.
X
(Art. 12)
FREEDOM TO BELIEVE
1. To know God means, according to Reformed teaching, to be a new man who obeys God and therefore believes in Jesus Christ as the prophet, priest and king in whom God Himself has acted, acts and will act.
2. By believing in Jesus Christ and receiving the salvation brought about by Him alone, man recognises his own unfaithfulness and therefore ceases to believe in himself. Therefore he cannot understand his faith as a work which he would be free to do by means of his own strength, for which he would possess in his own powers the organ and the capacity, and which he could prepare for, start, persevere in or continue by his own skill and achievements.
3. By believing in Jesus Christ and receiving the salvation brought about by Him alone, man recognises God’s faithfulness. Therefore he may understand his freedom to believe, i.e. to live a new life in obedience and hope, as the wonderful and unmerited but real gift of the Holy Spirit. According to Reformed teaching it is God alone through whom God is recognised in truth by sinful man reconciled through Him.
PART II: THE SERVICE OF GOD
LECTURE XI
(Art. 13)
THE REAL CHRISTIAN LIFE
1. The essence of all good action consists in the renewing of man through the Holy Spirit, and therefore through faith in Jesus Christ (cf. Lecture 10). This renewing is what makes the Christian life real and is as such the meaning of the span of life alloted to man.
2. Since man knows in faith the God who in Jesus Christ graciously intervenes on his behalf, he knows that he himself is God’s enemy and therefore a sinner, but also knows that he is acquitted of this sin and really separated from it. He knows his sin as that element of his existence which is alien to himself. He acknowledges that it has happened, is happening and will happen. But he can own allegiance to it no longer and he may own allegiance to the grace which forgives it.
3. Faith means the divine crisis which overtakes human existence, in the course of which man is convicted again and again of his sin, but is also and to a much greater extent assured again and again of God’s grace, in order that he may give God the glory in all the decisions in which both conviction of sin and assurance of grace become actual every day.
4. The real Christian life consists therefore in the accomplishment of daily thankfulness and repentance which, when it is efficacious and genuine, is not the good or bad fruit of our efforts, but is as a reiteration of faith in Jesus Christ the work of the Holy Spirit.
LECTURE XII
(Art. 14)
THE ORDINANCE GOVERNING THE CHRISTIAN LIFE
1. The ordinance governing the Christian Life is the Divine Law. Man has not himself to decide about what is good or evil, or about what is enjoined or forbidden. God has decided about that by His having given to His grace, revealed in Jesus Christ, the form of a definite claim upon man, and by His having therefore given to faith in Jesus Christ the form of definite obedience.
2. Jesus Christ has come to us as true God, that as such He might perfectly take our place and make us partakers of eternal life (cf. Lectures 7 and 8). Therefore the Divine Law demands that man, because he believes in Jesus Christ, should honour and call upon God, attend to His Word, seek Him in the ways which He Himself has shown man, and receive His salvation through the means which He Himself has given man.
3. Jesus Christ has come to us as true man, that as such He might really take our place and so partake of the misery and despair of sinful man (cf. Lectures 7 and 8). Therefore the Divine Law demands that man, because he believes in Jesus Christ, should exist for his fellow men, and render them as limited and weak human beings, honour, service and help.
4. The ordinance governing the Christian life, the way of thankfulness and repentance, the criterion of good and evil is therefore faith in Jesus Christ, which as such cannot exist without love to God and man and thus without the fulfilment of the true, the Divine Law.
LECTURE XIII
(Art. 15)
THE TRUE CHRISTIAN LIFE
1. Our thankfulness and our repentance are true obedience and are acknowledged by God as fulfilment of His Law, in so far as they are the work of faith in Jesus Christ, active in love, and therefore in so far as Jesus Christ intervenes on our behalf by His suffering and obedience. He and He alone is the true Christian life.
2. Precisely because Jesus Christ intervenes on our behalf by His suffering and obedience, we, regardless of the actual insincerity, superficiality and imperfection of our outward and inward achievement, are and remain in all circumstances and without intermission claimed for obedience to God’s Law and therefore for Christian life in love for God and man.
3. Precisely because Jesus Christ intervenes on our behalf by His suffering and obedience, we, regardless of the actual sincerity, depth and perfection of our outward and inward achievement, are and remain dependent on the sin-forgiving grace of God, and are therefore without the possibility of pleading before God our Christian life as our own glory and merit or of basing our confidence on any kind of reference to our own achievement.
LECTURE XIV
(Art. 16–17, 25a)
THE MYSTERY OF THE CHURCH
1. The Christian life is the life of the church of Jesus Christ hidden in God and manifest to men. That is to say (cf. Lecture 6), it is the life of the people, which through Jesus Christ has been gathered to be one in Him, in spite of all the diversity of the individuals thus brought together, of their position in time and of the limitations of the age to which they belong, and which has been elected and called to holiness in Him in spite of all human sinfulness. This people consists of those who in faith in Jesus Christ are reconciled to God, and who, because thus reconciled, may proclaim the glory of God.
2. Jesus Christ is never without His people, but in the humiliation of His divine nature and the exaltation of His human nature is always the goal, the meaning and the content of its history, the ground of the promise to, and the object of the faith of this, His people. Because of this, there is no reconciliation of man, and therefore no Christian life outside the church. The faith, active in love, of the individual man is not his own private concern, but consists in his participation in the hidden and manifest life of the body whose head is Jesus Christ.
3. The mystery of the church and of our participation in her life is the divine hiddenness of the work of the Holy Spirit, through which individual men are called to faith, active in love and so to Christian life, and thus to life in the church.
4. Whether our participation in the life of the church as manifested to men means that we are also partakers in her life hidden in God, is something which must be decided again and again in the actualisation of faith. But there can be no participation in the life of the church hidden in God which would not also mean immediately and directly our participation in her life as manifested to men.
LECTURE XV
(Art. 18a)
THE FORM OF THE CHURCH
1. The one universal and holy church of Jesus Christ exists, as manifested to men, in the form of individual churches, which differ in time and place, but which in Jesus Christ as their head, and therefore in their faith and work, are uniformly determined.
2. The existence of the church as manifested to men as individual churches involves a distinction which has to be drawn over and over again in the history of these individual churches, the distinction, namely, between the true and