Outline Owen Mortification of Sin

https://faculty.gordon.edu/hu/bi/ted_hildebrandt/SpiritualFormation/Texts/Owen_MortificationOfSin.pdf

Foundation of the Discourse

The relationship between justification and mortification is cause and effect (Owen 6).

Our duty: The choicest believers, who are assuredly freed from the condemning power of sin, ought yet to make it their business all their days to mortify the indwelling power of sin (7).

The efficient cause of this duty: The Holy Spirit (“if by the Spirit”).  Mortification must be done by the Spirit. Every other way is vain.

What are the deeds of the body?

The body is the seat and instrument of the corruption of our nature (7).  It is the same as “the old man” and the “body of sin.”  The power of our spiritual life depends on how much we mortify the deeds of the flesh (9).

The Necessity of Mortification

We are obligated by the ferocity of the battle to be killing sin at all times.

1. Indwelling sin is always with us even if judicial sin is negated.
2. This sin is still active.
3. If left alone, it will turn into greater sins (“scandalous and soul-destroying sins”).
4. Our new nature and the Spirit is the principle by which we oppose sin.
   1. Gal. 5.17
   2. 2 Pet. 1.4-5
   3. Our participation in the divine nature gives us an escape from the pollutions of the world.
5. If we neglect this duty, our soul is cast into a contrary condition.
   1. “Exercise and success are the two main cherishers of grace in the heart.”
6. It is our duty to be perfecting holiness in the fear of God.

Conclusion: notwithstanding our judicial freedom from sin, indwelling sin remains in the best of believers.

False Asceticism: Vanity of Popish Mortification

1. The Holy Spirit is sufficient for mortification
2. Popish Mortification
   1. The ways and ends of their mortification were never insisted on by God.
   2. The means that are appointed by God, and which they do use, are not used properly.  Fasting is important, but it should flow from the Spirit’s work of mortification.  Fasting and watching are streams, not fountains.
3. The Work of the Spirit
   1. The Spirit will take away the stony heart (Ezek. 11.19; 36.26).
   2. This is a gift of Christ, and Christ, as the head, communicates his gifts to us.
   3. How does the Holy Spirit mortify sin?
      1. He causes our hearts to abound in graces and fruits that are contrary to the flesh (Gal. 5.19-21).
      2. The Holy Spirit, as our efficient, hits sin at the root.
      3. He brings us into communion with the cross of Christ.

Chapter 4: The Usefulness of Mortification

1. The vigor of our spiritual life depends on mortification.
   1. Success in mortification won’t always lead to happiness, though.  A godly saint can mortify sin yet still face assaults (Psalm 88).
   2. Mortification shouldn’t be confused with the privileges that flow from adoption.
   3. Unmortified sin weakens the soul (Ps. 38.3).
   4. As sin weakens, so it darkens the soul.
2. Mortification prunes all the graces of God.

Chapter 5-6

1. What it is to mortify a sin.
   1. A habitual weakening of it.
   2. Constant fighting and contending against it.

Chapter 7: General Rules, and Rome’s false view, again

1. Unless a man is a believer, truly ingrafted into Christ, this isn’t possible.
2. It is the work of faith (Acts 15.9).

Chapter 8: Universal Sincerity for mortifcation

1. Without sincerity and an aim at universal mortification, no lust will be mortified.
   1. 2 Cor. 7.1
   2. God sometimes suffers one lust to chasten our other negligences.

Chapters 9-11

1. A lust that isn’t “loud” is often more dangerous.  It could be a sign of inveterateness.
2. The heart often engages in self-deception.
3. Guilt of the Sin
   1. The power of sin is weakened by grace, but not always the guilt is weakened.
   2. Load your conscience with the guilt of sin, so that you can let the Spirit work through you.
      1. Don’t fight guilt by your own righteousness.
      2. Let the law do what it is supposed to do.
      3. And then cry to God.

Chapter 12

I am going to call this one “Study as a mode of sanctification.”

1. Let our meditations fill us with our low estate and God’s high estate
   1. It reminds us how weak in prayer we are.
   2. Even at our best we have feeble notions of God.
2. The being of God.
   1. We have words and notions about the “things of God,” but not the things themselves.
   2. “We know him rather but what he does than what he is.”
3. But what of the difference between believers’ and unbelievers’ knowledge of God?
   1. Their manner of knowing is different, not the content.

Chapter 13

1. If you are upset by sin, don’t speak peace to your heart until God speaks.
2. If we look for healing and peace, we must look to the blood of the covenant.
3. How shall we know that God has spoken peace to us?
   1. We’ll know.  When God gives peace, he doesn’t go halfway.
   2. But he doesn’t necessarily do it right away.
   3. There is a “secret instinct in faith.”

Chapter 14

1. Have faith that Christ is at work killing our sin.
2. Expect in faith for a relief from Christ.
3. Our old man is crucified with Christ, not in respect of time but of causality. If we act on faith in the death of Christ, then we can expect
   1. Power
   2. Conformity
4. The Spirit alone:
   1. Convinces the heart of guilt
   2. Reveals unto us the fullness of Christ for relief.
   3. Establishes the heart in expectation of relief.
   4. Brings the cross of Christ into our hearts with its sin-killing power.
   5. Is the author and finisher of our sanctification.
   6. Supports our addresses to God.

 

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Rutherford’s Scotist Ethics

“Samuel Rutherford’s Euthyphro Dilemma” in Reformed Orthodoxy in Scotland by Simon J. G. Burton

Cameron’s Thesis:

1. Things that are good in themselves have a much stronger binding authority than adiaphora.

Rutherford’s Rejoinder:

1. Constitution of the divine image is dependent on the divine will (130).
2. Categories of simple and complex acts.
   1. The act of worshiping God is a simple act (for Rutherford, there is no object/intention in this act)
   2. The act of worshiping God in accord with the divine law is a complex act.
3. Only complex acts have moral status (130).
   1. A created object is not the measure or rule of the divine will (131).
   2. When God creates rational creatures, he at once creates the common principles of the natural law (132).

Advancing the Position

1. Love of God is the cornerstone of the natural law
   1. The question now becomes, per God’s command to kill Isaac, is whether a particular act should be considered obedience to God or not (132).
   2. This duty is not necessarily and immutably founded in God’s own nature before every decree of his will (133).
2. Bradwardine
   1. Distinction between things reasonable naturally prior to the divine will
      1. Such as God’s being and goodness.
      2. They are able to move the divine will.
   2. AND things which are reasonable naturally posterior to the divine will;
      1. Depend on God’s will for their reasonable status.
      2. Caused by the divine will and cannot move it.
   3. and things which are said to be mixed.

