169 chairs in their dinner jackets. The prerogatives and forms of natural

privilege were rigorously maintained.

In culture after culture, variations of such emphases are commonplace.

Because the governing world is for humanistic man this fallen world, the forms of this world’s activities take on great importance. Natural privilege is the ruling premise in one form or another. In Marxist countries we find the greatest exaltation of the ruling class because there is no countervailing doctrine of grace to limit their power. The same is true of pagan societies of the past.

Paul grounds the rejection of natural privilege in the fact of salvation by sovereign grace and predestination. The great festivals of the Old Testament likewise rejected natural privilege. The Day of Atonement and the Sabbath Year wiped out past sins, cancelled debts, and a man was stripped of all plans and obligations that might interfere with God’s will.

Natural privilege was blocked thereby.

The world of nature is fallen; the world of revelation is the redemptive order which must work to undermine all the pretensions of the natural world and all its claimed privileges.

Christopher Hill cites an example of what the English “Restoration” of Charles II did to the Church of England. In Wrexham, for example, gentlemen received the sacrament on one Sunday, as we have seen, and the poor on the next.⁷ Such a step established natural privilege in the very realm of grace and indicated the extent of the revolution wrought by the Restoration.

The world of natural privilege fails to see that this realm of man is God’s creation and, historically, a religious product. Gasset described in 1932 the new barbarism arising in the scientific and academic communities, the belief “that civilisation is there in just the same way as the earth’s crust and the forest primeval.”⁸ This failure to recognize the supernatural force in history leads to barbarism, because it treats as a continuing natural fact, like the air we breathe, the centuries-old advances of Christian faith. To a degree, this is what Rosenstock-Huessy also reacted against when he wrote:

Illiteracy and literacy are not opposites. We shall perish if this is not heeded. In the Christmas message of Queen Elizabeth, on December 25, 1958, I had to listen to the horrid sentence: “... let us enjoy our accumulated civilization.” That is the end of the living word, indeed.

For, what I resented all my life, even for our memory that it be treated as a sum and a mere rubbish heap, this now is proclaimed from on

7. Christopher Hill: The Experience of Defeat, p. 212. New York, New York: Vi-king, 1984.

8. Jose Ortega y Gasset: The Revolt of the Masses, p. 126. New York, New York:

W.W. Norton, 1932.

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high as constituting the universe of the word. Let us defend the Harmony of the Spheres against any accumulation of civilizations.⁹ Christianity is a rejection of the world of Adam and an affirmation of the world of Christ. As such, it is a denial of natural privilege in favor of sovereign grace. The world of Adam is the world of death.

9. Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy, “Biblionomics,” in Bibliography, Biography, p. 25.

New York, New York: Four Wells, 1959.

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38. Natural Privilege and Causality (Romans 9:14-18)

14. What shall we say then? Is there unrighteousness with God? God forbid.

15. For he saith to Moses, I will have mercy on whom I will have mercy, and I will have compassion on whom I will have compassion.

16. So then it is not of him that willeth, nor of him that runneth, but of God that sheweth mercy.

17. For the scripture saith unto Pharaoh, Even for this same purpose have I raised thee up, that I might shew my power in thee, and that my name might be declared throughout all the earth.

18. Therefore hath he mercy on whom he will have mercy, and whom he will he hardeneth.

(Romans 9:14-18)

Paul has been reviewing Israel’s history and origin with predestination in mind. No man and no people have any claim on God. If God can set aside Israel, He can set aside anyone.

Men, however, have a fixation on predestination; it is an offense to them, because it says that God, not man, is the Lord. Man wants to be in some degree his own god (Gen. 3:5), and hence his rebellion against this doctrine.

I recall, in the late 1930s, a professor, in a graduate course, refer in passing to Calvinism as “the triumph of logic over life;” he conceded freely that, if the God of the Bible is the actual God, Paul, Augustine, and Calvin are right, but logic for him was limited to the constructs of the human mind, and life had not evolved in compliance with a higher logic. At one point this professor was right: one must deny the God of Scripture to escape the necessity of predestination.

But Paul in these verses assumes predestination. His concern is to demonstrate the righteousness or justice of God. He relates to God’s justice His mercy and compassion. There can be no abstract definition of any of these things. Justice is not a platonic idea existing aloft to judge both God and man, but justice is what God does and is. The world of abstract universals is anti-Christian. This means that we must follow Calvin closely when he writes:

The predestination of God is indeed in reality a labyrinth, from which the mind of man can by no means extricate itself: but so unreasonable is the curiosity of man, that the more perilous the examination of a subject is, the more boldly he proceeds; so that when predestination is discussed, as he cannot restrain himself within due limits, he immediately, through his rashness, plunges himself, as it were, into the depth of the sea. What remedy then is there for the godly? Must they avoid every thought of predestination? By no means: for as the Holy Spirit has taught us nothing but what it behoves us to know, the knowledge of this would no doubt be useful, provided it be confined

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to the word of God. Let this then be our sacred rule, to seek to know nothing concerning it, except what Scripture teaches us: when the Lord closes his holy mouth, let us also stop the way, that we may not go farther.¹

In the plain words of Scripture, we are required to believe both in human responsibility and God’s predestination. We are not asked to understand it but believe it. None of us wait on understanding the process of digestion before we eat, for then we would all be dead, nor do we wait on using electricity until we understand it.

Paul’s point in v. 14 is thus blunt: it is blasphemy to question God’s justice.

In v. 15, Paul quotes from Exodus 33:19 and 34:7 concerning the mercy and compassion of God. If God so spoke to Moses, will He not assert His same sovereign power to grant or withhold mercy to Israel and to the church? God declares that the determination of those who shall receive His mercy is His sovereign act and choice. We must remember that the two verses in Exodus which Paul cites are God’s statements when Israel gave itself over to the worship of the golden bull calf, a fertility cult. There was then judgment on God’s part, but also mercy, without reference to any merit in those who received it. Like it or not, God and Paul slam shut every crevice against human merit. God’s mercy is as free as His grace: both are sovereign.

In v. 16, Paul concludes, to cite Lilly’s words, “Faith is God’s gift and not the product of man’s will or effort.”² Ultimate causality is reserved entirely to God. Neither man’s willing nor running, i.e., effort, can affect God’s determination. This, however, does not permit quietism; man’s secondary causality is basic to his life and his responsibility.

In v. 17, Paul again quotes from Exodus, this time 9:16. God spared Pharaoh’s life during the plague of boils in order to use Pharaoh to manifest God’s judgment. He predestined Pharaoh to live and to view his ruination as well as his reprobation.

Then, in v. 18, Paul concludes, “Therefore hath he mercy on whom he will have mercy, and whom he will he hardeneth.” God is sovereign; He alone is the ultimate and determining cause of all things, and whatsoever God does is just, because He is justice. The Westminster Confession of Faith, chapter III, section I, declares:

God from all eternity did by the most wise and holy counsel of his own will, freely and unchangeably ordain whatsoever comes to pass;

yet so as thereby neither is God the author of sin, nor is violence

1. John Calvin: Commentaries on the Epistle of Paul the Apostle to the Romans, p.

353f. Grand Rapids, Michigan: Eerdmans, 1948.

2. Rev. Joseph L. Lilly, “Romans,” in The Catholic Biblical Association: A Com-mentary on the New Testament, p. 432. Kansas City, Missouri: Sadler, 1942.

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