CTC 63

	Christ the Center
Episode	63
Guest(s)	Danny Olinger
Panel	Jeff Waddington, Jim Cassidy, Camden Bucey
Geerhardus Vos

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Length: 55:28
Date: April 3, 2009

Description

The Christ the Center panel had a fascinating conversation with Rev. Danny Olinger, general secretary for the Committee on Christian Education for the Orthodox Presbyterian Church and editor of The Geerhardus Vos Anthology, about all things Vos. Rev. Olinger gives the listener a brief biographical sketch of the life and ministry of Vos and gets to the heart of Vos' contribution to Reformed theology: Biblical theology of a Reformed and orthodox variety. Several key aspects of Vos' work are explained, including the expression "eschatology precedes soteriology." By the end of the discussion, listeners will understand the importance of Vos for a proper grasp of Reformed theology in general.

Panel

Geerhardus Vos

The Person

Geerhardus Vos (1862 - 1949)

Born in Netherlands 1862
Son of a Dutch Reformed preacher, a leader in the pietistic movement in the Netherlands.
Father moved family to Grand Rapids, Michigan (when Geerhardus was 19) to accept call to pastor CRC congregation of 1700.

Education

Geerhardus immediately enrolled in theological school in Grand Rapids. (Theological School is now Calvin College).
- Such an extraordinary student that he was made an instructor in his second year.
- After 2 years there he applied for entrance into Princeton seminary.
Princeton took him as a Middler.
- Received Princeton Seminary's highest honor. He wrote a paper tearing apart the Graf-Wellhausen documentary hypothesis.
Started PhD in Berlin
- One year into his PhD studies, Abraham Kuyper offers him the chair of Old Testament at the Free University of Amsterdam.
  - Time of great tension for this 24 year old.
  - Would have loved to work with Kuyper, but his father and uncle were Kampen men, not Free men. They weren't in to Kuyper's love of political activism and scientific language. They were more pietistical. Vos felt his first loyalty was to his father and he doesn't accept the offer.
- Ends up transferring into Strasbourg, finishes his PhD in 3 years.

Return to Grand Rapids

Returns to Grand Rapids to teach at the Theological School.
Teaches heavy academic load, spends lots of time in library, falls in love with and marries librarian Catherine Smith.
- This represents a break with his family.
  - Catherine is not Dutch and doesn't speak Dutch. His parents don't speak English.
  - Catherine is Methodist.
- At around this time Vos accepts call to return to Princeton Seminary.

Return to Princeton Seminary

Accepts new chair in Biblical Theology.
- William Henry Green had constantly urged Vos to come.
Presbyterian Church in trouble
- Charles Augustus Briggs "was on the loose".
- Confessional revision (which Vos in letters to [en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benjamin_Breckinridge_Warfield B.B. Warfield] had indicated was an "Arminianization" of the confession).
Vos serves at Princeton until 1932.

The Pitbull of Conservatives

1890's - 1903 he is very polemical.
Goes after the Liberals for what he sees as their gutting the Bible and gutting Biblical Christianity.
Confessional revision adopted in 1903.
- He is proven correct about Arminianization-- the Cumberland Presbyterian Church re-enters in 1906.
Enters a period of relative quiet

World War I

Born in Friesland in the Netherlands.
- Basically a Dutch-German area.
- German was as much a native tongue as Dutch.
- English was his third language, which he spoke with a heavy, heavy German accent.
It was said on the campus that he supported the Kaiser.
- Students simply stopped taking his courses.
  - His courses were thought to be hard, and he was thought to be pro-German.
Knocked down his popularity tremendously.

1920's

A couple of students Cornelius Van Til and his friend John J DeWaard were outraged that nobody was taking courses from this great theologian, so they essentially had Vos to themselves.
- Vos was Van Til's favorite teacher and considered him the most erudite man he had ever met.
When Van Til and DeWaard graduate, they're followed by two other students-- Ned B. Stonehouse and John Murray, who are also enamored with Vos.
- They believe that Vos is the great reformed exegete.
Van Til, Stonehouse and Murray become the young men that Machen chooses to become the core of Westminster Seminary. DeWaard becomes a leader in the Orthodox Presbyterian Church.
Machen never had a close relationship with Vos, but during the Presbyterian conflict there was no doubt that Vos sided with the conservatives.
- Machen helped Vos out with publishing a manuscript we now know as The Self-Disclosure of Jesus, which took liberalism to task for its conception of Jesus' messianic self-consciousness.
  - Liberalism thought Jesus didn't have messianic self-consciousness but was a moralist and humanitarian. Liberalism thought that the messianic was later thrust on him by the later church.
  - Vos rips the liberal view to shreds in this manuscript, but couldn't find a publisher.
  - Machen wrote to publishers to get it published because he saw it as the exegetical complement to Christianity and Liberalism.
So Vos has these young admirers who become very influential in the Twentieth Century.