Rutherford’s Scotist Ethics

1. Both Rutherford and Bradwardine attempted to identify different logical moments within the eternal and indivisible divine act.
   1. Grounds contingency not in the possibility of future action but in the present moment of existence itself (135).
   2. This allows Scotus to make a distinction between the single instant of time and the single instant of divine eternity in terms of a series of logically connected instants (135).
   3. Logically successive, but temporally synchronic structural instants.
2. Highest principle of morality:  God is to be loved
   1. Every moral action is defined in relation to this.
   2. Except for those acts with an intrinsic and necessary relation to the divine nature–those acts with God as the immediate object–the moral status of every action is determined solely by the divine will (136).
   3. Aquinas:  God didn’t actually command Abraham to murder; rather, God was calling due on Isaac early (since Isaac was supposed to die because he was mortal).

Bottom line application:  God is not bound by his creation.

Outline of Beeke’s Puritan Spirituality

This isn’t an outline of the whole book, but of what I found most helpful.

The book is vintage Beeke. While not a collection of independent essays, most of them can be read independently, although the essays on the Erskines build on each other.  In this book the reader gets an outstanding (if sometimes limited) perspective on Reformed and Puritan spirituality.  Aside from some editorial hiccups, this book is a treasure.

Content

The Holy Spirit is the bond that unites us to Christ. Excellent opening by Beeke. Places the internum testimonium Spiritus within the larger working of salvation, and not just as it relates to Scripture.

Calvin and Piety

1. Piety is rooted in the mystical union (3).
2. Communion and Participation
3. Piety’s Double-bond: The Spirit and Faith
   1. The Holy Spirit is the channel through which Christ is communicated to his people.
   2. “Engrafting.”  “Secret energy” (Calvin, quoted in Beeke 5).

Assurance

Calvin’s Paradoxes on Assurance of Faith

1. Faith is assent, trust, knowledge.
2. Assurance of the essence of faith
   1. “Sure and secure possession of those things which God promised us” (quoted in Beeke 37).
   2. Assurance can be quenched at times
3. Antinomies
   1. Calvin set the ought/is dichotomy against the backdrop of spirit/flesh.
   2. The germ of faith is not necessarily the same thing as the consciousness of faith.
4. Trinitarian framework
   1. Movement of the grace of faith from the Father in the Son through the Spirit.
5. Election and Missionary spirit:

Anthony Burgess on Assurance

1. The possibility of assurance (Beeke 174).
   1. False Assurance
   2. True Assurance
   3. Lacking consciousness of true assurance
2. The foundations of assurance
   1. Primary objective ground: divine promises in Christ.
   2. Secondary, internal grounds: testimony of the Holy Spirit.
   3. Syllogisms
      1. Practical syllogism:
      2. Mystical syllogism: only those who possess saving faith will receive the Spirit’s testimony.  Second premise: I cannot deny that I possess the Spirit’s testimony.  Conclusion: I have saving faith.
3. Cultivation of Assurance:  God uses conflicts, doubts, and trials to strengthen a believer’s faith.
   1. Privilege of assurance usually doesn’t come right away.
4. Assurance lost and renewed:

Puritans and Nadere Reformatie

1. The Puritans stressed the grounds of assurance
   1. They warned against elevating secondary grounds of assurance
   2. Assurance understood in a Trinitarian framework.
   3. Assurance is a gift of God involving the whole man.
   4. Stressed the act of faith.
2. The Dutch emphasized the “steps of grace.”
   1. Stressed the Spirit’s immediate witness.
   2. Stressed the habitus of faith.

John Brown of Haddington

Brown’s Compendius View

1. Federal theologian
   1. Covenant: “an agreement between different persons on certain terms” (quoted in Beeke, 216).
   2. “Brown rejects the idea of a covenant of redemption separate from a covenant of grace” (216).
      1. Distinguishes between contracting and administering.
      2. CoG conditional in nature but Christ fulfills all conditions.

Life and Theology of Thomas Boston

1. Federal Theologian
   1. Covenant of Works.
   2. Covenant of Grace
      1. Says CoG and CoR are two sides of the same covenant (231).
      2. CoG established in eternity.

 

Puritan Practice of Meditation

1. Clear your heart from things of the world.
2. Have your heart cleansed from guilt and pollution.
3. Begin with Scripture reading
4. Memorize the selected verses.

 

Ames and the Marrow of Theology

1. Moderate Voluntarism: Ames held to the primacy of volition
2. Maccovius held to primacy of intellect

Puritan Evangelism

1. Puritan Preaching was Biblical
2. Puritan preaching was doctrinal
3. Practical
4. Evangelistic
5. Symmetrical

Herman Witsius

1. God’s starting point in eternity did not demean his activit in time.
   1. Witsius was formally a Cocceian and materially a Voetian.
2. Economy of the Covenants
   1. Covenants between God and man are monopleuric.
   2. All covenants are dipleuric in administration.
3. Election is the backdrop of the covenant

 

Review and Outline of Lex, Rex

This is Samuel Rutherford’s response to the prelate Maxwell who advocated absolute obedience to monarchs in all respects. This book is a point by point refutation (and reads like it). Rutherford’s Key argument: “I reduce all that I am to speak of the power of kings, to the author or efficient, -the matter or subject, – the form or power, – the end and fruit of their government, – and to some cases of resistance” (Rutherford 1).

We can say it another way: We can reorder the scholastic causes (formal, efficient, material, final) to forms of limitation: what is the purpose of govt? Who or what brings govt into existence? Who or what constitutes govt? If these distinctions aren’t kept in mind, Rutherford’s argument doesn’t make sense. In fact, constitutional govt wouldn’t make sense, either.

Rutherford explains government is natural in its root but voluntary in its mode. Further, The power of creating a man a king is from the people (6). Can the people cede all of their liberty to the king? No, for the people do not have absolute power over themselves. You cannot cede what you do not have (81). The king is above the people by eminence of derived authority as watchman, but he is inferior to them in fountain-power, as the effect to the cause (115). This is Rutherford’s key, and in my opinion, strongest, argument in the book. God’s intention per civil govt is “external peace, and quiet life, and godliness of his church and people, and that all judges, according to their places, be nurse-fathers to the church (Isa. 40.23)” (105).

Can we resist the government? Well, individually no. As a member of an estate and body politic, yes. Resistance and patient suffering are not contraries when considered as virtues (153ff). If resistance can fall under the virtue of self-preservation, then it is not an evil. Were the entire Parliament and city of London to lay down their arms and go meekly to their deaths at the hand of Irish rebels? In lighter situations, such as taxes and tribute, we may not use acts of re-offending. Did Paul meekly submit to the king of Damascus or did he engage in self-preservation and escape (159)?

The book is somewhat difficult to read because Rutherford is engaging in a point-by-point refutation of Maxwell, so it isn’t always clear which point is under discussion.

Analytical Outline

I found Rev David Field’s analyses of Rutherford very helpful and invaluable.

http://davidpfield.com/other/rutherfordccs.pdf

http://www.davidpfield.com/published-articles/Rutherford-resistance.pdf

Rev Field’s key point, taken from Rutherford:

A woman or a young man may violently oppose a king, if he force the one to adultery and incest, and the other to sodomy (162 [331]).

