Union with Christ, the Duplex Gratia, and the Current Debate: A Pulpit Perspective

The current discussion in the blogosphere concerning union with Christ and the duplex gratia of justification and sanctification is a good one. We should have this debate, so long as it remains brotherly and respectful.

I’m actually not here to chime in on the technicalities of the doctrinal discussion – far better minds than my own are already doing that well enough. I want to address the discussion from the perspective of the pulpit. That is to say, from a practical and pastoral perspective relative to the week in and week out work of the minister of the Word.

And here I have only two points I’d like to make.

First, justification by faith alone must never become assumed, but must remain explicit in our preaching. With zeal to build up the holiness of the congregation, many pastors go on to a practical series of sermons where he addresses the nuts and bolts of the Christian life. Here he speaks to Christians, or to those he assumes are Christians. It seems that here justification by faith alone is not relevant. After all, so it seems, that doctrine is for converting unbelievers, not for the saints. What the saints need is teaching on what to do, not on what is done for them in Christ’s work of justifying the ungodly. The result of this can be two-fold. First, it may lead a congregation to forget the fact that they are still – in and of themselves – ungodly. And all they need are tips for better living. They come to church to get some good life advice on how to live the Christian life. Or, on the other hand, after hearing a series of sermons on what they should be doing, they become honest with themselves and discover that they aren’t living the Christian life as they should. The end result of this is despair. They get a bunch of good and biblical dos and don’ts, but because justification by faith alone is assumed rather than explicitly taught, they forget who they are in Christ no matter how much they fall short of God’s law.

Secondly, preaching from indicative to imperative is not enough. I think everyone in the current debate agrees that we must preach the imperatives as they are grounded in the great indicatives of the Gospel. And if we did this, my first point above wouldn’t really be a problem. But another problem arises if we preach in a linear why from the indicatives to the imperatives and stop there. The problem is we leave off on a legal note. We leave off with man. We leave off with what I am supposed to do. And our people go out from church, all charged up to change the world, and then horribly fall short on Monday morning. OK, if the sermon was really good, maybe they make it until Tuesday. And once again, they are driven to despair. Or, they fool themselves – or otherwise excuse themselves – and convince themselves that they are keeping the law they heard on Sunday. Therefore, we must also remind our people that even their sanctification – their gifted sanctification which flows from Christ himself – will be imperfect. Therefore, and I often tell my congregation this, Christ’s justifying grace redeems me not only from my past sins of open rebellion, but it also pays for my “good works” as well. If it is true that not even the most sanctified of believers in this life approach perfect obedience, and if our best of works are really as filthy rags in the sight of God, then Christ’s justification is not only a reality which became mine “back then” at my conversion. But we must remind our people that their justification is a continual and abiding reality, even and especially when I am living a holy life. Even when I say no to sin, and turn from it, that act was itself so mingled with sin that I praise God I am forgiven of even the imperfection found in that good work. I think that much preaching in Reformed pulpits can lead people to think that they come in and out of a state of justification. But we must remind our people that if they are really in union with Jesus Christ by a sincere faith, no matter how bad they fail in their sanctification throughout the course of the week, they are no less justified as they were when they were first converted. To say otherwise is to lead people to think that they are justified by their sanctification.

The beauty of the doctrine of the duplex gratia is how justification and sanctification are co-terminus benefits in the life of the believer. Even while I am being sanctified, I am at the same time justified in Christ. And as one who is justified in Christ, I am also being sanctified. We can never leave one or the other out of our pulpits.

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The World Redeemed From Within

The redemptive-historical steps from John 1:1 to 1:12 are some of the most remarkable in all the Scriptures. The eternal God (John 1:1-3) became man to enter the world that He had created (v.10)–a world that had rebellion against Him (v. 10). He came to the nation He had created for Himself (v. 11)–a nation that rejected Him (v. 11). In that rejection He redeemed out of that nation and that world a people for Himself, to make them sons of God. Note John’s transitions:

“The Word was God…without Him nothing was made that was made…He was in the world, and the world was made through Him, but the world did not know Him…He came to His own (i.e. the Jews) and His own did not receive Him…But as many as received Him, to them He gave the right to become children of God, to those who believe in His name.”

