Richards:

LECTURE XXII.
ABILITY AND INABILITY.

JOHN vi. 44. “No man can come to me, except the Father, which hath sent me, draw him.”

IT is good for us to be humbled and God has declared it to be a leading design of the Gospel, to stain the pride of all human glory. Every part of this wonderful scheme, in its origin, in its progress, in its consummation, tends to exalt God and to lay man in the dust ! We cannot turn to a page of the Gospel record, without finding something of this character. Do we glory in the dignity or strength of our natural powers, in our acquisitions, or in our enjoyments? The Gospel teaches us that we have nothing but what we have received, and that it is God alone who causes us to differ. Do we think favorably of our moral dispositions, or secretly flatter ourselves with our virtues? The Gospel declares that we are, by nature, children of wrath and disobedience, having no power to please God; because, with all our good qualities, we possess nothing in our unrenewed state which he dignifies with the name of virtue. Do we think ourselves safe because the Word of life is preached to us–or because we hear the voice of our Redeemer calling to us to come unto him and be saved? Our Lord confounds this self-deluding imagination, with all the vain hopes attached to it, by declaring, as in the words before us: ‘ ‘ No man can come to me, except the Father, which hath sent me, draw him.”

But will not many object to this declaration? Will they not say, “If we cannot come to Christ, how are we to blame for not coming? And if we can come, what need of being drawn by the Father? Are not these things strange and contradictory?” Strange and contradictory as they may seem, the Divine Teacher will not take back his words, nor soften their import. He lays down his doctrine with great clearness and strength: He speaks with the authority of one who came forth from God, and who is God himself. Whatever may be our opinions or our feelings, his Word will stand in broad and legible characters when the fire, which consumes all things, shall have dissolved this earth and these heavens. It is in vain to contend against what is written; the reck will not be removed out of its place for us. But though we may not contend, we may lawfully inquire; and sure I am, the more diligent and humble our inquiry, the more cheerfully shall we subscribe to what God has revealed.

In attending to the words before us, I propose, in the First place, briefly to consider what it is to come to Christ.

Second. To notice our Lord’s assertion, that no man can come to him unless drawn by the Father.

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C. Hodge (by way of A.A. Hodge):

Dr. Hodge says himself in his “Retrospect of the History of the Princeton Review,” 1871,

In all the controversies culminating in the division of the church in 1837-8, the conductors of this Review were in entire sympathy with the Old School party. They sided with them as to the right and under existing circumstances the duty, of the church to conduct the work of education and foreign and domestic missions by ecclesiastical boards instead of voluntary independent societies. They agreed with that party on all doctrinal questions in dispute; and as to the obligation to enforce conformity to our Confession of Faith on the part of ministers and teachers of theology under our jurisdiction. They were so unfortunate, however, as to differ from many, and apparently from a majority of their Old School brethren, as to the wisdom of the measures adopted for securing a common object. In our number for January, 1837, it is said: ‘Our position we feel to be difficult and delicate. On the one hand, we respect and love the great mass of our Old School brethren; we believe them to constitute the bone and sinew of the Presbyterian church; we agree with them in doctrine; we sympathize with them in their disapprobation and distrust of the spirit and conduct of the leaders of the opposite party; and we harmonize with them in all the great leading principles of ecclesiastical policy, though we differ from a portion of them, how large or how small that portion may be we cannot tell, as to the wisdom and propriety of some particular measures. They have the right to cherish and express their opinions, and to endeavor to enforce them on others by argument and persuasion, and so have we. They, we verily believe, have no selfish end in view. We are knowingly operating, under stress of conscience, against all our own interests, so far as they are not involved in the interests of the Church of God.’

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Mc’Crie:

It was in Scotland, however, that the federal scheme of revealed truth was carried furthest and presented in the most developed form. In 1650 there was printed at Edinburgh an edition of the Confession and Catechisms in which there appeared for the first time a treatise having for title, The Sum of saving knowledge: or, a brief sum of Christian Doctrine, together with the practical Use thereof.¹ This compendium never received the formal sanction of the Church of Scotland, but it became a well-nigh constant accompaniment of the Westminster documents in Scottish editions. Wodrow, the historian, declares it to have been the joint-composition of David Dickson, minister at Irvine, and thereafter Professor at Glasgow University, and of James Durham, minister of the Inner Kirk, Glasgow, and author of The Dying Mans Testament, or, a Treatise Concerning Scandal.² A work which the saintly M Cheyne regarded as the means of bringing about in him a saving change may well be read with interest, and ought to be handled with respect.³ At the same time, it will readily be admitted that federalism, as developed in the Sum, is objectionable in form and application. Detailed descriptions of redemption as a bargain entered into between the First and Second persons of the Trinity, in which conditions were laid down, promises held out, and pledges given; the reducing of salvation to a mercantile arrangement between God and the sinner, in which the latter signifies contentment to enter into covenant and the former intimates agreement to entertain a relation of grace, so that ever after the contented, contracting party can say, ‘Lord, let it be a bargain,’–such presentations have obviously a tendency to reduce the gospel of the grace of God to the level of a legal compact entered into between two independent and, so far as right or status is concerned, two equal parties. This blessedness of the mercy seat is in danger of being lost sight of in the bargaining of the market-place; the simple story of salvation is thrown into the crucible of the logic of schools and it emerges in the form of a syllogism.

C.G. Mc’Crie, The Confessions of the Church of Scotland, Their Evolution in History (Edinburgh: McNiven & Wallace, 1907), 72-73. [Footnote values modernized, footnote content original; and underlining mine.]

