Scripture guides us. God reigns sovereignly. Man cannot
escape his sin unless God loves him and elects him to salvation. God begins
this by giving him new life so that he believes in God and receives salvation.
We call this new life regeneration.
Much like the other concepts in this discussion, Arminians
do not object to the fact of regeneration, but to the nature of it. They
believe that God gives believers new life and creates in them a new heart, but
they insist that God only does this after men take the first step of
faith. God responds to man’s initiative and man is born again by his faith.
Why does this distinction matter? What difference does it
make whether man has faith or God gives him faith? It matters because scripture
teaches that God graciously gives salvation and not for, by, or through
anything that originates in us. Paul said, “For by grace you have been saved by
faith” (Ephesians 2.8).
For all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God, being justified as a gift by his grace.
The free gift is not like the transgression.
The wages of sin is death, but the free gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus.[1]
But if faith originates in us, then we exchange our faith
for salvation and salvation then becomes a transaction and not a gift.
We give God our faith and he gives us salvation. We trade our faith for
salvation, but a trade is not a gift.
Arminian Faith
We have seen that the Arminian does not believe that man is
dead in his sins, nor is he desperately wicked, a slave to sin, nor are his
thoughts only evil continually. The natural man has either a conscience that
leads him to God that convicts him of sin and enlightens him with spiritual
truth, or the image of God which performs much the same function. Every man has
some measure of spiritual grace, though he does not have the Holy Spirit. He
has been made alive to such an extent that he can believe in Christ
should he choose to, yet he remains dead to God and condemned because he has not
yet believed in Christ. Men who believe in Christ somehow possess some
greater measure than unbelieving men either of God’s grace by virtue of God’s
gracious choice, or of self-righteousness which leads them to trust in Jesus.
If Arminian theology seems to read like a mass of
aggravating self-contradictions, it should, because it does. Read again
Wesley’s beliefs on the “natural” man:
Salvation begins with what is usually termed preventing grace; including the first wish to please God, the first dawn of light concerning his will, and the first slight transient conviction of having sinned against him. All these imply some tendency toward life; some degree of salvation; the beginning of a deliverance from a blind, unfeeling heart…No man living is entirely destitute of natural conscience.[2]
For the Arminian,
there is no natural man. Every man has “some tendency toward life, some degree
of salvation.” Every man has had his blind eyes opened, or his dead heart made
somewhat alive. Now read Wesley’s thoughts on regeneration and remember, in
both cases, Wesley speaks of the person dead in his sins:
While a man is in a mere natural state, before he is born of God, he has, in a spiritual sense, eyes and see not; a thick impenetrable veil lies upon them; he has ears, but hears not; he is utterly deaf to what he is most of all concerned to hear. His other spiritual senses are all locked up: he is in the same condition as if he had them not. Hence he has no knowledge of God; no intercourse with him; he is not at all acquainted with him. He has no true knowledge of the things of God, either of spiritual or eternal things; therefore, though he is a living man, he is a dead Christian.[3]
In other places, Wesley seems to equate his notion of
preventing grace with regeneration. He says that preventing grace produces “the
desires after God…that light wherewith the Son of God ‘enlighteneth every one
that cometh into the world.’”[4] Wesley desperately tries to fuse
free will with scripture. He wants man to be ultimately responsible for his
damnation, relieving God of the troublesome responsibility, yet he also needs
to uphold the witness of the Bible. Man is a dead sinner, a slave to sin,
hostile to God and unable to please him. Either man is dead or alive, a slave
to sin or free from it, able to please God or not. If we are dead in our sins,
we cannot have faith. If we are alive, we cannot have raised ourselves from the
dead. Faith must originate from God.
Finney reasons from the back end when he says that since God
requires men to be born again before they see the kingdom of heaven, then
sinners must be able to regenerate themselves. He says, “Sinners are required
to make to themselves a new heart, which they could not do, if they were not
active in this change.”[5] He
continues by saying that it is absurd for God to require men to be born again
if only God can create this new birth.[6]
Calvinists distinguish between regeneration and conversion, while Finney makes
no distinction. God creates life in the sinner in regeneration and consequently
the sinner then turns to God in conversion. Finney says they are the same
thing. He contends, “The sinner has all the faculties and natural attributes
requisite to render perfect obedience to God. All he needs is to be induced to
use these powers and attributes as he ought.”[7] While
the new birth seems to indicate a complete change of state, from death to life,
or from slavery to freedom (Romans 6.6-7), for Finney the new birth is merely a
change of moral state. The sinner decides to be righteous because God “induces”
him. No change is necessary, only the proper motivation. He births himself into
this new life.
Wiley does not deviate much from this. Gospel repentance
requires no great change of the heart, but instead merely influence. He describes
“awakening” as the means by which the Holy Spirit draws men to God. He
describes it as “an immediate or direct influence upon the hearts of men.”[8]
Consider the verses he uses to support this:
The king’s heart is in the hand of the Lord: as the rivers of water; he turneth it withersoever he will.
Open thou mine eyes, that I may behold wondrous things out of thy law.
Create in me a clean heart, O God; and renew a right spirit within me.
Then opened he their understanding, that they might understand the scriptures.
Whose heart the Lord opened, that she attended unto the things that were spoken of Paul.[9]
While Wiley, Wesley, and others believe that these scriptures
speak of men who have only been influenced, who still remain able to resist
Christ’s call and deny him, none of these scriptures teach this. Every one of
these passages describe men who, having their eyes opened or their hearts
cleansed, all turn to Christ. Proverbs 21.1 tells us that God completely rules
over the heart of a king—God turns his heart wherever he wishes. The psalmist
says that God opens his eyes to understand scripture. God creates—not enables,
not strengthens, not helps—a clean heart. Scripture describes a complete change
of heart and mind, not a mere enabling of a sinner or a minimal “direct
influence.” Scripture must describe our enlightenment with this completeness,
for it describes our natural state with a corresponding completeness. Every
sinner is unable to please God, unwilling to seek him, a slave to sin, and dead
in it. Only a complete, absolute rebirth can change this, and the sinner cannot
do this himself.
Norman Geisler strongly affirms this pre-regeneration faith.
As I have discussed before, he contends that man can believe because man
possesses some remnant of God’s image within him.[10]
Geisler uses two types of verses to support his belief. The first type, like
Ephesians 2.8-9, tell us that man is saved by faith. While he acknowledges that
spiritual death is separation from God, he does not acknowledge that this
spiritual death has any actual effect on our ability to respond to God.[11]
Scripture everywhere tells us that God saves us through our faith in Christ,
but scripture also teaches us that God gives this faith, a fact that Geisler
conveniently ignores. Geisler assumes that since scripture teaches salvation by
faith, man is free and not enslaved to sin, and God does not elect unilaterally
independently of our will, that faith must be our choice. The second type of
scripture he uses to support this view describe man’s rebellion against God (2
Peter 3.5; Romans 1.18, 19).[12] Man
is free to choose God because man is free to deny God. The two do not coincide
however. Man is “free” to deny God because that is the only spiritual choice he
can make, but we cannot conclude that man is free to receive God because he
“freely” rebels against God. He can do nothing but rebel against God unless God
creates a new heart within him. Nowhere does scripture teach that any man after
having his eyes opened and his heart quickened, consequently denies Christ by
his free will.[13]
Arminians believe that after a man believes in Christ and
repents, then God makes him a new creation and gives him life (John 6.35, 63; 2
Corinthians 5.17; Colossians 2.11, 12). They differ in the sequence of events,
but the sequence is everything. How can a man trust in Christ before God works
in his heart? Paul tells us that faith is a fruit of the Spirit (Galatians
5.22), but if we have faith before we are regenerated, do we then have the Holy
Spirit previous to regeneration?
The Gift of Faith
Jeremiah describes the new birth, not as a response to our
faith, but as God placing his law within us and writing it on our hearts (Jeremiah
31.33). Ezekiel says that God will put a “new spirit” in us and remove our
“heart of stone” and replace it with a “heart of flesh” (Ezekiel 11.19; 36.26).
If we are dead in our sins, then God must make us alive before we
believe, and not after.
I will continue to repeat this again and again and again
because it is essential to our understanding of the Gospel, to our witness, to
our prayer, and to every part of our effort to minister to the lost. We do not
beg the sinner to convert himself—we beg the Holy Spirit to convert him. The
sinner has no power. He is dead, enslaved, rebellious, and hostile to God. He
cannot be otherwise without the work of the Holy Spirit. To those that say that
our efforts do not matter because Calvinism teaches that God has already
decided who will be saved, I say we do not preach the Gospel because our
efforts matter. Why does our strength need to matter? We did not help God
create the world, we did not help him create us, and we will not help him
create faith in the lost. God has no need of us. We do not preach the Gospel
because we understand God’s ways. We do not obey God because we understand him.
We obey because he has commanded it.
God gives faith. He creates a new heart within us and we
respond to his command by placing our trust in Christ. We are born again by his
will and not our own. He grants repentance to those he loves.
“This is the covenant which I will make with the house of Israel after those days,” declares the Lord, “I will put My law within them and on their heart I will write it; and I will be their God, and they shall be My people. They will not teach again, each man his neighbor and each man his brother, saying, ‘Know the Lord,’ for they will all know Me, from the least of them to the greatest of them,” declares the Lord, “for I will forgive their iniquity, and their sin I will remember no more.”
