27.-Divine providence governs the bad as well as the good actions of men, the latter by an actio efficax, the former by a permissio efficax.

–WOLLEB p, 30: “By God’s providence things good and bad are ruled. Good things are ruled by effectual action, to which belong the praecurrence, concurrence and succurrence of divine power. Bad things are ruled by actuosa permissio and so by permission, determining and direction” .

–POLAN distinguishes (VI, 17) two parts. in “God’s actual providence”, namely actio and permissio. “God’s actio–is only one of the good things which God effects right from the first creation of all things, either by Himself or by others, in which also the punishment of evil is counted, because it is of the nature of moral good.

–Divine permission is the act of the divine will by which God, in whose power it is to inhibit the actions of others, if He wiled, does not inhibit them, but according to His eternal and righteous decree allows them to be done by the rational creature” .

28.- This permissio is not a moral one, by which God would approve of sin, but a physical, by which He gives sin way, a non-impeditio peccati–BREMISCHE BEKENNTNIS (HEPPE, p. 169) : “Evil is partly malum culpae, partly malum poenae. That” the evil with which God temporally and eternally punishes and wî1 punish the world is ordained by God, is undeniable.–But that evil which is sin and which God neither creates nor causes, cannot be completely and in every way withdrawn from the eternal ordering of God, even though it be said that God is such a controller of the world that apart from and contrary to His ordering many a thing happens in the world.-But God does not ordain evil as He does good, i.e. as something that pleases Him, but as the sort of thing He hates, nevertheless knowingly and willingly destines, lets be in the world and uses wondrously for good”.

–RIISSEN (VIII, 12): “Sin should not be withdrawn from the providence of God. It falls under it as to start, progress and finish.-13: As to beginning God freely allows sin.–14: This permission is, however, not ethical, like a licence to sin, but physical, a non-impeditio of sin.–The statement ‘God wills to allow sin’ thus does not mean ‘God wills to approve sin morally’. Hence KECKERMAN (p. 115) says: “If willing to permit is the same as willing the permission of sin, we agree that God willingly permits it. If it is the same as permitting it approvingly or approving the thing permitted, we must not admit that God willingly permits sin”.

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1) –In and for itself then it was the entire fallen race of man which God made the object of His gracious revelation, when He resolved to present to humanity as a gift of grace the lie which it had forfeited. This is the eternal testament of the Father, “the immutable will of God to give an inheritance to the believing”, and the eternal decree of the Father Himself, according to which He has promised the whole of humanity, so far as it accepts His grace with penitence and trust, righteousness and eternal life as an inalienable inheritance of grace.

Note the essentially universalistic basis upon which the idea of the covenant of grace rests. COCCEIUS introduces his exposition of the doctrine of the covenant of Grace (De foed. IV, 74), by declaring that of course God might at once have punished man with all evils. But the height of wisdom and power aided Him in His glorious plan for exercising mercy on man. Accordingly He resolved (1) to unfold His inexpressible mercy “in vessels of mercy”, and (2) “to employ an ineffable kindness and longsuffering towards the entire human race”.

–Similarly EGLIN (De foed. grat. 40): The “impelling cause of the covenant of grace” is the “love of God for the world, i.e. for the whole human race, which by the act of Satan had fallen into misery”. For this “common lapse” of the human race God had ordained in Christ a “common remedy.” Now a distinction must be drawn between “God’s general decree” and the “particular decree of election“. The former is (43) the “covenant of grace including the whole human race and by the counsel of His will planning for all indefinitely in Adam, on condition that man should repent and believe.” The latter on the contrary is the covenant according to which God “Himself graciously fulfills the condition required in those whom He has assigned to Christ from eternity”. As regards the former (44) the “promise is general by an outward calling“; as regards the latter we can only speak of an “effective application of the promise in accordance with the special promise of grace”.

Source: Heinrich Heppe, Reformed Dogmatics (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Books, 1978), 371-372.

