Three Questions to Ask a Provisionist

Posted on by

A Follow-Up on Arminians, Provisionists, and Where the Real Disagreement Lies

After my recent article on Provisionism, a reader wrote to ask a practical question. Granted that many of the people who reject the doctrines of grace today are not Arminians, what should I actually ask someone in the first few minutes of a conversation, before we get to the meat of it, so that I know who I am talking with? That is the right question, and it deserves its own answer.

The reason it matters is simple. Most of the debates I have watched go wrong, and most of the ones I have taken part in that went wrong, went wrong at the start. Two men began arguing about grace before either of them had found out what the other believed about the sinner. They used the same words, drawing and Spirit and gospel and faith, and assumed the words meant the same things. Half an hour later they were no further along, and each had concluded that the other was not listening. Three questions, asked early and listened to carefully, would have saved them much frustration.

Here they are. Each has a passage or two behind it, and each tells you something different about the man across the table.

Question One: What Must Happen Inside a Sinner Before He Can Believe?

Put it this way. When a sinner hears the gospel, is there anything the Holy Spirit must do in him before he is able to believe it, or does hearing the message give him everything he needs?

This is the question that sorts the three positions in one answer. The classical Arminian will say that something must be done, that God gives a grace which makes the sinner able to respond, and that the sinner may still refuse it. The Reformed believer will say that something must be done, and that when God does it, the sinner comes, because his will has been made new. The Provisionist will say that no prior inward change is needed, nothing that must overcome an inherited inability. The Spirit draws, but He draws through the message itself, which is sufficient, and the sinner was always able to respond to it.

Listen for which answer you get, because the rest of the conversation depends on it. If the man says the Spirit must first do something in the sinner, you and he share the ground that Calvinists and Arminians have always shared, and your disagreement will be about what that something is. If he says the hearing is enough, you are hearing the Provisionist answer, and whatever he calls himself, the question of effectual grace is not yet on the table. There is a prior question, whether fallen man is unable at all, and that has to be settled first.

One guard here. Some will say that the Spirit convicts, and that can sound as if they have granted an inward work. Ask whether that conviction changes the will or only presents the truth to it. A good way to find out is to ask what the Spirit’s conviction does to the sinner that confronting him with the truth does not. On the Provisionist account the answer is that it does the same thing, only with divine weight behind it: the Spirit presses the truth through the preaching, and the friend’s rebuke may itself be His instrument. That is a real purpose, and I am not saying the system has none. But notice what the account leaves out. Conviction, so understood, addresses a will that was already able to respond. It does not restore an ability lost in Adam, because on this view none was lost. If that is the answer, it is the Provisionist answer in words we both use, and the inability question is still untouched. If it changes the will, you are not done yet, because the Arminian says that too. Press it: did that work make him able and leave him free to refuse, or did it make him willing so that he comes?

The passage to have ready is John 6:44: “No one can come to me unless the Father who sent me draws him.” Can. The word is about ability, not permission. Our Lord is not saying that no one is allowed to come without the drawing. He is saying that no one is able to.

The rest of the verse says more: “and I will raise him up on the last day.” The one who is drawn is the one who is raised. Some will say the promise applies only to the one who is drawn and then comes, so that the drawing can still be refused, and the pronoun by itself does not shut that door. The surrounding verses do. “All that the Father gives me will come to me” (6:37). The Father’s will is that the Son “should lose nothing of all that he has given me, but raise it up on the last day” (6:39). And “everyone who has heard and learned from the Father comes to me” (6:45). Given, drawn, taught, coming, raised: it is one group all the way through, and Jesus never describes a person who was drawn by the Father and did not come. The drawing in this chapter is the kind that arrives.

Do not expect the verse to end the conversation, though. Provisionists quote it too, and agree that the drawing is necessary. The verse settles that something must be done. What it does to the sinner is the question you are asking, and you will have to press it.

Question Two: Two People Hear the Same Sermon. One Believes. What Made the Difference?

This question finds out where a man locates the deciding factor in salvation, and it does so without asking him to defend a system. Describe the scene plainly. Two people sit side by side under the same preaching. The same Christ is set before both. One believes and is saved. The other walks out unmoved. What was the difference between them?

Watch what he does with it. There are three answers you are likely to hear. If his answer is that the one who believed was more open, more humble, more willing to be honest with himself, then he has told you that the difference lay in the sinner. He may not say it in those words, and he may not like having it put in those words, but that is where the answer lands. The decisive thing in the salvation of that man was something the man supplied. If his answer is that both heard the same sufficient word and the difference is that one refused and was hardened for it, you are still on Provisionist ground. God did act differently on that account, but afterward and in judgment, not beforehand in making one of them willing, and the prior question, whether either man was able before he chose, has not been touched.

