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.