Archive for November 6th, 2014

De Jong:

This love of God comes to sinners as members of the world which God so loved in Christ. It is a carried to them in the proclamation of the gospel. Christ is administering his work. He carries on the ministry though his heralds. As we saw previously it is Christ himself the world-Savior who stands behind the herald and is present in the proclamation99 There is the one message which is addressed to all sinners and it is addressed to them as sinful members of a sinful world which Christ redeemed. It is not addressed to them in their specific quality as either chosen or rejected in God’s world plan. It is a message in which the Christ himself calls sinners to live in him. It is a call to faith. And it is the proclamation which relates all sinners to the work of Christ. The redemptive universality of the New Testament is a kerygmatic universality which calls the sinner to repentance and faith. The Son of God’s love, the Savior of the world, now meets the sinner who lives under the wrath of God and summons him to salvation. It is the sinner where he is, that is as member of a world in the process of being saved by the reigning Christ, who is called to live in Christ. It is the sinner as a redeemable son of the first Adam who is confronted by the Second Adam and summoned to faith. It is the transgressor of the Old Adamic covenant who is offered salvation by the Mediator of the new and better covenant (Hebrews 8). He offers this sinner salvation in the way of faith because God keeps his word and deals with the post-lapsarian sinner in the same way as he dealt with him in the pre-lapsarian situation of Paradise. Man must believe.

If we see the offer of salvation in term of the call to faith we can understand that preaching is not in the first moment the communication of a certain group of logically interrelated doctrines. It is a beneficent and uniquely effective summons to share in Christ’s victory over sin. Hoeksema tends to obscure this latter fact because of his unfortunate, competitive polarity motif. At no costs can the preacher tell the sinner what he must do. He says that whoever proclaims "wat de mensch moet doen, verkondigt eenvoudig niet het Evangelie Gods,"100 Preaching, gospel preaching. receives a predominant intellectual emphasis in Hoeksema’s theological reflection. It tends to become an explication of certain dogmas and the decision required is a choice for or against these truths.

The emphasis is clearly discernable as we read, "Twee dingen gaan in de historie des Heiligen Evangelies altijd samen: God vervult de Belofte en verklaart aan de erfgenamen der Belofte wat Hij doet, dat is, Hij verkondigt hun het Evangelie."101 We notice here the unique equation of gospel proclamation with an explanation to the heirs of the promise concerning that which God does. The intellectual note comes to expression in his view of Holy Baptism as a seal "op deze waarheid, dat Hij het geloof voor gerechtigheid rekent."102 This same emphasis is found in the Protestant Reformed Declaration of Principles. We read that gospel preaching is "an oath of God that he will infallibly lead al the elect unto salvation and eternal glory though faith."103 There is in Hoeksema’s theology a subtle mutation of preaching into a report of an objective and fixed set of circumstances.

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