And if his answer is that God did something in the one that He did not do in the other, do not take that as a concession yet. Ask the next question: did that work of God bring him willingly to faith, or could he still have finally refused it? That is where the Arminian and the Reformed believer part company, and it is the only place a real concession can be made.

Two texts belong here. Romans 9:16: “So then it depends not on human will or exertion, but on God, who has mercy.” And 1 Corinthians 4:7, which is the question behind the question: “What do you have that you did not receive?” Paul asked it of Corinthians boasting over their favorite teachers, so applying it to faith is a step beyond the verse’s first setting. But the principle is stated without limit, and it bites here. If faith is the one thing the sinner brought to the transaction, then the sinner has something he did not receive, and Paul’s question has an answer it was never meant to have.

Question Three: What Did Adam’s Sin Do to You?

This is the question the reader who wrote to me was reaching for, and it needs to be put with care, because a careless version of it learns nothing. If you ask a Provisionist whether he believes in original sin, he will say yes, and he will mean it. The document Soteriology 101 points to as its account of sin, Article Two of the 2012 Statement of the Traditional Southern Baptist Understanding of God’s Plan of Salvation, affirms that because of the fall “every person inherits a nature and environment inclined toward sin.” Then it denies the two things that matter: “We deny that Adam’s sin resulted in the incapacitation of any person’s free will or rendered any person guilty before he has personally sinned.” Inability is the denial that sorts the conversation, since not everyone who takes the Provisionist name has signed that statement, and inability is the one thing they all deny. Inherited guilt is the statement’s own denial, and it is worth testing too. So the question has to be aimed at both. What did Adam’s sin do to you, personally, before you had sinned yourself? Did it leave you guilty? Did it leave you unable?

Here the reader’s own suggestion is a good one. He asked why infants die. It sounds like a hard question, and it is, but Paul asked it first and answered it. “Yet death reigned from Adam to Moses, even over those whose sinning was not like the transgression of Adam” (Romans 5:14). Death is the wages of sin. An infant has committed no sin of his own. He dies anyway. So why does death reign over him? A Provisionist may answer that death is a consequence of the fall rather than evidence of inherited guilt, and that the infant inherits the first without the second. Romans 5:14 on its own does not close that door, because it speaks of death and not of guilt.

Paul closes it two verses later. “The judgment following one trespass brought condemnation” (Romans 5:16), and “one trespass led to condemnation for all men” (Romans 5:18). Paul speaks of a verdict of condemnation, not merely inherited mortality, and he ties it to one trespass, Adam’s, before any of us had drawn breath. Read 5:12 in that light, “death spread to all men because all sinned,” and the sense of “all sinned” is that all sinned in Adam. The words “in Adam” are not in the verse; they are what the paragraph as a whole requires. That is inherited guilt, stated in one chapter. Paul says the same thing to the Ephesians when he calls us “by nature children of wrath” (Ephesians 2:3). By nature. Not by later choice. And David says it of himself: “Behold, I was brought forth in iniquity, and in sin did my mother conceive me” (Psalm 51:5).

I would stay with that one line of argument and resist the pull toward others. The reader also raised the death of infants in the judgments of Egypt and Canaan. Those are real questions with real answers, but they move the conversation from the condition of man to the justice of God in judgment, and that is a detour that is easy to take and hard to come back from, because the conversation is now about God’s character before it has settled anything about Adam’s children. Keep the question narrow enough that its answer sits in a single passage. That is what makes it an opening question rather than the whole debate.

How to Use Them

Ask, and then be quiet. The purpose of these questions is not to score. It is to find out what the man believes, in his own words, before you answer him. If you ask the first question and start rebutting the answer before he has finished giving it, you have learned nothing and taught nothing. Let him say it all. Then you will know whether you are talking with an Arminian, who shares your diagnosis and differs on the cure, or with a Provisionist, who disputes the diagnosis, and you can answer the position he actually holds.

And remember what the questions are for. They are not for sorting the sheep from the goats. A man can hold a muddled view of how he came to Christ and still be resting on Christ. Many of us did for years. The questions are for making the conversation honest, so that two people who both love the Lord can disagree about the right thing instead of talking past each other about the wrong one.

