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Alright, so week 8 is Calvin's
Doctrine of Salvation in general, and as it turns out, it looks
like we're going to do two weeks of this. There's four sections
that I've divided this into, and I'm really only going to
touch on the first and the second one today, because the second
half of it is sort of Calvin's Doctrine of not only sanctification,
but the Christian life. It's ten chapters in all, so
I will get for sure through chapter 3 today. There is so much there
that's applicable to the church today that some sections I just
want to read, not the whole section, but enough of them where we can
start drawing out some application. But let me read from Ephesians
chapter 2. And while you are turning there,
this is a very famous verse. That is the best verse to launch
off of today. Such a heavy Bible, it's taking the taking the podium
down. Nice. A whopping ESV study Bible. Look at that. Alright, while
you're turning in there, let me pray and we'll get started.
Father, we thank you for this day. Lord, please be with us. Wake us up, Lord, and illuminate
your word even through the study of historic figures that formulated
these doctrines as we consider the doctrine of salvation. I
pray that you would kindle in our hearts again an appreciation
for how you have saved us, a love for talking about these things,
a desire to be practical and liberate those who are suspicious
of these things. So, Lord, clear away the fog
from our own minds so that we can be better servants to others.
And minister your gospel to us again today, we pray in Jesus'
name. Amen. Ephesians chapter 2, verses 8
through 10. And as we read this, let me give you a couple of circles. And you're going to see these
words clearly used by Paul here. I'll complete
this chart when we get done. You're going to see a by, through,
and in. You're going to see an order
here in how we are saved. An order of salvation. This is
not a whole order of salvation, but it is a big picture of it. So Ephesians 2, 8 through 10
Paul says, for by grace you have been saved, through faith, and
this is not your own doing, it is the gift of God, not a result
of works, so that no one may boast. For we are his workmanship,
created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand,
that we should walk in them. So did you see the by, the through,
and the in? I'm sorry, for the four, I'm used to doing the N,
because big-picture Doctrine of Salvation, there's an N. I'll
get to that in a second. Thank you. So the by is obviously
by grace, the through is faith, and in verse 10, the four is
good works. Now that's sort of a microcosm
of part, you might call it a cross-section of part of the Doctrine of Salvation. The one that most concerns us
in Scripture is the one that basically says, by grace, through
faith, in the merits of Christ, or in the performance of Christ.
And since we've already talked about the Atonement, we'll draw
back on that a couple times. But in a lot of ways, Calvin
is going to talk in the first of these four, what I'm calling
these four sections from these ten chapters. In a lot of ways,
what he's going to talk about at first is entirely the relationship
between grace and faith. grace as an efficient cause,
the efficient cause of your salvation, and then faith as the instrumental
cause of your salvation. So, and he didn't really expound
upon Ephesians 2, 8, and 9 in these chapters, at least in the
early going, but Book 3 of the Institutes is entitled, The Mode
of Obtaining the Grace of Christ, the Benefits It Confers, and
the Effects Resulting from It. So notice three implied propositions
in that outline. Salvation has a mode, the mode
of obtaining the grace of Christ. It has benefits, and even those
benefits have other effects. So there's life within this new
life of salvation, grace upon grace. Now this ought to instantly
shed new light, hopefully, on the picture we usually form about
the doctrines of grace. It's bad enough when we think
of Calvinism, When we do that, we tend to think of the five
points in isolation from the rest of the biblical view, which
is an isolation that Reformed theology would never make. But
in addition, we can treat the doctrines of grace as if they're
all about the mode of obtaining this grace, and not about the
newness and finality and the objectivity and the invincibility
of this life. So Calvin is going to talk about,
in a sense, the mode of salvation, namely how God saves us. But he talks about it in the
context of how we obtain. Okay, so I'm going to put more,
we obtain the salvation. Now I hope your antennas are
up when you read something like this. Because, not that we're
trying to react to some bad teaching every time we learn anything
in theology, but this is diametrically opposed. Everything Calvin says
in the first three chapters is diametrically opposed to, for
example, the theology of N.T. Wright. How many times in Wright's
theology did we see that the doctrine of justification in
the Reformed tradition is sort of this how-to manual for how
to get right with God? And I've also heard others criticizing
and making fun of a book title by Billy Graham entitled How
to Become Born Again. Now that's a little bit more
respectable because that title is not entirely helpful. On the other hand, on the other
extreme, is the idea of making fun of the question that the
Philippian jailer had, which was, what do I have to do to
be saved? And so the new theology, if you
can hear it, is always at every point saying that salvation for
the individual is absolutely irrelevant. It may be in the
Bible, but it is a minor note. It's not the sort of thing first
century Jews were obsessing over. They were obsessing over the
end of the world, God's plan to Israel as a nation, God bringing
justice to the nations. They weren't obsessing over how
do I, the individual, obtain salvation. But Calvin is assuming
up front that there's a mode to how God saves us, or a mode
of obtaining God's grace. Now within God's grace, is everything
else in the Christian life, which is what he's going to talk about
in the last five chapters of the opening of Book
3, the Christian life, or sanctification. One of the things you're going
to notice about Calvin's Doctrine of Salvation is it's, in a sense, out of order.
It's not the same order that you would find in a normal systematic
theology textbook. Normally, in what's called the
order of salvation, you would see something like
this. You would see all the way back
in eternity, election. You would see back in history
and time, redemption. And then you would have that
sort of golden chain of salvation after that. Issuing forth in
the call, regeneration. And then I'm going to run out
of room here, but things such as justification, adoption, sanctification,
which happens throughout the course of the Christian life,
and then finally glorification. That's what you would normally
see in a doctrine of salvation in terms of the order. Calvin's
going to talk about sanctification before he explicitly draws out
justification. Because right now he's giving
you a big picture of the doctrine of salvation, And when we get
to Josh's week about justification, he's going to hone in on, now
why is he doing this? He's doing this because he's
in a controversy, he's in an argument with Rome. And so much
of what he's doing is driven by, and sometimes he's arguing
against Anabaptists or against Michael Servetus or against some
other fringe group. So what we're going to talk about
today is the relationship between grace and faith. And then we're
going to start to talk about proper instruments of grace. And so you have to maintain this
language that we've used throughout of the difference between an
efficient cause and an instrumental cause. The debate in the Middle
Ages was not about the efficient cause of your salvation. Rome
and the Reformers and the whole Catholic tradition agreed that
a sinner cannot make himself alive. They understood that grace
precedes faith, grace precedes justifying the act which justifies
you, in the sense how you obtain it. The only debate was over
instrumental means, the means of that grace. So the Roman Catholic
Church had a much more sound doctrine of salvation than modern
evangelicalism does. Modern evangelicalism is way
past Rome, off the reservation, in re-embracing the Pelagian
heresy. which Rome rejected for a thousand
years and it's only at the Reformation and the Council of Trent that
they started to explicitly start embrace or inject different elements
of it back into their doctrines. So the big idea, and this is
going to be the big idea this week and next week. I'm going
to throw three H-words at you about the Calvinistic doctrine
of salvation. I'm going to maintain that it
is historic Calvin's going to continue to
quote from Church Fathers to make this point. He doesn't even
have to do that in one sense. He can quote from the canons
of the Council of Ephesus in 481 and Orange in 529, both of
which condemned the original Pelagian heresy and the semi-Pelagian
heresy. The Calvinistic doctrine of salvation
is holistic, much to the surprise of the emergent types today.
