Prevenient Grace – God's "Go" Signal?

I’m not persuaded of the Arminian view of Prev. Grace, but I have to appreciate what the best of the Arminian thinkers were/are trying to do. The best of them want to take a position that answers well to all of the Scriptures that relate to the topic, that doesn’t make God “the author of evil/sin,” that avoids Pelagianism, and that seems to fit our experience of how people come into the Faith.

Roger Olsen is a helpful contemporary representative of classical Arminianism. But I haven’t been able to find a clear statement from him as to the scope and timing of God’s enabling grace. Maybe someone who has read more of Olsen can point me to it.

Here’s a helpful excerpt from Olson, in a 2012 post at Patheos: Prevenient Grace: Why It Matters

Calvinists also believe in prevenient grace. “Prevenient grace” is simply a term for the grace of God that goes before, prepares the way, enables, assists the sinner’s repentance and faith (conversion). According to classical Calvinism this prevenient grace is always efficacious and given only to the elect through the gospel; it effects conversion. According to classical Arminianism it is an operation of the Holy Spirit that frees the sinner’s will from bondage to sin and convicts, calls, illumines and enables the sinner to respond to the gospel call with repentance and faith (conversion).

Calvinists and Arminians agree, against Pelagianism and semi-Pelagianism, that the sinner’s will is so depraved and bound to sin that it cannot respond positively to the gospel call without supernatural grace.

Emphasis mine.

As Olson has defined it (enabling, drawing, etc.), it’s not hard to find in the NT. The more difficult part is the who, when and how. I’d like to see his thoughts on that.

[TylerR]

Don’t worry; I haven’t even been able to find a clear statement in Scripture about the very idea of prevenient grace!

For starters, how about Titus 2:11 - “For the grace of God that bringeth salvation hath appeared to all men”. I’m sure there will be plenty of argument about why this doesn’t mean what seems to be clear in the verse. But I can certainly see how the idea of prevenient grace could be gleaned from scripture.

In this post, Olson is reviewing an Arminian book on prevenient grace, and disagrees with the author a bit:

Shelton strongly affirms the idea that through the cross event all people—past, present, and future—receive sufficient assisting but resistible grace to believe and be saved. While I recognize that many of my fellow Arminians are convinced of this, I’m not as certain of it. Romans 10:17: “Faith comes by hearing and hearing by the Word of God.” It seems to me that even if some measure of prevenient grace is given by God to all people, sufficient faith to believe and receive the saving grace of God through Jesus Christ is especially tied to the gospel message and its proclamation in some form. Link

I recall seeing similar vagueness in Arminius on this point. I was not able to determine if his view was that all who hear the gospel receive sufficient grace to believe the moment they hear it, but that seems implied by some of what he says and so also with Olson.

Whatever else one might say about this view, it is certainly not accurate to call it semi-pelagian.

Later in the same post he writes.

With Calvinists I can affirm that we are all spiritually dead apart from supernatural grace, but I add only that 1) even the spiritually dead possess the formal image of God, and 2) supernatural grace heals that deadness so that sinners can at least make a decision to repent and trust in God and Christ or not.

I appreciate the way he tries to only disagree about what is genuinely a point of disagreement.

I tend to think that, in a sense, prevenient grace boils down to “everyone can believe and can make this choice in contradiction to their nature,” but I also believe that “no one will believe, given that choice.”

To my way of thinking, election is very provable, Scripturally. And the call to believe is offered legitimately to all because they can, but they won’t. It takes regeneration to make them want to believe. So prevenient grace, like unlimited atonement, is another argument of condemnation for the lost. Not that God needs another argument, but God does things lavishly and with overkill quite often.

2 Thessalonians 2:12, “in order that all may be condemned who did not believe the truth but had pleasure in unrighteousness.”

