the privileges of the children of God. But God owes a duty to himself and to his own law of love. He is under obligation to act in a manner worthy of God; to act towards every creature in perfect wisdom and love. Because God's action is always conformed to the law of love, which is the eternal law of reason, he is under obligation to deal with man in righteousness and good-will. The teaching of some theologians that God is under obligation to deal with men in righteousness but not in benevolence is contrary to scripture and to reason and true philosophy. Righteousness and benevolence are the two essential aspects of the love which the law requires. An attempted benevolence not exercised in righteousness would be destructive not only of all law but also of all true good having real worth as estimated by the standards of reason. And an attempted righteousness without benevolence would be a Draconian tyranny destructive not only of all good but of the law of love itself; for the love which it requires by the exclusion of benevolence would be eviscerated and dead. God is under obligation to the law of love eternal and immutable in himself, the absolute Reason, to deal in righteousness and benevolence with every rational creature, whether sinful or holy, mature or infantile with moral character not yet developed. And because man, rational like God, is under the same law of love, he stands in the presence of God and appeals to the universal law: "Shall not the judge of all the earth do right?" Man has the right under the eternal law of love to be treated by God in equity, with righteousness and good-will. For example, he has a right to be exempt from accountability for what it was never in his power to do or to prevent, and for sins committed ages before he was born. . The doctrine also brings into clear light the fact that, because God's law is the law of perfect reason and requires universal love, and because it is the law which the God in Christ himself obeyed on earth and vindicated in suffering and death in fidelity to it, therefore sinners are wholly unreasonable and without excuse in their sins and without any claim of merit before God. Therefore the sinner can only cast himself on the sovereign mercy of God. Therefore, in setting forth God's sovereignty as exercised under the law of love which he commands his creatures to obey, the doctrine vindicates God's just rights in relation to man, shows the reasonableness of his commands and the unreasonableness of man's sin, and so all the world stands guilty before God. 5. The true significance of the doctrine may be further elucidated by contrast with a false doctrine of predestination and election which has been widely prevalent. This doctrine, with the doctrines logically inferred from it, is in brief as follows. God has eternally elected some definitely designated persons to salvation and has justified these persons in his eternal purpose or decree; the number elected is definitely fixed and cannot be increased or diminished; they are chosen by God without any foresight of faith or repentance, or good works, or perseverance, or any right character of these persons as condition or reason moving him thereunto. And all other persons, for the glory of his sovereign power, God eternally purposes to pass by and leave in sin and ordains them for their sin to condemnation forever.1 As God has appointed the elect unto glory, so he has foreordained all the means thereunto. He sends his son into the world to make atonement for the elect and for them alone. After the Fall the Man lost his free will in the Fall, and thereafter all men are both unwilling and unable to return to God; they are under a necessity to do evil, slaves to the devil and their own lusts. The vindication of God's right arbitrarily to elect some and to pass by others rested on the doctrine of original sin. Man had his probation as a race in Adam and fell in him. human race is one "mass of perdition" (massa perditionis), all alike under deserved condemnation. Therefore, it was argued, when God of his own sovereign will elects some to salvation he does no wrong to the others whom he passes by and leaves under the condemnation which for their sins they deserve. Having thus made atonement limited to the elect, God sends his spirit to regenerate these elect persons and no others. The regeneration is wrought by an act of almighty power, by irresistible grace. Grace itself came to denote God's power instead of his favor or gracious disposition. with enlightening influence to the sin, but it never exerts on them the regenerating energy which none on whom it is exerted can resist and without which none can be saved. This irresistible grace is given only to the elect. The Spirit of God may come non-elect, convincing them of 1 "That there is an election and reprobation of infants no less than of adults, we cannot deny in the face of God, who loves and hates unborn children." (Acta Synod. Dort. Judic. 