Retirement

1932 retirement.
No more theological writings.
Writes poetry.
Catherine dies in 1935.
Vos dies in 1949.
Possibly did not join Westminster because he was 67 years old when WTS was founded and he didn't want to lose his pension.
- When Machen died in 1937, Vos wrote a moving letter to Machen's brother Arthur, about how even though Machen was his student in seminary, Vos had learned more from Machen as a faculty colleague than he had ever taught Machen.

Biblical Theology

Q: Isn't all theology biblical?
- A: Biblical Theology (BT) is a branch of exegetical theology., which deals with the process of the self-revelation of God in the Bible.
- BT brings into view the exegetical and the historical.
- BT ties together the supernaturalism of the Bible and the historical nature of the Bible.
  - You read the Bible and realize this is the very word of God, and it has one message at its heart, and that message is salvation from sin through the work of the savior Jesus Christ.
  - Jesus Christ stands at the center of the Bible, and what you find in the Bible from beginning to end concerns Him.
  - What you find in seed form in Genesis is connected to what you find flowering in the Book of Revelation.
The historic character is what distinguishes it from systematic theology (ST).
- ST deals with the Bible in a more logical manner.
Vos would say that BT deals with the linear (a line, with a beginning and end) whereas ST is more circular.
Vos would always want to keep BT and ST together. He believed that BT-- the exegetical--- came first, but that it built towards the crown of ST. He wanted to prop up ST, not harm it. And the proper way to do that was through BT.
Vos preferred "History of Special Revelation" over BT.
- Didn't like the term BT at all, but because the name had been in use for so long that he was stuck with it.
Q: Vos didn't invent BT, but how did he advance and develop it?
- A: He would say that it was Reformed Theology dealing with the doctrine of the Covenant, the history of redemption.
  - BT was born under an evil star, according to Vos. J.P. Gabler et al. in the 18th century were hostile to ST and dogmatics. So they wanted a way to attack ST, and so BT was a tool to attack the church, and Vos had wanted nothing to do with that.
  - According to Vos, BT correctly done would greatly help the church. I.e., undergirding BT with the notion that the Bible was speaking supernaturally. That you're dealing with the supernaturalism of revelation in the Bible, whereas Gabler et al. of the critical BT were purely naturalistic. They wanted nothing to do with the supernaturalism of the Bible.
  - Vos takes this discipline of BT and puts it on a sound Biblical foundation.
Vos would argue that the Bible is going to provide you with both the content and the form for doing theology.

Biblical Theology and Van Til's Presuppostional Apologetic

Q: does the one necessarily entail the other?
- A: I'd say they are of the same school, the same mind. I believe that Van Til gets his presuppostionalism and his supernaturalism from Vos. And so Van Til's contrast between the believer and natural man is Vos's contrast between the age to come and the present evil age.
Q: So there's a connection between the Pauline eschatology of Vos, where he develops the 2-age structure and the overlap of the ages and what Van Til later seems to be doing with the antithesis/ presuppositional apologetics? Is it right to say that he's appropriating the insights of Vos to the area of apologetics?
- A: Yes, I think so. I think that's on track, Jim.

Vos and the Unity of Scripture

Q: what would the view of Vos be on the unity of scripture? How would this vary from those outside of Vos-ian circles who would do BT today?
- A: I believe that Vos is in line with the Westminster Confession of Faith, Chapter 1, that he's on good historical ground creedally.
  - There's a relationship between redemption and revelation. Vos would say apart from redemption, revelation would be suspended in the air. That is, it would have nothing to say. That the two go together.
  - In saying this, he's not only pointing to the centrality of Jesus Christ in all of scripture, but to the normative aspects of scripture.
  - Modern BT ends up being descriptive, and Vos would want nothing to do with that. He believed that we are very much drawn into the phenomenon of redemption through the work of Jesus Christ, and through what Jesus has done for us we've entered into this covenental relationship in which life flows into life, and that to miss that as the heart of the Bible is to miss the message of the Bible entirely.

