RTS Papers / Turretin's Institutes / Spring 2018
***Citations are by volume and then page number of the P&R edition.
Turretin mentions three attributes by name here: justice, mercy, and wisdom. Because of the limits of this study, the focus here will be squarely on justice. God’s justice is one, eternal, and unchanging, and the nature of these attributes have implications for the whole work of Christ. He asks, “What becomes of justice which not only acquits the convicted sinner (sin being unpunished), but also bestows on him the most honorable rewards?” [II.435]
Justice is inevitably meted out because justice is immutable. The sinner cannot hope that the Judge will change his mind about the least sin. At the heart of this work of Christ, each aspect of the atonement must be conceived toward its proper object: “Satisfaction has God for its object; remission has men. Satisfaction is made to the justice of God and on that account sin is freely remitted” [II.436].
This points to the dimensions of the atonement that (1) relate eternity to time and (2) relate eternity to relevant conceptions of infinity. First, the atonement relates eternity to time in connecting the parties of satisfaction: at one point regarding the receiving satisfaction in eternity, and at another point regarding the payment made in time and space. “He gives it as God-man … he receives it as the Word … he gives it as Mediator and receives it as a Judge” [II.436]. In other words, how should we understand an eternal receipt of a space-time payment in light of the three classical attributes examined earlier?
Second, and even more mysterious, perhaps, in what sense was the ultimate suffering of Christ eternal, given the principle of the punishment fitting the crime? Although divine infinity was not explored in this thesis, it is common knowledge among students of Reformed theology that an “infinite debt” of sinners is assumed to be incurred given the “infinite worth” of the God whom we have offended. Turretin seems to assume this same necessity of an infinite punishment, even if “not infinite as to duration”[II.436], at least as to an equivalent value.
It is only the second that he addresses head on. He says that “what was deficient in time is supplied by the condition of the divine person” [II.436]. This may be a good start to the answer, but it only opens up another question concerning the impassibility of the divine Son. A start to resolving can be that impassibility requires only that the divine essence not suffer as an effect: that God have no potentiality and thus that God is not affected from beyond himself. Divine justice is not beyond himself. However this concludes in reconciling classical theism with the suffering of the Son, it hardly scratches the surface of what this suffering is. Turretin’s focus seems to be that the surpassing dignity of the Son explains the sufficient payment.
The more practical application drawn out by Turretin is the sufficiency of the atonement for the sake of the elect: indeed the efficiency of the atonement for the elect in contrast to a cross that pays for the sins of no one in particular, in the name of paying for everyone in general. The fourteenth question comes right to it: For whom did Christ die? Here the question is not the power of Christ’s death taken in isolation. None of the Reformed dispute that the blood and righteousness of Christ is sufficient to save an infinite amount of theoretical worlds. Rather the question regards the actual design. Amyraldianism is surveyed but quickly dispensed with as leading to absurdities. That Christ died absolutely for the elect, but conditionally for all, only attempts to ignore the actual design question.
All in all, there are aspects of a definite atonement that come in inseparable pairs. These are inseparable because God is inseparable. None of these can be separated: the decree to elect and call from the decree to include those same elect in the Son’s work, the satisfaction from the intercession, the gift of the Son to accomplish from the gift of the Spirit to apply, Christ’s obtaining of the church from the believer’s obtaining the salvation so derived, etc.
Of course inseparability in these saving works is really a reflection of indivisibility in the one who works them. To divorce any of these from each other would be to separate the intentions and effect of one of the Persons of the Godhead from the others.
The oneness of the sacrifice is appealed to by Scripture to prove its sufficiency (Heb. 7:27, 9:26, 10:10, 12, 14) [II.440], and it is also called an “eternal redemption” (Heb. 9:12). Far from being a sectarian, in the sense of “non-catholic,” doctrine, limited atonement is actually rooted in classical divine attributes.
JUSTIFICATION
Justification (Topic Sixteen) follows calling and faith (Topic Fifteen) because the ordo salutis is primarily about the eternal decree and only consequently about the way that an individual sinner is converted and experiences progress in this life. Notice about soteriology as a whole that those attributes of simplicity, eternality, and immutability remain at the root. It explains why the elect and reprobate cannot be anything other than what God has decreed, as Turretin says about the impossibility that God calls the reprobate in the same way as the elect [II.505].
That God knows perfectly who will end in either heaven or hell is a fact of which the theologian is conscious, and this demands a choice. At this crossroad, the theologian must choose between unconditional election, on the one hand, or the extremes of Universalism, Open Theism, or Annihilationism on the other. Mediating positions are a state of cognitive dissonance that will wear off.
