A Treatise of Justifying Righteousness, Preface – Book 1
The Preface.
Reader,
IF thou blame me for writing again, on a Subject which I have written on so oft, and so lately (specially in my Life of Faith, and Disputations of Justification) I shall not blame thee for so doing; but I shall excuse my self by telling thee my reasons. 1. The occasion is many loud accusations of my self, of which I have before given an account. I publish it, because I see the Contention still so hot in the Church of Christ, and mens Charity destroyed against each other; one side calling the other Socinians, and the other Libertines, (who are neither of them Christians) and if I mistake not, for the most part in the dark about one Phrase, and that of mens devising, rather than about the sence: But if indeed it be the sence that they differ about, it's time to do our best to rectifie such Fundamental Errours.
I find that all of us agree in all the Phrases of Scripture. And a Mans Sence is no way known but by his expressions: The question is then, Which is the necessary Phrase which we must express our sence by? We all say that to Believers, Christ is made our Righteousness; We are made the Righteousness of God in him; He hath ransomed, redeemed us, as a Sacrifice for our sins, a price; He hath merited and obtained eternal Redemption for us, that Sin is remitted, covered, not imputed; that Righteousness is Reckoned or Imputed to us; that Faith is Imputed to us for Righteousness, and any thing else that is in the Scripture. But all this will not serve to make us Christians! What is wanting? Why, we must say that Christs Righteousness is Imputed to us as ours, and that Christ satisfied for our sins! Well; The thing signified seemeth to us true and good and needful, (though the Scripture hath as good words for it as any of us can invent.) We consent therefore to use these Phrases, so be it you put no false and wicked sence on them by other words of your own: Though we will not allow them to be necessa…y, because not in Scripture; (And we are more against adding new Fundamental Articles of Faith to the Scripture, than against adding new Orders, Forms or Ceremonies). But yet it will not serve: what is yet wanting? why, we must hold these words in a right sense! What? yet are not your own devised words a sufficient expression of the matter! When we have opened those words by other words, how will you know that we use those other words in a right sence, and so in infinitum. Our sence is, that Righteousness is Imputed to us, that is, we are accounted Righteous, because for the Merits of Christs total fulfilling the Conditions of his Mediatorial Covenant with the Father, by his Habitual Holiness, his Actual Perfect Obedience, and his Sacrifice; or satisfactory Suffering for our sins in our stead, freely without any merit or Conditional act of mans, God hath made an Act of Oblivion and Deed of Gift, pardoning all sin, justifying and adopting and giving Right to the Spirit and Life eternally to every one that believingly accepteth Christ and the Gifts with and by and from him. And when we accept them they are all ours by virtue of this purchased Covenant-Gift. This is our short and plain explication. But yet this will not serve: Christianity is yet another thing. What is wanting? Why, we must say, that Christ was habitually and actually pe…fectly Holy and Obedient, Imputatively in our particular Persons, and that each one of us did perfectly fulfil that Law which requireth perfect Habits and Acts in and by Christ imputatively, and yet did also in and by him suffer our selves Imputatively for not fulfilling it▪ and Imputatively did our selves both satisfy God's Justice and merit Heaven; and that we have our selves Imputatively a Righteousness of perfect Holiness and Obedience as sinless, and must be justified by the Law of Innocency, or Works, as having our selves imputatively fulfilled it in Christ; And that this is our sole Righteousness; and that Faith it self is not imputed to us for Righteousness; no not a meer particular subordinate Righteousness, answering the Conditional part of the new Justifying Covenant, as necessary to our participation of Christ, and his freely given Righteousness. And must all this go into our Christianity! But where is it written? who devised it? was it in the ancient Creeds and Baptism? Or known in the Church for five thousand years from the Creation? I profess I take the Pope to be no more to be blamed for making a new Church-Government, than for making us so many new Articles of Faith: And I will not justifie those that Symbolize with him, or imitate him in either.
