Immediate and Irresistible
placed after regeneration and is associated only with the regenerate.
Immediate and Irresistible For all these reasons the Reformed unanimously held on to the linkage between external and internal calling and hence also to the order of calling and regeneration.104 They opposed the notion that the division of the call into an external and an internal one was a "division into two separate species" and viewed it as a "division of the whole into its parts and members."105 Just as, by taking this position, they turned against the Anabaptists on the one hand, so against Pelagians of all sorts they took the position that the external call and moral suasion by the Word is insufficient for salvation and has to be followed by a special operation of the Holy Spirit in the human heart.106
This operation of the Spirit was, first of all, called an immediate one. With this term they did not, however, intend to negate what they had earlier said about the connection between the external and internal call, but rather to define their position against two alternative currents. First of all, against the Remonstrants, who held the working of God's Spirit to be a purely moral one, a working whose fruit was dependent on human assent and compliance. Posted between God's activity and its effect in the human heart (which is regeneration) is thus the free human will.
Over against that position the Reformed said that the operation of God's Spirit in regeneration is immediate; in other words, that God's Spirit itself directly enters the human heart and with infallible certainty brings about regeneration without in any way being dependent on the human will. Second, by adopting the term "immediate," they sided against Cameron and the theologians of Saumur, who deemed the "enlightenment of the intellect" to be sufficient in regeneration and believed that this
enlightened intellect then so impacts the will that, by virtue of its character, it must necessarily follow the intellect.
Accordingly, what we have here is an immediate operation of God's Spirit in the human intellect but not in the human will.
Over against this Saumurian position the Reformed generally claimed that the Holy Spirit not only impacted the human will through the intellect, but also that it penetrated the will directly and there instilled new habits immediately.107
In the second place, if the operation of God's Spirit in regeneration is absolutely independent of the human will, it may be called "irresistible." Augustine already stated: "Aid must be given to the weakness of the human will in order that divine grace may be inexorably and invincibly effective."108 Materially the Augustinians and Thomists among Catholic theologians, such as the Jansenists, also agreed with this position, for they assume an essential distinction between "sufficient" and "efficacious" grace, seeing the former as conferring the capacity and the latter as conferring the actual willing and accomplishing, and hence taught an infallible activity of efficacious grace.109 But Rome firmly rejected this doctrine. At Trent it stated that when the human heart has been touched by the illumination of the Holy Spirit, "neither is man himself utterly without doing anything while he receives that inspiration, forasmuch as he is also able to reject it; yet he is not able, by his own free will, without the grace of God, to move himself unto justice in his sight."110 And to remove all doubt and uncertainty concerning the sense of this pronouncement, it declared at the [First] Vatican Council: "Faith in itself is a gift of God, even if it does not work through love; and an act of faith is a work pertaining to salvation. Through this act man freely renders obedience to God Himself by consenting to and by cooperating with His grace, when he could resist it."111 By that decree the infallible operation of grace is factually denied and the decision about whether a person will be saved or not is made a matter of the human will. From ancient times, that was the
teaching of Pelagians and semi-Pelagians, which in the Molinistic and Congruistic systems of the Jesuits won out over Augustine and Thomas and found acceptance also among the Anabaptists, Socinians, the later Lutherans (et al.),112 and in the Netherlands by the Remonstrants.113
The term "irresistible grace" is not really of Reformed origin but was used by Jesuits and Remonstrants to characterize the doctrine of the efficacy of grace as it was advocated by Augustine and those who believed as he did. The Reformed in fact had some objections to the term because it was absolutely not their intent to deny that grace is often and indeed always resisted by the unregenerate person and therefore could be resisted. They therefore preferred to speak of the efficacy or of the insuperability of grace, or interpreted the term "irresistible" in the sense that grace is ultimately irresistible. The point of the disagreement, accordingly, was not whether humans continually resisted and could resist God's grace, but whether they could ultimately—at the specific moment in which God wanted to regenerate them and work with his efficacious grace in their heart—still reject that grace. The answer to this question, as is clearly evident from the five articles of the Remonstrants, is most intimately tied in with the doctrine of the corruption of human nature; with election (based or not based on foreseen faith); the universality and particularity of Christ's atonement; the identification of, or the distinction between, the sufficient call (external) and the efficacious call (internal); and the correctness of the distinction between the will of God's good pleasure and the revealed will in the divine being. Whereas the Remonstrants appealed to Isa. 5:1–8; 65:2–3; Ezek. 12:2; Matt.
11:21–23; 23:37; Luke 7:30; John 5:34; and Acts 7:51, and to all the exhortations to faith and repentance occurring in Scripture, the Reformed theologians took their cue from the picture
Scripture offers of fallen humanity as blind, powerless, natural, dead in sins and trespasses (Jer. 13:23; Matt. 6:23; 7:18; John
8:34; Rom. 6:17; 8:7; 1 Cor. 2:14; 2 Cor. 3:5; Eph. 2:1; etc.), and
from all the forceful words and images with which the work of grace in the human soul is described (Deut. 30:6; Jer. 31:31;
Ezek. 36:26; John 3:3, 5; 6:44; Eph. 2:1, 6; Phil. 2:13; 1 Pet. 1:3; etc.). So they spoke of the efficacy and invincibility of God's grace in regeneration and articulated this truth in a confession at the Synod of Dort.114
Third, the activity of God in regeneration was also described as a "physical operation." But there was much controversy over the correctness of this description. People were agreed that the adjective "moral" or "ethical" was too weak and wide open to misunderstanding as well. Just as on the point of human incapacity people had objected to calling it "moral incapacity,"115 although this incapacity was in no way rooted in the substance of human nature, so in connection with the work of God's Spirit in the human heart, people could not confine themselves to the term "moral." This word, after all, had been used by the Remonstrants to indicate that the operation of grace was dependent on human consent and compliance and therefore resulted only externally in a change of the actions of the will, a reformation of life. And people could be even less content with the word "moral" when later, in the Reformed churches themselves, Cameron and his pupils Amyraut, Testard, Daillé, and Blondel described "particular" or "subjective" grace (which they distinguished from "universal" or "objective" grace) as an "ethical" or "moral" grace and in so doing paved the way for the congruist doctrine of Pajon and Placaeus.116 But then exactly what was the correct description was hard to say. The Synod of Dort stated that "regeneration, the new creation, the raising from the dead and the making alive … is an entirely supernatural work, one that is at the same time most powerful and most pleasing, a marvelous, hidden, and inexpressible work, which is not lesser than or inferior in power to that of creation or of raising the dead, as Scripture (inspired by the author of this work) teaches."117 And theologians speak of a "physical" or "hyperphysical," a "real" or "effective," a "persuasive" or