The three questions come down to one. Does God’s grace make faith possible and leave the outcome to the sinner, or does it bring the sinner willingly to faith? Scripture answers it, and the answer is the ground of all our gratitude. We were dead. He made us alive. We were unable. He drew us. We were guilty in Adam. He made us righteous in Christ. What do we have that we did not receive? Nothing at all, and to Him be the glory for every bit of it. Amen.

Two Anathemas

Posted on by

Is the Reformation Over?

In the year 2000, Rome’s doctrinal office, the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, published a declaration called Dominus Iesus. It was signed by Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, soon to be Pope Benedict XVI, and approved by Pope John Paul II. It says many things, but one sentence concerns you directly if you worship in a church like mine. The Christian communities which have not preserved a valid episcopate, that is, bishops standing in what Rome recognizes as an unbroken apostolic succession reaching back to the apostles, and with it what Rome regards as a true Eucharist, “are not Churches in the proper sense.”

In 2007 the same office was asked why its documents withheld the title of church from the communities born of the Reformation. It answered by repeating the judgment and naming us.

So the question this article asks is not an impolite one that Protestants have invented to wound Rome. Whether a body has forfeited the right to be called a church is a question Rome has already answered about us. In print. Twice. With papal approval. King’s Church in Peoria, Arizona, where I serve, is not a church in the proper sense, on Rome’s official account, and neither is yours unless your ministers stand in that line of ordinations.

I take no personal offense at this, and neither should you. Rome is being consistent with her own principles, and consistency is a virtue even when the principles are wrong. But do not mistake that for calm. Two contradictory gospels are in play, and where two gospels contradict, at least one of them lies under the anathema of God.

The word is an old one. An anathema is a formal curse: a solemn declaration that a person stands outside, and under judgment. Scripture uses the word, and so do church councils, and this article is about two of them. Someone here lies under the curse. Rome has pronounced its anathema against what we confess. Paul has pronounced his against every contrary gospel. The question is where his falls. A judgment has been made, and it rests on a standard, and the standard is the thing this article is about. Because once the standard is examined, the judgment does not merely fail. It reverses.

What makes a church a church?

For this particular judgment, Rome’s decisive criterion is sacramental succession. A true church, on this accounting, is one whose bishops can trace their ordinations, hand laid upon head, back through the centuries to the apostles, and whose altars therefore offer a valid Eucharist. Break the chain of hands and you break the church. That is why the Reformation communities are, on Rome’s account, not churches: our ministers were ordained outside the line.

This is not my summary of Rome. It is her own stated reason. The communities born of the Reformation, says the 2007 document, “do not enjoy apostolic succession in the sacrament of Orders,” and therefore lack, on Rome’s accounting, one of the things that make a church a church at all.

It sounds ancient and it sounds strong. And notice where Rome locates the defect that unchurches us. Not first in what is preached, but in who is ordained, and in what sacrament that ordination makes possible.

But ask what the apostles themselves thought made their ministry apostolic, and a different answer comes back. When Paul wrote to Timothy, a man on whom Paul himself had laid hands (2 Timothy 1:6), he did not tell him to guard a chain of ordination. He told him to guard the deposit: “Follow the pattern of the sound words that you have heard from me” (2 Timothy 1:13), and to entrust what he had heard to faithful men who would teach others also (2 Timothy 2:2). What passes from generation to generation is a message. The hands exist to serve it.

The church, Paul says elsewhere, is built on the foundation of the apostles and prophets, Christ Jesus Himself being the cornerstone (Ephesians 2:20). A foundation is laid once. It is not re-laid in every generation by ordination. What continues is the building, and the building stands on what the apostles taught.

The real question, then, is not whether ministerial succession matters. The New Testament plainly recognizes ministers and elders, appointment to office, and the laying on of hands. The question is which governs the other. Does an office make its message apostolic, or does the office itself stand under the judgment of the apostolic message? And it happens that the New Testament contains a test case that decides exactly that question, written by an apostle, about the possibility of his own defection.

The message outranks the messenger

The churches of Galatia were deserting the gospel for a different one, a gospel of Christ plus law-keeping, and Paul opens his letter with some of the most severe sentences he ever wrote. “But even if we or an angel from heaven should preach to you a gospel contrary to the one we preached to you, let him be accursed” (Galatians 1:8). And then, so nobody could take it for a flash of temper, he says it again: “As we have said before, so now I say again: If anyone is preaching to you a gospel contrary to the one you received, let him be accursed” (Galatians 1:9).

