The four Leiden professors offer a summary of the Bible’s teaching on the office of Christ, with corrections to misunderstandings still with us today. The Synopsis frames Christ’s mediatorial work not as three separate offices but as one office with three integrated features.
‘Not because he now falls upon bended knees before his Father in heaven.’
The Argument in Overview
The one office of Christ as Mediator has three aspects: prophetic, priestly, and royal. … The Lord Jesus Christ became our ‘sponsor’; he took upon himself the debt we owe; the payment for that debt is expressed as ‘expiation’ or ‘propitiation.’ The phrase ‘altar of the cross’ makes it clear that these terms should be seen in the context of sacrifice … The Latin theological phrase ‘pactum salutis’ [covenant of salvation] … arose from the understanding of Christ’s own offering of himself to the Father. The notion that satisfaction for sins through Christ’s death is not necessary for salvation, as the Socinians taught,1The Socinians were a 16th and 17th movement that rejected the Trinity, the divinity of Jesus, and original sin. Their intellectual descendants are the Unitarians, who believe that Jesus Christ was not God, but inspired by God in his moral teachings, and only in that way is he the saviour of mankind. Unitarianism still has a presence in parts of the United States of America, Europe, the United Kingdom, India, Australia, South Africa. is rejected … Christ will hand over all the elect together with his mediatorial sceptre to his Father.2Synopsis of a Purer Theology, Disputation 26, ‘On the Office of Christ;’ Boer and Faber eds., 291.
Which Nature Does the Mediating?
A question that has generated much confusion, answered with unusual precision:
25. … (1) that Christ is the subject and common principle of the mediatorial work, not in that he is God nor in that he is man only, but in that he is simultaneously God and man. (2) That Christ’s human nature is coming together with the Divine nature for that work, as serving the Divine, which is the higher cause … Without the protection and support of his divinity, the man Christ was not able to extend the mysteries of Divine wisdom from the bosom of the Father, nor to pay him as ransom sufficient for our sins, nor in time past to rend asunder the gates of hell. And even now he would not be able to hear in heaven the prayers of his chosen ones dwelling over all the earth.
That closing example is the practical test. A merely human Christ could not hear the simultaneous prayers of believers across the globe. The divinity isn’t decoration; it’s what makes the mediation work.
Wisdom, Righteousness, Redemption
38. Because those three functions can be discerned together only in Christ, it says that it was he whom God made to be our wisdom, justice, sanctification and redemption (1 Cor 1:30). He was made our wisdom in order to turn us by his prophetic instruction … into wise unto salvation. He was made our righteousness and sanctification, so that by the two-fold nature of his priestly office he might render satisfaction to the aggrieved Divine majesty on our behalf. He was made redemption for us so that by his kingly power he might keep us … within the boundaries of our calling, and by his protection keep us safe from all harm done by the enemy.
Notice how neatly Paul’s four terms map onto the three offices: wisdom to the Prophet, righteousness and sanctification to the Priest, redemption to the King.
The Prophet, Directly and Indirectly
39. Prophecy is the function whereby Christ establishes his people in the right doctrines of the Law and the Gospel … Sometimes he does this by himself directly, at other times indirectly, through other servants of his Word who have been endowed with gifts needed for that purpose.
On how the two modes relate, the Leiden Synopsis continues: in the immediate mode ‘the minds of men can be thoroughly enlightened without the help of the latter means [Christian preachers] … In the latter [mediate] mode, neither of these results can be effected without the help of the former [Christ acting directly through Scripture].’
The Priest, in Three Movements
42. Christ’s priesthood is the function wherein he appears before God’s presence in order to keep the Law (that he had received from him) in our name, to present himself to him as the victim [sacrificial offering] of reconciliation for our sins, and by his intercession, with him to obtain for us his constant help and the gift of the Holy Spirit, and to apply them to us effectively (Heb 10:7ff).
Three movements, each foreshadowed by the Levitical high priest, who watched over the Law in the ark, then stood before God for the people with sacrifice and prayers.
The writer of the book of Hebrews draws down on the king and priest Melchizedek, who blessed Abraham (Gen 14:17-20). Melchizedek prefigured the Levitical high priest, but differently, showing three advantages over the Levitical order: eternal duration, since Christ is a Priest ‘without father and mother, and without beginning and end’; the double office of King and Priest; and pre-eminence, since Levi ‘while he was yet in the loins of Abraham, gave tithes to Melchizedek’ (Heb 7:3, 9).
Five Reasons It Can’t Be Repeated
Hebrews distinguishes Christ’s sacrifice from the Levitical ones on five counts: the Person offering is a Priest in the order of Melchizedek who permits no successor; this Priest is blameless and set apart from sinners; the offering of himself was made once and so never repeated; the victim offered is united in Person to the Word that offers it; and its value is everlasting.
That five-part distinction, the Synopsis argues, ‘completely overturns’ the claim that a bloodless sacrifice of the mass can also be atoning. The positions contradict each other.
Not on Bended Knee
On intercession, one clarification worth having:
49. The Son of God brings this intercession about by a voluntarily administered grace … not because he now, after having put off his state of self-renunciation, falls upon bended knees before his Father in heaven, but because like a Priest …
The interceding Christ is not a suppliant. That posture belonged to the humiliation, which is over.
The King, Now and Then
52. But as Christ’s church has a twofold state, the one of grace in this age and the other of glory in the future, we should distinguish the current government of the church from the one that is to come. For in this life Christ rules his church through … faithful pastors, and he protects it by the administration of devout political magistrates. In the life that is to come, he will rule it directly, without the external supports of that kind.
And the end of it:
53. Hence it says that when Christ will hand over to God all the elect … he will also hand over to him his mediatorial (or dispensational) scepter so that he may forever conduct his purely Divine reign over his elect with the same glory and majesty that he shared with the Father from eternity (1 Cor 15:24, 26).
Pastors and magistrates are scaffolding. When the building is finished the scaffolding comes down — and so does the mediatorial sceptre.
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- 1The Socinians were a 16th and 17th movement that rejected the Trinity, the divinity of Jesus, and original sin. Their intellectual descendants are the Unitarians, who believe that Jesus Christ was not God, but inspired by God in his moral teachings, and only in that way is he the saviour of mankind. Unitarianism still has a presence in parts of the United States of America, Europe, the United Kingdom, India, Australia, South Africa. ↩︎
- 2Synopsis of a Purer Theology, Disputation 26, ‘On the Office of Christ;’ Boer and Faber eds., 291. ↩︎