Ordo salutis

“And those whom he predestined he also called, and those whom he called he also justified, and those whom he justified he also glorified.”

— Romans 8:30 (ESV)

Ordo salutis is Latin for “the order of salvation”: the sequence in which the Holy Spirit applies Christ’s saving work to an individual sinner, through effectual calling, regeneration, faith, justification, sanctification, and glorification (Rom. 8:30).¹ The order is chiefly logical rather than strictly chronological: each stage grounds the next as its cause, even where two stages occur at the same moment in a believer’s experience.² Reformed theology holds that God alone accomplishes every stage, against the Arminian view that a sinner’s own choice to believe, enabled but not determined by grace, decides the outcome.

Confessional Witness

The 1689 Second London Baptist Confession, word for word identical here to the Westminster Confession and the 1742 Philadelphia Confession, opens its chapter on the application of salvation this way:

“Those whom God hath predestinated unto life, he is pleased in his appointed, and accepted time, effectually to call, by his Word and Spirit… taking away their heart of stone, and giving unto them a heart of flesh.”³

Louis Berkhof notes that this wording reflects how “in seventeenth century theology effectual calling and regeneration are often identified, or if not entirely identified, then at least in so far that regeneration is regarded as included in calling.”⁴ The confession’s own chapter states calling and regeneration together as the entry point of the order, without itself specifying which of the two comes first; confessional Reformed theologians have gone on to answer that question differently.

Biblical Basis

Paul’s own statement of the order in Romans 8:30 moves from God’s predestining to his calling, justifying, and glorifying, without listing regeneration, faith, or sanctification by name; Reformed theology reads those as the content of “called” and the path to “glorified.”¹

Herman Bavinck argues that regeneration has to be placed logically before faith and repentance, not after, from the case of infants who die before any possibility of believing: “if repentance must precede regeneration— being as yet unconverted, they would then be lost,” which conflicts with the Bible’s own doctrine of the covenant of grace embracing such children. He concludes that “if salvation truly rests in God’s will and not in the human will, the order of regeneration preceding repentance is inviolable.”⁵

First John 5:1 is the text most directly at issue between the Reformed and Arminian orderings: “everyone who believes that Jesus is the Christ has been born of God.” Matthew Barrett argues the Greek verb behind “has been born” is a perfect passive, naming a completed prior state that grounds the believing rather than following from it, and that reading the verse the other way, faith producing new birth, would just as consistently make every other fruit the same passage lists (righteousness, 2:29; resisting sin, 3:9; love, 4:7; a faith that overcomes the world, 5:4) a human achievement that earns regeneration, which is a form of works-righteousness John elsewhere denies.⁶

Historical Development

Reformation and Reformed orthodoxy: the golden chain

Reformed theology’s ordered vocabulary for describing how salvation reaches a sinner did not appear complete at the Reformation; Calvin himself organized book three of the Institutes around “the way we receive the grace of Christ” without yet fixing a technical sequence.⁷ William Perkins’s A Golden Chaine (1591), subtitled “the order of the causes of salvation and damnation, according to God’s Word,” gave the tradition its first detailed diagram of the sequence; Theodore Beza’s earlier Tabula praedestinationis (1555) did similar work.⁸ Perkins’s chain was not, on Richard Muller’s reading, a rigid temporal timetable: every link in it, “from calling to sanctification,” is grounded in the believer’s union with Christ rather than treated as a strict sequence of separate events.² The same ordered vocabulary continued through Francis Turretin’s Institutes of Elenctic Theology and Herman Witsius’s Economy of the Covenants, and into the systematic theologies of Charles Hodge, W. G. T. Shedd, Bavinck, and Berkhof.⁹

The twentieth-century dispute over calling and regeneration

Confessional Reformed theologians have not agreed among themselves on one point the Westminster-family confessions leave open: whether effectual calling or regeneration comes logically first. John Murray’s Redemption Accomplished and Applied (1955) argues for the priority of calling, reasoning that Scripture represents calling as the act by which a sinner is united to Christ (1 Cor. 1:9), and that union with Christ is what joins a person to the Spirit’s inward operative grace; regeneration, on this view, is the fruit of that union and the means by which a sinner is brought to respond to the call already given.¹⁰ John Frame follows Murray: “regeneration is the first blessing of effectual calling. … And regeneration is the first item on the list that occurs inside of us.”¹¹

Louis Berkhof reversed the order, defining regeneration as “that act of God by which the principle of the new life is implanted in man” and placing it before the effectual call itself.¹² A third position, associated with Anthony Hoekema and Michael Horton, holds that splitting calling from regeneration at all is the wrong move, and that the Westminster Confession’s own language, which folds regeneration into effectual calling rather than ordering one before the other, should be retained as it stands rather than resolved into either camp’s sequence.¹³

