[Jesus] consented to His Father sending Him [on this] mission and was well content to do that errand. Indeed, so hearty was His consent that He took delight in it: “I delight to do thy will, O my God: yea, thy law is within my heart” (Psalm 40:8). “Jesus saith unto them, My meat is to do the will of him that sent me, and to finish his work” (John 4:34).

When sin entered human experience, it didn’t take God by surprise. Within the Trinity, arrangements had already been made to save some sinners. Patrick Gillespie (1617–1675) wrote at length on the subject of how God’s covenant undergirds the redemption of sinners. In the following updated extract, he shows how Christ, God the eternal Son, was involved in drawing up the covenant arrangements. As the Son He was not subordinate to the Father but freely consented to take on the work of redeeming sinners. As Patrick Gillespie takes us through the various aspects of the covenant arrangements, it helps us to realise what while salvation is free to us, on the Saviour’s side it was a costly, effortful work. We can also use these details as so many prompts to marvel more at the love which motivated Jesus Christ to take on this work so voluntarily.
He Was under No Obligation
Christ was not compelled to be our Redeemer. He was not under any necessity repugnant to his free and willing acting, when he took on the various offices, trusts, and relations of the covenant.

There was no compelling necessity, as if when someone is bound hand and foot. There was no such necessity on the Lord to send Christ, to lay these offices on Him; for He is a most free sovereign agent – above counsel, much more above compulsion. “Who hath directed the spirit of the Lord, or being his counsellor hath taught him?” (Isa. 40.13). “Whatsoever the Lord pleased, that did he in heaven and in earth, in the seas, and all deep places” (Psalm 135.6). He was not bound to change the law dispensation into a new dispensation of grace. Neither was there any necessity on Christ to take these offices and employments. He could not be compelled to lay down his life. “No man taketh it from me, but I lay it down of my self: I have power to lay it down, and I have power to take it again” (John 10.18).
There was no natural necessity, such as the necessity of the sun to give light, and the fire to give heat. God did not by any natural necessity send forth Christ; nor was the Son of God under any natural necessity to undertake the work of our redemption. God could have done things differently – He could in justice have prosecuted the covenant of works. There was no kind of necessity on God to send, or on Christ to go, on this errand.
There was no moral necessity, not so much as any command, motive, or inducement without Himself, either on God to lay this employment on Christ, or on Christ to take it on, and to undergo the work. God could have sent His Son or not sent Him, as pleased Him. There was not so much as a moral cause inducing him to it. “For God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth on him should not perish, but have everlasting life” (John 3.16) “For when we were yet without strength, in due time Christ died for the ungodly. But God commendeth his love toward us, in that while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us” (Rom. 5.6,8). And Christ could have refused to undertake the work, or agreed, as pleased Him; for who could have laid a command on Him, if the purpose of love that was in His heart had not led Him to consent? “Who being in the form of God, thought it not robbery to be equal with God. And being found in fashion as a man, he humbled himself unto death, even the death of the Cross” (Phil. 2.6,8).

He Was Involved in Drawing Up the Agreement
Whatever different features different covenants may have, it is essential and common to all covenants that they are agreements. This covenant is an eternal transaction and agreement between the Father and Christ the Mediator about the work of our redemption. Let us inquire a little into the various eternal acts of the will of God that concurred to make up this agreement.
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Here is good news: The Lord is committed to guarding the rose. He has given us a new heart, a holy heart; and he has told us that he will watch over it with all of his heart. He has sealed it for himself. He has said, “I am a jealous God.” The triune God of the Bible has sworn: Though dark, secret loves beckon and entice my children and my Bride, they will not prevail.

But I have this against you: You have left your first love.So then: Remember the place from which you have fallen,and repent and do the first works.(Revelation 2:3-4)
This word arrived as a gut punch to the Ephesians. It can do the same when we read it today.
Before it hit, the Lord was all commendation, praising these busy Christians for their toil, endurance, and holy intolerance of evil. After it hit, he did the same, lauding them for their hatred of the lawless works of the Nicolaitans. But in between there came a stern and urgent reproof, flashing like dark lightning against a deep blue sky. What can account for it?