2) –OLEVIAN (30 f.): “The heavenly Father resolved so to execute the decree of His love as to satisfy perfect justice. As it is essential to Himself He can no more deny it than He can deny Himself. So in the actual execution of the righteousness the greatness and strength of His love in the Son and of His perpetual mercy sworn from the beginning had to shine fort”. Even in the Redeemer’s work of reconciliation its essentially universalistic side must be acknowledged. Hence EGLIN (54) declares that it must not be said that God did not send His Son into the world “to be the common Saviour of the whole world, conditionally set forth”. Only, the circumstance that not all attain to faith and blessedness must not give rise to the view, that “in proposing a common remedy” God had failed of His purpose (51): (i) “The things which. He decreed as ex hypothesi and conditionally must be estimated conditionally and (2) “in those whom (the Father) willed to give to Christ, fulfilled the requisite condition gratuitously”. But above all it must be insisted that it is not true to say that Christ accomplished nothing for the reprobate: “he broke and abolished the whole lapse of Adam, the whole curse of the whole law, in short, the one same enemy of all, Satan”. Undoubtedly therefore we may say (63) with Scripture, that “as regards all-suffciency of merit Christ made purchase even for the reprobate, and even for them paid the lutron of death in full considered by itself, although it is not applied to them by the saving attraction of faith”.

Heinrich Heppe, Reformed Dogmatics (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Books, 1978), 373.

3) The single ground of the covenant of grace is God’s compassionate love for all men and the free Trinitarian counsel of God. –EGLIN (De foed. grat., 40): “The impulsive cause of the covenant of grace has been, God’s love for the world, that is, for the entire human race fallen into misery by Satan’s cunning”

Heinrich Heppe, Reformed Dogmatics (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Books, 1978), 384. Full name: Raphaelis Eglini Iconi Tigurini (Zurich, Marburg) c1614.

[Cf., Zwingli and Bullinger, here.]

–LUD. CROCIUS 962: “The object of the grace of compassion is the whole human race as wretched and fouled with sin. This is what our Saviour teaches by the word “world” Jn. 3. 16 (God so loved the world. . .). It is certain that here by the word “world” is to be understood not the entire system of heaven and earth with all their denizens divinely produced out of nothing, but only the human race.–963: Nor yet does Christ here understand by the world the elect only, according as they have already been separated from the world, but the entire human race taken all together (universe), according as by nature it lies in sin and according as it is commonly called through the gospel to repentance and faith in Christ”.

Source: Heinrich Heppe, Reformed Dogmatics (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Books, 1978), 372. Full name: Ludovigus Crocius (Bremen) c1636.

Heppe:

1) 25.–But while by praeteritio God refuses His redeeming grace to the rejected He does not deprive them of His common grace, which latter would have sufficed man in his original state to attain to eternal blessedness, and of which man continues to receive so much that he has no ground for excuse left at the judgment seat of God.

–LEIDEN SYNOPSIS (XXIV, 54-55): “For this to be understood correctly, careful note must be taken that this praeterition does not remove or deny all grace in those passed over, but that only which is peculiar to the elect. But that which through the dispensation of common providence, whether under the law of nature or under gospel grace, is dispensed to men in varying amount, is not by this act. of praeterition removed but is rather presupposed; the non-elect are left under the common government of divine providence and the exercise of their own arbitrium. Heppe, Reformed Dogmatics, 185.

2) God thus wrought in upon Adam’s fall by His permissio and ordinatio HOTTINGER (160-161) is the most adequate in making it clear, how this permissio and ordinatio is to be conceived. “Negatively: (I) God did not drive Adam to sin (a) because He severely forbade him, (b) in narrating the causes Moses makes no mention of God, (c) God made man upright, but he of his own motion forsooth, at the suasion and instigation of Satan, sought out a host of reasons. (2) God did not withdraw from him grace combating sin, because (a) that followed him into the punishment of the sin, according as it is the deprivation of the image of God because of sin, (b) because otherwise He would have been driving man to sin: just as when a house necessarily collapses when the pillars are withdrawn. (3) Nor did He in any way co-operate with his sin. Affirmatively: (i) He did not confer on Adam the aid of new and special grace or help him with extraordinary aid, so that he might will to persevere. (2) Nor did He hinder Satan from tempting him and him from obeying the tempter. (3) He ordered and directed the fall to the ends which He had predetermined by his eternal counsel. Not the ends of sin, which of themselves are nil, but of the divine permission. Some ends are in respect of men, others in respect of God. As regards the former the proximate end was the manifestation of the creature’s infirmity; the remote major was the felicity and more perfect salvation in the second Adam, Christ. In respect of God: the proximate end is the beauty of the whole which arises out of this permission and consists in this, that in the world as in a great house there are various vessels; the remote end is the revealing of His glory, primarily the display of His actual mercy in the salvation of the elect for Christ’s sake”.