Opposing Views

Arminian order: prevenient grace and faith before regeneration

Where the Reformed order places regeneration before faith, the Arminian tradition places a resistible “prevenient grace” before both, enabling but not determining a sinner’s own choice to believe, with regeneration following that choice. Robert Picirilli, expounding Arminius, describes prevenient grace as “that grace that precedes actual regeneration and which, except when finally resisted, inevitably leads on to regeneration,” a description close enough to the effect itself that Picirilli calls it “Pre-regenerating Grace” rather than something clearly distinct from regeneration.¹⁴ Roger Olson’s variant holds that prevenient grace already begins regeneration, which is then only completed once the sinner cooperates with it.¹⁵

Roman Catholic and Lutheran: baptismal regeneration

Rome and confessional Lutheranism both tie regeneration to the sacrament of baptism itself rather than distinguishing the two as the Reformed tradition does. Bavinck asks: “does baptism somehow impart a seed of regeneration?”, against the Reformed position that baptizes the children of believers on the ground of the covenant promise, while still holding regeneration and the sacrament apart as distinct acts.¹⁶

Objections and Responses

Doesn’t 1 John 5:1 say that believing comes before the new birth (“everyone who believes… has been born of God”)? The verse’s own Greek grammar points the other way. “Has been born” translates a perfect passive verb naming a completed, antecedent state, not an action that follows the believing named alongside it; reading the verse as faith producing new birth would, applied consistently to the rest of 1 John, turn each of the letter’s other marks of new birth, righteousness, resisting sin, love, faith that overcomes the world, into something a person achieves in order to earn regeneration, which is the works-righteousness the letter as a whole denies rather than teaches.⁶

If regeneration precedes faith, how can Scripture command sinners, spiritually dead and unable to respond, to believe and repent? Bavinck’s own answer does not resolve this into a settled formula so much as hold two truths together: the “order of regeneration preceding repentance is inviolable” if salvation truly rests on God’s will rather than the human will, and yet Scripture still commands the response those it addresses cannot produce unaided, “promiscuously and indiscriminately,” leaving the outcome to God rather than to human calculation of who is regenerate.⁵

Related Doctrines

References

Herman Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics: Abridged in One Volume, ed. John Bolt (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2011), chap. 18, “Calling and Regeneration.” ↩ ↩²
Carol Man Fen Chen, A Historical, Biblical, and Theological Interpretation of Covenants: Unconditionality and Conditionality in Relation to Justification and Sanctification (PhD diss., The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, 2019), 187, quoting Richard A. Muller: Perkins’s golden chain “does not express a ‘rigid temporal order’” but grounds “all of the links of the chain, from calling to sanctification… in the love of God to those in Christ.” ↩ ↩²
The Second London Baptist Confession of Faith (1689), chap. 10, “Of Effectual Calling,” para. 1. ↩
Louis Berkhof, Systematic Theology (London: Banner of Truth Trust, 1969), 455. ↩
Bavinck, chap. 18: “if salvation truly rests in God’s will and not in the human will, the order of regeneration preceding repentance is inviolable.” ↩ ↩²
Matthew Michael Barrett, “The Scriptural Affirmation of Monergistic Regeneration,” in “Reclaiming Monergism: The Case for Sovereign Grace in Effectual Calling and Regeneration” (PhD diss., The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, 2011), 207-208, 216-217. ↩ ↩²
Matthew Michael Barrett, “Introduction,” in “Reclaiming Monergism,” 1-20. ↩
William Perkins, A Golden Chaine; or, the Description of Theologie, Containing the Order of the Causes of Salvation and Damnation, According to God’s Word, in The Workes of William Perkins (Cambridge, 1612), 1:11-117, quoted in Barrett, “Introduction,” 11. ↩
Barrett, “Introduction,” 12. ↩
John Murray, Redemption Accomplished and Applied (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1955), 86-94, quoted in Matthew Michael Barrett, “Exploring the Relationship Between Effectual Calling and Regeneration in the Reformed Ordo Salutis,” in “Reclaiming Monergism,” 432-472, at 433. ↩
John Frame, Salvation Belongs to the Lord (Phillipsburg, NJ: P&R, 2006), 84-85, quoted in Barrett, “Exploring the Relationship,” 435. ↩
Louis Berkhof, Systematic Theology (Edinburgh: Banner of Truth, 2003), 468-69, quoted in Barrett, “Exploring the Relationship,” 435. ↩
Barrett, “Exploring the Relationship,” 432-433. ↩
Robert Picirilli, Grace, Faith, Free Will (Nashville: Randall House, 2002), 153, 156, quoted in Matthew Michael Barrett, “Arminian Synergism in Theological Perspective,” in “Reclaiming Monergism,” 253-316. ↩
Barrett, “Arminian Synergism in Theological Perspective,” discussing Roger Olson’s account of prevenient grace as already-begun regeneration. ↩
Bavinck, chap. 18. ↩