If the grounds for condemnation in 2 Thess. 2 is not believing the truth (i.e., that Christ died to atone for my sins), then you could see another argument, namely, you chose to not believe but could have.

this postulated understanding may not be correct, but we have often too easily (IMO) acknowledged that man is responsible without articulating (in a convincing way) how this reasonably possible in light of election. Prevenient grace coupled with election (which is contrary to Thiessen who rejects election) might be an interesting match up.

Thiessen is an interesting choice. His section on soteriology is the worse in the book. If I recall he sails close to semi-pelagianism, which is not the classic Arminian position (though Doerksen made them more Calvinist). Anyhow, for me election is real, but its mechanism is a mystery. A sinner will not come to Christ unless God calls him (i.e. convicts and illuminates), and certain formulations of prevenient grace would tie into that view. That said, many Arminians seem to teach that prevenient grace is given to all men, which I just don’t get.

Thiessen was the doctrines textbook at BJU when I was there. Undergrad. I’m sure they are using something better now. I seem to recall a prof or two who also felt the book was weak on soteriology.

As for the perennial debates, I find it interesting that there is a large non-semipelagian segment that doesn’t generally notice how much they agree on, because they’re divided over terminology.

I don’t want to trivialize terminology, but so many who agree that an act of divine grace is required before any sinner ever chooses to believe, disagree about what that gracious intervention should be called….with a degree of passion that often seems disproportionate.

I sometimes wonder if a completely fresh articulation might be healthy.

For those interested, you might look at my article on the subject:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/12FKxIGtjGnOeSkbXr2LiAgjxgfo1yuJN/view

[Paul Henebury]

Thiessen is an interesting choice. His section on soteriology is the worse in the book. If I recall he sails close to semi-pelagianism, which is not the classic Arminian position (though Doerksen made them more Calvinist).

However, Roger Olson in his Arminian Theology views Thiessen as classical Arminian. But it seems for Olson that prevenient grace being universal or restricted to gospel call is not a clear defining point of classical Arminianism. Because I do not currently have access to Olson’s book to reference directly, I quote from my dissertation summary (p.52 n.54, carried over from p.51) with some additional information in brackets added here for clarity:

Roger Olson distinctly argues Thiessen was “classical Arminian” based off Thiessen’s 1949 work [Lectures in Systematic Theology (1949; Grand Rapids, MI: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 1963; prior to Doerksen’s getting hold of it and changing some theology*] and specific position on prevenient grace (Arminian Theology[:Myths and Realities (Downers Grove, IL: IVP Academic, 2006)] , 42–43). However, what is not quite certain from Olson’s information is whether classical Arminian always holds to universal prevenient grace. His categorizing Thiessen as classical implies it, and his categorizing of John Wesley as classical (169), who he recognizes as also holding to universality of that grace (167), also implies it. Yet Olson considers Simon Episcopius to be a classical Arminian (169), but he did not hold to universal prevenient grace (167), rather believing prevenient grace only came “when the Word of God is heard” (166). Olson also notes, “Arminius left this question open” regarding universality, but “tended to restrict the reach of prevenient grace to the
scope of the evangelized” (167).

Regarding the * on Doerksen’s edits noted above, the paragraph prior to the one above in my dissertation I said this:

In the original edition, Thiessen is very universal about prevenient grace (155-156, 230-231). In the revised edition, Doerksen takes liberty, both steering the conversation away from Thiessen’s original view of conditional election to an unconditional election (106-108; cf. 155-156 in original), and in simply eliminating whole sections of Thiessen’s discussion (163-164; cf. 229-232 in the original, where most has been removed by Doerksen). Thiessen classifies the universal prevenient grace as a common grace (155), which is a category of graces he does deem secured by the atonement (330).

So I don’t know which version Tyler used, Thiessen originally or the Doerksen’s edits. Well, actually, his footnote says it is a 1949 original, so that is good.

Regarding

[Aaron Blumer]

Roger Olsen is a helpful contemporary representative of classical Arminianism. But I haven’t been able to find a clear statement from him as to the scope and timing of God’s enabling grace. Maybe someone who has read more of Olsen can point me to it.

