The Christian’s Highest Good

      Copyright © 2014 Douglas Vickers. All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in critical publications or reviews, no part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without prior written permission from the publisher. Write: Permissions, Wipf and Stock Publishers, 199 W. 8th Ave., Suite 3, Eugene, OR 97401.

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      Manufactured in the U.S.A.

      Scripture quotations are from the King James Version.

      To the memory of

      Miriam

      Preface

      The principal proposition I address in this book is that the Christian’s highest good consists in “fellowship with the Father and with his Son Jesus Christ,” as the apostle John has stated that in the introduction to his first epistle. That fellowship follows from the redemptive work of Christ, and by reason of the renewing, regenerating work of the Holy Spirit of God in the soul an individual is admitted to the high privileges it conveys. By reason of its grounding in God the Father’s adoption of the Christian believers as sons of God, that fellowship is, at its very inception, indissoluble. The Christian believer’s summum bonum, his highest good, is to see God. That, in its ultimate sense, will accrue to the Christian in the day of our Lord’s appearing, when the vision of God will be full in the face of Christ in his glorified human nature. But while in this life it is not possible to see God with the eyes of flesh, the Christian’s highest good is to know God in fellowship with him.

      The exposition of the meaning and implications of fellowship with God takes up a number of underlying and relevant issues. They have to do with both the essential and the official or redemptive identity of Christ, the extent of his propitiatory and intercessory work, and the manner in which those questions have been addressed in historic theology. Considered also are certain trends in thought which have influenced the changing patterns of the church’s statement of its evangel. This has required notice of the assumption of the competence of unaided human reason and the anthropocentric orientation it has fostered, as that has infiltrated its influence into the church’s statement of doctrine.

      The book aims to clarify the practical and experiential significance of the fact that by God’s salvific grace two classes of people exist: those who are in fellowship with God and are “walking in the light,” to use the phrase from John’s epistle, and those who still “walk in the darkness.” The implications of that distinction are traced at some length in the context of an examination of the Christian character that is consistent with the privileged state of fellowship with God. A final chapter considers the Christian’s prospect that “when he [Christ] appears we shall be like him, for we shall see him as he is” (1 John 3:2).

      As already indicated, in writing the following chapters I have been motivated and influenced by the text of the first epistle of John, though I have in no sense set out to provide a commentary on that highly important epistle. I acknowledge the influence of the valuable commentary on the first epistle of John by Robert S. Candlish, and as some aspects of my argument are dependent on it I make full acknowledgment of my indebtedness to it. Numerous commentaries on John’s epistle are available, and I have acknowledged at some points of the book the helpful expository suggestions of Martyn Lloyd-Jones.

      Parts of the first three chapters contain material that first found its way into a paper on “Why did Jesus Christ come into the world?” delivered at a meeting of the New England Reformed Fellowship (NERF) in September, 2013. I thank the Rev. David Green and the Executive Committee of NERF for their hospitality on that occasion. Parts of the remaining chapters are dependent on a syllabus on the first epistle of John that I prepared for the adult Sunday School of the West Springfield Covenant Community Church, Massachusetts, and I record my gratitude to the Rev. Al LaValley who facilitated that class.

      As has been the case with a long list of books and professional papers I acknowledge with gratitude the skillful editorial assistance of Ann Hopkins. I retain full responsibility for the blemishes and infelicities that remain.

      one

      The Issue Stated

      Nothing, in the context of cultural critique, impresses the mind more firmly than what is observable as the crippled search for meaning and authority. Criteria of knowledge, belief, and behavior are fractured. A half-millennium of comfortable confidence in the competence of human reason has dissipated. Its once assured modernity has transmuted into a postmodernism that is unsure of its direction, its internal coherence, and its capacity for the projection of truth. For the reality is that the ethos of the age has bogged us in a directionless individualism. There are no absolutes now, apart, perhaps, from the recognition of the trick that logic plays on us; the only absolute that has any currency and permits no denial is that there are no absolutes. That is the pointlessness of our time. What, therefore, it is urgent to ask, has the Christian church, or Christian men who have been called into the church, to say to the world at large? Is any meaning yet to be culled from the old pages of divine revelation, or are the claims that the church might once have made no longer accessible to recapture, recognition, or relevance?

      We may ask a different question. What does it mean to be a Christian in our time? And how do the claims of Christianity stand against the contemporary complex of thought? Our answers will insist on the continued relevance of the classic Christian confession and will contemplate what our title has envisaged as the Christian’s highest good. But in order to cast our discussion in adequate light it is necessary to reflect on two primary issues. First, what is to be said of the emergence in the history of thought of the virtually pervasive assumption of the competence and sovereignty of reason in the search for meaning; and how, if at all, has that influenced or infected the church’s theology and doctrine? In other words, how has the elevation of the assumed competence of human reason and will diminished the biblical declaration of divine grace? Second, in what ways, as a result, have errant theologies advanced their claims and competed for attention and in doing so influenced the pulpit and troubled the pew?

      Our objective in this chapter is to sketch briefly, first, some principal philosophic trends, and secondly their theological influence, that have brought us to our present malaise. We aim thereby to establish reference points against which the meaning of the Christian life and the place of the Christian in the world can be more readily established.

      Reason and Autonomy

Philosophy has surrendered its search for answers to big questions, God is no longer a presupposition that orders investigative inquiry, and the smallness of our thought has sprung from the same assumption that Protagoras, the early Greek philosopher, advanced in his dictum that “Man is the measure of all things.”1 Alexander Pope, the eighteenth century poet, took up the strain in his philosophic poem, Essay on Man, where he concludes with the proposition: “Presume not God to scan; the proper study of mankind is man.”2 The absorption of thought with the preeminence of man, with the ultimate explanatory significance of man, had, of course, an earlier revival. At the beginning of what is generally referred to as modern philosophy, Descartes had shunted thought onto an anthropocentric track in the conclusion of his search for a “clear and distinct idea.” He found that clarity in his awareness of his own identity and cognitive capacity. That, for him, was encapsulated in his familiar conclusion that