"Historic Calvinism and Neo-Calvinism" was published in the Westminster Theological Journal, vol. 36 (1973-74). Editorial revisions by Sherman Isbell of this article and of its footnotes are not to be distributed to other web locations for retrieval, published in other media, or mirrored at other sites without written permission of Sherman Isbell.

Some Theses of Hyper-Covenantism

What differentiates Neo-Calvinism in Kuyper's line from historic Calvinism? The presumptivist system stands out most prominently, but it is simply the visible appearance of a life-and-world view that often parades itself as the Christian life-and-world view, but which may with propriety be named Hyper-Covenantism, a synonym for Kuyper-Calvinism or Neo-Calvinism. As the name suggests, Hyper-Covenantism is an exaggeration of the historic Calvinist doctrine of God's covenant with man, a classical formulation of which is to be found in the Westminster Confession, chapter VII, with detailed expositions to be found in the writings of John Ball, Samuel Rutherford, Thomas Boston and Herman Witsius, among many others.(16) The aberrations of Cocceius may be regarded as a precursor of Hyper-Covenantism. What is Hyper-Covenantism? Just as Augustine has recently been charged with responsibility for inventing Pelagianism, which was only latent in Pelagius' own teaching,(17) the risk may be run of inventing a new aberration from orthodoxy in formulating explicitly a set of theses, sometimes openly avowed by Neo-Calvinists and sometimes presupposed more or less unconsciously, but pervading Neo-Calvinist doctrine and practice. Kuyper himself is most certainly not to be charged with propounding or approving every one of the following Hyper-Covenantist theses, although the fundamental and central theses were contributed by him and the others have been developed, whether validly or invalidly, from Kuyper's outlook. Seven theses may be formulated and expounded.

Thesis I: Covenant is a metaphysical category, under which all relations between man and God, man and man, and man and nature, may be subsumed.

This thesis may not previously have been formulated in these terms and is not being ascribed as such to any member of the Hyper-Covenant school. Yet on reflection one can discern this thesis to be the metaphysical presupposition of Hyper-Covenantism, metaphysical both in the sense of defining a category of being taken universally, and consequently in the sense of transcending the limits of created or temporal being. It is not to be condemned simply because it is metaphysical, but it ought to be subjected to scrutiny in the light of Scripture and with due regard to the historic Reformed confession as to God's covenant with man.

In Kuyper and his followers, this conception has often been presented in terms of an analogy from biotic life. The free and sometimes loose use of the words organic and organism betrays this source of the Hyper-Covenant axiom. On the sphere-sovereignty principle of Kuyper and Dooyeweerd, this appeal to a biotic analogy in support of a metaphysical axiom ought to be suspect ab initio. Historically, Kuyper's employment of the organic idiom reflects a pervasive fashion of nineteenth-century ideology. Speaking of the conception of the sovereignty of the state developed from German pantheism, Kuyper concedes to the enemy: "It was correctly seen that a people is no aggregate, but an organic whole. This organism must of necessity have its organic members."(18) Kuyper was well aware of the danger of the apotheosis of the state, denying the sovereignty of God. What he did not realize was that his acceptance of the organic analogy, not only at this point but as a pervasive feature of his outlook,(19) led to a re-interpretation of covenant theology, the metaphysical presupposition of which would entail a fundamental rejection of the sovereignty of God and issue in pantheism. If the organic analogy were pushed as by Schelling and Hegel to include the relation between God and the world, we could only conclude with Schleiermacher: "Ohne Gott kein Welt; ohne Welt kein Gott." ("Without God no world; without the world no God.")(20) Some Kuyper-Calvinists have contended that the covenant conception is needed as a balance to the emphasis on the sovereignty of God. This distressing perspective, unjustly suggesting that the sovereignty of God could be magnified excessively, has a striking kinship to the misguided antithesis of sovereignty vs. covenant proposed by secular scholars such as Perry Miller.(21)

It may be remarked that a tendency of a most deplorable nature has recently reared its head among some disciples of Dooyeweerd, and in this instance appears to have the approval of the master. This is the issue as to the attributes of God. A radical Neo-Dooyeweerdian at a conference sponsored by the American Scientific Affiliation a few years ago spoke scornfully of "The Anatomy of God Theology," and explained this as the type of discussion Berkhof presents as to the incommunicable and communicable attributes. Now Dooyeweerd objects to Van Til's dealing with the attributes within the traditional framework of a metaphysical theory of being. Dooyeweerd claims anti-metaphysically, à la Kant, "that the genuine conceptual contents of these transcendental limiting ideas do not transcend the modal dimension of our temporal horizon of experience," and applies this "to the theological limiting concepts relating to the so-called attributes of God."(22) Such expressions tending toward agnosticism would not escape the pen of a Reformed philosopher if the sovereignty and majesty of God had not been "balanced" by some such counter-weight as Hyper-Covenantism, which, as will appear, tends to lure the heart away from God to the world and man.