But yet many of the men that do this, are good men in other respects: and I love their zeal that doth all this evil, as it is for God and the honour of Jesus Christ, though I love it not as blind, nor their Errour or their Evil. But how hard is it to know what Spirit we are of! But it is the doleful mischief which their blind zeal doth, that maketh me speak; That three or four of them have made it their practice to backbite my self, and tell People, He holdeth dangerous opinions; He is erroneous in the point of Justification. And his Books are unsound and have dangerous Doctrines; He leaveth the old way of Justification, he favoureth Socinianism, and such-like: this is a small matter comparatively. Back-biting and false reports, are the ordinary fruits of bitter contentious Zeal, and the Spirit of a Sect as such doth usually so work (yea to confusion and every evil work,) when it hath banished the Zeal of Love and of Good Works. Jam. 3. 14, 15, 16. Tit. 2. 14. And I never counted it any great loss to their followers, that they disswade them from the reading of my writings (as the Papists do their Proselytes) as long as God hath blest our Land with so many better.
But there are other effects that command me once again to speak to them. 1. One is, that I have good proof of the lamentable Scandal of some very hopeful Persons of quality, who by hearing such language from these men, have bin ready to turn away from Religion, and say, If they thus set against and condemn one another, away with them all.
2. Because divers great Volumes and other sad Evidence tells me that by their invented sence of Imputation, they have tempted many Learned men to deny Imputation of Christ's Righteousness absolutely, and bitterly revile it as a most Libertine Irreligious Doctrine.
3. But above all, that they do so exceedingly confirm the Papists. I must profess that besides carnal Interest and the snare of ill Education, I do not think that there is any thing in the World that maketh or hardneth and confirmeth Papists more, and hindreth their reception of the Truth, than these same well-meaning people that are most zealous against them, by two means: 1. One by Divisions and unruliness in Church-respects, by which they perswade men, especially Rulers, that without such a Center as the Papacy, there will be no Union, and without such Vi…lence as theirs, there will be no Rule and Order. Thus one extreme doth breed and feed another. 2. The other is by this unsound sence of the Doctrine of Imputation of Christs Righteousness, (with an unsound Description of Faith) saying that every man is to believe it as Gods word (or side divinâ) that his own sins are pardoned; which when the Papists read (that, these men make it one of the chief Points of our difference from Rome,) doth occasion them to triumph and reproach us, and confidently dissent from us in all the rest. I find in my self that my full certainty that they err in Transubstantiation and some other points, doth greatly resolve me to neglect them at least, or suspect them in the rest which seem more dubious. And when the Papists find men most grosly erring in the very point where they lay the main stress of the difference, who can expect otherwise, but that this should make them despise and cast away our Books, and take us as men self-condemned and already vanquished, and dispute with us with the prejudice as we do with an Arrian or Socinian? They themselves that cast away our Books because they dissent from us, may feel in themselves what the Papists are like to do on this temptation.
4. And it is not to be disregarded, that many private persons not studied in these points, are led away by the Authority of these men (for more than Papists believe as the Church believeth) to speak evil of the Truth, and sinfully to Backbite and Slander those Teachers, whom they hear others slander: and to speak evil of the things which they know not. And to see Gods own Servants seduced into Disaffection and abuse and false Speeches against those Ministers that do most clearly tell them the truth, is a thing not silently to be cherished by any that are valuers of Love and Concord among Christians, and of the Truth and their Brethrens Souls, and that are displeased with that which the Devil is most pleased and God displeased with. These are my Reasons, submitted to every Readers Censure; which may be as various as their Capacities, Interests or Prejudices.