William Still put it so well when he wrote:

The preexistence of Christ is most plainly testified to in John 1:1, 2, 18; Phil. 2:6a; Col. 1:15; 1 John 1:1a…He is begotten, not created; the only and eternally begotten of the Father, before all worlds. With His coming, the eternal broke into time and became one with creation which had gone wrong, and which He could redeem only from within.

The greatest feat, drama and triumph in the history of all worlds is how God became Man, to be Man forever, and so do God’s job as Man without ceasing to be God, and yet as a true and proper Man. The Westminster Confession says that, ‘two whole, perfect and distinct natures, the Godhead and the manhood, were inseparably joined together in one person, without conversion, composition or confusion. Which person is very God and very Man, yet one Christ.’

It is only as we see the Man Christ Jesus thus that we understand what is happening in the Gospels and in the Acts, and what is being said in the Epistles and in the Revelation. If men would read the Gospels with this in view, they would find them, not full of problems, but full of answers to set them at rest about all their quibbles, engaging them in that “creative” thinking by the Holy Spirit which expands the mind and enlarges and inflames the heart until praise of Him pours forth spontaneously. 1

Still, William Notes on Galatians (Aberdeen: Didasko Press, 1972) p. 52

If There Must Be Trouble, Let it Be in My Day

Thomas Paine–the pro-revolutionary patriot and pamphleteer–was certainly no Christian and no fan of Christianity. But I find this sentence to be sound Christian thinking:

Not a man lives on the continent but fully believes that a separation must some time or other finally take place, and a generous parent should have said, ‘If there must be trouble, let it be in my day, that my child may have peace’; and this single reflection, well applied, is sufficient to awaken every man to duty.

Of course, Paine was rallying the country to independence from Britain, but his words can apply equally well to other ventures. Is there some institutional change you know must happen but have been putting off for fear of your own hardship? Is there a family confrontation that must take place but you are waiting for someone else to handle it and let you off the hook? Is there a difficult decision to be made in your church but you are happy to let the bomb explode in some other lap? Is there a need in the world, a crisis in your city, or a cause in your country that you are waiting for others to take up without you? Are you quietly saying to yourself, “If there must be trouble, let it be in someone else’s day”?

Christian virtue is far different. If you or your family or your church or your movement or your nation are in trouble now, should not your heart cry out, “Better that I face this instead of my children”? If suffering is to come, if hardship is to ensue, don’t you want to be summoned to the task rather than someone else? Aren’t you eager to be a “generous parent”?

May God awaken a sense of duty for all who to ought to face trouble now that others can be at peace later.

 

Kings of Judah: Hezekiah’s Heroic God

2 Chronicles 32:1-32:33

So the Lord saved Hezekiah and the inhabitants of Jerusalem…he provided for them on every side. (32:22)

One of the most interesting books I’ve read in recent years is entitled What If? The World’s Foremost Military Historians Imagine What Might Have Been. It’s a book of counterfactual history where scholars suggest how history would be different if key conflicts–the Battle of Brooklyn, Midway, D-Day, etc.–had gone differently.

The first chapter, by William McNeill, is about the plague that saved Jerusalem in 701 B.C. Assyria was threatening to destroy Jerusalem and wipe Judah off the map. This was no idle threat. Nation after nation had fallen to this superpower from the north. But God would not abandon his people. “Because you have prayed to me concerning Sennacherib king of Assyria,” the Lord reassured King Hezekiah, “I will defend this city and save it.” Overnight the entire army was wiped out and the city spared without one drop of Israelite blood.

These events confirmed for the Jews the implausible and world changing belief that their God was the only true God, making the failed siege of Jerusalem the most fateful might-have-been of history. “Never before or since,” writes McNeill, “has so much depended on so few, believing so wholly in their one true god, and in such bold defiance of common sense.”

