Exploring the doctrine of salvation—how sinners are saved by grace through faith in Christ.
Reading Time: 9 minutesQuestion 07036. The argument between Calvinism and Arminianism has been running for four centuries and shows no sign of tiring, which tells you either that the questions are unanswerable or that they matter enormously. I think it is the second. What is at stake is how God saves, what human beings contribute, for whom Jesus…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 07035. Effectual calling is the Reformed teaching that alongside the outward call of the gospel, which goes to everybody who hears a sermon, there is an inward call which God issues only to the elect and which always achieves what it was sent to do. On this understanding the outward call can be refused…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 07034. Predestination and foreknowledge are two words that make many Christians flinch, and the flinching usually has more to do with what they have heard about the words than with what the Bible does with them. Predestination sounds like fatalism. Foreknowledge sounds like a divine spreadsheet. Neither impression survives an honest look at the…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 07033. The doctrine of election is one of those subjects where people arrive with their minds already made up and their defences already raised, and I do not blame them. Few doctrines have caused more heat, more caricature and more pastoral damage when handled carelessly. Yet the word is in the Bible, it is…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 07032. The ordo salutis is Latin for order of salvation, and it refers to the logical sequence in which the various parts of salvation relate to one another. It is a theologian’s framework rather than a phrase you will find in Scripture, and I want to be honest about that from the outset. No…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 07029. Redemption in Christ is a word borrowed from the slave market and the auction block, and I think we lose most of its force because we have never stood in either. When Paul writes about being bought with a price, his first readers did not need the metaphor explained. Many of them had…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 07028. Reconciliation with God presupposes something most people would rather not admit, which is that a real estrangement exists in the first place. You cannot reconcile parties who were never at odds. So before we can say anything useful about how peace is made, we have to be honest about how the quarrel started…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 07027. Adoption as sons is, to my mind, the warmest word in the whole vocabulary of salvation, and it is the one most often skated over. Justification tells me my legal position has changed. Redemption tells me my bondage has ended. Regeneration tells me my nature has been renewed. Adoption tells me something further…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 07026. Imputed righteousness is the answer to a question that ought to keep every honest person awake: how can a guilty man stand in front of a holy God and not be destroyed? Imputation is the accounting word Scripture uses for what God does about that, and once you grasp it you will never…
Reading Time: 5 minutesQuestion 07025. The relationship between faith and works is where a great many Christians tie themselves in knots, and I understand why. Paul says a person is justified by faith apart from works of the law. James says faith without works is dead. Put those two sentences side by side without care and you have…