Life Flowing Into Life

Q: What exactly do you mean life flowing into life? I understand this is how Vos and the Reformed tradition would distinguish itself from Lutheranism. Could you explain this further?
- A: Vos has this phrase in the sermon on The Wonderful Tree, Isaiah 14:18. In the covenant, what has happened is that our God has acted and He has given Himself to us. He has condescended and given Himself to us through the gift of His Son, and through the work of Jesus Christ on our behalf we are saved. He is our Lord; we belong to Him. But that means in this covenant relationship that we are called now to give ourselves to Him in devotion and service. That the mark of this revelation life is giving ourselves to our God. Living in such a manner that we're motivated by God, in God, for God's sake alone, and that we are willing to lay down our life for Him and to lay down our life for our brethren. There's this reciprocal relationship in the covenant that we experience through the work of Christ and in the gift of the Holy Spirit. It is a foretaste of heaven itself, in that Place where God will be All in All.

Vos and the Covenant of Works

The Four-fold Estate

Q: how does Vos understand what was offered to Adam, and how are we in a situation different from Adam?
- A: You're getting into something that's very important in understanding Vos. The Covenant of Works offers before man an eternal goal. I think it's very important in understanding Vos to remember that he's operating out of what we would call a four-fold estate of man, viz., Creation, Fall, Redempton, and Glory.

In the estate of creation, man is created upright, man is created good. When he's not yet beyond the probation the Covenant of Works puts before these conditions. But from the History of Redemption we know that Adam falls, he disobeys, and the fall brings all mankind into a state of sin and misery. But then you have redemption, the promise of a redeemer. And that is what has occurred with the gift of Jesus Christ. But then you also have the fourth estate, the estate of glory. Now Vos argues that when the apostle Paul is looking at I Corinthians 15:45 ff., he has in view the relationship between the first and the fourth estates. He argues that what we find in scripture is that man was meant from the very beginning, even before the fall into sin, to commune with God in a higher estate in which there was no possibility of sin. But he was not yet in that estate when he was created. So that what you find then is that the goal of man is not to return to the garden-- and that's the Lutheran goal-- but to be in communion with God in that heavenly estate-- that higher estate, beyond the probation, where there is no possibility of losing your salvation. The heavenly is what man was meant for. Vos says this is writ large over reformed theology, and that is why the Glory of God is so essential to reformed theology, because we know that this work is all of our God's.

Eschatology Precedes Soteriology

Q: Is that what the expression eschatology precedes soteriology is all about?
- A: that's exactly right, Jeff. Before the fall into sin, there was this hope put before man of communing with God in a higher estate. That's the eschatological principle. If you don't get this in Vos, you might as well throw away his books!
- Comment: I (Jeff) wrote a series on the atonement where I actually made a big deal about this and how it actually influences what we understand Christ is actually doing on the cross. This is not an incidental point! You need to get that from Vos, because he gets it from the Bible.
- Comment: [Camden] Yes. God had a plan with Adam, and it wasn't just that he would stay in the Garden. History was headed somewhere. And then after he fell, and all mankind after Adam fell, Christ didn't come just to restore the state that Adam once had, but for a fuller life, a fuller communion with our very savior. The one that was held out to Adam, but Adam failed to obtain. And Christ gets it for us.
- A: That's exactly right, Camden. You just said it very well there.
  - Thank you. I've been taught well by men like you!
- Comment: When I [Jim] came to understand this... you just can't, you don't read the Bible the same again. And to know that all of scripture is eschatologically driven in and through the person and work of Jesus Christ, the first and second coming.

God Is the Gospel

Q: Why is this so important to understand for the life and ministry of the church?
- A: I'd say that you end up short of the true inheritance if you don't understand this. Let me give you an example. If you believe that the goal for the inheritance is something other than God himself, you're often going to end up with a theology that is very much attached to this world. You're going to wind up in the end tempted to retain your life in this creation and not to lose it for God's sake.
  - An example: Let's say that your goal is world betterment. You do this through social activism. Let's say your goal then is to have the culture transformed into a Christian culture. If God is not your goal, there's going to come a point in time where you'll be very indifferent to the means of grace. You're going to wonder, what's the use of the church? And you're going to end up subscribing to things that can get you to your goal other than the one who should be your true goal, God himself. The idea that Vos is helping us with is that when God is in a Psalm 73-fashion your true delight, he is your portion, your inheritance, when he is your heavenly treasure, and when you give yourself to Him, as you live out your union with Christ, you end up crucified to the world, and that's when you actually become the most helpful to the world. That's when you start to become salt and light. That's when you can actually impact the world through the Cross. But you can't get there unless you have that proper goal in the first place. You'll never have the proper transcendant unless God Himself is your goal.
  - WSC IS SO "VOSSIAN" [Jim].
  - This is so much in contrast to the prevailing mood of the current Evangelical community.[Jeff].
  - Jim and Jeff share about their recent trip to Theological Society meeting in Washington, D.C. about "Social justice". It goes to show how the current trends are. It's almost assumes that this is where we ought to be, this is where we ought to be going, that Christianity is about improving the culture, improving society and "doing justice". Of course, justice is radically redefined along non-Biblical terms. This kind of stuff is not going to be popular, and it's going to take time to condition our people to think along these ways because it is so counter-cultural, and it is so heavenly. And we're so caught up in this present evil age that it takes grace to have our minds directed towards the things which are above.
  - Jeff would go so far as to say that if you start teaching the Bible this way, in this day and age, you will experience the ministry of the cross. Guaranteed.