In other words, it encompasses everything good that could be
pointed out in an N.T. Wright or somebody like that
about the new creation. For example, sometimes you'll
be talking to somebody who's not Reformed. You'll talk about the
centrality of the cross. You'll bring out points such
as Romans 3, 23 through 28, about that being the center of the
Bible. and the importance that Christ's death does something
critically important for your old man. That person will typically
say, yes, but what about the Holy Spirit? What about the new
life? As if that's somehow some other, some opposing idea. So we're going to talk about
the Calvinistic doctrine of salvation being holistic. And then thirdly, because of that, you can use
the word hope-filled or hopeful. In other words, it is practical. It is, in the minds of the first
reformers, they were doing the work of liberators here. They
were liberating the captives from a system of religion that
was inherently abusive of real people. And so they expected
their doctrines to have the exact opposite effect. Now again, the
Institutes comes with its own outline and the first 10 chapters,
let me just read the headings of the first 10 chapters of Book
3, Number one, the benefits of Christ made available to us by
the secret operation of the Spirit. Secondly, of faith, the definition
of it is particular properties. And then the third chapter, regeneration
by faith, repentance and you might ask
what about that order why is he why is he calling it that
we will we will get to that and explain that that's really what
we're going to talk about today there's a lot in those first
three chapters four and five he gets specific about the instruments
of grace the proper instruments of grace it's called penitence
as explained in the sophistical jargon of the schoolmen. So right
there he's going to be criticizing the way that Rome's system has
borrowed from the philosophical language of the schoolmen, of
the scholastics from the Middle Ages. Widely different from the
purity required of the gospel of confession and satisfaction.
So there Calvin is purely doing polemics against Rome and against
their abusive system. Fifthly, of the modes of supplementing
satisfaction in other words, indulgences and purgatory. So
four and five is critical work against Rome. So six through
ten is all about the Christian life. Six, the life of a Christian
man, scriptural arguments exhorting to it. Seven, a summary of the
Christian life of self-denial. Eight, of bearing the cross,
one branch of self-denial. Nine, of meditating on the future
life. Ten, how to use the present life
and the comforts of it. So, you have to be reminded here
as we start of the overall history of the doctrine of salvation,
or soteriology. That's what it's called in theology,
the doctrine of salvation. So we can understand why book
three is structured the way that it is. Calvin didn't spend as
much time arguing for the primacy of grace because there was never
any debate about that until the explicit humanism of the following
generation of rationalistic theology. There was always an Erasmus that
tried to have things both ways, but in terms of official teaching
of the church, All of Christendom. This is a crucial point here.
I'm going to read what I have here in my notes and then I'm
going to get more explicit because this is the kind of thing that I don't
want to assume that you hear what I'm saying. Because if you
hear what I'm saying, you pretty much have to do everything you're
doing in life differently than you had been doing it before
you came to our church. So I don't want to take any chances that
you're not hearing what I'm saying. In terms of the official teaching
of the Church, all of Christendom culminating in the canons that
condemned Pelagianism and Semi-Pelagianism, all of Christendom acknowledged
that grace preceded and determined saving faith. The debate in the
16th century was over the instruments of that grace. Prior to starting churches, I
did not know a single person that understood that, or had
even heard that. Never knew anybody that understood
that. That's a problem. Big problem. So what do I mean? I mean that what you go around
tacitly referring to as Calvinism was what everybody understood
Christianity to be prior to a hundred years ago in many places, prior
to 200 years ago in virtually all places. Christians in all
the nations of Europe understood that when people were deviating
towards things such as Amiraldianism, Arminianism, Socinianism, and
so on, that you had intensely subtle deviations from Calvinistic
orthodoxy that people understood to be atheistic at its root. This is going to take a lot of
work for people to understand. Number one, because I think a
lot of the emotional reactions. Guys in the modern world tend
to think like chicks. And God made women to think like
that. That's totally cool for women. Here's what I don't mean. This is not an IQ issue. This
is an issue of emotional implications, relational implications. God
made women nurturers, and when they hear things like what I
just said, they hear things like, therefore Johnny's not a Christian.
Guys aren't supposed to do that. They're supposed to think about
the council emphasis in orange, because that's what I just talked
about. They're supposed to say things like, is that true? 25
canons? Let me Google that. That's what you're supposed to
think like. And if I'm wrong, well then let your argument be
that. But at no point did I say Johnny's not a Christian. That's
a separate question. That's a good question. There
is a link between what you believe about the doctrines of salvation,
what pastors and teachers and seminaries believe about the
doctrines of salvation, and then the gospel that's actually preached,
which gospel the Bible says is the only thing that saves people.
So there's a strong connection between the two. But the connection
is not, if you don't understand this, you're not saved. So we
have to be able to separate those two things. So you said it's the instrumental
means that they disagreed upon by the 16th century. My question is, wasn't Rome betraying
the sufficient cause because of their instrumental means?
Yes, and that can seem like, wait a minute, which is it? Did
they agree about the supremacy of grace, and all they disagreed
about was, is it faith alone, or is it faith through the working
of the works? ex opere operata as the Roman
Catholic Church taught. They would say, of course you're
justified by faith. And even the Judaizers in Galatia would
have believed something a lot closer to sola fide than most
evangelicals in the modern world. So, am I saying that the debate
is therefore about minutia? Not at all. Because depending
on where you land here, you actually wind up undermining this. And
the argument from Luther and Calvin was that Rome had undermined
its millennia-long teaching about Pelagianism, about things such
as original sin, about human inability, about God's regenerative
activity, and justification, the merit of Christ on the cross,
all things which the Catholic Church believed rightly about
on paper for a thousand years. but which the encroaching humanism
in the Middle Ages had started to supplement this idea of cooperative
or meritorious grace. Which, by the way, is that not
an oxymoron? Cooperative or meritorious grace? Meritorious grace. Doesn't Romans
11.6 explicitly say, if it is by works, then it's not of grace?
So the idea of meritorious grace, what we said yesterday, it's
kind of like saying a a French war hero. It's almost the same
thing. So yes, depending on where you
land on here, you start to undermine the idea that it's all of grace
when you start messing with that sort of thing. So yes, absolutely.
So we're not saying that because their debate was so subtle from
our vantage point, Therefore, it wasn't critical. No, it was
absolutely critical. We don't understand why subtle
things are critical things today. So, what does Calvin say about
the relationship between grace and faith? We've already seen
in Ephesians 2, 8, and 9 that there is an order here, that
you can't reverse that order. The benefits of Christ made available
to us by the secret operation of the Spirit. That's chapter
1. before I get to chapter 3 just remember from that chapter heading
of chapter 1 and what we're going to talk about that when Calvin
says that regeneration is by faith In chapter 3, he's talking
about something different. He's not going back on what he's
saying here in chapter 1. There he's linking the whole
act of regeneration as, in other words, he's defining regeneration
there as the transformation, the total new life, including
things such as repentance and faith and so on. So he's treating
that word differently in chapter 3. Here, he's saying the benefits
of Christ, namely the grace of Christ, made available to us
by the secret operation of the Spirit. So the first words here,
I'm going to do a lot of application, it's going to sound like I'm
picking on the whole church world today, but I can't help it. When you read the first three
chapters, everything is saying exactly what the problem is today.
