medieval
church’s doctrine of salvation, and it became again the doctrine of
Protestants and Catholics in the eighteenth century. As one writer
has summarized the medieval view,
... the church did not abandon such Biblical expressions as
justification and salvation by grace. The words of Paul were still
used freely by the theologians (as they are today), but the great
Pauline words (justification, grace, etc.) had evolved a new
meaning altogether. Justification had lost its objective, forensic
meaning. Instead of meaning what God did outside of man in
pronouncing him righteous, it came to mean God’s renewing,
sanctifying act in man’s own heart. Instead of justifying grace
meaning the disposition of mercy and favor in God’s heart,
grace had come to mean a God-given quality that adorned the
human soul....
The contrast between the medieval church and the
Reformation may be summarized as follows:
Godly Rule 583
Medieval
Justified by God’s work of grace in the heart
Justified by Christ’s work in our hearts
Reformation
Justified by God’s work of grace in Christ
Justified by Christ’s work outside of our hearts, i.e., on the
cross.4
The increasing closeness of Rome and of the Modernist and
evangelical churches is a natural one. At the same time, the
humanism inherent in Scholasticism is akin to that of Modernism.
And, Arminianism is simply the Protestant version of
Scholasticism, minus the ecclesiology.
When salvation becomes essentially a subjective experience, it
means, first, that justification and sanctification have become
confused, and man’s response to salvation becomes confused with
salvation. Second, it means also that God’s sovereignty in salvation
has been replaced by man’s decision. Instead of God’s decree and
grace, “wherein he hath made us accepted in the beloved” (Eph.
1:6), we have man’s decree, whereby man says, “I accept Jesus
Christ as my Lord and Savior.” What man accepts, man can take
exception to, and hence the implicit antinomianism of
Arminianism, and its hostility to predes-tination and the security of
the saints. Man is sovereign in such thinking, and his will cannot be
overruled by God nor determined by it. Third, in such a faith, there
being no sovereign God, there is no sovereign law over all creation,
nor a total mandate to conquer all things in the name of Christ the
King. Man can choose to be a Christian with respect to his inner
life, and the world to come. In education, he can favor statist
schools; in politics, humanism; in art, relativism; in morality,
situation ethics, or a limited Biblical moralism, and so on. In every
area, man is lord. If his standards coincide with Scripture, this is a
matter of choice, not of moral imperative. While sexual ethics have
remained somewhat closer to the Biblical norm, in most areas
private and cultural tastes have prevailed. As a result, the churches
4. “The Great Issues of the Reformation,” Present Truth, Special Issue, 1972, 18.
This writer does not, of course, agree with other emphases of the periodical.
have steadily moved from a God-centered religion to a
man-centered religion.
The difference is clearly in evidence when St. Paul speaks of the
meaning of salvation:
13. Christ hath redeemed us from the curse of the law, being
made a curse for us: for it is written, Cursed is every one that
hangeth on a tree:
14. That the blessing of Abraham might come on the Gentiles
through Jesus Christ: that we might receive the promise of the
Spirit through faith. (Gal. 3:13-14)
The meaning of this statement makes it clear, among other things,
that, first, we are all under the curse of the law, i.e., its death penalty,
as rebels against God. Second, Christ became accursed and was “a
curse” for us, while He Himself remained sinless. The curse of our
fall was laid upon Him (Isa. 53:6). Third, Christ redeemed us,
without any action on our part. Our sanctification requires our
action; our justification is entirely Christ’s work. In this sentence,
Paul does not even mention our faith (a working of grace in our
hearts, and entirely of God), but only the objective, justifying work
of Christ, the forensic act. Fourth, the purpose of this sovereign act
was to bring “the blessing of Abraham” unto all peoples. It is thus
important to analyze briefly the blessing of Abraham:
1. Now the LORD had said unto Abram, Get thee out of thy
country, and from thy kindred, and from thy father’s house,
unto a land that I will shew thee:
2. And I will make of thee a great nation, and I will bless thee,
and make thy name great; and thou shalt be a blessing:
3. And I will bless them that bless thee, and curse him that
curseth thee: and in thee shall all families of the earth be
blessed. (Gen. 12:1-3)
14. And the LORD said unto Abram, after that Lot was
separated from him, Lift up now thine eyes, and look from the
place where thou art northward, and southward, and eastward,
and westward:
15. For all the land which thou seest, to thee will I give it, and
to thy seed for ever.
Godly Rule 585
16. And I will make thy seed as the dust of the earth: so that if
a man can number the dust of the earth, then shall thy seed
also be numbered.
17. Arise, walk through the land in the length of it and in the
breadth of it; for I will give it unto thee. (Gen. 13:14-17)
4. And behold, the word of the LORD came unto him, saying,
This shall not be thine heir; but he that shall come forth out
of thine own bowels shall be thine heir.
5. And he brought him forth abroad, and said, Look now
toward heaven, and tell the stars, if thou be able to number
them: and he said unto him, So shall thy seed be. (Gen. 15:4-5)
1. And when Abram was ninety years old and nine, the LORD
appeared to Abram, and said unto him, I am the Almighty
God; walk before me, and be thou perfect.
2. And I will make my covenant between me and thee, and will
multiply thee exceedingly.
3. And Abram fell on his face: and God talked with him,
saying,
4. As for me, behold, my covenant is with thee, and thou shalt
be a father of many nations.
5. Neither shall thy name any more be called Abram, but thy
name shall be called Abraham; for a father of many nations
have I made thee.
6. And I will make thee exceeding fruitful, and I will make
nations of thee, and kings shall come out of thee.
7. And I will establish my covenant between me and thee and
thy seed after thee in their generations for an everlasting
covenant, to be a God unto thee, and to thy seed after thee.
8. And I will give unto thee, and to thy seed after thee, the land
wherein thou art a stranger, all the land of Canaan, for an
everlasting possession; and I will be their God.
9. And God said unto Abraham, Thou shalt keep my covenant
therefore, thou, and thy seed after thee in their generations....
19. And God said, Sarah thy wife shall bear thee a son indeed;
and thou shalt call his name Isaac: and I will establish my
covenant with him for an everlasting covenant, and with his
seed after him. (Gen. 17:1-9, 19)
17. … in blessing I will bless thee, and in multiplying I will
multiply thy seed as the stars of the heaven, and as the sand
which is upon the sea shore; and thy seed shall possess the
gates of his enemies;
18. And in thy seed shall all the nations of the earth be blessed;
because thou hast obeyed my voice. (Gen. 22:17-18)
The blessing of Abraham is so great that it extends even to
Ishmael and his seed (Gen. 17:20-21). It is a promise of land,
Canaan, and of prosperity and power. It is a promise, too, that the
spiritual heirs of Abraham shall possess the earth. Men shall be
blessed as they bless Abraham and cursed as they curse him. The
friends and enemies of Abraham are the friends and enemies of
God, an amazing and close covenant. According to Smith, on
Genesis 12:2, “I will bless thee” should read, “Be thou a blessing,”
by your faith and obedience, to all the families of the earth. All
things are promised to Abraham and his seed: the entire earth is
their inheritance and possession. Abraham is to be the father of “a
thronging crowd of nations.”5 Not only does God promise these
things to Abraham, but He also confirms them by a covenant and
oath. There is both a literal and spiritual fulfilment, a present and a
future blessing.
“The blessing of Abraham” means thus that we share in
Abraham’s blessing. If men are blessed and cursed by God as they
bless and curse Abraham, this then is also true for us. God reacts
with the same intense closeness to us: people are His friends and
enemies insofar as they are ours. We have a calling and a
predestined future, to possess all the earth, and our blessedness
therein is both a present and a future one. Christ’s purpose in our
redemption is not simply our self-preservation but also “that the
blessing of Abraham might come on the Gentiles through faith”
(Gal. 3:14).
Then, as St. Paul adds, “that we might receive the promise of the
Spirit through faith” (Gal. 3:14). Our inheritance is thus not by
blood descent from Abraham, but by the grace of God in Christ.
All the earth and all nations are thus included in the promise.
Salvation as St. Paul speaks of it is thus very different from
self-preservation: it is redemption, regeneration, inheritance, and
conquest.
5. R. Payne Smith, “Genesis,” in C. J. Ellicott, editor, Commentary on the Whole

Bible, vol. I (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Zondervan, n.d.), 57, 71.
Godly Rule 587
Christendom in the seventeenth century, despite its defects, still
believed in godly rule. Today, the churches are instead involved in
an ungodly surrender. What is required is a Biblical emphasis on
justification, on the necessity for conversion, and then the training
of the godly for world conquest and rule.
Justification, however closely related to regeneration and
conversion, is a separate and objective act, a forensic act, and it is
entirely God’s act. In our experience, we know it subjectively, but
it is not a subjective fact. We experience regeneration, which is a
consequence of God’s sovereign grace to those whom He justifies,
but we are still altogether passive in our regeneration. While
justification and regeneration cannot be separated, neither can they
be identified. Godly rule begins with the rule or sovereignty of God
in our salvation.
LXVIII
Manipulated Man
Jorgenson, in a study of literary and artistic “creativity,” cites

with approval the comments of author John Fowles in his novel,
The French Lieutenant's Woman:
You may think novelists always have fixed plans to which they
work, so that the future predicted by Chapter One is always
inexorably the actuality of Chapter Thirteen.... Only one same
reason (for writing novels) is shared by all of us: we wish to create
worlds as real as, but other than, the world that is. Or was. This is why
we cannot plan. We know a world as an organism, not a
machine. We also know that a genuinely created world must be
independent of its creator: a planned world (a world that fully
reveals its planning) is a dead world. It is only when our
characters and events begin to disobey us that they begin to
live.1
Jorgenson fully subscribes to Fowles’ thesis, because his religious
convictions require free will and deny predestination. Jorgenson’s
view is simplistic: only one kind of freedom exists, primary
freedom. There is no recognition that a primary or first cause alone
has primary freedom, and that man, as a secondary cause at best,
has only a secondary freedom. Jorgenson wants free will, and he
writes:
For Fowles, a world alive with characters who bear
responsibility makes free will a necessity. A novelist who
refuses to program his characters frees them to assume a
1. Cited
from John Fowles, The French Lieutenant’s Woman (New American Li-
brary, 1971) by Dale A. Jorgenson, “To Forgo Manipulation, ” Christianity To-
day, vol. XVII, no. 16, 11 May 1973, 34. The modern novelist is implicitly or
explicitly theological in his theory of writing. He is either indicting God for the
kind of world God made, or he is in effect saying, if I were God, I would make
man in a very different way; I would give him and the world an independence
God does not give us. Fowles is very obvious in his theological orientation. As
a humanist, he is indicting God, and he is affirming that his philosophy of cre-
ation is wiser than God’s.
589
believable existence, just as God willingly endows his creatures
with a totally “other” life of their own.2
It could be pointed out that a novelist does program his characters
in terms of his own faith and character. Given an identical episode
or characters, no two novelists would write the same novel about
them. The differences would be determined by their own natures.
Jorgenson, however, is really talking about God, who “willingly
endows his creatures with a totally ‘other’ life of their own.” Now
Jorgenson does not derive this conviction from Scripture but from
his views on art. From one end of Scripture to the other, it is clear
that God “programs” all creation, and there are no surprises in it
for Him (see Isa. 45:6-7; Rom. 9; Acts 2:23, 4:27-28; 15:18; Prov.
16:4, 33; 1 Tim. 5:21; Eph. 1:4-6, 9, 11; Rom. 8:30; 2 Tim. 1:9; 1 Pet.
2:8, etc.). Neither does Jorgenson derive this conviction from
science or observation. He was not free to choose his time of birth,
sex, race, or aptitudes; he is genetically a product of countless
generations, and one could also say a product of his environment,
and scientifically these statements are more tenable than
Jorgenson’s faith. To this point, moreover, Jorgenson might agree.
Wherein is man then free? The citation from Fowles makes this
answer clear: man is free to disobey his creator, ultimately and
absolutely free.
Jorgenson quotes Matthew Lipman’s What Happens in Art (1967),
to the effect that “The crucial point in the creative process is that
at which the developing quality of the artwork becomes
dominant.” The creature determines the creator. Jorgenson adds
the theological implication, to make sure that we miss nothing of
his meaning:
Recognition of this process is probably one reason why the
awe-inspiring moment of man’s creation painted by
Michelangelo on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel remains so
breathtaking. In all literature and art related to the
Judeo-Christian faith, this moment remains one of the
ultimately aesthetic experiences: the moment when Creator
God gives man breath, thought, choices, values, and eternity
of his own, as well as the need to create. Skinnerian
2. Ibid.
Manipulated Man 591
behaviorism has no adequate explanation for this
self-contained entity — a human being — who takes on life
and becomes a creative personality under his own control....
God willingly created man with this selfhood, even at the risk
of human rebellion. Since fiction is created by people and is
about human experience, it illustrates the integrity that God
grants human personality. And it should also convey respect
for this integrity....
Seeing Michelangelo’s vision of Creation transposed from the
ceiling of the Sistine Chapel into living creatures of God’s
design, we realize that it is impossible for us to manipulate
people or impose upon them standardization and conformity.
And we realize also that it is essential to bring them the love
of Christ that frees man to conform to the real personality
God intended him to possess.3
Jorgenson sees man as “a self-contained entity”; at its best, this is
hyperbole. Every time we eat or we feel the need for
companionship, we deny that statement. Moreover, Jorgenson
holds “that it is impossible for us to manipulate people or impose
upon them standardization and conformity.” Again, this is not true,
and the Incas of Peru were proof of this fact that men can be
manipulated and standardized. Hypnotism, to which non-religious
man is very prone, is also evidence of a ready temperament of man
where manipulation is concerned.
In Jorgenson’s perspective, man becomes independent of God
by virtue of his creation. In the Biblical perspective, man’s claim to
independence as another god is itself an aspect of God’s eternal
decree or program.
Jorgenson’s view is flattering to man and thereby renders him
more prone to manipulation. In my student days, I recall hearing a
shabby young man, an accomplished seducer, boast in the
locker-room about having deprived another girl of her virginity the
previous night. He was specific as to name and place, and loud
enough to be heard over the lockers. When asked by a listener how
he did it so easily, he laughed as he described it. His method was
essentially flattery: flatter the girl into believing that she is
3. Ibid., 36.
everything she dreams of being, and that you are overwhelmed by
love and unable to control yourself. She will have to doubt your
description of her if she doubts your intentions, and she will yield
almost out of a sense of duty and pity to her poor creature, only to
find herself the poor creature.
In other words, an age which most exalts man will most of all
manipulate man. A humanistic culture thus aims at totally
manipulated man.
A religion which abets this illusion concerning man, as
Arminianism does, abets the radical seduction of man which began
in Eden with the tempter. In its logical implications, its idea of
conversion completes the perversion of man inaugurated by the
adversary. For Jorgenson, salvation is “to bring them (men) the
love of Christ that frees man to conform to the real personality
God intends him to possess.” True enough, we do find our true
selves and our true freedom only in Christ, but only as creatures
who are totally created, predestined, and redeemed by the
sovereign God. This is not Jorgenson’s meaning. Christ confirms
man, in his perspective, in the humanistic freedom described by
Fowles, so that man is better able to go his own way by utilizing
Christ as a resource. Jorgenson sees the fulness of the Fall as man’s
salvation.
Man, however, is a creature; more than that, he is God’s creature, so
that not only man, but also all the conditions, possibilities, and
potentialities of man’s life are totally of God’s creation. Man’s fall
is of God’s ordination, and man’s salvation is of God’s sovereign
grace.
Let us look again at John Fowles’ comment: “We wish to create
worlds as real as, but other than, the world that is. Or was. This is
why we cannot plan. We know a world as an organism, not a
machine.” The world is neither an organism, nor a machine. The
real world is a planned world, a world ruled by God’s law. We can
plan that the sun will rise and set in a predetermined way, and, in
the plan of God, all things have their place and function. Fowles
holds that “a planned world (a world that fully reveals its planning)
is a dead world.” Any exhaustive knowledge of the world is
Manipulated Man 593
impossible, but the world does reveal its planning; an unplanned
world only exists in man’s imagination: it cannot be. Fowles also
holds that “a genuinely created world must be independent of its
creator,” and Jorgenson obviously approves. A “genuinely created
world” is indeed separate from its creator, but it cannot be
independent of him unless it is self-created. It is its creator’s
product and totally manifests at every point that it is a creation and
has neither made itself nor governs itself. The myth of evolution
offers us a self-made and independent world, but, because the artist
“creates” something, his “world” is totally his creature and totally
his product. Sartre is far more logical than Fowles. In The Flies,
Orestes declares his independence from God, but he realizes that
he is therefore separating himself from himself, from other men,
and from nature. Orestes says in part:
Foreign to myself — I know it. Outside nature, against nature,
without excuse, beyond remedy, except what remedy I can
find within myself. But I shall not return under your law; I am
doomed to have no other law but mine. Nor shall I come back
to nature, the nature you found good; in it are a thousand
beaten paths all leading up to you — but I must blaze my trail.
For I, Zeus, am a man, and every man must find out his own
way. Nature abhors man, and you too, god of gods, abhor
mankind.4
The humanism of Jorgenson is an absolute one. Sartre faces the
problem of humanism’s radical despair and hopelessness more
honestly. Jorgenson’s humanism is bound to stumble. It calls itself
Christianity and it seeks after righteousness on syncretistic terms,
but its terms are doomed, because they deny man’s Maker His due.
As St. Paul wrote of Israel,
31. But Israel, which followed after the law of righteousness,
hath not attained to the law of righteousness.
32. Wherefore? Because they sought it not by faith, but as it
were by the works of the law. For they stumbled at that
stumblingstone;
4. Jean-Paul Sartre, No Exit, and Three Other Plays (New York: Vintage Books,
1955), 122.
33. As it is written, Behold, I lay in Sion a stumblingstone and
rock of offense; and whosoever believeth on him shall not be
ashamed. (Rom. 9:31-33)
Israel was notable for its zeal in following after righteousness, and
its earnestness therein puts Arminians and antinomian
“Reformed” churchmen to shame. Israel claimed to follow the law
of righteousness, i.e., to keep the law, but they failed to keep it and
to gain its protection, because they sought to do so in the wrong
way. Their effort was wrong, because they rejected Christ, “that
stumblingstone.” They rejected God’s justification in Christ, and
they sought, not sovereign grace, but man’s choice of grace and
man’s earned protection and power. St. Paul quotes Isaiah 28:16
concerning the stumblingstone. God, Isaiah made clear, is the only
true foundation stone for the Temple, the only ground for man’s
life and redemption. To seek life apart from Him, or to turn
religion into a humanistic concern, is to stumble on the
stumblingstone, Christ, and to fall.
Israel was ready to accept Christ and make Him King, on their
terms (John 6:14-15), and Christ abandoned them, and indicted
them (John 6:22-71). Modern Arminianism and antinomianism
claim to believe in Christ, but on their terms. Are they any the less
guilty?
St. Paul declares, of those who truly believe in Christ,
“whosoever believeth on him shall not be ashamed” (Rom. 9:33).
This can also be rendered, “shall not be confounded.” The reading
in Isaiah 28:16 is, “he that believeth shall not make haste.” Young
calls attention to the identity of meaning: those who trust in the
sovereignty of God work in quietness and confidence, without
haste and in confidence of the outcome.5 To claim any freedom for
man apart from God is to stumble over the sovereign Christ. As
Calvin observed, “when we claim for ourselves any righteousness,
we in a manner contend with the power of Christ; for his office is
5. EdwardJ. Young, The Book of Isaiah, vol. II (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Eerd-
mans, 1969), 288.
Manipulated Man 595
no less to beat down all the pride of the flesh, than to relieve and
comfort those who labour and are wearied under their burden.”6
To accept ourselves as totally God’s creatures is not to be
manipulated but to be free. If I imagine myself to be Napoleon, I
am not free but mad. And if I also imagine myself to be a god, I
have not gained freedom and power by this ultimate madness but
have lost what freedom and power I might have had. My freedom
is to be myself, God’s creature in all my being.
Jorgenson’s essay makes very clear the affinity of Arminianism to
humanism. Jorgenson prefers to line up with Fowles rather than St.
Paul. Fowles is open about his faith, which is in the tradition of
Marx and Sartre. Fowles declares that “the novelist stands next to
God.”7 Moreover, Fowles makes clear his radical break with
Biblical theology in favor of the new non-theistic doctrines:
The novelist is still a god, since he creates (and not even the
most aleatory avant-garde modern novel has managed to
extirpate its author completely); what has changed is that we
are no longer the gods of the Victorian image, omniscient and
decreeing; but in the new theological image, with freedom our
first principle, not authority.8
The heading for Fowles’ last chapter is a quotation from Martin
Gardner’s The Ambidextrous Universe (1967), which affirms the
ostensible cooperation of chance with “natural law” (derived from
the void, apparently) “to create living forms better and better
adapted to survive.” His second epigraph is Matthew Arnold’s
“True piety is acting what one knows.” Fowles’ moral, at the end of
his book (the next to the last paragraph) is this:
For I have returned, albeit deviously, to my original principle:
that there is no intervening god beyond whatever can be seen,
in that way, in the first epigraph to this chapter; thus only life
as we have, within our hazard-given abilities, made it ourselves,
life as Marx defined it — the actions of men (and of women) in
6. John Calvin, Commentaries on the

