RE: Jape (or an even bolder idea than VanDrunen) W…

W.H. Chellis

RE: Jape (or an even bolder idea than VanDrunen)
W.H. Chellis

Caleb has me thinking about catholicity and Augustine’s broad notion of the “coextensive nature of the church universal.”

When we talk about the idea of corporate and national confessions of Christ there are questions that haunt me. I wonder if there are answers hidden here.

What I am thinking about is Samuel Rutherford’s notion of the covenanted nation providing federal holiness to its members. Rutherford, like Augustine, affirms the doctrine of Divine election, but recognizes that covenant is a broader category. We all do but the question is how much broader. Thus, Rutherford would say that you could have a true church made up entirely of reprobates (I hear the hisses from the Dutchmen on the list… spiritual Dutchmen at least?).

For Rutherford, all babies born of a covenanted state seem to have a right to baptism based on the federal holiness of the corporate confession. John Coffey writes,

“These godly Covenanters were undoubtedly convinced of the particular importance of the elect, and of the central place of the universal law of God, but they also had a clearly worked out concept of the covenanted nation, which historians have so far overlooked. This concept is intimately connected to the justification of infant baptism provided by Reformed theologians… Rutherfored explained that Reformed theologians made a sharp distinction between national covenants and the covenant of grace. The covenant of grace, he argued was a personal or “internal” covenant. Those who were party to the covenant were elect, the members of the invisible church. By contrast, national covenants were ‘federal’ or ‘external’, and included every baptized member of the national visible national church. Just as God has shown mercy to a thousand generations of Abraham’s descendents, and included them in the covenant with Himself; even though they had no ‘personal’ holiness, they were partakers of a ‘federal’ holiness derived from their parents or godly forefathers.” Politics, Religion, and the British Revolutions: The Mind of Samuel Rutherford, pg. 166-167.

Now that would give some bite to the Covenanter position on national covenanting… but I have never heard anyone in the last two centuries say anything remotely similar. Any thoughts?