Everything Rome is doing, except the trappings. There was a different
priesthood, there was a different external thing, but ultimately
it's the same problem. So the first words here in chapter
1 is a jolt to our modern pretensions. He says, We must now see in what
way we become possessed of the blessings which God has bestowed
on his only begotten Son, not for private use, but to enrich
the poor and needy. See, the Reformers understood
the controversy with Rome to be a matter of whether or not
real human souls would be liberated from captivity and abuse or whether
they would remain there in torture in a hell before hell. Contrary
to what Rob Bell believes, the debate in the Reformation was
not just about how to do church, and contrary to his latest book
apparently, which is about how the debate, or it's a debate,
the destinies of heaven and hell turn out to be not so much real
things at all. The Reformers understood the
exact opposite. that people were being abused
by this false system of religion. We think that these things are
neat little games to be held in private, maybe, if at all.
But they didn't. They understood that salvation
involves two parties. A savior and a sinner being saved. And that implies that redemption
has two actions. So let me draw this on the board.
The two actions in the drama of redemption. Number one, the
accomplishment of redemption in Christ, and then really what
Calvin is talking about now, because he's already talked about
that, he's talked about the work of Christ. So he's talked about redemption accomplished, so there is an objective, historic
ground zero, but then there's a point in time whenever, where it is applied. And that is the work of the Holy
Spirit. And that involves modes, benefits
conferred upon individuals. Somebody, an individual asking
a question like, what must I do to be saved? That's not a trivial
question if you're the one winding up in hell if you don't get that
answer. So the first practical question
we have to ask is, what is the link between the redemption accomplished
and applied on the one hand, and grasping the doctrine of
salvation on the other? So this is the context you have
to read Calvin in here. And quite honestly, this is the
context in which you have to understand the debate today between
people like NC Wright and the traditional evangelical world.
Because there is a link between this, namely these two things,
on the one hand. And then my question, which is
what must I do to be saved, or my grasp, or my understanding
of the doctrines of grace, of salvation. There's a link between
those two things. What's the link? I can see a
potential objection here. I understand why the doctrine
of God is essential to the faith. I understand why the doctrine
of Christ is essential to the faith. I understand why the doctrine
of Scripture is essential to the faith. But why is the doctrine
of salvation essential to the faith? since salvation, according
to you Calvinists, salvation is by grace. God is the one that
does it. What difference does it make
if I get it wrong, since God is the one accomplishing it anyway?
If I get it wrong, then grace covers that. Isn't that one of
the many sins that he dies for me for? At first that can seem
like a very understandable confusion, but there is a link between this,
especially this application, and this. We're going to argue
here that wrong views of this wind up not applying this. In other words, the psychological
disposition you have, the view you have, the opinion you have,
the posture of your soul toward Christ actually matters. So the answer to this question,
what's the link, is that the application of redemption by
the Spirit is an action taken upon us in which our minds are
actively looking, contemplating, and assenting to redemptive realities. And how we see them goes a long
way to whether we see them at all in a saving way. So you see
that. How we see this, and I could
go through the scriptures and talk about the importance of
how we see. For example, 1 Corinthians 15,
let me just read that really quick. 1 Corinthians 15, verses
1 and 2. The biblical authors don't struggle
with the tension between God doing it all and the importance
of us looking at it the right way. 1 Corinthians chapter 15,
verses 1 and 2, Paul is reminding the Corinthian Church of something.
He says, Now I would remind you, brothers, of the gospel I preached
to you, which you received, in which you stand, and by which
you are being saved, if you hold fast to the word I preached to
you, unless you believed in vain. Now notice the two conditional
words, if and unless. So in the first place, the doctrines
of grace, the doctrines of salvation, by the way, I'm not going to
take anything for granted. The word gospel simply means good news. That
means it means good content, how we're saved. In other words,
it is a synonym for the doctrines of salvation. How many times
do we see that in the modern world? The idea that the gospel
means something completely different than the doctrines of grace or
the doctrines of salvation. The doctrines of grace, broadly
defined, means the same thing as the gospel. Gospel means good
news, news about stuff, facts about stuff that happened. But
Paul is saying here that this gospel is the instrument, the
instrumental cause, the material that you're looking at that is
causing you to be saved. So the biblical authors understand
a link between my view toward the cross and the Holy Spirit's
application of the cross to me. And the link is that the Holy
Spirit applies it to my mind. The human soul is fundamentally,
basically, at the lens where it takes things in, intellectually. Our souls are intellects. with a will. Jonathan Edwards
said, the will is the mind choosing. Our problem, right up front,
is we have a philosophical assumption that's not from the Bible in
the modern world. We believe in an ancient heresy called Gnosticism,
at least with respect to the mind. We don't have categories
to grasp the connection between the application of redemption
by the Spirit and the importance of believing the right things
about the gospel. Now that raises a whole lot of
questions about what constitutes sufficient gospel knowledge. Those are good questions. We
can get to that. But at least let's start out
by saying there is a link between my understanding, my view toward
the cross, and the application of the Holy Spirit. Because the
definition of the application of the Holy Spirit is going to
be a bunch of stuff applied to the mind. a bunch of stuff appealing
to the mind, showing up, representing itself on the mind. That's a
dirty thing for us today. The mind, that means only smart
people will be saved. A couple bad assumptions there.
Number one, the things you most need for salvation are the simplest
and most repeated things in the Bible. Number two, you're assuming
that people don't work... when you hear the word intellect,
you're hearing some kind of... you have in your mind like the
faculty at Harvard or something. Okay? God made man and woman
and everybody with an intellect, with a soul, with a mind. This
is the way it shows up to us. So we have to get rid of some
of these philosophical assumptions if we're going to understand
this at all. So the application of redemption by the Spirit is
an action taken upon us, in which our minds are actively looking,
contemplating, and assenting to redemptive realities. And
how we see them goes a long way to whether we see them in a saving
way. Calvin's logic in this first section is crucial, and it progresses
like this. Number one, if we are not united
to Christ as individuals, then he says in 1.1, then nothing
which he suffered and did for the salvation of the human race
is of the least benefit to us." See what Calvin's saying so far?
There is something called our union with Christ, and he is
saying that if we have not been united to Christ in some way,
as individuals, then nothing which he suffered and did for
the salvation of the human race is of the least benefit to us.
And number two, if the Holy Spirit, and this is at the end of section
one, if, quote, the Holy Spirit is the bond by which Christ affectionately
binds us to himself. So let me draw this out so far.
Here's how his logic is progressing. Number one, if we don't have
union with Christ, then we can't be saved. So you need that. And
then secondly, the Holy Spirit is the bond by which we are united
to Christ. We need to be united to Christ.
We need to be united to His work. The Holy Spirit is what does
this. So, if those two things are necessary, then it follows
that whatever the Holy Spirit communicates to us is going to
be essential for this salvation to occur. So, study the New Testament. What the Holy Spirit communicates
to us as believers, that is going to be essential for this salvation
to occur. The communication of this blessing
takes the form of a seal. Calvin goes through all of these
things in section 2. A seal, a washing, a quickening,
and a love. But these things are all commended
to the mind. When the Bible speaks about the
Holy Spirit sealing us, washing us, quickening us, and giving
us his own love, these are things that are communicated first to
the mind. God made us rational beings.
with this mind we perverted his image and we fell, and through
this same mind he is going to restore us. And so much of the
aversion to the importance of the doctrines of grace really
turn out to be nothing but gnostic disparagements of the mind as
such. Any questions at all about that first section and a half
in chapter one? Because he moves from our union
with Christ, to the Holy Spirit being the bond, to the conclusion
Therefore, it matters what you believe. What the Holy Spirit
communicates to us is what is happening in regeneration. We've got a lot of problems here.