When I asked myself this question, a memorable poem by William Blake came to mind:
O Rose, thou are sick.The invisible wormThat flies in the night,In the howling storm,Hath found out thy bedOf crimson joy:And his dark secret loveDoth thy life destroy.
When people looked at the Ephesian rose, all seemed well. These believers were abounding in the work of the Lord. What’s more, to judge from the King’s commendations, they were doing their works in the Spirit and power of the Lord. This should give us pause: Though the Lord may be granting us fruitful labors, it also may be that a dark and dangerous love has begun to creep, worm-like, into our bed of crimson joy: into the life of love that was purchased for the Bride of Christ by his blood.
But what exactly was the nature of that invisible worm? And how was it enticing the Ephesians to leave their first love?
Perhaps we find our answers in a story about Martha and Mary (Luke 10:38ff). The Lord had come to town. Martha invited him into her home for dinner. Her sister Mary sat herself at the Lord’s feet, listening to his words. But Martha was distracted with her many preparations.
What’s more, she was angry. With an unholy boldness that shocks the reader, it is written that she came up to the Son of God himself and said, ““Lord, don’t you care that my sister has left me to do all the serving alone? Tell her to help me!” But the Lord, wise and gentle, answered with firmness: “Martha, Martha, you are worried and bothered about so many things; but only one thing is truly necessary. I’m saying this because Mary has chosen the best part, and it will not be taken from her.” 
Is this how it was with the Ephesians? Yes, their service was partly in the Spirit; but was it also partly in the flesh? Was it partly motivated by a sincere love for the Lord, but also by some “dark, secret love” that was creeping into the sacred space?
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In other words, faith justifies, and the various “other saving graces” that accompany it come into view in sanctification with its operation of the Spirit in which he “infuses grace” per Larger Catechism Q. 77. It is not an accurate summary to say that there is an infused habit of faith that is first passive in justification but then subsequently active in sanctification, when the confessions appealed to actually distinguish between the saving grace of justifying faith (Q. 72) and the other saving graces that accompany it (Q. 73; Conf. 11.2).

Credo, the organ of the movement to normalize scholasticism among evangelicals, has pursued an interesting career as of late. When it has not been praising the alleged glories of Platonism, giving space to people who regard the Reformation as a tragedy to be lamented, or interviewing the presidents of organizations whose faculty and contributors include female pastors, it has found time to cast aspersions at contemporary evangelicals for “cutting ourselves off from Thomas” and suffering, as a consequence, “from a theology that looks more modern than orthodox.”
Of particular interest is an article by J.V. Fesko asserting that the acceptance of Thomas Aquinas is a sort of litmus test for whether one may be deemed a bona fide Protestant. To be told that we are under obligation to embrace any Romanist in order to be considered Protestant is intriguing enough, but to hear that we must do so concerning the preeminent medieval scholastic and the man whom Protestants have historically understood to be among the foremost expositors of those ideas which so corrupted the Western church that she fell into that ‘Babylonian captivity’ from whence part of Christendom escaped only with great suffering – well, that makes for quite a large pill to swallow. To think that those who have justified our murder[1] and commended the religious veneration of images of Christ and of his cross[2] should be rejected as false teachers is, on Prof. Fesko’s view, only enough to make us “self-professed Protestants,” and such assertions are only so much “noisy din” and engaging in “cancel culture theology.”
Central to Prof. Fesko’s assertions is his belief that previous generations of Protestants employed a “nuanced approach to the thought of Aquinas” in which, for example, they “excised the problematic teachings of infused righteousness as it relates to justification but retained Thomas’ teaching on infused habits for the doctrine of sanctification.” As evidence Prof. Fesko says that John Owen “took a nuanced approach to Aquinas’s doctrine of justification,” especially as regards the concept of an infused habit of righteousness. He quotes Owen’s The Doctrine of Justification by Faith as proof when it speaks of “an habitual infused habit of Grace which is the formal cause of our personal inherent Righteousness,” but which is yet distinct from the “formal cause” of our justification, the imputation of Christ’s righteousness.