The Pauline Eschatology

Camden: We've had several interesting discussions on Vos and justification and the union with Christ. This always seems to come up every time we talk. Vos had an article entitled “The Alleged Legalism in Paul’s Doctrine of Justification”, The Princeton Theological Review 1:161-179. [1903]. In it, a very large stress is placed upon justification as a primary salvific benefit, and that seems to be at odds with what is found in his treatment of Pauline eschatology.

Olinger: This is complicated, so I'll give it my best shot. One of the first articles Vos writes is [www.biblicaltheology.org/dcrt.pdf The Doctrine of Covenant in Reformed Theology]. A great article, one that everyone should read. At the end of that article, he starts making comparisons between Lutheranism and the Reformed faith. He is arguing for the centrality of the Covenant in Reformed faith, and he looks at Lutheranism and he believes Lutherans really don't have a full-orbed theology. He believes that they are somewhat one-sided.

Vos says that the Lutheran understands the Holy Spirit as generating faith in the sinner, but that the sinner temporarily remains outside of union with Christ and then justification follows, and only then does the mystical union with the Mediator take place. And Vos really disagrees with that strongly. He says look, the Reformed Covenantal outlook is the reverse of that. You're first united to Christ, the Mediator of the Covenant. And that's why a mystical union. And that finds its recognition in faith. And by this union with Christ, Vos writes, all that is in Christ is given simultaneously. He then goes on to make the stunning statement that the Lutheran is like a child who enjoys the smile of his father for a moment, putting the emphasis entirely on justification, whereas the Reformed believer lives as a man, and he is conscious of the radiance of the Father's glory in total. This is from 1891.

When he arrives at the end of his career in 1932, he writes The Pauline Eschatology. Here he tells you right in the preface that historically with the Reformation, justification by faith has been seen as central to Paul. He understands why. He understands the necessity given what was happening with Rome. But he says, look, the entrance into Paul is not justification, but eschatology. Now, he goes on to say that the two are so closely intertwined that you'd never want to separate them. In other words, you could never have the Biblical hope without the forensic work of Jesus Christ on behalf of sinners. You never want to separate justification out from the plan of salvation. So, with that in mind, we need to go back to what he's doing in that polemical article (“The Alleged Legalism in Paul’s Doctrine of Justification”).

Contra Ritschl

Here is what's taking place, in Christendom. Ritschlian Liberalism is dominant, following after Albrecht Ritschl, the German theologian. Ritschl gets my vote for Vos' number one villain, who Vos is zeroing-in on, all the time. Vos seems obsessed with Albrecht Ritschl. And the Ritschlian theology guts Paul of the forensic. So when Vos is decentralizing justification in "The Doctrine of Covenant in Reformed Theology", he is doing so in an environment where his understanding is that everyone is agreed here on the forensics. He's talking about a particular aspect in view. When he gets to "The Alleged Legalism", he has written a series of articles. He wrote five articles in a row for the Bible Student leading up to this article, which appeared in the Princeton Theological Review. But in each one of them, he's dealing with the subject of Ritschl and liberalism gutting Paul of the forensic. The forensic was offensive to them. They wanted nothing to do with it. They wanted an atonement that had nothing to do with penal substitution. It was just so offensive to the "enlightened" mind. So Vos is going on the attack in defending the forensic as being essential to the Gospel. There is no Gospel unless the wrath of God is appeased through the work of Jesus Christ. There is no Gospel unless Jesus Christ stands in our place and His righteousness is imputed to us. And so Vos is defending atonement and he is basically saying, look, you have to understand first that Jesus really, historically died for our sins, and all that entails, as the basis of our salvation.

