Peter Leithart does a great job raising questions about B.B. Warfield’s book The Plan of Salvation here. I agree with just about all of Peter’s concerns, and would echo them. I certainly agree with him that at the very least a Warfieldian minimalism needs to be be filled out, and questions need to be answered.
The one place in Peter’s comments where I would raise a “yeah, but” would be with regard to his first set of questions about coherence. This is my reason for saying that Warfield still has an important point to make.
The problem is the perennial Jacob/Esau problem, since both those gentlemen were equally circumcised, and both came from the same womb at (almost) the same time. It would be difficult to find a sacramental distinction between them. Their access to the mediated means was equal — which is how Paul uses it in his argument. “Not of works, but of him that calleth” (Rom. 9:11). The distinction between the two was the love of God for Jacob, and the hatred of God for Esau — the distinction was in God’s intention, and God’s intention is not mediated. The intention drives the mediation, not the other way around. So, despite the fact that the available means of grace for the two men was identical, one was accepted and the other rejected. And if anything, Esau’s sacramental argument would have been the stronger.
If two men, one saved and one damned, can enjoy the same access to the same means, then the thing which distinguishes them is the faith of the one and the unbelief of the other. But that faith is itself a gift, and it is given in accordance with His sovereign will. The fact that the gift of faith is not inexorably given with every instance of a sacramental gift is what sets up the problem, and which is what makes historical evangelicalism a necessity.
Whenever God uses an instrument of grace, then that grace is of course mediated (in that sense, on that level). But when God is using the very same instrument of grace on a reprobate covenant member not three feet away from the first one, there must be an (unmediated in some sense) difference in God’s intention, or in His sovereign decree.
Paul calls this as God “giving the increase.” God is the Author of life, and His immediate gift of life is essential. A dead body and a living one both have access to the same organs and limbs, but with one crucial difference. When He determines to give this life, in the Bible it is described in comparison to the one great act that Peter grants has to have been unmediated — the act of creation itself. I say this in agreement with Peter’s point about mediation within the Trinity. If anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation (2 Cor. 5:17). Or, as Paul argues elsewhere, neither the presence of the sacrament, nor the absence of it, but rather a new creation (Gal. 6:15).
The verse that is inscribed on my mother’s gravestone points to just this truth. “For God, who commanded the light to shine out of darkness, hath shined in our hearts, to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ” (2 Cor. 4:6).
I am arguing that this command, this intention, has to be unmediated. When God commands the light to shine, the heart is consequently lit up. When someone remains in darkness, even if he has laid hold of every sacrament known to man, if he claims to be in the light (while hating his brother, say), the truth is not in him any more than the light is (1 John 1:6).
In short, I cheerfully grant that God uses instruments and means ordinarily, but I would argue (and I think that Warfield would agree) that for the converted, there must be an extra that is not anchored to anything in this world.