The next chapter in Covenant, Justification, and Pastoral Ministry is entitled “The Covenant Before the Covenants,” and is written by Scott Clark and David VanDrunen. In the course of reviewing it, I intend to quote Ambrose Bierce not once, but twice.
The first citation is of a more general nature. The topic of this chapter is the pactum salutis, the intra-trinitarian covenant between the Father and the Son before the creation of the world, and whenever theologians get into such rarified atmosphere I am always afraid that someone will have forgotten their oxygen mask. But then it turns out that at least half of them did. While there are sound scriptural grounds for holding to such a covenant, there are also grounds for being concerned that arcane speculations about the internal workings of the triune mind might intrude themselves unhappily into the discussion. If they do, then the whole thing begins to resemble the debate between infralapsarians and supralapsarians, which Bierce summarized as a debate over whether Adam fell down or Adam slipped up. In this kind of debate, unless everybody involved watches his step closely, things can get pretty stupid — like a couple of dogs, neither of them very smart, debating quantum physics. “No! Arf, arf.”
That said, two observations. The first is that that pest merit keeps showing up. This is another chapter that misses the statis, the basic point at issue. Merit is the thing that needs to be talked about, that needs to be established, and yet it is the thing that is always getting assumed.
The pactum salutis is “the eternal covenant of redemption” (p. 167).
“In Reformed theology, the pactum salutis has been defined as a pretemporal, intratrinitarian agreement between the Father and the Son in which the Father promises to redeem an elect people. In turn, the Son volunteers to earn the salvation of his people by becoming incarnate (the Spirit having prepared a body for him), by acting as the surety . . . of the covenant of grace for and acting as a mediator of the covenant of grace to the elect. In his active and passive obedience, Christ fulfills the conditions of the pactum salutis and fulfills his guarantee . . . ratifying the Father’s promise, because of which the Father rewards the Son’s obedience with the salvation of the elect” (p. 168).
The issue for me is not the word merit, but the medieval conception of it. And my point is that someone can reject the idea of merit, root and branch, and yet hold to the definition above.
If we conceive of the Father and Son conducting a raw, legal transaction, akin to the sale of a mule, then there are some fundamental problems with this scheme. But if we see it as promise and promised blessing, more like a king promising his daughter’s hand in marriage to any knight who slays the dragon, I am good with it. Worthy is the Lamb that was slain, and with His blood He purchased men from every nation. That purchase price was settled before the creation of the world, and it was settled within God’s eternal counsels. It was not settled by two adversaries in the marketplace, but rather by the Father, Son and Holy Spirit, all of whom indwell one another everlastingly in love. God is love, and the context of this pactum salutis has to be this love. This is what God is necessarily like, in all that He does. As I said, I don’t want to quibble over words, but I think that more than words is involved.
According to this chapter, this eternal covenant is a straight, legal business. God is acknowledged to be gracious, but that is off to the side, and doesn’t enter into the definitional nature of this transaction. “For the Son, the pactum salutis is a legal/work covenant of obligation, merit and reward” (p. 168). To parse the legalese like this, in my view, obscures the graciousness of all that God does. It makes me think of someone at a car rental counter, with a long line behind him, trying to read and grasp every word of the 4 pt. font contract he is signing.
When Christ came into the world, He came to do the will of His Father. He obeyed. He was promised the nations of men, and He gloriously fulfilled the conditions attached to that promise. So in discussing this, words like promise, blessing, obedience, submission are straight out of the Bible, and we should stick to them. Merit isn’t one of those words, and the sooner we get this gum off our Reformed shoe the better.
My second criticism of this chapter is of another nature entirely. The first one had to do with the nature of the theological claims; the second has to do with what I take to be a serious scholarly lapse. And here is my second Bierce citation. In his definition of valor, Bierce tells this anecdote.
“Why have you halted?” roared the commander of a division at Chickamauga, who had ordered a charge; “move forward, sir, at once.”
“General,” said the command of the delinquent brigade, “I am persuaded that any futher display of valor by my troops will bring them into collision with the enemy.”
This volume is offered to the Christian public because the gospel is purportedly under attack. The historic Reformed faith is being frittered away, and it is time for someone to take a stand. Okay, take a stand then. Elsewhere in this volume, specific threats are mentioned and, after a fashion, dealt with. But here, in a chapter dedicated to a discussion of the pactum salutis, in the context, remember, of federal vision threats, there is no interaction with Ralph Smith’s book Eternal Covenant. The book was published in 2003 by Canon Press, and, given the subject, it would be hard to imagine a more relevant book to interact with than this one. But no, nothing.