Psalm 45 Publications

The proponents of what is commonly called “unlimited atonement” will often point out certain passages that speak of God’s desire for everyone to be saved, and use those passages against the Calvinistic teaching of definite or limited atonement. A couple of the most common passages used in this way are 2 Pet. 3:9 and John 3:16. The usage of the first of these, 1 Peter 3:9, as a polemic against definite atonement fails to take into account the context. In the passage Peter is speaking to “you” [in some manuscripts, “us”] that is, to the believers to whom he is writing this letter, and explaining to them that the reason God has not yet ushered in the eternal state is that he desires “all” (implied: of you) to come to repentance. He will not destroy the earth before all of the elect have repented and believed in the gospel. A similar case could occur in a classroom, when a teacher asks, “I’m waiting for you to arrive before I start teaching; I want all to be here before I begin”. It would be foolish to say that the teacher is waiting for every human being who has ever lived; the context cries out against such an interpretation. Continue Reading

The term “irresistible grace” is a common theological phrase referring to the Calvinistic teaching that God has sovereignly determined to have grace upon certain persons, and he will unstoppably have his way in being gracious to them, and in finally saving them. In other words, God’s grace, in the case of the elect, does not stop with a mere offer of mercy; it is greater yet, and irresistibly draws his people to himself. It commands repentance and then grants that very repentance commanded. It calls sinners to himself and then gives them the spiritual life and heart of faith necessary to respond to that call. In other words, God’s grace freely and necessarily supplies everything, including the will to believe, that is necessary for the salvation of all the elect. Continue Reading

The common objection to the doctrine of irresistible grace, that it makes human response forced and artificial, as if they were robots and not real people making real choices, misunderstands what irresistible grace actually means. It certainly does not mean that God will bring people to Christ against their wills, kicking and screaming. Irresistibleness, in other words, does not imply coercion. On the contrary, it means that God will not just save his people apart from or in opposition to their wills, but he will give them the very will to come. He will give them new hearts of faith, that delight to come to him and walk in his ways. When Christ called to Lazarus from his grave, he irresistibly arose and came forth – but it was not as if the still-dead corpse were miraculously moving like a robot, nor yet as if he desperately wanted to stay in his grave, but Jesus dragged him out anyway. No, he was given new life, and the living will he received delighted to come forth from his stinking grave and embrace the Master (John 11:43-44). In the same way, when God irresistibly draws us to Christ, he does not makes us come mechanically, even though our hearts are still spiritually dead, nor does he force us to come unwillingly. He gives us new, living hearts of faith that delight to come to him, that could not do anything else, in fact, because our re-created wills naturally delight in him and want nothing else but to belong to him (for scriptural support, see the previous question, “What does the term ‘irresistible grace’ mean, and does the bible teach it?”). Continue Reading

The term “perseverance of the saints” means that every true “saint,” or in other words, all who have actually been “sanctified by the offering up of the body of Jesus Christ once for all” (Hebrews 10:10), will certainly persevere in faith until the end, and so be finally saved. The term does not mean that true Christians will never have seasons of doubt, nor ever fall into sin, but rather that God will always cause their faith to triumph at the last, and will never allow them to remain in gross sin indefinitely, but will continue the work that he first began in them, bringing it to perfection in the Day of Jesus Christ (see Philippians 1:6). Neither does the term mean that no one who makes a profession of faith will finally fall away: on the contrary, there are many false professions, and there are different kinds of false faiths that flourish for awhile but then wither away (e.g. Matthew 7:21-23; 13:1-23); but all who have been granted true faith, which God alone can give (e.g. Joh 3:27; Phi 1:29; 2Pe 1:1; Act 16:14; 18:27; Eph 2:8-10; Act 5:31; 11:18; 2Ti 2:25-26; 1Co 4:7), will continue in the faith until they reach their blessed end in heaven. Continue Reading

It is common to hear the term “eternal security” used basically as a synonym for “the perseverance of the saints”. The former term emphasizes that all who are in Christ, that is, all the elect, who have truly been regenerated, are secure in their position forever – they will never finally fall away. The latter term, on the other hand, emphasizes the manner in which God will infallibly preserve his own – by causing their faith to persevere through every trial, until they finally apprehend the prize of the upward calling, for which they have already been apprehended by Christ (see Philippians 3:12-14). If this is all that is meant by the term “eternal security,” then it is certainly a biblical doctrine, very similar to the term “perseverance,” and complementing it. Continue Reading

The expression “once saved, always saved” can simply mean that all who have been called out by the gospel of Christ, granted true faith, and saved from his wrath and the condemnation they had been under, will never more be in peril of eternal damnation, but will be saved by God’s sovereign and immutable grace for all eternity. If this is all that is intended by the expression, then it is complementary to the Reformed doctrine of perseverance, which teaches that all true saints will persevere in the faith, by God’s keeping power, until they finally reach their blessed end in heaven. Continue Reading

One common objection to the Reformed doctrine of the perseverance of the saints is that it must be opposed to the doctrine of salvation by grace alone, inasmuch as it denies that a person may live in habitual, unrepentant sin, and still be finally saved, even if at one time he made a confession of faith in Christ (or even if he continues to profess his faith). If a person who demonstrates no good works will not finally be saved, the argument goes, then good works are necessary for salvation; hence, salvation is not by grace through faith alone, but is by faith and works together. Continue Reading

The term “easy-believism” is a usually derogatory label, used to characterize the faulty understanding of the nature of saving faith adhered to by much of contemporary Evangelicalism, most notably (and extremely) by such Dispensational authors as Charles Ryrie and Zane Hodges. The term was popularized in an ongoing debate between Hodges, to whose theology the label “easy-believism” was affixed, and John MacArthur, to whom the term “lordship salvation” came to be applied. Continue Reading