This same simple, eternal, and immutable quality passes on through the whole work of the Son, so that Turretin speaks of redemption as one thing accomplished by the Son and applied by the Spirit. The former refers to the office of Christ, while the latter are his benefits [II.501].
More than in any other section, Turretin employs the language of Aristotle’s causes to make precise the doctrine. The “impulsive” or “meritorious cause” [II.637, 646] is the material cause: the object that God reckons as inherently righteous. This could be misleading. Both sides to the sixteenth century controversy could claim Christ’s own merit as that material ground for God’s verdict. “For although they do not appear to exclude entirely the righteousness of Christ, inasmuch as they hold that it by it he merited that God should communicate it to us by the Holy Spirit internal righteousness and thus it is a condition of the formal cause” [II.638, 649].
As to that form, whereas Rome saw justification as a moral-transformative work, the Reformers saw it as a forensic-declarative work. Two different formal causes issue forth into two different instrumental causes by which the recipient of God’s grace lays claim to the “righteous” status.
Rome said that this was an infused righteousness such that it inheres in the recipient of the Church’s sacramental grace. It was one’s own, however it may have been initiated by grace, so that God would not call “righteous” what was not in fact righteous.
The Reformers countered that this was an imputed righteousness such that God considers righteous the unrighteous through faith alone. Thus the Reformers saw faith as the sole, sufficient, instrumental cause. It is important to note that Turretin does not live up to Rome’s caricature. He even sets the bar higher: “God, the just Judge … cannot pronounce anyone just and give him a right to life except on the ground of some perfect righteousness” [II.637]. This is the real starting point: the righteousness of God per se.
Revisiting theology proper he had said, “Justice is usually meant in two ways: either as “God is in himself perfectly holy and just … Or justice is taken for particular justice, which gives to each his due” [I.235]. From this “arises a twofold right with regard to the infliction of punishment: one necessary and indispensable with respect to sin itself; the other free and positive with respect to the sinner. Justice demands that all sin should be punished, but does not equally demand that it should be punished in every single person sinning or at such a time and in such a degree” [I.236].
The justice of God, no less than his grace, is a sovereign justice. It belongs to his “autocratic right” [II.646]. Some may be inclined to see this as a principle of voluntarism rather than realism. God would be deciding for the justification of a sinner by virtue of the divine will rather than the divine intellect. Certainly God wills to justify in spite of what he knows about the real record of the sinner; but the Reformed realist knows that while God may be deciding mercy against the unrighteousness of the sinner, God is not deciding against his own justice.
For the Reformers to claim that divine justice is sovereign is not special pleading. The premises that (1) God could justify whomever he wills and that (2) none is righteous, do not imply that he justifies without a ground in perfect righteousness. “Christ by his obedience is rightly said ‘to constitute’ us ‘righteous’” [II.644]. If justice was satisfied, mercy does no injustice. Moreover, God’s ability to impute this righteousness through faith is seen by Turretin to rest in the union we have with Christ. As our Head, “he can communicate to us his righteousness and all his benefits” [II.647].
So while Rome paid lip service to the highest standard — i. e. that God could not call “righteous” what was not in fact — Turretin turns this very truth back upon their notion of inherent righteousness: “because no one is justified by an imperfect righteousness, since the judgment of God is according to truth” [II.640]. Thus the perfect righteousness of one who is both God and man is shown to be a consequent necessity to the absolute necessity of God’s righteousness.
He affirmed Luther’s maxim that justification is “the article of a standing and a falling church” [II.633]. Here again the classical method confronts our generation’s antipathy to right order. This issue was so crucial that distinctions that our age would consider exceedingly hairsplitting, Turretin saw as the pivot point of the whole gospel hope. Catholic theologian Bellarmine is represented throughout as the closest to the truth, and yet when he shows charity to the Protestants and uses the word “imputation” to consider the sola fide perspective, Turretin must point out that he is still allowing for this righteousness to be “offered back” to God as the fruit of our labor [II.650]. Again our generation may find this hairsplitting. Jesus did not. The parable of the Pharisee and tax collector has the latter going back to his home unjustified before God (Lk. 18:14).
Turretin calls the two parts of justification (1) remission of sins and (2) the right to life [II.656-57]. He treats the imputation of righteousness as the foundation with absolution and adoption being the two benefits flowing from it. This is that double cure that follows, as the necessary solution, from the double curse of guilt and alienation.
