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Text preparation and translation by BackToLuther using DeepL, Google Translate, Microsoft Translate, Yandex Translate. All bold text is Pieper's emphasis. All highlighting, red text, and most text in square brackets [ ] is mine.
The Foundation of the Christian Faith.
The Reformed sects and the Foundation of the Christian Faith.
The Reformed fellowships are divided into Calvinists and Arminians. That's how they divide themselves. The great American Reformed dogmatist William Shedd goes so far as to divide even all Christendom into Calvinists and Arminians. According to Shedd there are only “two great systems of theology which divide evangelical Christendom, Calvinism and Arminianism”. 28) The Lutheran Church, which in its confession rejects both Calvinism and Arminianism, is denied the right to exist. Another important American Reformed dogmatist, Princetonian Charles Hodge, joins Shedd in his judgment. Hodge declares the doctrinal position of the Lutheran Church “illogical” and untenable. 29)
Let us now first imagine how the foundation of the Christian faith stands with the Calvinistic Reformed. The characteristic of the Calvinist Reformed is that they deny universal grace (gratia universalis). Calvin thinks that God earnestly wants to make about twenty percent of mankind saved. He had created the remaining eighty percent to damnation. 30) Likewise the Westminster Confession of Faith of the Presbyterians: “Neither are any other redeemed by Christ, effectually called . . . but the elect only.” 31) The Princetonian dogmatist Charles Hodge also very vigorously limits God's will of grace and redemption through Christ to a small part of humanity. Hodge, in terms of expressions, is not such a ruffian as Calvin, who speaks of “excessive ignorance”, “childishness” and “dullness” on the part of those who teach a general will of God's grace in Christ. 32) Hodge [page 98]
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30) Inst. III, 21, 5; 24, 12.
31) Chap. III, 6.
32) Inst. III, 23, 1.
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is more polite in his expressions. But [the doctrines of] only a partial will of grace of God and only a partial redemption by Christ he also holds to firmly and adds that it is against God's honor and dignity to accept a general serious will of grace of God and a general redemption by Christ. Hodge writes:
“It cannot be supposed that God intends what is never accomplished; that He purposes what He does not intend to effect; that He adopts means for an end which is never to be attained. This cannot be affirmed of any rational being who has the wisdom and power to secure the execution of his purposes. Much less can it be said of Him whose power and wisdom are infinite. If all men are not saved, God never purposed their salvation and never devised, and put into operation, means designed to accomplish that end.”
And specifically in relation to Christ's merit, Hodge adds: “If equally designed for all men, it must secure the salvation of all.” (Systematic Theol., II, 323)
What becomes of the foundation of the Christian faith in this doctrine? Christian faith is, as our confession, the Apology, rightly says, fides specialis, that is, individual faith or personal faith, whereby a person who has come to know his sins refers to his person the grace or forgiveness of sins acquired by Christ for all men. Only “this faith, whereby everyone believes for his person (unusquisque) that sins are forgiven him for Christ's sake and that God is reconciled and gracious for Christ's sake, obtains forgiveness of sins and justifies us”. (M. 94, 45. [Apology IV(II) Trigl. 132-133, § 45, BoC here])
But the Calvinist denial of the general will of grace and of the general reconciliation through Christ's merit deprives this faith of the foundation which is inevitably necessary for it. Admittedly, as long as a person is still in a state of carnal security, has not yet awakened a conscience, it is quite irrelevant to him whether the grace of God extends to only twenty percent of humanity or to all human beings. But when the conscience wakes up, when the terrores conscientiae come, when the condemnation judgment of the divine law is felt in the conscience, then the twenty percent Calvinist grace fails completely. Then, under the pangs of conscience of the divine law, the sinner will count himself among the eighty percent of mankind for whom God will not save them and for whom Christ did not die. He will perish in despair if it cannot be proclaimed to him from the Scriptures that the grace of God in Christ extends to all men without exception.
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| Calvinist must become Lutheran |
The Reformed themselves admit that. A more recent Reformed theologian, Matthias Schneckenburger, shows in his “Comparative Presentation of the Lutheran and Reformed Concept of Doctrine” 35) [page 99] that the Calvinist Reformed, who is seized by real knowledge of sin, must become Lutheran if he is not to die in despair in the challenge. Schneckenburger says: “The Reformed doctrine is in practice always pushed to the Lutheran side.” In short, the Calvinistic-Reformed doctrine of a grace that extends to only about twenty percent of the people destroys the foundation of the Christian faith. The fact that in the course of time millions of people from the Calvinistic-Reformed camp have nevertheless also been saved has primarily a two-fold reason. Some had never absorbed the deadly soul poison of the [doctrine of] only a partial grace of God, because their preachers were mostly very silent about the official doctrine, which so resolutely reads a denial of the gratia universalis. Others, who had absorbed the poison in themselves, have excreted it again in fear of conscience and death, because they were reproached with scriptural passages that testify to the general grace of God, albeit partly only out of embarrassment. In order to hold fast to the inevitably necessary foundation of the Christian faith, the Lutheran Church therefore confesses in the Formula of Concord: 36) “We must in every way hold sturdily and firmly to this, that, as the preaching of repentance, so also the promise of the Gospel is universalis (universal), that is, it pertains to all men”.
How sturdily and firmly Luther held to the gratia universalis in order to hold fast the foundation of the Christian faith can be seen from the following concrete account: 37)
“You may say: ‘Who knows whether Christ also bore my sin? I have no doubt that He bore the sin of St. Peter, St. Paul, and other saints; these were pious people. Oh, that I were like St. Peter or St. Paul!’ Don’t you hear what St. John says in our text: ‘This is the Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world’? And you cannot deny that you are also part of this world. . . For if you are in the world and your sins form a part of the sins of the world, then the text applies to you. All that the words ‘sin,’ ‘world,’ and ‘the sin of the world from its beginning until its end’ denote—all this rests solely on the Lamb of God. And since you are an integral part of this world and remain in this world, the benefits mentioned in the text will, of course, also accrue to you.”
Each one of us has also experienced more or less clearly that the foundation of his faith would have disappeared if he had not been allowed to cling to the one hundred per cent grace that excludes no sinner.
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One of the Reformed sects in America today was started by Chuck Smith († 2013), his popular Calvary Chapel movement which falls into the category of "mediating" between the two Reformed divisions. In his book Calvary Chapel Distinctives, p. 121-122 he stated:
“We’re neither ‘Five Point Calvinists’, nor are we Arminian. We do believe in the security of the believer. We don’t believe that you can lose your salvation because you lost your temper or told a lie and, as a result, need to go forward next Sunday night to repent and get resaved. … So we seek to take a balanced position rather than getting on one side and pressing the ‘Five Points of Calvinism.’ When you take hard stands on these non-foundational issues, you’ll just empty your church of all of those who have Methodist, Nazarene, and other Arminian-influenced backgrounds. Why would you want to do that?”
Smith, while attempting to avoid the labels, admitted that "we seek to take a balanced position", which means he does not reject outright either position. He may not take "hard stands on these non-foundational issues" but neither does he demonstrate that some of these "non-foundational issues" actually destroy the foundation of Christianity. — In the next Part 7…
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