It is my prayer that these lectures will not only be a blessing to your hearts and stimulating to your mind, but also healing for our Reformed and Presbyterian subculture. We find ourselves in a civil war over justification and sanctification or grace and obedience, which I don't think that you can divide, but some people are doing it. And they're pejorative labels being thrown around like Grace Boys and Legalist, I've been called one of each. And they're being hurled from both sides. So may the Lord use this focus on the Lord's Supper wherein the gospel is so palpably presented to produce some healing to the wound of our church and our Reformed denominations. So let's come to the table together. where Jesus hosts us, and as we come closer to him, we'll inevitably come closer to each other. Would you let me pray one more time? Lord, I thank you for these people you've gathered in your good providence. These are loving people. They love your word. They gather here week after week to hear not just light Bible studies, but they hear theological lectures from one of the brightest theological minds in the country. Thank you for this place, this great church that you have used so magnificently over 200 years. The likes of James Henley Thornwell and Dr. McClure, and Dr. Connacht, and Dr. Ferguson, and many others. We thank you, Lord, for the many souls that have been saved here, many sons who have been sent into ministry, daughters into vocational Christian service. I pray that this evening you would use us as the sons and daughters of God to remember that you love us. And as you bind that afresh, as you pour that out afresh in our hearts into overflowing, that we would love one another. And we would love one another being inspired and invigorated all the more. as we hear the gospel preached, as we see it displayed in the table, as we experience its seal to our consciences. Guide us this evening, we pray in Jesus' name. God's people said together, Amen. Let's start with Warfield. Let's say some words about Warfield. We have to for Warfield Lectures, and delighted to. Sinclair Ferguson, you've probably heard of that guy. He was my doctor father, and it took me a long time to learn how to say that, but that's what you're supposed to say if somebody's inspired you in your doctorate, and that's who Sinclair Ferguson was to me. Sinclair Ferguson said that he was perhaps the finest theologian that America ever produced. Now, he did say America ever produced. He held out greater hopes for Europe. But the greatest American theologian, he said, was B. V. Warfield. As prolific a writer as Warfield was, he did give scant attention to the Lord's Supper. And out of over 40 books and booklets and 700 articles, periodicals, Princeton's greatest theologian only devoted three articles to the topic. The explanation could be that he was so burdened for the church's rapid compromise on the doctrine of Scripture that he just didn't have time to develop a reformed sacramental theology. He was an apologist at heart, and Warfield could have concluded that the reformed formulas on the supper were sufficient and could be enhanced by rear-guard theologians if necessary, but he was not one of those. My regret that America's greatest theologian wrote so little on the subject is selfish, I suppose, since it has been my area of scholarly focus, but my wife is very happy. Because if he had written more extensively on the subject, I would have had to add another chapter to my dissertation, and that would have prolonged the process was already 10 years long. So, she's glad that he didn't write anything. That said, Warfield's primary scholarly focus on Christian supernaturalism actually provides a necessary underlayment for the robust sacramental theology, for a robust sacramental theology in our secular age. In these two lectures, it's my prayer that I would honor Professor Warfield by recalling us to a vibrant view of the Lord's Supper, which when practiced has historically given rise to robust, ecclesiastical, and personal orthodoxy. When the preaching of the Word of God has been focused through the lens of the Lord's Supper, it's my contention that the church and individuals within the church have been the most orthodox or obedient or faithful or whatever you want to say. I want to contend that there's no other place in the church's practice where the supernatural nature of the Christian faith becomes more existential than in the Lord's Supper. And yet I think in developing this idea, I'm keeping with old Princeton's tradition, according to Hodge, to develop no original idea. Since my academic quest began with exploring the roots of Gilbert Tennant's preaching on the Lord's Supper, Gilbert Tennant was a preacher in the first Great Awakening, and you'll hear his name more than once tonight, I would like to think that this first student of the log college, that's what eventually became Princeton, And the early leader of the college in New Jersey made a profound impact on Warfield's personal views of the supper. In fact, I can't help but think that Tennant's ministry was so monumental that what I'll share regarding his views of the supper should be like reading Warfield's notes. What we read about Tennant's views and others should be like reading Warfield's college and seminary notes. So what was Warfield's burden for Christian supernaturalism and how does it relate to our topic? The term was the title of his inaugural address to the students of Princeton in 1896 and this is how he introduced the subject. Dr. John Bascom, he said, has lately told us afresh, and certainly, as we shall all