We're anti-intellectual. We've never heard of this doctrine,
union with Christ. Now, if you've studied theology
for a little bit, you've heard of it. But it's not really talked
about much. I suspect that one of the reasons
it's not talked about much is that you'd have to deal with
things like limited atonement if you did. Because the Bible
is constantly teaching us that those of us that are in Christ
have been put into his body, into his death, into his resurrection,
and therefore he's praying for the same people he died for.
And that creates problems if you don't like that. Yep? So
is this focused primarily on the power of the gospel going
towards a non-believer? faith, or is it talking about
sanctification? Both. Both, ultimately. Because
what Calvin's going to remember, that second point I made in the
big idea, his salvation, his doctrine of salvation, a real
doctrine of salvation is holistic. So the same things God is communicating
to us in Regeneration, He's continuing to communicate to us. The very
same things that grow and nourish our soul, and that passage in
1 Corinthians 15 and 1 and 2 really cement that home. The gospel
that you first believed in which you stand, by which you are being
saved. So, yeah, the same gospel that
saves us at the outset saves us continually until the end. So hopefully we get the link
between the application of redemption, which is the Spirit's work, which
is what he's talking about. Remember, this whole book in the Doctrine
of Salvation is how, or by what mode, the grace of Christ is
obtained by the individual sinner. So immediately he's fast-forwarding
to the work of the Spirit upon the individual. saving the individual. You pretty much have to cut out
the third book of the Institutes if you agree with N.T. Wright
about the non-importance of the individual obtaining or considering
modes by which he is to be saved. But that is the dominant theology
in the emerging church today. and not just by churches that
call themselves emerging. That is the dominant idea that
the doctrines of salvation are not really essential parts of
Christianity. They were applicable for middle-aged
people that were really warped in a state of morbid introspection
and things like that, but it's not really the big thing for
people in China and India. It certainly wasn't what first
century Jews were thinking about. That's psychotic, to be honest
with you. I remember you said that oftentimes people get saved
in online churches and then they learn theology later. So that's
true. Yeah. Thanks be to God. That's right. No, that's one
of those moments where you're working through it and you're
like, Yes, it makes perfect sense. So if salvation was legitimate,
the Holy Spirit really did legitimate the work, it's just later on
in life that he comes in terms of what the gospel really is
in depth and what happens to them. And then if they don't
ever get that knowledge, they just suffer malnourishment. Yes. Yeah, they could be in one of
two classes of people. They could be one of those people that is a stillborn Christian,
which in a sense Calvin's going to address this question in Chapter
2. this question of knowledge and
the relevance, not only that of being saved, but also distinguishing
between somebody who's just in one of these stillborn states
or somebody who is pressing on versus the idea that knowledge
really doesn't matter as a pretext for justifying And he calls it
implicit faith. We'll get to that. But Rome had
a doctrine of implicit faith that is indistinguishable, except
in words, from what you hear when you bump into the average
churchgoer today and you bring up these things and they say,
well, come on now, they're trying or don't judge or something like
that. They're in the building, that's
all that matters, and at least they're doing something. All
those different things, they're drawing back on, they're not
explicitly drawing back on this, but it's identical to the Roman
doctrine of implicit faith. So we will get to that. As an early clue to how different
the classical biblical mind saw this holistic salvation from
the way that sometimes this quote-unquote new Calvinism today often does,
Calvin reminds us in 1 section 2 that the spirit is called the
spirit of sanctification. And that implies a separation
from this age just as much as he accomplishes our union with
Christ. So, though Calvin's going to
have a lot to say about the Christians' exciting work in this world later
on, there's an important sense in which union with Christ is
severing from the world. So he focuses on other titles
given to the Holy Spirit in chapter 1, section 3. The Holy Spirit
is called the Spirit of Adoption. Also the Spirit is said to be
life because of righteousness, water, fire, he's compared to
a fountain, or is the hand by which God exerts his power. So
by contemplating the unity and diversity of the Spirit's work
of applying the work of Christ, we can see that there is never
a tension between salvation as a contemplated experience In
other words, an intellectual grasp of the doctrines of grace.
There's never a tension between salvation as a contemplated experience
and as an active experience. What's that phrase you always
hear? Sometimes you've just got to put away the driver's manual
and get behind the wheel. Deeds not creeds. The meat is
in the street. All these different things to
suggest that there is this inverse relationship between thinking
about stuff through doctrine and doing stuff. But by contemplating
the unity and the diversity of the Spirit's work in applying
the work of Christ, you can see that there is never a tension
between salvation as a contemplated experience and as an active experience. The modern Gnostic Christian
has the idea that intellectual activity is inherently paralyzing
to other activities of the soul and body. But the order is important. Notice that Calvin says that
of all the powers that the Spirit communicates to us, in chapter
1, section 4, he says, faith is his principal work. So if we picture this act of
God, the act of Holy Spirit giving us this dynamic new life, the
main energy he gives to us, according to Calvin, is to do something
passive. The first thing he gives to us
is to look, to look at him, to look outside of ourselves. This
is a revolution in thought for everything that we hear today.
To think and to receive today is treated as a synonym for doing
nothing. If you come to church, you either
come to a church to receive and be inwardly driven, or you do
what we ought to be doing, which is getting on the mission of
Jesus and doing. You see how those two things are separated,
divorced, treated as inherently incompatible with each other.
Calvin is absolutely shredding that idea and saying that these
things always only go together. Any questions about Chapter 1? If not, I will go on to Chapter
2, which is called Of Faith, the definition of it, and its
particular properties. So, Chapter 2 is one of those
massive chapters in the Institutes. There are 43 sections in all.
It consists of three parts, basically, a definition of faith, then a
fuller definition of faith, sort of an exposition of that definition,
and then an explanation of faith's relationship to hope and love.
The first thing that Calvin has to do in defining faith is to
show its relationship to knowledge. Because of what he's already
talked about, namely the mode of grace being obtained by the
individual, he has to show the relationship between faith and
knowledge. since the first ingredient of
faith involves the truth believed. So when God is lowered and man
is raised in history, here's what happens. People tend to
view faith as either hyper-objective or hyper-subjective. Let me draw
that out as best I can here. Here you have, remember the subject
is the knower or the experiencer. He's going to be facing that
way, that's why I'm going that way here. He's active, so he's
not like us. He's not really driven. He's
moving toward a particular object And since we're talking about
the gospel, we'll symbolize that by a cross. Over here by the cross,
I'm going to put the object. And over here in the faith, of
this person I'm going to put the subject. Now, of course,
the Holy Spirit's application of redemption is an objective
reality too, but we're just speaking loosely here. We're just speaking
one thing at a time. So, when God is lowered and man
is raised in history, people tend to view faith as either
hyper-objective or hyper-subjective. Meaning, they treat it objectively
at the expense of the subjective experience, or they treat it
as subjectively against the objective reality. So Calvin first raises
the problem of the hyper-objective impression of faith that countless
people receive from the medieval church. And here there is a link,
again, between nominalism and nominal Christianity. You're
going to see some links. When you use that about church
culture today, nominal Christians, what do you tend to mean by that? Yeah, Christian in name only. So on paper, sort of, they're
Christians. By association, they're Christians. Okay? And so what Calvin was
looking at is this impression that was created in the Middle
Ages of faith as, quote, common assent to the gospel history. You say, well that's a medieval
problem. But I don't know how many people I have asked, so what did Jesus
do? What's the gospel? And they'll
say something like, well, Jesus died for the sins of the world,
and they might as well end that sentence with yadda yadda yadda.
