Soteriology

The Lordship Salvation Issue is surely one of those many topics where the less I say the better. Nevertheless, I do want to say something (with some sense of trepidation).

Most of my friends are non-Lordship Salvation. Many are far more informed than I am. In many ways I’m over my head, and would rather avoid division – if for nothing else to avoid embarrassing myself. So in the few discussions I’ve had, I’ve tended not to say much.

Let every person do their own study and come to their own conclusion.

Few doctrines divide God’s people like the doctrine of election. Since both the word, “election” in its various forms, plus the concept using different words is found repeatedly in the Bible, some explanation must be offered. It cannot simply be ignored.

Although there are various shades of interpretation, in the end, it boils down to two possibilities. Either election means God chose His people without reference to anything He saw in man (unconditional election), or God chose people based upon something He saw or foresaw within them (conditional election).

In this excerpt from his classic Lectures in Systematic Theology, Henry Thiessen explains the concept of prevenient grace:¹

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I first encountered the term “High Calvinism” when I read Lewis Chafer’s systematic theology. This term is a bit old-fashioned now, of course. If someone is a “High Calvinist,” it means he’s very Reformed in his soteriology. This surely described R.C. Sproul!

Reposted from Analogical Thoughts, with permission. Read the series.

In this highly irregular series of posts, I’ve been considering the question, How well is Molinism supported by the Bible? As I explained in the first installment: