Regrettably, this issue needs to be raised, although it has been long established. Predestination is, put simply, Biblical. Denial thereof is obstinacy and pride, put simply. While there are many other doctrinal loci that cannot be obscured by this, yet, it must be taught.
http://www.virtueonline.org/portal/modules/news/article.php?storyid=16478
http://www.virtueonline.org/portal/modules/news/article.php?storyid=16478
PREDESTINATION AND PROMISE: ARTICLE XVII
By Roger Salter
Special to Virtueonline www.virtueonline.org
Sept. 1, 2012
Anglicanism's commitment to the doctrine of predestination is not merely something to be noted, acknowledged, and calmly filed away. Anglicans are often apologetic for their own personal convictions and tend to keep them private. Electing love is a truth to be rejoiced in, reinforced in our generation, and proclaimed for the comfort and reassurance of God's people, especially in times of testing, which we may be confronting sooner than we expect. Calvin's emphasis was due not only to his loyal exposition of Holy Scripture and his fidelity to the long standing Augustinian tradition. It was a pastoral response to the appeal of cart loads of saints being transported to prison and possible martyrdom.
Persecuted believers needed to know, in the face of death, that they were in the secure grip of their Saviour's love. Calvin knew the Biblical answer to their intense fear for themselves and their loved ones. Electing love is the recurrent theme through Scripture that persuades the Christian of the eternal, irreversible fondness of the Mediator for the folk he came to represent and rescue. Electing love, God's prior choice of his people, is the entrancing message of the Word of God. It is a rapturous, romantic refrain sung by prophets and apostles throughout the eras of divine revelation and it is a tune that bids all believers to sing with exuberant wonder and gratitude at the absolutely unmotivated mercy of God.
Our calling and coming to God is a process of courtship, the sweet but strong wooing of those lost and wretched ones by the divine Bridegroom set upon winning the hearts of all those who will constitute his Bride in a paradise of mutual adoration. Here the Song of Solomon comes into prominence as a disclosure of the tender and affectionate heart of God (St. Bernard, a favourite of Luther and Calvin, was captivated by this delicious disclosure of the Lord's ardent pursuit of the beloved). He wants to marry us and stay married forever.
Our Article speaks the clear language of Romans eight and nine, and all the other places in Scripture where the precious love of the Saviour towards his own is intimated and expressed in words that seal the certainty of a fully accomplished salvation, not a rescue attempt vulnerable to human refusal and failure. Electing love announces the success and sufficiency of the Lord Jesus in his saving assignment. Our Prophet, Priest, and King may not have his glory diminished by the fickleness and faithlessness of man. He draws those whom electing love desires.
The New Testament is replete and brimful of declarations and descriptions of God's love through Christ that takes hold of certain persons cherished before the foundation of the world and prized and preserved until they attain the next (Walter Eichrodt: Theology of the Old Testament, SCM Press, London, 1961 refers to individual election that is expression of man's total reliance upon God's pity [page 257] and which settles upon one person out of tens of hundreds and holds him tightly with unbreakable firmness in spite all his faults and failings [page 286]. Eichrodt's own words are even more striking. Copyright observed).
A perusal of Article XVII yields a summary of the Saviour in action for the sake of his elect separated from the rebellious mass of mankind of which the elect themselves were a compliant and recalcitrant part with no desire for the Lover of their souls. The testimony of scripture abundantly establishes this fact. We witness God's sovereign and gracious determinations, we observe the Incarnate One making amends for us, providing atonement, and effecting our deliverance on the cross. We note his work within us achieving subjectively the salvation he has wrought. The article is succinct, concise, and Biblically correct - a masterpiece of theological statement faithful to the inspired text.
The inner working of the Holy Spirit fulfils the objective work of Christ. We are made to feel, from the apprehension of truth and the desire for holiness, the reality and warmth of God's compassionate disposition. A responsive love is kindled, a consciousness of salvation, simply by gazing at the Redeemer - his attributes, acts, and invitations. These things are sufficient to create our assurance of eternal life engendered by the Spirit of God through trust in the promises. We look and live. This is what Calvin constantly counseled: a steady concentration upon Jesus, not a prying into the secret counsels of God. The predestinate cling to the promises that are worthy and true. We are guided to a guarantee of salvation by placing full confidence in Christ through a gospel that is addressed to all. No one can lay blame upon God for the forfeiture of his mercy. There is no external obstruction. Their deprivation is due to self-exclusion.
In the purpose of God every human being gets exactly what they truly want, friendship with God or his absence. No one is treated unjustly. The wicked, passed by in divine sovereignty, and condemned for the evil that are and do with deliberate resolve, want nothing of Christ (Romans 8: 5-8) and they bear the consequences of their sinful preference. They are not pining and yearning for the knowledge of God and ruing their lack of it. They steadfastly repudiate it (Articles IX &X).
Believers choose according to their new nature created and donated by God. He re-inclines their hearts towards him and they follow their changed affections which are directed by the Spirit's illumination of the attractiveness and suitability of Christ. The British Old Testament theologian Norman H. Snaith speaks of the love of God towards all in the unobligated invitations of the gospel, but knowing the certainty, because of human perversity, of universal refusal he moves upon the hearts of certain folk with an effective love that is so alluring that they cannot resist (The Distinctive Ideas of the Old Testament, Epworth Press, London 1955, the over-plus of God's love, "more than is required", page 140).
This is the unbidden, undeserved, unwanted love of God refusing to be defeated. Scripture introduces to our egotistic, native, Arminian theology the notion of effectual calling. Jesus in John chapter 6 speaks of our inability to come to him unless we are first drawn to do so: "Stop grumbling (man's contempt for God and his grace) among yourselves," Jesus answered. No one can come to me unless the Father who sent me draws him, and I will raise him up at the last day. It is written in the Prophets; 'They will all be taught by God.' Everyone who listens to the Father and learns from him will come to me (verses 43-45). G.C. Berkouwer (Divine Election, Eerdman's, 1960, page 48) reminds us that this "drawing" is actually a "dragging" in the original, and analogous in meaning to the heaving of Jeremiah out of the cistern in which he was incarcerated, a type of our bondage (Jeremiah 38: 11-13).
We are snatched from the burning and hauled out of the mire of our unwillingness. A kindly omnipotence draws us to Christ. Our natural condition is one of inability and helplessness, and like the Calvinist poet, Fulke Greville (Lord Brooke), we can only complain that we cannot even "strive to strive'. Not only theologians, scholars, students, and readers of the Bible are ravished by the thought of electing love, but also poets of the Elizabethan and Jacobite eras who clothed their appreciation of the overwhelming influence of grace in romantic verse and the language and figures of ancient myth. Grace inspires poetry and the BCP is a compendium of devout poetry that exults in the sympathetic kindness and concern of God.
Anglicanism in its symbols or standards is pledged to the preaching of "high and heavenly things", and especially to proclamation of the electing love of God personified in the One who descended to embrace us in this amazing passion of God for those upon whom he has set his favour: Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace to men on whom his favour rests (Luke2:14).
Our eternal salvation is to be enjoyed through Christ with whom we tarry as often as is possible, and it is his electing and everlasting love that fastens us to him. If we pondered it well we would be a stronger and more effective people. His felt love (extolled by Joseph Hall and George Whitefield) would make us winsome and create that holy envy among others to know him in his power to restore beaten-down strangers to God. We would have a testimony that convinces and removes all excuses. God saves his enemies addicted to and enslaved by evil - the utterly impotent. Anyone may call upon him. He saves us from ourselves, as corrupt and defiled as we sense ourselves to be. Arminianism throws us upon our own futile choices and vain efforts, and makes procrastinators of so many. Far better to come to a merciful God and cry, "My fate is in your hands" (John 10:27-30).
The heart of Scripture's portrayal of divine mercy is summed up in these words: "I was found by those who did not seek me: I revealed myself to those who did not ask for me" (Romans 10: 20). In holding to electing love we would at least be one with our principal founder, Thomas Cranmer (Thomas Cranmer's Doctrine of Repentance, Ashley Null, OUP, 2000). Concurrence with Cranmer may be attractive to those who seek authentic Anglicanism. The Bible is the epic of electing love and our Articles and liturgy encapsulate its enthralling content.