Because what they've just said is, I believe that Jesus was
a man that lived 2,000 years ago, healed a bunch of people,
died on the cross for the sins of sinners. And that's true.
And that must be believed in order to believe the gospel.
But is that what saving faith is? Is that the whole thing?
Is that the essence of it? And notice at this point that
when you say, wait a minute, wait a minute, they're trying,
that's good enough, that is implicit faith, that's a seed of faith.
Don't judge them, but that's not the issue. What's the problem?
Before I even get into this, just what's the problem with
that? If all I say is, Jesus died on a cross in real history
for sinners, I'm a sinner, even if I add, I'm a sinner, I don't
want to go to hell, Jesus did that, what have I not done yet
in that sentence? I haven't repented. I haven't
owned it. I haven't at any point said, for me! So, we're not judging
words and performance here. We're trying to drive to the
point. Do you understand that there's a personal trust issue
here? Do you understand that if he died for individuals, these
aren't just cardboard cutouts. These are real people. You're
one of those real people. This either applies to you or
you will experience the wrath of God. So what Calvin was looking
at here is this idea of faith as common assent to the gospel
history. Facts. which tends to obscure
the personal crisis that should be felt when viewing Jesus crucified. When Jesus is viewed, as Paul
said, publicly portrayed as crucified, there should be a crisis in your
heart. There should be a crisis in your
mind. You should be thinking, I did
that. I need some way around this.
I need a solution to this problem. The problem is not just intellectual.
The problem is I have done something, some moral division between me
and God has to be resolved. So this must be a deeply seeded
error because even in our day which hates objectivity, remember
this is the hyper-objective view of faith, even in our day which
hates hyper-objectivity, ironically, the Christian message is treated
as a set of remote facts that the seeker church took for granted
and which the emergent church is embarrassed by. but they both
still have a form of hyper-objectivity which keeps people from personally
owning the reality as sweeping our whole lives off of our feet.
As Augustine is quoted here by Calvin in section two, the thing
to be known is whither we are to go and by what way. In other
words, when we talk about the doctrines of salvation, we're
talking about something that has already swept us off of our
feet, either in the column of reprobate or in the column of
the elect. We're dealing with something
that we are wrapped up in and that concerns us ultimately. The parallel between the Middle
Ages and the present day are bursting forth in every sentence
of this section. He asks of the proper and charitable
notion of implicit faith. So here's where we're going to
get to it in chapter 2, section 2. Implicit faith. Is it faith,
Calvin asks, to understand nothing and merely submit your convictions
implicitly to the church? Isn't it interesting the parallels
between the Roman Catholic Church in the Middle Ages and the seeker-friendly
church of today? Is it faith to understand nothing
and merely submit your convictions implicitly to the church. All
this is to say that the Holy Spirit regenerates via the intellect. But there is an infinite treasure
of things which we are never going to know and under which
we bow in humility and we coexist with other people in charity,
other people in other churches. But, so Calvin's allowing for
that. He's saying, in a sense, like you said before, people
get saved in the Roman Catholic Church. in his day, that would
make a lot more sense in our day. But it still happens, I'm
sure, at some level. People get saved in those churches. We all got saved in Armenian
churches. Much greater numbers will be
saved in Armenian churches than the Roman Catholic Church. Okay? That makes sense. We're not judging
people's souls here. We are talking about the purity
of the gospel and how important that is to go out. And so Calvin
said, even granting that, chapter 2, section 3, under this pretext,
to honor ignorance tempered with humility with the name of faith
is most absurd. So he's saying, I will grant
you that that's happening everywhere and that God blesses his gospel
in spite of our wrong presentations of the gospel. He still blesses
it. But to call that saving faith, to call ignorance saving faith
is not helpful. That's me saying it in a nice
way. because of the way the Holy Spirit
applies redemption. In other words, when people get
saved in churches that do not properly communicate the gospel,
it is because God overcomes the lack of information. I can tell
you, in my own experience at a charismatic church, I was saved
by the same gospel that you would be saved at a Calvinistic church. It's the same gospel, but God
had to smuggle it in. And it wasn't hard to do. There
was Bibles on my shelf that I wouldn't have read without the Holy Spirit
doinking me. There were books by A.W. Tozer laying around in
that church. The gospel got through. The content
of what Christ did on the cross got through. So, when you're
saved in those churches, those are not counterexamples of what
we're saying. That's more proof of what we're saying. The thing
that saved you, and is not saving a lot of other people there,
is the same gospel that got through. So in spite of the attempt to
suppress the information in those churches. So what we're saying
right now is that it's bad to suppress that information. That's
all we're saying. We're not saying that therefore
the people that are saved there are less saved or something like
that. That's not really the point. So Calvin is not denying that
there is such a thing that we might call implicit faith, or
a simple faith, or a seed of faith, or a stillborn Christian,
whatever terms you want to use. He's not denying that. But when
the Bible describes it in the context, it's always an expectation
for an immediate deeper never-ending progress in knowledge. In other
words, any time in the Bible somebody needs to learn more,
say Apollos, somebody takes them aside and learns them more. Okay? When the disciples were ignorant
about the bread that Jesus was talking about, beware of the
leaven of the Sadducees and Pharisees, and they said, what? We didn't
bring bread? You didn't bring bread? Remember what Jesus says later?
Are your hearts so hardened because they didn't understand what he
meant. That's weird. I thought ignorance was innocence. That
was a weird reaction to say that was actually sinful for them
not to know. But it was. It was something
they should have known. Okay, so when the Bible talks
about simple faith, it's not just desecrating these people, but
it is beckoning them on to more. Think of the end of Hebrews 5
and beginning of Hebrews 6. when he says that milk is for
the immature, solid, meat is for the more mature, by this
time you should be teachers, let us leave behind the elementary
doctrines and move on to maturity. So yes, the Bible knows all about
this idea of implicit faith, but it never treats it as something
that's kind of just okay to massage. It treats it as something to
invite onto a deeper level, and so that somebody who's really
saved with a simple faith is someone who is moving forward
to more knowledge of faith. not a never-ending excuse to
break everything down to the lowest common denominator. About
the elements of faith, Francis Turretin in a century later would
break this down in a very systematic way. What he would do, and you
can see all three of these laid out in Calvin in this section.
For him, saving faith had three ingredients. These three words
in the Latin Number one, notitia, which is the knowledge, the basic
knowledge of the Gospel facts. So I'll just put knowledge of.
Secondly, assensus, which was assent to or persuasion of those facts. I'm convicted that
those things are true and matter ultimately even. And then thirdly,
what was called fiducia, which was personal trust and commitment
and owning it for yourself. Those three things had to be
there for saving faith. Doesn't mean you had to use those
words. Again, that's always the reaction. When we think like,
by the way, when I say this, I'm not I'm going to reiterate
this. This is not an IQ issue. I'm
just saying that God made men and women for different vocations.