The edition Prof. Fesko has quoted is available here. Owen mentions Thomas a single time and says this:
It is therefore to no purpose to handle the mysteries of the Gospel, as if Holcot and Bricot, Thomas and Gabriel, with all the Sententiarists, Summists, and Quodlibetarians of the old Roman Peripatetical School, were to be raked out of their Graves to be our guides. Especially will they be of no use unto us, in this Doctrine of Justification. For whereas they pertinaciously adhered unto the Philosophy of Aristotle, who knew nothing of any Righteousness, but what is an habit inherent in our selves, and the Acts of it, they wrested the whole Doctrine of Justification unto a compliance therewithall.
Such strong language and complete rejection can hardly be called taking a “nuanced approach to Aquinas’s doctrine of justification.” When Prof. Fesko, commenting upon the passage he had quoted, then asks:
How does Owen hold the concepts of imputed and infused righteousness together? How does he blend this Thomist category of the infused habit of righteousness together with the Reformation teaching of justification by the imputed righteousness of Christ?
We may fairly reply that he doesn’t: the passage from Justification by Faith Fesko quotes proves that Owen and other Protestant theologians vigorously distinguish between imputed and infused righteousness. It is noteworthy as well that the word “infused” appears a mere two times among Justification by Faith’s approximately 208,000 words.[3] “Imputed” appears 305 times and “imputation” some 429 times. The notion of an infused habit is not prominent, then, by any stretch of the imagination; if anything, it is, as the context of the excerpt Fesko quoted also shows, a mere passing thought, at least in this particular work.
Curiously, Fesko does not answer his own question with a further appeal to Owen’s works but by shifting to the position of the Westminster Assembly (which Owen did not attend). To this end he appeals to the Westminster Confession (11.1-2, 14.2) and Larger Catechism (Q. 77), and he believes he finds in them “the language of infused habits” which “the divines continue to employ” in Q. 75 of the Larger Catechism, which speaks of the sanctified as “having the seeds of repentance unto life, and all other saving graces, put into their hearts, and those graces so stirred up, increased, and strengthened, as that they more and more die unto sin, and rise unto newness of life.” Prof. Fesko believes that the description of Questions 75 and 77 (“in sanctification his Spirit infuseth grace”) “sounds a lot like Aquinas’s doctrine of justification as the believer increases in righteousness, but the difference here is that this growth does not factor in justification, which rests entirely upon Christ’s imputed righteousness.”
Before proceeding to Prof. Fesko’s other remarks in this section, let it be noted that in B.B. Warfield’s analysis of the Westminster Assembly and its products there is a single reference to Aquinas, and even there on a point of logic and regarding the completeness of Scripture.[4] That work is not an absolute catalogue of the minutes, admittedly, but if Aquinas were such a large presence in the thought of the Westminster divines we might expect that to show in a work such as Warfield’s. In addition, note that the phrase “habit” appears nowhere in the Westminster Confession or Catechisms and that “infuse” (in its various forms) appears in the Westminster Confession a single time in 11.1, cited by Prof. Fesko, in which it is said that “Those whom God effectually calleth, he also freely justifieth: not by infusing righteousness into them, but by pardoning their sins” (emphasis mine). Returning to Prof. Fesko’s remarks, he ends the paragraph in question by saying this:
In justification the infused habit of faith is passive but in sanctification it is active. What Aquinas conflates Owen and the Westminster divines distinguish. Even though they distinguish justification and sanctification, they nevertheless maintain they are inseparably joined together.
While we are on the topic of conflation, note carefully Prof. Fesko’s words (especially his first sentence) and how they compare to those of the passages he cites and his earlier statements. Larger Catechism Question 77, the only Westminster statement to positively employ the language of infusion, says that in sanctification the Spirit infuses grace, not a “habit of faith.” Sanctification follows justification, so the grace that the Spirit is said to infuse then is distinct from the faith which factors in justification.