Epistle of Paul the Apostle to the Romans (Grand
Rapids, Michigan: Eerdmans, 1948), 379f.
7. John Fowles, The French Lieutenant’s Woman (New York: Signet Books, 1969),
80.
8. Ibid., 82.
pursuit of their ends. The fundamental principle that should guide
these actions, that I believe myself always guided Sarah’s, I
have set as the second epigraph. A modern existentialist would
no doubt substitute “humanity” or “authenticity” for “piety”;
but he would recognize Arnold’s intent.9
Jorgenson, and Christianity Today, are more at home with Fowles
than with Scripture, and the same is true of most evangelical
churches. They thus preach a salvation which is no salvation at all.
9. Ibid., 365f.
LXIX
Humanism
Humanism having entered into the churches, it soon entered

into all of life. The humanistic emphasis of nineteenth century
revivalism soon perverted Christianity into a form of humanism.
The catechism was held up to ridicule. Whereas the Westminster
Shorter Catechism declares, “Man’s chief end is to glorify God, and
to enjoy him forever,” the practical import of religion was
increasingly the reverse: God’s chief end is to glorify man, and to
enjoy him forever.
The popular literature of the day sang of the glories of man, and
of God’s duty to act as man’s faithful ally and servant. It was seen
as Christ’s duty to judge man on man’s own terms. A very popular
example of this thesis appeared in Hay’s poem, “Jim Bludso, Of
the Prairie Belle,” for many years a much loved American poem
which still appeared in twentieth century school anthologies of
poetry, such as Carhart and McGhee’s Through Magic Casements. The
author, John Milton Hay (1838-1905), was assistant secretary to
Abraham Lincoln, Assistant Secretary of State under President
Hayes, ambassador to Great Britain under McKinley, and Secretary
of State under McKinley and Theodore Roosevelt. His poem “Jim
Bludso” (sometimes also spelled Bludsoe) appeared in his Pike
County Ballads (1871). Hay was a key figure of American policy: he
was instrumental in establishing the Open Door policy in China
and in making the Panama Canal a possibility. His poem is of
importance, not for any literary merit, for it has little, but as a
reflection of an intelligent man’s religion in a humanistic society.
Bludso was a river boat engineer, “no saint,” with “one wife in
Natchez-under-the-Hill, And another one here, in Pike.” He was a
profane man, but no liar.
And this was all the religion he had,
To treat his engine well;
Never be passed on the river;
To mind the pilot’s bell;
597
And if ever the Prairie Belle took fire,
A thousand times he swore,
He’d hold her nozzle agin the bank
Till the last soul got ashore.
The Prairie Belle grew old, but Bludso still refused to be passed.
When the Movastar, a better boat, came by, he raced her, with the
result being the destruction of the owner’s property, the boat, by a
fire caused by over-feeding and over-pushing the old boat. Bludso
headed the boat to the shore, and everyone’s life was saved save
Bludso’s, the cause of it all.
Bludso, a profane and godless man, a bigamist, a man who
gambled with the lives of the passengers (although they survived),
and with the properties of owner and passengers, is still a hero for
Hay, who concluded:
He weren’t no saint, — but at jedgment
I’d run my chance with Jim,
‘Longside of some pious gentlemen
That wouldn’t shook hands with him.
He seen his duty, a dead-sure thing, —
And went for it thar and then;
And Christ ain’t a going to be too hard
on a man that died for men.
Hay, an urbane and sophisticated man, expressed this humanistic
plan of salvation in the affected language of an uneducated and
homespun rural American, his idea of Rousseau’s pure natural
man. Today, Hay’s poem is no longer in favor: the need to bring in
Christ is no longer there. Man now saves himself on his own terms
and without any need for God or Christ.
Even more, man now holds that he needs no salvation: he is
good as he is, whatever he is, and his only problem is that the
Christian religion corrupts him into thinking he is a sinner, and that
certain acts are sinful. Thus, Allen and Martin hold, with Kinsey,
that all acts capable of being performed are therefore natural, and
what is natural is therefore moral. Anal intercourse, homosexuality,
incest, and other acts are held to be neither “immoral, sick or
abnormal.”1 If there is nothing wrong with man, then man needs
Humanism 599
no saving unless it is from Christianity because it declares man to be
a sinner.
For Biblical faith, salvation is from sin into the service of God,
to exercise dominion under Him. For humanism, salvation is from
the idea of sin and of being a sinner into the glorification and
service of man, whatever he is and whatever he does.
As Reese, a humanist, declared in 1927, “Humanism is the
conviction that human life is of supreme worth; and consequently
must be treated as an end, not as a means.”2 This means in part,
Reese declares,
Man is not to be treated as a means to the glory of God. The
Westminster catechism said, “The chief end of man is to
glorify God, and to enjoy him forever.” This is typical of
orthodox theologies. The glory of God is primary; man is
secondary. The result is that today in most religious circles
man is thought of as only an instrument in the hands of God.
The “event” likewise is said to be in the hands of God.3
Reese’s point is a logical one. Events are either in the hands of God,
or in the hands of man. Either God is primary, or man is.
Humanism insists on the ultimacy of man. In Reese’s words,
“Humanism... holds to man’s nature and essential worth” as against
some eternal worth beyond man. Moreover, “Man is not to be
treated as a means to cosmic ends.... To fix attention on cosmic
ends is to weaken one’s grasp on the human situation.”4 This
means that man must fix his attention on man, without any other
standard save man. Neither God nor anything in the universe must
be allowed to impose a requirement on man. “The sense of ought,
the feeling of responsibility, and the like, are products and
instruments of the emotional life of men, not authorities to be
imposed upon man.” The only ought is what man wills, and not
even other men can become a moral imperative for man. Yet “the
1. Gina
Allen and Clement G. Martin, M.D., Intimacy: Sensitivity, Sex and the Art
of Love (Chicago: Cowles Book Company, a Subsidiary of Henry Regnery Com-
pany, 1971).
2. Curtis W. Reese, in “Preface” to Curtis W. Reese, editor, Humanistic Sermons
(Chicago: Open Court Publishing Company, 1927), viii.
3. Ibid., ix.
4. Ibid.
good of each must become the concern of all.” No man can
compel another, and this mutual respect for one another’s ultimacy
is assumed to be capable of producing “mutuality” instead of
anarchy. Reese believes that all men should be concerned about all
other men. “Every hair that is prematurely gray, every clod that falls
too soon upon the casket of the dead, every unnecessary sorrow
that darkens a human brow, weighs upon the conscience of the
enlightened man.” This is wishful thinking, because humanism,
having posited man’s own ultimacy, leads to egoism rather than
mutuality. “The primary concern of Humanism is human
development.”5 In reality, it becomes the individual man’s will,
since no moral imperative exists beyond man.
Long before Reese, the Marquis de Sade stated the case more
clearly for humanism and its moral egoism. Sade saw that
humanism requires anarchism and egoism. Polanyi, in discussing
personal and political moral nihilism, has said that
The two lines of antinomianism meet and mingle in French
existentialism. Mme. de Beauvoir hails the Marquis de Sade as
a great moralist when Sade declares through one of his
characters: “I have destroyed everything in my heart that
might have interfered with my pleasures.” And this triumph
over conscience, as she calls it, is interpreted in terms of her
own Marxism: “Sade passionately exposes the bourgeois hoax
which consists in erecting class interests into universal (moral)
principles.”6
Polanyi himself sees no answer except a return to the
Enlightenment and its more rational brand of humanism. He does
not tell us where such a humanism will find its moral values, moral
values which are more than nihilism and more than man.
One of the great humanists of history acknowledged that he
found his sanity and salvation in recognizing the absolute
sovereignty of the God who in His grace had chosen him.
Nebuchadnezzar wrote:
5. Ibid., x, xf, xiii-xix.

6. Michael Polanyi, Beyond Nihilism (Cambridge: University Press, 1960), 26.
Humanism 601
34. And at the end of the days I Nebuchadnezzar lifted up
mine eyes unto heaven, and mine understanding returned
unto me, and I blessed the most High, and I praised and
honoured him that liveth for ever, whose dominion is an
everlasting dominion, and his kingdom is from generation to
generation:
35. And all the inhabitants of the earth are reputed as nothing:
and he doeth according to his will in the army of heaven, and
among the inhabitants of the earth: and none can stay his
hand, or say unto him, What doest thou?
36. At the same time my reason returned unto me; and my
counsellors and my lords sought unto me; and I was
established in my kingdom, and excellent majesty added unto
me. (Daniel 4:34-36)
What Nebuchadnezzar testified to was the absolute sovereignty of
God in all things, including his salvation. “None can stay his hand,”
i.e., “none can oppose God’s action.”7 Moreover, Nebuchadnezzar
tells us that his reason returned to him when he looked up to God
and recognized and acknowledged God’s absolute sovereignty. “It
is significant that from the Aramaic point of view ‘reason’ is manda,
‘knowing.’”8 The beginning of wisdom and knowledge is the fear
of the Lord and the recognition of His absolute power and
dominion.
Moreover, the words of Nebuchadnezzar echo Scripture. The
following verses are clearly in Nebuchadnezzar’s mind:
Ps. 145:13. Thy kingdom is an everlasting kingdom, and thy
dominion endureth throughout all generations.
Isa. 40:17. All nations before him are as nothing; and they are
counted to him less than nothing, and vanity.
Isa. 43:13. Yea, before the day was I am he; and there is none
that can deliver out of my hand: I will work, and who shall let
it?
Isa. 43:21. This people have I formed for myself; they shall
shew forth my praise.
7. Edward J. Young, The Prophecy of Daniel, A Commentary (Grand Rapids, Mich-
igan: Eerdmans, 1949), 113.
8. H. C. Leupold, Exposition of Daniel (Columbus, Ohio: The Wartburg Press,
1949), 202.
There is no reason to suppose that Nebuchadnezzar did not
know the Hebrew Scriptures. It was a part of his work to be highly
informed about every country he warred against, and his network
of spies was a very effective one. As the historical motive force of
the Hebrews, the Scriptures would be of especial interest to
Nebuchadnezzar, as was also the prophet Jeremiah. In part, his
previous actions were both an interest in and a war against the God
of Israel. Now he acknowledges Him as the only Lord and Savior
of man. “Now I Nebuchadnezzar praise and extol and honour the
King of heaven, all whose works are truth, and his ways judgment:
and those that walk in pride he is able to abase” (Dan.4:37). This is
a most telling confession. Because God is absolute and ultimate, all
His works are truth, and man must conform to God, not God to
man. For humanism, logically, all man’s works are truth when
arising out of his own existential being. For Nebuchadnezzar, all
man’s works are under the judgment of God who is alone
sovereign. For man the sinner, who is born and who dies, and who
comes into a ready-made world for a brief season, to claim priority
and ultimacy is indeed humanism, but it is also insanity, as all sin is.
For anyone to try to confuse Christianity and humanism or to make
them one is indeed to sin, and is insanity compounded.
LXX
Marriage and the Family
An important aspect of the Christian marriage service, which

was once common in many areas and still survives in some, was the
crowning of the bride and groom. In the Armenian wedding
service, a crown with a cross was worn. Prior to the wedding, on
the eve thereof, in the home of the bridegroom, and, separately, in
the home of the bride, bride and groom were crowned and seated
on a chair, symbolizing a throne. Friends and relatives then danced
the circle-dance around the crowned person, singing the crowning
song. After each stanza, the chorus took the crowned person on a
tour of the great Armenian monasteries, declaring in song, “Now
you are facing (the Monastery of) the Holy Cross, wearing red and
green. May God keep you blameless to enjoy your Queen,” or
“Now you are facing (the Monastery of) St. Thomas, wearing red
and green. May God keep you blameless to enjoy your Queen,”
and so on.
On the wedding day, a procession, with music and dancing, took
the bride and groom from their homes to the church. Both took
communion as a part of the service. The bridegroom was mantled
as a king, a cross in his crown, a dagger in his belt to defend his
realm and dominion, and the Gospel clasped to his breast as the
principle of dominion. The bride also was mantled and wore a
cross in her crown. The “sharragon” or hymn sung pertained to
their coronation.
The wedding festival lasted three days, with the king’s throne in
the wedding-hall surrounded by an honor guard. The purpose of
the service was to set forth the family as the central area of
dominion of the redeemed man, and the husband and wife as king
and queen, exercising dominion under God. In some parts of
Armenia, it was common for men, on coming home, to enter their
house declaring, “I am a lord!” Outside were the ungodly Turks,
and limitations on his power; here, he was a lord in Christ. The
603
Armenian word for queen, “takkuhee,” was often used as a name
for girls, and men often referred to their wives as “my queen.”1
These old world marriage services, with their coronation rites,
represented relics of a postmillennial faith, a belief that the
redeemed man is reestablished in Adam’s calling to exercise
dominion and to subdue the earth under God. They witness to the
fact that the central institution for this dominion is the family. We
are told, in Genesis 1:26-28,
26. And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our
likeness: and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea,
and over the fowl of the air and over the cattle, and over all the
earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the
earth.
27. So God created man in his own image, in the image of God
created he him; male and female created he them.
28. And God blessed them, and God said unto them, be
fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it:
and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl
of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the
earth.
This text is of central importance to the significance of marriage.
While, on an individualistic basis, dominion is primarily given to
man (1 Cor. 11:1-16), this does not mean that it is reserved to man.
It is unto “them,” male and female, that God gives the order to
exercise dominion. A central aspect of subduing the earth is by
being fruitful and multiplying, but it is far from all of it. It is from
the family that dominion goes forth: the family is thus the nursery
of dominion and the historical center thereof. Proverbs 31:10-31
makes it clear how important the woman is to dominion and how
practical her calling is: she manages farms and business, and is a
queen exercising dominion.
The Armenian wedding service included a prayer blessing the
crowns, and praying for the eternal crowns which do not pass
away, and for a conquest in history over the forces of Satan:
1. Froma letter by my father, Rev. Y. K. Rushdoony, February 24, 1956, and