And how they, with their equal IQs, grasp stuff is going to
vary. This isn't an IQ issue. But I
have to say this, I guess, to just irritate people, because
I want to do something to be clear. Guys in the modern world
think like chicks. So when you see something like
this, you think, you need that for saving faith? Stop. I didn't
say that. What do you mean by the word
that? You're laying it out with these Latin words. No, that's
not what I said. This is just a description of something you
need to have saving faith. You need to see something, you
need to believe it's true, and you need to personally own it,
which a child can do. Okay? So, this is simple, but
saving faith. If we don't have one of these
elements, it's not saving faith. If you don't have this, it's
that idea of implicit faith that Dave was talking about with Rome.
If you don't have this, but you attempt to have that, then you
have sort of this hyper-subjective, I personally believe in nothing
in particular. Well then, you have a functional
savior that can change from one day to another. Calvin would provide a description
of these three in this whole section. After dealing with our
agreement with the way God is and what he has done in general,
it remains for the sinner to own it for himself. So Calvin
moves on in section 7 of chapter 2. to our personal, individual
approach to God. And again, the Roman definition
parallels today exactly in drawing a distinction between formed
and unformed faith. Calvin says in section 8, for
they imagine that persons who have no fear of God and no sense
of piety may believe all that is necessary to be known for
salvation." So now Calvin is breaking out what must be included
in these kind of things. If I'm going to properly view
the cross, own the cross, own my own sins, and so forth, I
have to see God as holy and myself as sinful. It is not psychologically possible
to view the cross rightly if I have not seen God as holy and
myself as sinful. First of all, can I see myself
as sinful without God as holy? No, because what does that mean?
That doesn't mean anything. I'm judging sin by some horizontal
standard. I'm better than that guy, not
as bad as that guy. But if I understand sin is against God, and that
God's standard is perfection because He is perfection, then
I understand the sinfulness of sin. It's just like Paul said
in Romans 9, if it was not for the law, I would not know what
coveting was. He's not saying he couldn't look
at the page and see that one of these commandments says, do
not covet. But what he's saying is, if I didn't grasp the law,
I wouldn't actually know what this stuff means. I could see
out there in general revelation that people usually don't like
it when you long for their wife, or their donkey, or their bank
account, or whatever else. But that wouldn't make any sense
in a saving way, Paul is saying. So you need this information
in order to understand the cross. You don't mean the same thing
by trusting in Jesus if you didn't already mean this. Again, here's
what I'm not saying. I'm not saying that you had to
use these exact words. I'm not saying you had to recall
the particular scriptures that I'm thinking about right now.
I'm saying that conceptually, the one doesn't make sense without
the other. If These things are not true. If this doesn't have to be overcome,
then Jesus on the cross to me at best might be a dying martyr.
He might be a moral example. He might be a moral influence
on me. He might maybe be a victory over death. That's why you do
have other atonement theories, because they're starting with
different circles as the problem. So any questions on that at all
about when Calvin says, for they imagine that persons that have
no fear of God, no sense of piety, may believe all that is necessary
to be known for salvation. You can't start there. The scholastics in general, but
he'll have certain ones in mind and not others. Obviously the
most famous being Thomas Aquinas, but others like William of Ockham
and so on. The people, especially between
the 12th and the 15th century, and the dominant mode of teaching
that the Catholic Church was linked to all the universities.
You didn't have free and independent thought outside of the church
at that time. It was all one and the same. So the schoolmen
were basically the hired intellectual goons of the Roman Catholic teaching
office, in a sense. As I say in my philosophy class,
take that with a grain of salt. Don't one day have a bad thought
that you got from this class. Luther and Calvin, in some ways,
and especially Luther, was uninformed about some of the philosophy
going on among the schoolmen. Some anti-intellectualism at
the beginning of the Reformed tradition right away. So much
of what the scholastics were doing philosophically was good.
Not only good, but you take what they were doing away, you take
away Christianity. That's another class though, but hopefully that
stimulates your curiosity. What Calvin is saying here is
that when we water down the supernatural, miraculous, affecting nature
of the new birth and saving faith in the name of charity, in the
name of saying, well I need to have a broader view than this
because then that would mean that I would have to place that
guy under the curse of Galatians 1 or I would have to disassociate
myself from fellowship with that church. So in the name of that,
I'll have a broader definition. What Calvin is saying here is
that when we water down the supernatural, miraculous, affecting nature
of the new birth and saving faith in the name of charity, Calvin
would say that that is a false charity that deceives and enslaves
more people. It is here where Calvin offers
an explanation of how the reprobate can even be enlightened without
being given the new life of salvation. For example, in Hebrews 4-6,
Calvin says this about this concept of how the reprobate can be enlightened
in a certain way. So in chapter 2, section 11,
Calvin says, Therefore, as God regenerates the elect only forever,
by incorruptible seed, as the seed of life once sown in their
hearts never perishes, so he effectually seals them in the
grace of his adoption, that it may be sure and steadfast. But
in this there is nothing to prevent an inferior operation of the
Spirit from taking its course in the reprobate." I think that's
the first thing we have to get in our minds is a bit of common
sense. If the Holy Spirit is capable of communicating God
through general revelation, and giving life to the animals. Those
things are attributed to the Holy Spirit in the Old Testament.
Then why can't the Holy Spirit enlighten, reprobate people that
are standing in a church? I think you should agree that
the world is a better place because Christians are around and the
influence of Christian ideas. Christians have enlightened the
world with respect to law, economics, art, and so on and so forth.
Unbelievers have been enlightened by the presence of the Holy Spirit
and the Word of God being in the world. If that's true in
the world out there, how much more would it be true if you
were a reprobate standing in church hearing week after week
the Word of God. That's what the author of Hebrews
is talking about when he talks about this person who would fall
away after tasting of the age to come and being enlightened
by the power of the Spirit and so on. So one of the defining
differences between the elect's faith and the reprobate's faith
for Calvin, this is in chapter 2, section 12, is that as the
reprobate have no rooted conviction of the paternal love of God,
so they do not return They do not, in return, yield the love
of sons, but are led by a kind of mercenary affection." So true
children of God look in their faith unto God as a father. Those
who do not have true faith look to God as a judge. Those who
do, can take true information from the law and look to them
as their judge. But true sons, the elect, begin
to look at God as their father, instead of as their judge. In
sections 14 through 40, the bulk of chapter 2, Calvin takes these
three elements of faith, namely knowledge, persuasion, and trust,
and he unpacks them in order to avoid various confusions.
This knowledge of faith is neither a life of the spirit apart from... So, back to this. This knowledge
of faith is neither, if you look at this chart that I drew up
here, It is neither a life of the Spirit apart from its intellectual
activity, nor is it intellectual objectivity apart from the life
of the Spirit. Calvin cites Ephesians 3, 18-19
to make both points. In that verse you see both coming
together. Paul prays that the individual believer may have
the ability to comprehend with all the saints what is the breadth
and length and height and depth and to know the love of Christ
that surpasses knowledge." So he prays that they will have
an ability to know true knowledge that's out there whether they
got it or not, but with a knowledge that surpasses human reason's
ability to do that. He's praying for both. He's not
praying for one against the other. He's praying for both together.
So Calvin says in chapter 2, section 14, The certainty which it requires
must be full and decisive, as is usual in regard to matters
ascertained in proof." So he's talking about a certainty which
this knowledge requires. So, in a sense, there's going
to be what we usually, well, I say usually, some people mean
different things by this. When some people say certainty, when
the old thinkers said certainty, they meant self-evident. They
were talking about the thing itself, the object, They were
talking about sort of a rational certainty, a philosophical certainty.