In this context, that's what he's saying. Because Ritschl and others were going straight to the transformative. They were totally bypassing the forensic, going straight to the transformative and basically saying that Christianity is about the Holy Spirit's work in you. But there was no forensic basis. And so that's the setting for what he writes in "The Alleged Legalism".

Now, I will also say concerning "The Alleged Legalism" that it appears to me that in his defense of the Reformed Faith and the doctrine of justification he is writing it in a philosophical manner. That is, he is going along the lines (it appears to me) of systematic theology. And that's something that he rarely does. He almost always goes historical, and post-1912 he gives no hint of entering into something in a Systematic way. But I believe that's what's going on there, and at view is the fact that the liberals have totally dismissed the forensic, so he's coming to the defense of the forensic.

Camden: Well, in the "Pauline Eschatology", which doesn't have the same polemical tone as "Alleged Legalism" did, there's still the transformative and the forensic are both absolutely essential. But for Vos, they're simultaneous? Is that what you're saying?

Olinger: Yes, very much so. I think it's undeniable that's what he's writing in the "Pauline Eschatology".

He wants to talk in terms of everything we receive, we're receiving from the Living Christ. He pretty much wants to talk in those terms. So that what we experience as believers is coming from our union with the Living Christ. And as Christ is regenerated and justified and sanctified and glorified, that is all ours in the closest bond imagineable with our savior.

Where to Begin Reading Vos

Jim: Let's say if you're introducing someone to Vos or perhaps for our listeners who have not been well-acquainted with Vos, where would you suggest they begin in terms of reading materials, etc. Where would you have them start, where would you have them go?

Olinger: Well, I always recommend Grace and Glory, which is a series of sermons that he preached in the chapel at Princeton. I believe they're the most accessible way into Vos. And you can really see in those sermons the great practical value of Biblical Theology. I agree with Vos. I'm attracted to BT because it's so practical. Now you have to define practical in the way the Bible defines practical. Practical-- Biblically speaking-- is the cultivation of communion with the Living God. And Vos is really obsessive about that. He centers on the work of Jesus Christ and then he just hammers these imperatives that bring home the call to the communion with the living God.

Now if you wanted to use modern means and someone who was a follower of Vos, I think that listening to the sermons of Charlie Dennison would also help one see what a Vosian outlook would look like.

Camden: Those would be a great place to start as well as the Westminster Confession, right?

Olinger: Oh yeah. I read the first question of the Shorter Catechism in Vosian terms. Now, I don't think the Westminster devines necessarily had all this in view, but that when we talked about glorifying God, that brings in view God's ownership of us. He is our Lord. We owe everything to him. But he also as servants has given himself in the Covenant to us to enjoy. So he has condescended as servant and he is ours in the covenant so that again, there's this mutual relationship in the covenant, life flowing into life with our God, and this is what we were meant for.

Like Jim said earlier in the show, it just changes your life, it changes the way we read the Bible. It ceases to become about you. You realize in Pauline terms that to live is Christ and to die is gain.

Jim: Just a follow-up question. You've mentioned Charlie's sermons. Where might they be available for people?

Olinger: I think you might be able to find them at Grace OPC Sewickley website or through Kerux, the Journal of the Northwest Theological Seminary, where his brother Jim is the academic dean. This is useful in seeing how this two-age structure pans out.

Camden: More advanced level collections include A Geerhardus Vos Anthology edited by Danny E. Olinger and Redemptive History and Biblical Interpretation edited by Richard Gaffin.

Camden: One last question. If Vos is the University of Michigan, I guess that makes Ritschl Ohio State.

Olinger: Oh, that is so cold, Camden! I can't believe that you would go there!

Camden: Danny's a big Buckeyes fan and I asked him when we were setting this session up if Vos would be a Buckeyes fan, and he had an excellent response.

Olinger: As much as I am a Buckeye through and through, Ohio State was founded in 1877, and in 1899 they had their most famous president, William Oxley Thompson, and he remained president for 27 years. He was a presbyterian minister who was an arch enemy of Machen. He was on the committee which investigated the re-organization of Princeton Seminary. There is a big statue of Thompson in front of the OSU library. And I think that in that sense Vos would be a Wolverine, because he'd want nothing to do with William Oxley Thompson.

Camden: Danny, you're on the OPC Committee on Christian education and you've authored two helpful publications. Would you like to promote them?

Olinger: Well, thank you! New Horizons is published for members and friends of the OPC and parts of it are available online. We'd be glad to send you a free subscription if you write us. And then we also publish online Ordained Servant which is a magazine for all officers in the OPC.