During the controversy in the Protestant Reformed Churches (PRC) in the early 1950s over the unconditional covenant of grace, some ministers were introducing in their preaching and writing all kinds of contingencies, conditions, prerequisites, and activities for man to perform to experience the covenant blessings of God. Those introductions of conditions and prerequisites were efforts to undermine the free salvation of God and to cast the elect of God on the performance of their activities before God would give to them his blessings.

Sufficient to prove that conditions and prerequisites were being introduced are a few examples from Rev. Hubert De Wolf’s 1952 Formula of Subscription examination by the consistory of First Protestant Reformed Church regarding his preaching that “God promises every one of you that, if you believe, you will be saved.”¹

Chairman Rev. Cornelius Hanko asked the following questions of Reverend De Wolf regarding the promise in infant baptism: “Is this promise conditional? Is it to ‘Everyone of you if you believe,’ or is it unconditional and for the elect only?”

Reverend De Wolf responded,

My answer is no. An infant cannot receive this promise by a conscious faith. This is an abstract promise to the elect, that is, to the elect church, and is consciously appropriated by the believer.²

Note De Wolf’s words “abstract promise.” Abstract means existing only in thought with no concrete or physical existence or considering something theoretically. In other words, according to De Wolf the promise exists in theory or in thought and has no concrete existence until the believer consciously appropriates the promise.

Regarding Canons of Dordt 1, error 5, the chairman asked, “How can these [‘faith, the obedience of faith, holiness, godliness, and perseverance’] be conditions and fruits at the same time?”

Reverend De Wolf answered, “Because, Mr. Chairman, fruit and condition are not mutually exclusive. Something can be a fruit and at the same time can assume the function of a condition.³

Regarding Belgic Confession article 22, the chairman asked, “Is faith presented [in this article] as a condition or as a God-given means?”

Reverend De Wolf answered, “It is a means. It is, of course, a means that, whereby we embrace, as the article also states, enabling us to embrace.”

Note that article 22 says absolutely nothing about “enabling us to embrace.”⁴

Next the chairman questioned Reverend De Wolf regarding his preaching that “our act of conversion is a prerequisite to enter into the kingdom of God.” Chairman Hanko asked, “Are not our regeneration and conversion the entering into the kingdom? How then can conversion be before entering into the kingdom?”

Reverend De Wolf replied,

I have no objection to saying that regeneration and conversion are the “entering in.” I really have no objection to that. I think in a sense, certainly they are the entering in. I would say they are, but that does not mean…that you cannot use them in a sense of before.

Just because they are the entering in, that does not mean that you cannot speak of conversion also from the point of view of being a prerequisite…The one does not exclude the other…

Conversion is the fruit, result of regeneration. It’s only possible because of regeneration.⁵

Reverend De Wolf’s conditional theology emphatically applied to man’s experience of salvation. During his examination he meticulously distinguished between salvation in the initial sense and the believer’s conscious enjoyment of that salvation. For De Wolf the conscious enjoyment of salvation, which is salvation itself, was not by faith alone but by and after man fulfilled conditions, prerequisites, or activities (all the same thing) by God’s grace.

There is no comfort and no hope in a doctrine of prerequisites by grace or in any other enabling doctrine, so that man works his salvation by grace. So-called “practical” preaching that proclaims what man must do for salvation is not the gospel, and that kind of preaching casts the child of God into all kinds of doubt regarding the reality of his salvation.

In September 1952 during the heat of the controversy in the PRC, Rev. Herman Hoeksema preached a sermon on Lord’s Day 17 of the Heidelberg Catechism titled “The Resurrection of Christ.” Hoeksema’s defense of the Reformed faith in that sermon is as relevant today as it was then. Many of the same assaults that Hoeksema combatted in this sermon are being hurled at Christ and his church today.

The theology that “our act of conversion is a prerequisite to enter into the kingdom of God” is the same man-first theology of prerequisites that teaches that

God works in such a way that He moves us to act in order that He may then act in the way He has determined…God works this aspect of salvation [repentance] in such a way that He (sovereignly) moves the elect sinner to repentance so that, following this repentance, He may forgive.⁶

There is no hope in those statements because they do not contain the finished work of Christ and his righteousness for salvation.