If it be natural to one man to defend himself against the personal invasion of a prince, then is it natural and warrantable to ten thousand, and to a whole kingdom ; and what reason to defraud a kingdom of the benefit of self-defence more than one man? (158 [324])?

Key argument: I reduce all that I am to speak of the power of kings, to the author or efficient, -the matter or subject, – the form or power, – the end and fruit of their government, – and to some cases of resistance (Rutherford 1).

Field neatly rephrases Rutherford’s argument: If we reorder the causes (to final, efficient, formal and material) and take “cases of  resistance” to be “forms of limitation” we may rephrase the conclusions of Lex, rex as a series of questions: What is the purpose or goal of government? Who or what brings government into being? What is it that makes government government, or what is the essence of government? What is government made out of? What are the due limitations of civil government (Field 5)?

Rutherford gives a book-length response to “P. Prelate.”

C1: “All civil power is immediately from God in its root” (Rutherford 1).

1. Civil society is natural in radice but voluntary in modo.
2. The power of creating a man a king is from the people (6).
   1. Judges 9.6; 1 Sam. 11.15
   2. A choice is made to choose this man and not that man.
3. Is God’s call to not resist ordained authorities always absolute?  Rutherford gives a number of reductios to prove otherwise:
   1. A pastor is ordained of God; if a pastor becomes a robber, is it a sin to resist him?
   2. If a king brings in foreign invaders, such as “Irish cutthroats,” it is lawful to resist (15).

C2: Where obligation exists by contract, violation of the faith plighted in the contract, cannot in proper terms be called disobedience or contempt of authority (24).

1. Government and power-making: the community, not the Pope, doth put forth this act (making a king) as a free, voluntary power (29).
2. The community keeps to itself a power to resist tyranny (35).
3. The previous laws of a community or nation give people the right to resist invaders who try to overthrow that order (36).

C3: Idolatry and Prior Laws

1. If a nation is Christian (or theistic), the people do not have to aid a ruler in making it idolatrous (40).
2. Rutherford’s hypotheticals are quite interesting:  if a king invites Papists to invade and subdue the Protestants, must the Protestants merely accept this?
3. Covenants limit the power of kings (57).
4. The Western legal heritage at this time had already limited the power of kings: if a king negates the conditions which made him king (e.g., the people’s investiture), then he may be negated since he violated them “from his own consent” (63).

C4: Nature and Destruction

1. Law is rooted in nature and nature can’t be destroyed.  Therefore, a king doesn’t have the power to destruction (66).
2. What if a people are conquered?
   1. This is why there really can’t be a “blank check to Nero” type interpretation, otherwise it gets really silly.
      1. This means “might makes right.”
      2. So, the new conqueror is automatically “the powers that be”?
      3. Does that mean the old–indeed, legitimate–ruler is now illegitimate?
      4. At what point does he become illegitimate–when the new conqueror conquers 50.01% of the land?
   2. Presumably, given the analysis in 2.1.1-2.1.4, a people would be sinning in resisting.   Yet, let’s say they “reconquered” the conquerors.  Does that automatically make them “in the right?”

C5: Kingmakers

1. The Holy Spirit invests the people (Dt. 17.15-16) with kingmaking power.
   1. But that’s the Old Testament!
   2. Fair enough–it is also Western (and Russian) legal tradition.
2. Can the people cede all of their liberty to the king?
   1. No, for the people do not have absolute power over themselves.
   2. You cannot cede what you do not have (81).
3. They give the king political power to their own safety, but reserve natural power to themselves.  Here Rutherford buttresses his argument with natural law reasoning and the 6th Commandment.
4. Inferior magistrates are also “powers from God” (else, if Paul were just talking about the king, why didn’t he simply say “power”?).
   1. They also bear God’s sword (90).
5. Scripture notes the people make the king, never the king the people (113).
   1. The people united to make David king at Hebron.
   2. The king is above the people by eminence of derived authority as watchman, but he is inferior to them in fountain-power, as the effect to the cause (115).  This is Rutherford’s key, and in my opinion, strongest, argument in the book.

C6: Parliament and the People

1. “The princes of the house of Israel could not be rebuked for oppression in judgment (Mic. 3.1-3) if they had not the power of judgment” (95).
2. Historical reductio:  Did Parliament sin by not giving Charles I the tax legislation he wanted?  
3. The Parliament can resist the king, for it, too, his of God, even “a congregation of gods” (111, quoting Psalm 82.6).

C7: Is the King absolute?

1. God does not give absolute power, because: (101ff)
   1. The king has his power from the people, as already established.
   2. The king is commonly known as a living law, but if he is a law then he is not absolute.
   3. Is the power to do evil from God?
      1. Depends on what kind of distinctions we make.  If “power” means “approval from God,” then did David have the power to kill Uriah and deflower Bathsheba (103)?
      2. Obviously, that is not a positive power but a mere permission.
      3. In either case, the king doesn’t have absolute power.
   4. The power to work contrary to the Good cannot be a lawful power, since the king is a minister of God for Good.
   5. The prophets rebuked the kings of Israel; hence, the power was not absolute.

C8: The Goal of Civil Govt.

1. God’s intention per civil govt is “external peace, and quiet life, and godliness of his church and people, and that all judges, according to their places, be nurse-fathers to the church (Isa. 40.23)” (105).
2. Therefore, God must have appointed means to this end.
   1. The obstruction of Good and justice works contrary to this end.

C9: The Health of the People

1. If the people are the cause of the king, then their own safety must be principally sought (119).
2. What is the end or purpose of the king?  The king isn’t the king simply so he can be the king.  Therefore, the prelate’s argument is reduced thus:
   1. The king is a lame king unless given the power to waste and destroy.
   2. The king cannot be happy unless he has the power to lay waste the Lord’s inheritance.

C10: Royalty mediately

1. The king has royalty mediately by the people’s free consent (123).
2. Power is not an immediate inheritance from heaven but is always mediated in situations.

C11: Judges and the Laws

1. If judges exist, then the king is not the sole interpreter of the law (137).

C12: War

1. Private subjects, Rutherford carefully argues, may not officially rise against the king.  Estates, however, may (139).
2. There is a distinction between the king in concreto and the king in abstracto (office of the king).

C13: Venerable authority

1. The person of the king is not venerable in its authority.
2. If the contrary hold true, then Manasseh did not shed innocent blood or engage in sorcery (150).

C14: Resistance and patient suffering are not contraries when considered as virtues (153ff).

1. If resistance can fall under the virtue of self-preservation, then it is not an evil.
2. Were the entire Parliament and city of London to lay down their arms and go meekly to their deaths at the hand of Irish rebels?
3. In lighter situations, such as taxes and tribute, we may not use acts of re-offending.
4. Did Paul meekly submit to the king of Damascus or did he engage in self-preservation and escape (159)?

C15: Self-Defense as Rational and Natural

1. We must first engage in supplications.
2. Flight is not always possible or natural, as in the case of the aged and infants.
3. Rutherford makes an interesting assertion:  “No man in the 3 kingdoms sought to harm the king’s person” (162).  It does not seem that Rutherford would agree with Charles’ execution.
4. Humorous reductio on the Irish rebel and natural law (165).

