Semantic Shift and the Decline of Orthodoxy: Part Two – Evangelical and Catholic: Part One of Part Two – Evangelical

In the outline of this series at the end of Part One, I had stated that in the second entry we would look at how shifts in the meaning of “evangelical” and “Catholic” have indicated a move away from orthodoxy. In the writing of this second entry it has become apparent that this will require more than one essay. This, therefore, is Part One of Part Two, in which we will look at “evangelical.” Part Two of Part Two will focus on “Catholic.” There will, of course, be overlap, because both semantic shifts point to the same movement away from orthodoxy in evangelical Protestantism.

In the sixteenth century the Protestant Reformers referred to themselves, their teachings, and their followers as “evangelical”. For this reason, in continental Europe the term evangelical is still largely synonymous with “Protestant.” Before looking at how this word has developed different connotations in the English-speaking world and especially North America, we should consider why the Reformers adopted this term in the first place.

Evangelical is a word formed from the Greek word that is usually translated “Gospel” in the New Testament and which literally means “good news.” The Gospel is the kerygma of the Christian faith - the message of good news that Jesus Christ told His disciples to proclaim to the whole world. St. Paul summarized the content of that message in the fifteenth chapter of his first epistle to the Corinthians – that Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures, was buried, and rose again the third day according to the Scriptures and the testimony of a long list of eyewitnesses culminating in his own. Stated in its fullest, it includes the entire revealed narrative concerning Jesus Christ from His Incarnation to His Ascension. This is why the books of the New Testament that provide such a narrative are, accordingly, called Gospels.

What, therefore, did the Protestant Reformers mean by calling themselves “evangelical”?

They did not mean to say that they had rediscovered the Gospel after it had been lost. The death and resurrection of Jesus Christ, and indeed His Incarnation and Ascension, are the very heart of the ecumenical or Catholic Creeds that the Church in both its Greek and Latin divisions, had been affirming since the early centuries of Christianity. In both the baptismal (Apostles’) and Eucharistic (Nicene-Constantinopolitan) Creeds these are the found in the second and longest, of the three paragraphs that make up the Creedal confession.

The reason the earliest Reformers, the Magisterial Reformers – Dr. Martin Luther, John Calvin, Thomas Cranmer, et. al., - began referring to their teachings as evangelical was because of their emphasis on the Pauline explanation of why the Gospel is just that, “Good News”, for the whole world. In this, they did not see themselves as recovering something that had been long buried beneath the accumulation of centuries of tradition. They saw their understanding of the Gospel as being consistent with rather than opposed to the traditional doctrine of the Catholic Church. They saw their opposition as being the papacy – the patriarch of Rome who had usurped jurisdiction far beyond the legitimate confines of his own ecclesiastical province in clear violations of the canons of the early Councils – and his followers. They called the papal doctrines that they opposed “Roman” rather than “Catholic”, insisting that they were fairly recent inventions of the papacy rather than part of the faith that was “quod ubique, quod semper, et quod ab omnibus creditum est” (“that which has been believed everywhere, always and by all”) and therefore “Catholic” as defined by St. Vincent of Lerins.

So what is the Pauline explanation of why the Gospel is “Good News”?

The answer to this is spelled out for us by St. Paul in his epistle to the Romans. In this epistle, he declares that the Gospel is “the power of God unto salvation to every one that believeth; to the Jew first, and also to the Greek” because “therein is the righteousness of God revealed from faith to faith: as it is written, the just shall live by faith” (1:16-17). He then spends the next three and a half chapters explaining what this means, which explanation culminates in another summary statement of the Gospel, that Christ “was delivered for our offences, and was raised again for our justification.” (4:25).

St. Paul begins his explanation with an indictment of the nations of the world for turning away from God to idols, which resulted in their being given over to a depraved mind and wicked practices. He rests this indictment upon God’s having given a sufficient revelation of Himself and His character, including His wrath against wicked and unrighteous behaviour, in His creation as to render all men without an excuse (1:18-32). He then shows that national Israel derives no special advantage in this regard from her having received God’s written Law because unless she obeys the Law it will only condemn her (chapter 2). The “day of wrath and revelation of the righteous judgment of God” is coming, he warns, and on that day He will “render to every man according to His deeds”, whether good or bad, regardless of whether they be Jew or Gentile and a hypothetical Gentile who lacks the written Law but nevertheless does what is right according to it, will be better off than a Jew, who boasts of the Law, but does not obey it. However, this hypothetical Gentile does not exist, because neither Jews nor Gentiles maintain the righteousness that God requires of man in His Law. With a string of quotations from the Old Testament, St. Paul draws his indictment of the entire world, Jew and Gentile, alike to a close by stating plainly that all have sinned, there is none righteous, that the whole world is guilty before God, and that therefore “by the deeds of the law there shall no flesh be justified in his sight.” No one will be pronounced righteous by God, on account of his having done what is right.

