Of The Power Of Free-Will In Preparing Us For Our Conversion To God
Chapter 13
OF THE POWER OF FREE-WILL
IN PREPARING US FOR OUR
CONVERSION TO GOD
The judgment of the Arminians concerning the power of free-will about spiritual things in an unregenerate man – someone who is in the state of corrupted nature before and without the help of grace – may be laid open by the following positions which they hold:
First. That every man in the world, reprobates and others, have in themselves the power and ability to believe in Christ, to repent and yield due obedience to the new covenant; and this is because they did not lose this power by the fall of Adam. "Adam after his fall," says
Grevinchovius, "retained a power to believe; and so did all reprobates in him."344 "He did not lose" (as they said at the synod) "the power to perform that obedience which is required in the new covenant, formally considered as required by the new covenant; he did not lose a power to believe, nor a power to forsake sin by repentance."345 And those graces that he did not lose are still in our power. From which they affirm that, "faith is called the work of God only because he requires us to do it."346 Now, having appropriated this power to themselves, ensuring that the grace of God is quite excluded, a grace which they made needless before, they teach –
Secondly. That to reduce this power into an act, so that men may become actual believers, there is no infused habit of grace, no spiritual
Chapter 13: OF FREE-WILL IN PREPARING US FOR CONVERSION
vital principle necessary for them, or bestowed on them; rather everyone, by the use of his native endowments, makes himself differ from others. "We reject those things which are spoken concerning the infusion of habits before we can exercise the act of faith,"347 says the epistle to the Walachians. "I deny that the internal principle of faith required in the gospel is a habit divinely infused, and that the will should be determined by the strength and efficacy of it," says another of them.348 Well, then, if we must grant that the internal vital principle of a supernatural spiritual grace is a mere natural faculty, not elevated by any divine habit – if it is not God that begins the good work in us, but our own free-wills – then let us see what more goodly stuff will follow. One man by his own mere endeavors, without the aid of any received gift, makes himself differ from another.349 "What does it matter that a man makes himself differ from others? There is nothing truer: the one who yields faith to God who commands him, makes himself differ from the one who will not have faith when God commands it." These are the words of their Apology, which, without question, is an irrefragable350 truth if faith is not a gift received from above. For on that ground alone the apostle proposes these questions,
"Who makes you to differ from another? And what do you have that you did not receive? Now if you did receive, why do you glory, as if `you had not received it?" The sole reason why Paul denies that anyone makes himself differ from another by his own power, is because what the difference consists of is "received;" it is freely bestowed on him.
Deny this, and I confess the other will fall by itself. But until their authority is equal with the apostles', they would do well to forbear the naked obtrusion351 of assertions that are so contradictory to the apostles'; and thus they would not trouble the church. Let them take all the glory to themselves, as Grevinchovius does. "I make myself," he says, "differ from another when I do not resist God and his divine predetermination; which I could have resisted. And why may I not boast of this as of my own? That I could do it is by God's mercy"
(endowing his nature with such an ability as you heard before); "but
Chapter 13: OF FREE-WILL IN PREPARING US FOR CONVERSION
that I would do it, when I might have done otherwise, is of my power."352 Now, when, after all this, they are forced to confess some evangelical grace, though it consists only in a moral persuasion by the outward preaching of the word, they teach –
Thirdly. That God sends the gospel, and reveals Christ Jesus to men, according to how well they dispose themselves for such a blessing. "Sometimes," they say in their synodical writings, "God calls this or that nation, people, city, or person, to the communion of evangelical grace, whom he pronounces worthy of it in comparison to others."353 In Acts 18:10, God encourages Paul to preach at Corinth by affirming that he had "many people in that city" (which, doubtless, were his people then only by virtue of their election). But in these men's judgments "they were called so because even then they feared
God, and served him with all their hearts, according to that knowledge they had of him; and so they were ready to obey the preaching of St.
Paul."354 It is a strange doctrine, that men should fear God, know him, and serve him in sincerity, before they ever heard of the gospel; and by these means they deserve that the gospel should be preached to them!
This is that pleasing of God before faith that they plead for in Act.
Synod., p. 66; that "preparation and disposition to believe, which men attain by the law and by virtuous education;"355 that "something which is in sinners, by which, although they are not justified, yet they are made worthy of justification."356 For "conversion and the performance of good works is," in their apprehension, "a condition pre-required to justification."357 So speak the children of Arminius. If this is not an expression that is unparalleled in the writings of any
Christian, then I am somewhat mistaken.
