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, 3^rd of May 2019.