While so far this sounds more like bad – even terrible - news than good, St. Paul then immediately declares that “now”, that is, in the Gospel, “the righteousness of God without the law is manifested, being witnessed by the law and prophets.” The ‘righteousness of God” so manifested, however, is not the righteousness of God’s wrath against “all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men”, however, but the righteousness by which God counts as righteous all those who believe in Jesus Christ. This is the significance of the Gospel – Christ’s death is both a redemption (a price paid to free someone from bondage, in this case bondage to sin and death) and a propitiation (an offering which satisfies the offended justice of God against sinners) and therefore the grounds upon which God can so credit sinners who believe in Jesus with righteousness without compromising His own justice. (3:22-28).

In his next chapter St. Paul explains justification further by considering the example of Abraham. In the fifteenth chapter of Genesis, God comes to Abram – he would not become Abraham until two chapters later when circumcision was established as the sign of the covenant - in a vision and tells him “Fear not, Abram: I am thy shield, and thy exceeding great reward.” This is in reference to Abram’s having just turned down the reward offered him by Bera, king of Sodom, for recovering all that had been taken by Chederlaomer of Elam and his confederates when the latter defeated the kings of the Plain of Jordan in the Battle of Siddim. Abram’s response was to ask God what He would give him, hinting heavily as to what he wanted it to be by twice mentioning that he was without child and that his servant, Eliezer of Damascus was his steward and heir. God makes him the promise he is looking for and tells him that “he that shall come forth out of thine own bowels” shall be his heir and that his seed shall be as the stars of heaven in number. Moses then says of Abram that “he believed in the LORD; and he counted it to him for righteousness.”

St. Paul draws two important conclusions from this. He uses the fact that this took place prior to Abraham’s circumcision to make the point that just as Jew and Gentile are alike sinners, so they are justified before God in the same way, by faith, and that Abraham is the father of all who follow him in being justified by faith, whether circumcised Jews or uncircumcised Gentiles. Before going into this, however, he makes it clear that works are no part of justification in the eyes of God. If Abraham was justified by works, he says, “he hath whereof to glory, but not before God”. That God credited Abraham’s faith to him as righteousness was an act of grace on God’s part – grace meaning favour that is freely bestowed upon its recipients. The justification of sinners in the eyes of God is always an act of grace – and therefore it can never be by works for “to him that worketh is the reward not reckoned of grace, but of debt.”

The Pauline doctrine of justification by faith without works became one of the five famous Solas in which the Reformers summed up their evangelical doctrine. Specifically, it became Sola Fide – by faith alone. In his Lectures on the Psalms of Ascent Dr. Luther declared of this doctrine: “quia isto articulo stante stat Ecclesia, ruente ruit Ecclesia” - “because if that article stands, the Church stands, if it collapses, so collapses the Church.” It accordingly was made prominent in the confessions of all the Churches of the Magisterial Reformation – Article XI of the Anglican Church’s Thirty-Nine Articles of Religion, Article IV of the Lutheran Augsburg Confession and Article XXIII of the Reformed Belgic Confession. Against this doctrine, the Romanists asserted a) that it violated Catholic consensus, b) that it added a word “alone” which is never used by St. Paul to qualify “faith” in his writings on justification, and c) that the qualification of justifying faith by “alone” is in fact denied by St. James in the twenty-fourth verse of the second chapter of his epistle.

I will defer discussion of the first of these objections to Part Two of Part Two for while it pertains to a significant difference between the sixteenth century evangelicalism of the Magisterial Reformation and subsequent evangelicalisms, that difference has to do with their understanding of the Catholic tradition, namely that whereas the Reformers denied that any such break with Catholic consensus had taken place, the later evangelicals affirmed it. The second objection is entirely specious as the “alone” in “faith alone” means “and not by works” which is stated repeatedly and in much stronger language than this by St. Paul in Romans: 3:28; 4:4-8 (note the especially strong wording of verses 5 “to him that worketh not” and 8 “without works”); 9:30-32; and 10:4-10. Similar statements can be found throughout the entire corpus of Pauline literature. As for the third objection, it is quite evident that the Jacobean use of the terms “justification”, “faith” and “works” cannot be the same as the Pauline use of these same terms, for if the two Apostles were using all of these words with the same meaning, they directly contradicted each other. It is entirely defensible to maintain that all three words have different meanings in St. James than they do in St. Paul. It is certain, however, at least for anyone who believes in the verbal, plenary, inspiration of the entire New Testament, which all orthodox Christians do, that St. James means something different by the word “justification” than St. Paul and that the justification that he writes about is not justification before God. St. Paul himself tells us that in the second verse of the fourth chapter of Romans. (1)

It was because of their insistence on the primacy of the doctrine of justification by faith and not works that the sixteenth century Reformers called themselves “evangelical.” For it meant that the Gospel was just that – the message of the Good News of a salvation already accomplished and completed to be proclaimed to the world in the hearing and believing of which the salvation so proclaimed is personally appropriated by the believer and not a set of instructions as to how people are to save themselves.

Is it not evident that what is called “evangelical” today is radically different from this?

Consider the average “evangelical” formulation of the Gospel today. There are many variations, of course, but they all tend to follow this three part pattern. The first part is to present people with the Scriptural truth that all of us are sinners and cannot achieve the righteousness which God requires of us through our own works. The second part is to present the Gospel message itself – that God has given us His Only-Begotten Son to be our Saviour, Who died for our sins on the cross and rose again from the dead. So far this is in accordance with Scripture, Catholic orthodoxy, and the evangelical doctrines of the Reformers. The first part is what the Reformers called the message of the Law, the second part the message of the Gospel. The third part of the contemporary evangelical formulation, however, is to present the step – or steps, this detail is where all the variation comes in – that the individual must take to personally appropriate the offered salvation.

The wide variety of ways in which this step is presented is itself a huge problem because it generates confusion. Expressions such as “invite Jesus into your heart”, “accept Jesus Christ as your Saviour”, “make a commitment to Christ”, etc. are manifestly NOT different ways of saying the same thing and if one attempts to argue otherwise he is likely to end up proving merely that none of them mean anything at all. Moreover, to make these things into steps that one must take to appropriate Christ’s salvation AFTER one has heard and believed the Gospel is to teach salvation by works. As Orthodox Presbyterian Bible scholar Dr. Edward F. Hills put it:

And this would imply that we are saved not by believing but by a receiving which is different from believing, by a "yielding" to Christ perhaps, or a "surrendering" to Him, or a "turning over of our lives" to Him. But all this is salvation by works and contrary to the Bible. For the Scriptures plainly teach that to receive Christ as Saviour is to believe on Him. (The King James Version Defended, 4th edition, 1984, p. 184, bold indicating italics in original)

Sometimes, however, the step is presented as to “believe in Jesus Christ” or to “trust Jesus Christ” which expressions do mean the same thing. As the late Missouri Lutheran pastor John M. Drickamer put it:

What is faith? Faith is belief and faith is trust. Faith is believing the facts of the Gospel: God the Son, died for my sin and rose again from the dead; for His sake God has forgiven all my sins, so that I will not be damned to hell but welcomed into heaven forever. Faith is trusting God that this forgiveness is real because of Christ. There is no difference between faith as belief and faith as trust. Trusting a person to drive safely is the same as believing that he is a safe driver. (What is the Gospel? It is Finished, 1991, p. 2)

It is, of course, true to say that faith – believing the Gospel, trusting Jesus Christ – is how we appropriate the salvation God freely gives to ourselves. This is the role assigned to faith in God’s order of salvation. As the Right Reverend Dr. Christopher Wordsworth, nineteenth century Bishop of Lincoln, helpfully explained, St. Paul represents our faith neither as the principal cause, meritorious cause, efficient cause nor instrumental cause in God’s hand of our justification, for these are, respectively, God’s mercy, Christ’s death, the gracious operation of God the Holy Ghost, and the Holy Sacraments and Ministry of the Word, but rather:

He represents Faith as the instrument on our side, by which we rely on God’s word, and appeal to Him for mercy, and receive a grant of pardon, and a title to the Evangelical promises from God. (The New Testament of Our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ in the Original Greek: With Notes by Christopher Wordsworth D.D., Part III – St. Paul’s Epistles, 1859, p. 200)

