SIR ROBERT ANDERSON
Secret Service Theologian
ENTAIL OF THE COVENANT
CHAPTER V
"WE are to nurture our children in the
chastening and admonition of the Lord, and thus to train them up in the way
they should go ; but the promise that they will not depart from it is by no
means to be trusted. And if they turn away from God and die impenitent, we may
comfort our broken hearts, as best we can, by the knowledge that the result was
wholly unaffected by our own unfaithfulness or want of faith : for their awful
destiny was irrevocably settled in a past eternity by an immutable decree of
fate. If they are elect, they will be saved ; and if not, they will be damned ;
and nothing that we do, or fail to do, can influence the issue."
It is
with reluctance that I thus recur again to that village sermon. * But I do so
because the preacher gave expression to a traditional and well-accredited
belief that saddens many a Christian heart, and rests like a night mist upon
many a Christian life. " When the gift of life was proffered us we were
conscious in accepting it that we did so freely voluntarily. Since then, we
have come to see that grace did not exhaust itself even in working out our
deliverance at a cost so priceless, and bringing it within our reach, but that
our very acceptance of the gift was the Spirit's work, and as directly the
action of grace as Calvary itself. But more than this, now that we have
received the message, and are come within the scene of joy and blessing to
which it bids us, we have to learn that, in a sense fuller and deeper still,
grace is sovereign. The gospel of our salvation spanned the open door of grace
as we approached it; above the inner portal, we now read the solemn and blessed
words ' Chosen in Him before the foundation of the world.' " l
1 The Gospel
and its Ministry, chap. vi.
With a heart rejoicing and at rest in the
sunshine of the Divine presence, the Christian can ponder this glorious truth ;
whereas the doctrine which the Latin Fathers based upon it leaves us bewildered
and benumbed
at the shrine of an awful deity whose dread decrees are a veto
even upon prayer, for they are as irrevocable as they are
mysterious.
But are not all Divine decrees irrevocable? Let Scripture
itself decide the question. Did not God decree the destruction of the
Sodomites? And yet in response to Abraham's prayer He promised to spare them if
ten righteous men could be found among them. Did not God send His prophet to
proclaim to the men of Nineveh that in forty days their city would be
destroyed? And yet He cancelled the judgment when the men of Nineveh repented
at the preaching of Jonah. Did not God decree the death of Hezekiah, sending
His prophet to warn him of his impending doom? And yet it came to pass that,
before Isaiah was gone out into the middle court, God turned him back with the
message, "I have heard thy prayer, I have seen thy tears ; behold I will heal
thee."
Will anyone dare to maintain that God did not really purpose to
put an end to the King of Judah's life, or to destroy the great Assyrian city,
and that the words which His prophets uttered by His commandment were intended
merely to bring about the results which actually followed. The theology of the
Jesuits condones untruthfulness of this kind, and we use strong language in
condemning it. Turning away from such evil thoughts, let us firmly grasp the
truth, that we have not to do with irrevocable decrees of fate, but with the
present action of the living God, who hears not only the prayers of those who
are His own, but the cry of penitent sinners who cast themselves upon His
mercy. No Divine promise of favour or blessing has ever failed ; but the
student of Scripture will recall many an instance of God's " repenting " in
respect of a threatened judgment. And where promised blessing has been delayed,
the delay is always due to human sin ; but if judgments are held back, the
respite is always ascribed to divine long-suffering. The supreme instance of
this is the great final judgment, when this earth is to be given up to fire.
Surely the sin of man has ere now made it fully ripe for destruction ; why then
is its doom so long deferred ? The answer is explicit : it is because of the
long-suffering of God, Who is " not willing that any should perish, but that
all should come to repentance." 1
1 2 Peter iii. 7, 9.
"Chosen in Him
before the foundation of the world." Let us take note of the time and the
circumstances in which this wonderful truth was revealed. The covenant people
had crucified the Lord of glory, and incurred the further guilt of rejecting
the Pentecostal gospel of forgiveness through the blood their wicked hands had
shed. For though the Apostle Paul, to whom the great revelation of grace was
specially entrusted, had completed the whole circuit of his ministry to Israel,
from Jerusalem to Rome, not a single Synagogue had accepted the proffered
mercy. " There was no remedy," and the people of the covenant were set aside.
And then it was that, in "the Captivity Epistles," the great " mystery1" truth
of the Church, the body of Christ, which had already been foreshadowed, was
fully and finally revealed.
1 In the New Testament a "mystery "is " not a
thing unintelligible, but what lies hidden and secret till made known by the
revelation of God" (Bloomfield'a Greek Testament).
The Abrahamic
covenant related primarily to an earthly people and to earthly blessings;
whereas this mystery revelation has to do with a heavenly people, and blessings
in heavenly places in Christ. And while the covenant with Abraham was as
definitely an event in time as was the covenant of Sinai, this "mystery"
reveals a purpose which pertains to eternity and has no relation whatsoever to
time.1
1 No pagan language has any word to express " eternity." In Greek a
future eternity is represented as endless duration in time (unto the ages of
ages) ; and a past, as in Eph. i. 4.
And yet the "election" difficulties
which distress so many Christians depend on assuming that "before the
foundation of the world" means some epoch in time prior to 4004 B.C. !2 But
eternity is not endless time : it is the antithesis of time. And if the
theories of Kant be true - and no metaphysical system is more thoroughly
philosophical - and time is merely a law of thought, imposed by the Creator on
His finite creatures, all these difficulties disappear. Not that I assume for a
moment that this is the right solution of them; but if they can be solved so
easily, surely the Christian may dismiss them from his thoughts, and have a
heart at rest in the presence of God, with whom what we call past and future
may be an eternal NOW.