 

Luther and the Jews

Luther and the Jews I: The Problem

Most preachers and teachers have what one student of mine calls `the candy cane class’ — that sermon or lecture which is in the back pocket, so to speak, committed to memory and there to be pulled out at a moment’s notice if, on a Sunday morning, somebody requests that you preach or teach at the last minute. For me, it’s what I call my Luther shtick: a brief account of his life up to 1518, culminating in an exposition and application of his teaching on what it is that makes a theologian of the cross.

Some years ago, I became aware, however, that each time I gave this talk, one of the first questions to come from the audience would be some variation on this basic theme: `But didn’t Luther hate the Jews and write pamphlets about them that led to the Holocaust?’

Of course, if like Rousas Rushdoony — for those at the creepier end of the Christian Life and Worldview spectrum, the doyen of historical scholars (`scholar’ being their term for him, not mine) — you don’t think the Holocaust happened, this isn’t a problem (see my posts of some years back); back on Planet Earth, however, the question has some urgency for those of us who want to make the case for Luther’s continued relevance. We can’t really dodge this one by referring to a few skinhead historians or writing foaming-at-the-mouth taxi-driver style blogs accusing our opponents of being educationally sub-normal bleeding heart liberals.

Indeed, given the fact that racism and genocide played prominent and evil roles in the history of the last 100 years, such a question is, of course, always more than just a question of the `Didn’t Luther suffer from constipation?’ variety. If Luther did hate the Jews, then surely he was a racist; and if he was a racist, couldn’t this be seen as a good gauge of his theology? And should we not therefore dismiss it as bad — at best a dead end, at worst an ideology of evil?

Certainly this view has found some significant supporters. Most famously, the American journalist, William Shirer, a man who witnessed the rise of Hitler while working in Berlin in the 1930s, proposed a positive and direct connection between Luther and the German anti-Semitism which fueled the Holocaust. Then, if you care to spend any time researching Holocaust Denial on the web, on the myriad anti-Semitic sites out there, you will find quite a few which link to Luther’s writing on the Jews. In addition, certain strands of the New Perspective on Paul, have posited links between Luther’s theology of justification and racism. This is all significant evidence that, yes, there may well be a huge theological problem here.

To put the case in a nutshell, the piece of writing which stands at the heart of the question is On the Jews and Their Lies, a work from 1543. Now, anyone who has read any of my recent posts will know that, when it comes to uncritical fans of Luther, I am right up there with the best of them; but even for a benighted Lutherophile like myself, this book is vile. Its rhetoric is revolting, and many of its suggestions — not least locking up Jews in their synagogues and burning the buildings to the ground — are not only horrific in and of themselves but, in light of events in Europe between 1933 and 1945, horribly prophetic.

Thus, the question I became accustomed to being asked at Sunday School hour is indeed a good one: did Luther and his theology in some way inspire or cause the Holocaust? If he did so, and this connects directly to his theology, then clearly such theology is morally repugnant.

There is the problem in a nutshell. Tomorrow, I hope to offer some lines of reflection that, if not absolving Luther of being in this regard a vile bigot, at least point to the fact that the tirade of 1543 is an aberration from his overall theology, not an integral part of it.

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Luther and the Jews II: The Context

In my last post, I tried to summarise what we might call `the Shirer thesis’ which posits tight connection between Luther and the Holocaust. In this post, I want to start to offer an avenue of critique.

The first thing any historian needs to do when looking at a text is ask: `Is this text typical of the time or unusual?’ The typical never really needs any explanation, after all — it’s exactly what one expects, what everyone was doing at the time etc. Rather, it is the unusual, `the dog that did not bark,’ as Sherlock Holmes once said, that peaks the interest. So, is Luther’s treatise typical or atypical of the time in which it was written?

In fact, sad though it is to acknowledge, the 1543 tirade against the Jews is pretty typical of medieval and Renaissance rants against Judaism. Of course, nasty comments about Jews are the stock in trade of Christian writers right back to the Apostolic Fathers of the late first and early second centuries (e.g., The Didache; the Martyrdom of Polycarp); but by the late Middle Ages anti-Jewish diatribes were something of an established form, with their own themes and idioms.

Looked at in this way, Luther is not actually doing anything unusual. In fact, he even uses typical elements of late medieval anti-Jewish literature: for example, he talks about the `Blood Libel,’ a claim that Jews kidnapped Christian children and used them for ritual sacrifices. It was nonsense, of course, and most unpleasant of Luther to use it; but in so using it, he nonetheless indicated that his work was not unique but part of an ongoing tradition.

The second thing a historian needs to ask is: are the categories of the sixteenth century the same as today? Put more simply: we think of the hatred of Jews as an example of racism, and racism is the bogus idea that someone if inferior based on the biological category of race. Is this the case with Luther? Did he write against Jews because he was racist in the modern sense?

The answer is no. Race as we think of it today is really a concept of relatively modern provenance, something that arguably emerges in the nineteenth century as interest grew in biology, evolution etc. The ideology of the Holocaust was undoubtedly racist in this sense: the Nuremberg laws of 1935, which effectively paved the way in judicial terms for what became the Final Solution, made it clear that conversion to Christianity did not exempt someone: for the Nazis the matter was one of blood (albeit built on completely fallacious science) not of religion. For Luther, however, Judaism was a religious category. He had no real grasp of racial identity and no concern for the kind of racial issues which dominated Nazi ideology. And this points some of the way towards a resolution of our consideration of the Shirer thesis which we shall state in Part III

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Luther and the Jews III: Lessons

In yesterday’s post, I pointed to the fact that, while we today find Luther’s 1543 work, On the Jews and their Lies, extraordinarily vile and offensive, it was, sadly, in many ways a rather conventional piece for the time. I also noted that Luther was also not operating with racial categories: he considered Jews evil because they opposed the gospel, not because they were racially inferior. Conversion to Christianity would have solved the problem. This does not make his hate any more acceptable, but it does mean that the road between Luther and Auschwitz is a complicated one which defies direct and simplistic attempts to make him one of the primary historical culprits.

I also noted on Friday that it is the unusual, not the usual, which is often most interesting to the historian. Luther’s 1543 treatise is not unusual; but this was not the only book he wrote on the Jews; and the other book, the earlier one, is much more unusual. That Jesus Christ Was Born a Jew (1523) is a remarkable piece of work. In it, far from calling for the Jews to be incinerated in their own places of worship, Luther calls on Christians to be good and loving neighbours to them, to help them, to extend hospitality to them, to reach out to them with the love of Christ. In the context of the times, this is what we would now call an incredibly progressive position. So why the change? From enlightened gentlemen to foaming at the mouth extremist in just 20 years?

The reason lies with Luther’s understanding of the times in which he was living. Scholars have become increasingly aware over the years that Luther is part of a late medieval culture of eschatological expectancy. To put it simply: he thought his rediscovery of the gospel was a sign that history was about to end, with the triumph of the church and the return of Christ.

This connects to his early attitude to the Jews. The 1523 treatise was written in the context of great hope for the gospel, and his advice then is to reach out to them as positively as possible, to win them for Christ. When we move forward to 1543, by contrast, Luther is old, ill, and, above all, disillusioned both by the divisions among the Reformers and the way in which the gospel has not carried all before it. In such a context, he looks for those who are responsible; and, among them, he sees the Jews, those who have the Holy Scriptures but who adamantly refuse to see Christ therein. It is this that drives him to write such a bombastically bitter and hateful treatise against them.

What lessons can we draw from this? First, I would suggest that the connection between Luther and the Holocaust is clearly very complicated. Luther was no racist in the modern terms because he did not have the categories; rather, he was fairly typical of the kind of anti-Jewish sentiment which later morphed through a complex of contexts into modern, racial, anti-Semitism. His treatise of 1543 is grim reading and has been appropriated by various neo-Nazi and racist groups; but the history of textual reception is different from the original textual intention. This, of course, is not to excuse the 1543 work or ameliorate its viciousness; it is simply to point out that the story is more complicated than many have made it out to be.