And I will give them one heart, and put a new spirit within them. And I will take the heart of stone out of their flesh and give them a heart of flesh, that they may walk in My statutes and keep My ordinances and do them. Then they will be My people, and I shall be their God.
But as many as received Him, to them He gave the right to become children of God, even to those who believe in His name, who were born, not of blood nor of the will of the flesh nor of the will of man, but of God.
No one can come to Me unless the Father who sent Me draws him... It is the Spirit who gives life; the flesh profits nothing… No one can come to Me unless it has been granted him from the Father.
When they heard this, they quieted down and glorified God, saying, “Well then, God has granted to the Gentiles also the repentance that leads to life.
For to you it has been granted for Christ’s sake, not only to believe in him, but also to suffer for his sake.[14]
Everywhere scripture teaches that if someone has any
knowledge of God, any wisdom, any guidance or inspiration that leads him to
God, that revelation must come from God. God revealed his command and promise
to Noah through the rainbow (Genesis 9.13), commanding him to fill the earth
just as he commanded Adam and promising never again to flood the earth. He
appeared to Abraham and promised to make him a great nation (Genesis 12.1-3,
7). God revealed himself to Moses in the burning bush (Exodus 3). He appeared
as a cloud and a pillar of fire to the Israelites (Exodus 13.21), and gave them
the Ten Commandments (Exodus 20). He appeared to Isaiah (Isaiah 6), Jeremiah
(Jeremiah 1), and Ezekiel (Ezekiel 1), to make himself known to them and to
command them. None of these could have known, believed in, or obeyed God apart
from revelation. Christ came to reveal God to us (John 14.9-11). God
gave us his word (2 Timothy 3.16-17; Hebrews 4.12) and we cannot understand his
word without the Spirit.
I will ask the Father, and He will give you another Helper, that He may be with you forever; that is the Spirit of truth, whom the world cannot receive, because it does not see Him or know Him, but you know Him because He abides with you and will be in you.
But the Helper, the Holy Spirit, whom the Father will send in My name, He will teach you all things.
But when He, the Spirit of truth, comes, He will guide you into all the truth.
But a natural man does not accept the things of the Spirit of God, for they are foolishness to him; and he cannot understand them, because they are spiritually appraised.[15]
We do not believe without a complete change of nature. The
natural, unregenerate man understands, accepts, and believes nothing of God—nothing
of his will, nothing of his glory or love. He will not repent of his sins apart
from a new birth. Consider the reformer’s words describing our nature and our
tendency towards conceit:
If in broad daylight we look down at the ground or attend to things which are round about us, we have no trouble believing our sight is extremely sharp and keen. When, however, we look straight up at the sun, the power that served us so well on earth is dazed and dazzled by so intense a light, forcing us to admit that our ability clearly to see earthly objects is weak and feeble when it comes to gazing at the sun. This is how it is when we try to estimate our spiritual strengths. As long as we do not look beyond earth’s horizons, we are perfectly content with our own righteousness, wisdom and power. We flatter and congratulate ourselves, and are not far from thinking we are demigods! … In their search for God’s truth men do not, sadly, go beyond the limits of their nature as they should; rather, they judge God’s greatness according to their own crude understanding. They comprehend him not as he has made himself known, but according to the image which they themselves have arrogantly fashioned.[16]
[1]
Romans 3.23-24, 5.15; 6.23
[2]
Wesley, “On Working Out Our Own Salvation,” II.1, III.4.
[3]
Wesley, “The New Birth,” II.3.
[4]
Wesley, “The Scripture Way of Salvation,” I.2.
[5]
Finney, 270.
[6] Ibid.
[7] Ibid,
272.
[8]
Wiley, Christian Theology: Volume II,
page 342.
[9] Ibid.
Proverbs 21.1; Psalm 119.18; Psalm 51.10; Luke 24.45; Acts 16.14.
[10]
Geisler, Systematic Theology, 771-775.
[11]
Ibid, 771.
[12]
Ibid, 773.
[13]
While scripture gives many warnings about falling away from the faith, these
warnings do not directly state that men who receive Christ then fall away from
him because they sin too grievously. They are hypothetical warnings, not direct
statements of doctrine. I will discuss this in the final chapter on
perseverance.
[14]
Jeremiah 31.33-34; Ezekiel 11.19-20; John 1.12-13; 6.44, 63, 65; Acts 11.18;
Philippians 1.29.
[15] John
14.16-17, 26; 16.13; 1 Corinthians 2.14.
[16]
Calvin, Institutes, 2, 6.
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