My Arguments in the third Chapter I have but briefly and hastily mentioned, as dealing with the lovers of naked Truth, who will not refuse it when they see it in its self-evidence. But they that desire larger proof, may find enough in Mr. Gataker and Mr. Wotton de Reconcil. and in John Goodwin of Justification, (If they can read him without prejudice). From whom yet I differ in the Meritorious Cause of our Justification, and take in the habitual and actual Holiness of Christ as well as his Sufferings, and equal in Merits; and think that pardon it self is merited by his Obedience as well as by his Satisfaction: To say nothing of some of his too harsh expressions, about the Imputation of Faith, and non-imputation of Christs Obedience, which yet in some explications he mollifyeth, and sheweth that his sence is the same with theirs that place all our Righteousness in remission of Sin; such as (besides those after-mentioned) are Musculus, Chamier, and abundance more: And when one saith that Faith is taken properly, and another that it is taken Relatively in Imputation, they seem to mean the same thing: For Faith properly taken is essentiated by its Object; And what Christ's Office is, and what Faith's Office is, I find almost all Protestants are agreed in sence, while they differ in the manner of expression, except there be a real difference in this point of simple Personating us in his perfect Holiness, and making the Person of a Mediator to contain essentially in sensu Civili the very Person of every elect sinner, and every such one to have verily been and done, in sensu civili, what Christ was and did.
I much marvel to find that with most the Imputation of Satisfaction is said to be for Remission of the penalty, and Imputation of perfect Holiness for the obtaining of the Reward Eternal Life; and yet that the far greater part of them that go that way say, that Imputation of all Christs Righteousness goeth first as the Cause, and Remission of Sin followeth as the Effect: So even Mr. Roborough pag. 55. and others. Which seemeth to me to have this Sence, as if God said to a Believer, [I do repute thee to have perfectly fulfilled the Law in Christ, and so to be no sinner, and therefore forgive thee all thy sin.] In our sence it is true and runs but thus [I do repute Christ to have been perfectly just habitually and actually in the Person of a Mediator in the Nature of Man, and to have suffered as if he had been a sinner, in the Person of a Sponsor, by his own Consent, and that in the very place, and stead of sinners; and by this to have satisfyed my Justice, and by both to have merited free Justification and Life, to be given by the new Covenant to all Believers: And thou being a Believer, I do repute thee justified and adopted by this satisfactory and meritorious Righteousness of Christ, and by this free Covenant-Gift, as verily and surely as if thou hadst done it and suffered thy self.
For my own part I find by experience, that almost all Christians that I talk with of it, have just this very notion of our Justification which I have expressed, till some particular Disputer by way of Controversie hath thrust the other notion into their mind. And for peace-sake I will say again, what I have elsewhere said, that I cannot think but that almost all Protestants agree in the substance of this point of Justification (though some having not Acuteness enough to form their Notions of it rightly, nor Humility enough to suspect their Understandings, wrangle about Words, supposing it to be about the Matter); Because I find that all are agreed, 1. That no Elect Person is Justified or Righteous by Imputation while he is an Infidel or Ungodly (except three or four that speak confusedly, and support the Antinomians) 2. That God doth not repute us to have done what Christ did in our individual natural Persons Physically: The Controversie is about a Civil personating. 3. That God judgeth not falsly. 4. That Christ was not our Delegate and Instrument sent by us to do this in our stead, as a man payeth his debt by a Servant whom he sendeth with the money. 5. That therefore Christs Righteousness is not Imputed to us, as if we had done it by him as our Instrument. 