The sum of their doctrine, then, in this particular concerning the power of free-will in the state of sin and unregeneration, is this:
That every man having a native, inbred power of believing in Christ upon the revelation of the gospel, also has an ability to do so much good that it will procure from God the preaching of the gospel to him; without any internal assistance of grace, he can give assent and yield
Chapter 13: OF FREE-WILL IN PREPARING US FOR CONVERSION
obedience to the gospel; the preparatory acts of his own will always proceed so far as to make him excel others who do not perform them, and those others are therefore excluded from further grace.
This Pelagianism is more gross than Pelagius himself would ever justify. Therefore we reject all the former positions, as so many monsters in Christian religion. In their place we assert the following positions:
First. That we, being by nature dead in trespasses and sins, have no power to prepare ourselves to receive God's grace, nor in the least measure to believe and turn ourselves to him. It is not that we deny there are pre-conditions in us for our conversion, or dispositions that prepare us in some measure for our new birth or regeneration; but we affirm that all these are also the effects of the grace of God, and that alone is their proper cause; for of ourselves, "without him, we can do nothing," John 15:5. "We are not sufficient of ourselves to think of anything as being from ourselves," 2 Cor 3:5, much less to do what is good. In respect to that, "every one of our mouths must be stopped;" for "we have all sinned and come short of the glory of God," Rom
3:19, 23. We are "by nature the children of wrath, dead in trespasses and sins," Eph 2:1-3; Rom 8:6. Our new birth is a resurrection from death, wrought by the greatness of God's power. And what ability, I pray, does a dead man have to prepare himself for his resurrection? Can he collect his scattered dust, or renew his perished senses? If the leopard can change his spots, and the Ethiopian his skin, then we can do good who by nature are taught to do evil, Jer 13:23. We are all
"ungodly," and considered "without strength" when Christ died for us, Rom 5:6; we are "wise to do evil," but "we have no strength, no knowledge, to do good." Indeed, all the faculties of our souls, by reason of that spiritual death under which we are detained by the corruption of our nature, are altogether useless in respect to any power to do what is truly good. Our understandings are blind or "darkened, being alienated from the life of God through the ignorance that is in us, because of the blindness of our hearts," Eph 4:18; by such blindness
Chapter 13: OF FREE-WILL IN PREPARING US FOR CONVERSION
we become "darkness" itself, Eph 5:8. So void is the understanding of true knowledge, that "the natural man cannot receive the things of the Spirit of God; they are foolishness to him," 1 Cor 2:14. [He is] nothing but confounded and amazed at spiritual things; and, if he does not mock, he can do nothing but wonder, and say, "What does this mean?"
Acts 2:12-13. Secondly, we are not only blind in our understandings, but we are also captives to sin in our wills, Luke 4:18; by this "we are servants of sin," John 8:34; we are "free" only in our obedience to that tyrant, Rom 6:20. Indeed, thirdly, all our affections are wholly corrupted, for "every imagination of the thoughts of the heart of man is only evil continually," Gen 6:5. While we are "in the flesh, the motions of sin work in our members to bring forth fruit unto death,"
Rom 7:5.
These are the endowments of our nature. These are the preparations of our hearts for the grace of God which we have within ourselves. No – Secondly, There is not only an impotency but an enmity in our corrupted nature to anything spiritually good: The things that are of God are "foolishness to a natural man," 1 Cor 2:14. There is nothing that men more hate and contemn than that which they consider folly.
They mock at it as a ridiculous drunkenness, Acts 2:13. And I would to God that our days did not yield such evident proofs of that universal opposition that exists between light and darkness, Christ and Belial, nature and grace – that we could not see every day the prodigious issues of this inbred corruption swelling over all bounds, and breaking forth into a contempt of the gospel and all the ways of godliness! It is so true that "the carnal mind is enmity against God: it is not subject to the law of God, nor indeed can it," Rom 8:7. So that –
Thirdly. Just as a natural man neither knows nor wills by the strength of his own free-will, so it is utterly impossible for him to do anything pleasing to God. "Can the Ethiopian change his skin, or the leopard his spots? Then he can do good," Jer 13:23. "An evil tree cannot bring forth good fruit." "Without faith it is impossible to
Chapter 13: OF FREE-WILL IN PREPARING US FOR CONVERSION
please God," Heb 11:6; and "that is not of ourselves, it is the gift of God," Eph 2:8. Almighty God works in various ways and sundry manners, according to the unsearchableness of his wisdom, to translate his chosen ones from the power of darkness into his marvelous light.