agree, most truly, that the relation of the natural and supernatural is the question of questions. It underlies all of our rational life, that one question of the relationship between the natural and the supernatural. The fact of such a relation, he justly adds, is the most patent and omnipresent in the history of the human mind. We can't think at all without facing the great problems which arise out of the perennial pressure of this most persistent of intellectual questions. From the first dawn of intelligence, each human mind has busied itself instinctively with their adjustment. The history of human thought in every race from its earliest beginnings is chiefly concerned with the varying relations which men in this or that stage of culture under the influence of this or that dominating conception have conceived exist between the natural world in which they lived and that supernatural world in which they have been prone to conceive to lie above and beyond it. And he goes on to say that you either fall off on one side or the other without Christ in the middle. You either become all natural, that is material and secularist, or you become all supernatural and mystical. And Christianity alone and an incarnated Christ brings those two together perfectly, the natural and the supernatural. So, Warfield prophetically anticipates what would become the predominant characteristic of mainline Christian denominations within 20 years of his death. Some of you have lived through the mainline demise. That characteristic would be anti-supernaturalism. As a professor of mine used to say, and several of us in this room, he used to say, A liberal Catholic, a liberal Jew, and a liberal Protestant are all the same. Because they're all anti-supernatural. They're all secularist. And Warfield saw it coming. In fact, Warfield's star student, J. Gress of Machen, would battle anti-supernaturalism his whole career. Machen went so far as to say that anti-supernaturalistic faith, which the mainline denominations had fully imbibed, was no longer Christianity. Rather, it was a new religion called liberalism. In his lecture, Warfield explained how this tragedy would occur. The church would continue to imbibe naturalistic rationalism to the point that it would de-supernaturalize Christianity. And it would do so to fit the predominant worldview of a world convinced that there was no reality beyond what could be explained scientifically. Therefore God, Christ, creation, salvation would be redefined as purely existential phenomena. Some of you have lived through the neo-orthodox movement where the old favorite words that you knew from scripture were gutted and replaced with new material meaning. Therefore, God, Christ, creation and salvation would be redefined as purely existential phenomena. It'd become a modern pantheism. God and Christ would just be unseen forces of positive change. Creation and salvation would merely be a location and description of human flourishing. But Warfield was not going down without a fight, and he instilled the same biblical determination in the 2,000 students he would teach before his death. He stood on the frankness, quote, the frankness of Christianity's commitment to the absolute supernatural. God, he insisted, was not entangled in nature, but rather transcends all the works of his hands. Consequently, nature is not self-made or self-existent. It is more properly called creation because God spoke it into being and preserves and governs it by his sovereign word. Into His creation, God sent a supernatural man to redeem sinners, and He graciously makes generation after generation aware of it through His supernatural revelation. But a supernatural redemption, reported through supernatural revelation, would be of no profit without a supernatural salvation applied to believers through faith and by the Holy Spirit. Supernaturalism is, in short, the very heart of the Christian religion. Supernaturalism is Christianity in its deepest evangelical and reformed piety and its most profound sense of the dependence upon God. Here in brief, says Zaspel, who's written a tremendous work on Warfield's theology, here in brief is the summary of B.B. Warfield's career. He was about the work. of showing that Christianity is a supernatural faith and truth brought into the natural world and applied to people in the natural world made to live in a supernatural world for eternity. So what does that commitment to supernaturalistic Christianity have to do with our topic of the Lord's Supper? I believe that if Warfield had lived long enough, he may have pushed on to add a sub-point to his view of supernatural salvation called supernatural sacraments. It's unnecessary to choose between a supernaturally transcendent Christianity and imminent or with us Christianity. Our gracious God closes the gap between his transcendence in our current existence as Christian disciples on a regular basis through the Lord's Supper. Heaven comes to earth regularly through the Lord's Supper. As close as He has come through the incarnation and the inscripturation of His revelation, there remains a distance of time between the original event in our daily lives. Yes, the Holy Spirit applies both to us through emotional consolation and illumination. But only in the Lord's Supper Is there the promise of the regularly scheduled, predictable experience of supernatural promises being sealed to our consciences like a king's signet ring in hot wax? There will always be those unexpected sometimes when a light surprises with healing in its wings, when you mysteriously feel the Lord with us, or when his word finds us