The Canons of Dort

By Edwin Walhout

A pastoral and theological critique of a controversial document from the post-Reformation era.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Edwin Walhout
• Release date: Jun 20, 2011
• ISBN: 9781458152206

Edwin Walhout

I am a retired minister of the Christian Reformed Church, living in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Being retired from professional life, I am now free to explore theology without the constraints of ecclesiastical loyalties. You will be challenged by the ebooks I am supplying on Smashwords.

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The Canons of Dort

A Theological and Pastoral Critique

by Edwin Walhout

Published by Edwin Walhout

Smashwords Edition

Copyright 2010 Edwin Walhout

Cover design by Amy Cole ([e-mail])

See Smashwords.com for additional titles by this author,

including critiques of five ancient Christian creeds

and two additional Reformation creeds

(Heidelberg Catechism and Belgic Confession)

Biblical quotations are from the New Revised Standard Version of the Bible.

Smashwords Edition, License Notes

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Table of Contents

I Divine Election and Reprobation

II Christ’s Death and Human Redemption Through It

III Human Corruption

IV Conversion to God and the Way It Occurs

V The Perseverance of the Saints

Preface

This critique does not include an analysis of the historical setting of the Synod of Dort. Nor does it analyse the section in each Canon which considers Errors. On the contrary it is limited to a critique of the theology in each of the main sections of these Canons, trying to understand the mentality of the church fathers of Dort, and then to evaluate the theological positions being defined.

The critique argues from the point of view of the ancient Hebrew-Christian mindset, the way of thinking evident in both the Old and New Testaments of the Bible. There are significant deviations from that definitive Biblical mindset here in these Canons of Dort. There is, of course, much that is laudable and essential, but as often as not these gems of theology are put in a skewed theological framework which casts a cloud of doubt even upon them. The overall conclusion is that the church should no longer accept the Canons of Dort as definitive of its ecclesiastical theology.

The Canons of Dort

The Decision of the Synod of Dort on the Five Main Points of Doctrine

in Dispute in the Netherlands

(as found in the Psalter-Hymnal, 1988 edition, p. 927 f.)

I Divine Election and Reprobation

Article 1: God’s Right to Condemn All People

Since all men have sinned in Adam and have come under the sentence of the curse and eternal death, God would have done no one an injustice if it had been his will to leave the entire human race in sin and under the curse, and to condemn them on account of their sin. As the apostle says: The whole world is liable to the condemnation of God (Rom. 3:19), All have sinned, and are deprived of the glory of God (Rom. 3:23), and, The wages of sin is death (Rom. 6:23).

All men have sinned in Adam. In Genesis the name Adam not only refers to the individual so named but also carries the connotation of the entire human race, as if Adam is Everyman. Dort gives us to understand, correctly, that what the individual person Adam does in the Genesis stories is intended to be a description of what everybody does.

It is not made clear here in Article 1 that this is the background of the Reformed theology of Dort. What is the connection between Adam and the rest of us? This article does not specify an answer.

If, however, we go to the prior Reformed creed, the Belgic Confession of Faith, we do find an answer, namely, the doctrine of original sin. In that creed it is affirmed that the guilt and pollution of Adam’s sin is passed on by heredity.

Hence it is very likely that this first article of the Canons of Dort also means to say that we all have sinned in Adam in the sense of original guilt and pollution passed on to us by heredity.

While the attempt to define the connection between Adam and us is in itself laudatory, one can hardly credit the doctrine of original sin in the sense of hereditary corruption. How can a moral act such as that described in Genesis 3 produce a result in terms of genetics?

Since, however, this doctrine of original sin is not defined here, it is not appropriate to analyze it further. Simply recognize that it is probably the background of the article’s first clause.

… have come under the sentence of the curse. This refers to the curse that God pronounced upon sin: that Eve would have great pain in childbirth, that Adam would have to contend with weeds in his farming operations, and that the serpent would some day be crushed.

Understandably this curse is extended in our theology to cover all actual and possible consequences of sin in our daily civilized life. The entire human race lies under this curse from God upon our human sin, the evidences thereof to be seen everywhere from disease to war to pain and poverty, to guilt, depression, crime, hatred, and all other kinds of evil.

