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There is some helpful background information at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sophie_Scholl. If you plan on watching the movie, you might want to do so before reading this article or before reading my comments below.

The Christian character of the Scholl family is movingly demonstrated in the scene in which Sophie meets with her father and mother. The Nazi criminal investigator tries to convince Sophie of the rightness of his brave new world which has no place for God or the individual conscience. He  confidently asserts that the law of the state is the highest law, and yet he wrestles with his own conscience as he tries to act consistently with this conviction. He wants to spare Sophie but she will not cooperate by compromising her convictions. The hateful and arrogant judge who presides over the trial shows the hardening effect of godless philosophy. The inspiring courage of this young Christian lady stands in obvious contrast to the cowardice of many others.

I doubt I could memorize the WSC solely by listening to a recording of it. Yet I have found this helpful for working on the exact wording and for reviewing. The recording is about 31 minutes. I would suggest listening to it when exercising or when driving on longer trips.

I have found the following observations on wording helpful in memorizing the WSC.

The words “wherein” and “whereby” are often used in the WSC, but I have found it helpful to take note of the following usages of these two words. The word “wherein: is used in the answers to these questions:

• Q.33. What is justification?
• Q.92. What is a sacrament?
• Q.94. What is baptism?
• Q.96. What is the Lord’s supper?

The word “whereby” is used in the answers to these questions:

• Q.7. What are the decrees of God?
• Q.31. What is effectual calling?
• Q.34. What is adoption?
• Q.35. What is sanctification?
• Q.86. What is faith in Jesus Christ?
• Q.87. What is repentance unto life?

In the commentary on the ten commandments, expressions using either forms of the word “other” or forms of the word “neighbor” are used to express applications regarding one’s fellow human. Forms of the word “other” are used in the answers to the following two questions and forms of the word “neighbor”  are used everywhere else:

• Q.68. What is required in the sixth commandment?
• Q.74. What is required in the eighth commandment?

The WSC uses four different sets of three words to refer to the threefold division between what one thinks, says and does:

• The expression “thoughts, words, or works” is used in Q.61. What is forbidden in the fourth commandment?
• The expression “heart, speech, and behavior” is used in Q.71. What is required in the seventh commandment?
• The expression “thoughts, words, and actions” is used in Q.72. What is forbidden in the seventh commandment?
• The expression “thought, word and deed” is used in Q.82. Is any man able perfectly to keep the commandments of God?

The third member of the Godhead is sometimes referred to as the Holy Ghost and sometimes as the Holy Spirit or Spirit. “Holy Ghost” is used in the following:

• Q.6. How many persons are there in the Godhead?
• Q.22. How did Christ, being the Son of God, become man?
• Q.36. What are the benefits which in this life do accompany or flow from justification, adoption, and sanctification?
• Q.94. What is baptism?

“Holy Ghost” is used in naming the three members of the Godhead (Qs. 6 & 94), in explaining Jesus’ conception (Q. 22), and in the expression “joy in the Holy Ghost” (Q. 36). “Holy Spirit” or “Spirit” is used  elsewhere (Qs. 24,29,30,31,89,91).

“Another factor for which perhaps we should be grateful is that printing is so much more expensive nowadays. A couple of generations ago it was all too cheap and easy to engage in a prolonged pamphlet-warfare which might do untold harm by spreading a local or personal difference far and wide and enlisting partisan support on either side. I have a considerable collection of such polemical pamphlets, and I regard it as a great mercy that we see so little of this sort of thing today.” (page 166, Answers to Questions)

I also thought that the following statement, taken from the same paragraph, was helpful:

“It is all too easy to interpret orthodoxy as meaning ‘what I think’ and heterodoxy as meaning ‘what the other man thinks.’”

The more proximate issue is the relationship of the will to the free agent. The immaterial part of the human is an integrated, organic whole. It does not consist of a collection of isolated and encapsulated entities which function independently of each other. The intellect and the will are merely functional distinctions within the human spirit or soul. Any action of the will is an expression of the character of the free agent:

Whenever the will acts, it does so based on what the intellect has ultimately determined to be best for the free agent according to the free agent’s standards. When a free agent wills to do evil, no matter how evil the evil may be or how obviously against the real interests of the free agent, the free agent in his most ultimate judgment has judged the act to be to his greatest good. No free agent ever wills anything which he has, in his last judgment, judged as bad for himself, even though he may recognize this on other levels. Because of this, the decisions, choices and actions of a free agent are a measure of his moral character and a revelation of his moral standards. The fallen free agent always has on some level a knowledge that his evil actions are contrary to the moral standard of absolute good and thus remains responsible for his actions.

The free agent acts as a free agent whenever he spontaneously wills something based on his final understanding of the good and his own best interest. The free agent acts well as a free agent only when his final understanding of the good and his own best interest is rightly informed through faith in God’s revelation. Only then is the free agent’s understanding in conformity with absolute factual truth and absolute moral standards.

Adam and Eve were created in a state of innocence in which they looked in faith to God as their ultimate reference in determining the good and their best interest. They also were created with the ability to change their faith reference from God to self. In innocence, they had no inner inclination to do so, but did so under the influence of an external tempter. After shifting their ultimate faith reference from God to self, they saw the apparent short term advantages of what God had forbidden and judged it to be to their best interest to disregard God’s warnings and to partake of what God had forbidden in disobedience to God’s command. They continued to act as free agents, but they no longer acted well as free agents.

As a result of the change in their faith reference, Adam and Eve were no longer innocent in terms of either their legal standing or their moral condition. With a heart corrupted by making self the ultimate reference, they did not understand the true sinfulness of their sin nor the true misery of their new situation. With their new autonomous faith reference, they could not recognize that it was to their best interest to make God once again their faith reference. This moral inability resulting from their autonomous faith reference was a just penalty for their transgression.  Their descendants, who were begotten in Adam’s moral image, also had this autonomous faith reference. This was a just legal judgment upon Adam, who was the sole material source of the human race and who acted as the legal representative of the human race during his period of probation in paradise. After the fall, the human’s autonomous reference distorted all his understandings and inclined all his decisions toward disobedience to God’s revealed will. This noetic distortion and volitional inclination to sin dominated and characterized his life. In an act of mercy, God restrained the consistency of the human’s conformity to his autonomous faith reference to prevent self-destruction and to enable secular civilization.

When Adam rejected God as humanity’s faith reference, God had a right to abandon humanity as sustainer. Had God done so completely, creation would have descended into chaos and collapsed. To the degree which God did withdraw as sustainer, chaos and curse came upon creation, including sickness and physical death. This was a just judgment upon Adam’s sin. 

With an innocent heart, Adam had changed his faith reference from God to self under the influence of an external tempter. With a corrupt heart, the fallen human would need more than a righteous example, teacher and exhorter to enable him to change his faith reference back to God. He would need a strong Redeemer who paid the necessary ransom price. The only such Redeemer is Jesus Christ. When Jesus redeems an individual, He gives him a perfect legal standing before God and makes God again his dominate faith reference, yet without totally eliminating at this time the autonomous faith reference. The result is that the redeemed human lives a life that is dominated and characterized by righteousness, and yet sin still touches all that he does. He also has the potential for slipping back temporarily and partially under sin’s dominance. God through specific means of grace combined with the work of the Spirit strengthens the redeemed person’s faith and thus enables him to die more and more unto sin and to live more and more unto righteousness. Thus God in salvation progressively restores the free agent’s ability to act well as a free agent.

The soul is made perfect in holiness at death, and the total person is made perfect in holiness at the resurrection on the last day. At this point, God enables the redeemed to return to God as their faith reference with absolute consistency. The human is from this point forward in an environment free of all external tempters and temptations. Glorified humanity will then live as spontaneous free agents in a permanent condition of perfect holiness with no internal motivation or external temptation for changing the faith reference point. Though perfect in holiness, glorified humanity will engage in an everlasting progression of learning and development as they build a new civilization on the new earth. This will be the highest state of freedom and happiness because humans will spontaneously and perfectly choose to do what is right and good and in their best interest as measured by the absolutes rooted in God’s nature.

“Neither are any other redeemed by Christ, effectually called, justified, adopted, sanctified, and saved, but the elect only.”

The second of the nine declarations in this PCA position paper also uses similar language:

“The view that an individual is ‘elect’ by virtue of his membership in the visible church; and that this ‘election’ includes justification, adoption and sanctification; but that this individual could lose his ‘election’ if he forsakes the visible church, is contrary to the Westminster Standards.”

Some have criticized the use of this language as a critique of the Federal Vision because this language lists salvific benefits without specifying whether they refer to individual or corporate salvation. Yet an examination of the Westminster Assembly’s usage of this language as a critique of Amyraldianism suggests the appropriateness of using this language in a critique of the Federal Vision.

On pages 138-144 of his book The Westminster Assembly and Its Work, B.B. Warfield discusses the history behind the inclusion of this very sentence, the last sentence in Chapter III, Section VI, in the Confession of Faith. Warfield says,

“This debate, begun Wednesday morning, October 22, [1645,] and continued at least to October 31, constitutes one of the most notable debates reported in the Minutes, and certifies us that the closing sentence of the sixth section is one of the most deliberate findings of the Assembly.”

The debate reveals that there was a small group at the Assembly whose views on the extent of the atonement had been influenced by Cameron and Amyraut. The confessional statement that “neither are any other redeemed by Christ … but the elect only” was a reference to the redemption accomplished at the cross, an affirmation of the doctrine of limited atonement and a denial of the hypothetical universal atonement affirmed by the Amyraldians.

According to the original Amyraldianism, God decreed for Christ to die for everyone without exception with a universal, hypothetical atonement conditioned on faith, and God decreed for the Holy Spirit to work faith only in the hearts of the elect. This is basically an effort to combine an Arminian view of the accomplishment of the atonement through the work of Christ with a Calvinistic view of the application of the atonement through the work of the Spirit. There are a number of problems with this approach. The Arminian view of the atonement contradicts those Scriptures which teach a definite substitutionary atonement that infallibly saves all those whom God intended it to save. This view also denies that the cross pays the price to redeem the elect from unbelief and purchases for them the gift of faith, and thus cuts the direct link between the objective accomplishment of the atonement and its effectual subjective application. The Amyraldian perspective disrupts the economic unity of the Trinity with the Father first sending Christ to accomplish the atonement for all without exception and then together with the Son sending the Holy Spirit to apply that atonement only to the elect.

According to Warfield, the Amyraldian view represented at the Assembly was a modified version in which Christ died for the elect with an effectual, saving atonement and for the non-elect with a hypothetical atonement conditioned on faith. This modified view results in Christ’s dying in different senses for different people: in a definite saving atonement for the elect and in an indefinite hypothetical and conditional sense for the non-elect. Their position that Christ died in a hypothetical sense for the non-elect conditioned on faith together with their acceptance of the Calvinistic doctrine of total depravity and their teaching that the Holy Spirit regenerates and thus works faith in the hearts of only the elect has the same practical outcome as the regular Calvinistic teaching that God passes by the non-elect and has ordained them to dishonor and wrath for their sin (WCF 3.7).

The only apparent motivation for this confusing doctrinal complexity is the notion that one must have an atonement that is not only infinite in value but also in some sense decretively intended for all without exception in order to justify the free offer of the gospel. What this effort is really doing is improperly mixing the decretive and the preceptive aspects of God’s will. In His decrees, God has unconditionally foreordained for His own glory whatsoever comes to pass. In His revealed will, God offers promises which He will fulfill when specified conditions are met. When one views the atonement from the perspective of God’s decrees, one sees a definite atonement which will save everyone whom God has decreed for it to save. When one views the atonement from the perspective of God’s revealed will, one sees an atonement of infinite saving value which God freely, genuinely and sincerely offers indiscriminately through the gospel message. These two views of the atonement are complimentary and not contradictory. God sincerely desires obedience to His revealed will and is sincerely grieved by disobedience to His revealed will, including the gospel command and offer. Yet God’s greatest obligation is to the greatest good, which is His own glory, and this is what He has consistently decreed.

Again, a few Westminster Divines held to this modified Amyraldianism, and this resulted in an extended debate when the Westminster Assembly was working on the confession of faith. Warfield says the following regarding the debate on the concluding statement of Chapter III, Section VI of the Westminster Confession of Faith:

“The result of the debate was a refusal to modify the Calvinistic statement in this direction — or perhaps we should say the definitive rejection of the Amyraldian views and the adoption of language which was precisely framed to exclude them.”