It may be objected that the Hyper-Covenant axiom is metaphysical, while Dooyeweerd is protesting against metaphysics. In reply, it may be pointed out, as Dooyeweerd himself has often observed, that the history of philosophy is full of dialectical antinomies, of which this may well be another instance. Moreover, Dooyeweerd like all anti-metaphysicians is involved in the antinomy of transcending the boundary he sets in the very act of setting it. Van Til, if he were so inclined, could in a Christian-theistic sense reply to Dooyeweerd, as Hegel did to Kant in a similar matter. Kant claimed to set limits to reason, to make way for faith. His faith, to be sure, was not Christian faith, but morality independent of the God of the Bible. But it is his limiting reason to arranging the data of sensation that has left its stamp on Hyper-Covenantism. This appears particularly prominent in the system of Dooyeweerd, notwithstanding his criticism of various aspects of Kant's system. The restriction of reason was rightly rejected by Hegel, who pointed out that to set a limit to thought, one must stand outside the limit. Now Van Til was fond of borrowing terms from modern secular philosophy, including Kant's 'limiting concept' and the Kantian 'as if', and giving these locutions a Christian connotation. As he was greatly influenced by the Neo-Hegelianism of Bradley, Bosanquet and Bowman, why should he not borrow the Hegelian argument and apply it against Dooyeweerd? Possibly the elements of Hyper-Covenantism in his own thought would then call for alteration, and a resulting recognition of the role of logic in theology would lead to a position akin to that of Gordon Clark, not to speak of the classical outlook of Reformed theology.(23)

Thesis II: The covenant relation between God and man was an essential element of man's original state entailed by the creation of men in God's image.

This thesis is a theorem necessarily following from thesis I. It is, however, contrary to the historical account in Genesis, where the covenant of works is represented as, in G. Vos' terms, 'pre-redemptive special revelation',(24) or, one may say, as a positive divine institution, presupposing a natural law according to which man is under obligation to obey all the commandments of God. The Westminster Confession provides a scriptural philosophy of the covenant relation, in which justice is done both to the sovereignty of God and to the antecedent obligation of the moral law, prior to the covenant of works. "The distance between God and the creature is so great, that although reasonable creatures do owe obedience unto him as their Creator, yet they could never have any fruition of him as their blessedness and reward, but by some voluntary condescension on God's part, which he hath been pleased to express by way of covenant."(25)

Note that in religion, i.e. man's relation to God, there is something more fundamental than the covenant relation, namely the moral law. Hyper-Covenantism, by overlooking the intrinsic binding force of the moral law, has in itself the seeds of a relativizing of moral standards, seeds that have produced a crop of poisonous weeds in the latest generation of Neo-Calvinists. Hyper-Covenantism in this matter has a strange kinship with antinomianism, which is rooted in a confusion of the law as rule of life with the law as covenant of works. It should not be too surprising that, despite the emphasis on law by Kuyper, Geesink and Dooyeweerd, the avant-garde of the movement should exhibit pronounced antinomian tendencies.(26)

Thesis III: The covenant is not to be viewed primarily as soteriological, but as cultural, Gen. 1:28 being construed as containing a 'culture mandate' for the human race.

Like the preceding thesis, the present one lacks solid exegetical grounding, is a consequence of the original axiom, and is fraught with pernicious consequences. Talk of a culture mandate should be banned from the 'language of Canaan' and recognized as a shibboleth of Hyper-Covenantism. The word culture is far from clear and well-defined in its meaning, and in Neo-Calvinist circles lends itself to encouraging the introduction of a humanistic attitude toward life, involving the idolatry of the works of man's hand in the fine and useful arts, accompanying, under pretence of covenant zeal, gross neglect of the great salvation. The biblical and classical Reformed covenant doctrine, on the contrary, is soteriological from start to finish. Even the covenant of works was a way for the attainment of eternal life, while the covenant of grace is nothing more nor less than the arrangement devised and executed by the Triune Jehovah for the salvation of the elect in Christ to the praise of His glory.

Gen. 1:28 is to be read simply as a grant to our first parents of dominion over the creatures, not as defining the chief end of man, which is to be found only in God and not in the world of nature nor in man's relations with his fellows. Hyper-Covenantism by its proclamation of the 'culture mandate', sometimes accompanied by an inflated theory of 'common grace', threatens to substitute "another gospel," scarcely distinguishable from the Modernist social gospel, for the gospel of free and sovereign grace.(27) The true and heavenly glory of the covenant is obscured when its soteriological character is enshrouded in a naturalistic veil of Cultuur.