The Rev. Roger Salter is an ordained Church of England minister where he had parishes in the dioceses of Bristol and Portsmouth before coming to Birmingham, Alabama to serve as Rector of St. Matthew's Anglican Church
By Roger Salter
Special to Virtueonline www.virtueonline.org
Sept. 1, 2012
Anglicanism's commitment to the doctrine of predestination is not merely something to be noted, acknowledged, and calmly filed away. Anglicans are often apologetic for their own personal convictions and tend to keep them private. Electing love is a truth to be rejoiced in, reinforced in our generation, and proclaimed for the comfort and reassurance of God's people, especially in times of testing, which we may be confronting sooner than we expect. Calvin's emphasis was due not only to his loyal exposition of Holy Scripture and his fidelity to the long standing Augustinian tradition. It was a pastoral response to the appeal of cart loads of saints being transported to prison and possible martyrdom.
Persecuted believers needed to know, in the face of death, that they were in the secure grip of their Saviour's love. Calvin knew the Biblical answer to their intense fear for themselves and their loved ones. Electing love is the recurrent theme through Scripture that persuades the Christian of the eternal, irreversible fondness of the Mediator for the folk he came to represent and rescue. Electing love, God's prior choice of his people, is the entrancing message of the Word of God. It is a rapturous, romantic refrain sung by prophets and apostles throughout the eras of divine revelation and it is a tune that bids all believers to sing with exuberant wonder and gratitude at the absolutely unmotivated mercy of God.
Our calling and coming to God is a process of courtship, the sweet but strong wooing of those lost and wretched ones by the divine Bridegroom set upon winning the hearts of all those who will constitute his Bride in a paradise of mutual adoration. Here the Song of Solomon comes into prominence as a disclosure of the tender and affectionate heart of God (St. Bernard, a favourite of Luther and Calvin, was captivated by this delicious disclosure of the Lord's ardent pursuit of the beloved). He wants to marry us and stay married forever.
Our Article speaks the clear language of Romans eight and nine, and all the other places in Scripture where the precious love of the Saviour towards his own is intimated and expressed in words that seal the certainty of a fully accomplished salvation, not a rescue attempt vulnerable to human refusal and failure. Electing love announces the success and sufficiency of the Lord Jesus in his saving assignment. Our Prophet, Priest, and King may not have his glory diminished by the fickleness and faithlessness of man. He draws those whom electing love desires.
The New Testament is replete and brimful of declarations and descriptions of God's love through Christ that takes hold of certain persons cherished before the foundation of the world and prized and preserved until they attain the next (Walter Eichrodt: Theology of the Old Testament, SCM Press, London, 1961 refers to individual election that is expression of man's total reliance upon God's pity [page 257] and which settles upon one person out of tens of hundreds and holds him tightly with unbreakable firmness in spite all his faults and failings [page 286]. Eichrodt's own words are even more striking. Copyright observed).
A perusal of Article XVII yields a summary of the Saviour in action for the sake of his elect separated from the rebellious mass of mankind of which the elect themselves were a compliant and recalcitrant part with no desire for the Lover of their souls. The testimony of scripture abundantly establishes this fact. We witness God's sovereign and gracious determinations, we observe the Incarnate One making amends for us, providing atonement, and effecting our deliverance on the cross. We note his work within us achieving subjectively the salvation he has wrought. The article is succinct, concise, and Biblically correct - a masterpiece of theological statement faithful to the inspired text.
The inner working of the Holy Spirit fulfils the objective work of Christ. We are made to feel, from the apprehension of truth and the desire for holiness, the reality and warmth of God's compassionate disposition. A responsive love is kindled, a consciousness of salvation, simply by gazing at the Redeemer - his attributes, acts, and invitations. These things are sufficient to create our assurance of eternal life engendered by the Spirit of God through trust in the promises. We look and live. This is what Calvin constantly counseled: a steady concentration upon Jesus, not a prying into the secret counsels of God. The predestinate cling to the promises that are worthy and true. We are guided to a guarantee of salvation by placing full confidence in Christ through a gospel that is addressed to all. No one can lay blame upon God for the forfeiture of his mercy. There is no external obstruction. Their deprivation is due to self-exclusion.
