"Straight from the Laboratory of John Wesley" -- B. B. Warfield Reviews Lewis Sperry Chafer's "He That Is Spiritual" (Part Three)
Warfield in His Study at Princeton
Part Three
Warfield takes Chafer to task for mishandling the biblical text both in translation and in the original language. If you’ve read any of Warfield’s major essays, you know that Warfield was a master lexicographer and philologist. His patience with Chafer is obviously running thin at this point in his review—especially when Chafer misuses a text to make a “bizarre” theological point.
It is a temptation to a virtuoso in the interpretation of Scripture to show his mettle on hard places and in startling results. Mr. Chafer has not been superior to this temptation. Take but one example. “All Christian love,” he tells us (p. 40) “according to the Scriptures, is distinctly a manifestation of divine love through the human heart”—a quite unjustified assertion. But Mr. Chafer is ready with an illustration. “A statement of this is found,” he declares, “at Rom. 5:5, ‘because the love of God is shed abroad (lit., gushes forth) in our hearts by (produced, or caused by) the Holy Spirit, which is given unto us.’” Then he comments as follows: “This is not the working of the human affection; it is rather the direct manifestation of the ‘love of God’ passing through the heart of the believer out from the indwelling Spirit. It is the realization of the last petition of the High Priestly prayer of our Lord: ‘That the love wherewith thou hast loved me may be in them’ (John 17:26). It is simply God’s love working in and through the believer. It could not be humanly produced, or even imitated, and it of necessity goes out to the objects of divine affection and grace, rather than to the objects of human desire. A human heart cannot produce divine love, but it can experience it. To have a heart that feels the compassion of God is to drink of the wine of heaven.”
Warfield identifies Chafer’s specific error–misusing a verb and thereby misrepresenting Paul on Romans 5:5.
All this bizarre doctrine of the transference of God’s love, in the sense of His active power of loving, to us, so that it works out from us again as new centers, is extracted from Paul’s simple statement that by the Holy Spirit which God has given us His love to us is made richly real to our apprehension! Among the parenthetical philological comments which Mr. Chafer has inserted into his quotation of the text, it is a pity that he did not include one noting that ἐκχέω [pour out] is not εἰσχέω [pour into], and that Paul would no doubt have used εἰσχέω had he meant to convey that idea.
As he brings his “review” to a close, Warfield returns to his original point. Lewis Sperry Chafer is a Presbyterian minister with an Arminian view of the Christian life. After getting the gospel largely right, Chafer embraces a bifurcated understanding of the Christian life which is entirely inconsistent with an evangelical view of justification.
A haunting ambiguity is thrust upon Mr. Chafer’s whole teaching by his hospitable entertainment of contradictory systems of thought. There is a passage near the beginning of his book, not well expressed it is true, but thoroughly sound in its fundamental conception, in which expression is given to a primary principle of the Evangelical system, which, had validity been given to it, would have preserved Mr. Chafer from his regrettable dalliance with the Higher Life formulas. “In the Bible,” he writes, “the divine offer and condition for the cure of sin in an unsaved person is crystallized into the one word, ‘believe’; for the forgiveness of sin with the unsaved is only offered as an indivisible part of the whole divine work of salvation. The saving work of God includes many mighty undertakings other than the forgiveness of sin, and salvation depends only upon believing. It is not possible to separate some one issue from the whole work of His saving grace, such as forgiveness, and claim this apart from the indivisible whole. It is, therefore, a grievous error to direct an unsaved person to seek forgiveness of his sins as a separate issue. A sinner minus his sins would not be a Christian; for salvation is more than subtraction, it is addition. ‘I give unto them eternal life.’ Thus the sin question with the unsaved will be cured as a part of, but never separate from, the whole divine work of salvation, and this salvation depends upon believing” (p. 62). If this passage means anything, it means that salvation is a unit, and that he who is united to Jesus Christ by faith receives in Him not only justification—salvation from the penalty of sin—but also sanctification-salvation from the power of sin—both “safety” and “sanctity.” These things cannot be separated, and it is a grievous error to teach that a true believer in Christ can stop short in “carnality,” and, though having the Spirit with him and in him, not have Him upon him—to use a not very lucid play upon prepositions in which Mr. Chafer indulges. In his attempt to teach this, Mr. Chafer is betrayed (p. 29) into drawing out a long list of characteristics of the two classes of Christians, in which he assigns to the lower class practically all the marks of the unregenerate man. Salvation is a process; as Mr. Chafer loyally teaches, the flesh continues in the regenerate man and strives against the Spirit—he is to be commended for preserving even to the Seventh Chapter of Romans its true reference—but the remainders of the flesh in the Christian do not constitute his characteristic. He is in the Spirit and is walking, with however halting steps, by the Spirit; and it is to all Christians, not to some, that the great promise is given, “Sin shall not have dominion over you,” and the great assurance is added, “Because ye are not under the law but under grace.”
The gem of Warfield’s review, however, and well-worth reading, is the concluding portion. This is a great description of the Christian life!
He who believes in Jesus Christ is under grace, and his whole course, in its process and in its issue alike, is determined by grace, and therefore, having been predestined to be conformed to the image of God’s Son, he is surely being conformed to that image, God Himself seeing to it that he is not only called and justified but also glorified. You may find Christians at every stage of this process, for it is a process through which all must pass; but you will find none who will not in God’s own good time and way pass through every stage of it. There are not two kinds of Christians, although there are Christians at every conceivable stage of advancement towards the one goal to which all are bound and at which all shall arrive.