To present the appropriation of salvation by faith as a step to be taken after one has heard the Gospel and been persuaded of its truth is a distortion, however. Faith is precisely the condition of the heart that ensues from being persuaded of the truth of the Gospel and not a further step, an act of the will, to be taken in response to said persuasion. The Gospel, properly presented, as the sixteenth century Evangelical Reformers understood, directs the repentant sinner’s focus away from himself and makes it to rest in faith upon Jesus Christ, the Only-Begotten Son of God, crucified for us and risen again. By presenting faith as a step to be taken by an act of the will after one has been persuaded of the truth of the Gospel, contemporary Evangelical Gospel formulae redirect that focus onto ourselves.

In the English-speaking world, the term “evangelical” has come to refer to the subcategory of Protestants who present the Gospel in this way. It has taken on this meaning through a series of historical steps. The first of these took place in the seventeenth century when the Dortian Calvinists who did not separate from the Church of England after the Restoration began to use the label “evangelical” for their own party within the Church. Thus “evangelical” became, for a time, synonymous with “Calvinist”, which was a more limited usage than in the sixteenth century when it included all branches of Magisterial Protestantism. In the eighteenth century, however, there was a further shift in the meaning of the term when it came to be associated with the revival movement represented by both George Whitefield (Calvinist) and John Wesley (Arminian). Since Wesley differed from Whitefield on precisely the doctrines by which the seventeenth century Anglican evangelicals had designated their party, this demonstrates that in the eighteenth century the label evangelical had come to distinguish its referents more by a common experience than by a common doctrine. This became even more obvious in the early nineteenth century, a period in which the most prominent American evangelical preacher was Charles G. Finney. Finney’s doctrine was heretical by the standards of Calvinists and Arminians alike. Indeed, it was heretical by much broader standards than these. Finney came very close to Pelagianism, if he was not actually a true Pelagian, in his rejection of Original Sin. This placed him outside the orthodoxy of all three branches of the Magisterial Reformation – see Article IX of the Articles of Religion, Article II of the Augsburg Confession, and Article III of the Belgic Confession. Indeed, it placed him outside of the orthodoxy of Christ’s One Holy Catholic and Apostolic Church for Pelagianism was condemned as heresy in the early centuries long before the Greek, Latin and English branches of the Church broke fellowship with each other. (2) It was with Finney, however, that the term evangelical finally arrived at a meaning recognizable as that of the present day. Having an identifiable conversion experience, understood primarily in terms of a change in one’s life and behaviour, came to be the distinguishing mark of the evangelical.

Moreover, Finney seems to have been the first to have translated the Gospel into the language of technique. By the language of technique, I mean the kind of language used in an instruction manual. A series of steps explaining the irreducible minimum of the correct procedure towards achieving a particular end. This language is the language of modern science and technology, and the product of rationalism. By the last century it had so permeated every field of knowledge that it came under the heavy critique of such thinkers as Michael Oakeshott, Jacques Ellul and George Grant. In the nineteenth century is was most evident in the writings of Charles Finney with regards to the conversion of sinners, leading to the criticism that his theology of evangelism was so mechanical and anthropocentric that, in B. B. Warfield’s words, “God might be eliminated from it entirely without essentially changing its character.” The contemporary evangelical presentation of the Gospel discussed above, while not as susceptible to the charge of having made God irrelevant, nevertheless has its discernible origins in his mechanical, technical, approach to making converts.

In the sixteenth century, evangelical designated the doctrine of justification by faith and not works, the doctrine that God, through events of the Gospel, the death for our sins and resurrection of His Son Jesus Christ, had accomplished the salvation of the world so that all who believe in Jesus Christ as He is proclaimed in the Gospel are pardoned of their sins and credited with a righteousness that is given to them freely rather than earned through their efforts. It was primarily doctrinal – about the truths which God has revealed in the Gospel in His Word – rather than experiential. Through the changes this term underwent between the sixteenth and the nineteenth centuries, this was reversed and it became primarily experiential rather than doctrinal – about our experiences rather than about the truths of God as revealed in His Word.

This itself is an indication of a move away from orthodoxy. The truths which God has revealed in His Word are stable and unchanging. Human experience is ever shifting and changing. Remember the illustration with which Christ ended His famous Sermon on the Mount. God’s truths are a safe foundation to build upon. Personal experience is not. This does not mean that experience is not important, but it very much means that sound doctrine must take primacy over personal experience. When this is reversed in the basic meaning of an important theological label it does not speak well of the orthodoxy of the movement bearing that label. Note that none of this should be taken as meaning any particular individual values personal experience over sound doctrine merely because he calls himself an evangelical.

This change also indicates a shift in the ranking of the doctrines of salvation. The sixteenth century evangelical Reformers awarded the primacy to justification. The Romanists, as we shall discuss in Part Two of Part Two, maintained that this was a departure from Catholic orthodoxy which granted sanctification equality with justification, if not awarding it the primacy. Contemporary evangelicalism, going back to Finney, and some might argue even to Wesley, would seem to award the primacy to regeneration, at least in practice. In doing so, however, they have radically changed the meaning of the new birth. Whenever the new birth is mentioned in the Scriptures it is described as a sovereign act of God (John 1:13; 3:8), operating through His instrumental means of His Word (James 1:18; 1 Peter 1:23) and baptism (Romans 6:3-5; Colossians 2:12, Titus 3:5), independent of the will of the recipients. In contemporary evangelical theology the new birth is depicted as an experience that you can bring about by following a prescribed set of steps. This is pretty much the complete opposite of how it is presented in the Scriptures. We shall look at this further in Part Two of Part Two.

(1) Note also that the word “grace” does not appear in St. James’ discussion of justification. Whatever St. James means by “justification” it is by works and not by grace and ergo not the same “justification” of which St. Paul writes in Romans.

(2) There are some who would maintain that the Greek branch of the Church – the Eastern Orthodox – is Pelagian or Semi-Pelagian. Those who take this position are generally either strong Calvinists who mean it as a criticism of Eastern Orthodoxy or the type of person I referred to in Semantic Shift and the Decline of Orthodoxy: Part One – Orthodoxy when I said “there is also a type of convert who is drawn to the Eastern Church because its unfamiliarity to most Westerners allows him to selectively draw from minority voices within that tradition and present them as if they were the mainstream of that tradition in order to create the impression that ideas of his that would be considered liberal neo-Protestantism in the West are really the ancient views of this venerable Church.” Either way, what they are saying is a distortion of the fact that the Eastern and Western branches of the Church were beginning to diverge already in the days of St. Augustine and that the Eastern Church never embraced Augustinianism. This does not mean that it accepted a form of Pelagianism or dissented from the condemnation of such as heresy by the pre-Schismatic Church. The kind of reasoning that would equate non-Augustinianism with Pelagianism or semi-Pelagianism is the same kind that argues that if you are not a Calvinist then you must be an Arminian or vice versa. It is invalid in either case. The Greek Church’s problem with Augustinianism was not with the idea that we have all inherited a broken, fallen, sinful nature from Adam. It was with the idea that we have inherited his guilt for the specific sin committed by Adam and Eve. Pelagianism requires the denial of the former as well as the latter. These ideas can be distinguished as “Original Sin” and “Original Guilt” although the lack of consistent usage has led to much confusion.

God’s Will: With and Without Means

Orthodox Christianity has always taught that God’s will is singular and immutable, i.e., that it neither changes nor contradicts itself. Due, however, to the fact that it was God’s eternal will to create other moral agents than Himself, i.e., other beings such as ourselves and the angels who are capable of making intelligent, responsible, decisions, different facets of the divine will can and must be distinguished. This is because such moral agents have, by definition, the capacity to resist the will of God – to disobey Him, rebel against Him, and, in short, to sin. This capacity is not absolute and rebellion can only occur within the limits of what God, in His Sovereignty, permits. Nevertheless, this requires that we distinguish between the ways in which God wishes or desires for us to act, and the ways in which He allows us to act. God has expressed the former facet of His will in His Law, including both the natural law written in our consciences at Creation, and the Moral Law revealed in His Word. His Law tells us what He wants us to do – love God with all our hearts and our neighbor as ourselves – and what He does not want us to do – everything forbidden in the Ten Commandments, such as idolatry, murder, theft, slander, coveting and the like. To go against the revealed will of God is to commit a sin either of omission or commission. It is never God’s wish that we sin, but since it was His wish for us to be responsible, moral, agents, He, permits or allows us to do so, in the sense that He does not prevent it by force, (1) within the limits that He establishes so as to contain the evil that we do and overrule it so that ultimately good is the result.

