In this chapter we will continue to cite from Peter Toon who shows that some Hyper Calvinists of the past, such as Joseph Hussey and Isaac Watts, who were Calvinists (Hussey being a Hyper Calvinist), believed in the preexistence of the human soul and nature of Christ before his coming into the world by birth of Mary. The above image also speaks of other theologians who believed this doctrine, such as Karl Barth and Donald B. Bloesch. According to a Google search, AI gives us this information about Karl Barth's belief in the preexistence of the human nature of Christ:
"Here's how Barth approached the preexistence of Christ's humanity: Rejection of a Logos asarkos: Barth rejected the notion of a logos asarkos, which refers to the Word of God existing without human nature before the incarnation. Instead, Barth argued that the "he" in John 1:2 ("He was in the beginning with God") refers to the incarnate Jesus of Nazareth, thereby including his human nature in his preexistence with God. In other words, Jesus of Nazareth, the Logos who would become incarnate, is the Word of God existing eternally with God."
This reminds us of Mormon ideology about God being a man with a physical body. According to Mormon ideology, specifically within the theology of "The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints," Jesus Christ and Satan are considered spiritual brothers in a pre-mortal existence. They also, like the Two Seeders, believe in what they call "Spirit Children of God" believing that before this life, everyone, including Jesus and Satan, lived with God the Father as his spirit children.
Now let us return to Peter Toon, who is giving us those who believed in the preexistent man Christ Jesus. Wrote Toon in his book "THE EMERGENCE OF HYPER-CALVINISM IN ENGLISH NONCONFORMITY 1689–1765" (from which we began citing in the previous chapters):
"In the strange book, The Redeemer’s Glory Unveil’d (1733), by Samuel Stockell, who was once a member of Hussey’s Church, we find a combination of Hyper-Calvinism and the doctrine of the pre-existence of the human soul of Christ. Since several writers, apart from Watts, advocated the doctrine of the pre-existence of Christ’s human soul it is possible that Stockell was influenced by one or other of these. He believed that it was only correct to speak of the human soul of the God-Man as begotten of the Father. “I cannot understand,” he wrote, “the terms in vogue amongst us namely, eternal Generation and essential Filiation. Because I am positive that Christ, as the eternal God, was never begotten, since it is impossible for me to conceive the Begetter and the Begotten to be of equal date.” (pg. 48)
The idea of a preexistent human Christ is a foundational part of the Two Seed ideology. As we see, it did not begin with Daniel Parker and Gilbert Beebe, just as the dualism of Parker did not begin with him but was borrowed from Manichaeism. Toon says Stockwell, like the Two Seed Primitive Baptists who would pop up in the early nineteenth century, blended together "a combination of Hyper-Calvinism and the doctrine of the pre-existence of the human soul of Christ." Notice how he also believed that the creation of the human soul of Christ occurred when he was "begotten" by the Father. It is no wonder, as we will see, that "Primitive Baptists" Elders John Clark and Grigg Thompson accused the Two Seeders of embracing Arianism.
Concerning Stockwell, another writer, Ruth Macritchie, in "A theological study of hyper-Calvinism in the writings of Joseph Hussey (1660-1726), John Skepp (1675-1721), John Gill (1697-1771), and John Brine (1703-1765)," written for her Phd. degree (2025) wrote the following concerning Stockwell (See here emphasis mine):
"He was an attentive disciple of Hussey and embraced his theology, the title of his influential book The Redeemer’s Glory Unveil’d mirroring Hussey’s. He openly confessed the ‘despised, but powerful, Antinomian Gospel’ and ‘everlasting Love’. He shared Hussey’s view of eternal justification or ‘conscience-justification’, which does not require the assistance of ‘sinful Faith’ to ‘give it an additional Value’. He taught that properly God does not forgive sins, for he cannot pardon debts which are already paid, reflecting the antinomian belief that the elect were never guilty. He further developed Hussey’s doctrine of the pre-existence of Christ’s human soul, or preexisterianism, a theory in turn adopted by the Particular Baptist minister John Stevens (1776-1847), himself a hyper-Calvinist. This controversy over eternal generation or sonship resulted in a painful split in the Particular Baptists in the nineteenth century, the scars of which remain to this day. This led to the formation of the Gospel Standard Strict Baptists who strongly adhered to Christ’s eternal sonship against both Hussey and Stockell, but ‘ironically became, and still are, the chief defenders of Hussey’s “no-offer” doctrine in England’." (pg. 110)
Wrote Toon:
"Perhaps it should be added that the doctrine of the God-Man which (Thomas) Goodwin gave in his Exposition of Ephesians I is developed into a rather more logical form in the treatise, and it was probably from the former not the latter that Hussey received inspiration. At least he denied that the latter actually influenced him. Thomas Goodwin set the Augustinian and Calvinist doctrine of the Mediator, the God-Man, in the context of the Ramist and Puritan doctrine of technologia. As we noted in Chapter I, the foundation of this doctrine was the belief that in the mind of God there existed and exists a coherent and rational scheme of ideas upon which He modelled the world."