powerfully in our time of need. But we are not left to such iterative experiences of supernatural comfort. Jesus loved us so much that he instituted a supper. Jesus loved us so much he instituted a supper which he commanded his church to celebrate often So that the Christian could mark it on his calendar and say on that day Heaven will come to earth and seal all of God's promises Which are yes and amen and Jesus to my heart Warfield A couple of Warfield's articles, these two in particular, The Fundamental Significance of the Lord's Supper is the title of one. The other, The Communion in Christ's Body and Blood. He mostly restates traditional Calvinistic sacramental theology. For instance, in The Fundamental Significance, Warfield found occasion to emphasize a point he was often burdened to make concerning the price of Christ's redemption. Warfield often railed against those who cheapened the word redeem. In other words, he was concerned that already in his day the word redeem had been cheapened from its biblical significance and as a gospel preacher as well as a technical theologian, Warfield was insistent that redemption never be used without emphasizing the cost implied. In the Scriptures, redemption always involves a significant cost. When we fail to remember that redemption's bloody price, that redemption's bloody price, we fail to emphasize the infinite sacrifice our Savior made for our salvation. Therefore, in true Puritan fashion, Warfield insisted that the fundamental significance of the Lord's Supper is conveyed by its identification with the Passover meal and reminded us that the Old Testament faithful were redeemed from Egypt by the blood of a sacrificed lamb and at the cost of many firstborn children. Likewise, by this meal we remember chiefly that Christ, our Passover, is sacrificed for us. At the same time, Warfield urged a point especially trumpeted by John Calvin, that the Lord's Supper is a Eucharistic sacrifice. It celebrates the finished work of Christ and the effects of His death. Warfield argued that Christ instituted the Lord's Supper as a new feast after the Passover, not before and not during the Passover. But he instituted it after the Passover, following the sacrifice of the Passover lamb. The Lord's Supper is not akin to offering a sacrifice on the altar, but rather the Thanksgiving feast by worshippers following the sacrifice. Here's what Warfield said. That's the fundamental significance of the Lord's Supper. Whenever the Lord's Supper is spread before us, we are invited to take our place at the sacrificial feast, the substance of which is the flesh and blood of the victim, which has been sacrificed once for all at Calvary. And as we eat these and their symbols, we are certainly not repeating his sacrifice, nor yet prolonging it, but continuing that solemn festival upon which it was instituted by Christ. by which we testify our participation in the altar and claim our part in the benefits bought by the offering immolated on it. Therefore, the believer, he says, must come to the table with thanksgiving and joy and celebration. I try to remind my elders of that. I say, you know, at least smile when you come back up the aisle. We won't get to dancing with the elements for another couple hundred years, but we can at least smile. This is a happy thing. We're not re-sacrificing Christ. It's not a memorial of our sins. It's a memorial that our sins have been satisfied for once and for all. And all the more we must do so, he assured. because we participate in the altar, 1 Corinthians 10. It's no mere remembrance, but an occasion when the Holy Spirit binds the secured benefits of Christ's finished work to our consciences. Picking up on another Calvinistic theme, Warfield underscores the significance of communion with Christ's body and blood. Communion implies not only an intensification of the believers' union with Christ's physical work on our behalf, but with brothers and sisters in Christ. The whole Christian world is a Passover company gathered around the Paschal Lamb, and by their participation in it, exhibiting their essential unity. All over the world, celebrating the same Supper, we demonstrate that we are one body. Now, his third title in the Supper was a bit more novel for the dogmatic theologian. Here it is, The Posture of the Recipients at the Lord's Supper. A footnote to the history of Reformed usages. Man, I'm sure they got a lot of readers. The posture of the recipients of the Lord's Supper, a footnote to the history of Reformed usages. But he didn't have an art of titling his articles, but they were great articles. Though careful not to be as insistent as his forebears like Knox, who said everybody should eat at the long tables, Warfield does conclude that kneeling is not appropriate given that it is a Eucharistic sacrifice rather than an expiatory sacrifice, and the receiving from a common table is preferred to walking up to it given that it is a family meal. Though Warfield is clear that posture at the table is ultimately a matter of adiaphora or unimportance, such scholarly effort on such a novel theme reveals Warfield's heart as a churchman. In his study he had learned from Philip Schoff that Zwingli, Ulrich Zwingli, had initiated communion seasons for his congregation and in order for them to feel that this was a family meal rather than an austere ecclesiastical rite that they could only observe, he removed the ornate altar pieces and replaced them with wooden tables. Beautiful golden altars were taken away and plain wooden tables put in their place. And instead of serving the elements in gilded vessels, he