Another vital distinction is that which must be made between God’s will as exercised absolutely or directly and God’s will as exercised intermediately. The difference between the two can be illustrated by the account of the healing of blind Bartimaeus in Mark 10:46-52 on the one hand, and the account of the healing of a man born blind in John 9:1-11 on the other. In the former, Bartimaeus is begging at the side of the ride when Jesus passes by. Addressing Jesus by the Messianic title “Son of David”, Bartimaeus asks Him for mercy. Jesus summons Bartimaeus to Himself, asks him what he wants, and upon receiving the answer “Lord, that I might receive my sight”, says “Go thy way, thy faith hath made thee whole.” Upon this divine pronouncement Bartimaeus receives his sight. This is God exercising His will directly.

In the other account, Jesus and His disciples pass by a man who had been blind since birth. Jesus spits on the ground and makes mud, puts the mud on the man’s eyes, and then tells him to go wash in the pool of Siloam. When the man emerges from the pool he can see. This is God exercising His will intermediately – through means, or secondary causes.

Note that in the examples used to illustrate the difference, both acts of healing were miracles. C. S. Lewis defined a miracle as “an interference with Nature by supernatural power,” (2) which would certainly seem to apply to both of these events. Thus, while it is generally true that God’s will exercised absolutely is synonymous with His miraculous works, and His will exercised intermediately unfolds itself in natural processes, human history, and the like, there is a middle area in which God works the miraculous through means. In such cases, the relationship between the means or secondary cause(s) and the miraculous outcome is mysterious and inexplicable, as is the case with the mud used in the healing of the man born blind. (3)

As we have seen, created moral agents such a human beings and angels have the capacity to act against God’s will, within the limits that God has set to curb and contain evil. The rest of creation, living and non-living, does not possess this capacity and never resists God’s will. Furthermore, God’s will when exercised absolutely, cannot be resisted by any part of creation, whether it possesses moral agency or not, due to God’s Sovereign Omnipotence. It is a sign of the depraved thinking of our times that so many think that it is the other way around and that God cannot, in His Sovereign Omnipotence, work contrary to the natural laws that He Himself has put in place and which are one manifestation of His intermediate will. (4) Even theology, in modern times, has often been tainted with this blasphemous notion. (5)

It is God’s intermediate, will, therefore, that created moral agents can resist. More specifically, they can resist the revealed expressions of His intermediate will – the Law and Gospel. The Law, which consists of God’s commandments, expresses His will as to how we are to behave, and this is an intermediate expression of His will because God has made the fulfilment of this aspect of His will to be dependent upon the means of our own wills which He created with the capacity to disobey His own. The capacity to disobey is implicit within the capacity for voluntary obedience, which is essential to the moral goodness God desires and requires of His created moral agents. (6) When we exercised our wills in disobedience to His in the Fall, however, we lost the capacity for voluntary obedience and our wills became enslaved to sin.

The Gospel is God’s message of Good News about everything that He has done to rescue us from our sin. It tells how He gave us a Saviour, His Only-Begotten Son, Who came down from Heaven and became a man, Jesus Christ, Who being perfectly righteous and without sin Himself, willingly took our sins upon Himself and paid for them with His death on the cross, rising triumphant over sin, death, the grave, hell and the devil three days later. In the Gospel, God reveals His willingness to forgive our sins, accept us as perfectly righteous, adopt us as His children, and give us everlasting life in His eternal Kingdom freely, on account of our Saviour, Jesus Christ and His finished work.

The Gospel is an expression of the intermediate will of God. God’s willingness to receive us into His grace – His favour, unmerited by ourselves – is universal in extent. It is the world that was the recipient of God’s gift of a Saviour (Jn. 3:16) and it was for the sins of the whole world that the Saviour made satisfaction (1 Jn. 2:2). His grace is promised, however, only to those who believe in Jesus Christ (Jn. 1:12-13; 3:14-18, 36; 5:24; 6:35-40, 47; 11:25-27; 13:46-48; 14:6). It comes to us only through means. The atoning death of Jesus Christ on the cross as proclaimed in the Gospel was the means by which our salvation was accomplished. The Gospel itself, proclaimed in Word and Sacrament, is the means by which the grace, purchased for us by Christ at Calvary, is brought to us. (7) Faith, is the means by which we receive the grace.