It is biblical to say that the man Christ Jesus and every creature was in the mind of God as an idea long before they came into existence. But, to go further than this and claim that there was an actual existence in eternity past is heterodox and far removed from what the scriptures teach. Goodwin may have laid the foundation for others to go further than he did, but Goodwin did not believe that Christ as a man actually existed from eternity or from before his birth in the womb of Mary.
Wrote Toon:
"Apart from the verses in the first chapter of Ephesians which speak of predestination and Christ, Goodwin found the basis for his doctrine in Colossians 1. 15–19; John 17. 5, 24; and Proverbs 8. 22–9. All these passages make some reference, he believed, to the Second Person as He existed in heaven before the creation of the universe and after the agreement of the covenant of grace. He thought that these verses describe the Second Person as the God-Man (that is possessing the human nature) in the mind of God as an archetype, a real, preexistent idea. Christ was thus “set up from everlasting”; when God “marked out the foundation of the earth” the God-Man was by Him. He was “the image of the invisible God, the first-born of every creature” as He existed in God’s decrees." (pg. 74-75)
One can see how Goodwin's view was one step short of actually affirming the eternity of the human nature of the Son of God. Yes, the man Christ Jesus was foreseen by God but that does not mean that the man Jesus actually existed from eternity. To exist in God's mind and decrees does not mean actual existence. If that were true, then everything is without beginning, even earth and animals, for they were surely in God's mind before their actual creation.
Wrote Toon:
"The Son of God was extant and with God at the instant when he was chosen to this glory of being God-Man; …the glory of it was immediately given to him at the very act of predestinating him to it." (pg. 75)
This is what Beebe asserted as the leading apologist for Two Seedism.
Wrote Toon:
"Goodwin also believed that when God created the human race He modelled it on the idea He already had of the God-Man. Indeed, not only was Adam formed in the image of the God Man (Genesis 1. 26), but his marriage to Eve was a type of the union of Christ to God’s elect already ratified in heaven. The elect in heaven had already been given as “meet companions, children, and spouses unto him” since in God’s thoughts He was already set up as an “everlasting father and … an everlasting husband to them”. It must be emphasised that Goodwin was not saying that Christ’s human nature actually existed in heaven. Rather, as he explained: Whatever God predestinates, persons, or things concerning persons He hath the idea thereof and all that appertains thereto in the divine mind."
Goodwin may not have gone so far as to say that Christ's human nature actually existed in heaven before the creation of the world, but others later did go that far. The Two Seed Primitive Baptists did go that far. Recall that I cited from the Bear Creek Association's articles of faith (1832) that said:
"Article 2. We believe in the man Jesus being the first of all God's creation and the pattern of all Gods perfection in nature, providence, grace and glory, and in relative union with the Divine Word, and thus united with the whole Trinity."
What Goodwin said above seems to be what this article of faith says.
Wrote Toon:
"Goodwin was simply trying to explain what thoughts of God were contained in the decrees of predestination." (pg. 75)
This belief of Goodwin and others is similar to Plato's theory of two realms, one being the physical world we experience and the other being a separate, higher realm of perfect, eternal Forms (or Ideas).
Wrote Toon:
"Like Goodwin, Hussey accepted the orthodox doctrine of the eternal generation of the Son of God, but he went one step further than Goodwin by making a distinction between the words “eternal” and “everlasting”." (pg. 76)
A person may say that he believes in the eternal sonship of Christ, and yet not believe that Christ has always been the only or uniquely begotten divine Son of God, for whatever takes place before the world began is said to be eternal or without beginning.
Wrote Toon:
"In days when the doctrine of the Trinity was being abused by some and misunderstood by others, Hussey felt that he had found the key to a perfect appreciation of the doctrine. Rather than seeking to understand a “few hard School Terms” (e.g. “consubstantial”) Hussey felt that: The Trinity is not to be studied or known but as we mingle the Doctrine of Christ with that High or Glorious study, and bring along with us the Wisdom-Mediator, as the human nature had a secret way to stand in God, and so was the Glory-Man from the Days of Everlasting. Therefore to know the doctrine of the “Glory-Man” was to possess the secret of the mystery of the Trinity. Concerning the relation of the God-Man and the Church in the decrees of God, Hussey explained: As the Eternal Son of God in the Everlasting Covenant and Counsel of Settlements did assume or take on him the Covenant-Man (or first Human Nature from which our Natures flow) into union with Himself, the Second Person; so did he take the Church presented of God unto him in a Marriage-Deed of Settlement and Covenant-Contract, at the Donation of the Father, and before the Holy Ghost: consequently Christ and the Church were both mystically One Person in God’s covenant, long before Adam...This was the Secret Glory of the Church in her Marriage Settlements between God and Christ." (pg. 76-77)
This is one step short of Two Seedism, and so this heresy did not begin with Daniel Parker nor Gilbert Beebe.