Now the PRC is also busy denying or minimizing that faith is a bond. Faith is not God’s act; faith is man’s act. Rev. Martyn McGeown claims that “justification is God’s act of declaring believers righteous, while faith is our activity of trusting Jesus for salvation, which is not God’s act.”⁷ Continuing his false theology, McGeown writes,

That we are united to Jesus Christ by the Holy Spirit is certainly a biblical truth, but in the Bible and in the confessions the emphasis is on faith as the activity of believing. The Catechism defines faith not as a bond, and certainly not as a passive, lifeless bond, but as an activity…(Q&A 21)…

But does not the Catechism in LD 7 speak of being “ingrafted” into Christ by faith? It does, but the German word einleiben (ingraft) does not refer to, or even imply, a passive, subsconscious bond—we are ingrafted into Christ by believing in Him; that is our conscious connection to Him…We become members of Christ’s body or one plant with Him by believing in Him.⁸

Those direct assaults on the Reformed and historically Protestant Reformed theology of Herman Hoeksema blaspheme the work of the Holy Spirit and attempt to place man on the throne of God. The current theology of the PRC is not a gospel of hope, but it is a doctrine of despair.

The members of the church, lying in the midst of sin and death, endure all kinds of assaults on the surety of their salvation from their flesh, the world, and the kingdom of Satan. Over against this Herman Hoeksema preached the gospel-truth of the resurrection of Christ for the comfort of the church. His whole point in the sermon was that all the elect were raised with Christ at his resurrection by the fact of their living union with Christ (faith) and that Christ, not the elect, applies all of salvation. We do not apply salvation by our acts; Christ applies salvation by his Spirit.

Hoeksema was at pains in his sermon to show that salvation is complete in Jesus Christ. As the head of the covenant, Christ had upon him the sins of all the elect, and he atoned for those sins at the cross. In the resurrection of Christ, God testified that all the sins of the elect sinner were atoned for, that he is righteous, and that the work of salvation was finished at the cross and is complete in Christ as the head of his people. The head was raised, and the body was raised with him in the resurrection. First Corinthians 15:17 says that if this were not so, preaching Christ would be in vain, and we are still in our sins. Verses 20 through 22 are God’s truth concerning the salvation of the elect in Christ as testified in the resurrection of Jesus Christ and our blessed resurrection through his resurrection as his body. Christ was raised as the head of the elect.

All Christ’s benefits that he merited at the cross for his elect are really ours by our union with Christ, which is to say by faith. The sermon demonstrated that the resurrection is not some abstract event that testified to the possibility of salvation and that man must now obtain salvation experientially by working.

Question 65 of the Heidelberg Catechism asks, “Since then we are made partakers of Christ and all His benefits by faith only, whence does this faith proceed?” Faith comes “from the Holy Ghost, who works faith in our hearts by the preaching of the gospel, and confirms it by the use of the sacraments” (Confessions and Church Order, 108).

We were raised with Christ, and he makes us partakers of an eternal righteousness that can never be touched by unrighteousness again because he has overcome death, and he now lives to apply that righteousness to his elect by his Spirit. Christ raised us to a new, eternal life by his power. Christ is the firstfruits of an already ripe harvest of the elect who are gathered into the kingdom of God inevitably by his power.

God waits on no man and no creature, but God is the free (sovereign) Lord of salvation. He works salvation, which is impossible for man. Man could not and would not ever conceive of salvation. Man could not accomplish salvation and would not will to do it. God works salvation! Otherwise, the whole gospel is impossible.

The resurrection means righteousness for the elect, a righteousness out of the midst of sin and death (unrighteousness) that can never be marred or spoiled. That righteousness means life, the very life of the Son of God. We can never spoil Christ’s righteousness, which is ours by faith, whereby we are united to Christ as his body. That is what the Catechism teaches. Man has as much to do with obtaining or experiencing salvation as man has the right to claim that he was active in raising Christ from the dead or to claim that man will be active in his own resurrection of the body when Christ comes again. Man is dead. All the activity of life in the elect is the activity of Christ, not of man.

What a gospel! The child of God is lifted up to see the glorious reality that is his in Christ by such preaching as Herman Hoeksema proclaimed that Lord’s day. If the “gospel” that is preached to you each and every Sunday does not give you that comfort but is casting you on your doing, then it is no gospel. The gospel proclaims what has already been accomplished in Christ—the salvation of the elect!

Transcript of “The Resurrection of Christ”