subsequent conversations on the subject of old Armenia’s wedding customs.
Marriage and the Family 605
In thy living name, God and Lord, maker of heaven and earth,
who madest all things by the word of thy behest, thou
fashionedst man, the first Adam, and establishedst from him
the marriage of Eve. Thou blessedst the marriage of Seth, and
therefrom the earth increased down to Noe. Thou blessedst
the marriage of Noe, and therefrom the earth drew her
heritage down to Abraham. Thou blessedst the marriages of
Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, and they increased on earth and
were crowned in heaven. Out of the stock of Judah thou
blessedst David, and from the seed of David, Mariam, and
from her didst beget the Saviour of the world, for thou
becamest crowner of all Saints. Now with blessing let this
crown be blessed and the marriage of these persons, that this
servant and handmaid of thine may pass their lives in peace in
all religiousness, To the end that Satan be driven afar from
their midst, and thy mercy may come upon them, and that we
may utter to thee praise and glory, together with the Father
and the holy Spirit, now and ever.2
Genesis 1:28 is often cited with respect to the creation mandate
to exercise dominion, but it is too rarely noted that the primary
purpose of marriage is not simply procreation, but that procreation
is an aspect of subduing the earth and exercising dominion over it.
This dominion is total: it is to include all the earth and “every living
thing that moveth upon the earth.” This mandate to dominion is to
man as male and female, and it is inherent in every institution man
creates and every area of his life.
It is essential to the life of church, state, and school, to the arts
and sciences, to every calling and every phase of life, but, in its
primary assignment and orientation, it is given to the family. The
central area of dominion is thus not politics nor economics, but the
family under God.
The family cannot be limited to the modern atomistic family,
those living under one roof as husband, wife, and children. The
marriage unit of husband and wife is the nuclear family, but it is not
the sum total of the family. To illustrate: on the one hand, a family
with three children, nominally religious, is in no sense Christian,
nor an area of dominion. Each member goes his own way: there is
2. F.C. Conybeare, Rituale Armenorum (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1905), 111f.
This prayer is from cod. I, “a very simple and relatively early form.”
no sense of any moral responsibility to God or to one another, nor
to the grandparents. This is a marriage and a family, but in a
biological sense and a legal sense, not in a Christian or moral sense,
in that even adultery and fornication are tolerated within limits. On
the other hand, another family has three children, two sons and
one daughter. A son and daughter have never married; all three
children reside some distance from home. They are, however, a
godly family. The parents are supported in retirement by the
unmarried son and daughter, with help from the other son. The
married son was helped through the university by his brother and
sister. The family has helped other relatives, and some friends as
well, and, while absent from their small town home, have been
important in aiding some Christian causes therein. All three
children are exercising dominion under God, and all three have a
strong sense of family. The daughter, nearing retirement herself,
has more of a family life in her effect on other families, and the love
she has earned, than the lawless mother in the first family. In the
first family, family life means little more than a legal sexual
relationship and life under one roof, an essentially biological
concept of family life. In the second family, family life is a form of
social organization with theological premises, so that it exists and
governs where no sexual relationship exists.
The family as a social organization is the prime area of dominion.
It has far more than personal significance. Originally, and, to some
degree, in some areas of the world, the family in the larger sense, as
clan and tribe, has been extremely important. The weakness of
these older forms has been the primacy of blood rather than of
faith. By insisting on the primacy of blood, the theological
significance of the family has been obscured, and, instead of
dominion, the clan or tribe has aimed at power. This has meant a
separation from rightful and godly authority and a divorce of
power from its justification in terms of an ultimate moral law.
However, in the modern world, romanticism and pietism have
reduced the family to the personal and emotional level, so that
marriage and the family become purely personal to the parties
involved, and they are indifferent to the theological and social
significance thereof. Thus, the pietist sees Christ as King in the
personal sense, “my Lord,” which indeed He is, but the pietist fails
to see Christ as King over Church, state, school, family, vocation,
arts and sciences, and every area of life, and the pietist thus fails to
see the social significance of redemption and Christ’s kingship.
The family in Biblical law controls three central areas of life, the
control of which governs society. Any institution or agency which
controls children, property, and inheritance is the determining agency in
any society. Not surprisingly, the modern state, in its totalitarian
designs, has invaded all three areas in varying degrees, by means of
property taxes, inheritance taxes, statist schools, and laws limiting
the jurisdiction of the family. The state seeks to be the new family
of man.
The state, moreover, claims dominion over the earth and over
man. It has separated itself from God and presented itself as the
new god and creator, the source of determination or
predestination. The state is thus of necessity hostile to the Biblical
doctrine of marriage and the family. The state and the family
represent two rival powers claiming jurisdiction over the same
territory and claiming the same powers of dominion.
However, the degree to which the state takes over the
government of man, from man and the family, is also the degree to
which it disintegrates the soul of man and the stability of society.
Because God located the primary exercise of dominion in and
through the family, it means that if church, state, school, or any
other agency weakens the family, the end result is a weakening of
that agency. Dominion is best exercised in every area when it is best
exercised first of all in the family. The nursery of man’s life is also
the nursery of man’s dominion under God.
Because the family as a social organization is the prime area of
dominion, it has also been a primary area of deformation. Social
deformation began as the family saw itself as an area of tyrannical
power, as in ancestor worship. The family was made into a lawless
domain wherein the head of the house or clan exercised vast
powers to the destruction of its members. In Scotland, for
example, the Highland clan chiefs treated clan members as slaves
without title to their lands and lives. In old China, the family could
take the life of its members or reduce them to servitude at will.
The Biblical family is a radical break with the blood family. In the
Biblical family, ostracism is not, according to Scripture, for
violations of clan law in the blood family, but for violations of
God’s law. All members of the family are placed under God’s law.
Instead of a purely immanent frame of reference, the family in
Scripture has a transcendental framework and law.
Moreover, the particular family is required to align itself with the
covenant family as the family of God. The early Christians spoke
of themselves as the “third race” (as against Greeks and
barbarians), and the “Christian race.” As a family, through the
deacons, they cared for their sick, unemployed, widows, orphans,
and needy members. The church must be seen as the new larger
family; the twelve disciples replaced the twelve tribes, the old
family unity of blood, as the new family government and structure.
In the modern world, the nuclear family sees freedom in
dissociation from its members. Relatives, grandparents, and then
children are separated from the family, not only physically, having
other residences, which is normal, but also emotionally. The
smaller the family becomes, the weaker it is. Most people are not
mature enough to take the total brunt of one another’s foibles and
weaknesses. The more people we must live with, the more readily
we will make ourselves agreeable to one another. Television is
much given to portraying dramatic clashes of persons on frontier
outposts, in wagon trains, and in like situations. This is nonsense.
People in such a context could not afford to quarrel easily with one
another; they needed one another too much. As a result, tension
and conflict over minor matters, while always present, was not as
freely indulged in. Those who have known people from the
pioneer era can witness to their far greater tolerance of foibles and
weaknesses; such people could speak candidly about the faults of
others with no intention of breaking with them or fighting readily
about matters of difference.
In a modern urban context, we have from thousands to millions
of people living around us. Being sinners, we thus know that we
have vast resources for fellowship and friendship. As a result, we
can quarrel with some and join ourselves to others very casually.
We develop a low tolerance as a consequence. People are
expendable as friends, because there are so many people around us.
The result, too, is a lowered ability to put up with the foibles of
relatives and family members.
The same problem besets the church. A man or woman who
troubles one church can move from one congregation to another
indefinitely and find a new area in which to exploit their foibles,
and the result is an undisciplined situation. The consequence is not
dominion but anarchy.
The wedding crown was once common to much of
Christendom.3 It was a symbol of the purpose of the Christian
family, to function as a particular area of dominion under God, the
key area in which children and property are held. If responsibility
and dominion wane in the family, they will wane in all society.
Technically, the doctrine of salvation means the sovereign act of
God’s redeeming grace. This act, however, does not occur in a
vacuum and cannot be held in abstraction from life. Man was
created to exercise dominion and to subdue the earth under God,
to develop the implications of creation in terms of God’s law.
Man’s salvation is his restoration to this calling. Where salvation is
present, there man awakens to his calling and works to fulfil it.
Salvation means God’s sovereign grace and regenerating power in
the life of man. The idea of impotent Christianity is a contradiction
of terms. The power of God in man’s life means his active kingship
in every area, and an immediate battle against the claims of the
Kingdom of Man. The family is the first area of that kingdom, and
the ceremonial crowning of the bride and groom was an expression
of that faith.
3.
Alma Oakes and Margot Hamilton Hill, Rural Costume, Its Origin and Develop-
ment in Western Europe and the British Isles (London: B. T. Batsford Ltd., 1970),
166f.
LXXI
Manners
A year before his death, Dostoyevsky, in a conversation with the

editor, Alexey Suvorin, raised a significant hypothetical question.
Supposing, he said, you were looking at pictures in Daziaro’s shop
window, and another man was also there, pretending to be looking
at pictures. Suddenly, an excited third person comes running and
says to the other man, “The Winter Palace will blow up soon! I’ve
just placed a bomb there!”
“What would you do?,” asked Dostoyevsky. You have accidently
heard of a conspiracy and the possible death of the tsar. Should you
run for the police, go to the Winter Palace to warn them, or do
nothing? “And what would I do?,” Dostoyevsky asked, and
answered, “nothing.”
But I keep asking myself why not? Surely it is a terrible thing!
There is going to be a terrible crime. Surely we should do
something! I was rolling cigarettes when you came, but all the
time I was thinking about this, and I thought of all the reasons
which would lead me to prevent the crime — weighty,
substantial reasons — and then I thought of all the reasons
why I would do nothing at all. And really, it is because doing
anything would be perfectly ridiculous! Why? Because I would
be afraid of being taken for an informer. Imagine! I am going
to the Winter Palace, they look at me, they question and
cross-examine me, and offer me a reward, or perhaps they
suspect I am an accomplice! It’s published in the newspapers:
“Dostoevski informed against the criminals.” How absurd! It
is a matter for the police. After all, they are paid to do these
things. The Liberals would never forgive me: they would drive
me to despair and worry me to death! Everything in this
country is abnormal; that is why these things happen, and no
one knows how to behave, nor only in the most difficult
circumstances, but in the very simplest.1
1.Robert Payne, “Dostoevski: The Last Days,” in New World Writing, vol. 14
(New York: New American Library, 1958), 235f.
611
The problem suggested by Dostoyevsky is an important one.
When the basic standards are in doubt, men hesitate to act in the
most obvious situations. They are paralyzed with doubts, and
immobilized by considerations, where, in times of clear-cut moral
standards, men act unquestioningly.
It has often been pointed out that revolutionary eras are also
reactionary eras; revolution is a major force for reaction. First of all,
the revolutionist, by denying the validity and value of all normal
and peaceable courses of action, throws society back into brute
force and coercion. Nothing is tolerated except revolution. In
other words, the problems of life have as their solution death.
When all law and order are denied in favor of revolution, it is
difficult then for revolution to reestablish precisely what it has
worked to destroy. The revolutionist finds the demand for law and
order counter-revolutionary.
Second, those who oppose revolution do so in steadily reactionary
terms when they are without faith. Being without principles, they
cling to the past as against the present. During the French
Revolution, it was not only Robespierre and his successors who
were reactionary, but the Monarchists as well. The revolutionists
had become a savage band of murderers, and the Reign of Terror
was their fitting memorial. The Monarchists, however, waged war,
not against the Revolution, but against France itself; by aligning
themselves with France’s great enemy, Britain, they betrayed
everything that the monarchy had stood for. Napoleon was thus
the only alternative: both the Revolution and the Monarchists were
discredited.
Third, because a revolutionary era is hostile to normal and
peaceable courses of action, it tends to stifle and to destroy growth
and progress, because every move towards amelioration, relief, and
improvement is damned as an enemy of revolution. To cite a minor
but revealing example, a revolutionary era stifles the development
of good manners and etiquette. For example, in pre-revolutionary
Europe, women’s dress was so full, and chairs were so heavy, that
it was necessary, as a practical matter, for a woman at table to be
helped with her chair; this was not only good manners but also a
necessary act. Similarly, in eighteenth century London, a gentleman
Manners 613
took the curbside of the walk, and the woman was thereby
protected from being splashed by the mud and filth churned up by
passing carriages. These and other illustrations can be cited to
show that etiquette rested on a very practical and necessary basis,
as good manners always must. To turn to Emily Post’s Etiquette
(1922) is to step back into a world closer to Louis XVI than to
Henry Ford.
Good manners are a form of reconstruction. The everyday
problems of life are met in terms of a desire to solve them with
grace and charity. A revolutionary temper is hostile to
reconstruction: its urge is to destroy, not to rebuild. As a result, in
a revolutionary era, etiquette tends to be frozen and archaic, an
echo of the past rather than a force for the present.
Let us examine briefly one or two areas where manners are in
need of reconstruction. A very prominent aspect of life in the
second half of the twentieth century is the working wife. This fact,
however, is governed by no rule of modern manners. It is useless
for a working wife, whose partial support of the family is a
necessary factor, to be helped with her chair if there is no
evaluation of her work in the house. Does she now have two jobs,
the work outside the home, and the work at home? What is the role
of the children, and what is the duty of the husband? It is assuredly
more than help with a chair. And then there is the fact that the
financial power gained by the working wife tends to make her
independent in her relationship towards her husband. What, in
terms of God’s standard, does her new power give her, and what
does it require of her? Could it not be the basis for a return to the
standards of Proverbs 31:10-31, with a renewed importance for the
wife, and also a stronger unity in marriage?
When St. Paul wrote, “evil communications corrupt good
manners” (1 Cor. 15:33), the word he used was ethos, ethical
conduct or morals. Moffatt rendered it “character.” Shore
commented on this sentence,
They (the Corinthians) had become tainted by the bad moral
atmosphere in which they lived and which was impregnated
with the teaching of that false philosophy, “Let us eat and
drink, for tomorrow we die.” “Be not deceived,” he adds
solemnly; it is a fact. “Evil communications corrupt good
manners.” This is a proverb, slightly modified in one word
from a line in the Thais of Menander. It is impossible to say
whether the Apostle was acquainted with the original line in
the poem, or not: for in any case he would probably have
quoted it in the form in which it was current among ordinary
people. The force of the proverb is, that even evil words are
dangerous. The constant repetition of an immoral maxim may
lead to immoral life. Words that seem harmless, because they
float lightly like thistle-down, may bear in them a seed of evil
which may take root and bring forth evil fruit.2
This is true enough, but it reduces St. Paul’s meaning to its
minimum. St. Paul had just quoted an ancient pagan proverb, “Let
us eat and drink, for tomorrow we die” (1 Cor. 15:32; cf. Isa. 22:13,
56:12; Luke 12:19). The Corinthians were too intimate with the
pagans around them who shared this faith, rather than faith in the
resurrection. St. Paul summoned them to “Awake to soberness
righteously, and sin not; for some are in ignorance of God: I speak
this to your shame” (1 Cor. 15:34, ARV). The “evil
communications” were with people, principles, and practices
which were a fruit of the denial of the resurrection. The “good
manners” or character required were a product and an outcome of
salvation through Jesus Christ, a belief in the resurrection of the
body, and daily “communications,” associations, or fellowship in a
realm of development of good manners. Good communications
strengthen, develop, and reconstruct good manners.
The doctrine of salvation thus has far-reaching implications; it
affects everyday mundane matters as well as weighty and eternal
concerns. If a man denies God and is a humanist, then his “ethos,”
character, or manners, in their every detail, is informed and
governed by a heedlessness for the future. “Let us eat and drink;
for tomorrow we die” (1 Cor. 15:32).
This is a revolutionary premise: it is a revolt against the future in
the name of the present. The revolutionist refuses to work
patiently for a future good which he may only partially see in his
2. Teighmouth Shore, “I Corinthians,” in C. J. Ellicott, editor, Commentary on the
Whole Bible, vol. VII ((Grand Rapids, Michigan: Zondervan, n.d.), 349.
Manners 615
own lifetime. What he cannot have now he despises and destroys.
The implicit premise of his actions is, “tomorrow we die.” Death
for him means also the futility of morality and hope: it means the
absurdity of life and manners. As a young student, for a time a
humanist and a revolutionary minded atheist, observed, “I was
deliberately rude and immoral; I figured if life was senseless enough
to make everything add up to nothing, then manners and morals
were nothing but lipstick and paint on a corpse.” The logic of
unbelief in salvation and the resurrection is a revolutionary act of
murder against the future, and against past and present. Our Lord
declared, “because I live, ye shall live also” (John 14:19). The
revolutionist says in effect to man and the world, “because I die,
you shall die also.” His gift to the world is death.
In contrast, the Biblical doctrine of salvation leads to a
reconstruction of every area of life. It gives scope and focus to
reason, and it gives foundation to manners and morals. The
doctrine of the resurrection makes a future-orientation inescapable
to true faith, because every act today has both temporal and eternal
consequences. Life is not absurd, but rich with meaning. St. Paul
made clear what characterizes men who are “stedfast” and
“unmoveable” with respect to salvation and the resurrection:
57. But thanks be to God, which giveth us the victory through
our Lord Jesus Christ.
58. Therefore, my beloved brethren, be ye stedfast,
unmoveable, always abounding in the work of the Lord,
forasmuch as ye know that your labour is not in vain in the
Lord. (1 Cor. 15:57-58)
LXXII
Reigning in Life
A London Sunday newspaper ran a questionnaire a few years ago