40.) And having thus regenerated the elect God keeps them by the same irresistible grace so that they can never fall away. This form of the doctrine of predestination and election, with the doctrines logically derived from it, is incompatible with free will, and with moral law, a moral system, and moral government. It has often been explicitly asserted that free will was lost in the Fall. The doctrine has been commonly associated with determinism, denying that a man determines by will the ends for which he acts and the exertion of his powers, and teaching that the will itself is determined by the strongest motive. Its logical basis is the fundamental error that arbitrary and almighty will unregulated by reason is supreme. This doctrine, with its necessary sequences, has been variously modified in the course of theological thought through the ages. Elements of it and tendencies of thought originated in it still survive. Its deepest root, the conception of the supremacy of will unregulated by reason, is by no means eradicated but is still sprouting up into theology. All doctrines of God's sovereignty springing from this root logically involve the denial of free will and moral government. It is some erroneous form of the doctrine of election against which the common objections are urged. These objections are of no force against the scriptural doctrine rightly understood.1 1 Browning pictures this false doctrine of election in its practical influence as presented by Johannes Agricola in Meditation: There's heaven above, and night by night I look right thro' its gorgeous roof; For 'tis to God I speed so fast, I lie, where I have always lain; God smiles as he has always smiled; Ere suns and moons could wax and wane, Ere stars were thunder-girt, or piled The heavens, God thought on me his child; Ordained a life for me, arrayed Its circumstances every one To the minutest; ay, God said This head this hand should rest upon Thus, ere he fashioned star or sun. The truth underlying the extravagant doctrine of unconditional election which has been described, is the great fact that it is God who first seeks man in redemption, not man who first seeks God, – and that this is true both of God's redemptive action as a whole and of his approaches to individuals by his word and his Spirit to draw them to himself. Through lack of discrimination, theologians And having thus created me, Thus rooted me, he bade me grow, Guiltless forever, like a tree That buds and blooms, nor seeks to know But sure that thought and word and deed To drink the mingled venoms up; The draught to blossoming gladness fast; For as I lie, smiled on, full-fed By unexhausted power to bless, I gaze below on hell's fierce bed, And those its waves of flame oppress, One altar-smoke, so pure to win, The martyr, the wan acolyte, The incense-swinging child, undone Before God fashioned star or sun! God, whom I praise, how could I praise, Make out and reckon on his ways, And bargain for his love and stand, Paying a price, at his right hand. ROBERT BROWNING: Men and Women, Poetical Works, vol. v. pp. 229-231. London, 1882. have applied this great truth to the election of the individual so as logically to involve the denial of justification by faith. For in this application of the doctrine of unconditional election, the man's faith would not be a real condition of his justification; it would be merely docetic, an illusion and sham. On the other hand, we have had denials of God's election so one-sided and ill-considered as to involve the overlooking of God's free and sovereign grace seeking man to redeem him from sin, not moved thereto by any antecedent action of man seeking God, the exaltation of man to practical independence of God, the magnifying of God's fatherly love to the exclusion of his sovereignty, law, and government, and the denial of God's universal providence. ― III. THE IDEAL AND THE REAL. The objection is urged that we present only the ideal, not the real; that we present what God's government ought to be, and what it is reasonable to expect it to be; but that this ideal is not realized in the real, and is incompatible with the actual facts in the constitution and evolution of the universe, and in the constitution and history of man. The ideal is that God in universal love does all that perfect wisdom, righteousness, and good-will require or permit, to realize the highest ideal of perfection and well-being possible in a finite universe and a moral system of finite free agents, and this both for every individual and for mankind in society. But it is said that the real does not accord with this ideal; children are born in the slums of great cities, their environment shutting them out from the knowledge of God and his revelation in Christ, and from all influences to right living, and fraught with influences predisposing them to vice, and themselves with innate propensities to evil inherited from vicious ancestors; men existed for long ages in savagery, some remains of which still linger on earth; the majority of mankind are still non-Christian; and even where the people are nominally Christian, the progress of Christian civilization is far from complete. This objection is presented forcibly by Herbert Spencer, in an article in the "Fortnightly Review" (1895): "After nearly two thousand years of Christian teaching and discipline, how near are we to that ideal life which Christian leading was to bring us to? What must we think of the sentiment implied in the saying of a glorified prince, repeated by VOL. II.-2 |