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Volume 73,
Issue 9
A staunch supporter of the popular doctrine in Reformed and Presbyterian circles, that God makes a conditional covenant with every physical child of believing parents, has candidly confessed the real character of such a covenant. He frankly acknowledges that, according to this doctrine of the covenant, God loves every physical child of believers with His covenant love in Jesus Christ and sincerely desires to save every child. This covenant doctrine denies that faith is one of the benefits earned by the death of Christ for the elect children only and that faith is itself included in the promise made by God to the children of believers in baptism. Editorial A Candid Confession of the Character of a Conditional Covenant (3) The candid confession makes plain, therefore, that it is the character of a conditional covenant to affirm that God's covenant love in Jesus Christ is wider than the elect children of believing parents; that God's covenant love in Jesus Christ fails to save many whom God so loves; and, by clear and necessary implication, that the reason why some children are saved is not God's covenant love, but their own will and work, that is, faith as their performance of a required condition. This was the candid confession ,of Reformed minister, Rev. Cecil W. Tuininga, in the January 1, 1997 issue of the Standard Bearer, in answer to questions that I had put to him. In my editorial in the January 15, 1997 issue of this magazine, I demonstrated that the character of a conditional covenant, as candidly confessed by Rev. Tuininga, is condemned both by Scripture and by the Reformed creeds as a departure from the gospel of sovereign grace. Pointed Questions What I have not yet done is to answer the questions that Rev. Tuininga put to me. After he answered my questions about the real character of a conditional covenant, Rev. Tuininga addressed pointed questions to me concerning the real character of the unconditional covenant: "Now allow me a few questions."Fair enough. In what follows, Rev. Tuininga's questions appear in italics. Because of the length of some of them, I will not quote them in their entirety. For the complete questions, the reader is referred to the editorial in the January 1, 1997 issue of the SB. My answers immediately follow Rev. Tuininga's questions, in regular type. 1. Is every baptized child, according to your position, elect and hence saved? How then answer for those who reject the covenant promises? Do they not break covenant with God? Answer: No, according to the doctrine of the unconditional covenant of grace, every baptized child is not elect and saved. Some baptized children are reprobate and lost according to God's eternal decree of predestination. This is the plain teaching of the Bible in Romans 9:6-24. Some physical children of believing Abraham and Sarah, for example, Esau, were excluded from God's saving purpose (v. 15); were hated by God before birth (v. 13); and were vessels of wrath fitted to destruction (v. 22) - all, in God's eternal will of predestination (vv. -11, 15, 18, 22).This is also the express teaching of the Reformed creed, the Canons of Dordt: . . . not all (the physical children of believing parents - DJE), but some only are elected, while others are passed by in the eternal election of God; whom God . . . hath decreed to leave in the common misery into which they have wilfully plunged themselves, and not to bestow upon them saving faith and the grace of conversion; but . . . at last for the declaration of His justice, to condemn and punish them forever.... And this is the decree of reprobation . . . (I/ 15). These children (whom God alone knows) by their unbelief in later years are guilty of despising God's covenant, God's covenant love, and God's covenant Son (Heb. 10:29). They "break" the covenant in the sense that they grievously violate it by holding it in contempt as it is clearly made known to them in the word of God and the sacraments; by refusing to embrace it in faith as they are seriously called by God to do; and by disobeying the command to walk in the covenant by a holy life.But they emphatically do not break the covenant in the sense that, whereas God establishes His covenant with them personally, whether by promise to them or by the work of the Holy Ghost in their hearts, they nullify the promise or undo the work of the Holy Ghost within them. God's covenant of grace with Abraham and his "seed" is sure and unbreakable. It is sure and unbreakable with all the seed of Abraham, which seed is Jesus Christ and all the elect (Gal. 3:16-29). It is sure and unbreakable precisely by the promise of God, that is, by the promising God Himself (Rom. 4:16). It is exactly the concern of the apostle in Romans 9:6ff. to deny that God's covenant Word of promise is ineffectual in the perishing of so many physical children of believing Abraham and Sarah (v. 6). The; promise to the "seed of Abraham" was not, in fact, addressed by God to, or intended for, all the physical children of Abraham, but only to and for the elect among the physical children (vv. 7-13). The same is true of the promise in baptism today. Some, and only some, among the physical children of Abraham and Sarah were "the children of the promise" then (v. 8). Some, and only some, among the physical children: of believers are "children of the promise" today. These are the children to whom alone God addressed, and addresses, His promise, "I will be your God, and you will be my child." This covenant promise is gracious and (if I may be forgiven a redundancy) sovereign. It is never without saving effect. It regenerates, gives faith (in this order!), makes holy, and takes to heaven. The promise - the covenant Word of God - does this. No child to whom God addresses it can victoriously resist it, any more than the effectual call of Romans 8:30 can be resisted by the elect object of the call. "Not as though the Word of God hath taken none effect" (Rom. 9:6). Ever! A Desire to Save All the Children? 