In the purpose of God every human being gets exactly what they truly want, friendship with God or his absence. No one is treated unjustly. The wicked, passed by in divine sovereignty, and condemned for the evil that are and do with deliberate resolve, want nothing of Christ (Romans 8: 5-8) and they bear the consequences of their sinful preference. They are not pining and yearning for the knowledge of God and ruing their lack of it. They steadfastly repudiate it (Articles IX &X).
Believers choose according to their new nature created and donated by God. He re-inclines their hearts towards him and they follow their changed affections which are directed by the Spirit's illumination of the attractiveness and suitability of Christ. The British Old Testament theologian Norman H. Snaith speaks of the love of God towards all in the unobligated invitations of the gospel, but knowing the certainty, because of human perversity, of universal refusal he moves upon the hearts of certain folk with an effective love that is so alluring that they cannot resist (The Distinctive Ideas of the Old Testament, Epworth Press, London 1955, the over-plus of God's love, "more than is required", page 140).
This is the unbidden, undeserved, unwanted love of God refusing to be defeated. Scripture introduces to our egotistic, native, Arminian theology the notion of effectual calling. Jesus in John chapter 6 speaks of our inability to come to him unless we are first drawn to do so: "Stop grumbling (man's contempt for God and his grace) among yourselves," Jesus answered. No one can come to me unless the Father who sent me draws him, and I will raise him up at the last day. It is written in the Prophets; 'They will all be taught by God.' Everyone who listens to the Father and learns from him will come to me (verses 43-45). G.C. Berkouwer (Divine Election, Eerdman's, 1960, page 48) reminds us that this "drawing" is actually a "dragging" in the original, and analogous in meaning to the heaving of Jeremiah out of the cistern in which he was incarcerated, a type of our bondage (Jeremiah 38: 11-13).
We are snatched from the burning and hauled out of the mire of our unwillingness. A kindly omnipotence draws us to Christ. Our natural condition is one of inability and helplessness, and like the Calvinist poet, Fulke Greville (Lord Brooke), we can only complain that we cannot even "strive to strive'. Not only theologians, scholars, students, and readers of the Bible are ravished by the thought of electing love, but also poets of the Elizabethan and Jacobite eras who clothed their appreciation of the overwhelming influence of grace in romantic verse and the language and figures of ancient myth. Grace inspires poetry and the BCP is a compendium of devout poetry that exults in the sympathetic kindness and concern of God.
Anglicanism in its symbols or standards is pledged to the preaching of "high and heavenly things", and especially to proclamation of the electing love of God personified in the One who descended to embrace us in this amazing passion of God for those upon whom he has set his favour: Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace to men on whom his favour rests (Luke2:14).
Our eternal salvation is to be enjoyed through Christ with whom we tarry as often as is possible, and it is his electing and everlasting love that fastens us to him. If we pondered it well we would be a stronger and more effective people. His felt love (extolled by Joseph Hall and George Whitefield) would make us winsome and create that holy envy among others to know him in his power to restore beaten-down strangers to God. We would have a testimony that convinces and removes all excuses. God saves his enemies addicted to and enslaved by evil - the utterly impotent. Anyone may call upon him. He saves us from ourselves, as corrupt and defiled as we sense ourselves to be. Arminianism throws us upon our own futile choices and vain efforts, and makes procrastinators of so many. Far better to come to a merciful God and cry, "My fate is in your hands" (John 10:27-30).
The heart of Scripture's portrayal of divine mercy is summed up in these words: "I was found by those who did not seek me: I revealed myself to those who did not ask for me" (Romans 10: 20). In holding to electing love we would at least be one with our principal founder, Thomas Cranmer (Thomas Cranmer's Doctrine of Repentance, Ashley Null, OUP, 2000). Concurrence with Cranmer may be attractive to those who seek authentic Anglicanism. The Bible is the epic of electing love and our Articles and liturgy encapsulate its enthralling content.
The Rev. Roger Salter is an ordained Church of England minister where he had parishes in the dioceses of Bristol and Portsmouth before coming to Birmingham, Alabama to serve as Rector of St. Matthew's Anglican Church
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