Secondly, there is no necessary connection between his doctrine of justification and his hatred of Jews. Indeed, in the early years, his doctrine of justification was part of what made him break with the standards of his day and reach out to the Jewish community. The connection is rather more with his eschatology, and the failures of the Reformation project as a whole. This is important because his hatefulness to the Jews does not mean we cannot learn positively from things he said and did elsewhere.

Third, the whole matter should be a salutary warning that Christians need to pray continually that they will finish well. It is sad that Luther’s 1543 treatise overshadows that of 1523, but quite understandable, given the content. What a tragedy that a man used for such great good in the church could also become in popular culture associated with something as vile and evil as the Holocaust. Few of us, I expect, will make errors as public and influential as his; but that is a sign rather of singular lack of importance and stature on our part, not any particular moral superiority. Those with the greatest gifts in the church are often those with the greatest flaws. As we age, and as the dreams and aspirations of youth are snuffed out one by one like so many candles, and as the darkness of death starts to encroach, the temptation to bitterness and recrimination no doubt increases. At that point, more than any other, we need to seek grace to remain faithful and gracious. The sins of youth are terrible enough; for some, the sins of old age are even worse.

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Sobering Report on College Drinking

The article is entitled “College Drinking is Liberating, and a Good Excuse.” I’m not sure if the folks at USA Today agree with the title, but it seems that college students certainly do. In the August 22 report, Sharon Jayson maintains that college students drink a lot and there’s not much anyone can do about it.

Colleges trying to stem the tide of student drinking have focused on the evils of intoxication and all the trouble that can ensue when students drink too much. But new psychological research suggests that the downsides of excessive drinking aren’t bad enough to make students stop.

“They intend to get intoxicated,” says psychologist E. Scott Geller, director of the Center for Applied Behavior Systems at Virginia Tech.

“We have shown in several studies that their intentions influence their behavior. If they intend to get drunk, it’s difficult to stop that.”

Geller, who has been studying alcohol awareness since the mid-1980s, notes that education hasn’t worked.

“We thought if we could demonstrate to students that their performance deteriorated under alcohol, they would be convinced that their alcohol consumption has put them at risk,” Geller says. But “knowing that one is impaired, physically and even emotionally, did not seem to reduce alcohol consumption.”

Binge drinking is so bad that when researches tried using Breathalyzers at parties and bars it only encouraged students to drink more. No matter how many bad consequences are put in front of students–drunk driving, addictions, unwanted sexual intercourse, unwanted pregnancy, sexually transmitted diseases, decreased performance in school–Jayson argues that it just doesn’t offset the two perceived benefits of drinking: it’s liberating and a good excuse.

On the former, students thinking of alcohol as “liquid courage.” It makes them more fun, more adventurous, less tied to inhibitions. On the latter, drinking is seen as a convenient way of avoiding personal responsibility. The sober girl who hooks up with a complete stranger might be considered a slut. But if she’s drunk, then it’s not really a mark on her character; she just had a few too many. Likewise, many students feel justified if they miss class or perform poorly because of a hangover. No matter what people tell them about the possible dangers of drinking, getting drunk, for many college students, is the best way to have fun. And whatever negative consequences may come, these are thought to reflect on the alcohol not on the individual.

What to Do?

How should Christians respond? Here we are at the start of another school year with thousands of students returning to classes and thousands more leaving home for the first time. Many of these students are already excited to drink. Others will be sucked into the party scene their first weekend and may not pull out of it for years…or ever. Many professing Christians will live duplicitous lives–getting smashed on the weekends while still trying to be the good Christian boy or girl their parents and ministry friends imagine them to be. The problem is huge and anyone wishing to minister to college students needs to think about a biblical approach.

Here are a few suggestions on how to begin formulating a Christian response to drunkenness on our college campuses.