2. Does God not love and desire the salvation of all those within the covenant? Answer: No, God does not dove and desire the salvation of all those," whether adults or children, who may for a time live in the sphere of the covenant. By "living in the sphere of the covenant," I mean that one is baptized into a true church, is instructed in the truth of the gospel, makes public confession of faith, participates in the public worship of God, and shows himself to others as one walking in obedience to the law. It is one's holding membership in the instituted and visible church.Scripture sharply distinguishes between this formal membership, on the one hand, and spiritual union with Christ and His covenant people, on the other hand. The prophets repeatedly distinguish the "remnant" from the visible organization of the nation of Israel and from the majority of nominal members of that nation (Is. 1:9). The apostle confirms this distinction and grounds it in God's eternal election: "Even so then at this present time also there is a remnant according to the election of grace" (Ram. 11:5). Likewise, the apostle John distinguishes those who for a time are merely formal members of the New Testament church from "us" who are the true church. Some go out "from us" who, nevertheless, never were "of us" (I John 2119). The entire defense of God's effectual Word of promise and, with this, of the grace of the work of salvation in the family of father Abraham, rests, in Romans 9, on the validity of the distinction between certain children's being "Israel" and other children's merely being "of Israel" (v. 6). To be "Israel" is to be living members of Christ and the family of God according to election. To be merely "of Israel" is to be members of the institution only formally and by outward profession; it is to be merely "in the sphere of the covenant." That God does not love and desire the salvation of all who are merely "of Israel" is the plain teaching of the apostle in Romans 9:13-15. God did not love circumcised Esau, but hated him. He never had mercy on him, nor did He wish to have mercy on him. Nor, I may add, was it unjust of God that He did not have mercy on Esau. Neither may any of us puny humans dare to call the electing and reprobating God into question: "Nay but, O man, who art thou that repliest against God?" (v. 20) It is the intention of the apostle that what he says in Romans 9 specifically of Esau applies also to all those physical descendants of Abraham who perished in unbelief and disobedience, as well as to those physical children of believing parents who similarly perish down through the ages. A Desire to Save All Men? 3. And in this connection does God not desire the salvation of all men? Answer: No, God does not desire the salvation of all men, that is, "all men" in the sense intended by Rev. Cecil Tuininga, namely, every human who ever lived, lives, and will live.Scripture is against it. Did God desire the salvation of all those who perished in the flood, adults and children alike? Did God desire the salvation of all who perished in the fires of Sodom and Gomorrah? Did God desire the salvation of all the Canaanites whom He commanded Israel to kill to the last infant? Did God desire the salvation of all the heathens who lived and died without the gospel before Pentecost? God saves only by the Word, and He Himself announces that in the time of the old covenant "He sheweth His Word unto Jacob.... He hath not dealt so with any nation" (Ps. 147:19, 20). The New Testament agrees. A divine desire to save is God's purposeful will. But He wills to have mercy on some only and, thus, to save them; others, He wills to harden and, thus, to damn them (Rom. 9:18). This is the clear, powerful, and (to many) offensive testimony of the Canons of Dordt, which confession binds Rev. Tuininga as it binds me. This is also the clear testimony, incidentally, of the Westminster Confession of Faith (WCF). There is not so much as a hint in the Reformed confessions of a universal love of God and of a universal desire for salvation. This is why, when Reformed and Presbyterian churches begin to fall away, they must add such a statement to the creeds. The Presbyterian Church in the United States of America (PCUSA) did this in 1903 by adding a section on God's universal love and desire for the salvation of all men to the WCF. The Christian Reformed Church (CRC) did the same thing in 1924 by appending an official, binding, qualifying, doctrinal statement to the "Three Forms of Unity." Candor and Clarity I have now answered Rev. Tuininga's questions.I have answered them as candidly as he answered mine. As frankly as he opened up the character of the conditional covenant, so frankly have I opened up the character of the unconditional covenant. No one - not Rev. Tuininga, not I, not a single reader of the SB - can now be ignorant or confused regarding the differences between the doctrine of a conditional covenant and the doctrine of the unconditional covenant. No one can fail to see that the differences are fundamental. The conditional covenant teaches a universal covenant love of God in Jesus Christ; not necessarily for every human (although the texts that Tuininga raises and the arguments that he uses to support his covenant view are ominous in this respect) but certainly within the sphere of the natural family of believing parents. God loved every physical descendant of Abraham and Sarah, including Esau. God loves every physical child of believing parents in the time of the new covenant. This covenant love of God fails to save many toward whom it is directed. Whether a child is saved by this love of God depends upon his performance of a condition, although it is usually added that the child can perform this condition only with the help of divine grace. The unconditional covenant teaches that the salvation of the children of believers is due only to God's love for these children in His covenant with them in Christ. This love, having its source in the eternal election of grace, is efficacious: it infallibly saves every child who is its object. It is gracious: God owes it to none of our children. It is sovereign: No parent may contend with God because it may please God not to love every one of his physical children. Yet Again: Hyper-Calvinist! One thing I have not yet done: I have not explained those passages of Holy Scripture that Rev. Tuininga raised in connection with his questions. In his question, whether God loves and desires to save all the physical, baptized children, he appealed to Matthew 23:37. In his question, whether God desires the salvation of all humans without exception, he appealed to I Timothy 2:3, 4 and to II Peter 3:9.He obliges me to explain these texts in a concluding editorial on his candid confession. Perhaps my explanation, in addition to showing that there is no conflict between these texts and the doctrine, of an unconditional covenant of particular grace, can prove that in holding the unconditional covenant the Protestant Reformed Churches (PRC) are not hyper-Calvinist. There was, the reader may recall, at the end of Rev. Tuininga's letter this familiar, but still hurtful, dismissal of the ERC: "I would be very happy to see our Protestant Reformed brothers come to recognize and correct their hyper- Calvinism and become truly Reformed." Is it so? - DJE |
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