served the bread on wooden plates and the wine from wooden cups, just like they would have used at home. He also brought to light that Thomas Chalmers, the Scottish pastor of the 1800s, actually rearranged the pews in St. John's Church in Glasgow, so as to give the feel even to a large congregation that they were seated as a family around a table. As Warfield would make clear in his volumes on perfectionism, the distinguishing characteristic of Christianity, its unique bridging of the supernatural and the natural, is that Christ is present with his people. And nowhere in all the celebrations of the church is that point made more explicit than in the serving of the Lord's Supper, where Christ is displayed as hosting a meal with his family gathered around. Nobody wants to be surrounded by an unhappy family. He wants to be surrounded by a thankful family. And Warfield's ability to mine treasures from Scripture and cut them into dazzling theological stones makes us jealous for him to do the same with every conceivable topic like the one before us. However, he was a mere mortal and it appears that he just didn't have time to get to it. So we must be grateful for what we have from him. The best we can do is open the doors he's provided into his seminary notes and retrace their steps to the heritage we share with him. The tenants, the Puritans, and John Calvin. So having looked at what Warfield believed, I want to work our way back gradually to what theology, what theological convictions on grace and obedience and the conditionality and the unconditionality of the covenant, how all of that fed and feeds our robust celebration of the Lord's Supper, inspiring us to obedient, grateful and doxological obedience. So, next topic I want to take up is this topic of orthodoxy. That is, right belief leading to orthopraxy, right action. So the relationship between faith and obedience. From the time of Calvin forward, the Reformed tradition has pursued two basic strategies for maintaining orthodoxy. How do you keep people believing and acting the right way? That's orthodoxy. Now those who have, one is subjective, the other is objective. Those who have sought to preserve orthodoxy by stressing the new birth and inward piety have tended to emphasize the unconditional aspects of the covenant. particularly the passive reception of Christ and his benefits by faith. That is, they've been prone to reject any suggestions that there are conditions to the covenant as a compromise of the free offer of the gospel. On the other hand, those who sought to preserve orthodoxy by more objective means have stressed subscription or external duties, highlighting the conditional aspect of the covenant, especially the requirements of active repentance and obedient faith. Their fear has historically been that unless the conditions are insisted upon, grace will become cheap. The former strategy, that is the subjective one, struggles with the danger of antinomianism, that is against the law or disobedience, and the latter with neonomianism or legalism. Only when the conditional and unconditional aspects of the covenant are kept in balance does a church move forward in a healthy way. In other words, are there conditions to the covenant before you can, as a condition to be remaining Orthodox, or are there no conditions, and if you dare add them, you're a legalist? Well, that's the question. One place where this balance was maintained in Reformed churches was at the communion table. That's my thesis. In the breaking of bread and pouring out of wine, in the reception of the presence of Christ, Reformed believers were urged to live worthy of the gospel of Christ they professed. Ruling elders examined communicants beforehand to determine whether their lives were in fact worthy of the grace of God. And yet, in their sin and failure, these believers were pointed in the communion servant to Christ in his grace appropriated by faith. As a result, one of the best avenues for gauging a healthy balance between subjectivity and objectivity, between piety and orthodoxy, is to consider communion sermons, sermons that were preached on the occasion of the serving of the Lord's Supper. These sermons, the minister would point his listeners both to their duties and to Christ's grace in a way that highlighted the dual purpose of the sacrament of the Lord's Supper. The law college men from whom Warfield was theologically descended were especially adept at this kind of communion discourse. Gilbert tended in particular with his emphasis on the love of Christ and love for Christ was exemplary in his sacramental preaching. Those emphases were heard in his passionate appeal for sinners and saints to receive free grace as well as his exhortation to those who were departing from it to return to it. So what was the instrument that kept those refrains alive in Tennant's preaching? It was a sacramental heritage he inherited, not just from Ulster. but from his Reformed forefathers. Such preaching remained Tennant's key strategy for changing a selfish individualism of the colonies. That's what got me interested in this topic to begin with. When I was a young pastor, I thought I was working for Paul. He thought he was working for me. But when I was a young pastor, I wondered how in the world do I preach to selfish people? And how do I preach to selfish people who are completely comfortable in their selfishness, and think that they're virtuous while they're being selfish, and find no real need for the gospel? And I didn't know much more about the Great Awakening preaching than of Jonathan Edwards, Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God, that