Theopedia

Resistible prevenient grace

Definition

Resistible prevenient grace is the Arminian and Wesleyan doctrine that God grants sinners, before conversion, a grace capable of being refused that restores enough ability to the will to respond to the gospel or reject it. Arminian theologians have disagreed over its extent: Jacobus Arminius and Simon Episcopius held that it is given only to those who hear the gospel preached, while John Wesley and later Wesleyans held that it is given universally, to every person.1 It is a form of synergism, contrasted with the Reformed doctrine of irresistible grace.

Confessional Witness

The Second London Baptist Confession and the Westminster Confession both deny a resistible construal of saving grace under the heading “Of Effectual Calling”: God’s call to the elect proceeds “not from anything at all foreseen in man, nor from any power or agency in the creature,” effectually “determining them to that which is good,” so that it cannot finally fail, even though the elect “come most freely, being made willing by his grace.”2 This is the doctrine the Reformed tradition names irresistible grace; resistible prevenient grace is its Arminian and Wesleyan alternative.

Biblical Basis

Proponents of universal prevenient grace anchor the doctrine in Christ’s own universal drawing. Commenting on Jesus’s promise that “when I am lifted up from the earth, [he] will draw all people to myself” (John 12:32), Grant Osborne writes that “all people are equally drawn to the Father,” a drawing that, unlike the Reformed effectual call, “is not an irresistible drawing… but rather a drawing that can be resisted.”3 John 1:9’s “true light that gives light to every man” is read the same way. Thomas Oden takes Jesus’s statement that “no one can come to me unless the Father who sent me draws him” (John 6:44) as naming prevenient grace directly, since such “drawing and enabling is precisely what is meant by prevenient grace.”4 Paul’s statement that “the grace of God has appeared, bringing salvation for all people” (Titus 2:11) is read as extending this grace to every person without exception; Oden concludes that “to no one, not even the recalcitrant unfaithful, does God deny grace sufficient for salvation.”5

Historical Development

Arminius and Episcopius: grace restricted to the evangelized

Jacob Arminius (1560-1609) himself “viewed prevenient grace as restricted to where the gospel is preached,” a limitation the Remonstrant theologian Simon Episcopius maintained as well: “prevenient grace for Episcopius is restricted to the evangelized as well.”1 On this account, someone who has never heard the gospel has not yet received the grace that would enable a real response to it.

Wesley’s universal extension

Later Wesleyan-Arminians broke from that restriction. “Many Wesleyan-Arminians, such as John Wesley, John Fletcher, and later Wesleyans like John Miley, have argued that prevenient grace is universal in scope, common to all mankind,” tying its extent directly to the universal extent they hold Christ’s atonement to have: “the extent of Christ’s atoning work is universal rather than particular, so also does it follow that prevenient grace is universal rather than particular.”6 As Rogers explains Wesley’s own reasoning, “Wesley’s notion of the ubiquity of prevenient grace is based upon his view of the universal extent of the sacrificial work of Christ, and its benefits for man. Christ lived and died for all, and according to Scripture, God for the sake of Christ freely bestows grace upon all.”7 On this view, the universal scope of prevenient grace also restrains sin generally and leaves every person some basic knowledge of God and of the moral law, a function Wesleyan theology holds in close but not identical relation to Reformed common grace.8

Objections and Responses

The doctrine lacks clear scriptural support. Even sympathetic evangelical assessments concede the weakness of the exegetical case for it. Thomas Schreiner, surveying the case for Wesleyan prevenient grace, found “how little scriptural exegesis has been done by Wesleyans in defense of prevenient grace,” despite the doctrine being “vital to their system of theology, for even Wesleyans admit that without it ‘Calvinist logic is irrefutable.’”9 Millard Erickson concurs: “there is no clear and adequate basis in Scripture for this concept of universal enablement. The theory, appealing though it is in many ways, simply is not taught explicitly in the Bible.”10 Wesleyan New Testament scholar Ben Witherington III goes further, conceding that Wesley’s own proof texts do not, on inspection, bear the weight the doctrine puts on them: concluding prevenient grace from a text like Matthew 5:44-45 “is a stretch,” and “one should not hang one’s entire theology about what sinners can do by free choice on such an exegetically weakly supported notion.”11

Doesn’t a grace that restores real ability to believe, even short of regenerating, still preserve genuine human freedom without needing to be irresistible? Bavinck argues that such a grace is both unattested in Scripture and incoherent on its own terms: “a grace that does not regenerate people yet restores their will to the point where they can opt for the gospel is nowhere taught in Scripture and is also a psychological absurdity.”12

Related Doctrines

References

  1. Matthew Michael Barrett, “Arminian Synergism in Theological Perspective,” in “Reclaiming Monergism: The Case for Sovereign Grace in Effectual Calling and Regeneration” (PhD diss., The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, 2011), 267. ↩ ↩2

  2. The Second London Baptist Confession of Faith (1689), chap. 10, “Of Effectual Calling,” paras. 1-2, text as reproduced by The 1689 Confession. ↩

  3. Barrett, “Arminian Synergism in Theological Perspective,” 268, quoting Grant R. Osborne, “Soteriology in the Gospel of John,” in The Grace of God and the Will of Man, ed. Clark H. Pinnock (Minneapolis: Bethany House, 1989), 256-257. ↩

  4. Barrett, “Arminian Synergism in Theological Perspective,” 269, quoting Thomas Oden, John Wesley’s Scriptural Christianity (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1994), 251. ↩

  5. Barrett, “Arminian Synergism in Theological Perspective,” 270, quoting Thomas Oden, The Transforming Power of Grace (Nashville: Abingdon, 1993), 48. ↩

  6. Barrett, “Arminian Synergism in Theological Perspective,” 267-268. ↩

  7. Barrett, “Arminian Synergism in Theological Perspective,” 267-268, quoting Rogers, “Prevenient Grace,” 159-161. ↩

  8. Barrett, “Arminian Synergism in Theological Perspective,” 270-271. ↩

  9. Barrett, “The Inadequacy of Arminian Synergism,” in “Reclaiming Monergism,” 330, quoting Thomas R. Schreiner, “Does Scripture Teach Prevenient Grace in the Wesleyan Sense?” in Still Sovereign: Contemporary Perspectives on Election, Foreknowledge, and Grace, ed. Thomas R. Schreiner and Bruce A. Ware (Grand Rapids: Baker, 2000), 241, 246. ↩

  10. Barrett, “The Inadequacy of Arminian Synergism,” 331, quoting Millard J. Erickson, Christian Theology (Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 1985), 925. ↩

  11. Barrett, “The Inadequacy of Arminian Synergism,” 331, quoting Ben Witherington III, The Problem with Evangelical Theology: Testing the Exegetical Foundations of Calvinism, Dispensationalism, and Wesleyanism (Waco, TX: Baylor University Press, 2005), 207-209. ↩

  12. Herman Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics, ed. John Bolt, trans. John Vriend (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2008), 4:86, as quoted in Barrett, “The Inadequacy of Arminian Synergism,” 331n48. ↩