… and eternal death. Here we have another undefined term, the meaning of which we will have to discover elsewhere, very probably again in the Belgic Confession. Dort is here affirming that the consequences of Adam’s sin are to be understood not merely within this life but also in the existence to come after physical death. When we deliberately live in sin, as Adam, we thereby deserve to go to hell forever. That is Dort.

…God would have done no one an injustice if it had been his will to leave the entire human race in sin and under the curse, and to condemn them on account of their sin. This is an expansion of the previous affirmation that sin deserves hell. It follows, says Dort, that if sin deserves hell, God can in full justice simply leave us there. We get what we deserve; we deserve what we choose; we choose to sin rather than to obey. So we can have no complaint if we get what we choose.

This is the theodicy of Dort, Dort’s way of justifying God. But does God need justifying? Who are we to think we can, or even need to, justify God? Do we need to explain God’s right to do what he does? The Canons are correct to insist that the troubles we are in as a human race are our own fault, not God’s. God created us good and in his image. We, exercising that image, choose contrary to the will of our creator, contrary thus to our own good created nature, and we suffer for it. That is correct.

But the Canons are preparing the ground for an explanation of election and reprobation, and one wonders whether this first paragraph is entirely satisfactory in defining the parameters of divine election and reprobation.

Dort is reading more into the story of the fall of Adam and Eve than is actually in Genesis 3, that is the notion of eternal death. What is there in this Genesis account that suggests there is such a thing as eternal death, that is, hell?

Furthermore, what is there in this account that requires us to think physical death is a result of sin? To be sure, God said to Adam and Eve, In the day you eat thereof you will surely die. But they certainly did not die that very day, for Adam lived to be 930 years old. The death he died at the moment of sin was spiritual death, moral death, death to what God commanded them, death to the life of God-imaging for which they had been created. Death in this instance means choosing not to obey God, but rather to obey the temptation of the devil. But, note well, there is nothing in this resembling what Dort calls eternal death.

It is better to define the consequences of the sin of Adam and Eve in terms of what God had commanded them in the cultural mandate. What did God require of his human creatures when he created them? To be his image in the way they populated the earth and gained dominion over it, to subcreate a civilization that incorporated into its structures all the divine virtues of honesty, truthfulness, justice, love, respect, reliability, hard work, and so forth. Adam and Eve must be rigorously obedient to God in order to accomplish this goal. But God did create them human, not animal. This means with the ability to choose not to obey, able to go their own way instead of God’s way.

That is what the choice between the two named trees of Eden represents. Adam and Eve could not avoid making a decision between those trees, that is, they could not avoid the decision either to obey God or not to obey him. They had to choose one way or the other. The fact that they chose to disobey meant that they would go about their daily work in such a way that they would not reflect the image of God in their behavior and relationships. We see the consequences in their children and in the antediluvian history of Genesis.

We see it also in all of ancient history. All ancient civilizations were founded on force, military compulsion, war, suppression, slavery. Consequently they all failed to reflect the goodness and love of their creator, failed to image God in the cultures they created. Dishonesty, crime, poverty, pride, jealousy, suppression, slavery, selfishness, cruelty, and the like were endemic to all those ancient cultures, identify them as one might. That is what we see in actual history as the result of our sin. There is no need to speculate about eternal death, whatever that may or may not mean. We see the untoward results of sin every day in the structures of our civilization.

So then, what might it mean that God would do no injustice to leave us in that condition? No injustice to whom? To us? But that is not the point at all. God created us with a certain purpose in mind. When we sin we are not working toward that end. So God’s task, so to speak, is to get us to the point that we choose to obey him and image him in our daily work and civilization. How does he do this? Not by sending us to hell. That is entirely beside the point. He gets us to become obedient by sending Jesus and his Spirit to change our minds and wills.

So, to be frank about it already here at this point, the Canons of Dort begins with a skewed vision of God’s purpose. We need, on the contrary, to think in a God-centered teleological way: What is it that God wishes to accomplish in time and in history, and how is he doing it? The theological parameters of the doctrine of election and reprobation should be delineated in terms of God’s purpose, not in terms of theodicy.