Turretin is very helpful in answering those who would accept the imputation of Christ’s righteousness but balk at the imputation of Adam’s guilt. As an increasing number of Evangelicals are coming to Reformed theology through the New Calvinism, and therefore apart from consistent covenantal categories, it is only natural that doctrines such as this may seem dispensable. Paul’s analogy in Romans 5:12-21 is mined by Turretin not only for the parallel between Adam’s unrighteous act and Christ’s righteous act, but also the parallel between the immediate death of Adam’s race and the immediate life of Christ’s.
At first glance, it may seem as if the life and death parallel adds nothing to the question of imputation. After all it may be argued that, “We can accept Adam’s race being born into the sin nature, totally depraved, and destined for death apart from Christ. We can also celebrate the imputation of Christ’s righteousness (complete with active and passive obedience). But what do we lose if we jettison Adam’s guilt imputed and can it really be demonstrated from Romans 5:12-21 to begin with?”
In answering the fourth question he insists “sin and righteousness are contraries” and “between death and life there is no middle ground" [II.659]. The language of Paul’s analogy is not about the sin, righteousness, death, and life, that operate incrementally throughout the course of earthly existence. Here we are dealing with the mountain peaks, Adam and Christ, not primarily to hear about the long-term effects of their representative actions (although those are implied), but about the immediate effects, upon the whole of their races. Otherwise the analogy is incoherent.
Christ’s righteousness here “does not imply the extinction of sin, but only the pardoning of it” [II.660]. The analogy breaks down at once if Adam’s effects are natural but not forensic, yet Christ’s forensic and not yet natural. As far as the direct consequence of the act of the two heads, the former is infusion while the latter is imputation. But if Adam’s work was an infused unrighteousness, why should Rome not claim this analogy to teach an infusion the other way?
A similar one to the mystery of the atonement comes up here as well. Given that the whole decree is inherent to God, thus simple, eternal, and immutable, When and where does the act of justification take place? As with satisfaction, so with justification: How do they relate? On a theological mutualist account, there is space-time experiential cause rendering an effect in God. But the classical perspective will not allow this. Turretin speaks of “a twofold handling of it” which distinguishes between the act of God that justifies and the experience of the believer who becomes justified. As faith is the instrument it is only treated as a cause “relatively and organically” [II.670].
He describes those who “hold that justification [is] … an immanent and internal act in God. However, as nothing new can happen to God in time, they think it was made in him from eternity and ascribed to faith only as to cognizance and sense because it leads us into the knowledge of him and makes us certain of it” [II.683]. Turretin approves of the rational but will take a different position because, he says, “The decree of justification is one thing; justification itself another …The will or decree to justify certain persons is indeed eternal and precedes faith itself, but actual justification takes place in time and follows faith” [II.683]. Romans 8:30 is a passage which forces him to conclude this. Here we have a good example of how contemplative and biblical theology can work harmoniously to demand a more rigorous, but more accurate, distinction.
The simple, eternal, and immutable character of salvation is of practical importance. This is true of the atonement and justification. Turretin places, as if in a hierarchy, God promise in the covenant of grace as the foundation, and Christ’s righteous action as that which grounds the past, present, and future dimensions of our sins to that promise [II.665]. None of this contradicts the necessity of continuing repentance and persevering faith. Moment by moment is the only way that we can receive the benefits of repentance and faith and thus they remain necessary conditions.
Both satisfaction for sins and justification of the sinner must take into account future sins, or else one could only be forgiven and declared righteous at moment-by-moment faith. Such a time-and-change-bound satisfaction and righteousness would also implies that faith is meritorious, as the performance of it is the decisive mark between sins forgiven and others not, between righteousness possessed and righteousness forfeited. Justification has those attributes not simply because there is only one means by which believers are justified by faith alone. In addition, in the life of a single believer: “It is one thing to apply justification often and to extend it to sins of daily occurrence … another to repeat and renew justification often. The former we grant, but not the latter” [II.687]. What does this mean but that justification is one, eternal, and immutable?
CONCLUSION
Right order in theology continues into his third volume which deals with ecclesiology and the sacraments. Why is there one church? Who are its members? What are its powers? What are the sacraments and how do they differ from the false sacraments of Rome? In fact he opens off the question of whether knowledge of the church precedes the knowledge of other doctrines or vice versa. So his insistence of right method never departs.
There is not much mystery as to why Turretin’s work has fallen into disuse. With the Enlightenment came an overall secularization in the institutions and countries of the West. The Institutes were still the standard text in dogmatics at Princeton until Charles Hodge completed his own. A good case can be made that it should be required reading again until he is truly surpassed by newer generations of Reformed scholars working in the same vein. As it stands his system has not been equalled.
(#Turretin #Reformed #justification #Rome #Institutes #Scholastic #righteousness)
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