Question 39

The duty which God requireth of man—Duty, what is due, what is owed as a debt: that which we ought to do. In seeing anything to be right, we see at the same time that it is our duty to do it. Duty is that act, or word, or thought, or feeling, or wish to which a man is bound. The following is Kant’s celebrated apostrophe: “Duty! thou great, thou exalted name! Wondrous thought, that workest neither by fond insinuation, flattery, nor any threat, but merely by holding up thy naked law in the soul, and so extorting for thyself always reverence, if not always obedience,—before whom all appetites are dumb, however secretly they rebel,—whence thy original? and where find we the root of thy august descent, thus loftily disclaiming all kindred with appetite and want? To be in like manner descended from which root is the unchanging condition of that worth which mankind can alone claim for themselves.”

obedience to his revealed will. To reveal signifies to make known what has hitherto been concealed. At its root the word means to draw back a veil. The name of the last book of the New Testament, called in Greek the Apocalypse, has the same root and meaning. It contains the Revelation which God gave to Jesus Christ, that He might again discover it to John, and through John to the Church. The word is also used in a wider sense of the whole of Scripture, or of that economy of gracious manifestation and interposition of which Scripture is the written record. Hence the distinction, Nature and Revelation.

God’s will is for many purposes sufficiently revealed to us in the constitution of nature, and in the experiences of life. Prior to and apart from Scripture, there is a binding revelation of God written on every man’s conscience and heart. And hence Paul teaches that the very heathen are a law unto themselves. Hooker and Butler have made the thought familiar to us, that revelation itself, in many of its parts, is but a republication and expansion of the law of Nature. At the same time, and after the fullest recognition has been taken, and the frankest acknowledgment made of all that nature and experience can teach to man, there is still a vast field left unoccupied that only revelation can fill. Let the student consider how much nature or experience could have taught him of the transcendently important truths the first half of the Catechism has set before him: as also how much the Catechism rests on Scripture in what it has still to teach. And as Hooker and Butler have been referred to for the claim they advance for a recognition of the revealing functions of nature and experience, so may they be profitably studied for their splendid exhibition of the superior sphere and service of Revelation. (See especially the latter writer on the nature of Revelation and the necessity for it in his Analogy, Part ii. chap. i.)

“The secret things belong unto the Lord our God; but those things which are revealed belong unto us, and to our children for ever, that we may do all the words of this law” (Deut. xxix. 29).

From this and kindred scriptures divines have learned to speak of God’s will as decretive and preceptive, absolute and conditional. God’s decretive will embraces His eternal purposes. (See Answer 7.) Which will, so far as it is revealed, is to be believed and reverenced, but His preceptive will is to be received and obeyed. His preceptive will is the rule of life to us. (Answer 2.) As to how our duties enlarge and increase with the growth of revelation, see Butler, ii. 1.

Uses

1. “If I were asked in what book a clear outline of the Christian faith might be found and studied, I would at once say, ‘In the first thirty-eight Questions of the Assembly’s Shorter Catechism.’ But if I were asked for a practical guide, to lead men to Christ, and to train them to holiness, I would say, ‘Begin at the thirty-ninth Question, and be guided with those that follow onward to the end’” (Macfarlan’s Preface to Paterson).
2. “An orthodox faith and an obedient life is the whole duty of man” (Newman).
3. “The standard of right and wrong is eternal in the heavens,—unchangeably one and the same. But here on earth it is perpetually variable,—it is one in one age or nation, another in another. Every profession has its conventional morality, current nowhere else. . . . And in all these cases the temptation is to live content with the standard of a man’s own profession or society; and this is the real difference between the worldly man and the religious man. He is the worldling who lives below that standard, or no higher; he is the servant of God who lives above his age” (Frederick Robertson).

Questions

1. Point out the Question with which Question 39 is logically and doctrinally connected in the scheme of the Catechism, and characterize in Catechism language the intervening Questions.
2. Expand and illustrate Macfarlan’s position that the second part of the Catechism leads men to Christ.
3. Give illustrations of God’s decretive and preceptive will.
4. Supply scriptures in support of Christian’s contention against Talkative, The soul of religion is the practick part.