–Hence above all it must be insisted that God effected Adam’s fall not by withdrawing His common grace.

–MARESIUS (VI, 29): “Much less must it be said that God positively withdrew His grace from man before the act of sin, because then God would be set up as the author of it; but man freely sinning rejected and repudiated that aid”.

–v. TIL (Hypotyposis p.I22): “God withdrew no strength from man before the sin”. But the permissio peccati was also not a mere non-impeditio of sin. Heppe, Reformed Dogmatics, 309-310.

3) 36.–It must also be recognized that, supported by the common grace of God fallen man is capable of producing an ordinary morality and of doing good in external and natural things, or at least of exercising himself in them. But even the goodness that man does in external, natural and ordinary things is not truly good and pleasing to God. He never achieves it entirely from the right motive, i.e., never from love and obedience to God alone, He always admits the joint influence of his concupiscence. As a result, it is true, the naturally and the ordinarily good works are rewarded by God with temporal benefits. But in truth they are sinful and condemnable. And in spiritual things man can do absolutely nothing good, since his spiritual eye is veiled from the knowledge of God that brings blessing and his will can do and achieve only what is contrary to God’s good pleasure.

RISSEN (IX, 45): “The question is not as to outward civil and moral good. We do not deny that some powers still survive in man after the lapse, as regards those outward works and civil goods, so that he exercises justice and temperance and emits an act of mercy and charity, so that he keeps his hands from theft and murder and emits operations of like virtues by the antecedent concurrence or God and His general assistance; this is the outlook of Gentile virtues, of which later. But the question is of spiritual and supernatural good which is pleasing and acceptable to God: whether man in the state of sin is so corrupt, that the power of his liberum arbitrium as regards the good in question are not only slipped and worn but quite perished, so that he cannot know anything truly saving or do anything good: which is what we affirm”. Heppe, Reformed Dogmatics, 363.

4) 37,–Hence fallen man enslaved by sin cannot in any way personally grasp gracious aid when offered to him, or rise to a positive non-resistance to it, or prepare in an external disciplinary or pedagogic way to receive. a redemptive favour.

–POLAN (VI, 6): “The man who is not reborn has no strength or very little, by which in any way to respond to God if He called him, or to open the door to His knock, or to assent to His proposal of salvation, or in short to co-operate with Him, if He operated upon him”.

–MASTRICHT (iV, iv, 33): “Although the Reformed grant readily that man can non-resist in a negative way, as a man naturally dead can non-resist attempts to restore him to life, and although they concede that unregenerate man may frequent churches, pour forth prayers and other outward things, they deny that he can non-resist positively; they deny that an unregenerate can perform these outward good things by the sheer strength of their natural arbitrium, save by common grace; on which see Paul, Heb. 6, 4, 5,6 (as touching those who were once enlightened and tasted of the heavenly gift, and were made partakers of the H. Ghost, and tasted the good word of God and the powers of the age to come, and then fall away, it is impossible to renew them again to repentance. . .)”. Heppe, Reformed Dogmatics, 366.

6) But further HEIEGGER still recognizes the essential prerogatives of the “baptized non-elect over the unbaptized” (XXV, 49): “Even in early times circumcision also conferred upon the circumcised among the non-elect a privilege above the non-circumcised. To them were entrusted the oracles of God Rom. 3. 1-2.-By a like reasoning there is a common grace and favour of God which all baptized persons possess, even the non-elect, viz., initiation and ingrafting into the outward body of the Church, in virtue of which even though perishing they have a right to the name of ‘uieis basilasias and enjoy the outward privieges of God’s covenanted.-But this is the mere Gourtyard, shell and surface of baptism.” Heppe, Reformed Dogmatics, 623.