CORNERSTONES OF SALVATION:
Foundations and Debates in the Reformed
Tradition
By Lee Gatiss
Evangelical Press. 233 pages. £10.99
ISBN 978 1 783 971 954
Those with an interest in Protestant, and particularly Reformed, theology will find this volume both informative and gripping.
The author, Dr Lee Gatiss, is a Lecturer in Church History at Union Theological College, and the various articles reflect an impressive mastery of the field. At the same time, however, they keep in mind the needs of the modern church.
The topics covered include union with Christ, Archbishop Grindal’s views on preaching, and John Owen’s on infant baptism and infant salvation; and though I can no longer get excited by yet another article on James Dunn’s views on justification, I did very much appreciate Gatiss’s survey of Wesley’s Arminian campaigns, especially the credit given to Whitefield, both for his extraordinary labours as God’s primary instrument in the 18th-century Awakening and for the graciousness with which he bore the opportunism and misrepresentations of Wesley.
Luther and Erasmus
Tastes will vary, but there are two subjects on which Dr Gatiss’s treatment is especially valuable. One is the chapter on the debate between Luther and Erasmus on Free Will. Quite apart from the details, it is a timely reminder how central this issue was to the Reformation: so central, indeed, that Luther congratulated Erasmus on identifying this as the key issue in the whole struggle. In Luther’s own eyes it was no less important than the doctrine of justification and the reason for this was simple: it was precisely because of the bondage of the will that salvation had to be by grace alone (solā gratiā). Luther did not altogether deny freedom of choice, though he rather sarcastically limited it to such activities as milking cows and building houses. What he did deny was that man had spiritual freedom; and here there was, and still is, a gulf between the Reformation and Romanism. Whereas Romanism argued that the pre-regenerate man could cooperate with grace, and even earn it by doing what he could, Luther insisted that the human will, left to itself, would never come to Christ. True though it was that we are justified by faith alone, our wills are so bound in sin that only invincible, prevenient grace can enable us to believe.
Behind this debate over one specific doctrine lay a more fundamental concern. Luther believed passionately in the decisive importance of people’s ideas and beliefs, and this left him impatient with the tendency among Protestants to major on the corruptions of the church and the abuses of the papacy. The danger lay, he insisted, not in the impiety of the clergy, but in the errors they preached. It was their ideas that were poisonous and one drop of poison, he reminded his hearers, could ruin a whole drink. Gatiss drives the point home by invoking ‘an old rhyme’ (though clearly not as old as Luther): ‘Johnny was Erasmian. / But Johnny is no more. / What Johnny thought was H2O / was H2SO4.’
Extent of the atonement
But no less valuable than the treatment of Free Will are the two chapters on the Westminster Assembly’s debates on the extent of the atonement. These debates occasioned some of the keenest exchanges recorded in the Minutes, mainly because of the presence in the Assembly of a group of able and persistent Hypothetical Universalists. As Dr Gatiss points out, it would be misleading to label them ‘Amyraldians’. There was a stream of native English Hypothetical Universalism going back, not to Amyraut in France, but to John Davenport, Bishop of Salisbury, who, as we are reminded, was doing theology before Amyraut was born and who had had a significant influence on the conclusions of the Synod of Dort. Davenport’s view had been adopted by Archbishop Usher, and it was represented in the Westminster Assembly by such powerful advocates as Edmund Calamy, famous (only among theologians, of course) for his enigmatic dictum that Christ ‘did pay a price for all, with absolute intention for the elect, conditional intention for the reprobate, in case they do believe’.
The second of the two articles on this subject is headed ‘A Deceptive Clarity?’ and addresses the question whether the Westminster Confession’s statements on the extent of the atonement are as clear as advocates of particular redemption might wish. The reply, fully justified, is that they are not, and that the final wording reflects a clear reluctance to exclude Hypothetical Universalism. The Confession certainly stops short of condemning Calamy and his associates as heretics, even though, as Warfield suggested, ‘Amyraldian’ interpretations of the Confession are ‘more subtle than satisfactory’. Nevertheless, as Warfield (supported by Muller) concedes, the final wording allows Hypothetical Universalists to ‘exist under the Symbol’.
If this is so, then (picking up on Gatiss’ phraseology) ‘four-point Calvinism’ is a tolerable ‘shade of opinion within a generic Calvinism’. Assuming, of course, that we have a canonical definition of Calvinism in the first place.
