The Office of Christ in Predestination

Extract

Concluded from previous issue of the Journal5. Lutheranism and German Protestantism¹The difference in spirit between Calvinism and Lutheranism is illustrated by Melanchthon's famous phrase: hoc est Christum cognoscere, beneficia eius cognoscere. There are of course evident dangers in the wholesale application of the principle, and later Lutheranism did not successfully avoid them. The religious egotism to which it gave rise was certainly too anthropocentric to convey an unobjectionable view of the relation between God and man. It is not by chance, as Brunner (Mediator p. 408) points out, that Ritschl is found repeatedly appealing to the principle in defence of a point of view which really regards God as the “guarantee of the value of human life”.Yet if there is any place where the principle can exert a salutary influence upon theological thought, it is in the doctrine of Predestination. Calvin avoided the pernicious consequences of the principle in virtue of his consistent emphasis on the sovereignty of God. But it would be difficult to defend Calvinism against the charge of scholasticism as it worked out the doctrine of Predestination in obedience to this emphasis, without the corrective influence of Melanchthon's principle. It can hardly be disputed that at this point faith begins to breathe more freely as it turns from the austere and highly rarefied atmosphere of Calvinism to the more robust air of Lutheranism.(i) Heppe is incontestably right in his judgment that the principle of Protestantism was to “ vindicate for the believer the certainty of the possessor of salvation in the promise and reality of God”.