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RenewingMinds
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J. N. Darby pointed out that what is at the bottom of the Arminian/Calvinist dispute is responsibility. Both systems view man's responsibility wrongly.
The Standing of Fallen Man
Responsibility Ends At The Cross!
"...Adam fell from an innocent state to a fallen state, having acquired the knowledge of good and evil, with the [his] will now under the direction of the evil moral nature [life] also acquired in the fall. Adam, as fallen, is viewed in Scripture as head of a fallen race. We speak of two men because Scripture does (1 Cor. 15:47). Natural man [1 Cor. 2:14) is a replication of Adam fallen. The second man [Christ] is out of heaven. This does not mean that His humanity came from heaven (it came from Mary) but that His moral origin is heaven, and so He is not of the world (John 17:14). So He is the heavenly One (1 Cor. 15:47,48). And, there are two Adams, two heads. The Lord is called the "last Adam" (1 Cor. 15:45) assuring us that there will never be another head after Him.
"Men [individually and collectively] are viewed, then, under the first man, Adam, after he had sinned. Up to the Cross, God put fallen man under probation, under testing, to see [demonstrate for our understanding] if fallen man was recoverable. It is well to understand that this position before God is a standing, a standing in the flesh. The epoch of probation, that ran from Adam fallen to the Cross, was not to educate God concerning what result there might be—which would be a ludicrous thought about the omniscient One—it was to [progressively and] fully demonstrate that fallen man was not recoverable, and to conclude that he was "lost," etc. The sorry spectacle is that most professed Christians have not learned the lesson. At any rate, this testing took many forms which have been reviewed in numbers of books and papers, and runs throughout the writings of J. N. Darby, and will not be repeated here. The final test was the revelation of the Father in the Son:
...but now they have both seen and hated both me and my Father (John 15:24; see also 14:9-11).
"This was the result of the climactic test of fallen man. This represents the test of man, standing in Adam, Adamic responsibility, to see if he was recoverable from the Fall. The answer is a conclusive no: man was not recoverable. This answer is not understood by most who profess to know the Lord. Moreover, the testing of man was concluded at the Cross.
If Christ has come to save that which is lost, [the notion of] free-will has no longer any place. Not that God hinders man [volitionally] from receiving Christ—far from it. But even when God employs all possible motives, everything which is capable of influencing the heart of man, it only serves to demonstrate that man will have none of it, that his heart is so corrupted and his will so decided not to submit to God (whatever may be the truth of the devil's encouraging him in sin), that nothing can induce him to receive the Lord and to abandon sin. If, by liberty of man, it is meant that no one obliges him to reject the Lord, this liberty exists fully. But if it is meant that, because of the dominion of sin to which he is a slave, and willingly a slave, he cannot escape from his state and choose good (while acknowledging that it is good, and approving it), then he has no liberty whatever. He is not subject to the law, neither indeed can be; so that those who are in the flesh cannot please God.
And here is where we touch more closely upon the bottom of the question. Is it the old man that is changed, instructed, and sanctified? or do we receive, in order to be saved, a new nature [life]? The universal character of the unbelief of these times is this—not the formally denying Christianity, as heretofore, or the rejection of Christ openly, but the receiving Him as a person, it will be even said divine, inspired (but as a matter of degree), who re-establishes man in his position of a child of God. Where Wesleyans are taught of God, faith makes them feel that without Christ they are lost, and that it is a question of salvation. Only their fright with regard to pure grace, their desire to gain men, a mixture of charity and of the spirit of man, in a word, their confidence in their own powers, makes them have a confused teaching and not recognize the total fall of man.
For myself, I see in the word, and I recognize in myself, the total ruin of man. I see that the cross is the end of all the means that God had employed for gaining the heart of man, and therefore proves that the thing was impossible. God has exhausted all His resources [He chose to employ], and man has shown that he was wicked, without remedy, and the cross of Christ condemns man—sin in the flesh. But this condemnation having been manifested in another's having undergone it, it is the absolute salvation of those who believe; for condemnation, the judgment of sin, is behind us; life was the issue of it in the resurrection. We are dead to sin, and alive to God in Jesus Christ our Lord. Redemption, the very word, loses its force when one entertains these ideas of the old man. It becomes an amelioration, a practical deliverance from a moral state, not a redeeming by the accomplished work of another person. Christianity teaches the death of the old man and his just condemnation [Rom. 8:3], then redemption accomplished by Christ, and a new life, eternal life, come down from heaven in His person, and which is communicated to us when Christ enters us by the Word. Arminianism, or rather Pelagianism, pretends that man can choose, and that thus the old man is ameliorated by the thing it has accepted. The first step is made without grace, and it is the first step which costs truly in this case.