6. That all the fruits of Christs Merits and Satisfaction are not ours upon our first believing (much less before). But we receive them by degrees: we have new pardon daily of new sins: We bear castigatory punishments, even Death and Denials, or loss of the greater assistance of the Spirit: Our Grace is all imperfect, &c. 7. That we are under a Law (and not left ungoverned and lawless) and that Christ is our King and Judge: And this Law is the Law or Covenant of Grace, containing, besides the Precepts of perfect Obedience to the Law natural and superadded, a Gift of Christ with Pardon and Life; but only on Condition that we thankfully and believingly accept the Gift; And threatning non-liberation, and a far sorer punishment, to all that unbelievingly and unthankfully reject it. 8. That therefore this Testament or Covenant-Gift is God's Instrument, by which he giveth us our Right to Christ and Pardon and Life: And no man hath such Right but by this Testament-Gift. 9. That this, (called a Testament, Covenant, Promise, and Law in several respects) doth, besides the Conditions of our first Right, impose on us Continuance in the Faith, with sincere Holiness, as the necessary Condition of our continued Justification, and our actual Glorification. And that Heaven is the Reward of this keeping of the new Covenant, as to the order of Gods Collation, though as to the value of the Benefit, it is a Free Gift, purchased, merited and given by Christ. 10. That we shall all be judged by this Law of Christ. 11. That we shall all be judged according to our deeds; and those that have done good (not according to the Law of Innocency or Works, but according to the Law of Grace) shall go into everlasting life, and those that have done evil (not by meer sin as sin against the Law of Innocency) but by not keeping the Conditions of the Law of Grace, shall go into everlasting punishment. The sober reading of these following texts may end all our Controversie with men that dare not grosly make void the Word of God. Rev. 20. 12, 13. 22. 12. & 2. 23.) 12. That to be Justified at the day of Judgment, is, to be adjudged to Life Eternal, and not condemned to Hell. And therefore to be the cause or condition that we are Judged to Glory, and the Cause or Condition that we are Justified then, will be all one. 13. That to be Judged according to our deeds, is to be Justified or Condemned according to them. 14. That the great tryal of that day (as I have after said) will not be, whether Christ hath done his part, but whether we have part in him, and so whether we have believed, and performed the Condition of that Covenant which giveth Christ and Life. 15. That the whole scope of Christ's Sermons, and all the Gospel, calleth us from sin, on the motive of avoiding Hell, (after we are reputed Righteous) and calleth us to Holiness, Perseverance and overcoming, on the motive of laying up a good Foundation, and having a Treasure in Heaven, and getting the Crown of Righteousness. 16. That the after-sins of men imputed Righteous deserve Hell, or at least temporal punishments, and abatements of Grace and Glory. 17. That after such sins, especially hainous, we must pray for Pardon, and repent that we may be pardoned, (and not say I fulfilled the Law in Christ as from my birth to my death, and therefore have no more need of Pardon.) 18. That he that saith he hath no sin, deceiveth himself, and is a lyar. 19. That Magistrates must punish sin as God's Officers; and Pastors by Censure in Christs name; and Parents also in their Children. 20. That if Christs Holiness and perfect Obedience, and Satisfaction and Merit, had bin Ours in Right and Imputation, as simply and absolutely and fully as it was his own, we could have no Guilt, no need of Pardon, no suspension or detention of the proper fruits of it, no punishment for sin, (specially not so great as the with-holding of degrees of Grace and Glory); And many of the consequents aforesaid could not have followed.
All this I think we are all agreed on; and none of it can with any face be denied by a Christian. And if so; 1. Then whether Christs perfect Holiness and Obedience, and Sufferings, Merit and Satisfaction, be all given us, and imputed unto us at our first believing as Our own in the very thing it self, by a full and proper Title to the thing: Or only so imputed to us, as to be judged a just cause of giving us all the effects in the degrees and time forementioned as God pleaseth, let all judge as evidence shall convince them. 2. And then, whether they do well that thrust their devised sence on the Churches as an Article of Faith, let the more impartial judge.
I conclude with this confession to the Reader, that though the matter of these Papers hath been thought on these thirty years, yet the Script is hasty, and defective in order and fulness; I could not have leisure so much as to affix in the margin all the texts which say what I assert: And several things, especially the state of the Case, are oft repeated. But that is, lest once reading suffice not to make them observed and understood; which if many times will do, I have my end. If any say, that I should take time to do things more accurately, I tell him that I know my straights of time, and quantity of business better than he doth; and I will rather be defective in the mode of one work, than leave undone the substance of another as great.
July, 20. 1672. Richard Baxter.
The Contents.
