Cocceius

Cocceius (Koch), Johannes, an eminent Dutch theologian; b. at Bremen, July 30, 1603; appointed professor there, 1629; at Franeker, 1636; at Leyden, where he d. Nov. 4, 1669. Fie was the first to elaborate the system of Federal Theology, which became dominant in Holland, and was adopted in the Westminster Standards. (See his Summa Doetrina de Fcedere et 7'es-tamento Dei, 1648.) Cocceius “laid down the guiding exegetical principle, that every passage must be interpreted according to its context, and have only that sense to which the context leads. He drew his theology directly from the Bible, and from it alone; and thus he put himself in opposition to the scholastics and the Cartesians.

“And, since the Bible is the history of redemption, in the form of a covenant between God and man after the fall, he logically conceived of the relation between the I parties before the fall as also a covenant. But this covenant is not, like a human one, an agreement for mutual service; rather, it is one-sided. The fundamental law of every covenant of God with men is, he says, that man is receiver, God giver. Man was qualified by his creation to receive it. He was free, rational, and holy. The first covenant was ‘of works.’ God gave man the promise of eternal felicity, on condition that man remained holy, as he was able to do. This was his work. But he fell, and accordingly was cursed. After the fall he was still bound to perfect obedience and faith: God, however, who is rich in mercy, put in place of the Covenant of Works the ‘ Covenant of Grace,’ upon precisely similar principles. God yet stands as free giver; man, as willing receiver. Cocceius shows that the fulfillment of the latter required the sending of Jesus Christ, and, in the biblical way, handles the doctrines of redemption under nine divisions —its purpose (the promised grace), its mode (gratuitous), its founder (a mediator), its means (faith), its recipients (believers), its cause (God’s good pleasure), its revelations (the Bible), the method of its application (the operation of the Holy Spirit), its ultimate object (the glory of God). The history of the second covenant falls into three divisions (economies): the ante-legal (the law under the form of conscience, the grace under which the patriarchal prot-evangel manifested itself, and the kingdom of God existed in the form of the family); the legal (the written law, grace in the form of ceremonial types and prophecy, the kingdom of God existed in the nation); and the post-legal economy (in which Christ himself appeared as the completely fulfilled personal law, and as the personal grace, as the personal word, and in which the kingdom of God exists in universal form). The effects of the Covenant of Grace are the happiness of the individual soul, the conversion of physical death from a punishment into a deliverance from the body of sin, and, lastly, the resurrection of the body. The Federal theology of Cocceius does not rest upon the doctrine of predestination, as did the teaching of the Protestant scholastics of the sixteenth century. Man, he taught, was not a machine by which the divine decree was carried out, but a person who received the divine grace into his heart, and by it was led unto perfection. (See Ebrard: Ckristliehe Dogmatik, § 257.) As was to be expected, the scholastic school attacked him, and called him a heretic. He replied that * orthodoxy a la mode ’ was the ruin of the Reformed Church, because it prided itself upon its orthodoxy, and yet was full of worldliness. Cocceius had the spiritually minded upon his side. He took the substantially pietistic ground that one should not listen to those preachers who regarded the work of teaching religion merely as a profession. Unhappily the controversy took a political turn. The aristocratic party, which had supported Arminius, supported the Cocceians; the Oranian party, his opponents. At one time, a deeper split than Arminianism had made threatened the Netherland Church, but by pacificatory measures peace was restored, and it was established by law that one out of every three ordinarii at each university should be a Cocceian.”—A. Ebrard in Schaff-Herzog: Eney. vol. i., p. 503. Cocceius, besides commentaries on nearly the whole Bible, and other works, was the author of the first complete Hebrew lexicon: Lexicon, Heb. et Chai. V. T. (Leyden, 1669).