This is proved as well by Westminster Confession 11.2, quoted previously by Fesko, which says that “Faith . . . is the alone instrument of justification; yet is it not alone in the person justified, but is ever accompanied with all other saving graces.” In other words, faith justifies, and the various “other saving graces” that accompany it come into view in sanctification with its operation of the Spirit in which he “infuses grace” per Larger Catechism Q. 77. It is not an accurate summary to say that there is an infused habit of faith that is first passive in justification but then subsequently active in sanctification, when the confessions appealed to actually distinguish between the saving grace of justifying faith (Q. 72) and the other saving graces that accompany it (Q. 73; Conf. 11.2). (The question of when, and to what extent, faith is best described as passive or active is one we will not engage here.)
And as for the fact that the Westminster divines and Owen distinguish what Aquinas conflates, it may be asked how exactly that proves anything for Fesko’s case. That the respective parties have different perspectives upon sanctification and justification has nothing to do with the question of whether the former got a concept of infused habits from the latter.
Fesko also appeals to the Canons of Dort’s explicit mention of faith as being infused. Yet here too the question arises as to whether the similarity in terms between Aquinas and Protestants arises because the latter are borrowing from the former: perhaps Dort’s divines borrowed the concept of infused faith unknowingly or got it from other sources? That is an academic question which we have neither the space nor the inclination to answer here, but whether or not Fesko’s basic assertion is correct, he fails to make the case in this article. Such evidence as he provides is circumstantial at best and can be sufficiently explained by other theories absent further evidence. Mere coincidence or reception from other sources is at least as probable on the thin evidence (if such it is) that Fesko gives here. When he states that Owen, Dort, and Westminster “plied Aquinas’s insights” he is therefore coming to a conclusion that is not warranted and which other material in his sources makes seem highly doubtful. Consider again Owen’s mention of Aquinas above, as well as the fact that the Synod of Dort also rebuked the Franeker professor Maccovius for his use of the Romanist scholastics Suarez and Bellarmine.[5]
Fesko asserts two benefits of “the concept of an infused habit.” First, “infused habits help us distinguish between natural human ability from [sic] those abilities given by the grace of God in salvation.” But one can do such a thing without the concept of infused habits, for example by saying that natural morality is a result of God’s common grace, whereas sanctification comes from his saving grace. It is not clear that the language of infused habits does anything that cannot be done just as well otherwise. When Fesko states that “acknowledging that a capacity for holiness and righteousness is infused is another way of saying that it is the gift of God” we can reply: ‘why not just say that a capacity for righteousness is the gift of God, then, and spare your readers the scholastic terminology and the confusion it is likely to engender?’
Second, Fesko claims that “the infused habit of faith establishes a conceptual context for a theology of virtue,” to which the same objections apply. One can simply say that true virtue pleasing to God is his own gift and arises because of our new nature in Christ and the operations of the Spirit in us as we work out our salvation.
In conclusion, consider the sheer absurdity of Fesko’s position. He belittles his living brethren for the sake of trying to lay claim to the heritage of a dead Romanist who would regard him as a heretic who should be put to death. In this we see a fine example of how theologians have a bad tendency to get carried away in their speculations and researches, and how they tend to lose sight of the practical matters entailed in serving Christ. Be very careful whom you read, dear reader, for “bad company ruins good morals” (1 Cor. 15:33) and “much study is a weariness of the flesh” (Ecc. 12:12). You do not need to tackle Aquinas’s many words (the Summa Theologica in PDF is over 9,400 pages) or his excruciating prose, nor sift through his various erroneous doctrines in order to be a faithful servant of Christ, whose yoke is by contrast light and easy (Matt. 11:28-30), and whose word is sufficient for all you need in order to know him and to abound in virtue (Ps. 19; 119; 2 Tim. 3:16-17; 2 Pet. 1:5-8).
Tom Hervey is a member of Woodruff Road Presbyterian Church (PCA) in Simpsonville, S.C.

[1] Summa Theologica, IIaIIae Q.11, Art. 3
[2]Summa Theologica, IIIa, Q. 25, Art. 3 and 4
[3] “Infusion” appears 25 times, but often while discussing the position of Rome.
[4] The Westminster Assembly and Its Work by B.B. Warfield, p. 206, quoting the position of George Gillespie expressed in one of his writings.
[5]H. Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics, Vol. I, p. 181
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