One of the reasons why I’m enjoying this book is because there are lots of things that I’ve been thinking for some time but struggling to synthesise. What Doug Wilson does is do the drawing together that I had been struggling to do, so that there are lots of moments along the lines of “Ah! That category you’ve just introduced helps make sense of those 6 things…”
On we go.
What is a covenant?
“Covenants among men are solemn bonds, sovereignly administered, with attendant blessings and curses.” (Page 63)
And this seems to me to be a crucial step in the argument…
“God knew and foreordained from before the foundation of the world who the elect would be at the end of the world. But this foreknowledge is not the covenant itself, but rather God’s ultimate knowledge of the outcome of the covenant. But since we know that God has this knowledge, we have assumed that this is the ‘true’ covenant made between God in His secret counsels and the elect, whoever they are. But this is not how the covenants are represented in the Bible. The covenants are historical and visible. Covenants of God have a physical aspect, like an oak tree.” (Page 64)
I love this quotation:
“The Old Covenant is not the time in which God attempted to save His people through law, but, finding this to be a failure, decided to use grace and forgiveness in the New Covenant. This understanding represents a radical misreading of the relationship of the two testaments.
“A central part of our problem is caused by the New Testament refutations of the Pharisaical distortions of the law of Moses. They are commonly assaulted with their own (heretical) terminological distortions (i.e., words like ‘law’). But the contrast in the New Testament is not between Old and New; the contrast is between Old distorted and Old fulfilled.” (Page 65)
Visible and Invisible church. There is a problem with…
“the attitude which sees the ‘invisible’ Church as the ‘true’ Church and the ‘visible’ Church, at best, as only an approximation of the true Church. Down here on earth we might play at Church, but the real thing is invisible. When you have two churches existing at the same time, with the membership lists not identical, this creates a problem. We know there is only one Church, so which one is the real one? Modern evangelical Protestants have tended to say that the invisible Church is the real one, which is why we tend to have such a low view of the churches we can actually see.” (Page 70)
So what’s the answer? It is to take the flow of history into account.
“So instead of seeing two churches at the same point in time and then trying to figure out which one has our allegiance, we need to take the importance of redemptive history into account. For example, if we were told that there were two Peter Smiths, one heavenly and one earthly, we might get confused about which one was the real Peter. But confronted with Peter Smith on Monday and again on Tuesday, we do not have any such problem. In the same way, we should see the visible Church in history growing and developing as all creatures in history do. And we have that same visible Church at the end of history. Under such circumstances, we do not ask which one is the true Church — it is the same Church. Does the Church in history contain those who are not elect? Absolutely. But the Church at the end of history contains all the elect, and none of the nonelect.” (Page 71)
Add new comment