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The Doctrine of
the Sovereignty of God: Part II
John Macleod
John Macleod (1872-1948) was Principal of the Free Church of Scotland College, Edinburgh. This address was published in The Evangelical Quarterly (1941).
It is in regard to the bondage of the will to sin that on the field of history, discussion took place in the Pelagian controversy. For the Pelagians denied the truth of the teaching of the orthodox which laid stress on the spiritual bondage of man as a fallen being. In connection with this denial they had their quarrel with the sovereign will of God in regard to the dispensation of His grace; and this quarrel has passed on along the line of their avowed successors such for instance as the Socinians. In a modified form we find the Semi-Pelagian strain taking up this teaching and so quarreling with the free and absolute sovereignty of God's will in the distribution of His saving favour and salvation. This holds of the earlier and later Semi-Pelagians so that the Arminians both of the early seventeenth century and of the Methodist movement, join hands with the first representatives of their tendency in raising opposition to the freedom and sovereignty of the love and will of God in the choice of a people who shall reap the good of His thoughts of saving grace. The criticism that Pelagianism in its several varieties makes on the truth of the sovereignty of grace, is rooted in the unhumbled and self-righteous thoughts of men who fail to see that they are indeed sinners or who have no just or serious sense of the evil of sin and the righteousness of the doom that is out against it and that lies upon the sinner because of it. An uncircumcised heart is its source.
The objections that an Apostle had to face recur down the ages. Men will still say "Who hath resisted His will?" so that they have to be told that it does not belong to the thing that is made to say to its Maker, "Why hast Thou made me thus?" They need to be told that God our Maker is our Lord and King, being all that He is and all that the ideal Lord and King must be. If to be an ideal king among men one must be wise and just and true and good, these things raised to the height of full perfection and bearing the stamp of unending immutability belong to the Sovereign of heaven and earth. If a king to be a king indeed must be good, He is good. There is none good but one; that is God. If he must be true, He is true. If he must be just, He is just. If he must be wise He is wise. If he must be mighty He is mighty. And in all these things He is infinite, eternal and unchangeable while over and above His wisdom, power, justice, goodness and truth He is as perfect in the beauty of His holiness as He is in all His other attributes. Of such a One it is not to be thought that he should not be trusted even in the dark. Nor should we dare to think of Him and of His ways as though He were subject to our judgment while as a matter of fact we are subject to His judgment and not He to ours. Thus in the infinitude of His Being there are depths that no plumb line of ours can fathom so that it is sheer presumption on the side of man to take the measuring rod of his own creature mind to measure the thoughts and ways of One Whose judgments are unsearchable and Whose ways are past finding out. In these things it is our best wisdom to be clad with true lowliness of mind for we are dealing with things that are so high above us that we cannot order our speech by reason of darkness. When such wisdom is shown as keeps man within his proper bounds he will sit as a little child at the footstool of God as He speaks in His Word and will say, "I will hear what the Lord will speak." It is to souls of such gracious docility that those things of the Kingdom are made known which are hid from the wise and prudent. They are of such a temper because they have been born from above and this new birth is the outflow and the token of the high sovereign and distinguishing love of Him Who in His counsel of peace and purpose of love set them apart from everlasting to be His own.
It is a fruit of God's kingly choice that comes out in the efficacious gracious work of the Holy Ghost. For there is a bond that binds into one scheme or system the truths of the doctrines of grace. These doctrines are part of one whole. With God's sovereign choice goes hand in hand His kingly provision and destination of the redeeming work of His Son in the effectual working of His gracious call as He quickens His called ones to newness of life. It is this working that begets faith; and the conversion or the turning of the sinner to God is the result of the renewing of his will which has been wrought by the effectual call. The newness of life thus given is seen in an abiding inclination of the called ones to new obedience so that the renewal of their will prompts them willingly to abide in Him to Whom they have betaken themselves and thus they persevere in the faith and in new obedience. This willing abiding in the Vine or in the City of Refuge tells of the operation in real grace of the love that in the purpose of grace sets apart its objects to be vessels prepared unto glory. That which is born of the Spirit is Spirit, so that the new born have that in them that cleaves to the Lord and His good ways. The outflow of sovereign choice in electing love is found in the reality of the new life of the regenerate which beginning at their call shall reach its crown of completion in the achieved perfection of the subjects of grace here in the kingdom of glory hereafter.
