De Regno Christi

Kevin asks about the origins of evil.  The mystery of evil is ultimately inscrutable.  Kevin suggests that answer if found in Adam’s free will.  I agree that Adam’s will was free, however I do not believe this takes away the difficulty.  The Bible, and Christian tradition, affirm that Adam was made in the image of God.  Adam was created “good.”  He knew the true God experientially.  He was righteous in every way.  The law of God was written on his heart.  It might be said that Adam was perfect.  Almost.  One imperfection existed.  Adam’s perfection was mutable.

The mutability of Adam’s righteous estate presents the central drama of the creation narrative.  Adam was created righteous but his righteousness would be tested.  The test comes with these words, “you shall not eat of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.”  The threat raises the stakes.  On the day that you eat of it, you shall surely die.”

In this primeval covenant,  father Adam was free. Free to choose.  Free to obey.  His rebellion was freely chosen and the result was disastrous. But how does this solve the problem of the mystery of evil?  Kevin seems to imply that Adam’s freedom demands the God had not providential control of the events. This is problematic.

According to the Bible and Christian tradition, God is infinite, eternal, and unchangeable.  To quote the Westminster Shorter Catechism, “in being, wisdom, power, holiness, justice, goodness, and truth.”  He is the Alpha and Omega.   He does not change.  He does not repent.  He knows the Creator of all things, the sustainer of all things.  His providence extends to all things, including the birds of the sky and the hairs on our heads.  As God, He does not learn by external observation.  His knowledge is not dependent upon His creatures, but His creatures are dependent upon His knowledge.  He is the self-contained, ontological Trinity.  Any other conception of God makes him mutable, changeable, and dependent upon His creation.  Such a God is not the true of the Bible and Christian tradition.

So in short, the Bible, as it is understood and confessed by the Reformed, teaches that God is not the author of evil.  Further, Adam was free.  He is culpable for his guilt.  But the tension remains.  How was a creature that enjoyed the kind of perfection that Adam enjoyed, who had the law of God written on His heart, tempted? I do not know.  I do know what the Bible teaches.  God was sovereign.  Adam was free.  The result was disaster… but O happy fault that lead to such a great salvation.

Finally, the thing that troubles me about Kevin’s post is that it seems to imply an analogy between Adam’s freedom before the fall and our freedom after it.  This makes a categorical mistake. Adam was holy, just and good.  Original sin has forever changed that equation.  Adam’s children are not placed back in his shoes, able to freely choose life through obedience.  Such an analogy is pure Pelagianism.  Of course, Kevin is not a Pelagian, but we need to be aware that any leap from Adam to his children needs to take into account the results of the fall.  If we are talking about Christians, then the leap not only must take into account the results of the fall but the work of the 2nd Adam. Now on these issues, the Reformed and the Roman Catholic are likely to disagree.

What I see in the pages of posts and comments on DRC—and certainly in Bill’s posting from May 2nd—are the words of committed Christians striving to follow their Savior. In our age this challenge continues to beleaguer us all, as it did the apostles and martyrs of the first century. I recognize the sincerity and passion for truth of all of those posting here. Praise God for that. I pray that my meager musings on these pages are equally committed to Christ and to the truth.

As we continue in this glorious season of Easter I thought it might be an appropriate time to take up where our previous discussion on grace and justification left off. I hope you all will not object to indulging more in this question as I think it a most important one to this dialogue.

In light of Bill’s expressed desire for dialogue with non-Reform but equally passionate Christians (I pray a category within which I might fall), I hope that you will bear with me as I attempt to gain clarity on the Reformed teaching on a particularly sticky issue. I do realize that this can be a rather sensitive area, one which has a long history of misunderstanding and disagreement. So please accept my promise that I am not trying to raise hackles here nor to beat a horse that perhaps many consider to be dead. It is my expressed desire to gain a better understanding of the Reform teaching on predestination and original sin and even the concept of sin itself and perhaps, in the process, to help some readers gain a better understanding of Catholic theology in turn.

When I consider the exegeses made in previous posts and comments regarding grace and sin and justification I am drawn to the theological beginning of the question: the opening chapters of Genesis. God creates the world and all that is in it. God creates man. All that he creates is good. On this surely we agree.

How then does sin enter the world? This question has been posed myriad times throughout the ages, particularly by those questioning the goodness of God. Since the goodness of God is clearly not in question here at DRC, I feel free in posing this question as a challenge against the previously-posted Reform understanding of sin and grace. Based on the Reform understanding of sin and grace, how does sin enter the world?

In Catholic theology, the moment of the fall of Adam presents little difficulty. In fact it reinforces our understanding that God allows all of us the possibility of choosing to reject Him. All men are created with freewill. The purpose of freewill is to be given the opportunity to love since without freedom there can be no possibility of love. Adam was created in the grace of God which was manifested in the perfect beauty of Eden. At the moment that he pridefully bought the lie of the serpent, Adam fell into sin. God gave him the freedom to make this choice because he loved Adam enough to grant him that greatest blessing of all: the ability to love as God loves, to choose God or to reject Him. Adam could have chosen otherwise and choosing otherwise would have allowed him to remain in that grace, in the garden. Because he had freewill, his decision to reject God is fully his own. This, as best as I can express it, would be the Catholic understanding of the entrance of sin into the human world.