I believer we ought to hold to the Word; but, philosophically and morally speaking, [autonomous] free-will is a false and absurd theory. Free-will is a state of sin.
Collected Writings of J. N. Darby, 10:185-187
The Issue of Responsibility
The first man [Adam] was the responsible man, and his story ended at the Cross
MAN'S RESPONSIBILITY IS AN IMPORTANT MATTER
...the question of responsibility... lies at the root of Calvinism and Arminianism. Responsibility there must and ought always to be; but in respect of acceptance, the first man [Adam] was the responsible man, and his story ended at the Cross, though each has to learn it personally. Our standing is in the Second [Man], who charged Himself indeed with our failures in responsibility (Himself perfect in every trial in it), but laid the ground of perfect acceptance before God: lost on the ground of the first [Adam], we are before God on the ground of the finished work of the last Adam--not a child of [the first] Adam, as to our place, but a child of God, "the righteousness of God in him." Before the Cross, and up to it, responsibility developed; after it, righteousness revealed, and the original purpose of God, which was in the last Adam, could then be brought out. This opens out what was purely of God, which we have mainly in Ephesians, though elsewhere; and conduct is the display of the divine nature as in Christ. This last is a blessed part of it. The study of what He is, is surely the food of the soul. His Person, His work, may carry us deeper in the apprehension of what God is, for it was met and glorified there, and we worship and praise; but with Him we can walk, and know, and learn that none is so gracious as He. What will it not be to see Him as he is! Letters of J. N. Darby 2:477,478.
CONFOUNDING RESPONSIBILITY WITH POWER [ABILITY]
J. N. Darby wrote:
"All that the Lord hath said will we do, and be obedient." These words (the response of the people [Israel] with one voice, when Moses had taken the book of the covenant and read in their audience, Exodus 24) were the complete confounding of two very distinct principles, which man has been continually mistaking and confounding since the fall of Adam—responsibility and power. Man is responsible to keep the law perfectly, but by the fall he has lost the power {cp. Rom. 8:7}. This the natural heart cannot understand. One man denies his responsibility, and another assumes his power; grace, and this only, puts a man right on both points. Collected Writings of J. N. Darby, 12:276, note.
The reason that "grace, and this only, puts a man right on both points," will be seen before the end of this book [book title given below]. He further noted this:
The principle that responsibility depends on the power of the responsible person is false, save so far as the alleged responsible person is in his nature such as to negate the claim. A stone cannot be responsible nor even a beast, for moral conduct, because they are not in the relationship to which responsibility can attach. But obligation flows from relationship, and where the relationship exists (which constitutes it), the obligation subsists: the power to fulfill it has nothing to do with it. For example: A man owes me a thousands pounds (quid; Sterling); you are a spendthrift (a person who spends wastefully), and have not a penny; you have no power to pay really--therefore I have no claim nor you responsibility? That will not do. Example two: Romans cut off their thumbs, and could not hold a spear, [so as] to avoid military service: were they held irresponsible?
I know that man takes another ground of reasoning against God, that God put him into this place, or he was born in it, and therefore he is not responsible. This raises another point, that moral responsibility attaches to [the] will, not to power. We do what our own consciences condemn because we like it. My child refuses to come when I call him to go with me; I am going to punish him because he would not: he pleads that he was tied or could not open the door. But I punish him because he refused as to his will to yield to the obligation: I had a knife ready to cut what bound him, a key to open the door: he by his will refused the claim. In a word, responsibility flows from the claim on us arising from the relationship in which we stand. There is not a man in Glasgow that would hold that he had no claim on a man who owed him a thousand pounds (quid) because be had no ability to pay it. It has nothing to do with responsibility. We may lightly treat God so, alas! and say, "The woman that thou gave to be with me, she gave me of the tree, and I did eat;" but he pleads his sin as his excuse. God says, "Because thou hast hearkened unto the voice of they wife, and hast eaten of the tree, " etc., therefore. [With regard to Adam and Eve, the original obligation attached to Adam, as the command was issued directly to him, Genesis 2:16-17.]
GOD REQUIRES FROM MAN WHAT HE [MAN] IS NOT ABLE TO PERFORM
In the second part of Romans (5:12 to chapter 8), where "sin in the flesh" (the old nature/life) is especially in view, we read:
Because the mind of the flesh is enmity against God: for it is not subject to the law of God, neither indeed can be (Rom. 8:7).
Man's position before God is stated to be "in the flesh," and man cannot (inability) please God (Rom. 8:8). Yet God holds man responsible. Arminians reason on this and say that such a thing cannot be. Their notion, arrived at by the fallen human mind is that if a man cannot pay what is owed to God, then he could not be held responsible. We might expect that they would not so view the matter if someone owed them a huge, personal debt that could not be paid. If a man owed an Arminian $10 million and could not pay one cent, the consistent Arminian would say to the man, 'since you cannot pay, then you do not owe anything.'