I just learned in my school textbooks, as you did. in which I explained to my congregation this past week that those textbooks that most of us studied were heavily influenced by Unitarians, and they conveniently edited out the last half of Edward's sermon, which was to extend wide the arms of Christ and to welcome sinners home, but all we hear is the spider hanging over the cauldron and so forth. And so I suppose that studying this era that I would find that awakening preaching that really worked was hellfire and brimstone preaching. But I was pleasantly surprised to find that what the theme that God used to awaken the colonies, who had a lower church attendance rate than we do today, that the preaching that he used was preaching of the love of God in Christ dramatically displayed on the table of the Lord's Supper. So what drew me to Tenet was this issue in particular. How do you preach to selfish people and then how, when they're converted, do you keep them walking with the Lord? in order to understand why Tenet serves as a worthy model of leadership in his passionate defense and promotion of orthodoxy through the personal appropriation of the covenant in the Lord's Supper. It's important to gain a sweep of the way Reformed theologians have thought about that through the years. This tradition, it seems to me, finds its clearest and earliest articulation in John Calvin. who insisted that there could be no orthodoxy without complementary orthopraxy. Since the Reformation, representatives of the tradition have sought to answer the Roman Catholic charge that a doctrine of imputed righteousness, that is justification through faith alone, leads to antinomianism. I've heard that on more than one occasion. If I, from my Roman Catholic friends in St. Louis, for instance, if I believe what you believe in justification by faith, then I would live like a reprobate. But Rome insisted that justification was imputed immediately in response to infused grace at baptism. or at least held in suspense until it was reached for by good works. In other words, Rome called reformed theological orthodoxy into question because of the lifestyle it presumably would produce. But the continental reformers did not ignore the charge because the relationship between orthodox thought and practice was a key issue for them as well. The reformers strenuously objected to that charge that sovereign, justifying grace leads to spiritual disobedience. On the contrary, they insisted that the realization of grace in Jesus Christ, which satisfied all guilt before the law of God, was alone sufficient to produce a long trajectory of grateful obedience. Likewise, in the 17th century, the Westminster divines insisted that justification and sanctification were indissolubly joined. Justifying faith, they said, was ever accompanied with all other saving grace, including sanctification. John Calvin's rebuttal of the charge that free grace leads to unorthodox behavior was especially creative and effective. In other Reformed and Lutheran manuals, justification was explained before sanctification. You had a chapter on justification, or several, and then some chapters on sanctification. But not Calvin. He started with sanctification. Eight chapters on sanctification. And then, eight chapters on justification, so as to explain how sanctification works. What would eventually be called sanctification in Calvin, Calvin called regeneration. In other words, you're saved, you're saved by justification, and you're saved, which means that you obey. This regeneration or new life comes by faith, the acclaim which joins one to the life of Christ. Therefore, its inherent concern is with holiness and the pursuit of good works which glorify God. In effect, Calvin said more than his Lutheran colleagues, who could give the impression that good works only come as one consciously reflects on justification. Justification entered Calvin's discussion of regeneration later, much more strongly than his contemporaries. He stated that because faith joins to one to Christ, the new life which results cannot help but be characterized by holy living, as Christ cannot be divided into parts. So the two things, justification and sanctification, which we perceive to be united together in Him, are inseparable. The result was an incontrovertible reproof to the Romanist accusation of antinomianism. Here is what grieves me in the debates we have within Reformed theology. We are trying to tear Christ apart by failing to emphasize union with Christ that we are joined to Jesus and Jesus justifies us and Jesus sanctifies us because He is justified and He is sanctified. To be joined to Him is to be joined to both. You can't set up a conference that focuses only on sanctification. You can't set up a conference that focuses only on justification. Because you can't set up a conference that focuses on half Jesus and the other one on half Jesus. Calvin was unshackled from the constraints felt by later Reformed scholastics to place justification prior to sanctification because he rooted both of them in the doctrine of union with Christ, which is prior to all. Calvin's successors did the same thing. The Protestant scholastics found it necessary to define their faith more precisely. That is, they started writing theologies and creeds. and manuals. It was an era of codification, but recent scholarship has shown that contrary to many accusations that these Protestant scholastics, that is the generation that followed Calvin, that they were cold and rigid or simply dead, it's been proven that they were theologians of the heart