So according to Warfield, the following confessional statement “was precisely framed to exclude” the modified Amyraldianism:

“Neither are any other redeemed by Christ, effectually called, justified, adopted, sanctified, and saved, but the elect only.”

If the language of this statement was appropriate for excluding the view that Christ provided for all the non-elect a hypothetical salvation conditioned on a faith which they will never exercise, then this language is also appropriate for excluding the view that Christ provided for some non-elect a corporate salvation conditioned on a perseverance which they will never exercise. The criticism that this confessional language is not relevant to any Federal Vision teaching because it does not use the appropriate qualifiers would also make this language irrelevant to modified Amyraldianism, the very doctrine which, according to Warfield, it was framed to exclude. Such criticism must be misguided because it proves too much.

In the earlier days of the Federal Vision, some proponents made statements which seemed to define the corporate salvation experienced by everyone in the visible church as the common product of an undifferentiated, homogeneous grace in which the elect persevere and the non-elect do not. This is analogous to the original Amyraldian position. In one, there is a hypothetical redemption for all without exception conditioned on faith; in the other, there is a corporate salvation for all in the visible church head for head conditioned on perseverance.

Later some Federal Vision proponents made clear that the differing outcomes (perseverance for the elect and non-perseverance for the non-elect) must indicate differences in the corporate salvation experienced by the elect and the non-elect in the visible church. This more refined view is analogous to the modified Amyraldianism discussed above. One teaches a definite atonement for the elect; the other teaches a corporate salvation with the seeds of perseverance in it for the elect in the visible church. One teaches a hypothetical atonement for the non-elect conditioned on a faith which the non-elect will never exercise; the other teaches a corporate salvation without the seeds of perseverance for the non-elect in the visible church conditioned on a perseverance which the non-elect will never exercise. In contrast to these Federal Vision and Amyraldian views, the confession teaches that “neither are any other redeemed by Christ, effectually called, justified, adopted, sanctified, and saved, but the elect only.” According to the confession, both the elect and the non-elect in the visible church may experience the outward privileges of the church and the common operations of the Spirit.

I am reminded of a paragraph I recently read in the document found here: http://www.bbmhp.org/neatby/neatby.pdf :

A friend, extremely well acquainted with Irish affairs, related that a conference was held between the Walkerites and the Kellyites to discuss terms on which a union between the two communions might be effected. The negotiations were broken off by the absolute refusal of Kelly and his friends to entertain a term of fellowship on which the other side peremptorily insisted. The article of belief to which the Kellyites declined to commit themselves was “that John Wesley is in hell.”

The report states that nine doctrines which some NPP or FV proponents may believe, are contrary to the Westminster standards. This means that those who hold these doctrines do not qualify for ordination in the PCA. This does not mean that someone who holds any of these doctrines cannot possibly be a Christian.

In his sermon “Free Will — A Slave,” Spurgeon gave the benefit of the doubt regarding their salvation to some whose preaching contained error:

Ah, when they are preaching and talking very slowly, there may be wrong doctrine; but when they come to pray, the true thing slips out, they cannot help it. If a man talks very slowly, he may speak in a fine manner; but when he comes to talk fast, the old brogue of his country, where he was born, slips out.

“The movie documentary ‘Expelled’ was excellent. I thought the key point was that modern microbiology has discovered that the biological cell is not a simple gel but an organic factory far more complex than any human invention. This new data exposes the inadequacy of the naturalistic Darwinian model for explaining the origin of species. To use the language of Thomas Kuhn, we are witnessing the early stages of a scientific paradigm shift on the level of the  Copernican revolution. As to be expected, the establishment is stubbornly clinging to its old familiar model and is desperately resisting the ‘survival of the fittest’ in the realm of scientific explanations.”

http://books.google.com/books?id=V68OAAAAIAAJ&printsec=frontcover&dq=WIlliam+Heth+Whitsitt#PPA34,M1

The book gives evidence that almost all early Anabaptists baptized by pouring or sprinkling and that immersion as a mode of baptism was not introduced to English Baptists until the year 1641.

 For a short biography of Dr. Whitsitt, go to

http://archives.sbts.edu/partner/Article_Display_Page/0,,PTID325566%7CCHID717900%7CCIID1978900,00.html