I wonder how close this is on the map of mine (c) above (represented by Turretin): The one God simply appropriates different covenant roles for each divine person. Turretin speaks in this context of the ”will of the Father” and ”the will of the Son”, but he is aware that this is a distinction, which is achieved in the economy. Scott, on the other hand, seems to argue (from what I have read so far) that God`s one will is instantiated three times by the personal sustenance of the Father, the Son, and the Spirit. This, I think, would place this plurality of volunteers in the immanent Trinity. For the purposes of discussions on EFS, it is important to describe in the Pactum how the Father and the Son interact with each other – not only that one sends and the other is sent, but that here divine counsel is presented as a multitude of acting agents. ”Legal Parties” and ”Negotiated Agreement” are the key terms of Van Asselt`s quote above: Within the Trinity there is an exchange, a pact formed by two parties after some negotiations and agreed by both, each with its respective role to play in the subsequent economy of salvation. According to Chaniotis, divine laws are known for their apparent inflexibility. [6] The introduction of interpretation into divine law is a controversial subject, as believers attach great importance to adhering exactly to the law. [7] Opponents of the application of divine law generally deny that it is purely divine and point to human influences in the law. These opponents characterize these laws as belonging to a certain cultural tradition. Followers of divine law, on the other hand, are sometimes reluctant to adapt inflexible divine laws to cultural contexts. [8] When the Covenant of Grace was based on a covenant between two Divine Persons, a broader dualism was introduced into the Divinity–again ignoring the gospel as the revelation of the Father through the Son and of the Son through the Father, which took place in Jesus Christ.

The result was an uncertainty that necessarily relativized the unconditional validity of the Covenant of Grace and made it doubtful whether, in the revelation of that covenant, we really had to do with the will of the one God alone. If there are not only different and fundamentally contradictory qualities in God, but also different subjects who are united in this matter, but above all who had to reach an agreement, how can God`s will, which is seen in the history of the Covenant of Grace, be known as binding and unambiguous, the first and last word of God? The way is then also opened on this page to consider the possibility of another form of His will. There is necessarily and seriously the question of a will of God the Father, which is at the origin and essentially different from the will of God the Son. Conflicts often arise between secular conceptions of justice or morality and divine law. [11] [12] Divine law encompasses any law that is perceived as coming from a transcendent source, such as the will of God or the gods – as opposed to man-made law or the law of the world. According to Angelos Chaniotis and Rudolph F. Peters, divine laws are generally perceived as superior to man-made laws,[1] sometimes because of the assumption that their source has resources beyond human knowledge and reason. [3] Believers in divine laws might give them more authority than other laws,[4][5][2] for example, assuming that god`s law cannot be changed by human authorities. [2] Medieval Christianity grew out of the existence of three kinds of laws: divine law, natural law, and man-made law. [4] Theologians have substantially discussed the scope of natural law, with the Enlightenment promoting a greater use of reason and expanding the scope of natural law and marginalizing divine law in a process of secularization. [9] [additional citation(s) required] Since the authority of divine law is rooted in its source, the origins and history of the tradition of divine law are important. [10] [a] Again, I am not convinced that this is completely fatal to the doctrine of pactum salutis.

But the way a negotiated ”deal” seems to go against the grain of a ”divine will” should be sobering. First, it is not clear that the scholastics articulated a vision of The Trinitarian ”persons” (hypostases) and the realization of their actions, which is entirely consistent with the old doctrine. What is a ”person”? Boethius` famous definition, so often quoted in the Middle Ages, is that a person is ”an individual subsistence of a rational nature.” In God, this nature is one, and it consists of three distinct but essentially and peristoretically united Persons: father, son, and Holy Spirit. Although I am by no means an expert of that time, I think it is correct to say that this Pactum is by no means a mere metaphor for the explanation of Trinitarian relations for the Reformed scholastics (and their successors today). It is not that tradition has imagined an appropriate narrative to illustrate a divine mystery through legal and federal language. No, the eternal agreement of these two ”legal parties” must, in my opinion, be taken literally: the Father and the Son engage with each other to complete the redemption of sinners. Second, and relatedly, there is a more open deviation from the Sixth Ecumenical Council`s declaration on the will of Christ. Again, this may only be implicit. The Council established as Orthodoxy the doctrine that Christ has two wills – one divine and one human – because the capacity of the will goes hand in hand with a nature, not a person.

Because God has a nature (or an essence), God has a will. And because they share the one divine essence, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit share one and the same will—not that they always agree on a way to act as three different agents, but that they have one and the same capacity for preparation. It is not clear that the Reformed vision deviates here from classical Trinitarianism. But it seems that it works with an implicit idea of the person who progressed in the medieval way of understanding personality (and especially the divine personality) by postulating multiple consciousnesses in God (before the incarnation of the Son). On this basis, God can exchange with God. Religious law, like canon law, includes both divine law and additional interpretations, logical extensions, and traditions. [5] It was a very interesting article. I wonder if all versions of the Pactum are open to Barth`s criticism.

Turretins might be able to avoid it, but as you point out, his teaching of the Pactum doesn`t seem to add much to a traditional doctrine of divine missions and appropriations. (I also wonder if Turretin was somehow a more traditional Reformed scholastic, since the doctrine of pactum salutis was not until the mid-17th century. ==External links== So the key to the problem when I tried to diagnose it is how we`re going to answer the question ”What is a person?” Is a person in God a discreet subject, an ”I,” with his own center of consciousness? Or is a divine person an instantiation of the one subject, who is the one God who enjoys a center of consciousness in the Divinity –albeit in a different way from the Son and the Spirit? (And what could this ”other means” mean?) The conception of this intertrinitic pact as a contract between the persons of father and son must also be criticised. Can we really consider the first and second person of the Trinitarian deity as two divine subjects and therefore as two legal subjects that can do business and make commitments with each other? It is a mythology for which there is no place in a proper understanding of the doctrine of the Trinity as the doctrine of the three modes of being of the one God as understood and presented in Reformed Orthodoxy itself. God is a God. If He is considered the highest subject and ultimately the only one, He is the only subject. And when we talk about his eternal decisions or decrees in relation to what he obviously does among us, even if we call them a contract, then we do not consider the divine persons of the Father and the Son as partners in this contract, but the one God – Father, Son and Holy Spirit – as the only partner, and the reality of man, which is as different from God as the other. The relationship we are dealing with when we think of the basis, reason, and starting point of salvation is not that of an agreement between the Father and the Son, Says Barth, but that of the union of God and humanity. That seems right to me.

The basis of salvation is not an intertrinitic pact, but the free choice of God`s grace, that eternal work of God internum ad extra, by which God decides to be God for us and to make us God`s people. The content of this decision—this decision of the only subject in His unified will—is that God as Father will send how the Son God will go and how the Spirit God will accomplish this work in the perfection of divine unity. I didn`t get my hands on Scott Swain`s full chapter in the new book, but he adapted parts of it for a number of positions at Reformation21 last fall. The third part is particularly relevant. He concludes: ”When it comes to the relationship between pactum salutis and the divine will, we must not only take into account the unity and indivisibility of this will, but we must also take into account the three-dimensional nature of the livelihood of this will, if we are to appreciate the status of doctrine as an example of Orthodox Trinitarian argumentation. Because the Son, in his personal mode of existence, emanates eternally from the Father, his personal nature of availability also emanates from the Father. The voluntary submission of the Son to the Father in the pactum salutis is therefore a faithful expression of his childlike divine identity as the son of God consubstantial and eternally begotten. (b) Another is to arrive at a complete argument for three centers of consciousness in God. .