In my previous article, we began to revisit the question of the Jews from a Reformed perspective during our present Western “noticing.” What overlap or divergence is there between the woke right and confessional, Reformed Christianity? Having approached matters from the economic or redemptive-historical perspective of Scripture, especially as found in Romans 9 to 11, let’s consider some doctrinal issues relating to Original Sin, the “world” as enemy of the Church, and divine providence.
The Jews & Original Sin
In considering Jewish identity across the ages, we argued that the Jewish people have continued and must continue essentially intact and identifiably so for the fulfillment of the ancient promises to the fathers. Not in terms of temples and tribulations, mind you—but “natural branches,” being torn away by their unbelief, must by true faith be re-grafted in to their “own olive tree” by national repentance and faith in the Messiah and their inclusion within the catholic, Visible Church on purely equal terms with their Gentile counterparts.
But the woke right mood, when mixed with a generic Reformed Christianity, seems to produce at least a functional rejection of Original Sin. Specifically, the universality of Original Sin. Now, in all fairness, our kinist friends are not wide of the mark in pointing out that the Jews are unique sinners, having sinned against unique privileges. The prophets would have agreed with them, one and all! Moses was weary of living because of them. Elijah, their Moses redivivus, was pretty down on them too and was also pushed to the brink. Christ excoriated them as a “crooked and perverse generation.” And Stephen denounced them as incurably obdurate across the generations: “Ye stiffnecked and uncircumcised in heart and ears, ye do always resist the Holy Ghost: as your fathers did, so do ye.” It is also not hard to find similar witnesses among our Reformed divines. Thomas Boston, a most tender-hearted evangelist, yearning over the fallen Jews, himself did not blush to write in his sermon on Acts 2:40, “Save yourselves from this untoward [insufferably perverse] generation”:
The following is a quote from David Calderwood’s (1575-1650) introduction to the Firstand Second Books of Discipline of the Church of Scotland (1560 and 1578 respectively). Here, we have a find statement of sound, Christian historiography. It really goes to the heart of unbelief as applied to the doing of history in our modern, secular age. “Let God arise, and His enemies be scattered!”
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“Is the Lord changed, because he changes the manner of his working? God forbid. For although he declares not in our times who belongs to him by miraculous fire sent from heaven, as in the days of Elijah; the earth opens not her mouth, as in the days of Korah; he rains not showers of brimstone upon the Sodomites of this age; he turns not such as look back into pillars of salt to season others; neither is his favour manifested towards his own secret ones in earthly and visible blessings, so wonderfully as of old; yet the God of Israel is our God, and the God of the old testament is the God of the new, and better testament, having still a secret and equivalent providence most wisely disposed, and framed for the weal of his kirk, according to the diversity of the ages succeeding one after another. So that no wise heart perceiving the course thereof could wish another than the present, howsoever the folly of infidelity blinds men to affect the miracles, ease, and outward prosperity of former generations, and if these fail, to cast themselves headlong in desperation, defection, or atheism. Yea, because he works not as before, in their haste they conclude that he works not at all.”
Below is a tremendous sermon Thomas Chalmers preached on the scourge of cholera in Britain in the year 1832. In it, we see God as the First Cause hearing and answering prayer either lower or higher up on the chain of secondary causes. Masterful. And also instructive as the world watches the vicious spread of Ebola. Listen to the sermon here. And access more titles I’ve recorded by Thomas Chalmers.
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ON THE CONSISTENCY BETWEEN THE EFFICACY OF PRAYER AND THE UNIFORMITY OF NATURE.
“Knowing this first, that there shall come in the last days scoffers, walking after their own lusts, and saying, Where is the promise of his coming ? for since the fathers fell asleep, all things continue as they were from the beginning of the creation” (2 Peter 3:3-4).
The infidelity spoken of in our text, had for its basis the stability of Nature, or rested on the imagination that her economy was perpetual and everlasting-and every day of Nature’s continuance added to the strength and inveteracy of this delusion. In proportion to the length of her past endurance, was there a firm confidence felt in her future perpetuity. The longer that Nature lasted, or the older she grew, her final dissolution was held to be all the more improbable-till nothing seemed so unlikely to the atheistical men of that period, as the intervention of a God with a system of visible things, which looked so unchanging and so indestructible. It was like the contest of experience and faith, in which the former grew every day stronger and stronger, and the latter weaker and weaker, till at length it waswholly extinguished ; and men in the spirit of defiance or ridicule, braved the announcement of a Judge who should appear at the end of the world, and mocked at the promise of His coming.
But there is another direction which infidelity often takes, beside the one specified in our text. It not only perverts to its own argument, what experience tells of the stability of Nature ; and so concludes that we have nothing to fear from the mandate of a God laying sudden arrest and termination on its processes. It also perverts what experience tells of the uniformity of Nature; and so concludes that we have nothing either to hope or to fear from the intervention of a God during the continuance or the currency of these processes. Beside making Nature independent of God for its duration, which they hold to be everlasting, they would also make Nature to be independent of God for its course, which they hold to be unalterable. They tell us of the rigid and undeviating constancy from which Nature is never known to fluctuate; and that in her immutable laws in the march and regularity of her orderly progressions, they can discover no trace whatever of any interposition by the finger of a Deity. It is not only that all things continue to be as they were from the beginning of creation-causes and effects following each other in wonted and invariable succession, and the same circumstances ever issuing in the same consequents as before. With such a system of things, there is no room in their creed or in their imagination for the actings of a God. To their eye Nature proceeds by the sure footsteps of a mute and unconscious materialism; nor can they recognise in its evolutions those characters of the spontaneous or the wilful, which bespeak a living God to have had any concern with it. He may have formed the mundane system at the first: He may have devised for matter its properties and its laws: but these properties, they tell us, never change; these laws never are relaxed or receded from. And so we may as well bid the storm itself cease from its violence, as supplicate the unseen Being whom we fancy to be sitting aloft and to direct the storm. This they hold to be a superstitious imagination, which all their experience of Nature and of Nature’s immutability forbids them to entertain. By the one infidelity, they have banished a God from the throne of judgment. By the other infidelity, they have banished a God from the throne of providence. By the first, they tell us that a God has nought to do with the consummation of Nature ; or rather, that Nature has no consummation. By the second, they tell us that a God has nought to do with the history of Nature. The first infidelity would expunge from our creed the doctrine of a coming judgment. The second would expunge from it the doctrine of a present and a special providence, and the doctrine of the efficacy of prayer.
“It is our fault, that we look upon God’s ways and works by halves and pieces; and so, we see often nothing but the black side, and the dark part of the moon. We mistake all, when we look upon men’s works by parts; a house in the building, lying in an hundred pieces; here timber, here a rafter, there a spar, there a stone; in another place, half a window, in another place, the side of a door: there is no beauty, no face of a house here. Have patience a little, and see them all by art compacted together in order, and you will see a fair building. When a painter draweth the half of a man; the one side of his head, one eye, the left arm, shoulder, and leg, and hath not drawn the other side, nor filled up with colours all the members, parts, limbs, in its full proportion, it is not like a man. So do we look on God’s works by halves or parts . . . yet do we not see, that in this dispensation, the other half of God’s work makes it a fair piece.”
-Samuel Rutherford, The Trial and Triumph of Faith (1645)
West Port Experiment 