first, and theologians of the head secondly. Objective truth, they said, is incomplete until it finds its way into subjective piety. Now, how about the Puritans? If the Puritan immediately following Calvin could be characterized as codification of orthodoxy, the Puritan era could be characterized as the development of precisionist piety. They were focused on how you live. Precisionism was an approach to the Christian life that defined itself by punctilious attention to behavior and duty. Over the history of Puritanism, the focus of precisionist piety moved from a corporate effort to reform public manners to an introspective focus on personal transformation. We've seen that kind of move even in my lifetime, in the last 40 years. from theonomy, remember theonomy? That we will eventually take over the country and the world, and we'll set up Christian institutions, and everybody will live by God's laws. Well, in about 20 years, theonomists figured out that wasn't going to work, just like the Puritans in Cromwell's England did. And the Puritans in Cromwell's England, when they figured out they couldn't turn their country into a Christian country, turned inward. And a number of them became exclusively focused, not all Puritans, but some Puritans became focused on trying precisely to define how orthodoxy would be carried out in their churches and their homes. Theonomy to federal vision. Seems to me, you can trace the characters. The characters tend to be the same. The old theonomists have become the new federal visionists. If you don't know what those terms mean, then you can be a perfectly healthy, happy Christian and not know it. Don't worry about it. Come talk to Pastor Thomas about it. Puritans focused their attention on private and familial piety, Sabbatarianism, Bible reading, sermons, worship, catechizing, and small group meetings. The shift produced results, good results mostly. Historian Theodore Dwight Bozeman has argued that Puritanism was by far the most dynamic and influential movement within the Church of England in the period and within about two decades it evolved into a luxuriant spirituality without precedent or peer elsewhere in the Protestant world. But as I said earlier, as it became more and more inwardly focused, it had the tendency of becoming legalistic. I don't want to talk about that, so I'm going to move on to the next thing. And you don't know what that is, so you know what it is. I want to get to the Awakeners. In the next generation, the Great Awakening revived tension between two extremes. The success of that movement, Great Awakening for some of you younger folks, was that period of time in colonial America between 1734-35 and 1745 or so. a dramatic movement of the Holy Spirit among all of the colonies really, but mainly in the northern colonies that resulted in the conversion of about 50,000 souls. Now at the time that was 20% of America's population. Can you imagine a revival today that converted in 10 years 20% of the population? Mark Noll recently argued that Puritanism ended... I don't know how I got up there, sorry. That's the part I didn't want to talk about. The Great Awakening. The central theologian of the awakening Jonathan Edwards provided the corrective in his Religious Affectives, that is between these two extremes of objectivity and subjectivity, in his book Religious Affections. In that work he sought to define from scripture what the true affections of a regenerated heart were and ought to look like. although he dared not lay down infallible tests for identifying them." In other words, he was not a precisionist. That is, I'm going to define how you have to feel and what you have to do and what you have to act like, but I'm going to give you general guidelines. Instead, he put these forward as guidelines which Christians must use with humility to examine themselves and others in order to discern general patterns of the Spirit's renewing work. In doing so, he headed off the extremes of legalism and antinomianism." I challenge you to read religious affections, especially as Presbyterians. Because he's describing, basically, how joy, the joy of the Holy Spirit, should burn its way out of your heart. Somebody ought to be able to see that you're happy sometimes. Somebody ought to see that you're excited when you worship. Somebody ought to hear that your heart is full when you sing. That's a Puritan. However, the tension between objective versus subjective means for preserving individual and corporate orthodoxy did not go away. In Presbyterianism, it arose in the 18th century through the debate over subscription. some led by John Thompson, insisted that orthodoxy could only be maintained in the church by strict verbal subscription to the Westminster Confession of Faith. Others, led by Jonathan Dickinson, insisted that while creedal commitments were important, a pious life was the surest mark of biblical fidelity. Dickinson was not a loose subscriptionist. He just said, you're not going to ensure orthodoxy by just telling people to subscribe. He knew that because he had already learned that in 17th century England, because, you know, all of those folks who were unconverted preaching in their pulpits, not that all were unconverted, but all the folks who were preaching in those pulpits were strict subscriptionists. He said, there must also be the mark, you must also see fruit of the Spirit in someone's life. Purely objective measures failed because some strict subscriptionists fell into immorality and practiced plagiarism. Purely subjective measures fail too, as apparently godly people sometimes espouse Sassanian and