Calvin and his lame sanctification and
lame overcoming view ---Calvin’s first gratia was his formal
cause of a person’s right standing before God. It happens outside of us. In
heaven. ---His view of justification answered the
question, “How does a sinner obtain a clean conscious before God’s ‘tribunal’
and gain an unshakable assurance of salvation”? ---For him justification, which was by the
merits of Christ, was grounded only in the heavenly legal declaration of God’s
righteousness. Justification was not renovative in us, for it was extra nos or outside of us. ---Calvin placed the discussion of human
moral deeds or actions in his doctrines of regeneration and sanctification,
which is part of Calvin’s second gratia ideas. ---By justification through sola fide,
Christians were pronounced just not because they were such in reality but were so by
imputation. ---Calvin’s duplex gratia = double
grace, which was simul istus et peccator just like Luther, sees
Justification as a kind of space suit protecting the sinner and whatever
happens inside is not really developed or focused on by Calvin. ---There was forgiveness of sins and inner
renewal but the inner renewal was almost a lame situation. The doctrine of
union with Christ was the umbrella under which his view of sanctification
functioned. ---This duplex/double (2) gratia/grace
stressed the assurance of salvation in the believer’s conscience. Period.
Overcoming is not a message that Calvin was eager to enter in. ---His interpretation of Rom 8:4a was
grounded in his second iustitia and a
view of justification sympathetic to Augustine’s and Aquinas’s. ---“Might be fulfilled in us” was
understood by him as “might be performed by us,” a view in accord with Rom
13:8. With the lips he confess Romans 13:8 but in practice he denies that
possibility. ---His interpretation of Rom 8:4a was
grounded in his first gratia and a view of justification sympathetic to Luther’s and
Melanchthon’s. ---“Might be fulfilled in us” was
understood by him as “Christ’s fulfillment of the law for us,” in heaven and
imputed or thrown over us while we stay the same in us, namely same time sinner
and same time saint. ---What is serious here is that this view
of Calvin of something always outside of us, is not in line with the thinking
of Paul in Romans 13:8 but against the thinking of the Word of God. ---So what is the problem with Calvin? He
just preach conversion and then walks away thinking it is the end of the
gospel. ---He does not harmonize Jesus, John,
James, Peter, Jude and Paul’s messages that justification is [Christ for us in
heaven as imputation] is just the switching on of salvation or one side of the
coin of the full gospel. Sanctification is the other side of that coin [Christ
in us through the second Comforter on earth, the Holy Spirit as real renovation
and transformation on earth moment by moment improving] which is switched on at
the same time. ---Calvin is quiet about sanctification
and this impartation grace. Thus a lame sanctification view. ---The value of Ellen White is that she
presents a Salvation 4.1 upgrade of carefully balancing both imputation and
impartation and growth and transformation to proper keeping of the Law of God
until perfection in a balanced way. ---It is this part that is silent in
George Knight or Hans LaRondelle or G. Berkhouwer’s views because of Calvin’s
silence of it. ---That is why Jacobus Arminius and John
Wesley reacted against Calvinism. Each one of them had a proper biblical
picture somewhere and Ellen White and the Spirit leading her, collected those
pieces and put them together in a harmonious mosaic of proper gospel. ---Andrew Kang of Korea and his uncle in the USA, Denis Priebe of
the USA, Doug Batchelor of the California and the books and essay of Herbert
Douglas just before his death, explains this very carefully. ---Herbert Douglas was the Seventh Day
Adventist Churches first systematic theologian. His ideas are very organized
and well prepared and well presented. ---I think that the Sabbath School
quarterly on Salvation in 1954 October (see www.ssnet at Lesson Archives) was written by him. It presents this
proper view of Salvation without Calvinistic inroads in it.
Source: I used the research of Peter Dubbelman from
Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary “Bucer’s and Calvin’s understanding
of Justification through the lens of Romans 8:4a: in nobis or extra nobis”. It
was a seminar on Reformation Theology HTH 9700, 3rd of May
2019.