C16: More on Just War Theory and Defensive Wars (166ff)

1. As the priests executed a ceremonial law on King Uzziah, so may the three estates of Scotland execute the  moral law of God upon the king (171).

C17: But what about martyrs? (182ff)

1. Can Christians defend themselves against murderers?

Working outline of Lex, Rex

I still have 100 pages to go in my outline.  Most of my critical help has come from Rev. David Field.

I found Rev David Field’s analyses of Rutherford very helpful and invaluable.

http://davidpfield.com/other/rutherfordccs.pdf

http://www.davidpfield.com/published-articles/Rutherford-resistance.pdf

Rev Field’s key point, taken from Rutherford:

A woman or a young man may violently oppose a king, if he force the one to adultery and incest, and the other to sodomy (162 [331]).

If it be natural to one man to defend himself against the personal invasion of a prince, then is it natural and warrantable to ten thousand, and to a whole kingdom ; and what reason to defraud a kingdom of the benefit of self-defence more than one man? (158 [324])?

Key argument: I reduce all that I am to speak of the power of kings, to the author or efficient, -the matter or subject, – the form or power, – the end and fruit of their government, – and to some cases of resistance (Rutherford 1).

Field neatly rephrases Rutherford’s argument: If we reorder the causes (to final, efficient, formal and material) and take “cases of

resistance” to be “forms of limitation” we may rephrase the conclusions of Lex, rex as a series of questions: What is the purpose or goal of government? Who or what brings government into being? What is it that makes government government, or what is the essence of government? What is government made out of? What are the due limitations of civil government (Field 5)?

Rutherford gives a book-length response to “P. Prelate.”

C1: “All civil power is immediately from God in its root” (Rutherford 1).

1. Civil society is natural in radice but voluntary in modo.
2. The power of creating a man a king is from the people (6).
   1. Judges 9.6; 1 Sam. 11.15
   2. A choice is made to choose this man and not that man.
3. Is God’s call to not resist ordained authorities always absolute?  Rutherford gives a number of reductios to prove otherwise:
   1. A pastor is ordained of God; if a pastor becomes a robber, is it a sin to resist him?
   2. If a king brings in foreign invaders, such as “Irish cutthroats,” it is lawful to resist (15).

C2: Where obligation exists by contract, violation of the faith plighted in the contract, cannot in proper terms be called disobedience or contempt of authority (24).

1. Government and power-making: the community, not the Pope, doth put forth this act (making a king) as a free, voluntary power (29).
2. The community keeps to itself a power to resist tyranny (35).
3. The previous laws of a community or nation give people the right to resist invaders who try to overthrow that order (36).

C3: Idolatry and Prior Laws

1. If a nation is Christian (or theistic), the people do not have to aid a ruler in making it idolatrous (40).
2. Rutherford’s hypotheticals are quite interesting:  if a king invites Papists to invade and subdue the Protestants, must the Protestants merely accept this?
3. Covenants limit the power of kings (57).
4. The Western legal heritage at this time had already limited the power of kings: if a king negates the conditions which made him king (e.g., the people’s investiture), then he may be negated since he violated them “from his own consent” (63).

C4: Nature and Destruction

1. Law is rooted in nature and nature can’t be destroyed.  Therefore, a king doesn’t have the power to destruction (66).
2. What if a people are conquered?
   1. This is why there really can’t be a “blank check to Nero” type interpretation, otherwise it gets really silly.
      1. This means “might makes right.”
      2. So, the new conqueror is automatically “the powers that be”?
      3. Does that mean the old–indeed, legitimate–ruler is now illegitimate?
      4. At what point does he become illegitimate–when the new conqueror conquers 50.01% of the land?
   2. Presumably, given the analysis in 2.1.1-2.1.4, a people would be sinning in resisting.   Yet, let’s say they “reconquered” the conquerors.  Does that automatically make them “in the right?”

C5: Kingmakers

1. The Holy Spirit invests the people (Dt. 17.15-16) with kingmaking power.
   1. But that’s the Old Testament!
   2. Fair enough–it is also Western (and Russian) legal tradition.
2. Can the people cede all of their liberty to the king?
   1. No, for the people do not have absolute power over themselves.
   2. You cannot cede what you do not have (81).
3. They give the king political power to their own safety, but reserve natural power to themselves.  Here Rutherford buttresses his argument with natural law reasoning and the 6th Commandment.
4. Inferior magistrates are also “powers from God” (else, if Paul were just talking about the king, why didn’t he simply say “power”?).
   1. They also bear God’s sword (90).
5. Scripture notes the people make the king, never the king the people (113).
   1. The people united to make David king at Hebron.
   2. The king is above the people by eminence of derived authority as watchman, but he is inferior to them in fountain-power, as the effect to the cause (115).  This is Rutherford’s key, and in my opinion, strongest, argument in the book.

C6: Parliament and the People

1. “The princes of the house of Israel could not be rebuked for oppression in judgment (Mic. 3.1-3) if they had not the power of judgment” (95).
2. Historical reductio:  Did Parliament sin by not giving Charles I the tax legislation he wanted?  
3. The Parliament can resist the king, for it, too, his of God, even “a congregation of gods” (111, quoting Psalm 82.6).

C7: Is the King absolute?

1. God does not give absolute power, because: (101ff)
   1. The king has his power from the people, as already established.
   2. The king is commonly known as a living law, but if he is a law then he is not absolute.
   3. Is the power to do evil from God?
      1. Depends on what kind of distinctions we make.  If “power” means “approval from God,” then did David have the power to kill Uriah and deflower Bathsheba (103)?
      2. Obviously, that is not a positive power but a mere permission.
      3. In either case, the king doesn’t have absolute power.
   4. The power to work contrary to the Good cannot be a lawful power, since the king is a minister of God for Good.
   5. The prophets rebuked the kings of Israel; hence, the power was not absolute.

C8: The Goal of Civil Govt.

1. God’s intention per civil govt is “external peace, and quiet life, and godliness of his church and people, and that all judges, according to their places, be nurse-fathers to the church (Isa. 40.23)” (105).
2. Therefore, God must have appointed means to this end.
   1. The obstruction of Good and justice works contrary to this end.

C9: The Health of the People

1. If the people are the cause of the king, then their own safety must be principally sought (119).
2. What is the end or purpose of the king?  The king isn’t the king simply so he can be the king.  Therefore, the prelate’s argument is reduced thus:
   1. The king is a lame king unless given the power to waste and destroy.
   2. The king cannot be happy unless he has the power to lay waste the Lord’s inheritance.

C10: Royalty mediately

1. The king has royalty mediately by the people’s free consent (123).
2. Power is not an immediate inheritance from heaven but is always mediated in situations.