Since God’s grace is communicated to us through means, we are capable of resisting it. Indeed, as fallen sinners, in rebellion against God, who are inclined not to trust Him, we are capable only of resisting, not of co-operating with grace. It is a distortion of the Gospel to present it, as so many contemporary evangelicals do, as calling for a decision, an act of the will on our parts. This heresy both underestimates the extent of the corruption of man’s will by Original Sin, (8) and distorts the repeated promises of the Gospel that God’s grace is freely given to all who believe. Belief is never an act of the human will. When we say “I believe this” or “I trust that person” we use the active voice, because, of course, we do the believing, but we could also say, in the passive voice “I am convinced of this” or “I am persuaded that that person is reliable” and we would not be saying anything different. The interchangeability of these active and passive expressions demonstrates the truth that even non-spiritual beliefs about ordinary, mundane, affairs are not produced by our wills but by the persuasive power of the objects of our faith. (9) What is true of belief about ordinary things is all-the-more true about belief in the Gospel, as Jesus Himself pointed out to Nicodemus (Jn. 3:11-13) and St. Paul spent much of the first two chapters of his first epistle to the Corinthian church demonstrating.

This does not mean that Calvinism is correct. Calvinism gets it right that unregenerate man is incapable of any sort of voluntary response to the grace of God, but concludes from this that God’s grace is not universal in extent, that God determined in advance that He would not save certain people, that Jesus Christ died only for those He had elected to save, and the elect are called to faith by an act of the absolute will of God (irresistible grace). This in effect denies that God communicates His grace to men through means. In an upcoming essay, I will address the Calvinist-Zwinglian denial of the grace-conveying role of the Gospel sacraments, but my point here is that the Calvinist doctrine nullifies the Gospel, even preached in bare form in the ministry of the Word, as a means of conveying grace. Irresistible grace requires no means and so, the Gospel, in the Calvinist economy of salvation, bears no more discernible relationship to the production of faith in the believer, than the mud that Jesus made bears to the healing of the man born blind. Indeed, it is difficult to see how the Gospel as Calvinists understand it – Jesus might have died for you, if you one of His elect, but if not you are out of luck – could ever produce saving faith, the confidence that one is in God’s freely given grace through the merits of Christ and His Atoning death alone.

The Gospel, free of these distortions, declares that that in Jesus Christ, the Son of God, and His Atoning death and resurrection, God has freely given us full and complete salvation by His grace, which we receive simply by believing. The Holy Spirit, through the Gospel, persuades us of the truth of the Gospel, and when we are so persuaded, we believe. There is no further step that is required on our part, the Gospel by persuading us, has given us the faith by which we have received God’s grace. God does not limit the persuading ministry of the Holy Spirit to a select few that He has predetermined. That ministry accompanies the Gospel wherever it is proclaimed so that the Gospel contains itself the life-giving power to produce faith. Since, however, in the Gospel God’s gracious will is exercised intermediately rather than absolutely, we remain capable of resisting it to our own perdition. The blame for the damnation of the lost belongs to them alone, the credit for the salvation of the saved belongs to God alone.



