Saturday 28 February 2009

Calvin liberates; Owen enslaves!

What a real joy and privilege it is to hear the Gospel of God soundly and passionately preached! To hear it being offered to sinners and to the lost and ungodly is the greatest sound under heaven. For Christ and His saving work to be heralded as the only remedy for human sin, is what the world needs to hear. And to be told that the only escape from the fierce wrath of an angry God is to hide in Christ Jesus is the most urgent of messages that the world needs to hear today.

Yet how sad it is that some preachers feel themselves restrained, not by the clear teaching of Scripture, but by a man-made system of theology that is foisted upon the Gospel, is most concerning and distressing. For a minister of the Gospel to be restrained by what men have said, rather than liberated by what God says in His Word, is tragic.

Let me explain. When John the Baptist proclaims, "Behold! The Lamb of God Who takes away the sins of the world!" what are many 'reformed' preachers to make of this statement? Many simply ignore it! Why? Because it does not fit in with the scholastic approach to biblical interpretation found most notably in the theologising of John Owen. Sadly, this approach has been followed almost without criticism by Westminster theologians, as demonstrated in their Confession of Faith.

Others try to explain it away! The 'world' does not mean the 'world' at all, these smart men tell us! The Bible writers got it all wrong! So Owen, following the logic of Aristotle, has made the Scripture say what the original writers did not intend it to say, otherwise they would have said it clearly.

For Owen, 'world' means the 'world of the elect.' How he arrives at this position he does not tell his readers. We are left to deduct from his other writings that because Christ, in his view, died only for the elect, the term, 'world,' can only mean the 'world of the elect.'

Thus human philosophical reasoning has to supplement the incomplete testimony of Scripture in order to get the whole truth out of it. What a pity the Biblical writers did not have the knowledge that Owen had! Or, what a pity Owen had not lived when the inspired apostles lived and wrote the Scriptures under the direct inspiration of the Holy Spirit.

Sadly, not a few reformed ministers have allowed themselves to be taken down a road that is not faithful to the teaching of Scripture. Yet how faithful our God is! Seeing the situation in which the church found herself, through centuries of ongoing and unchallenged unfaithfulness, He raised up a man called John Calvin, a man who knew the Scriptures, and who preached them many times each week to the citizens of Geneva. Calvin got the balance of Scripture just right, when he gave due place and emphasis to the particular and universalistic texts, and did not try to squeeze them into some man-made mould.

Then God raised up the sons of Calvin, men who were accounted worthy to promote the Gospel as rediscovered at the Reformation, and expounded by men like Calvin. Possibly the most faithful interpreters of Calvin in Europe were the Huguenots, those faithful and courageous ministers of the Gospel of saving grace.

Among these was the godly genius, Moise Amyraut (1596-1664), Professor of Theology at the Reformed Academy located in the French town of Saumur. Amyraut understood the teaching of Calvin as being true to the Bible, and his name was given to a system that arises from his distinctive theological stance.

Amyraut was convinced that orthodox Calvinism had distorted the original Bible-based teaching of John Calvin, his criticisms arousing intense hostility. Tried for heresy on at least three occasions (in 1637 at the Synod of Alencon - three years after he published his Traite de la predestination, in 1644 at the Synod of Charenton, and again in 1659 at the Synod of Loudun, where the charges faired no better), and was acquitted each time.

The reason why the French churches could not condemn Amyraut for heresy was that his teaching had drawn massively from the teaching of the great Genevan Reformed, John Calvin. Hence, to have condemned Amyraut was to condemn Calvin, which very thing they did not want to do. Within Reformed and Presbyterian circles, the theology known as "Amyraldianism" has aroused strong dissent ever since. The university of Saumur became the university of French Protestantism.

Now, why this brief history of the Reformed work in France in the seventeenth century? Because those who condemn Amyraldianism today, are, by definition, condemning the greatest reformer of all time, Calvin. Sadly, so few who condemn Amyraldianism have never even read Amyraut's works, and unwittingly in their theological and historical blindness, condemn that man to whom they give such honour and prominence.

Were the church to re-visit the history of the Huguenots, and also to study the writings of men like Calvin, Cameron, Amyraut, Quick, Daille, Baxter, Edwards, McCheyne, Ryle, Chalmers, and the greatest preacher of the last century, Dr D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones (especially on his understanding of the gospel and the atonement), they would be exposed to authentic Calvinism, and would receive a much-needed corrective to their assymetrical theology.

These men knew that when they offered Christ to sinners as they preached the mighty Gospel of Christ, they had something real to offer to them - the remedy for their wrong relationship with God because of their sinfulness. They were not offering perishing sinners a mere fig leaf! Not at all. They were offering a real salvation to all who would take it by faith. These great men had a message for the entire world, and a salvation that was big enough to redeem a thousand worlds. They could tell lost sinners that they only had to see themselves as being of the world to be warranted to come to Christ alone for salvation, not see themselves as belonging to the elect.

Oh, how sad it is that so many reformed preachers refuse to tell the world that Christ died for it! How sad that when they know that Christ died for sinners, their logic does not lead them to see that the entire world is a world of sinners. When they say that Christ gave His life for the lost, their narrow system does not permit them to say to all and sundry, "That includes you!" When they preach that 'Christ died for the ungodly,' they do not seem to believe that all without Christ are in an ungodly condition, the entire race, therefore Christ died for all mankind.

These good men have imposed on the text of Scripture a spiritually dangerous man-made restriction to the Gospel, and feel themselves unable to offer a whole Christ to a whole humanity - as Calvin was well able to do, and Amyraut, and Cameron, and Edwards, and Ryle, and Chalmers, and Lloyd-Jones.

The conclusion? The theology of John Calvin liberates the reformed preacher and gives him a real Gospel remedy for all mankind; but the theology of John Owen, including Westminster theology, enslaves the evangelistic preacher to such an extent that he cannot uninhibitedly offer the remedy of the Gospel to all his hearers. His fear is that one of the non-elect might be saved if he believed the Gospel.

With a lost and perishing world around us, it is time that we returned to the authentic Gospel as expounded by that great evangelist and reformed of a former era, John Calvin, and set before dying mankind that good news that Christ died for the sins of the world. And the benefits of the redemption purchased by Christ can become theirs by trusting the Saviour.

May God grant that that day will come very soon.

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