to check on religious belief among its readers. Readers were asked
if (a) they believed in heaven and hell, (b) in reincarnation, or (c)
did not know? The yes answers for reincarnation had a large lead
over those for heaven and hell. Except for the farming areas,
“hardly one in 20 attended religious services, even irregularly.” In
the U.S., where church attendance is as high as eleven in every
twenty, there is still a tendency to believe in what is most
convenient to believe. When an American reader of a book on
reincarnation was asked if there were any truth to it, he said, “‘Well,
I don’t know,’ but added, ‘I’d rather believe in it than nothing. Hell,
I don’t want just to die. I’d like to have a second chance.’”1
This comment is very indicative of a major factor in the modern
mentality. First, the man said that he did not know the truth of the
matter, but, in effect, he denied the relevancy of truth for a pragmatic
criterion. Some kind of belief he felt was necessary, particularly one
that got around the fact of death. Thus, reincarnation offered him
a good possibility, because it posited the continuation of life, and
it eliminated the possibility of hell. This consideration was no
doubt a major factor in the British preference for reincarnation.
Second, the decision is man-centered, not God-centered; it is
anthropology rather than soteriology. Salvation is not what God
ordains, but what man decides he needs. Such a perspective is
humanism, whether it chooses God or reincarnation, because the
main focus is on man. Third, the man stated, “I’d like to have a
second chance.” Every day of that man’s life was a second chance,
but he never saw it as such. I recall hearing of a man, who had only
recently died, of whom a relative said that, at thirty, he declared
that, if he were twenty again, he would do things differently. At
forty, he said that, if he were thirty, he would do things differently;
1.Robert Graves, “Reincarnation,” in Beyond Reason (Chicago: Playboy Press,
1973), 140f.
617
and at fifty years of age, he made the same comment about being
forty, and so on, until his death as a bumbler who muffed every
opportunity that came his way. When the man said, “I’d like to
have a second chance,” what he meant was that he preferred a
universe in which there was neither law nor judgment, but which
was always open to revision. There would then be no universe, only
brute and meaningless factuality.
Fourth, we must recognize that the man was at least honest. He
wanted to have priority with respect to salvation, another “chance”
to make use of it whenever he felt ready for it. He was like the
humorous old reprobate in Nevada who remarked, “Salvation
would make sense if a man could turn it on five minutes before
hell.” This attitude is precisely the mentality of hell, i.e., the
sovereignty and ultimacy of man.
The context of the Biblical doctrine of salvation is the Kingdom
of God and the sovereignty of God. God does not save man to
make man happy, but to restore man to his rightful place of service
under God. Men are comparable to runaway slaves who forsake a
good master to serve a bad one; their lord redeems them to restore
them to their rightful duties. If this image is not flattering to man,
it is because it is not intended to be: it is a necessary corrective to
the humanism which uses God to satisfy man’s problems and
ensure man’s happiness. It must be added that man, created in
God’s image, violates his being and nature when he forsakes God
and can therefore only be truly free and happy when he obeys God
and serves Him.
St. Paul, in Romans 5:17-21, sets forth the significance of man’s
calling:
17. For if by one man’s offence death reigned by one; much
more they which receive abundance of grace and of the gift of
righteousness shall reign in life by one, Jesus Christ.
18. Therefore as by the offence of one judgment came upon
all men to condemnation; even so by the righteousness of one
the free gift came upon all men unto justification of life.
19. For as by one man’s disobedience many were made sinners,
so by the obedience of one shall many be made righteous.
Reigning in Life 619
20. Moreover the law entered, that the offence might abound.
But where sin abounded, grace did much more abound:
21. That as sin hath reigned unto death, even so might grace
reign through righteousness unto eternal life by Jesus Christ
our Lord.
The emphasis here is not on the individual man. Paul’s
presupposition is that two humanities exist, and he only considers
us in relationship to these two, the humanity or race of Adam, and
the humanity or race born again in Jesus Christ. Our particular
individuality is not separable from our membership in these races.
All are born in Adam; many are born again in Jesus Christ. St. Paul
analyzes the life of these two humanities, and our life, in terms of
the two heads, Adam and Jesus Christ.
On the one hand, St. Paul declares, Adam fell from his calling,
and by his offense, death reigned. The consequence is
condemnation, the death penalty to all the sons of Adam. Thus, by
Adam, all are made sinners. The law, given through Moses, made
the offense of Adam all the more fearful. As Murray noted, “The
more explicit the revelation of law the more heinous and
aggravated are the violations of it.”2 The law is not only a statement
of what God forbids, but also, implicitly, a declaration of what man
must do. To declare, “Thou shalt not kill,” means that man must
regard all life as God-created and entirely subject to His law-word,
so that man must at all times see all life and death in conformity to
God’s word. The law thus made it clear how far-reaching man’s sin
is. Man from Adam on likes to say to himself, why should God
make such a fuss over my little sin? The law makes clear the extent
and nature of his sin. It makes it clear that by sin death reigns, so
that his sin is no longer a small thing, but a deadly blight destroying
man.
Christ, however, as the second Adam, by His grace and the free
gift of righteousness, enables man to “reign in life.” Christ gives
His redeemed ones “the justification which is unto life and issues
in life.”3 By His grace, “many” are made righteous. Therefore,
2. John Murray, The Epistle to the Romans, vol. I (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Eerd-
mans, 1959), 208.
3. Ibid., 202.
“grace reigns through righteousness unto eternal life by Jesus
Christ our Lord” (Rom. 5:21).
At this point again, Murray’s comment is telling:
The similarity of verse 21 to verse 17 is apparent; the
governing thought in both is the reign contemplated. But the
differences are worthy of note. In verse 17 it is the reign of
death, in verse 21 it is the reign of sin in death; in verse 17 the
recipients of the gift of grace reign in life, in verse 21 grace
reigns unto eternal life.4
Man was called to dominion (Gen. 1:26-28); he was called to
establish his reign over the world under God. By his fall, man
introduced the reign of death into the world; sin in him reigns unto
death, both in time and eternity, if he remains in the Fall. Christ,
however, by His grace and the gift of righteousness, enables man
to reign in life, i.e., in this life or world, and to “reign through
righteousness unto eternal life,” i.e., in the life to come. The Fall
means the reign of sin and death over man. Christ’s redemption
means man’s reign in time and in eternity. Very plainly, salvation
means reigning. The rebellious slave is established in kingship. We
are “more than conquerors” (Rom. 8:37) in Christ, because we are
also kings. We cannot understand the full meaning of salvation if
we separate it from the fact of reigning. Paul’s multiple use of the
word “reign” in Romans 5:17 and 21 makes clear the centrality of
reigning in the doctrine of redemption. To defer the fact of
reigning to the other world is a Manichaean separation of the world
into two alien realms, one (the material) surrendered to one god,
and the other (spiritual) reserved for the other god. The hostility of
many to the idea of victory in the material world is evidence of
Manichaean leanings. St. Paul is emphatic: we “reign in life.” The
Biblical doctrine of salvation requires it.
4. Ibid., 209.
Appendix
The Curse
Psalm 137 is regarded with some embarrassment by many

Christians. Thus, the Rev. Archdeacon Aglen echoed an earlier
judgment, declaring, “The psalm is beautiful as a poem — the
Christian must seek his inspiration elsewhere.”1 However,
according to 2 Timothy 3:16-17, “All Scripture is given by
inspiration of God, and is profitable for doctrine, for reproof, for
correction, for instruction in righteousness: That the man of God
may be perfect, thoroughly furnished unto all good works.”
Clearly, this psalm is given by inspiration of God, and it must be
profitable for instruction in righteousness. Let us first examine the
psalm, and then analyze its significance doctrinally, among other
things, for the doctrine of salvation.
1. By the rivers of Babylon, there we sat down, yea, we wept,
when we remembered Zion.
2. We hanged our harps upon the willows in the midst thereof.
3. For there they that carried us away captive, required of us a
song: and they that wasted us required of us mirth, saying, Sing
us one of the songs of Zion.
4. How shall we sing the LORD’s song in a strange land?
5. If I forget thee, O Jerusalem, let my right hand forget her
cunning.
6. If I do not remember thee, let my tongue cleave to the roof
of my mouth; if I prefer not Jerusalem above my chief joy.
7. Remember, O LORD, the children of Edom in the day of
Jerusalem: who said, Rase it, rase it, even to the foundation
thereof.
8. O daughter of Babylon, who art to be destroyed; happy shall
he be, that rewardeth thee as thou hast served us.
9. Happy shall he be, that taketh and dasheth thy little ones
against the stones.
Those who regard this psalm with horror, and the feelings of the
captives as ungodly, are themselves the ones whose morality needs
1.
The Rev. Archd. Aglen, “Psalms,” in C. J. Ellicott, editor, Commentary on the
Whole Bible, vol. IV (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Zondervan, n.d.), 284.
621
questioning. These captives had seen their homeland destroyed,
their temple and capitol city razed to the ground, their friends and
relatives killed, their wives and daughters raped, and, in the line of
march of captives being led to Babylon, newborn babies seized and
brained against the rocks as an impediment to the march. It
requires some kind of moral monster to say to these captives that
they should feel only loving thoughts towards their captors.
But let us first examine what the psalm reports, and then return
to its meaning. The waters or rivers of Babylon were more than the
Tigris and Euphrates rivers. In view of the desolation that is now
Babylon, and much of the Near East, it is difficult to imagine the
world of that day. Babylon was a beautifully irrigated land, a
network of canals flowing at all times, providing not only
year-round irrigation for the land but also a source of much beauty.
The tree-lined canals were a natural gathering place, and there the
displaced persons gathered to worship God. Their worship and
their music interested their captors, who listened to these services.
Purely on esthetic grounds, they found the “Lord’s song,” the
music of the psalms, appealing, and they required that these and
other Hebrew songs be sung for their amusement. This request
rubbed salt into the wounds of the captives. As Leupold observed,
The grief described is not the ordinary longing for the
homeland, a longing which displaced persons may always have
felt. It was rather occasioned by the fact that they remembered
Zion and all that that ancient capital stood for: the Temple, its
services, the remembrance of godly men that dwelt there, the
mighty deliverances that God had wrought, the dynasty of
David that had had its seat there, and the Holy City as the
object of sacred pilgrimages during high festivals. All these
facts would flood through the minds of captives and move
them to bitter tears, which we cannot help but believe were
frequently the tears of repentance.2
As they gathered by the waters, the psalmist reports, “We sat
down”; Taylor comments, “to sit on the ground was the posture of
mourners in the ancient East.”3 Overcome by grief as they tried to
1959), 935.
3. WilliamR. Taylor, “Psalms,” in Interpreter’s Bible, vol. IV (New York: Abing-
don Press, 1951), 704f.
The Curse 623
sing, they gave up, and “We hanged our harps upon the willow trees
in the midst thereof.” Their tears came as they “remembered
Zion,” but their grief was aggravated by the demand of their
captors that they resume their song to amuse the Babylonian
onlookers. Their tormentors required mirth; they wanted no tears
to indict them, but music to entertain them. The response is well
described by Taylor:
The thought of anyone singing the sacred songs to tickle the
ears of a godless people evokes from the psalmist a passionate
expression of his love for Jerusalem in the form of a curse on
himself should he ever fail in loyalty to her. Sardonically, he
offers a song with a string of curses (vss. 5-9) as a grim
substitute for the request of the foe. He lays a curse on hand
and tongue should they with lyre or song prove traitor to
Jerusalem, which is higher than my highest joy.4
The psalmist curses Edom, who in 587 B.C. had rejoiced over the
destruction of Jerusalem and the temple. In Obadiah 10-16, we
read not only of Edom’s joy at Jerusalem’s destruction, but also of
their entry into the war after Jerusalem’s fall, to cut off all who
escaped from the Babylonians. The judgment of God upon Edom
and “upon all the heathen” was this: “as thou hast done, it shall be
done unto thee: thy reward shall return upon thine own head”
(Obad. 15). This law is the other side of the Golden Rule; as men
do to others, so God shall do to them. What follows is in terms of
this: the Babylonians, like many peoples past and present, had
ruthlessly brained the babies of their enemies. Such horrors are
reported in 2 Kings 8:12, Isaiah 13:16, Nahum 3:10, Hosea 10:14
and 13:16. Homer reported similar murders in the Iliad, XXII, 63.
Braining babies and ripping open pregnant women was practiced
in Europe and the Near East into the twentieth century, against the
Jews in pogroms, and by the Turks against Armenians.5 Isaiah
13:16 is a prophecy that what Babylon has done will in God’s time
4. Taylor, The Interpreter’s Bible, vol. I, 706.
5. When this writer lived among and was a missionary to the American Indians,
an aged Shoshone neighbor and friend had seen her newly born daughter,
many years earlier, brained against a rock by her husband. The reason: three
daughters had been born in a row, and no sons. To change her luck, the imme-
diate sacrifice of the baby girl was mandatory. She believed that this was true;
after all, her next child was a son. J. O. was an unusually kindly, thoughtful, and
sensitive woman whom I can only remember with affection; the act was to her
a painful but necessary one because of the “spirits” and their requirements.
be done to her: “Their children also shall be dashed to pieces
before their eyes; their houses shall be spoiled, and their wives
ravished.” The psalmist recalls this prediction, made long before
Jerusalem’s fall, and now echoes it. God had predicted this. As
Leupold observed, “If a man takes such an attitude, is he more
cruel than the Lord?”6 The practice was brutal and wrong,
although no more so than the mass murder by bombing of civilian
populations in modern warfare. It is a moral law that God returns
to a people that which they have done, at the hands of others like
them; this is the declaration of Obadiah 15.
Taylor’s interpretation of this curse is modernistic, but he is right
in seeing that it was also true that “the operation of the curse was
entrusted to God as the sole source of power in all things.”7
Moreover, in this case, Taylor adds,
The curse takes a more ghastly turn as a blessing is invoked on
him who in implementing it perpetrates heinous acts of
vengeance and takes your little ones and dashes them against the rock,
wiping out the breed forever.8
Let us now examine the meaning of this, the heart of this psalm,
the curse. We fail to see the meaning of a curse if we do not recognize
that, whatever else may be said of it, it is first of all a form of prayer.
Most prayers are prayers of and for blessings: they ask for the care,
protection, and prospering hand of God. Prayers which ask for
judgment on evildoers are prayers which ask for God’s curse upon
all such peoples. Proverbs 3:33 tells us that “The curse of the
LORD is in the house of the wicked: but he blesseth the
inhabitation of the just.” God is always cursing the wicked and
blessing the righteous. In our prayers, we are to unite with Him in
our cry for justice as well as our hunger for His grace and mercy,
for ourselves and others.
There are certain things we cannot pray for: we are not to sit in
judgment on our parents, nor to curse them; they are to be judged
by God, never by us. “Whoso curseth his father or his mother, his
lamp shall be put out in obscure darkness” (Prov. 20:20). God will
6. Leupold, op. cit., 937.