(1) When speaking of the aspect of God’s will that “allows” or “permits” the sins of men and angels, “allow” and “permit” must be carefully defined in this way. In ordinary usage these terms suggest the idea of approval, or at least the withholding of judgement and punitive consequences, on the part of an authority. God never allows or permits sin in this sense of these words.
(2) C. S. Lewis, Miracles: A Preliminary Study, (Glasgow: William Collins & Sons, 1947, 1960) p. 9. Although in a footnote to this definition Lewis says that it is not theologically precise but “crude” and “popular” for “the common reader” it is not significantly different from the definition of a miracle as God doing things “contrary to the pattern known and expected by us in nature” offered by St. Thomas Aquinas in Summa Theologica, I.105.7.
(3) St. Thomas, in the article of the Summa referred to in the previous note, limited true miracles to expressions of the absolute will of God which go against the pattern of nature. Noting the derivation of the word “miracle” from the Latin verb for “to wonder at”, he excluded events that have a secondary cause of which many people are ignorant, such as an eclipse, and acts like Creation which are outside the pattern of nature altogether. At least with regards to the second category of events excluded from the miraculous, this is much stricter than customary usage. Nevertheless, miracles-through-means don’t really contradict this because while the secondary cause of an eclipse – the moon passing between the sun and the earth – is knowable, the role the mud played in the healing of the man born blind is not.
(4) The terminology “the laws of nature” contributes to the problem. These “laws” are written in the indicative, rather than the imperative mood. They are not inviolable edicts, but descriptions of how we have observed natural processes to operate. A law of nature says that under such and such conditions, X will happen, because that is what we have observed to happen under these conditions repeatedly in the past. The predictive ability of the law will be highly accurate but it does not constitute proof that the opposite of X will not happen, much less proof that the Being Who put the natural processes in operation in the first place cannot suspend them when His purposes call for it. For an excellent treatment of this, and many more aspects of modern man’s naïve faith in science, see Gordon H. Clark, The Philosophy of Science and Belief in God, (Jefferson, Md.: The Trinity Foundation, 1996, a reprint of the original 1964 edition with a new foreword and short essay at the end both by John W. Robbins)
(5) This taint can be found in varying degrees. Outright liberal or modernist theology swallows the misconception that science has debunked the miraculous and either denies that the events described in Scriptural accounts of miracles happened altogether, or reinterprets them in accordance with naturalist presuppositions. Others who are more orthodox, accept God’s performance of miracles as being truly miraculous, but try to make the concept of miracles more harmonious with that of an inviolable natural order. C. S. Lewis, for example, in his otherwise excellent defense of the reality of miracles cited above, displays this tendency when he argues that the miracles God performs in the Bible, consist of His doing instantaneously things which occur in the natural order, but through long processes. The implication of the argument that miracles, viewed this way, are more realistic and rational, is that the natural order imposes limitations on God. The same sort of thinking is evident, in a more pronounced way, in the writings of Austin Farrer, although both men were too orthodox to take this line of reasoning to its ultimate conclusion. Then there are the various attempts, such as progressive creationism (Hugh Ross, et al), to harmonize creation with Darwinism. In these theories, natural processes are made to be to be the means of creation, at least for life. What all of these views have in common is that to one degree or another they elevate the natural order above the God Who created it and is Sovereign over it.
(6) For a fuller treatment of this point see my essay “The Nature and Origin of Evil.”
(7) “The power to impart God’s own forgiveness, life, and salvation Christ has placed into His Gospel: ‘The words I have spoken to you -- they are full of the Spirit and life’ (John 6:63). Through His word the disciples were made ‘clean’ (John 15:3), and by their repeating of this same word others will come to faith till the end of time (John 17:8, 20).” Kurt E. Marquart, The Saving Truth: Doctrine for Laypeople, Volume 1 of Truth, Salvatory and Churchly: Works of Kurt E. Marquart, Ken Schurb, Robert Paul, eds. (Luther Academy, 2016), p. 78. A few pages later Marquart wrote “The Gospel is an utterly unique form of communication. In Greek the words for ‘Gospel’ and for ‘promise’ are closely related. Unlike the Law, which threatens, the Gospel is pure promise. Fulfilled in Christ (2 Cor. 1:20), God’s saving promises actually carry in and with them the very things promised. The word for ‘promise’ can mean also ‘the ghint promised,’ and these two senses can run together into one (as in Gal. 3:22; Eph. 3:6, Heb. 6:12, 17). As live divine promise, the Gospel is much more than information. This ‘more’ may be compared to the difference between a letter and a check: the letter might promise a birthday gift, but the check actually conveys it.” (p. 81). Admirers of Marshall McLuhan might appreciate the inversion of his most famous words in Marquart’s next sentence “Here it is a case of the message being the medium – for imparting the very things the message names and describes.”
(8) The ancient heresy of Pelagianism denied Original Sin and taught that man retained his full capacity for voluntary obedience after the Fall. A modified version of the heresy known as Semi-Pelagianism taught that man retained his capacity for voluntary obedience but that it required the assistance of the grace of God. The synergism, decisionism, or Arminianism (the most common term, but the most inaccurate as it properly refers to a much more precise theological position) of contemporary evangelicalism is partially, although not completely, Semi-Pelagian.
(9) As John M. Drickamer aptly put it “Christian faith is not a human achievement. It is a gift of God. We cannot choose to believe the Gospel, to have faith in Christ (John 6:29, 44; 1 Corinthians 2:14, 12:3). We do not choose to believe anything. We do not choose to believe that today’s weather is bright and sunny. We believe that the day is sunny or rainy depending on what comes down from the sky and makes an impression on our eyes and skin.” John M. Drickamer, What is the Gospel? It is Finished, (1991) p. 2. (This book is a self-published collection of the author’s articles that had previously appeared in Christian News newspaper).