Notes

(16) See Appendix B of Perry Miller, The New England Mind: The Seventeenth Century (New York: Macmillan, 1939), pp. 502-05, for a rather full list of English Puritan, Dutch and New England writers on covenant theology.
(17) Peter Brown, Augustine of Hippo (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1969), p. 345: "Indeed Pelagianism as we know it, that consistent body of ideas of momentous consequences, had come into existence; but in the mind of Augustine, not of Pelagius."
(18) Kuyper, Het Calvinisme, pp. 80-81: "Zeer terecht zag men het in: een volk is geen aggregaat, maar een organisch geheel. Dat organisme nu had zijn organische geledingen." The second sentence appears to be essential to the analogy, although the further development is rejected by Kuyper: "Door deze organen werkt de Staatswil, en voor dien Staatswil had alles te bukken. Deze Staatswil was oppermachtig, was souverein. . . . Zoo vervalt elk transcendent recht in God."
(19) In the Stone Lectures, passages such as the following may be mentioned (p. 70): "De mensch wordt uit den mensch geboren, en hangt krachtens die geboorte organisch met heel het geslacht saam." Here organisch may have a literal sense, but the notion of the race as a single organism is a form of the analogy in question. Cf. p. 71: "De organische eenheid van ons geslacht . . . en in dat ééne wereldrijk heel de menschheid organisch saamleefde." See also Kuyper's Encyclopedia of Sacred Theology (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1898), p. 113: "The whole is always something different from the combination of its parts. First because of the organic relation which holds the parts together. . . ." Again, p. 64: "Consequently you cannot attain unto a conception of 'science' in the higher sense, until you take humanity as an organic whole. Science does not operate atomistically. . . . No, science works organically. . . ." Kuyper goes on to speak of organic relations in the object (p. 66), and to say that an organic relation between subject and object is necessary (pp. 67-68): "There must be an organic relation between that object and our nature, between that object and our consciousness, and between that object and our world of thought." This idiom of organic relations, which may be a way of talking of internal relations, is not illuminating in epistemology.
(20) The dictum occurs in Schleiermacher's Dialektik. The implications of the organic analogy were developed in Schelling's Philosophy of Nature (1797), and dominated Hegel's philosophical thought from his Frankfurt period until the end of his life.
(21) See his treatment of covenant theology in Jonathan Edwards (New York: William Miller Sloan Associates, 1949), pp. 71-99. Cf. p. 77: "Actually . . . the covenant of grace came to mean in Puritan circles in both the Englands, not what God was pleased to grant, but what He was obliged to concede." Cf. also p. 30: "By this adroit and highly legalistic formulation, seventeenth-century New England found a way for human enterprise in the midst of a system of determinism."
(22) Herman Dooyeweerd, "Cornelius Van Til and the Transcendental Critique of Theoretical Thought," in Jerusalem and Athens, ed. E. R. Geehan (Nutley, N. J.: Presbyterian and Reformed Publishing Company, 1971), p. 87.
(23) Dooyeweerd's contrast of limiting ideas and "genuine conceptual contents" is clearly akin to as well as derived from Kant's opposition of idea and concept. While Van Til adopts the Kantian notion of limiting concept, it is not clear that he means the same as Dooyeweerd. A Hegelian dialectical conception of logic has colored his notion of paradox, a notion alien to Dooyeweerd.
(24) Geerhardus Vos, Biblical Theology (Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1959), pp. 31-32 and 37ff.
(25) Westminster Confession, chap. VII, sec. i.
(26) Cf. A. H. de Graaff and C G. Seerveld, Understanding the Scriptures (A.A.C.S.: Toronto, 1969), in which de Graaff makes the following statement (p. 29): "The Bible does not teach us how to be good and how to avoid being bad," and with respect to the Ten Commandments (p. 35): "None of them can be literally followed or applied today, for we live in a different period of history in a different culture."
(27) Cf. John M. Frame and Leonard J. Coppes, The Amsterdam Philosophy (Phillipsburg, N. J.: Harmony Press, 1972), in which Coppes, while retaining the term 'cultural mandate', makes substantially the same point, that Christianity is first and foremost soteriological, not cultural. Frame's section on evangelism is incisive (p. 48): "Normal cultural pursuits . . . must take second place to the preaching of the gospel."

Go to the next installment:
Historic Calvinism and Neo-Calvinism: Part III