Look carefully at who falls under that curse. “Even if we.” Paul puts the apostles themselves under it. And remember how the same letter opens. Paul is an apostle “not from men nor through man, but through Jesus Christ” (Galatians 1:1). His commission came directly from the risen Christ, and even that commission would not shield him if he changed the message. Even an angel out of heaven would not be shielded.

That settles the question of standard, and it settles it from inside the apostolic circle. Office does not validate message. Message validates office. If the mightiest office in the church’s history cannot survive changing the gospel, then no chain of ordinations, however long and however carefully documented, can carry authority away from the gospel it was ordained to serve. A church is in succession from the apostles exactly as long as it holds the apostolic gospel, and not one day longer.

By that standard, the standard Paul himself imposes, the question about Rome becomes answerable. Not, does she have the hands? I do not grant Rome’s historical claim, but I do not need to settle it here. Suppose every link holds. Grant her the hands entirely, for the sake of the argument. The question that decides everything remains: does she have the message?

Two anathemas

On the doctrine of justification, the doctrine of how a sinner is made right with God, two anathemas now stand in the historical record, pointing in opposite directions.

The first is Paul’s, from Galatians 1, pronounced on anyone, apostle or angel included, who preaches a gospel other than the one delivered. And what was the one delivered? The letter goes on to say it plainly: a person is not justified by works of the law (Galatians 2:16), and “if righteousness were through the law, then Christ died for no purpose” (Galatians 2:21). And Paul writes the same to the Romans without a shadow of a qualifier: “For we hold that one is justified by faith apart from works of the law” (Romans 3:28).

The second was pronounced at the Council of Trent, in January 1547, in the sixth session’s canons on justification. I have set out that session’s teaching at length in a previous article and will not repeat the case here. It is enough to say what the canons do. They pronounce Rome’s anathema on justification by faith alone and on justification by the imputation of Christ’s righteousness alone, and they reject the Reformation doctrine that the justified sinner may rest, with the certainty of faith, in God’s forgiveness of his sins. The council anathematized, proposition after proposition, what the Reformers preached, and what I preach, and what this article’s readers, most of them, believe.

The fairest Roman Catholic reader will object at this point, and the objection deserves to be faced in the open rather than stepped around. Trent, he will say, did not condemn the words faith alone without qualification. Canon 9 pronounces its anathema on faith alone only as the canon itself glosses it: a faith that requires nothing else to cooperate in obtaining justifying grace, and no preparing movement of the sinner’s will. And Protestants, he will add, sometimes quote the opening words of that canon without letting the rest of the sentence speak.

Grant the qualification. It is genuinely there, and quoting around it is not honest work. But granting the qualification is not the same as granting the conclusion drawn from it, because the qualifier reaches into the disagreement rather than around it. The Reformers taught repentance, renewal, and obedience with all their strength. What they denied is exactly what the canon requires: that some movement of the sinner’s will cooperates in obtaining the grace by which God justifies him. And in any case, Canon 9 does not stand alone.

Canon 11 narrows the ground. It carries no qualifier about the sinner’s cooperation, and it pronounces the anathema on justification by the “sole imputation” of the righteousness of Christ, to the exclusion of a grace and charity poured into the heart and inhering there, and even on the claim that the grace by which we are justified is nothing but the favor of God. That is not an antinomian caricature. That is the Reformation doctrine of the ground of justification stated with precision: the righteousness on the basis of which God declares the sinner righteous is Christ’s righteousness reckoned to him, not a righteousness inherent in him, with the Spirit’s inward renewal following as fruit and never as ground. Trent identified the distinction and chose its side.

One reply remains, and it deserves the same open hearing. Canon 11, the careful reader will say, condemns imputation only to the exclusion of grace and charity, and the Reformers excluded neither, since they taught that the Spirit’s renewal always accompanies the verdict. It is chapter 7 of the same session that takes this reply away. The chapter names the single formal cause of justification, the thing by virtue of which a man actually is righteous in God’s sight, and names it as the righteousness of God, not that by which He Himself is righteous, but that by which He makes us righteous. That is not a claim that inherent righteousness accompanies justification. It is a claim that inherent righteousness is the righteousness that justifies, and the council calls it the only one. And the chapter presses the point in Rome’s own voice, insisting that we are not only reputed righteous but are truly righteous, receiving righteousness within us. Canon 10 then seals the point from the other side, pronouncing its anathema on anyone who says that men are formally righteous by the righteousness of Christ Himself, the righteousness by which He merited justification for us. Between the chapter and the canon, the last exit closes. Trent did not merely require inward grace to accompany justification. It made the righteousness received within the sinner the righteousness by which he is formally just, and cursed those who put Christ’s imputed righteousness in that place.