C11: Judges and the Laws

1. If judges exist, then the king is not the sole interpreter of the law (137).

C12: War

1. Private subjects, Rutherford carefully argues, may not officially rise against the king.  Estates, however, may (139).
2. There is a distinction between the king in concreto and the king in abstracto (office of the king).

Outline of Shedd (whole)

I did a larger review of Shedd, but this is an analytical outline to help students working through him.

Prolegomena

“If  all that can be said by the theologian respecting God is that he is not this or that, then the mind has in fact no object before it and no cognition whatever…The deity becomes the unknown and unknowable” (Shedd 71).

Revelation

On Genesis 1-2: “As far as the text is concerned, there is full right to explain it (e.g., day) as a period” (107).

Theology: Doctrine of God

God’s Spirituality

Man knows the nature of a finite spirit by his own self-consciousness; he knows the nature of an infinite spirit analogically (153).

Divine spirit: God is the most real substance of all.

1. God is a necessary essence
2. God is ens, actual being (157).
3. God is unextended and invisible substance (164).
4. Without passions:  passion implies passivity

God’s Personality

1. Personality is marked by two characteristics
   1. Self-consciousness
      1. Regarding the Trinity, “the media to self-consciousness are all within the divine essence” (173).
      2. God distinguishes himself from himself, thus two acts.  There is now a reciprocal object-ego, which then requires a third term, percipient between the two (174).
   2. Self-determination
2. “The three distinctions in the one essence personalize it: God is personal because he is three persons” (171).

Innate Idea and Knowledge of God

Arguments for the Divine Existence

Trinity in Unity

Thesis:  God cannot be self-contemplating, self-cognitive, and self-communing unless he is trinal in  constitution (220).

Terminology

1. God is trinal, not triplex.  The latter connotes composition (229).
2. Person denotes a mode of essence
3. We prefer essence to substance, because the latter implies accidents.
4. A divine person: the divine essence with a special property, subsisting in an especial manner (Owen, Trinity Vindicated, 10.504)

Nota Bene: The three persons/one essence doesn’t make the essence a fourth person.  Shedd explains by way of analogy: when the subject-ego posits the object-ego, it simultaneously posits the whole human spirit along with it; but this act doesn’t create a second human spirit (235).

Divine Attributes

Definition: “A Trinitarian person is a mode of the essence; a divine attribute is a phase of the essence” (275).

Simplicity:

Omniscience: Divine knowledge is:

1. Intuited, not discursive; direct vision (286).
2. Simultaneous, not successive
3. Complete and certain

God has a knowledge of all possible things (287).  This is his simple knowledge. Interestingly, Shedd denominates God’s conditional knowledge (e.g., Mt. 11.21-23) as middle knowledge (287).

Justice

God’s holiness is the perfect rectitude of his will (290).

1. Rectoral justice: God is right in himself and all his actions
2. Distributive justice: God’s rectitude in the execution of law.
3. Remunerative justice: distribution of rewards

The Divine Decrees

“The divine decree relates only to God’s opera ad extra” (311).  There are sequences in the execution but not the formation.  

You must have the divine decree to have foreknowledge; otherwise, how will the event be certain?  It will then be contingent.  “An event must be made certain before it can be known as a certain event” (313).

Theses on the divine decree:

1. It is founded in wisdom (Eph. 1:11).
2. It is eternal (Acts 15:18)
3. It is universal, including “whatsoever things come to pass.”
4. It is immutable; there is no defect in God’s knowledge, power, and certainty (Isaiah 46.10).

Efficacious and Permissive Decrees

“The efficacious decree determines the event”

1. By physical and material causes (Job 28.26)
2. By an immediate spiritual agency (2 Tim. 2:25)

The permissive decree relates only to moral evil.  If we deny God’s permissive decree, then we make evil independent and this leads to dualism and manicheanism (319).

On an Arminian scheme, a man may at any time fall from faith and therefore his fate can’t be determined until death. Therefore, he is elected after he is dead! (345)

Creation

Shedd holds to old-earth.  Day is not defined by the bible as 24 hour period; the following:

1. Day means daylight in distinction from darkness (Gen. 1.5; 16, 18)
2. Day means daylight and darkness together (1.5)
3. Day means the six days together (2.4).
4. The first day could not have been measured by solar revolutions.

Against Eternality of Matter

If matter is eternal then it must be the first cause, but matter cannot be the first cause because this is self-moving and perpetually moving.  Matter is marked by the force of inertia (380).

Miracles

They aren’t unnatural events; they are natural to God (417). Miracles upon earth are nature in heaven.

ANTHROPOLOGY

Man’s Creation

Traducianisim: applies the idea of species to body and soul (431).  The key question: when God created Adam and Eve, did he create in and with them the invisible substance of all the succeeding generations of men?  And by this “invisible substance” Shedd simply means the “principle of life itself” (434).

1. Key argument:  the whole female was produced out of the male (439).

Original Sin

In line with Shedd’s traducianism, he sins posterity sinned in Adam geminally and not covenantally (435).

1. This maintaiins the justice of God in punishing us for Adam’s sin.
2. The term “flesh” denotes man as soul and body.

Adam is a public person, not a representative one (450).

Traducianism refuses to separate punishment from culpability.  On semipelagian and EO views, we are punished (death) for that which we aren’t culpable (Adam’s sin).  

But does this ruin the Adam/Christ parallel?  No.  Shedd says it is a fallacy to think that if penal suffering can be imputed, so must sin (462).  Righteousness can be imputed two ways: meritoriously and unmeritoriously.  Sin can’t. Righteousness is a gift.  Sin is wages.  

Shedd has a good explanation of Romans 5.  Infants sinned in Adam, but not after the likeness of Adam.  They only sinned in the probationary sense, not in Adam’s postlapsarian sins (479).

Man’s Primitive State

“Holiness is more than innocence.  It is not sufficient to say that man was crated in a state of innocence…[holiness] is positive character, not mere innocency” (494).

1. Concreated holiness: man was not created neutral, but positively holy.  (Shedd would have rejected the ‘pure nature” approach of some medieval Thomists)
   1. The idea of the will as a mental faculty presupposes concreated holiness
   2. Spiritual substance is characterized by self-motion.  Adam was a livign soul.  Life implies motion.
   3. If holiness is not created, the creature improves the Creator’s work (497).
   4. The dependent nature of finite holiness proves it is concreated.
   5. If man’s will is in a state of indifference with no inclination whatsoever, it could never begin self-motion.

Voluntariness as Self-Determination

1. The freedom of the will is its self-motion (498).
   1. Freedom of the will is primarily self-determination to a single end, not a choice between two yet unchosen contraries (503).
   2. Pelagian psychology defines freedom as indifference (suppl. 4.2.6). Scriptural psychology sees it as the spontaneous inclining of the will to what God commands and aversion of what he forbids.
      1. The Pelagian view is wholly in volitions.
2. Inclination is not volition.
   1. The first activity of the will is inclination, not volition (504).  Man is biased in his will before he chooses.  

Human Will

Definition of the Will

The whole soul as cognizing is the understanding; and the whole soul as inclining is the will (509).