7. Taylor, op. cit., IV, 703.
8. Ibid., 707.
The Curse 625
never fulfil or answer a causeless curse (Prov. 26:2). Hypocritical
and self-seeking blessings become a curse to those who proclaim
them (Prov. 27:14).
The doctrine of irresistible grace is basic to Scripture. “And all these
blessings shall come upon thee, and overtake thee, if thou shalt
hearken unto the voice of the LORD thy God” (Deut. 28:2).
Similarly, Scripture teaches us the doctrine of irresistible curses: “But it
shall come to pass, if thou wilt not hearken unto the voice of the
LORD thy God, to observe to do all his commandments and his
statutes which I command thee this day: that all these curses shall
come upon thee, and overtake thee” (Deut. 28:15).9
If we want only a world of blessings, we are morally wrong and
guilty. The world before the Fall was a world of blessings only, as
the world after the Second Coming will be. The world after the Fall
is a world under the curse, but “Christ hath redeemed us from the
curse of the law, being made a curse for us: for it is written, Cursed
is every one that hangeth on a tree: That the blessing of Abraham
might come on the Gentiles through Jesus Christ; that we might
receive the promise of the Spirit through faith” (Gal. 3:13-14). The
goal of the history of redemption is that there be “no more curse”
(Rev. 22:3). To ask for a curse-free world is to deny that we are
fallen and live in a fallen world.
Under certain circumstances, cursing is totally forbidden:
And he that curseth his father, or his mother, shall surely be
put to death. (Ex. 21:17)
And thou shalt speak unto the children of Israel, saying,
Whosoever curseth his God shall bear his sin. (Lev. 24:15)
17. As he loved cursing, so let it come unto him: as he
delighted not in blessing, so let it be far from him.
18. As he clothed himself with cursing like as with his
garment, so let it come into his bowels like water, and like oil
into his bones. (Ps. 109:17-18)
There is a generation, that curseth their father, and doth not
bless their mother. (Prov. 30:11)
9.See R. J. Rushdoony, The Institutes of Biblical Law (Nutley, New Jersey: Pres-
byterian and Reformed Publishing Company, 1972), 660-664.
Careless cursing and blessing are condemned (James 3:10); in
matters personal as against religiously governed, we are to return
blessings for curses (Matt. 5:44; Rom. 12:14).
Similarly, there are limits to prayers of blessing (John 17:9; 1 John
5:16; 2 John 10-11). Very briefly, prayers of blessing and cursing are
petitions to God which must be made in terms of the law-word of
God. Their purpose must be in terms of God’s plan of salvation
and sanctification, His triumph over His enemies and His purpose
for His people and the world. The prophet Isaiah had made clear
the nature and destiny of Babylon, and the psalmist prayed in terms
of that knowledge. Sin must be cursed, it must be judged, in order
for God’s blessing to flow. The vision of Revelation includes the
cursing and fall of Babylon the Great as the precondition to the
triumph of Christ (Rev. 18, 19).
It should be noted also that the psalmist does not declare that he
shall himself undertake to judge Babylon, or to kill her little ones.
He is fully aware that vengeance belongs to God, and he leaves it
there, recognizing that God’s law shall prevail. The unholy joy of
Babylon in destroying Judea and in murdering its suckling children
will be the joy also of the destroyers of Babylon. He recognizes that
this judgment is ordained by God: “O daughter of Babylon, who
art to be destroyed.” The principle of this judgment is not only given
by Obadiah but also by James 2:13: “For he shall have judgment
without mercy, that hath shewed no mercy; and mercy rejoiceth
(or, glorieth) against judgment,” i.e., mercy triumphs over
judgment, but judgment is total against the merciless. Some other
declarations of this principle of judgment include
Because thou hast spoiled many nations, all the remnant of the
people shall spoil thee; because of men’s blood, and for the
violence of the land, of the city, and of all that dwell therein.
(Habakkuk 2:8, spoken of Babylon)
Woe to thee that spoilest, and thou wast not spoiled; and
dealest treacherously, and they dealt not treacherously with
thee: when thou shalt cease to spoil, thou shalt be spoiled; and
when thou shalt make an end to deal treacherously, they shall
deal treacherously with thee. (Isa. 33:1)
The Curse 627
He that leadeth into captivity shall go into captivity: he that
killeth with the sword must be killed with the sword. Here is
the patience and the faith of the saints. (Rev. 13:10)
Call together the archers against Babylon: all ye that bend the
bow, camp against it round about; let none thereof escape:
recompense her according to her work; according to all that
she hath done, do unto her: for she hath been proud against
the LORD, against the Holy One of Israel. (Jer. 50:29)
For many nations and great kings shall serve themselves of
them also: and I will recompense them according to their own
deeds, and according to the works of their own hands. (Jer.
25:14)
Flee out of the midst of Babylon, and deliver every man his
soul: be not cut off in her iniquity; for this is the time of the
LORD’s vengeance; he will render unto her a recompense.
(Jer. 51:6)
And I will render unto Babylon and to all the inhabitants of
Chaldea all their evil that they have done in Zion in your sight,
saith the LORD. (Jer. 51:24)
Because the spoiler is come upon her, even upon Babylon and
her mighty men are taken, every one of their bows is broken:
for the LORD God of recompences shall surely requite. (Jer.
51:56)
One of God’s first steps in the restoration of man after the Fall was
to place his life, world, and work under the curse (Gen. 3:14-19).
The curse is judgment upon sin, and all sin must be judged and
condemned that man might be freed into the world of blessing.
Those for whom Christ did not accept the curse cannot escape the
curse. Those who shy away from any and all ideas of a curse also
shy away from the blessing of God.
The psalmist was faced with evil. In terms of the prophecies of
Isaiah and Jeremiah, Babylon was accursed. Had the psalmist not
assented to that curse, he would have shared it. Today, we must say
of every sin, that it requires God’s ordained judgment: murder
requires the death penalty, theft requires restitution, and so on. To
deny this is to place one’s life under the curse. To affirm God’s
judgment, and, in faith and obedience to serve the Lord, is to place
ourselves under God’s blessing.
Those who are unwilling to see anything accursed will see
nothing blessed. A generation unwilling to recognize that some are
reprobate will not know salvation either.
Scripture Index
Genesis 3:15-19 --- 45
1:1 --- 3 3:17-19 --- 132
1:2 --- 392 3:22 --- 493
1:13 --- 393 4:16-26 --- 473
1:26 --- 48 6:2 --- 277, 355
1:26, 28 --- 44 6:6 --- 396
1:26-28 --- 116, 604, 620 9:1-7 --- 292
1:28 --- 605 9:4 --- 96
1:31 --- 289, 291 9:5 --- 295
2:1-3 --- 116, 119 9:9-10 --- 291
2:2 --- 119 9:13 --- 291
2:2-3 --- 119 9:13-17 --- 291
2:3 --- 119 9:16 --- 291
2:5-6 --- 291 11:1-4 --- 282
2:7 --- 413, 451–452 12:1-3 --- 584
2:16-17 --- 280 12:2 --- 586
2:17 --- 73, 92, 246, 300, 13:14-17 --- 585
493 15:4-5 --- 585
2:18 --- 496 15:5 --- 526
2:21 --- 131 15:6 --- 526
3 --- 45, 278 16 --- 495
3:1 --- 74, 166, 291 17:1 --- 31, 103
3:1-5 --- 165, 291, 320 17:1-9 --- 585
3:4 --- 291, 300 17:6 --- 526
3:4-5 --- 166 17:19 --- 585
3:5 --- 29, 48, 74, 116, 170, 17:20-21 --- 586
192, 210, 220, 239, 246, 22:17-18 --- 586
279, 282, 291, 300, 318, 32:26 --- 574
329, 369, 438, 492 41:38-39 --- 451
3:6 --- 320 Exodus
3:8 --- 205 3:14 --- 31, 232, 237
3:12 --- 400 4:22 --- 355
3:14-15 --- 282 4:22-23 --- 358
3:14-19 --- 627 6:12, 30 --- 507
3:15 --- 51, 408 12:3-13 --- 23
629
15:1-19 --- 23 18:19 --- 497

15:2 --- 21 19:17-18 --- 515
16:18 --- 446–447 19:36 --- 520
19:5-6 --- 274 20:18 --- 497
19:8 --- 177 23:15 --- 563
20:3 --- 206 24:15 --- 625
20:4-6 --- 206 25:1-7 --- 176
20:7 --- 207 25:8-55 --- 325
20:12 --- 208 26:34-35 --- 176
20:13 --- 208 26:41 --- 507
20:14 --- 208 27:30 --- 511
20:15 --- 209 Numbers
20:16 --- 209 11 --- 198
20:17 --- 209 14 --- 198
21:17 --- 625 14:18 --- 518
22:1-15 --- 381 15:13 --- 91
23:18 --- 91 16 --- 198
28:36 --- 403 20-21 --- 198
28:36-38 --- 408 25:1-6 --- 198
28:43 --- 432 28:2 --- 91
29:12 --- 96 28:6 --- 91
29:15 --- 95 28:8 --- 91
29:19-21 --- 95 28:13 --- 91
29:43-46 --- 98 28:19 --- 91
32 --- 198 28:24 --- 91
32:7-10 --- 198 29:13 --- 91
32:14 --- 396 29:36 --- 91
32:28 --- 198 Deuteronomy
33:19 --- 512 2:14 --- 196
34:22 --- 563 3:35 --- 316
Leviticus 5:1-3 --- 195
1:3 --- 93, 95 5:3 --- 196
1:4 --- 93 5:32-33 --- 199
1:10 --- 93 7:6-7 --- 274
10:13 --- 91 10:16 --- 507
16:2 --- 432 11:24-25 --- 97
17:11 --- 93 12:23 --- 93
Scripture Index 631
13:8 --- 514 12:7 --- 484

16:10 --- 563 21:1, 2 --- 175
17:18-20 --- 519, 551 23:3 --- 520
19:13 --- 514 1 Kings
19:21 --- 514 1:50 --- 96
21:8 --- 518 2:28 --- 96
21:18-22 --- 515 4:24 --- 44
27 & 28 --- 477 8:41-43 --- 516
27, 28 --- 177 8:46 --- 378
28 --- 69 8:50 --- 378
28 & 29 --- 493 10:25 --- 66
28:1-4 --- 52 10:28-29 --- 66
28:2 --- 625 18:29 --- 91
28:15 --- 625 18:36 --- 91
29:13 --- 196 21:17-29 --- 514
29:29 --- 491–493 2 Kings
30:6 --- 507 8:12 --- 623
30:11-14 --- 491 9:18-19 --- 66
32 --- 420 18 & 19 --- 110
32:43 --- 518 18:1-8 --- 110
33:4 --- 520 18:16 --- 227
Joshua 19:35-37 --- 112
1:3-5 --- 97 24:17 --- 174
9 --- 175 25:8 --- 508
13:14 --- 91 1 Chronicles
Judges 1:1 --- 178
3:9 --- 21 3:15 --- 174
3:15 --- 21 2 Chronicles
15:14 --- 451 7:14 --- 90, 401
1 Samuel 30:20 --- 176
11:13 --- 21 36 --- 173
19:5 --- 21 36:11-21 --- 174
2:6 --- 356 36:15 --- 512
8:7 --- 519 36:22-23 --- 178
13:9 --- 520 Ezra
15 --- 520 9:4-5 --- 91
2 Samuel Nehemiah
9:27 --- 21 76:10 --- 569

9:28 --- 44 85:10-11 --- 536
Job 87 --- 516
1:6 --- 167 89:30-34 --- 359
1:6-12 --- 167 90:2 --- 31
1:8 --- 166 91 --- 241
1:9-11 --- 166 94:12 --- 359
2:1 --- 167 99:8 --- 316
2:4 --- 170 103:13 --- 359, 512
2:4-5 --- 167 109:17-18 --- 626
5:17 --- 359 110:1-7 --- 565
9:24 --- 547 115:3 --- 31, 35
9:28 --- 547 118:27 --- 91
9:30-31 --- 547 119:67 --- 359
9:30-35 --- 547 119:71 --- 359
9:32 --- 548 121:3-4 --- 119
9:33 --- 548–549 126:5- 6 --- 447
13:15 --- 166 126:5-6 --- 443, 448
Psalms 137 --- 621
1:4 --- 455 137:5-9 --- 623
2 --- 552 141:2 --- 91
8 --- 177 145:3 --- 31
9:17 --- 317 145:13 --- 601
18:40 --- 564 149 --- 52
20:5 --- 21 Proverbs
34:7 --- 359 3:33 --- 624
34:9-10 --- 359 5:5 --- 317
36:6 --- 522 7:27 --- 317
49:14 --- 44 8:36 --- 138, 212, 289
51:4 --- 363 9:18 --- 317
51:7 --- 547 10:12 --- 383
51:14 --- 521 12:10 --- 337
68:20 --- 21 16:33 --- 590
72:8 --- 534 16:4 --- 31–32, 590
72:9 --- 534 16:33 --- 31, 36
72:11 --- 534 19:15 --- 131, 138
72:12-13 --- 517 20:20 --- 625
Scripture Index 633
20:22 --- 241 40:28 --- 119

22:9 --- 448 42:1-4 --- 372
26:2 --- 625 42:4 --- 372
26:11 --- 537 43:10 --- 274
27:14 --- 625 43:13 --- 601
30:11 --- 626 43:20 --- 274
31:10-31 --- 604 43:21 --- 601
Ecclesiastes 44:1-2 --- 274
9 --- 241 45:6-7 --- 31, 590
11:1 --- 449 45:7 --- 520
12:14 --- 339 45:14-25 --- 32
Isaiah 45:21 --- 521, 535
1:10 --- 408 45:21-23 --- 32
1:17 --- 522 45:23 --- 97, 533, 535
2:4 --- 536 49:15 --- 512
2:12 --- 22 52:7 --- 520
2:22 --- 59 53:6 --- 367, 584
3:8 --- 316 53:11 --- 535
5:16 --- 522 54:4-8 --- 512
8:20 --- 506 54:10-17 --- 418
10:22 --- 522 56:12 --- 9, 614
11:9 --- 526 60:3 --- 570
12 --- 24 60:10-14 --- 85
13:16 --- 623 60:11 --- 87
22:4-7 --- 535 60:14 --- 87, 97
22:13 --- 9, 614 61:1-3 --- 372–373
28:7 - 31:9 --- 111 61:8 --- 22
28:16 --- 594 62:2 --- 358
29:1 --- 91 63:9 --- 512
30:1-7 --- 112 63:15-16 --- 512
33:1 --- 627 65:20 --- 543
35:1-6 --- 425 Jeremiah
36 & 37 --- 110 3:19 --- 358
37:1-5 --- 112 4:4 --- 507
37:6-7 --- 112 6:10 --- 507
38:17 --- 376 17:26 --- 91
40:17 --- 601 22:16 --- 522
23:4 --- 435 12:2 --- 544–545

23:5 --- 535 Hosea
25:1 --- 177 1-3 --- 512
25:9-12 --- 176 2:19 --- 512
25:11 --- 179 10:14 --- 623
25:12 --- 177 11 --- 512
25:14 --- 627 13:16 --- 623
29:10 --- 176 Joel
31:20 --- 512 1:15 --- 22
31:31 --- 22 2:1 --- 22
31:38-40 --- 405 2:28 --- 564
32:36-44 --- 417 2:28-32 --- 563
32:40 --- 359 Amos
33:11 --- 91 1:11 --- 515
33:15 --- 535
Obadiah
36:20-32 --- 142
10-16 --- 623
37 - 38 --- 142
15 --- 623–624
38:19 --- 142
41 --- 508 Micah
50:15 --- 316 4:3 --- 68
50:29 --- 627 5:9-13 --- 68
51:6 --- 627 7:19 --- 376
51:24 --- 627 Nahum
51:56 --- 627 1:2 --- 316
52:12 --- 508 3:10 --- 623
Ezekiel Habakkuk
17:11-21 --- 175 2:8 --- 626
17:15 --- 175 Zechariah
17:19 --- 175 2:1-5 --- 88
24:25 --- 316 3:1-5 --- 167
28:13 --- 85 7:9 --- 515
37 --- 399 7:9-10 --- 517
37:26 --- 520 9:9 --- 65
Daniel 9:9-10 --- 63, 534
4:34-36 --- 601 10:1-5 --- 164
4:35 --- 19 10:4 --- 33
4:37 --- 602 14:14 --- 87
Scripture Index 635
14:20-21 --- 403 10:7 --- 398

Malachi 10:8 --- 444
1:13-14 --- 93 10:28 --- 357
2:10 --- 354 10:29-30 --- 79, 113
3:6 --- 31, 35, 187 10:30 --- 357
Matthew 10:34 --- 285
1:1-2:23 --- 411 10:41-42 --- 80
1:16 --- 412 10:42 --- 79
1:20 --- 412 11:7-15 --- 573
1:21 --- 21 11:7-9 --- 574
3:1-6 --- 373 11:11-15 --- 573
3:7-12 --- 574 11:12 --- 573–574, 577
4:17 --- 570 11:20 --- 453
5:7 --- 511, 518 12:7 --- 518
5:17-18 --- 377 12:14-21 --- 372
5:17-19 --- 177, 197 12:36-37 --- 339
5:18 --- 519 13:24-30 --- 543
5:20 --- 519 13:42 --- 317
5:22 --- 519 13:54 --- 453
5:26 --- 519 14:2 --- 453
5:44 --- 626 14:30 --- 21
6:8-9 --- 357 15:6-9 --- 215
6:9 --- 576 15:9 --- 483
6:10 --- 577 15:11 --- 407
6:12 --- 323–324, 368, 372, 16:15-19 --- 419
382 16:17 --- 422
6:14-15 --- 382 16:18 --- 422
6:24 --- 484 17:1-8 --- 14
6:30-34 --- 359 17:4 --- 14
6:31-33 --- 357 17:5 --- 15
7:15-19 --- 55 18:1-5 --- 14
7:20 --- 55, 454 18:11 --- 21
7:21 --- 563 18:15-20 --- 456
8:22 --- 216 18:18 --- 381
8:25 --- 21 18:21 --- 369
9:13 --- 518 18:22 --- 178
9:21 --- 21 18:27 --- 518
19:28 --- 394 9:43-44 --- 317