Then there's certainty meaning an emotional state you feel,
a psychological level of certainty. And Calvin's talking about both.
He says you want both. The Bible strongly suggests that
we should have both. So it's never one against the
other. Where did I go? So, we have in
this divine person, the Holy Spirit illuminating our soul
at all times, preventing us from our natural inability to see
what we want or to desire to see it anymore. So, this is,
it's kind of like we talked about in the doctrine of Scripture.
There's signs in Scripture that are self-attesting. But the Holy
Spirit, the internal testimony of the Holy Spirit, is lighting
up the room for you. It's making you see things that
are already there that you should have seen, but the weakness of
your flesh simply won't look at. So this is not a burning
in your bosom against objective signs, it's a burning toward
objective signs. The kindling in this fire of
faith for Calvin is Scripture. And a true believer goes there
to recall God's promises. Calvin talks about somebody who's
a real believer who starts to believe the gospel more and more
in the face of sin. He reflexes back up against the
fiery darts of doubt and condemnation. And the basic character of his
heart is certainty. So again, another massive, not
just difference, a collision course between Calvin's way of
thinking and the emerging way of thinking today. Certainty
good. Listen to the emergence. Certainty bad. Certainty not
just overrated, certainty bad. That's the dominant note coming
through the church today. Certainty arrogant. Certainty
naive. Certainty oppressive. But Calvin's
saying certainty is good. Certainty is necessary and a
defining characteristic of a true believer. A building certainty
that God is your Father and not your judge. So Calvin deals with
a, talk about subtle objections, Calvin deals with a heresy that
was out there at his time, which he doesn't really name in this
case, that kind of suggested that the believer stands at a
crossroad between viewing Christ, which is certain, versus viewing
ourselves, which is damnation. But Calvin says that is not good
enough. The believer doesn't stand between looking at himself
versus looking at Christ and has to choose at every minute
between certainty and damnation. You see what's at stake here.
The Roman Catholic Church, one of the practical implications
of the Roman Catholic Church's gospel is that you can't have
assurance and it is morally presumptuous of you to assume that God accepts
you. before the final judgment. You
see that explicitly spelled out in Catholic theology, but Calvin
says, he responds to this, it will never do, this is chapter
2, section 24, it will never do to separate Christ from us,
nor us from him. But we must with both hands keep
firm hold of that alliance by which he has riveted us to himself. So Calvin, in a sense, is joining
together the goodness of certainty with that doctrine of the union
with Christ. He's saying it is not good enough
to have available to us this object of certainty, which is
Christ, and we're not sure which is which. But one of the things
you must believe, listen to the way they talked. You must believe
this. Calvin's mind was not, what about
my mom? What about my sister? What about the church? Tell them
the same thing, then, if you love them so much. As long as
you're pretending to love people. We are so full of it. If you
love people, you would talk like this. You wouldn't change the
subject in the name of love. You would commend the subject
in the name of love. Calvin's saying, you must believe
this, unless you want to go insane. You must believe this if you
don't want to contemplate going to hell. Because people for whom
this is true don't go to hell. That's good. I can say that's
good with certainty. I know some of this stuff is
like, well yeah, who doesn't believe that? One of the things
we're going to face in this church is when people come to Christ
through our ministry, one of the things they're going to battle
against is not knowing how bad it is in American evangelical
land, or just come to Christ through one of these gospel ministries
that are everywhere in other parts of the country, but they
don't know how bad it is. And so one of the questions,
you're always getting this look like, doesn't everybody believe
this? And it's a struggle to try to
put this in a historic context and say, actually, this is a
great battle. It always has been a great battle,
but we're in the minority today. And raising our kids in this
church, too, is going to be difficult, showing them how poisoned it
is. I mean, my son, when I tell him
stuff like this, he's like, what kind of moron is that? No, exactly. Our kids, that phrase
we always use, the disadvantage of the advantage. If you come
from a Christian home in general, you suffer from the disadvantage
of the advantage. You don't know how irrational
atheism is, in a sense. I mean, you might study and everything,
but it does wonders to listen to people in their confusion,
in their doubt, in their pathetic grappling for idols. It does
something if you come out of the other side. There's advantages
to it, too. I'm not bashing the idea. Obviously, I want to raise
my kids in a Christian home. I'm not going to put them out in
a tent and that whole thing, but there are disadvantages that
we have to be aware of. As to the objects of saving faith,
since the work of Christ has a negative and a positive dimension,
namely the removal of wrath and imputation of His righteousness.
Removal of wrath, that's the negative dimension of the work
of Christ and the imputation of righteousness, so He's taking
something and He's giving something, the great exchange. As those
objects of our saving faith have a negative and positive dimension,
so our faith in Him mirrors that. It's a belief in that same positive
and negative dimension. He says in chapter 2, section
28, our belief is in the removal of all enmity and our admission
into favor. When we ask people in membership
classes, membership interviews, what's the gospel? I definitely
want both ends of that. I want you to believe that He
has taken away all your bad But I want you to understand that
He's also given you all of His good. That's what I mean by a
holistic, hopeful doctrine of salvation. The idea that you
can do better than that in these new Gospels... You guys are just
doing the salvation for the individual. God came to save the whole world.
He came to restore the cosmos. Can you name one thing that's
bigger than the whole cosmos? Because I can. God. We get God. which means we get
the world thrown in. Romans 4.13 says that the children
of Abraham are promised the whole world. Abraham gets the whole
world. So where did you hear, Mr. Wright,
in the Reformers doctrine of salvation that contained in gaining
God is not the whole world? I realize in the modern world
you have pietism and individualism and people watering that down,
but that's not the fault of the Reformed Gospel. That's a misunderstanding
of history and virtually everything else. So personally, as individuals,
we are believing in the removal of all enmity and our admission
into His favor. Faith is not faith in faith.
Faith is not merely faith in the attributes of God, such as
His justice. That is by definition not a trust in His promises.
For if He promises to have mercy then it is no trust at all to
make no distinction between what He will do for harm and what
He will do for our good. You must be believing that God
is for you in Christ and that He is intending for your good.
Now that seems so simple. and yet the unregenerate can
make no sense of it. In section 33 through 36, especially, Calvin
exalts the grace of God in regeneration as the necessary and sufficient
condition for real faith to be present. He cites numerous New
Testament passages that talk about God's regeneration creating
our faith, and it becomes clear that part of our problem in thinking
through this doctrine is that we tend to neglect just how otherworldly
real faith is, and how utterly incapable of it we are in our
natural state. And finally, he closes the chapter
pitting the charity, sorry, the clarity given by the Spirit,
he gives that too, and he does close it, the love that the Holy
Spirit gives to us, but the clarity given by the Spirit to all believers
against the idea of the Roman teaching office, which considers
it arrogant to claim that we can know the mind of God in his
salvation to us. We would do well, again, to apply
this argument to today. The simple fact of the matter
is that when God saves a sinner, he makes the individual inquire
into the gospel, to know the gospel, and to treasure the gospel.