2 This conventional date will serve here as well as
any other.
The assumption that this eternal election includes all the
redeemed is one of the many inferences from Scripture which arc common in our
theology. Certain it is that not only the nations of the saved, but the earthly
people of the covenant when again restored, will have their position upon
earth; and we have no warrant for assuming that they are within the "chosen
before the foundation of the world." The presumption is that these words refer
definitely to the redeemed of this present age, whose peculiar position and
blessings are a special burden of the "Captivity Epistles." And this wonderful
revelation must not be frittered away by bracketing it with the ninth chapter
of Romans, or other Scriptures, which relate either to the general truth of
Divine sovereignty, or to the people of God in other dispensations past or
future.
And let us not forget that the same Scripture which reveals this
heavenly election teaches also "the mystery of the gospel" : as the Apostle
calls the supreme revelation of grace. The truth of a timeless election is thus
inseparably linked with a gospel that is "preached to every creature which is
under heaven" 2- the gospel of "God our Saviour, who willeth that all men
should be saved and come to the knowledge of the truth."3 This Scriptural truth
of election must therefore be kept apart from the Augustinian doctrine. For
while the truth is an incentive to faithfulness and zeal, the doctrine affords
an excuse for unfaithfulness and apathy. And this, not merely in the case of
individual Christians, but of the Professing Church as a body. William Carey
proved this to his sorrow when he pleaded in vain for missions to the heathen.
"If the natives of India are elect, they will be saved ; and if they are not
elect, no missionaries need be sent to them"- such was the response his appeals
evoked from "the Church." We have seen how and when the" mystery" truth of
election was revealed; it may be desirable here to mark how and when the
doctrinal perversion of it originated.
1 Eph. vi. 19. 2 Col. i. 23. 3 1 Tim.
ii. 4.
While Moses was still with the Church in the wilderness, the
apostasy of Israel had declared itself. And the later Epistles plainly indicate
that, before the Apostles left the earth, the Professing Christian Church was
proving false to its trust. As Canon Bernard writes in his Bampton Lectures: "I
know not how any man, in closing the Epistles, could expect to find the
subsequent history of the Church essentially different from what it is. In
those writings we seem, as it were, not to witness some passing storms which
clear the air, but to feel the whole atmosphere charged with the elements of
future tempest and death. Every moment the forces of evil show themselves more
plainly." But it was not until the time of the Patristic theologians that the
full extent of the lapse from Christian truth and testimony became plainly
manifest. Indeed most of their writings related to the heresies that prevailed
; and the record of their efforts to maintain a Christian standard of morals is
a main feature of the Church history of that age. The devastating persecutions
which raged from time to time were a check upon these evils; but when, with the
"conversion" of Constantine, that restraining influence ceased, and the
Professing Church became free to set its house in order, the apostasy took
shape in what we call " the religion of Christendom."
Speaking
generally, "the theology of the Latin Fathers was governed by the old Platonic
conception of the 'transcendent' Deity, a God far removed from men; whose
alienation, moreover, was rendered more terrible by the doctrine of original
sin. In their view the benefits of the work of Christ were limited to a
privileged few, and their system aimed at extending the number of that
minority, and mitigating for them the perils of their position. The simple
baptism of the New Testament was remodelled on pagan lines as a mystical
regeneration and cleansing from sin, bringing the sinner from under the
storm-cloud of Divine wrath into the sphere where a mystically endowed
priesthood could minister to him further grace. For in this theology Divine
sovereignty became sheer favouritism; election came to mean little more than
immunity from wrath ; and grace, instead of being, as in the New Testament, the
principle of the Divine action, and the characteristic of the Divine attitude,
toward mankind, was regarded rather as a sort of spiritual electricity to be
communicated to the favoured few by ordinances which owed their validity to a
sacerdotal class. The Church, which in their system meant practically the
clergy, was the mediator between an alienated and angry God and men depraved
and doomed."l St. Augustine of Hippo was the master mind by whom this system
was moulded into the form which it has ever since maintained.2 The greatness of
the man is unquestionable. And his intense piety is manifest m his Confessions,
a book that reveals the experiences of a pure and earnest soul reaching out
toward God through mists and darkness that fuller Christian truth would have
dispelled. For there is scarcely an error in Christendom-religion that cannot
be found in embryo in his writings.
1 The Bible or the Church, ch. iv.
2
"With Augustine the whole subject assumed new and front-rank prominence. It was
mostly a new creation from a new star point, drawn not from earlier Christian
sources, but from the ideas which he had imbibed from his philosophical
studies" (Hastings' Encyc. of Religion, art. Election").
As has been so
justly said, "Augustine substituted an organised Church and a supernatural
hierarchy for an ever-present Christ. To Augustine, more than to anyone else,
is due the theory which is most prolific of the abiding curse inflicted on many
generations by an arrogant and usurping priestcraft. . . . And all that was
most deplorable in his theology and ecclesiasticism became the most cherished
heritage of the Church of the Middle Ages, in exact proportion to its narrowest
ignorance, its tyrannous ambition, its moral corruption, and its unscrupulous
cruelty." l
Such then was the soil, and such the atmosphere, which produced
the theological doctrine of Election.2
1 Dean Farrar's Lives of the Fathers,
vol. ii. 603.
2 On this subject, see further the App.
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