20:4 --- 520 9:50 --- 285
20:28 --- 476, 552 10:27 --- 399
21:4-5 --- 63 10:45 --- 476
21:9 --- 69 11:2 --- 536
21:29 --- 395 11:22 --- 17–18
21:32 --- 395 11:25 --- 383
23:8 --- 15 15:12-14 --- 69
23:15 --- 317 Luke
23:23 --- 518, 520, 522, 1:26-2:20 --- 411
525, 527–528, 531–533 3:4 --- 397
23:23-24 --- 511 3:7-14 --- 395, 397
24 --- 79 3:7-9 --- 397
24:21 --- 70 3:8 --- 401
24:35 --- 78 3:16-17 --- 397
25:21 --- 339 3:38 --- 357–358, 412
25:37 --- 79 4:16-20 --- 373
25:40 --- 79, 445 4:21 --- 373
25:41 --- 317 6:5 --- 132
26:24 --- 552 8:36 --- 21
26:52 --- 52 9:28-36 --- 14
27:3 --- 395 9:31 --- 14
28:18 --- 80 9:46-49 --- 14
Mark 9:60 --- 216
1:3-5 --- 373 10:25-26 --- 516
1:14 --- 552 10:27 --- 516
1:15 --- 399 10:29 --- 516
2:3-12 --- 117 10:29-37 --- 515
2:5 --- 322, 364 10:37 --- 518
2:9 --- 322, 364 12:13-21 --- 387
2:27 --- 126 12:19 --- 614
3:29 --- 380 15:17 --- 396
6:2 --- 453 15:24 --- 216
6:12 --- 398 15:32 --- 216
9:2-8 --- 14 16:13 --- 484
9:6 --- 14 16:16-18 --- 577
9:33-37 --- 14 16:24 --- 400
Scripture Index 637
16:27-28 --- 400 3:8 --- 399

16:30 --- 400 3:14 --- 95
16:31 --- 401 3:16 --- 527
17:10 --- 92 3:18 --- 345
17:20-37 --- 529 4:7 --- 399
17:31-36 --- 529 5:1 --- 117
18:1-8 --- 527 5:9-10 --- 117
18:6-8 --- 530 5:16 --- 117
18:9 --- 371 5:17 --- 117, 119
18:10-14 --- 149–150 5:24 --- 346
18:14 --- 371 5:25 --- 216
19:10 --- 21 6:14-15 --- 594
19:14 --- 74–75 6:22-71 --- 594
19:41-44 --- 70 8:1-11 --- 381
19:42 --- 66 8:12 --- 508
21:27 --- 339 8:28 --- 95
22:25 --- 505 8:31-32 --- 229
22:29 --- 552 8:32 --- 219
23:21 --- 153 10:10 --- 71
23:28-31 --- 71 10:27-30 --- 552
23:34 --- 375 10:28-29 --- 418, 422
23:39-43 --- 80 11:50 --- 153
23:43 --- 85 12:28 --- 576
24:19 --- 453 12:32 --- 95
24:47 --- 570 12:34 --- 95
John 14:31 --- 95
1:3 --- 79, 118, 229 14:6 --- 148, 209, 228
1:9 --- 148 14:12 --- 452
1:12 --- 394 14:13 --- 335
1:12-13 --- 357, 413 14:17 --- 451
1:13 --- 332 14:19 --- 615
3:1 --- 389 15:4 --- 216
3:2 --- 391 15:7-8 --- 335
3:3-4 --- 392 15:16 --- 329, 334
3:5-8 --- 392 17:9 --- 626
3:6 --- 393 17:23 --- 357
3:7 --- 393 17:26 --- 357
18:36-37 --- 94 1:18-21 --- 58, 308, 355

19:11 --- 31 1:19- 20 --- 461
20:17 --- 357 2:2 --- 278
20:21-23 --- 452 2:5-6 --- 339
20:22-23 --- 455 2:12-16 --- 459–460
20:23 --- 381 2:16 --- 339
Acts 2:29 --- 2, 507
2 --- 564 3:9-10 --- 377
2:22-24 --- 567 3:10 --- 540
2:23 --- 31, 590 3:19 --- 377
2:32-35 --- 564 3:24 --- 476
2:36-39 --- 567 3:24-25 --- 324
2:40 --- 21 4:2 --- 213
3:1-4:30 --- 565 4:3 --- 349
3:19 --- 395, 570 4:6-8 --- 345
4:27-28 --- 31, 590 4:17 --- 17–18
6:7 --- 528 5:5 --- 55
15 --- 189 5:6-21 --- 24
15:7-11 --- 421 5:9 --- 21
15:10 --- 150 5:10 --- 24
15:18 --- 31, 113, 440, 590 5:11-13 --- 307
16:1-3 --- 507 5:12 --- 278
16:30 --- 527 5:14 --- 412
17:28-29 --- 354, 358 5:15 --- 412
17:31 --- 53 5:17 --- 620
19:21 --- 452 5:17-21 --- 618
20:21 --- 378 5:19 --- 324, 412
22:7 --- 414 5:21 --- 620
26:14 --- 414 5:45 --- 413
Romans 6:9 --- 67
1:3 --- 411 6:14 --- 67
1:5 --- 528 6:18 --- 398
1:8-21 --- 461 6:20-23 --- 247
1:14-15 --- 461 7 --- 17
1:16 --- 10, 461 7:10 --- 377
1:17-21 --- 492 7:15-25 --- 283
1:18 --- 5, 278, 476 7:17 --- 415
Scripture Index 639
8:17 --- 359 13:6 --- 417

8:1 --- 349, 372 13:11 --- 22
8:14-16 --- 357 13:16 --- 419
8:14-17 --- 54 14:10 --- 339
8:15 --- 192, 357–358 14:12 --- 339
8:16 --- 359 15:13 --- 324
8:17 --- 357 16:20 --- 51, 97, 408, 422
8:17-18 --- 357 1 Corinthians
8:18-28 --- 292 1:2 --- 409
8:19-22 --- 118 1:18-30 --- 283
8:19-23 --- 543 2:6-16 --- 283
8:21-22 --- 292 3:5-10 --- 432
8:23 --- 357 3:11-15 --- 432
8:26-27 --- 357 3:13 --- 550
8:28 --- 13, 132, 256 3:16-17 --- 431–432
8:29 --- 190, 357 3:17 --- 432
8:30 --- 590 5:3-5 --- 452
8:30-34 --- 345 5:5 --- 22
8:33-34 --- 418 6:2 --- 544
8:37 --- 620 6:11 --- 410
8:38-39 --- 418 6:19-20 --- 432–433
9 --- 39, 113, 590 7:14 --- 410
9:4 --- 358 7:34 --- 452
9:11, 13 --- 31 8:1 --- 106
9:15-16 --- 31 11:1-16 --- 604
9:18 --- 31 15:12-22 --- 542
9:22-23 --- 31 15:16-17 --- 544
9:23 --- 339 15:20 --- 544
9:31-33 --- 594 15:22 --- 412
9:32 --- 214 15:24-26 --- 312
9:33 --- 594 15:32 --- 9, 266, 354, 614
10:17 --- 370 15:33 --- 613
12:8 --- 518 15:34 --- 614
12:14 --- 626 15:42-58 --- 544
12:19 --- 316 15:45 --- 412
13:1-8 --- 487, 495 15:45-47 --- 544
13:3 --- 214 15:47 --- 412
15:57-58 --- 615 3:10 --- 214, 476

15:58 --- 40, 129, 132, 157, 3:11 --- 345
320, 334, 544 3:13 --- 367, 476–477
16:22 --- 283 3:13-14 --- 584, 625
2 Corinthians 3:14 --- 586
1:24 --- 505 3:26 --- 355, 357
2:13 --- 452 3:26, 28 --- 358
4:3-6 --- 283 4:1-7 --- 358
5:10 --- 339 4:3 --- 509
5:17 --- 394 4:4 --- 411
5:19 --- 346 4:4-6 --- 357
5:21 --- 367 4:6 --- 55, 358
6:14-18 --- 283 4:9-10 --- 507
6:18 --- 358 4:24 --- 509
7:10 --- 396, 398 5:1 --- 150, 509
8:1-9:15 --- 444 5:2-4 --- 509
8:8 --- 444–445 5:13 --- 487
8:9 --- 444–445 Ephesians
8:10-15 --- 444 1:4 --- 39, 329
8:13-15 --- 446–447 1:4-5 --- 357
8:14-15 --- 445 1:4-6 --- 590
9:6 --- 443 1:5 --- 352
9:6-11 --- 447 1:5-6 --- 31
9:8 --- 449 1:6 --- 583
10:3-5 --- 29 1:7 --- 476
10:3-6 --- 283 1:9 --- 39, 590
Galatians 1:11 --- 31, 39, 441, 590
1:4 --- 367 1:13-14 --- 359
2:1-5 --- 506 2:4-5 --- 460
2:1-9 --- 189 2:6-7 --- 9
2:3 --- 507 2:8-9 --- 213, 374, 460
2:3-5 --- 189 2:9 --- 214
2:4 --- 193 2:9, 10 --- 461
2:16 --- 193, 214, 345 2:13 --- 570
2:20 --- 367 3:8 --- 9
3:2 --- 214 4:22-24 --- 394
3:5 --- 214 4:28 --- 381
Scripture Index 641
5:1 --- 357 2:5 --- 551

5:14 --- 216 3:2 --- 446
5:24 --- 494 5:12 --- 53
6:5 --- 495 5:21 --- 590
6:10 --- 283 6:6 --- 449
6:18 --- 417 6:13 --- 94
Philippians 2 Timothy
1:6 --- 418 1:9 --- 329, 590
1:27 --- 452 3:16-17 --- 621
2:1 --- 518 4:3-4 --- 492
2:7 --- 411 4:18 --- 22
3:5 --- 507 Titus
4:2 --- 364 1:8 --- 446
4:4 --- 10 1:12 --- 354
4:9 --- 359 1:15 --- 556
Colossians 3:5 --- 394
1:14 --- 476 Hebrews
2:2 --- 53 1:14 --- 359
2:8-10 --- 228 2:17 --- 24
2:9 --- 367 4:9 --- 120
2:11 --- 507 4:15 --- 463
2:12 --- 18 6:1 --- 216–217
2:13-14 --- 95 6:11 --- 53
3:12-13 --- 518 6:12 --- 359
3:12-14 --- 106 6:17 --- 359
4:12 --- 55 7:1 --- 274
1 Thessalonians 7:1-3 --- 558
1:5 --- 53 7:3 --- 558
2 Thessalonians 7:5 --- 558
1:7- 8 --- 339 7:22 --- 551, 553
1:8 --- 316 8:6 --- 551, 553
2:2-6 --- 9 9:14 --- 216–217
2:13-14 --- 329 9:15 --- 476, 551, 553
3:6-1 --- 474 9:22 --- 94
1 Timothy 9:28 --- 22
1:17 --- 31 10:16-22 --- 374
2:2 --- 7 10:19, 23 --- 371
10:22 --- 53 2:13-19 --- 486

10:34 --- 518 2:16 --- 487–488
11:1 --- 53 2:17 --- 487
11:3 --- 373 2:18 --- 495
11:6 --- 137, 372, 532 2:24 --- 367
11:10 --- 181, 188 3:6 --- 495
11:13-16 --- 181 3:7 --- 338, 359
12:5-8 --- 357 4:8 --- 383
12:6 --- 359 4:9 --- 445
12:11 --- 477 4:17 --- 434
12:14 --- 285 2 Peter
12:22-29 --- 118 2:1-22 --- 538
12:24 --- 551, 553 2:4 --- 339
12:27 --- 68 2:14 --- 538
13:2 --- 446 2:17-22 --- 538
James 2:18-19 --- 538
1:17 --- 31, 35, 577 1 John
1:18 --- 394 1:8 --- 399
2:5 --- 359 1:8-2:2 --- 414
2:12 --- 527 3:1 --- 358
2:13 --- 626 2:20 --- 239
2:17-26 --- 459 3:1 --- 357
2:26 --- 218, 454 3:1-3 --- 394
3:10 --- 626 3:9 --- 414
3:17 --- 518 3:16 --- 414
4:12 --- 505 3:17 --- 518
1 Peter 4:1 --- 506
1:3 --- 415 4:17 --- 414
1:4 --- 357, 359 5:1-3 --- 394
1:5 --- 22 5:14 --- 357, 359
1:18-19 --- 433 5:14-16 --- 380
1:23 --- 394, 415 5:16 --- 626
2:8 --- 590 5:18 --- 415, 417
2:9 --- 275 2 John
2:9-10 --- 274 10-11 --- 626
2:13 --- 487, 496 Jude
2:13-17 --- 495 4 --- 215
Scripture Index 643
6 --- 339 19:16 --- 544

18 --- 215 21:1 - 22:6 --- 320
24-25 --- 41 21:4 --- 320
Revelation 21:5 --- 454
3:15 --- 435 21:7 --- 357
11:15 --- 416 21:12 --- 85
12:10 --- 22 21:24-27 --- 86
13:10 --- 627 22:1-3 --- 320
15:3 --- 24 22:3 --- 625
18 & 19 --- 626 22:5 --- 320
19 --- 320 22:14-15 --- 84
Index
Abou Ben Adhem, 513–514 Aristotle, 3446–47, 182, 223,
Academy of Athens, 146 289342–345, 347
Achtemeier, E. R., 511–512, Arius, 146
514, 522 Armenia, 507603–604
Adams, John, 44 Armes, W. D., 501
Adjustment, 243–245 Arminian revivalism, 332
Adoption, 338–340, 351–360 Arminians, Arminianism, 240,
Adultery, 202, 208, 279, 319, 332346–347, 465, 583,
381, 582 592594–595
Aelfric, 420 Armour, R., 136
Africa, Africans, 466 Arnold, Matthew, 256–257,
Agar, H., 207 595–596
Aglen, Rev. Archdeacon, 621 Ascetics, 279
Alexander the Great, 343 Aseity, 137
Alexander, J. A., 32, 86 Askew, Anne, 423
Alford, Henry, 367, 381 Asoka, 91
Allen, Gary, 293 Assurance, 53–61
Allen, Gina, 598–599 Atlantic Monthly, 222
Alvarez, A., 136 Atonement, 2493–95, 143476–
Amhara, 465 478, 550–551
Amillennialism, 556 Augustine, 183, 277, 536
Anarchism, 484–486 Augustus, 390–392
Angel, E., 235 Authorities, 485–487
Angra Mainyu, 4 Authority, 4345–49, 51483–
Antinomians, Antinomianism, 488, 491495–498
107, 199, 200, 205, 307,
409477–478, 514, Baber, R. E., 201
516520–521, 523581– Baillie, D. M., 427–431
583, 594 Baird, James, 387
Antithesis, 277–285, 493 Baker, H., 182
Arabian Nights, 290 Balfour, Arthur, 46
Arabs, 465–466 Ball, C. J., 174–176
Aratus, 354 Bancroft, 169
Arber, E., 423 Banks, J. S., 520
Archimedes, 237 Barclay, William, 21
645
Barlow, William, 580 Borgese, G. A., 207

Barry, A., 106 Bottomore, T. B., 315
Bart, P. B., 331 Braden, W., 155
Barth, Karl, 278, 332, 430 Breasted, J. H., 295
Barton, G. A., 296 Broadus, J. A., 396
Barzun, J., 168–169 Brock, W., 238
Baudelaire, C., 155 Brooks, V. W., 207
Bavinck, H., 552–553 Brown, Norman O., 153–154
Baylis, C. A., 225 Brown, W. Adams, 21
Beard, C. A., 255 Bruce, F. F., 355
Beckwith, C. A., 352 Bruce, Lenny, 183, 231
Behn, A., 143 Brunner, Emil, 288
Bela, 467 Brute factuality, 232–233, 235,
Bell, D., 469–470, 472–473 317
Bellamy, J., 361–366, 370–372, Brutus, 65
377 Buckle, 169
Beneficium, 43–44 Buddha, Buddhism, 1–2, 91–
Bennett, W. H., 518 92, 97, 114159–164,
Berdyaev, N., 288 222, 437
Beria, 310–311 Budge, E. A. Wallis, 3
Berkhof, L., 553 Buis, H., 313
Bestiality, 58 Bunyan, John, 496
Bettenson, H., 503 Bunzel, J. H., 204
"Big Bang (mental)", 234 Burnett, W., 155–157
Binswanger, L., 326 Bury, J. B., 255
Bishop, 145 Byron, Lord, 301–305, 321
Black, A., 133
Blackman, A. M., 211–12 Calendar, 120–122, 127–128
Blackman, E. C., 526 Calvin, John, 48, 87103–105,
Blake, W., 252 146, 179, 191, 217, 239,
Blanshard, B., 225 352, 439, 472, 493, 575,
Blessing, 477 594
Blood, 9193–97 Campus Crusade, 19
Bludso, Jim, 597–598 Carlson, C. C., 13
Blunt, J. H., 418–419 Carlyle, 169
Boardman, W. E., 16 Casartelli, L. C., 4
Boettner, L., 442 Causality, 109–118, 457–458
Index 647
Causes, secondary, 118 469