“Lordship salvation” is the term generally used in contradistinction to a teaching that is sometimes called by the derogatory term “easy-believism,” but by its adherents is usually referred to as “Free Grace Theology” (see Question #69, above). The term was popularized in an ongoing debate between John MacArthur, who argued for “Lordship salvation,” and Charles Ryries and Zane Hodges, who argued against it. Continue Reading

Although the nuances of what has been taught as lordship salvation may differ, and some of its proponents may at times have expressed their doctrine in ways that pose some potential problems, the basic teaching of lordship salvation, that true, saving faith must be accompanied by repentance, turning from sin, and utterly submitting to Christ; and that true faith will always prove itself in genuine sanctification and holiness, demonstrated over the course of the believer’s life, is essentially just part and parcel of the Reformed teaching on the perseverance of the saints (see questions 65-68 above). Continue Reading

Patristics is the branch of theology dealing with the writings of the Church Fathers, who are the most prominent pastors and theologians of the Church from the end of the Apostolic period until the beginning of the Medieval period. The time span of the Patristic period is generally considered to be about AD 100 (after the death of John, the last living apostle) until about AD 604 (when Gregory the Great died after serving in the the bishopric of Rome, in a life of ministry that tended to lock into place the basic elements of the Medieval Church, including the consolidation of ecclesiastical power in the church of Rome, and the ascendancy of the Roman bishop, who would come to be called the “pope”). Continue Reading

The term “the Reformers” usually refers to the principal theologians protesting the doctrinal and ethical corruption of the Roman Church in sixteenth-century Europe. Because of their protestation against the corrupt Church of their day, the movements they began became known collectively as “Protestantism,” and the reforming movement of the sixteenth-century itself became known as the Protestant Reformation. Continue Reading

The Puritan movement arose in the late sixteenth-century and continued until the early eighteenth-century, in places where the doctrines of the Protestant Reformation had become somewhat obscured or corrupt, and most particularly, in the Anglican Church in England. The Puritan movement was rather broad, and on the extreme end of the spectrum included various groups that traced themselves back to the Radical Reformation and the Anabaptist movement (many of whom were called “Separatists”). But the predominant stream of Puritans largely worked for the purification of the Anglican Church, and are commonly divided into two classes, the English Puritans and the American Puritans. Continue Reading

Although Postmodernism is notoriously difficult to define, it is essentially a philosophical and cultural reaction to the boundless optimism of the modern worldview, which had roots in such influential thinkers as Immanuel Kant and Augustus Comte, and was marked by a great confidence in the ability of humans to discover a vast body of certain and indisputable knowledge through the operation of the scientific method, and thereby to exercise an ever greater control over the material world, and increase the happiness and prosperity of people everywhere. In contrast, the Postmodern worldview that began to develop after the World Wars was very skeptical of the possibility of any certain knowledge whatsoever, and deeply distrustful of power structures and the misuse of posited knowledge to cement authority in the hands of the strong, whether in places of governmental, religious, or other realms of influence. Continue Reading

“Emergence,” or the “Emerging” or “Emergent” Church, is a movement within Protestant Christianity deeply impacted by the worldview of Postmodernism, and in particular, the Postmodern hermeneutic of Deconstructionism (see question #74 above). Although it varies significantly from one group to the next, one of its most common characteristics is a deep distrust of sure doctrinal convictions, which the Church has historically used, in their opinion, to wield authority and oppress the weak. All theological convictions and points of doctrine should be held with “humility” (read: “uncertainty”), and open to ongoing dialogue, in which all opinions and perspectives should be embraced and affirmed. Real Christianity, they claim, is not about believing anything in particular, but rather about doing what Jesus did, eating with and loving sinners and the weak and despised. Continue Reading

The “New Perspective on Paul” is a relatively recent paradigm shift in understanding what the Apostle Paul meant in his teaching on justification. According to the New Perspective, justification does not address the question of how a sinful individual may be pronounced righteous before a holy God; it actually answers the question of who may be considered a member of the covenant community. According to this perspective, Paul’s criticism of the Judaizers had nothing to do with their legalism, or basing their hopes of being accepted by God upon a moral lifestyle; on the contrary, the Jewish religion that Paul was confronting was a grace-based religion. Paul was actually condemning their ethno-centrism, in saying that a person had to accept Jewish customs such as circumcision in order to be counted a part of the family of God. Present justification is only the recognition of someone as a part of God’s family; and there will likewise be a future justification, based upon the whole life lived, which will determine whether or not God accepts someone into future, eternal bliss. Continue Reading

The “Federal Vision” is the designation preferred by its proponents of a movement that took on definite shape during a pastor’s conference at Auburn Avenue Presbyterian Church in Monroe, Louisiana, in January 2002. The forces behind this important conference extend at least as far back as the controversial teaching of Dr. Norman Shepherd, who was finally dismissed from Westminster Theological Seminary (Philadelphia) in 1981 for teaching that baptism really but conditionally procures for its subjects all the benefits of Christ’s redemption, which must then be maintained by the believer’s faithfulness – which means, in essence, that justification is finally secured by faith and works. Additionally influential was the “New Perspective” on Paul’s doctrine of justification, which teaches that the Judaism Paul was contending with was not a legalistic religion, and that Paul’s rebuke to them was not directed against any tendency to trust in their works for approval with God, but rather in their ethnocentric desire to force Gentiles to display Jewish “badges” such as circumcision (see question #76 above). These strains of thought were influential in creating a milieu in which the original speakers at the Auburn Avenue pastor’s conference, entitled, “The Federal Vision: An Examination of Reformed Covenantalism,” could expound their understanding of a more “objective” nature to the covenant. Continue Reading