1. The understanding is the cognitive faculty or mode of the soul.
2. The understanding is fixed and stationary.  It can be darkened but not structurally changed.
3. The will is that mode of the soul which self-determines (511).
   1. Edwards identifies the will (Will 3.4) with the heart and contra distinguishes it from the understanding.
   2. Scripture uses “inclination, desire, and affection” interchangeably.

Inclination vs. Volition

1. Inclination terminates on the soul.  Volition on the body.
2. Inclination is the central action of the will; volition is the superficial action (519).
   1. The action of the will is best termed voluntary.
   2. The superficial action is volitionary.
      1. All volitionary acts of choice are performed to satisfy the prevailing inclination of the wil (520).
      2. Volitions are means.
3. Jonathan Edwards’s position:
   1. The outward act is preceded by the volition
   2. The volition is preceded by the inclination
   3. The inclination is either concretely holy (per regeneration) or sinful (per apostasy).
4. Summary
   1. Volition moves the body.  Inclination moves the will.
   2. The total action of the will subdivides into voluntary and volitionary
   3. This distinction explains moral ability (Suppl. 4.3.3)

Man’s Probation and Apostasy

Death as the Consequence of the First Sin

Sin is not a being in the sense of substance, yet it is not a nothing, either (545).  It is a habitus.

Original Sin

Adam’s sin was both internal and external.

Imputation of Adamic Guilt

1. Per Romans 5:12, infants did not repeat the Adamic sin.
2. Yet, they sinned in some other manner because they are part of the pantes.
3. Is hemarton passive or active?
   1. Paul does not merely “regard” or “Treat” us as sinners.  That would require a different construction in Greek: hamartanein einai.
   2. The passive tense excludes Adam and Eve from the pantes.
   3. The passive denotes God’s action, not man’s, yet it is the sinner’s act, not the judge’s, which is the reason for punishment (560).
4. This isn’t the same type of union as between Christ and man

Corruption of Nature

Adam’s sin is both the act and the resulting state of the will (566).

Shedd’s thesis is that the corruption of nature is guilt:

1. The Bible doesn’t distinguish between sin proper and sin improper.  The principle of sin is interchangeable with the act.
2. Romans 7.7 has an interplay of epithumia and sarx.
3. The regenerate hate the remainders of corruption as much as the corruption.
4. It is guilt because it is connected with a voluntary, even if not volitional aspect.

Original Sin as Voluntary Inclination

Sin in its entire history is inclination and self-determination (571).

Edwards, again

1. Disposition precedes volition.
2. Adam and his progeny were one agency in the act of sin.
3. “Act” for Edwards means self-determination, not the Arminian form where it is a volition + power to the contrary.

Inability

Related to inclination of will and not individual choice.

Moral necessity:  one’s volitions must be like the inclination, not that the inclination itself is necessitated by God (587).  Example, “the formation of habit is voluntary; but when the habit has been voluntarily formed, it cannot be eradicated by a volition” (595).

Christology

Logos assumed a human nature.  The properties of the divine nature can’t be destroyed (616).

Crucifixion

The union between the human soul and the human body was dissolved temporarily, but the union between the Logos and the human soul and body was not.  Christ’s human soul and body were separated from each other during the “three days and three nights,” in whihc he “lay in the heart of the earth.”  This was death. The humanity of Christ was dislocated for a time and its complete personality interrupted.

Christ’s still had self-consciousness by virtue of the divine person (618).

Christ’s Mind

“The human mind stood in a similar relation to the Logos as the mind of a prophet does to God” (619).

The finite and limited human nature prevented the full manifestation of deity.  We must make a distinction between the existence of the Logos in Christ’s person and the full manifestation of it (620).

Shedd has a very good defense of the extra calvinisticum.

Soteriology

Mediatorial Office

1. The office of mediator is one of reward (Phil. 2:5-11
2. Scripture does not speak of the covenant of grace and the covenant of redemption in the same language.
3. Threefold Office
   1. Christ executes the office of prophet mediately through his Holy Spirit.

Atonement

1. Personal atonement is made by the offending party.  Vicarious atonement by the offended (693).
   1. Personal atonement is incompatible with mercy.  Vicarious atonement is the highest form.
   2. Socinianism refuted:  substitutionary atonement is not foreign to the Trinity.
2. Reconciliation
   1. Compassion is a feeling; reconciliation is an act resulting from it (705).
3. Penal substitution
   1. Atonement is correlated to justice, not to benevolence (723).
   2. Justice insists on nothing but what is due.
   3. The atoning mediator can demand upon principles of strict justice the release from the penalty of any sinful man in respect to whom he makes the demand (725).
   4. Does the idea of punishment “contain, besides the objective element of suffering inflicted by the judge, also the subjective element of guilt?”  p. 736
   5. The vicarious suffering of the Godman obtains its element of infinitude from the person, not the duration.
4. Extent of the atonement
   1. Extent could mean either “value” or “range.”
   2. Since redemption implies the application of Christ’s atonement, unlimited redemption cannot logically be affirmed by any who hold that faith is wholly the gift of God (743).
5. Universal offer of the atonement
   1. Divinely commanded (Mat. 16.5).
   2. God calls men to believe, not to believe they are elected.
   3. Common grace benefits from said offer
      1. Paganism is abolished
      2. Depravity restrained
   4. The offer of the gospel discloses to the unbeliever his own obstinacy.

Regeneration

1. Range of usage: wide and narrow
2. Definition and scope: “Regeneration…is an act; conversion is an activity or a process” (763).
   1. The cognition gained is immediate consciousness.
   2. God inclines man to holiness and disinclines him to sin.
      1. The unregenerate is unable to be willing in the direction of holiness.
   3. Immediacy of regeneration
      1. Immediate contact between God and man.
      2. Spiritual essence touches spiritual essence
      3. The spirit of man is dead and contributes no energy or vital principle of any kind.
      4. The dead soul is not an instrument by which spiritual life is originated.  It is the subject (770).
   4. Seeking:
      1. Find out that you need it and that your enslaved will cannot originate it.
      2. The sinner cannot cooperate in the work of regeneration but he can in the work of conviction.  This “preparative” does not make the sinner worthy of regeneration.
      3. Even if all the acts of the unregenerate are sinful, some are better preparatives than others.  (e.g., it is better to go to preaching than to the saloon).

Justification

1. Faith unites with Christ and union with Christ results in justification (793).
2. Dikaioo doesn’t mean sanctification or making just for the reason that its antithesis means “condemning.”