Cavafy, C., 299 Constantine, 485
Cavell, M., 210–211 Continuity, 429
Chamberlain, W. D., 395 Conversion, 579
Chance, 39–40, 109–110, 256– Conway, M. D., 517
257, 269271–272, 275 Conybeare, F. C., 605
Change, 181–188 Coptic Church, 507
Changelessness, 184, 187 Coronation, 603–604, 609
Charles II, 580 Cote, R., 278
Christian Liberty, 481–488 Council of Elvira, 381
Christianity Today, 412, 589, 596 Council of Trent, 352
Church, 204, 418–425 Covenant, 195–206, 277, 283,
Cicero, 64 291, 343, 348, 376, 514,
Circular reasoning, 262–264 522, 553585–586
Circumcision, 506–509 Creation Mandate, 45
Circumstance, 295, 304 Creationism, 4
City of God, 277 Crime, 186
City of Man, 204207–208, 218, Cubism, 126
277 Cultures, outlaw, 195–212
Clark, G. H., 254, 265341, 349, Curse, 367, 477621–628
359482–484 Custance, A. C., 109116–117
Cleanthes, 354 Cyclical view of history, 3, 539
Clinton, F., 561 Cynics, 113, 484
Cocchiara, G., 134 Cyrus, 177
Cochrane, C. N., 40
Cohn, N., 579 Darrach, B., 156
Common ground, 55–57 Darwin, C., Darwinism, 141,
Communism, 407, 447 185, 235272–273, 288–
Comte, 38, 277 289
Conflict of interests, 287–293 Darwin, F., 272
Conquest, 422, 580 Davids, C. A. F. Rhys, 91, 159
Conscience, 321, 324481–488 Davidson, F., 168
Conscience, liberty of, 481– Davis, C. Truman, 71
482, 484501–509 Daysman, 547–553
Conservatives, Conservatism, Deane, W. J., 131
88541–542 Death, 135295–305, 307–312
Conspicuous consumption, Decatur, S., 101
Declaration of Independence, Douglas, J. D., 521548

44 Drugs, 155
Degradation, 165–171 Dualism, 278–279, 460
Deism, 118 Duclos, J., 145
Delitzsch, F., 23, 119, 492 Dummelow, J. R., 444
Democracy, 207–208 Dunleavy, I., 58
Depravity, total, 33 Durkheim, E., 186
Descartes, R., 238
Destiny, 274 East Germany, 89
Determinism, 41269–274, Ebin, D., 155
437–438 Ecology movement, 126, 245,
Deus ex machina, 1–3, 42 407
Deviation, 185 Eddy, Mary Baker, 113, 222
Devil, 242–247, 258 Edersheim, A., 508
Dewey, John, 57, 146, 226229 Edwards, Douglas, 411–412
Dialecticalism, 113, 289, 437, Edwards, Jonathan, 249
460 Effectual Calling, 329–335, 341
Diehl. D., 540 Egypt, 2–3, 11–14
Dietrich, J. H., 242–245 Eighth commandment, 209
Dionysus, 26–27 Eliade, M., 134
Discipline, 580 Eliot, C. W., 267
Disintegration, 90 Elizabeth I, 498
Divine right, 496–498 Ellenberger, H. F., 235
Dogs, 538 Ellicott, C. J., 119, 335, 403,
Dominion, 43–52, 66–67, 116, 433, 574, 577
120123, 131–132, 372, Ellison, H. L., 110–112
407, 415, 417, 422, Ellul, J., 385
424470–474, 538552, Elwin, Malcolm, 321
603–609, 620 Empson, William, 299
Domitian, 411 Engels, F., 202, 288
Donizetti, 233 Enlightenment, 59, 123, 249,
Donne, John, 247 277
Dooyeweerd, H., 113, 290 Environmentalism, 407
Dorner, A., 269–270 Epimenides, 354
Dostoyevsky, 27, 37159–160, Epistemology, 224, 280, 281
194, 305, 314, 478611– Equilibrium, 77
612 Escapism, 1–2, 9
Index 649
Ethiopia, 465 First commandment, 206

Etzler, J. A., 139 Fischoff, E., 205
Eudaemonism, 270 Fitts, D., 312
Evangelism, 567–570 Flower children, 299
Evil, 241–248, 278–280, 282 Foote, S., 311
Evolution, 185–187, 289–293 Forcefulness (holy violence),
Excommunication, 456 573–577
Existentialism, 27–28, 32–33, Ford, Henry, 471–472
36–37, 41, 59, 75, 205, Foreknowledge, 190–191
224238–240, 278, Forgiven, the, 369–374
318355–357 Forgiveness, 161321–327,
375–383
Facts, 118, 219, 224, 228231– Forgiver, the, 361–368
240, 262–264 Fort, Charles, 259, 261
Factuality, brute, 110232–233, Fortune, 457
235, 317 fourth, 208
Fairbairn, P., 358 Fourth commandment, 208
Fairchild, H. P., 49, 201203– Fowles, John, 589–596
205 Frankl, V. E., 273
Faith, 53–54, 58–60, 359369– Franklin, B., 221
374, 385–386, 388393– Freedom, 114, 136190–194,
394, 399, 525–532 236, 308, 356, 373, 389,
Fall, 45, 70, 182184, 187–188 430, 442, 484486–488,
Family (and familialism), 201– 503
205, 208, 351, 353603– Freeman, Kathleen, 34
609 French Revolution, 120, 612
Family of man, 208, 282, 607 Freud, Martha, 326
Fascism, 287 Freud, S., 153, 253322–326,
Fate, fatalism, 265–266, 269– 364, 472
275, 457
Feibleman, J. K., 231, 242, 271 Gabor, D., 59
Ferries, G., 22 Gardiner, F., 175
Fersen, S. von, 235 Gardner, M., 595
Feudalism, 44 Gates of hell, 421
Fiedler, L. A., 299 Gauguin, Paul, 387
Fifth commandment, 208 Gay, Peter, 249, 278
Finkelstein, L., 150–151 Geden, A. S., 4
Geldenhuys, N., 531 Gutman, W. K., 100–101

Generation gap, 290
Genet, J., 252254 Hadas, M., 457, 463, 478
Genghis Khan, 234 Harada, T., 295
George III, 44 Hardy, Thomas, 378–379
Gibbon, 169 Harmony, 161
Gilot, F., 388 Harmony of interests, 287–293
Ginsberg, Allen, 556 Harrelson, W. J., 519
Ginsburg, C. D., 93 Harrington, Allan, 234
Giving, 444–449 Hart, J. S., 393
Glass of Fashion, 141 Harvard, 219, 222, 267
Gnostics, Gnosticism, 106, Hastings, James, 21–22, 159,
252, 463 295, 399, 465, 517, 520,
God 527
definition of, 31, 232 Hate, 149–157
only true existentialist, 31 Hay, J. M., 597–598
Goldwater, Barry, 149 Hazlitt, William, 300–301
Good works, 213–214, 217– Heavenor, E. S. P., 167–168
218 Hegel, F., 169277–278, 289
Good, E. M., 520 Heidegger, 236
Goodness, 150152 Heine, 362
Gordon, A. D., 472 Helen of Troy, 1, 3
Gornick, V., 330 Hell, 206, 209313–320, 401,
Gosse, E. W., 296 406, 424
Graham, W., 272 Hemingway, E., 389
Graves, R., 617 Hendriksen, W., 455–456
Gray, Thomas, 296 Hengstenberg, E. W., 403–405
Greece (Greeks), 182–184, Henley, 438
187223–224, 289, 342, Henry, C. F. H., 395, 409
344, 385, 389, 474, 485 Heraclitus, 34
Greig, I., 144 Herbert, G., 309
Grote, 169 Higgins, G. V., 540
Grotjahn, Martin, 322, 326 Hilarity, principle of, 443–449
Grunfeld, F. V., 233 Hill, M. H., 609
Guardini, R., 260, 264 Hinduism, 4, 97, 437
Guilt, 133321–325 Historicism, 135
Guterman, S. L., 501–502 History, 259–260, 263
Index 651
Hitler, 255308 Hume, David, 222, 498

Hodge, A. A., 334344–345, Hunt, J. H. L., 513
347–348, 359, 440 Huntford, R., 152
Hodge, C., 24, 29, 51, 190, 213, Huntington Library Quarterly, 138
307, 433445–446, 461, Husbands, 494–497
494 Hutchinson, G. P., 543
Hoeksema, H., 555–556 Huxley, A., 126, 151, 155
Holderlin, F., 233
Hollander, X., 58 Idea, 31
Holmes, O. W., 219–222, 248 Idleness and Revolution, 131–
Holter, P., 75 138
Holy Spirit, 451–456 Idolatry, 496
Holy, holiness, 403–410 Iliad, 1, 623
Homer, 1 Ilico, (N. Micklem), 362
Homosexual, Homosexuality, Image of God, 69, 125, 190
58, 75, 141, 169, 202 Imprecatory prayer, 621–628
Hooper, Bishop, 423 Incarnation and Indwelling,
Hoopes, N. E., 356 411–415, 427–435
Horace, 81–83, 88, 90 Incest, 58, 279
Horizon, 233 Indefectibility, 418–419, 425
Hospitality, 445–448 Indians, 106, 624
How, W. W., 422 Industrial Revolution, 123–124
Howard, J. K., 451, 454 Inerrancy, 418–419
Hughes, H. P., 246 Infallibility, 418–419
Hugo, V., 233 Ingersoll, 242
Hulse, E., 529–530 Injustice collector, 321
Humanism, 55, 5764–65, 67, Innocence, 143–144, 337
78, 83, 99101–102, 106, Insanity, 233, 318, 502
133, 143, 149155–156, Insurance, 11–13, 16, 19
163, 202–205, 218, 234, Intellect as Savior, 141–147
244, 253, 260, 275, 290, Ionesco, E., 386
300, 305, 337, 362, 375, Irrationalism, 473
378, 380, 512, 516, Islam, 2, 5
539541–542, 561–566, Isolation, 133, 138
583, 592–595, 597– Iverach, James, 45–47
602, 617–618
Humanity, 425, 619 JAMA, 322
Jesus Movement, 19 Kerr, Clark, 223

Jewish-Roman War, 70 Kevan, E. F., 168
Joachim de Flore, 208, 277, 541 Keynes, J. M., 267
Joachim, H. H., 225 Kierkegaard, S., 235
Job, 166–168, 170547–550, Kik, J. M., 529
553 King, 551
John Birch Society, 293 Kingdom of God, 14, 54,
John of Segovia, 133 7186–88, 94, 107, 137,
Johnson, L. B., 99 177, 182, 218, 284, 317,
Johnson, P. A., 42 320, 338, 353, 360, 366,
Johnson, S. E., 80, 351574–576 373, 391, 395397–399,
Jones, P. B., 165 403–407, 421, 447, 478,
Jorgenson, D. A., 589–596 487, 518, 526533–536,
Journal of the American Scientific 540, 544552, 559569–
Affilliation, 451 570, 573–577, 609, 618
Jubilee, 119324–327, 372–373, Kingship, 519–520
382–383 Kinsey Reports, 231
Judaizers, 189506–508, 509 Kinsey, A., 231, 598
Judgment, Justice, 21–29, 173– Klausner, J., 150–151
179, 313–314, 533–535 Klossowski, Pierre, 170
Julius Caesar, 65 Knight, E. W., 28, 38
Justice, 475–479 Knowledge, 260–264
Justice and Mercy, 519–523 Knox, John, 423–424
Justification, 189, 193337–349, Kohn, H., 207
409, 459, 463583–587 Koran, 4
Justinian, 146 Krishna, 222
Kristol, I., 472
Kabalists, 76 Kritzmann, Paul E., 2
Kant, E., 223 Krutch, J. W., 356
Karamazov, I., 159–161 Kwan-yin, 516
Karma, 114–115, 136, 374, 437
Keeton, M. T., 115 L. A. Free Press, 293
Keil, C. F., 23, 119, 492 Lactantius, 396
Keimer, Mary, 314–315 Lacy, John, 315
Keimer, Samuel, 314 Laing, R. D., 234
Kennedy, J. F., 100145 Lake, C., 388
Kennedy, R. F., 101 Lamont, W. M., 579
Index 653
Lampert, 428 Lie, 25

Lange, J. P., 178195–196 Life, 470
Lassale, 288 Lindsay, Hal, 13
Laughton, William, 357 Lipman, M., 590
Law, 44–47, 49–52, 68–70, 85– Liszt, F., 156
87, 90, 92, 94, 101, 105, Logic, 259261–262, 266457–
107, 182186–188, 250, 458, 463–464, 484
254289–290, 292, 312, Lord’s Prayer, 323, 327576–
351, 363364–367, 388– 577
389, 391–393, 435, Los Angeles Herald-Examiner,
459460–463, 468–469, 145, 234
476–478, 491–493, Los Angeles Times, 540
503, 506508–509, 519– Louis XIV, 315, 580
520, 522525–528, Love, 149–157
532540–541, 544555– Lowe, W. H., 403
557, 559563–564, 618– Lubberland, 138
619 Luck, 458
Lawlessness, 540 Luther, M., 472
Leathes, S., 550 Lyte, H. F., 187
Lechler, Gothhard, 44
Lee, F. N., 83, 124 M’Clintock, John, 353, 581
Leeuw, G. Van Der, 449, 465 Machen, J. G., 393, 525
Lehan, 37 Machine, 124–129, 139
Lehan, Richard, 37 Machinery as Messiah, 471
Leisure, 132–133 Maddocks, M., 234
Lenau, N., 233 Madness, 233–235
Lenin, 121, 407 Mailer, N., 252
Lenski, R. C. H., 5, 78, 189, Mair, A. W., 295
274, 334, 355367, 397, Malraux, A., 28, 38
574 Man, manipulated, 589–596
Leupold, H. C., 44, 51, 66, 119, Manichaeans, Manichaeanism,
363, 408, 517535–536, 246, 279, 289, 463,
565, 601622–624 576620
Levi, E., 76–78 Mann, T., 207
Levin, Harry, 138 Manners, 611–615
Lewis, C. S., 318 Manson, Charles, 211
Liberty, 481–488 Mantey, J. R., 395, 399
Margoliouth, G., 295 Michelangelo, 590–591

Marriage, 100603–609 Michelet, 169
Martin, C. G., 598–599 Micklem, N., 93–94, 97, 515
Martin, Malachi, 561–562 Millay, Edna St. Vincent, 99
Marx, Marxism, 42, 65, 81, 83, Millenarianism, 579
89120–122, 124, 135, Miller, A. R., 125
145, 208, 278287–288, Miller, Henry, 134153–155
293, 315, 425, 438470– Millett, Kate, 330
472, 473, 539595 Milman, 169
Masaryk, T. G., 296–300 Milton, John, 318
Masochism, 337 Mises, L. von, 287–288
Mason, A. J., 488 Moffatt, James, 51, 215217–
Massey, W. A., 209–210 218, 229, 239, 497, 508,
Matter, 182–183 613
Maugham, R., 468 Mohammed, (Islam), 2–4, 290,
Maurras, C., 541 437
May, Rollo, 235–238 Molinos, 581
Mazda, Mazdaism, 4 Molnar, T., 539, 541
Mazzolani, L. S., 82 Monism, 183
McCarthy, J., 149 Montez, Lola, 156
McConkey, James H., 16 Moore, C. A., 143
McHale, J., 59 Moore, J. N., 288
Meaning, Meaninglessness, Moore, R., 58
2828, 38–41, 6175–80, Moore, T. V., 68, 164409–410,
109116–118, 232–233, 535–536
238, 253254–261, Moran, B. K., 330
263266, 273–275, 297– Moravians, 581
299, 313–314, 318, More, Thomas, 501
319324–326, 348386, Morgan, E. S., 469
465472–473 Morgan, G. C., 420
Means, S., 371 Morgan. W., 399
Mediator, 547550–553 Morris, L., 526
Mehring, W., 478 Mueller, T., 352
Menander, 354 Mukti, 4
Menelaos, 1 Mumford, L., 207
Mental Health, 152 Munro, H. H., 309
Mercy, 511–518 Murray, John, 409, 461,
Index 655
475619–620
Murray, Margaret A., 3 O’Callaghan, S., 465–466
Musset, Alfred de, 233 O’Connor, P., 157
Myers, R. M., 446 Oakes, A., 609
Mystery religions, 6 Obedience, Christian, 487–
488, 491–499
Naegele, K. D., 186 Obligations, 202
Napoleon, 612 Occultism, 75–76, 77
Nature, natural law, 47–48, 76, Octavian, 64
143242–245, 427–430, Odajnyk, W., 28
438598–599 Oenone, 3
Nature-grace, 289427–430 Ofari, E., 293
Nazis, 287 Oliver, R. P., 540–541
Neale, Robert, 210 Olmsted, F. L., 570
Nebuchadnezzar, 601–602 Omnipotence, 76–77
Necessity, 269–270, 272, 274 Oroonoko, 143
Neoplatonism, 457, 463, 571 Orton, W. A., 438
Nepal, 161 Osiris, 3
Nero, 478 Otto, R., 574
Nerval, G. de, 233 Ownership, 43, 4548–51
Nesselroad, J. R., 199–201
New York Times, 561 Paganism, 64141–142
Newsweek, 406 Palm Sunday, 533
Newton, Sir Isaac, 259, 278 Parable
Nicodemus, 389–393 Good Samaritan, 515–516
Nicol, 55 Pharisee and the Publican,
Niebuhr, Reinhold, 207 149–151
Nietzsche, 25–28, 219, 226, Unrighteous Judge, 527–
233, 237, 252, 278, 542 532
Nihilism, 27 Paradise, 81–90, 134136–139,
Ninth commandment, 209 318319–320, 387
Nirvana, 2, 92, 162 Pardon, 347
Nixon, R., 101, 149 Paris, 1, 3
Nodier, Charles, 233 Parker, J. W., 2
Normality of crime, 186 Parkinson, T., 557
Nothingness, 135, 263, 266 Parmenides, 34–35, 183
Novels, 589 Parrott, T. M., 266
Parsons, T., 186 Police, 406