Wrote Toon:
"It is very difficult to know whether or not Hussey did believe that the human nature of Christ mysteriously existed “standing in God” before the Incarnation." (pg. 77)
Some of these folks who believed in the preexistence of the human nature of Christ believed that the human soul of Christ was part of God's divinity, very similar to the Mormon teaching that God in his divinity was a man.
Wrote Toon:
"By his doctrine of the God-Man, Hussey believed that he preserved the doctrines of the Person of Christ and the Trinity from all possibility of Socinian and Arian errors. He felt that his vision of the eternal Son of God, Who, in the everlasting covenant of grace assumed humanity, was such a Bible-based, God-given, picture of salvation, that it ruled out all human schemes whatever their origin." (pg. 81)
I doubt that Daniel Parker had read Hussey's books, nor the books of others who promoted this "doctrine of the God-Man." Parker was simply parroting what he had been taught by a brother from Tennessee (we don't know who this brother was) so that his book on the two seeds was not the result of having read books on Manichaeism, Gnosticism, Arianism, etc. That is not true with Gilbert Beebe however, the man who did far more than Parker to promote Two Seedism. Beebe was a far better apologist for the fundamental ideas of Two Seedism than Daniel Parker. One of those ideas was this God-Man idea, for once a man accepts it he is on the road to believing that when Christ was begotten as a man in eternity past so too were all those chosen to salvation.
Wrote Toon:
"The three doctrines of Hussey which he (John Beart) chose to attack were the God-Man Christology, the doctrine of eternal justification and the denial of the free offer of grace." (pg. 82)
Beebe embraced the idea that Christ was made human when he was begotten as the Son of God sometime in eternity past. He also taught that the elect were also then begotten. These "three doctrines of Hussey" made their way into Two Seed ideology.
Wrote Toon:
"With regard to Hussey’s view of the God-Man, Beart believed that it was a perversion of Goodwin’s doctrine in that it tended to make the humanity of the Mediator exist in heaven before the actual Incarnation. In opposition to the doctrine of eternal justification and its corollary that justification by faith is merely a persuasion that one is already justified, Beart advocated the doctrine of virtual justification in the resurrection of Christ and a valid justification of the sinner through grace and by faith. Of the latter he wrote that “there is, at, or upon believing, some true and real act of God toward the soul, which is not merely a manifestation of what was done before, but is truly justification”. Beart also held that “the Free Tender of Christ is the soul’s warrant for receiving him”. He felt that “ there must be a Warrant in the Word as well as in the heart”. In his doctrines of justification and the free tender of Christ, Beart was repeating what men like Ames, Owen and Goodwin had often said in the previous century." (pg. 82)
Again, Hussey, Watts, and Stockwell and others who taught the preexistence of the human Christ, and who affirmed that "the humanity of the Mediator" did "exist in heaven before the actual Incarnation" became a foundational principle of Two Seedism in the early nineteenth century.
Wrote Toon:
"And also he (Hussey) deduced from the part which he believed that Christ played in the covenant of grace the doctrine that Christ’s humanity was “standing in God” before the creation of the world. One of Hussey’s followers, Samuel Stockeil, abandoned the doctrine of eternal generation because he could not conceive how “the Begetter and the Begotten” could be of equal date." (pg. 145)
What was true of Stockeil was also true of many of the founders of today's "Primitive" or Hardshell Baptists, for they too denied eternal generation and believed that Christ was not the divine Son of God by his being begotten of the Father. Some were semi Arians in regard to this novel idea, and some, like Wilson Thompson, were Modalists or Sabellians. But, of course, the Begetter and the Begotten can be of equal date, as the orthodox view affirms. If God has always been "Father," then Christ the Word has always been "Son."
Wrote Toon:
"Yet another person, to whom we have only made brief reference, who helped to spread the doctrine of Hyper Calvinism was Samuel Stockell. His views on the God-Man gained acceptance amongst many Particular Baptists so that John Brine in 1754, and Andrew Fuller thirty years later, had to make reference to them. John Macgowan (1726–1780), minister of Devonshire Square Particular Baptist Church from 1767 to 1780, likewise taught that the human soul of Christ was joined to His divine nature in heaven before the creation of the world and so also did John Allen, a Baptist minister, and author of Royal Spiritual Magazine (1752). In the first part of the nineteenth century, Stockell’s views were adopted by John Stevens (1776–1847), another Particular Baptist minister. Stevens also shared the views of Wayman, Gill and Brine in regard to the duty of sinners and opposed Andrew Fuller on this point. But through the writings of Stevens on the question of Christology, there was a serious controversy about the doctrine of eternal generation amongst Strict and Particular Baptists in the 1830s and 1840s which resulted in the formation of a group of Baptists who are now called the Gospel Standard Strict Baptists." (pg. 147-148)
In our next chapter we will begin to see how this doctrine of the preexistence of the human nature of the divine Son of God was a step towards the doctrine of the preexistence of souls.
No comments:
Post a Comment