Eschatology

Intermediate or Disembodied State

1. “The substance of the Reformed view is that the intermediate state of the saved is heaven without the body and the final state is heaven with the body” (832).
2. Pagan influences
   1. In the Hellenized conception all souls go down to hades
   2. Doesnt’ square with biblical model:  God is always represented as “on high.”  Paradise is in the third heaven and none of the heavens are in the underworld.
3. Descent into hell
   1. Most natural way is to read it as Christ is buried.
   2. Did Christ’s body go to hell, or just his spirit?  If the latter, wouldn’t this complicate the orthodox view that all actions of the Logos are united?
4. Scriptural view of the intermediate state
   1. Going down to Sheol/Hades isn’t simply dying.
   2. “To redeem from sin a being whose consciousness expires at death is superfluous” (844).
5. Hades is retribution and woe
   1. Dives is in torments in Hades (Lk. 16.23)
   2. Hades is the contrary of heaven (Matt. 11.23).
   3. Its kingdom is antagonistic of Christ (Matt. 16.18).
   4. It is the prison of Satan and the wicked (Rev. 1.18).
   5. If Hades simply means the underworld, which would include paradise, then in Revelation paradise is also cast into the lake of fire!
   6. Most of the same arguments will apply to the term Sheol.

Christ’s Second Advent

In this section Shedd rebuts premillennialism without really offering an alternative.

Final Judgment

Hell

1. The doctrine of endless punishment is associated with the denial of those tenets which are logically and closely connected with it: original sin, vicarious atonement, and regeneration (885).
2. Actual attempts by the restorationist to explain what the words depart from me, you cursed, into everlasting fire prepared for the devil and his angels really means are rare (887).
   1. Jesus didn’t consider himself deluded:  “to threaten with everlasting punishment punishment a class of persons described as ‘goats upon the left hand’ of the eternal judge, while knowing at the same time that this class would ultimately have the same holiness and happiness with those described as ‘sheep upon the right hand’ of the judge, would have been both falsehood and folly.  The threatening would have been false” (889).
   2. Had Christ intended to teach that future punishment is temporary and remedial, he would have compared it to a dying worm and quenchable fire (892).
3. Annihilationism is false for the following reasons:
   1. Death is the opposite of birth and birth does not mean the creation of substance.
   2. The spiritually dead are described in scripture as conscious.
   3. The extinction of consciousness is not the nature of punishment.  The essence of punishment is suffering, and suffering implies consciousness.
   4. According to this theory, brutes are punished
   5. The advocate of conditional immortality, in teaching the extinction of consciousness as eternal death, implies that the continuance of consciousness is eternal life.  But mere consciousness is not happiness.  Judas was conscious, certainly, when he hung himself, but he was not happy (899).
4. Shedd hints at a postmillennialism in suggesting that the larger number of humanity will be saved (908ff).  “The circle of God’s election is a great circle of the heavens and not that of a treadmill” (910).
5. Rational argument:  endless punishment, outside of its scriptural defense, needs three points: a just God, man has free agency, and that sin is a voluntary action (911).
   1. Punishment isn’t chastisement nor is it calamity.
   2. Punishment is retributive in its aim.
   3. The objection that endless punishment is overkill for a temporary sin/crime fails to understand the nature of punishment.  You aren’t ever punished for the duration of the crime committed.  You are punished, for example, for murdering someone (which usually takes just an instant), not on how long the stabbing took.
   4. The continuous nature of guilt necessitates the endlessness of retribution.  Sinners in hell are hardened in their sin.
      1. In the very act of transgressing the law of God, there is a reflex action of the human will upon itself, whereby it becomes unable to perfectly keep that law” (923).
   5. And the endless suffering of a finite being isn’t exactly “infinite.”  The being is finite, since he has a beginning.
   6. Good for society:
      1. No theological tenet is more important than that of eternal retribution to those modern nations which, like England, Germany, and the United States, are growing rapidly in riches, luxury, and earthly power (928).

Notes on Shedd, part 1

From Shedd’s Dogmatic Theology.

Prolegomena

“If  all that can be said by the theologian respecting God is that he is not this or that, then the mind has in fact no object before it and no cognition whatever…The deity becomes the unknown and unknowable” (Shedd 71).

Revelation

On Genesis 1-2: “As far as the text is concerned, there is full right to explain it (e.g., day) as a period” (107).

Theology: Doctrine of God

God’s Spirituality

Man knows the nature of a finite spirit by his own self-consciousness; he knows the nature of an infinite spirit analogically (153).

Divine spirit: God is the most real substance of all.

1. God is a necessary essence
2. God is ens, actual being (157).
3. God is unextended and invisible substance (164).
4. Without passions:  passion implies passivity

God’s Personality

1. Personality is marked by two characteristics
   1. Self-consciousness
      1. Regarding the Trinity, “the media to self-consciousness are all within the divine essence” (173).
      2. God distinguishes himself from himself, thus two acts.  There is now a reciprocal object-ego, which then requires a third term, percipient between the two (174).
   2. Self-determination
2. “The three distinctions in the one essence personalize it: God is personal because he is three persons” (171).

Innate Idea and Knowledge of God

Arguments for the Divine Existence

Trinity in Unity

Thesis:  God cannot be self-contemplating, self-cognitive, and self-communing unless he is trinal in  constitution (220).

Terminology

1. God is trinal, not triplex.  The latter connotes composition (229).
2. Person denotes a mode of essence
3. We prefer essence to substance, because the latter implies accidents.
4. A divine person: the divine essence with a special property, subsisting in an especial manner (Owen, Trinity Vindicated, 10.504)

Nota Bene: The three persons/one essence doesn’t make the essence a fourth person.  Shedd explains by way of analogy: when the subject-ego posits the object-ego, it simultaneously posits the whole human spirit along with it; but this act doesn’t create a second human spirit (235).

Divine Attributes

Definition: “A Trinitarian person is a mode of the essence; a divine attribute is a phase of the essence” (275).

Simplicity:

Omniscience: Divine knowledge is:

1. Intuited, not discursive; direct vision (286).
2. Simultaneous, not successive
3. Complete and certain

God has a knowledge of all possible things (287).  This is his simple knowledge. Interestingly, Shedd denominates God’s conditional knowledge (e.g., Mt. 11.21-23) as middle knowledge (287).

Justice

God’s holiness is the perfect rectitude of his will (290).

1. Rectoral justice: God is right in himself and all his actions
2. Distributive justice: God’s rectitude in the execution of law.
3. Remunerative justice: distribution of rewards

The Divine Decrees

“The divine decree relates only to God’s opera ad extra” (311).  There are sequences in the execution but not the formation.  

You must have the divine decree to have foreknowledge; otherwise, how will the event be certain?  It will then be contingent.  “An event must be made certain before it can be known as a certain event” (313).

Theses on the divine decree:

1. It is founded in wisdom (Eph. 1:11).
2. It is eternal (Acts 15:18)
3. It is universal, including “whatsoever things come to pass.”
4. It is immutable; there is no defect in God’s knowledge, power, and certainty (Isaiah 46.10).

Efficacious and Permissive Decrees

“The efficacious decree determines the event”

1. By phsical and material causes (Job 28.26)
2. By an immediate spiritual agency (2 Tim. 2:25)

The permissive decree relates only to moral evil.  If we deny God’s permissive decree, then we make evil independent and this leads to dualism and manicheanism (319).