He calls some powerfully in the midst of their march in the way of ungodliness, as he did Paul. He prepares others by outward means and helps of common restraining grace, moralizing their nature before it is begotten anew by the immortal seed of the word. Yet this is certain, that all good of this kind is from his free grace; there is nothing in ourselves, as being from ourselves, except sin. Yes, and all those previous dispositions with which our hearts are prepared by virtue of common grace, do not at all enable us to concur, by any vital operation, with that powerful, blessed, renewing grace of regeneration by which we become the sons of God. Nor is there any disposition towards grace, however remote, that can possibly proceed from a mere faculty of nature; for every such disposition must have the same order as the form that is to be introduced. But nature, in respect to grace, is a thing of an inferior alloy, between which there is no proportion. A good use of gifts may promise additional uses, provided they are of the same kind. There is no rule, law, or promise that would make grace due upon the good use of natural endowments.
But you may say here that I quite overthrow free-will, which I seemed to grant before. To this I answer that in regard to that object concerning which now we treat, a natural man has no such thing as free-will at all, if you take it for a power to do what is good and wellpleasing to God in spiritual things; or for an ability to prepare our hearts for faith and to call upon God. As our church article says, that would be a home-bred self-sufficiency, preceding the change of our wills by the almighty grace of God, and by which any good might be said to dwell in us; and we utterly deny that there is any such thing in the world. The will is radically free in itself; yet in respect to the term or object to which it should tend in this regard, the will is corrupted, enthralled, and under a miserable bondage. It is tied to such a need to
Chapter 13: OF FREE-WILL IN PREPARING US FOR CONVERSION
sin in general, that although unregenerate men are not restricted to this or that sin in particular, for the most part they can do nothing but sin.
All their actions in which there is any morality are attended with iniquity: "An evil tree cannot bring forth good fruit;" even "the sacrifice of the wicked is an abomination to the LORD."
These things being thus made clear from the Scripture, the former Arminian positions will fall to the ground by themselves, having no foundation but their own authority to stand on. For they make no pretense of proof from the word of God. The first two I considered in the last chapter, and now concerning the third, I add only this: that the sole reason why the gospel is sent to some and not to others is not because of any dignity, worth, or desert in those to whom it is sent, any more than these are found in the rest who are allowed to remain in the shadow of death. Rather, it is the sole good pleasure of God, so that it may be a subservient means to execute his decree of election: "I have many people in this city," Acts 18:20; "I thank you, O Father, Lord of heaven and earth, because you have hidden these things from the wise and prudent, and have revealed them to babes. Even so, Father; for so it seemed good in your sight," Mat 11:25-26. So that the Arminian opposition to the truth of the gospel in this particular is clearly manifest:
S.S.
Lib.
Arbit.
"Of ourselves we can do nothing,"
Joh 15:5. "We are not sufficient of ourselves to think any thing as being from ourselves," 2 Cor 3:5.
"We are by nature the children of wrath, dead in trespasses and sins,"
Eph 2:1-3.
"We retain still after the fall a power of believing and of repentance, because Adam did not lose this ability," Rem. Declar. Sen. in Synod.
"Faith is not of ourselves: it is the gift of God," Eph 2:8.
"Faith is said to be the work of God, because he commands us to perform it," Rem. Apol. "There is no infusion of any habit or spiritual vital principle necessary to enable a man to believe," Corv.
Chapter 13: OF FREE-WILL IN PREPARING US FOR CONVERSION
"Who makes you differ from another? And what do you have that you did not receive? Now if you did receive, why do you glory as if you had not received?" 1 Cor 4:7.
"There is nothing truer than that one man makes himself differ from another. He who believes when God commands, makes himself differ from him who will not,"
Rem. Apol.
"Can the Ethiopian change his skin, or the leopard his spots?
Then may you also do good, who are taught to do evil," Jer 13:23.
"I may boast of my own, when I obey God's grace, which it was in my power not to obey, as well as to obey," Grevinch.
"Believing on him that justifies the ungodly," Rom 4:5. "Being justified freely by his grace," Rom 3:24.
"True conversion and the performance of good works is a condition required on our part before justification," Filii Attain.
"I thank you, O Father, Lord of heaven and earth, because you have hidden these things from the wise and prudent, and have revealed them to babes. Even so, Father; for so it seemed good in your sight,"
Mat 11:25-26.
"God sends the gospel to such persons or nations, that in comparison to others, they may be said to be worthy of it," Rem.
Apol.