CHap. 1. The History of the Controversie. In the Apostles days: In the following Ages. Augustine and his followers Opinion. The Schoolmen. Luther: Islebius: The Lutherans: Andr. Osiander: The latter German Divines who were against the Imputation of Christ's Active Righteousness: Our English Divines: Davenant's sense of Imputation. Wotton. de Reconcil. Bradshaw, Gataker, Dr. Crisp, Jo. Simpson, Randal, Towne, &c. And the Army-Antinomians checkt by the rising of Arminianism there against it. Jo. Goodwin, Mr. Walker, and Mr. Roborough; Mr. Ant. Burges; My Own endeavours; Mr. Cranden, Mr. Eyres, &c. Mr. Woodbridge, Mr. Tho. Warren, Mr. Hotchkis, Mr. Hopkins, Mr. Gibbon, Mr. Warton, Mr. Grailes, Mr. Jessop: What I then asserted: Corn. a Lapide, Vasquez, Suarez, Grotius de Satisf. Of the Savoy Declaration; Of the Faith of the Congregational-Divines: Their saying that Christs Active and Passive Obedience is imputed for our sole Righteousness, confuted by Scripture. Gataker, Usher, and Vines read and approved my Confession of Faith. Placeus his Writings and trouble about the Imputation of Adam's Sin. Dr. Gell, Mr. Thorndike, &c. vehemently accusing the doctrine of Imputed Righteousness. The Consent of all Christians, especially Protestants, about the sense of Imputed Righteousness. 1. The form of Baptism. 2. The Apostles Creed. 3. The Nicene and Constantinopolitan Creed. 4. Athanasius's Creed. 5. The Fathers sense: Laurentius his Collections: Damasus his Creed. 6. The Augustan Confession. 7. The English Articles, Homilies and Confession. 8. The Saxon Confession. 9. The Wittenberg Confession. 10. The Bohemian Confession. 11. The Palatinate Confession. 12. The Polonian Confessions. 13. The Helvetian Confession. 14. The Basil Confession. 15. The Argentine Confession of the four Cities. 16. The Synod of Dort, and the Belgick Confession. 17. The Scottish Confession. 18. The French Confession. Whether Imputation of Passion and Satisfaction, or of meritorious Perfection go first: How Christ's Righteousness is called the formal Cause, &c. That it is confessed that Christ's Righteousness is imputed to us, as our sin was to him. Molinaeus: Maresius, Vasseur, Bellarmine is constrained to agree with us. A recommendation of some brief, most clear, and sufficient Treatises on this subject; viz. 1. Mr. Bradshaw; 2. Mr. Gibbon's Sermon; 3. Mr. Truman's Great Propitiation. 4. Placeus his Disput. in Thes. Salmur. 5. Le Blank's Theses: And those that will read larger, Mr. Watton, John Goodwin, and Dr. Stillingfleet.
Chap. 2. The opening of the Case, by some Distinctions, and many Propositions: Joh. Crocius Concessions premised: Mr. Lawson's Judgment.
Chap. 3. A further Explication of the Controversie.
Chap. 4. My Reasons against the denied sense of Imputation and personating. The denied sense repeated plainly. Forty three Reasons briefly named.
Chap. 5. Some Objections answered.
Chap. 6, 7, 8. Replies to Dr. Tully; and a Defence of the Concord of Protestants against his Military Alarm, and false pretence of greater discord than there is.
Of the Imputation of Christs Righteousness (Material or Formal) to Believers:
Whether we are Reputed personally to have suffered on the Cross, and to have satisfied God's Justice for our own sins, and to have been habitually perfectly Holy, and Actually perfectly Obedient, in Christ, or by Christ, and so to have merited our own Justification and Salvation. And whether Christ's Righteousness Habitual Active and Passive, be strictly made our own Righteousness, in the very thing it self simply Imputed to us, or only be made ours in the effects, and Righteousness Imputed to us when we believe, because Christ hath satisfied and fulfilled the Law, and thereby merited it for us. The last is affirmed, and the two first Questions denied.
I Have said so much of this subject already in my Confession, but especially in my Disputations of Justification, and in my Life of Faith that I thought not to have meddled with it any more; But some occasions tell me that it is not yet needless, though those that have most need will not read it. But while some of them hold, that nothing which they account a Truth about the Form and Manner of Worship is to be silenced for the Churches peace, they should grant to me that Real Truth so near the Foundation (in their own account) is not to be silenced when it tendeth unto Peace.
In opening my thoughts on this subject I shall reduce all to these Heads. 1. I shall give the brief History of this Controversie. 2. I shall open the true state of it, and assert what is to be asserted, and deny what is to be denied. 3. I shall give you the Reasons of my Denials. 4. I shall answer some Objections.