Prof.
Herman C. Hanko
[Source: Common Grace Considered (2019 edition),
pp. 292-293, 313-315]
[An]
important question that has come up, especially among Calvinists, is the
harmony between God’s will to save some (the elect) and to reprobate others on
the one hand, and His will that all men be saved on the other. There is evident
and incontrovertible conflict between the two wills of God. In answer to this
problem, some have felt free to speak of “two wills” in God—one will to save
all, and another will to save some. Others have appealed to “paradox” and “apparent
contradiction,” by which God’s “logic” is placed on a much higher level that
our logic, so that what seems to us
as contradictory is not contradictory
in God’s thoughts.
This,
e.g., is the whole argument of R. Scott Clark in an article entitled “Janus,
the Well-Meant Offer of the Gospel and Westminster Theology.” He writes,
This essay contends that the reason the
well-meant offer has not been more persuasive is that its critics have not
understood or sympathized with the fundamental assumption on which the doctrine
of the well-meant offer was premised: the distinction between theology as God
knows it (theologia
archetypa) and theology as it is revealed to and done by us (theologia ectypa).
In making the biblical case for the claim that God reveals himself as desiring
what he has not secretly willed to do, Murray and Strimple assumed this
distinction which they did not articulate explicitly. (R. Scott Clark, “Janus,
the Well-Meant Offer of the Gospel and Westminster Theology,” in The Pattern of Sound Doctrine: Systematic
Theology At The Westminster Seminaries—Essays in Honor of Robert B. Strimple
[P&R Publishing, 2004].)
This proposed solution is a rather fancy and Latinized way of saying that the conflict in God’s will to save the elect only and God’s will to save all men is only in our theology and not in God’s theology. God’s theology is fundamentally different from revelation and from our theology.
[…]
The
Latin terms may give a sense of learning to the argument and persuade others by
some superior language found only in the Latin, but the fact is that the
English words mean something quite different. According to my trusty Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary,
confirmed by Webster’s Unabridged
Dictionary, the English word archetype
means “original” and the English word ectype
means “copy.”
Now,
I do not think that it would be proper to call our knowledge of God a “copy” of God’s knowledge of Himself. Our knowledge of God is the knowledge of
fellowship and friendship. It is like
the knowledge to learn about my knowledge I have of my wife; and Scripture
confirms that I have God’s full consent to use the analogy of marriage. Nor
must we forget this when we talk of the knowledge of God. Scripture makes it
very clear that our knowledge of God is of such a kind that the same word can
be used for it as is used for Adam and Eve, when Adam “knew” his wife Eve and
she conceived and bore a son (Gen. 4:1).
The
wicked have a certain knowledge of God as well, acquired through God’s speech
in creation (Rom. 1:18ff). But this
knowledge is very limited, although accurate. They know, Paul says, that God is God and that He alone must be served.
This is not a knowledge different
from what God has in Himself and of Himself; if it were, the wicked would have
an excellent excuse for not serving Him (Rom. 1:20). They will not be able to
say, in the judgment, “We had only ectypal knowledge
of thee, and did not know that thou art the only God.”
But
the knowledge that the believer has is saving
knowledge, knowledge of covenant
fellowship with God, knowledge that sets
free, knowledge that saves. But
it is impossible to imagine that such knowledge could be intimate and
covenantal if it involved contradictions.
If I may carry the analogy of the knowledge of my wife into the context of the “well-meant
gospel offer,” the intimate knowledge of our marriage would be impossible. She
told me that she loved me and wanted to be married to me and to live with me in
the intimacy of marriage. But she told me, also, that, in some sort of
different way, which I could not comprehend, she loved other men as well, and
desired to be married to them. This sort of thing would make the knowledge of
the intimacy of marriage impossible—even if she said to me (as some defenders
of the “well-meant gospel offer” say), “My love for other men is different from my love for you … It is
not contradictory, as you seem to think, but you are not capable of
understanding why it is not contradictory.” I assure you, that would do little
to relieve my concern—if “concern” is a strong enough word.
But,
supposing that we use the ideas of “original” and “copy” for a moment. If God’s knowledge of Himself is original
(as it is) and our knowledge of God
is a copy, the copy is like the
original in many respects or it is not a
copy. If the copy says that God loves His people as elect, but God loves all men
in His desire to save them, then the original has to say that too, or the copy
is no more a copy. In other words, if the
copy says things not found in the original, it is not a copy.
To
say that the copy has problems and contradictions in it that the original does
not have, is to say that we do not have a
copy at all, and that we cannot tell
what the original says. We are incapable of saying anything about the
original. We cannot say anything
about God from the knowledge we have in Scripture. We are theological agnostics; and the knowledge of God as our God is forever impossible—even in
heaven. Even in heaven, I say, for our knowledge of God that we shall have in
heaven is the same as it is now in all
respects. We know God always and only through Christ. The difference is
only that now we know Christ “through a mirror darkly” (I Cor. 13:12), but
presently we shall know Him face to face.
But
again, our knowledge that we have “through a mirror darkly” is not (and cannot
be) contradictory and therefore inaccurate. If I am shaving in front of the
mirror and see my wife behind me, I do not expect that, by turning around and
seeing who is behind me, it will be another
person than my wife. When we turn around in heaven, throw away the mirror,
and see Christ face to face, and God in Christ, we will not say (thank God) I
had an entirely wrong knowledge of
you while I was in the world. I thought you said in the mirror, “I love not
only you, but all men.” And the answer would come to us in heaven, “Your
knowledge of Me while you were on earth was only theologia ectypa and not theologia archetypa. We ought to be
very thankful that that is not the case. Can you imagine a martyr willing to
die for his knowledge of Christ when it is only theologia ectypa? I would not be
prepared to do that. I will gladly and willingly die for one who is my Friend,
who has cared for me, saved me from the wreck I made of my own life, and will
take me into His own covenant life. I cannot imagine myself dying for a god of whom I know nothing, much less
whether He truly loves me, when He
loves everybody, even those who kill me and who go to hell.
No,
the distinction will do nothing to solve the problem, but it will only rob us
of the knowledge of our God through Jesus Christ, a knowledge that is more than
life to us.
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QUESTION
BOX:
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Q. “What are the main problems with the notion that ‘our
knowledge of God, which is apparently contradictory, is, in God’s mind,
perfectly harmonious’?”
Such
an idea as this does two serious and destructive things to our knowledge of
God. First, it results in theological
agnosticism; that is, we cannot really know who and what God is and what is
the nature of His mighty works. Second, we cannot know Him with that saving
knowledge of which Jesus speaks in His high-priestly prayer: “And this is life
eternal, that they might know thee the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom
thou hast sent” (John 17:3). (Herman
C. Hanko, “Common Grace Considered” [2019 edition], p. 325)
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