Rome opposes that in the name of charity. The seeker-friendly
church opposes that in the name of charity. The emergent church
opposes gospel-treasuring, gospel-knowing, gospel-inquiry in the name of
charity. You see how perverse our thought
process is today. Calvin then moves on to the instruments
of grace which occupies the middle chapters. I'm only going to get
to section 3 and only the beginning of it today, or chapter 3. Regeneration by faith and of
repentance. Repentance, first of all, is
treated here as an inseparable twin pillar to belief in the
forgiveness for our sins. That's exactly what we see in
the Gospel call throughout the New Testament. Calvin treats
it as a psychological impossibility and a contradiction in terms
to turn to Christ for mercy and life without despising that which
we are being rescued from. So, this whole section is Calvin
talking about the absolute necessity of, the rationale for, and the
fruits of repentance. So, you've heard this all the
time. Let's treat regeneration, creating
this new life, as this whole category, the circle. And then
within that, he causes faith. But this is instantaneous. Okay? And so, let's do this. To show somebody sort of doing
this 180, here's the person in the middle, and he's turning. So over here on the left, I'll
put repentance on the left side of the person turning. and on
the right I'll just put the word Belief. I'll put Repent and Believe.
And you know, Ian, I hope when you study the Bible you're not
just looking for magic mantras and incantations and frequency
of words and things like that. I hope that when you see in Acts
and elsewhere when the Gospel call always linked, Repent and
Believe, Repent and Believe, the Kingdom of God is coming,
therefore repent and so on. I hope when you see that, that
you're not just looking for word frequency. I hope you're seeing the logic
of it. Repent and believe represents
a turning away from sin and toward Christ. And so Calvin is treating
these as components or aspects of regeneration. That explains
the title. So he explains these things as
instantaneous at conversion. And so we're only drawing them
out to show their logical relation. Otherwise the chapter heading
might be confusing when he says regeneration by faith because
he's already said that Regeneration precedes faith. So he explains
in chapter 2 section 3. Sorry chapter 3 section 2 When
we attribute the origin of repentance to faith we do not dream of some
period of time in which faith is to give birth to it and We
only wish to show that a man cannot seriously engage in repentance
unless he knows that he is of God. But no man is truly persuaded
that he is of God until he has embraced his offered favor."
So in other words, Calvin is, maybe unhelpfully here, using
two senses of the word faith in the same line of reasoning.
He's referring at one point to an instance of sight. So let's,
from regeneration here, we're going to draw sort of a light
He's treating faith as this first sight of the substance of the
gospel, but he's also treating this as an act of faith that's
ongoing throughout your life. So, regeneration, or the whole
new life, is an act of faith, which the characteristic he most
wants to focus on here is repentance. Just skim through some of this
stuff chapter 3 section 5 a real conversion of our life unto God
proceeding. Oh Sorry, he's defining repentance here. This is his
own death after he gets through some insufficient definitions This
is his definition of repentance chapter 3 section 5 It is a real
conversion of our life unto God, proceeding from sincere and serious
fear of God, and consisting in the mortification of our flesh,
and the old man, and the quickening of the spirit." He then goes
on to unpack what he means by every part of that definition,
which I'm not going to do here. I'll just summarize it. By real conversion of our life
unto God, convert, he's referring to the turning there. That's
how he's using that word. That's how we traditionally use
the word repentant, sort of an about face. Proceeding from sincere
and serious fear of God, so there he's referring to the motive,
the motive that moves us in conversion, sincere and serious fear of God.
And consisting in, and then he draws out two elements of this
turning, the mortification of our flesh and the quickening
of the spirit. So the killing of the old man
because you see the substance of the new man. So he defines
it and then he unpacks it. When he gets to the practical
rationale for this in the rest of the section, actually this
is in 10 through 20 of chapter 2, all those sections, he's laboring
the point of the practical nature and the objectives of repentance.
He says in 310, because in the regenerate man there is still
a spring of evil which is perpetually sending forth desires that allure
and stimulate him to sin, he goes on to say, we again regard
it as sin whenever man is influenced in any degree by any desire contrary
to the law of God. No, we maintain that the very
pravity which begets in us such desires as sin. So he has to
spend a lot of time in the next few sections arguing that your
concupiscence, your inclination to sin, is sin. And Pelagians
didn't like that, and Anabaptists didn't like that, because they
argued for, at least when somebody was restored to Christ, he was
restored to a state of innocence. And you see things like that
in some elements of Wesley's early thought that was picked
up by the Holiness Movement, especially the Nazarenes, that
would teach a kind of immediate sanctification. Which, if you
disagree with that, you disagree with it because, well, doesn't
1 John say that you continue to sin? And if you say you don't,
you're calling God a liar. That's true. But Calvin spends
a couple of chapters saying what he means by sin in the Christian. So I'm going to cut it there
and then next week we're going to talk about sanctification
and the whole Christian life and looking forward to heaven
as part of the doctrine of salvation. So that's what I mean by holistic
and hopeful. Any questions at all about that?
The way that Calvin was using the word conscience... I bumped
into this Catholic that was using that word all over the place.
He was trying to say that it's just a bent And I think the way
that Calvin was using it was that, the way that Edward said,
we always do what our strongest desire is, I think with the word
concupiscence is this idea that this raises to your strongest
desire. This concupiscence is your strongest
desire. Yeah. Here's the thing. I would
argue, and I wouldn't want to encourage that person to have
in his mind what he has in his mind, but when I think of the
word bent, I think of the same word as inclination, because
I'm inclined, inclined, inclined bench, which is bent. But here's the problem when I
say that. I'm thinking of a physical object. When I think of a highest
desire, I'm not really thinking about a physical object anymore.
Okay? So there's some picture thinking
there. So concubiscence, bent, inclination, all just mean the
very same thing, as high, as strong, as desire. Our problem
is, when we think of bent, we start thinking of a picture of
something, don't we? Bent. Like that. You know, like an
actual geometric figure. But if he means it's just bent
a little bit... Yeah. And what that says to me is it's
bent a little bit more. Yeah. Well, if he was using it
in the sense where you can overcome it, like humanistically speaking...
Yeah. Right. Because, you know, it's like
a wood maker. I mean, it's just bent over. Like, I am different than my
bent. So I can reach over to my bent that's bent that way
and I can reach over like Superman and bend it back that way. Well,
no, it's not a thing over there. It's not a thing. It's me. I'm
me. Last time I checked. So, you'll
have to do that to yourself if you can pull it off. And I guess
they think they can. And what bent you to do that? Yeah, exactly. What bent did
you have in you to fix your bent? And when you bend a bent, you
are bending the bent. And when you do that, that is
a highest desire motivating you. So for example, last night, though
I did not unbend my bent, because I participated in the eating
of chocolate cake, even though I had a... But, you know, it
was good. I only ate a couple... Yeah,
there you go. And then I worked out. And it
hurt, because I had a lot of nasty garbage in here, and it
was hard. And so I had this battle of highest
desires, all in like one two-hour stretch, I had a highest desire
to eat chocolate, and then two hours later I had a highest desire
that seems to be diametrically opposed to that highest desire.
So it's not a different thing going on when we bend our will,
we have another highest desire at that point. And then I slept, which is against
both. So I guess I'm three people.
Let's see if it compares.
Calvin's Doctrine of Salvation in General
Series Calvin's Institutes
A brief overview of calvins doctrine of salvation.
| Sermon ID | 3711018391 |
| Duration | 1:24:08 |
| Date | |
| Category | Teaching |
| Bible Text | Ephesians 2:8-10 |
| Language | English |
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