Arminian doctrines. Although the 1729 Adopting Act brought peace to the subscription debate, there's a compromise. It was but a temporary and surface cure to a deeper disagreement which would lead to division in the Presbyterian camp by 1741. By the late 1730s, the Great Awakening was becoming a widespread phenomenon in Presbyterians. like Tenet and his brothers, who were, by the way, strict subscriptionists. They just didn't believe that that's what you should use as your only means of preserving orthodoxy. They were participating, these Presbyterian brothers were participating in the Great Awakening with great zest. In fact, Tenet drew more listeners to his preaching than George Whitefield ever did. It's just that George Whitefield was better at talking about himself than Tenet was. Their Reformed and Presbyterian colleagues believed revival to be the only cure for unfaithful living, particularly selfishness. That's the sin that they saw. Selfishness is the problem with this culture. However, other Presbyterian leaders were offended by the social disruption to the point that they divided from the revivalists. You know, it's fine for people to get saved, but it's disrupting everything. They distinguished themselves as the old side and pejoratively referred to the others as the new side. primarily distinguished from the old side in their approach to, and the new side was primarily distinguished from the old side in their approach to preaching. They were convinced that the only cure for selfishness would be preaching that led first to conversion and then to a loving response to the Savior, evidenced by a faithful life. Such preaching did result in the spiritual awakening of a church which had become at ease in Zion. In the midst of this torrent and the tradition of Edwards stood Gilbert Tennant. He preached the same balance as Calvin, John Cotton, and Jonathan Edwards, but with a more concentrated call to believers and non-believers alike to focus their hearts subjectively on the visible sign of the Lord's Supper, God's covenant meal with his people. Tennant insisted that if those believers participated in the supper with Christ-centered faith, then they would nurture an objectively faithful life. Well, before we move on to the topic of the covenant in the next lecture, Let me wrap up this section with one more look at Warfield. Warfield wrote a brilliant piece called, A Brief and Untechnical Statement of the Reformed Faith. It's still a very a nice little pamphlet that you could use to introduce people who say, you say you're Reformed, what are you Reformed from? You know, what is that Reformed faith thing that you're talking about? Well, this is a good primer. And Warfield said in two of those paragraphs something very beautiful. He weaves together this relationship that we've been after. The relationship between faith and obedience, between orthodoxy and orthopraxy, between justification and sanctification, listen to them. Paragraphs 9 and 10 of 13. I believe that the redemption wrought by the Lord Jesus Christ is effectually applied to all his people by the Holy Spirit, who works faith in me and thereby unites me to Christ. renews me in the whole man after the image of God, and enables me more and more to die unto sin and to live unto righteousness. Until this gracious work having been completed in me, I shall be received into glory." in which great hope abiding, I must ever strive to perfect holiness in the fear of God." You hear it there? I'm justified, I'm definitively sanctified, as your pastor told you recently, and I am being progressively sanctified, and the day will come when I will be glorified. In the meantime, I must strive to be obedient. How in the world do those things hold together? We don't know. You just sing the doxology over them. I believe, secondly, I believe that God requires of me under the gospel, first of all, that out of a true sense of my sin and misery and apprehension of His mercy in Christ, I should turn with grief and hatred away from sin and receive and rest upon Jesus Christ alone for salvation. and be accepted as righteous in God's sight only for the righteousness of Christ imputed to me and received by faith alone. And thus and thus only do I believe I may be received into the number and have a right to all the privileges of the sons of God." We'll talk more about that theme of the relationship between the conditionality and the unconditionality of the covenant and then focus on the Lord's Supper in the next hour. So thank you very much for paying attention. Let me close this prayer and then we're going to eat some more or what are we going to do? Yeah. They're going to put the tables back, we're going to have a little dance and then we're going to get back together after. Lord, thank you for these people. It can't be easy to listen to things like this at times, but I so much appreciate their attention and I We most of all appreciate the gospel of the Lord Jesus Christ. And we thank you, Father, that you have seen fit not just to tell us about it, but you have given us this sermon in picture form called the Lord's Supper and baptism too. You touch us in these physical ways. because you want us to know that we know that we are the children of God. Oh Lord, would you not just assure us and comfort us, but in so doing, would you move us out into obedience, into contagious evangelism and merciful service. We pray in Jesus' name. Amen. Good work. I've got to follow up with you over breakfast tomorrow. This has impact on my doctoral studies. Very sensitive, inexpensive. Thank you. Very happy to see you. Good to see you.