On an Arminian scheme, a man may at any time fall from faith and therefore his fate can’t be determined until death. Therefore, he is elected after he is dead! (345)

Creation

Shedd holds to old-earth.  Day is not defined by the bible as 24 hour period; the following:

1. Day means daylight in distinction from darkness (Gen. 1.5; 16, 18)
2. Day means daylight and darkness together (1.5)
3. Day means the six days together (2.4).
4. The first day could not have been measured by solar revolutions.

Against Eternality of Matter

If matter is eternal then it must be the first cause, but matter cannot be the first cause because this is self-moving and perpetually moving.  Matter is marked by the force of inertia (380).

Miracles

They aren’t unnatural events; they are natural to God (417). Miracles upon earth are nature in heaven.

ANTHROPOLOGY

Man’s Creation

Traducianisim: applies the idea of species to body and soul (431).  The key question: when God created Adam and Eve, did he create in and with them the invisible substance of all the succeeding generations of men?  And by this “invisible substance” Shedd simply means the “principle of life itself” (434).

1. Key argument:  the whole female was produced out of the male (439).

Original Sin

In line with Shedd’s traducianism, he sins posterity sinned in Adam geminally and not covenantally (435).

Self-Love and Augustine: Analytical Outline

This is an outline of Oliver O’Donovan’s The Problem of Self-Love in St Augustine.
Thomas Aquinas identified three different froms of self-love: friendly, hostile, neutral.

1. Augustine’s own use of it identifies with the eudaimonist tradition (O’Donovan 2).
1. Four Aspects of Love
   1. Dilectio and caritas are words better-suited than amor.
      1. There is no caritas about evil things; only cupiditas.
   2. The loving subject stands in a complex relation to the reality he confronts.
      1. “Order” is a teleological notion.
      2. The subject discovers this order.
   3. The final good.
      1. Augustine initially thought this meant happiness.
      2. The supreme Good can’t be below or equal to man; it is above him.
      3. Using language like finis bonum introduces a positivist note (17).
   4. Cosmic love
      1. Metaphysical/ethical realism.
      2. The love of God is a metaphysical movement of the human will towards its final cause.
         1. But this doesn’t really account for deviations.
         2. Augustine then said that the movement of each thing is “proper” in that it occurs without any exterior force as an intervening cause.
      3. Augustine’s “Neo-Platonism.”
         1. The good of each degree is identified with the degree above it.
         2. Yet Augustine the metaphysician had to admit that only one object of love was permissible.
   5. Positive Love
      1. For the early Augustine “use” was opposite of love.
      2. Distinction between things and signs
         1. Things are subdivided
            1. Objects of enjoyment: you cleave to something for its own sake.
            2. Objects of use: not all use of temporal things is love.
      3. This is classical eudaimonism: the end is something one posits (28).
   6. Rational Love
      1. Love is estimation, appreciation, approval, not appetite or movement.
      2. The lover’s response to the object of his admiration is dilectatio.
         1. The basis of this delight is rational.
         2. Love’s order is given by its comprehending conformity to the order of reality.

 

• Self-Love and the Love of God

 

1. The pyramidal ordo amoris supposes that every subordinate good derives its value from its final orientation to God.
2. Knowledge: We require God’s merciful self-communication
   1. The human mind
      1. We also need subjective criteria: the mind loves itself.

 

• Self-Love and Self-Knowledge

 

1. Love follows knowledge.
2. Matter and Mind
   1. To be in matter is to be in space.
   2. The intelligible realm is “in itself.”
3. Soul and Presence
   1. Self-presence: the soul detached from the world of matter
   2. Distance-from-self: the soul in matter.
   3. Augustine identifies the inner self with conscience (71).
4. There is a gulf between self-knowledge and knowledge of God.
5. Commentary on De Trinitate
   1. First three-fold division
   2. Amans, amata, amor
      1. This was the Trinity of external love.
      2. The subject-object-copula only yielded two terms.
      3. New triad can yield three: mens, notitia, amor.
   3. Memoria, intelligentia, voluntas

 

• The Primal Destruction

 

1. Self-love is to reject the good common to all, God himself, in favor of some limited personal good.
2. Platonic echoes: Augustine sees the soul of man occupied in the middle place of the universe.
   1. We must view the soul as expanding (reaching towards God) and contracting (sin).
3. Your private interests should not clash with another’s, for the only true interests have to be communal because the only true goodness was God, who gives himself freely to all (103).
   1. Neglecting the common good is neglecting the transcendent good common to all.

 

• Suum has become an ontological category (104).

 

Thesis: Self-love is notorious to define, be it pagan or Christian.  And it isn’t always clear what Augustine means by it.  O’Donovan, however, does point the way through the morass and gives us something like the following: Augustine takes classical eudaimonianism and gives a “communal” and eschatological cast to it:  self-love finds its true expression in love to God, which orders my love to others (138).

O’Donovan ends with an outstanding presentation of Christian Eudaimonism.  Such a view will have to take a positivist view of the finis bonum.

But in some ways more important than the above is O’Donovan’s wise, judicious handling of the history of ethics in the ancient world.  Among other things, he gives us an outstanding commentary on the latter half of De Trinitate.

Dugin notes, 2: Dasein as Actor

1. What is the nature of freedom?
   1. Classical Liberals defined freedom as “freedom from.”  There should be no ties on an individual’s will.  
      1. It is these individuals, acting alone but taken as a whole, who form the circle of liberal action.
      2. Lacking a telos by definition, liberalism is hard-pressed to explain what we have freedom for.
   2. All political theories have an acting subject.
2. Dasein as subject.
   1. Dasein is a way to overcome the subject-object duality.  It is inzwichen, the “between.”
3. Hidden Racisms
   1. Is “progress” racist? Maybe.  Progressive societies have an implicit judgment that other societies, who do not hold such views, are inferior.
   2. The only true human rights are those enshrined by global capitalism, democracy, individualism.
4. Ethnos: A community of language
   1. Racist societies, whether Nazis or American neo-liberals, reduce society to a concept like race, blood, market.
   2. A better reduction, if reduction it is, is language.

Dugin outline, chapter 1

I am doing an analytical outline of Dugin’s Fourth Political Theory.

Birth of a Concept

1. Three Ideologies
   1. Liberalism: the individual is the normative subject (this includes both free market capitalism and the Democratic Party.  I am using “liberal” in a non-perjorative sense).
   2. Fascism: race or nation is normative subject
   3. Communism: Class
      The second and third options failed, leaving liberalism in charge.  Without any alternatives, liberalism is the norm.
   4. 4th political theory: Dasein is the acting subject.  We will explain more on this later.
2. Postmodernism
   1. Global Market Society
      1. Globalism
      2. Technology
   2. Kingdom of Antichrist
3. Heidegger and the Event
   1. The ancient greeks confused the nuances between pure being (Seyn) and a being (Seinende).
   2. Nihilism and the event
      1. The “Nothing” is the flip side of being and paradoxically reminds one of Being’s existence.
      2. Event: the sudden return of being.