So I am wondering, based on the Reform understanding of this event, how exactly did He Fall? I’m not so concerned with the vehicle (i.e. the serpent as symbol or reality) but with the essence itself. How does evil come into the world if God is all good? Of course, prefigured in the story of Adam and Eve is the existence, already, of evil. The serpent is already in the garden and clearly is a manifestation of evil. For the sake of simplicity, I believe we can focus our discussion on the fall of Adam and Eve as this is the first sin of man.

If I am understanding it correctly, it would seem that based on the Reform understanding of grace and sin presented previously, Adam and Eve were not granted the grace of God to save them from the fall. It would then seem to follow that based on the Reform theology, it was God’s will that evil enter into the world since his choice to grant grace to one or another person is all His own. Yet this obviously would be antithetical to His nature.

So my question is: How does Reform theology resolve this apparent conundrum of the entrance of sin into the world?

The last two years have been hard.  Regular readers will know that in October of 2008, I resigned as Pastor of the Rochester Reformed Presbyterian Church and took up the work of a full-time attorney. The work has been fun and, in many ways fulfilling.  The work has made the transition far less painful than it might have been.

My decision is resign from the pastorate was not an easy one.  By the time I took that last step, I was filled with hurt, anger, and spiritual exhaustion.  The story is not unique and either are the details.  A mix of strong personalities, conflicting theological presuppositions, failures to follow procedure, and my own failings in terms of combative pridefulness led to irreconcilable difference on the Session.  In the Fall of 2009, after the birth of my third daughter, Mary, my family’s membership was transfered to a local Christian Reformed Church congregation.  The Presbytery sent me my ministerial credentials, in good standing, at about the same time.

At the time, we were almost relieved to no longer be a part of the RPCNA.  Relief soon turned to alienation.  We had lost our home.  We were divorced from the Tribe that been so central to our own self-identification.  Even singing from the Psalter became a painful act to be avoided.  Reading theology based on a hermeneutic of hurt, I tried to run from Reformed orthodoxy.  Why?  It have no answer.  Throughout my theological conflicts as a Pastor, I always stood on the side of Reformed orthodoxy.   My defense was often prideful, sometimes arrogant, occasionally sinful, but always in defense of truth.

Nonetheless, I ran.  More accurately, I read.  I read the Roman Catholics.  I re-read Thomas and was introduced to the New Theology.  I read the work of former Calvinists who became Roman Catholics.  I read the work of Anglicans who became Roman Catholics.  I read Anglicans that stayed Anglicans and I lost my bearings in a sea of self-imposed theological relativism.  I wanted a true, infallible Church.  One that would reward her champions of orthodoxy rather than persecute them.  My family joined the theologically moderate Christian Reformed Church.  We attended the high Church Anglican churches.  We explored the beauty of Anglo-Catholicism and her rich liturgy.   But the whole in our hearts did not heal.  The gap only widened.

So why I am telling all this DRC readers?  Because I suspect you already knew.  You have, in many ways, observed the journey.  I am sure many wondered where it would go?  Would I end up an Anglican?  Would I cross the Tiber and become a Papist?

Today, I can tell you where the theological journey ends.  It ends where it began.  ”In my beginning is my end” wrote T.S. Eliot in East Coker.  True enough.  Today, I tell you that all my wanderings were the result of hurt, and spiritual exhaustion.  I am a Reformed, Presbyterian, Confessional, Psalm-singing Reformed Presbyterian.  In exile, yes, but not without hope.  In Calvin and  Turretin, Machen and Van Til I have found the substance the fills the whole that existed in my soul.

So here is the retraction.  I retract anything that I have written here at the DRC which questions the primacy of the Reformed faith as the purest form of the gospel of Jesus Christ.  I further retract any latitudinarian sentiments that would obscure the purity of the gospel or suggest compromise with any other system of theology.  I retract any statements that might have obscured the great principles of faith alone, Christ alone, or the Bible alone.

I do not retract my belief that thoughtful and fruitful discussion can be had with Roman Catholic theologians and philosophers.  More the central mission of the DRC, I do not deny that Christian involvement in the secular sphere of politics can be greatly enhanced by dialogue between Geneva on Rome as we try to work out the implications of life together in the city of man.

While I have tremendous affinity for the overall position of Westminster Two-Kingdom advocates, I remain skeptical of their proclivity to distinguish between the 2nd table of the 10 commandments which is said to bind all men as well as nations, and the 1st table which is restricted to the individual, the family, and the Church. While I appreciate theological and practical reasons for freeing to the Civil Magistrate from the duty to suppress heresy and idolatry, I  fear that the two table division is artificial and unconvincing.

So should Barack Obama take on the role of inquisitor general?   Should the Congress go to work on establishing a church and purging the land of its idols?  Let me answer with a resounding, hell no.  Reasonable Christians must reject theonomic sharia and anti-Augustian “transformationalism”.  Despite their theological peculiarities, the American founding fathers cut the Gordian knot of Western Christendom and gifted us a system that wisely insulates the Church from the domination of the state while allowing Christians to live as faithful citizens of this city which is passing away.  Church and State can be friends without extending the relationship into a romance.  This is wisdom.

But what about the commandments?  In posts to follow want to try to explore the 10 commandments, their relationship to the natural law, and their application to the nation-states in high hopes of developing a more satisfying answer than 2-Kingdom theology has provided to date.