What of the Strange Language in Belgic Confession Article 14?

During our discussion at our recent Men's Fellowship, the question came up concerning what to make of the strange sounding words of Belgic Confession, article 14: But being in honor, he understood it not, neither knew his excellency, but willfully subjected himself to sin and consequently to death and the curse, giving ear to the words of the devil.

What follows is an excerpt from my forthcoming commentary on the Belgic Confession, With Heart and Mouth.

The Depths of Depravity
With all of this in mind, we can understand why this article speaks of the heights and depths. It was from this height of creation, with the possibility of an even higher existence, that Adam fell. Adam, the crown of God’s creative acts, the only creature made in God’s image and likeness, the creature to whom God gave dominion, and the one with whom God made a covenant, broke that covenant by transgressing its commandment. The Confession continues, as it describes the depths of Adam’s sin:

But being in honor, he understood it not, neither knew his excellency, but willfully subjected himself to sin and consequently to death and the curse, giving ear to the words of the devil. For the commandment of life, which he had received, he transgressed; and by sin separated himself from God, who was his true life.

The phrase, “he understood it not, neither knew his excellency,” is one that is “unique to Reformed symbolics.”²⁶ It is most likely an allusion to the first half of Psalm 49:20 (48:21 in the Latin Vulgate). The Confession says, “Truly, while being in honor” (Verum quum in honore esset), reflecting the Vulgate’s, “Man when he was in honor” (homo cum in honore esset).

On a prima facie reading, this language sounds like the medieval doctrine of the donum superadditum, which taught that Adam was created deficient and that a super-added gift of grace was given to him after his creation. As R. Scott Clark correctly states, “The medieval view makes sin an ontological or metaphysical problem rather than a moral legal one.”²⁷ Yet the Confession itself militates against this view, saying that Adam was made “good, righteous, and holy, capable in all things to will agreeably to the will of God.” Clark has pointed out that there are statements in other Reformed writings that use similarly strange language. For example, in Zacharius Ursinus’s Summa Theologiae of 1561–62, he stated in question and answer 25 that original sin is “guilt because of the fall of our first parents, ignorance and doubt concerning God and his will” (emphasis mine).²⁸ In 1626 Johannes Wollebius explained the Fall as “thoughtlessness and meddlesomeness.”²⁹

If our Confession, along with Reformed theology in general, rejects the Roman Catholic doctrine of the donum superadditum, what are we to make of this language, which seems so strange and so difficult? In the first place, as in our discussion of the context of the Confession as well as the suggestion of Saravia that it was originally a sermon of some sort, we must let this mid-sixteenth-century document speak for itself. The sermonic tone and de Brès' life on the run must be appreciated and accounted for. Second, the language of “understood it not . . . neither knew his excellency,” needs to be recognized in the context of the emerging Reformed covenant theology. The teaching that Adam was at the height of creation, yet through the trial of the commandment of life could have received an even higher life, helps us to see that what de Brès is saying is that Adam did not understand and know in the sense that he did not embrace what was true of himself to enable him to obey the command and reject Satan’s temptation.³⁰ John of Damascus alluded to the verse from the Psalter in question (see his previous quote) and applied it to the concept of the promise and threat held out to Adam in the probationary command: if Adam were obedient “he should share eternal blessedness and live to all eternity,” but if Adam were disobedient, “Comparing himself in ignorance of his true dignity to the senseless beasts, and shaking off his Creator’s yoke, and neglecting His divine injunction, he will be liable to death and corruption.”

The fact that Adam was not deficient in knowledge and in need of Rome’s donum is confirmed by the fact that the very next clauses in the Confession speak of his active rejection of what God said for what the Devil said: he “knowingly” (sciens) and “willingly” (volens) subjected himself to sin by “giving ear to the words of the devil.”

Because of this willful transgression, Adam suffered the consequences of God’s curse: “You may surely eat of every tree of the garden, but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat of it you shall surely die” (Genesis 2:16–17). Therefore he “separated himself from God, who was his true life” by transgressing the commandment of life.

²⁶. R. Scott Clark, “Article 14—Of the Creation and Fall.” Christian Observer 173:22 (November 17, 1995): 25.
²⁷. Ibid., 25; cf. Muller, Dictionary, 96–97.
²⁸. Lyle D. Bierma with Charles D. Gunnoe, Jr., Karin Maag, and Paul W. Fields, An Introduction to the Heidelberg Catechism, Texts and Studies in Reformation and Post-Reformation Thought, ed. Richard A. Muller (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Baker, 2005), 166.
²⁹. Wollebius, Compendium Theologiae Christianae, 67.
³⁰. This is also the interpretation given by De Jong, The Church’s Witness to the World, 258.