1. Know your enemy. Like a good AA course, the first step is admitting we have a problem. I don’t need to give you statistics to convince you that lots and lots of college students drink alcohol to get drunk. Churches and Christian leaders must not take their eyes off of this singular fact. Take almost any college in the country, especially the big state schools, and I can just about guarantee that the biggest obstacle to Christian discipleship is not Richard Dawkins or Bart Ehrman or all the heady objections to Christianity that our apologetics are meant to counter. We need apologetics. I’m 100% for taking every thought captive to Christ. But for most 17-22 year-olds the most common temptations to sin are alcohol and sex. Even when there are intellectual objections to Christianity, these are often just cover for a debauched lifestyle. Tens of thousands of college students walk away from the church this year or never give it a chance because their main goal each week is to get smashed and hook up. Rare is the campus ministry that needs to talk about Derrida more than drunkenness.

2. Demonstrate a mature attitude toward alcohol. Some Christians go farther than Scripture in condemning alcohol. I won’t get into that argument here, but I don’t believe you can condemn alcohol from the Bible. If you try, many folks will swing to the other side when they realize your arguments don’t work. On the other hand, the Christians that recognize the good gift of wine or beer need to grow up at times. Christian upperclassmen (and other adults) who can drink legally should be careful with alcohol consumption around underage believers. They should not talk about beer like it’s the coolest thing since Sufjan Stevens. Christian liberty is no reason for social life and conversation to revolve around the conspicuous consumption of alcohol.

3. Be boldly biblical. There is good wisdom in admonishing sinners by presenting the negative consequences of sin. “You reap what you sow” is how the Bible puts it. So it’s appropriate to warn binge drinkers of STD’s and addictions and DUI’s and scrambling your brains on a car antenna (I won’t go into details, but it was the most disturbing story I heard while I was in college). And yet the Bible doesn’t just say, “Stop getting drunk because it will hurt you.” It also says, “Stop getting drunk because God hates it.” Drunkards do not inherit the kingdom of heaven (1 Cor. 6:10). Drunkards do not belong in the church’s fellowship (1 Cor. 5:11). Of course, there is forgiveness for the sin of drunkenness. But the Bible repeatedly rebukes those who seek after this sin. Woe to those who run after strong drink, Isaiah says (5:11). Do not get drunk, is Paul’s command (Eph. 5:18). This is what God has to say about the tradition of partying every weekend while in college: “Let us walk properly as in the daytime, not in orgies and drunkenness, not in sexual immorality and sensuality, not in quarreling and jealousy. But put on the Lord Jesus Christ, and make no provision for the flesh, to gratify its desires” (Rom. 13:13-14).

4. Show tough love. There’s a fine line between caring for your drunken friend (who may legitimately hurt himself or others) and enabling sin. Don’t let friends drink and drive and don’t let friends crack their skulls open (I saw people come close in college). But don’t feel sorry for the weekend warriors. Don’t pick up all their messes or remove all their consequences. This line from the USA Today article stuck out: “The campus environment provides so much social support that even when students have bad experiences drinking, the help they get from friends afterward is seen as a positive.” If you are interested in real community, take a risk and show some tough love.

5. Remind the Christians who they are. I realize that many of the binge drinkers have nothing to do with Christianity. But at least in the Midwest (and I’m sure in the South), most college students claim some Christian affiliation. Press home their profession of Christ. Tell them what it means to be a new creation. Help them see who they are in Christ. Show them that because they are joined to Christ they take Christ with them to get hammered and get in bed with someone. Teach them again all the good news of Christ crucified for sinners and Christ raised for newness of life. Then implore them to live as if they actually believed what they say they believe.

 

The Sincere Offer of the Gospel

TurretinFan writes:

Is the “free offer” of the gospel really “sincere” if Jesus only died for some men and not all? If there is no atonement available for them, the offer seems insincere.

This is a frequent objection, particularly from Amyraldians and Arminians. If you think that the gospel is “Jesus died for you,” then this objection makes a lot of sense. If we’re supposed to tell people indiscriminately that Christ died for them, but he didn’t, that doesn’t seem very sincere.