Payne, J. B., 521 Pontiac, MI, 199
Payne, R., 611 Pope John XXIII, 561, 566
Peace, 25–28 Pope Paul VI, 561
Pelagius (Pelagianism), 16–18 Pope Pius XI, 288
Penance, 396 Pope, Alexander, 183
Pentecost, 451561–566 Pornography, 388–389
Penthouse, 101–102, 105 Possibility, 192
Perfection, 99–107, 410 Post, E., 613
Perkins, William, 485 Postmillennialism, 422, 539,
Permanence, 182, 187 559, 604
Perseverance, 417–425 Poussin, L., 114
Persia, 83 Power, 251–252, 356
Pessimism, 4, 9, 159 Pragmatism, 226, 229, 349
Pfister, Oskar, 322 Prairie Belle, 597
Pflaum, J. H., 136 Predestination, 40, 5964–66,
Pharisee, Phariseeism, 149– 79113, 125–126, 190–
153, 214–215, 217389– 191, 250, 263, 265, 274,
392, 397, 483, 511 430437–442
Philo, 501 Premillennialism, 579
Picasso, P., 388 Present Truth, 583
Pierson, A. T., 16–18 Presuppositionalism, 142,
Pietism, 16–18, 123, 129, 401, 240261–263, 292
422, 424 Priest, priesthood, 274550–
Piety, 15–16 552, 555–559
Piper, Otto, 12 Primitivism, 143–144, 387–388
Pitts, J. R., 186 Pritchard, J. B., 112
Plagues, 22 Probability, 115271–274
Plato, 47, 113, 223, 344 Procrustes, 65
Play, 210 Progress, 28249–257, 537
Playboy, 83, 183, 231, 342 Property, 48–50, 446–447
Pliny, 502 Prophet, 551
Plotinus, 183 Prophet, Priest, King, 555–559
Plummer, A., 531 Propitiation, 475
Plumptre, E. H., 32, 87, 178, Proscription, 503
445 Prostitution, 58, 75329–330,
Polanyi, M., 600 466
Index 657
Providence, 249–257, 259– 559, 567, 582614–615

267, 438–440 Revivalism, 332, 401, 582
Psychopaths, 234 Revolution, 131–137, 184–188,
Publican, 149–151, 398 205, 212, 298, 385612–
Puritans, 123, 206, 313, 613, 614
438468–469, 482, 485, Reward, 447
497, 543 Ridenour, R., 293
Ridley, Jasper, 423
Quanbeck, W. A., 376, 380399 Righteousness, 519–522
Quietism, 580–581 Rights, 202
Rizzo, F., 406
Ramsay, Sir W.M., 6–7, 9–10 Roach, Richard, 314–315
Randolph, T., 514 Robertson, W., 541
Ransom, 476 Robespierre, 612
Rapture, 13 Robinson, W. C., 412
Ratner, J., 146 Rock, 420–421
Rawlinson, George, 96 Roepke, W., 267
Reality, return to, 457–464 Rolling Stone, 211
Reconciliation, 476, 552 Roman imperial theology, 411
Reconstruction, 417, 435613– Romantic Movement, 156,
615 246, 301, 606
Redemption, 476, 525 Rome, 295, 351, 385, 389, 470,
Reese, C. W., 599–600 485501–503
Regeneration, 385–394, 452 Rookmaaker, H. R., 126
Reik, T., 75 Roosevelt, F. D., 100, 287308
Reincarnation, 314, 617 Rose, H. J., 295
Relativism, 229, 583 Rosenheim, R., 146, 161
Repentance, 395–401, 570 Rosenstock-Huessy, E., 121–
Responsibility, 561–566 122, 127–129
Restitution, 70366, 375–376, Ross, 414
381, 383, 396, 401, Ross, A., 414–415
455520–523, 525–526, Ross, I., 156
530 Rousseau, 81, 155, 159, 163,
Restoration, 366, 367, 375, 377, 185, 598
381, 382, 417521–523, Roy, D., 469
552 Rubinoff, L., 250–254
Resurrection, 537–544, 557, Rule, godly, 579–587
Runes, D. D., 225, 231, 235, Satan, 246–247, 278–279, 281–

242, 271 283
Rushdoony, R. J., 35, 40, 49, Saturday Review, 210
50, 59, 75, 205, 228, Savage, 134
322, 337, 386, 434, 497, Saviors, political, 63–71
529, 625 Schilder, K, 375533–534, 536
Rushdoony, Y. K., 604 Schmitz, H., 293
Russell, J. B., 504 School, 205
Russia, 120–122 Schopenhauer, 273
Schroeder, F. W. J., 195
Sabbath Year, 373 Schuhmann, R., 233
Sabbath, Sabbaths, 119–129, Scott, Thomas, 84, 196, 213
132–134, 138150–151, Seaman, L. C., 184–185
154–157, 176 Seaver, R., 170
Sacrament, 427–434 Second blessing, 16
Sacred and Profane, 404–407 Second commandment, 206
Sacrifice, 91–98 Second Law of
Sade, 60 Thermodynamics, 543
Sade, Marquis de, 60, 170, 407, Secret things, 492–493, 497
504, 600 Security, eternal, 552
Saint Simon, 147 Self-righteousness, 170
Salmon, S. D. F., 84 Sell, Edward, 4
Salvation, 1–10 Seneca, 458
as insurance, 11–13 Sennacherib, 111–112, 116,
in the Old Testament, 21– 118
25 Serfdom, 7
pagan, 4–7 Seventh Commandment, 208
perfectionism, 99 Sex, 201279, 389
Salvemini, G., 207 Shackleton, 468
San Gabriel Valley Tribune, 200 Shakespeare, 512
Sanctification, 96403–410 Shaw, Robert, 36, 346, 348,
Sand, George, 538 441, 505
Sanday, W., 191–192, 509 Shelley, P. B., 185
Sartre, J. P., 27, 3336–40, Shils, Edward, 186
58114–115, 233, Shmidman, J. H., 530
319438–439, 593, 595 Shore, T. T., 613
Sassoon, S., 562 Siegel, Rabbi Martin, 73–74
Index 659
Simpson, A. B., 16 Stanton, V. H., 227

Sin (defined), 246–248, 280 Start, J. W., 406
Sixth commandment, 208 State, 46–48, 50203–206, 482–
Skinner, B. F., 41–42, 147, 252 488, 501–506, 509, 605,
Slavery, 189–190, 192–194 607
Smeaton, G., 528 Stauffer, E., 66, 390
Smith, D., 415 Steichen, E., 208
Smith, Hannah Whittall, 16–18 Stent, G., 255, 257
Smith, Jack, 356 Sterne, Laurence, 309
Smith, R. P., 103, 586 Stibbs, A. M., 168
Social Darwinism, 288 Stirner, Max, 170, 278
Socialism, 64–65, 88–89, 126, Stoicism, 449
146, 454 Storrs, E., 313
Socinians, 347 Strong, James, 353, 581
Sociology, 186 Suetonius, 411
Socrates, 141, 239, 484 Suicide, 267295–305
Sodomy, 58 Sunday neurosis, 273
Sollier, J. F., 351 Surinam, 143
Song of Moses, 23 Suvorin, A., 611
Sontag, S., 356–357 Sweden, 151–152
Soref, H., 144 Sword and Trowel, 496
Sorrow, 396, 398401 Synthesis, 277–278, 282–283
South Africa, 149
Sovereignty (of God), 31–42, Tacitus, 478
192–193, 206, 419, 505, Tahiti, 387
583, 587 Talmon, J. L., 148
Sovereignty of man, 19 Tardini, Cardinal, 561
Soviet Union, 470 Taylor, F. W., 470
Spencer, D., 550 Taylor, W. R., 622–624
Spengler, 541 Taylor-Taswell, S. T., 131
Spinoza, 437 Temple of God, 431–432
Srimekundan, 161–162 Temple, William, 288
St. Francis, 304 Ten Commandments, 73, 206
Stafford, P., 317 Tenth commandment, 209
Stalin, J., 42, 255, 308310–311, Terrien, S., 548–550
407 Terry, M. S., 84, 573
Stalin, S. A., 311 Tertullian, 7, 9, 421, 503
Testimonials, 13
Teutons, 5 U.S. News & World Report, 89
The Wanderer, 561 Union with Christ, 409
Theft, 89, 209, 468477 United Nations, 561
Third commandment, 207 Universals, 31, 223, 228
Third World, 277 Urceus, 300
Thomas, W. H. Griffith, 17 Urge to mass destruction, 27
Thomism, 240, 290
Thomson, E., 421 Valery, P., 541
Thomson, James, 266, 342 Van Til, Cornelius, 56, 224,
Thoreau, H. D., 138 226261–264, 280, 557
Thorp, W., 266 Van Til, Henry, 278–279, 283–
Tibet, 161 284
Tillich, Paul, 60–61, 238278, Van Til, L. J., 482, 485
427–428, 431 Vatican Council, 561
Time, 156 Veritas, 219–220
Timon, 312 Vialatoux, J., 541
Tithe, tithing, 444–448, 511 Vico, G., 541
Toleration, 501503–504 Victorious Life, 16–17, 19
Tolstoy, L., 472 Vietnam, 149
Toynbee, 541 Vindiciae Contra Tyrannos, 44
Tragedy, 378 Vine, W. E., 45, 53, 84, 239,
Trajan, 503 275, 324, 383, 416, 577
Transfiguration, 14 Violence, 252473
Trespasses, 383 Virgil, 390
Trinity (Ontological/ Virgin Birth, 411–413, 483
Economical), 240 Vocation, 205
Trivialization, 386 Von Rad, 196, 199
Truman, H. S., 101 Vultures, feast of, 320
Trumbull, C. G., 16
Truth, 219–232, 235–236 Wadsworth, B., 468
Tuaregs, 467 Wainhouse, A., 170
Tupper, C. B., 199 Waldmeir, J. J., 37
Turgot, 277 Walker, D. P., 313, 316
Turks, 13, 338 Wall Street Journal, 472
Tyrmand, 193 Wallace, George, 149
Waller, C. H., 97, 195
Index 661
Warens, Madame de, 155 Witchcraft, 504

Warfield, B. B., 16–18, 165, 527 Womb, 512
Warner, Samuel J., 27, 75 Women, 290
Watts, Isaac, 127 Wordsworth, W., 168
Way, Arthur S., 29, 81, 247 Work, Works, 119–139, 199,
Webb, R. A., 353–354 202, 205, 208213–218,
Webster, Noah, 48, 241 465–474
Wesley, John, 16 Workman, H. B., 44
Westcott, B. F., 181216–217, World Council of Churches,
393 288, 562
Westminster Catechism, 246, Worship, 11
256, 323, 491, 528557– Wright, G. E., 195, 492
558, 597, 599 Wurmbrand, Richard, 316
Westminster Confession, 35, Wyclif, John, 43–44
39, 53, 129, 255, 264,
333, 339, 344, 440, 481, Young, E. J., 594, 601
505, 528 Youngert, S. G., 5
Westminster Standards, 144
Whicher, G. F., 82 Zabel, M. D., 378
Whitman, Walt, 154 Zambia, 143
Whittier, J. G., 103, 105 Zarathushtra, 4
Widow, 529–530, 531 Ziegler, M., 74
Williams, G. H., 219–220 Zimmerman, C. C., 202
Wills, Gary, 342 Zockler, O., 178
Wilson, John, 110 Zoroastrianism, 279
Wilson, Woodrow, 100 Zwingli, 472
The Author
Rousas John Rushdoony (1916-2001) was a well-known
American scholar, writer, and author of over thirty books. He
held B.A. and M.A. degrees from the University of California
and received his theological training at the Pacific School of
Religion. An ordained minister, he worked as a missionary
among Paiute and Shoshone Indians as well as a pastor to two
California churches. He founded the Chalcedon Foundation,
an educational organization devoted to research, publishing,
and cogent communication of a distinctively Christian
scholarship to the world at large. His writing in the Chalcedon
Report and his numerous books spawned a generation of
believers active in reconstructing the world to the glory of
Jesus Christ. He resided in Vallecito, California until his death,
where he engaged in research, lecturing, and assisting others in
developing programs to put the Christian Faith into action.
The Ministry of Chalcedon
CHALCEDON (kal•see•don) is a Christian educational

organization devoted exclusively to research, publishing, and
cogent communication of a distinctively Christian scholarship
to the world at large. It makes available a variety of services
and programs, all geared to the needs of interested ministers,
scholars, and laymen who understand the propositions that
Jesus Christ speaks to the mind as well as the heart, and that
His claims extend beyond the narrow confines of the various
institutional churches. We exist in order to support the efforts
of all orthodox denominations and churches. Chalcedon
derives its name from the great ecclesiastical Council of
Chalcedon (A.D. 451), which produced the crucial
Christological definition: “Therefore, following the holy
Fathers, we all with one accord teach men to acknowledge one
and the same Son, our Lord Jesus Christ, at once complete in
Godhead and complete in manhood, truly God and truly
man....” This formula directly challenges every false claim of
divinity by any human institution: state, church, cult, school,
or human assembly. Christ alone is both God and man, the
unique link between heaven and earth. All human power is
therefore derivative: Christ alone can announce that “All
power is given unto me in heaven and in earth” (Matthew
28:18). Historically, the Chalcedonian creed is therefore the
foundation of Western liberty, for it sets limits on all
authoritarian human institutions by acknowledging the
validity of the claims of the One who is the source of true
human freedom (Galatians 5:1).
The Chalcedon Report is published monthly and is sent to all
who request it. All gifts to Chalcedon are tax deductible.
Chalcedon
Box 158
Vallecito, CA 95251 U.S.A.

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The Institutes of Biblical Law, Vol. I

For a complete listing of available books by

ROSS HOUSE BOOKS

1. Salvation: Pagan and Christian . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1

The Greek word salvation, soteria, means deliverance,

7. A. S. Geden, “Salvation (Hindu),” Hastings, op. cit.,

18.Tertullian, “Apologeticus,” in Ante-Nicene Christian Library, vol. XI (Edin-

James Hastings’ Encyclopaedia of Religion and Ethics (vol. XII)

7. Ibid., II, 609f.

The word salvation in the Old Testament means safety, ease,

10. Nietzsche, First Essay of The Genealogy of Morals, in ibid., 36.

The Biblical doctrine of God is that He is eternal (Ps. 90:2; 1

6. Westminster Confession of Faith, Chapt. III, sect. 1.

20. Peter A. Johnson, “Books…,” Stanford Observer, February 1972, 8.

John Wyclif, in his analysis of dominion, did some of the

1. De. Civ. Dom. i. chs. 7, 14.

14. Leupold, op. cit., 166.

Salvation cannot be confused with insurance, but it is

13. Ibid., 97.

In describing the events of Palm Sunday, St. Matthew wrote:

4. H. C. Leupold, Exposition of Zechariah (Columbus, Ohio: The Wartburg Press,

Salvation is the saving grace of God manifested through Jesus

The memory of Paradise is common to many cultures all over

8. JosephAddison Alexander, Commentary on the Prophecies of Isaiah (Grand Rap-

6. Herman Bavinck, Our Reasonable Faith (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Eerdmans,

2. “Super Starr,” in ibid, 78f.

3. R. Payne Smith, “Genesis,” in C. J. Ellicott, editor, Commentary on the Whole

6. “Super Starr,” Penthouse, May 1972, 20.

A cause is that power or agent which produces any thing or

5. Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness (New York: Philosophical Library,

10. Ibid., 27.

On the seventh day, according to Genesis 2:1-3, God rested from

7. F. N. Lee, Culture, (Cape May, New Jersey: n.d.), 4.

According to Proverbs 19:15, “Slothfulness casteth into a deep

6. Harry Levin, “Paradises, Heavenly and Earthly,” in The Huntington Library

In 1921, an interesting and anonymous commentary on the

To speak of salvation by love and hate will be offensive to those

The Buddhist plan of salvation, or, more accurately, escape, is

1. C. A. F. Rhys Davids, “Buddha,” in James Hastings, editor, Encyclopaedia of

6.Thomas V. Moore, A Commentary on Zechariah (London: Banner of Truth

In Genesis 3:1-5, we have, very plainly stated, Satan’s plan of

In 2 Chronicles 36, we have a brief but vivid account of the

1. C. J. Ball, “II Chronicles,” in C. J. Ellicott, editor,

In Hebrews 11:10, we are told that Abraham “looked for a city

5.L. C. B. Seaman, From Vienna to Versailles (New York: Coward-McCann,

St. Paul, in Galatians 2:1-9, reviews certain aspects of the

3. John Calvin, Commentaries on the

3. John Peter Lange, Commentary on the Holy Scriptures: Numbers, Deuteronomy

6. Von Rad, op. cit., 78.

10. Fairchild, op. cit., 307.

11. Joseph H. Bunzel, “church,” in ibid., 40.

12. See R. J. Rushdoony, Intellectual Schizophrenia (Philadelphia: Presbyterian and

17. Ibid., 34ff., 49, 58.

19. Ibid., 23.