Before the Pelagian controversy arose what was in substance the system that called forth the witness of Augustine to the doctrines of grace had been taught by men like Clement of Alexandria and other Church teachers in whose case their philosophy gave law to their theology. That philosophy had at its heart a pagan strain. Along with the earlier philosophic theologians we may take the general strain of the teachers of the Greek Church who were not given to an Augustinian type of teaching. The influence of Augustine as one of the recognised and accepted doctors of the Church told on the Western Churches in such a succession as we find in the names of outstanding teachers like Anselm and Bernard and so far as Aquinas, so that there was a definite Augustinian tradition which gave the Evangelical element to the mixed teaching of the Middle Ages. A Gottschalk might be condemned and a Semi-Pelagian strain might prevail among the Scotists and the Franciscans of pre-Reformation days. Yet so great was the authority that was recognised as belonging to Augustine that when the threads of Mediaeval Scholasticism were woven into one fabric at Trent, the Council aimed at avoiding any finding that would come in conflict with the teaching of the great bishop of Hippo while with equal care it sought to shun any form of words that would condemn the Semi-Pelagianism which was rampant in the current teaching of the Church and the Schools. So intellectual acrobats went through their gymnastic exercises of balancing themselves on the tight rope by coming to noncommittal findings which kept their doctrine from being too definite on the one side or the other of debated questions which were open in the Schools.
The Augustinian strain that came out in Jansenius and Baius was a much more emphatic utterance of the doctrine of grace than the teaching that found acceptance in Lutheran circles from the later days of Melanchthon's life onward or in the beginnings of the Arminian movement in the Reformed Churches. The earlier stage of the Reformation showed the leading teachers of the Protestant world to be very much at one as to the gratuitous character of the Gospel salvation. Their movement was indeed a resurgence of the teaching of the Doctor of Grace. This marked them out to begin with from the half-way men of the Humanistic Reform. In the main features of their teaching the first Reformers were at one as to the gracious character of salvation. They were also at one with the teaching of the line of the Augustinian witnesses of earlier days except that in the sphere of relative grace they made a great advance in setting forth the truth as taught by the Apostles in regard to the free Justification by faith of the believing sinner. This advance made clear the distinction between grace as it renews the nature and grace as it rectifies the standing of those to whom it is shown. As things came about the defence of the truly gratuitous character of the provision of the Gospel fell to be made by the Reformed as distinct from the Lutheran Churches. They were in the Augustinian tradition on the subject.
In the Church of England in Post-Reformation days, the first uprising of a type of teaching that came in conflict with the true teaching of its Confession was firmly repressed and the Lambeth Articles made plain to the world the strict Reformed orthodoxy of the leaders of the Anglican Communion in the latter days of Queen Elizabeth. It was not then to be wondered at that the representatives of England at the Synod of Dort should join in the condemnation of Arminianism and in the profession of the Reformed Faith in regard to the decree of God which recognises His holy sovereignty in the dispensing of His saving favour.
The findings of the renowned ecumenical Synod of the Reformed Churches set forth their faith as it was held in the great theological age which followed the Reformation itself when the divines of Western Protestant Europe were thoroughly at home in the kind of questions that were at issue between their Churches and Rome and in particular were alive to the meaning of the marked Semi-Pelagian teaching of their Jesuit opponents who were the foremost champions of the Papacy as they were the keenest critics of the doctrine of the Reformers. It was no convention of novices or of weaklings that met at Dort in 1618. They had among their leaders and counselors some of the foremost divines of their day. And the conclusions at which they arrived in the avowal of their faith and in the condemnation of error were not hastily come to. They were the ripe decisions of a generation of Theologians who were at home in their subject, expert in wielding their weapons and temperate and restrained in the terms in which they set forth their judgment. Coming as they did in point of time after the National Confessions and Catechisms of the Reformed Churches, even after the Irish Articles of 1615, except the documents of the Westminster Assembly they with these documents of British origin are the culminating exhibition of our common Reformed Faith when it was called upon to unfold its inmost genius and essence in self-defence against the revived Semi-Pelagianism of the early Arminians.
Their statements on these subjects put in short compass the dogmatic teaching of our Churches. Thus the Canons of Dort say:
Art. 1. "As all men have sinned in Adam, and have become exposed to the curse and eternal death, God would have done no injustice to anyone, if He had determined to leave the whole human race under sin and the curse, and to condemn them on account of sin . . . ."
Art. 2. But "in this is the love of God manifested, that He sent His only begotten Son into the world that everyone who believeth in Him should not perish but have everlasting life . . . ."
Art. 3. But that men may be brought to faith, God mercifully sends heralds of this most joyful message to whom He willeth, and when He willeth, by whose ministry men are called to repentance, and faith in Christ crucified.
Art. 4. They who believe not the Gospel on them the wrath of God remaineth, but those who receive it, and embrace the Saviour Jesus with a true and living faith are, through Him, delivered from the wrath of God and endowed with the gift of everlasting life.
Art. 5. The cause or fault of this unbelief as also of all other sins, is by no means in God, but in man. But faith in Jesus Christ and salvation by Him, is the free gift of God . . . ."
Art. 6. That some, in time, have faith given them by God and others have it not given, proceeds from His eternal decree . . . . according to which decree, He graciously softens the hearts of the elect, however hard, and He bends them to believe; but the non-elect He leaves, in just judgment, to their own perversity and hardness. And here, especially, a deep discrimination, at the same time both merciful and just, a discrimination of men equally lost opens itself to us; or that decree of Election and Reprobation which is revealed in the Word of God . . . ."
Art 7. But Election is the immutable purpose of God, by which before the foundations of the world were laid, He chose out of the whole human race, fallen by their own fault from their primeval integrity into sin and destruction, according to the most free good pleasure of His own will, and of mere grace, a certain number of men neither better nor worthier than others, but lying in the same misery with the rest, to salvation in Christ; Whom He had, even from eternity, constituted Mediator and Head of all the elect, and the foundation of salvation; and therefore He decreed to give them unto Him to be saved; and effectually to call and draw them into communion with Him, by His own Word and Spirit; or He decreed Himself to give unto them true faith, to justify, to sanctify, and at length powerfully to glorify them, having kept them in the communion of His Son; to the demonstration of His mercy and the praise of the riches of His glorious grace . . . ."
Art. 9. This same Election is not made from any foreseen faith, obedience of faith, holiness, or any other good quality and disposition, as a pre-requisite cause or condition in the men who should be elected but unto faith, and unto the obedience of faith, holiness, &c. And therefore Election is the fountain of every saving benefit; whence faith, holiness, and the other salutary gifts and finally eternal life itself, flow as its fruit and effect . . . ."
Art. 10. Now the cause of this gratuitous Election, is the sole good pleasure of God, not consisting in this, that He elected into the condition of salvation certain qualities or human actions, from all that were possible; but in that out of the common multitude of sinners, He took to Himself certain persons as His peculiar property . . . ."
Art. 11. And as God Himself is most wise, immutable, omniscient and omnipotent; so, Election made by Him can neither be interrupted, changed, recalled, nor broken off; nor can the Elect be cast away, nor the number of them be diminished."
This teaching is but an exposition or expansion of the teaching of the Belgic Confession in what it has to say on the subject. So in brief compass the Second Helvetic Confession which found so wide an acceptance in the Reformed Churches says: "God hath from the beginning freely and of His mere grace without any respect of men predestinated or elected the saints whom He will save in Christ." So also we find in the Irish Articles which passed through the hands of James Ussher such words as these: "By the same eternal counsel, God hath predestinated some unto life, and reprobated some unto death, of both which there is a certain number known only to God which can neither be increased nor diminished." This choice these Articles go on to attribute only to the good pleasure of God Himself. There is no question as to the agreement of the Westminster documents with the common consensus of the Reformed Churches as they deal with this matter of Divine Sovereignty and Predestination.