Scriptures, however, don’t present the gospel that way. In Scripture, the gospel is expressed in terms of repenting of your sins and believing on (i.e. trusting in) Jesus Christ for salvation. If you trust in Christ and repent of your sins, God will have mercy on you.

There is a world of difference between those two messages. One message makes an unconditional assertion regarding what Christ has done. The other message makes a conditional assertion about what God will do.

Yet, even among those who will grant to us that the gospel is not, “Jesus died for you,” some people still don’t like the idea of salvation being offered to those for whom God has not made any provision. Indeed, our Amyraldian and Arminian friends sometimes urge on us the idea that such a conditional offer is not “sincere” unless God has made preparations for those people.

The mere absence of enough provision for everyone to be saved, however, doesn’t explain this objection. Suppose a company offers to “anyone who is willing to come down here and listen to us explain the benefits of our new tractor,” an incentive of “$5, just for coming down and listening to the talk.” No one would consider it “insincere” if the company doesn’t actually have $5 times the number of people who will hear the offer, so long as they have $5 times the number of people that they think will accept the offer.

So, as long as the provision is sufficient for those who will “accept” the offer, we don’t view the offer as insincere. Since, under the Calvinist framework, God has made provision for all who will come to Christ, the offer of the gospel should also be considered to be sincere by this standard.

The intuition behind the objection that remains, however, is that an “offer” doesn’t seem sincere, if you have no intention of giving the offered thing to the person to whom you are offering it. For example, when a child offers to share an ice cream cone, it sometimes happens that this is simply an imitation of a parent’s offer to share the parent’s cone. If the parent were to try to accept the child’s offer, the child might greedily refuse to allow the parent to have a bite. So, the child has only offered to share the cone because the child thought the offer would be refused. Such an offer is insincere.

Of course, by this time we are now dealing with the kind of objection that an Amyraldian, or someone like Ponter, cannot consistently make. After all, the problem with the child’s offer is not that he doesn’t have a cone to share, but that he does not intend to give up the cone. The Amyraldian admits that God does not intend to save the non-elect. Therefore, whether or not a provision is made seems utterly moot.

Nevertheless, for those who insist that God must intend to save, we may still legitimately question the weight of this objection. Isn’t it enough that God intends to save everyone who “accepts” the “offer”? The idea that God must intend to save all those whom he knows will refuse seems absurd when expressed that way. Thus, we may conclude that while such an objection may have some limited intuitive appeal, it does not hold up to intellectual scrutiny.

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A gentleman by the name of David Poner objects to this and uses an analogy to express this:

David says to his friend Paddy,

Paddy, if God were to say to me, “David, I want to offer you a green polka dotted unicorn for your next birthday, all you have to do, David, is to believe and embrace my offer, you will get a green-spotted unicorn for your birthday,” God would be thoroughly sincere in this offer.

Paddy, the Irish Leprechaun, says to David,

But that would be impossible David, because everyone knows that green spotted unicorns don’t exist in this world. God could not sincerely offer to give you something that does not exist.

Ponter has tried to bias the example by picking something very fanciful. Let’s pick something less fanciful. Suppose that God simply promises 1 ounce more gold than currently exists. Well, in that case, I think we would all recognize that God would not be challenged to fulfill that offer simply because of the present non-existence of the last ounce of gold, since God can easily make more gold. It doesn’t even require omnipotence to make a finite amount of gold. So, the intuition that God cannot offer what he doesn’t presently have is mistaken.

Moreover, Ponter’s analogy seems flawed for another reason. The gospel (in its primary sense) doesn’t promise to give you a thing or object. It promises salvation from your sins. God is saying that if you trust in Christ and repent of your sins, you will be forgiven, adopted, justified, and so on.

Maybe you will say, “but what about our heavenly mansions?” Maybe you have something there! Will heaven be a ghost town of empty mansions of folks who were offered the gospel but didn’t accept? Or does God actually only prepare mansions for those who trust in Christ? Intuitively, one would not expect heaven to be full of unoccupied mansions. But is that what Ponter thinks is necessary to make God’s offer sincere?