With this love God cannot love even His elect as considered in themselves, because in that view they are guilty, polluted sinners, but they were, from all eternity, objects of it, as they stood united to Christ and partakers of His righteousness. “(2) The term implies complacency, delight and approbation. His love towards them arises merely from “the good pleasure of His own will,” without the least regard to anything ad extra or out of Himself.
Neither are even the merits of Christ Himself to be considered as any way moving or exciting this good will of God to His elect, since the gift of Christ, to be their Mediator and Redeemer, is itself an effect of this free and eternal favour borne to them by God the Father (John 3.16). Of this, no good works wrought by them are in any sense the cause. “(l) His eternal benevolence, i.e., His everlasting will, purpose and determination to deliver, bless and save His people. Love, therefore, when attributed to Him, signifies. In us it is such, but if, considered in that sense, it should be ascribed to the Deity, it would be utterly subversive of the simplicity, perfection and independency of His being. “I.-When love is predicated of God, we do not mean that He is possessed of it as a passion or affection. In discoursing on the Divine decrees, mention is frequently made of God’s love and hatred, of election and reprobation, and of the Divine purpose, foreknowledge and predestination, each of which we shall distinctly and briefly consider. “HAVING considered the attributes of God as laid down in Scripture, and so far cleared our way to the doctrine of predestination, I shall, before I enter further on the subject, explain the principal terms generally made use of when treating of it, and settle their true meaning. Zanchius continues as follows in his Chapter 1, entitled in grandiose manner “Wherein the Terms Commonly Made Use of in Treating of this Subject are Defined and Explained”:
This seems to be the proper definition of mercy as it relates to the spiritual and eternal good of those who are its objects.” “POSITION 2.-Mercy is not in the Deity, as it is in us, a passion or affection, everything of that kind being incompatible with the purity, perfection, independency and unchangeableness of His nature but when this attribute is predicated of Him, it only notes His free and eternal will or purpose of making some of the fallen race happy by delivering them from the guilt and dominion of sin, and communicating Himself to them in a way consistent with His own inviolable justice, truth and holiness. “When we call the Divine mercy infinite, we do not mean that it is, in a way of grace, extended to all men without exception (and supposing it was, even then it would be very improperly denominated infinite on that account, since the objects of it, though all men taken together, would not amount to a multitude strictly and properly infinite), but that His mercy towards His own elect, as it knew no beginning, so is it infinite in duration, and shall know neither period nor intermission. “POSITION 1.-The Deity is, throughout the Scriptures, represented as infinitely gracious and merciful (Exod. “VI.-I shall conclude this introduction with briefly considering, in the sixth and last place, THE MERCY OF GOD. In his rather pretentious sixteenth century work Absolute Predestination Stated and Defined, Zanchius included some Scripturally unjustified statements regarding the nature of God, of which the following excerpts are representative: And why not? Zanchius’ vision of God is perfectly compatible with the omniness, perfection and asexuality of the mainstream God. To this day, Zanchius is held in high esteem by many mainstream Church leaders. This absolutely flawless state was enshrined by the medieval cleric Jerome Zanchius, a strict adherent of the heavenly perfection envisioned by Aristotle and Ptolemy. CHAPTER TWO: How the removal of sexuality from God propagated into the Middle Ages and beyondĪ thousand years after the Church had formalized its dogma, her insistence upon purity had not only remained, but had crystallized into a rigid perfectionism.