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¹The Confession of Faith, and the Larger and Shorter Catechisme, First agreed upon by the Assembly of Divines at Westminster. And now approved by the Generall Assembly of the Kirk of Scotland, to be a part of Uniformity in Religion between the Kirks of Christ in the three Kingdomes. Edinburgh, Printed by Gideon Lithgow, Printer to the University of Edinburgh, 1650. The Confession and Catechisms are provided with distinct titles, but are paged continuously. At the end, occupying sixty-six unnumbered pages, comes what has for title page:–‘A Brief Sum of Christian Doctrine, and the Practical Use thereof, contained in Holy Scripture, and holden forth in the Confession of Faith and Catechisms. Agreed upon by the Assembly of Divines at Westminster, and received by the General Assembly of the Kirk of Scotland.’ The error in the punctuation of the above, which makes the Sum to be a product of the Westminster Assembly, was repeated in subsequent editions till 1744, when the period after Catechisms was changed into a comma. Subsequent to 1650 nearly all Scottish editions of the Confession include the Sum, which does not appear to have ever been issued as a separate publication. Carruthers’s Facsimile Shorter Catechism, pp. 41-42.

Prof. Warfield s Pointing of the Westminster Confession. Presbyterian and Reformed Review, Oct. 1901, pp. 626-27.

Dr D. Hay Fleming in D. x. 318-24.

²He [Mr David Dickson] and Mr James Durham dreu up The Summ of Saving Knouledge, in some afternoons when they went out to the Craigs of Glasgou to take the air, because they thought the Catechisme too large and dark ; (and if 1 be not forgot, my informer, Mr P. S. [Patrick Simson] was their amanuensis,) and the application was the substance of some sermons Mr Dickson preached at Inneraray, written out at the desire of my Lady Argyle. Analecta, vol. i. p. 166.

³Diary in Memoir, March 11, 1834.

Chambers:

CHAPTER 6

THE COVENANT OF REDEMPTION

Holy Scripture contains all things necessary to salvation: so that whatsoever is not read therein, nor may be proved thereby, is not to be required of any man, that it should be believed as an article of the Faith, or be thought requisite or necessary to salvation.¹

The role of the covenant of redemption² has already been referred to both in relation to the purchase of faith and Owen’s understanding of redemption and satisfaction, and was highlighted in the outline of Owen’s argument as being central to the development of a structure that would allow Owen to convincingly demonstrate that Christ only intended to benefit the elect by his death, that it was only “for” the elect. What is the covenant of redemption as Owen understands it? Considered now in itself what contribution does it make to “The Death of Death” and the position Owen is arguing for? Is it a convincing structure which one should or must adopt in seeking to understand Christ’s work? In attempting to answer these questions we will first look at Owen’s exposition of this covenant in The Death of Death, supplementing that with his treatment of this covenant elsewhere, principally in Exercitation XXVIII of his commentary on Hebrews. We will then consider the role this covenant plays by relating it both to Owen’s central thesis and the other arguments he advances to support that thesis. Following that examination of the covenant in The Death of Death we will consider the origin of this covenant, its modern exponents and critics, and make an assessment of the place of such a covenant today. In the light of that assessment we will then reconsider Owen’s reliance on that covenant in relation to his thesis.

The covenant of redemption in the Death of Death.

The “covenant or compact” made in eternity between the Father and the Son is introduced by Owen in Book 1:III as the third aspect of the first of the Father’s “two peculiar acts… in this work of our redemption by the blood of Jesus,” his “sending of his Son into the world for this employment.”³ It is thus an element of Owen’s grounding the work of the atonement in the Trinitarian life of God who is the agent of this work of redemption.⁴

While elsewhere Owen goes to some length to both justify and fully explicate this application of covenant language to the relations between the Father and the Son,⁵ Owen is content to here assume the validity of this structure and focus on two aspects of this covenant that have particular relevance to his argument. These two elements are firstly the Father’s promise,

to protect and assist him in the accomplishment and perfect fulfilling of the whole business and dispensation about which he was employed, or which he was to undertake.⁶

It is on the basis of these promises that the Son undertakes “this heavy burden” of being a Savior for his people, and these promises are the foundation of the Savior’s confidence,

so that the ground of our Savior’s confidence and assurance in this great undertaking, and a strong motive to exercise his graces received in the utmost endurings, was this engagement of his Father upon this compact of assistance and protection.⁷

The second element is the Father’s promise of success, or a good issue out of all his sufferings, and a happy accomplishment and attainment of the end of his great undertaking.

This is that aspect of the covenant that is most directly relevant to the dispute about the intention of God in the atonement, for it directly introduces the notion of ‘end’ or purpose in relation to the Son’s work, his ‘great undertaking’ and assures it of success. That ‘end’ is what is promised the Son and it is that alone which the Son intended to achieve.⁸ For the content of the promise we are directed to Isaiah 49, and Owen makes it clear that what is promised is the salvation of his people, “his seed by covenant,” and it is only this the Son intends in the work. This sole determination to attain the promise is apparent in Christ’s intercession in John 17,

the request that our Savior makes upon the accomplishment of the work about which he was sent; which certainly was neither for more nor less than God had engaged himself to him for.

That intercession, which is

no doubt grounded upon the fore-cited promises, which by his Father were made unto him,⁹

is for a full confluence of the love of God and fruits of that love upon all his elect, in faith, sanctification, and glory.¹⁰

That is , what is promised Christ is the actual salvation of the elect, and this is the ‘end’ he seeks to achieve. The Son’s role is his agreement to undertake the work under the terms and conditions proposed, the principle being that he should make his life a ransom price for sinners.¹¹

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