I seem to recall that Olson’s book Arminian Theology: Myths and Realities does more explicitly show him taking a view that prevenient grace comes at the time of the gospel witness, but since I do not have a copy to look at right now, I cannot confirm or guide to where that was, but if you have not looked at it, you might get a hold of a copy.

BEGIN UNRELATED GRIPE: I hate the fact that Sharper Iron’s “blockquote” feature italicizes all the text of the quote. I know italicizing has become somewhat “common” on web page representations of quotes (it may even be the default of the

HTML tag in browsers), but academically, it creates issues because italics should only be used for emphasis and styling of titles to books and other major works, so it creates confusion to have whole sentences of text in italics. I would love to see a site wide, style fix to prevent blockquotes from doing that. The gray box and indent is enough of a style change to distinguish it as a quote. END GRIPE.

In his review of Prevenient Grace: God’s Provision for Fallen Humanity, Olson gives somewhat of a statement of his position:

Shelton strongly affirms the idea that through the cross event all people—past, present, and future—receive sufficient assisting but resistible grace to believe and be saved. While I recognize that many of my fellow Arminians are convinced of this, I’m not as certain of it. Romans 10:17: “Faith comes by hearing and hearing by the Word of God.” It seems to me that even if some measure of prevenient grace is given by God to all people, sufficient faith to believe and receive the saving grace of God through Jesus Christ is especially tied to the gospel message and its proclamation in some form. I would prefer to say that the gospel message is made available to many people in some form, even to those who are not reached by Christian evangelism.

And in the comments section he adds:

I wonder, though, whether God is an equal opportunity savior or whether he depends on us (the church) to disseminate prevenient grace by means of gospel preaching (and other evangelistic means)? I think Wesley would have agreed with all that you say here. I’m just not sure prevenient grace is automatically universal.

You can read the entire review here.

It’s relatively easy to edit the theme so quote blocks don’t italicize. Unfortunately, that causes other problems. One of them is that blockquote doesn’t indent properly when it appears next to an image in a teaser… So there’s little visual clue that it’s a quote in that situation. There are are various solutions, but they all involve tradeoffs, unfortunately. This is one reason italicized blockquotes are common on the web.

… having said that an idea just hit me that I don’t think I’ve tried before. It may show up in our next style update.

Ok…so back to the real topic…

Thanks to Dr Combs for the article link above. Interesting read. It seems like the question of Original Sin and imputation always ends up connected to the question of how grace operates to bring sinners to life.

And the connection makes sense. What one needs to get out of the mess one is in depends on the nature of the mess.

Article Eight: The Free Will of Man
We affirm that God, as an expression of His sovereignty, endows each person with actual free will (the ability to choose between two options), which must be exercised in accepting or rejecting God’s gracious call to salvation by the Holy Spirit through the Gospel.
We deny that the decision of faith is an act of God rather than a response of the person. We deny that there is an “effectual call” for certain people that is different from a “general call” to any person who hears and understands the Gospel.
Genesis 1:26-28; Numbers 21:8-9; Deuteronomy 30:19; Joshua 24:15; 1 Samuel 8:1-22; 2 Samuel 24:13-14; Esther 3:12-14; Matthew 7:13-14; 11:20-24; Mark 10:17-22; Luke 9:23-24; 13:34; 15:17-20; Romans 10:9-10; Titus 2:12; Revelation 22:17

-A Statement of the Traditional Southern Baptist Understanding of God’s Plan of Salvation, May 30, AD 2012

http://gulfcoastpastor.blogspot.com/2012/06/traditional-southern-baptis…

David R. Brumbelow

As Olson pointed out, by failing to include any mention prevenient grace, the statement is not quite classical Arminiansim.

But without at least that much, it’s hard to see how the intent is not semi-pelagian.