The Arminian, recognizing that man owes a debt, infers from this fact that man has the ability to pay. If God commands repentance, the Arminian infers from this that man is able to repent. If God says, "whosoever will may come," the Arminian infers from this that man has the ability to come. If God say believe the gospel, the Arminian infers from this that man can exercise human faith and believe. And if God says, keep the law, is it to be inferred that man can keep the law? [Yes, according to the Arminian.] So the Arminians produces numbers of Scriptures, from which he infers these things, and then claims that those Scriptures prove what we really know are false inferences. It is circular reasoning that proves nothing by the self-deception of such circular reasoning.
In reality, such texts only show that man is responsible, not that he has moral free will toward God.
Man's Status and Responsibility Now
MAN'S PRESENT RESPONSIBILITY CONTRASTED WITH THE PAST
It is important to understand that the first man is no longer under probation, under testing, to see if he is recoverable. The Cross ended that testing and the verdict of the trial of the first man has been rendered: he is unrecoverable; he is lost, he is dead (2 Cor. 5:14). It was J. N. Darby who brought before God's people the truth about the probation of the first man and its character, its end at the Cross, God's governmental and dispensational ways, etc. Here we will consider some statements of his concerning the probation of man being ended and how man is now regarded by God.
In [1 Cor. 10] v. 11 the "ends of the world" is the completion of the ages {i.e., the ages of trial of the first man}. To me the world now is not under any dispensation {the Mosaic age continues on}, but the whole course of God's dealing with it are over until He comes to judgment {at the appearing of Christ to smite the nations}. Man was under responsibility from Adam to Christ {in fallen Adam, a standing in the flesh}, and then our Lord says, "Now is the judgment of this world" {John 12:31}. Historically I see this: up to the flood no dealings of God, but a testimony in Enoch. We see a man turned out of paradise, and presently God comes in by a solemn act, and puts that world all aside. Then after the flood we see various ways of God with the world. He begins by putting it under Noah {the first administration--government}. He gave promises to Abraham, then law raising the question of righteousness {the Mosaic administration}, which promise did not. Law as brought in to test flesh, and see whether righteousness could be got from man from God. Then God sent prophets until there was no remedy, and then He says there is one thing yet I may still do: I will send My Son; and when they saw the Son, they said, "This is the heir, let us kill him, and the inheritance shall be ours," {Matt. 21:38} and then, so far as responsibility went, God was turned out of the world. Then comes the cross, and atonement for sin, and a foundation for a new state of things altogether, and that was the completion of the ages {i.e., the ages of testing}. God is not now dealing with man to try if he is lost or not, and so in Johns Gospel man is gone from chapter 1. The first three Gospels present Christ to man, and then He is rejected; but in John 1 {:11-13},
He came to his own, and his own received him not. But as many as received him, to them gave he power to become the sons of God, even to them that believe on his name: which were born, not of blood, nor of the will of the flesh, nor of the will of man, but of God.
There we find God's power coming into the world, and the Jews all done with: only some receive Him who have been born of God, and so John's Gospel is thoroughly what men call Calvinistic. Collected Writings of J. N. Darby, 26:248.
The history of man in responsibility goes on up to the cross; but, since the cross, a man, though individually he goes through the discovery of what he is, is not in a state of probation at all; responsibility in that sense is over. Here is a man who, say, has been trading, and has not a farthing [British coin worth one quarter of a penny] left. It is of no use saying to him, "Take care of your money." He could only say, "I have no money to take care of."
So, as a present thing, when I have really found out my state [condition], I find I am lost. Christ came to seek and to save the lost, not those who are in a state of probation. Still, I personally must go through the learning process.
I see I am lost already, my state is enmity against God; that is a present fact, i.e., in my uncoverted state.
Now, when in my enmity I rejected Christ, God gave Christ to cleanse me from it, and I am brought [by irresistible grace] to own this. As a man, I am done with, and I am no more in the flesh, for it was condemned in the Cross; but I am clear now, and through the rent veil I go into the holiest as white as snow. Notes and Jottings, p. 33, 321.
The Sovereignty and Glory of God in the Election and Salvation of Lost Men, Roy A. Huebner, excerpts from pages 14-28
In the Cross we see [man's] responsibility met completely; Christ has met all the failure,
the fruit of the tree of responsibility met completely; the fruit of the tree of responsibility
{i.e., the tree of the knowledge of good and evil}, and has glorified God in so doing. JND
- SEATED
- ASCENDED
- RAISED
- BURIED
- CRUCIFIED