Canon 12 continues in the same direction, rejecting the claim that justifying faith is nothing else than confidence in the divine mercy that remits sins for Christ’s sake, or that such confidence alone justifies. Canon 9 deserves its qualifier. Canon 11 narrows the ground. Chapter 7 removes the escape.

Nearly fifteen centuries separate the two anathemas, and they cannot both stand. If Trent’s doctrine, in which justification is conferred through baptism and the sinner is made inwardly righteous, is the apostolic gospel, then Paul’s curse falls on me. If justification through faith apart from works of the law is the apostolic gospel, then Paul’s curse falls on the council that anathematized it, and it falls with exactly the weight Paul assigned: even if we, even if an angel from heaven.

There is no third option in which both curses miss. That is what people are asking for when they ask whether the Reformation is over, whether they know it or not. They are asking whether one of the two anathemas can be quietly retired. And the only honest answer requires finding out whether anything has actually moved.

Which direction has Rome moved?

Rome has changed since the sixteenth century. There is no question about it. The question is the direction.

In 1854, Pope Pius IX defined the Immaculate Conception as dogma: the teaching, often misunderstood, that Mary herself was conceived without the stain of original sin. In 1870, the First Vatican Council defined papal infallibility, and defined it de fide, a Latin label meaning the doctrine must be believed as part of the faith itself. In 1950, Pope Pius XII defined the bodily Assumption of Mary into heaven, again as binding dogma. Every one of those definitions is post-Reformation. Luther and Calvin never faced any of them as solemnly defined dogma. Each one is a new obligation laid on the conscience of every Roman Catholic.

R. C. Sproul made the observation many times. Writing in Tabletalk in 2009, in the article that asked whether the Reformation is over, he noted that nearly every significant Marian decree belongs to the last century and a half, and that papal infallibility, long assumed in practice, was only formally defined in 1870. His conclusion, in a video teaching, was blunter: “Things are not getting better; they’re worse.”

It is true that the tone has warmed, and the change of tone is what most people mistake for a change of doctrine. The older language was heretics and schismatics. Vatican II spoke instead of separated brethren. That is a real softening, and I am glad of it. But set the two changes side by side. The vocabulary moved from insult to courtesy. The dogma moved from Trent to Trent plus three new binding definitions. The manner came toward us. The matter walked away.

And the Catechism of the Catholic Church, published in the 1990s as the authoritative summary of Roman teaching, reaffirmed the whole sixteenth-century inheritance: justification through the sacraments, the treasury of merit, purgatory, indulgences. I have traced those doctrines through Rome’s own current documents in the two previous articles, down to a decree in force this year. Nothing in the modern paperwork has retired anything Trent defined.

But what about the agreements?

Three documents are always raised at this point, and each has been examined in detail in the first article of this series, so here I will only run them past the standard we have established, which is the message.

Evangelicals and Catholics Together, in 1994, affirmed that we are justified by grace through faith because of Christ, which is a sentence Rome could have signed at Trent, since the disputed word, alone, was the word left out. The Gift of Salvation, in 1997, went further, affirming sola fide in so many words and speaking of God’s acceptance of the sinner grounded in the righteousness of Christ alone. Then it listed the relation between righteousness imputed and righteousness worked within among the questions still requiring further and urgent exploration. That is not a detail left over. It is the very point the anathemas were pronounced about. And the Joint Declaration of 1999, the weightiest of the three, declared that Trent’s condemnations do not apply to Lutheran teaching as presented in that document, a limitation the Vatican’s own newspaper would soon spell out in print.

Measure all three against the standard. Not one of them changes what Rome teaches justification to be. None repeals a canon of Trent. The Joint Declaration limits the application of the old condemnations to one agreed statement of Lutheran teaching, and a commentary in the Vatican’s own newspaper insisted that the binding teaching of Trent remained intact. They adjust the diplomacy while the doctrine stands. If succession runs through the message, then documents that leave the message where Trent put it leave everything where Trent put it.

The verdict

Now the sentence this article exists to say, and I want to say it carefully, because it is heavy and because I do not write it with any relish at all.

The confession of faith my church holds, the 1689 Baptist confession, says something sober about churches in general before it says anything about Rome in particular. The purest churches under heaven, it says, are subject to mixture and error, and some have so degenerated as to become no churches of Christ (chapter 26, paragraph 3). Notice what kind of statement that is. It is not a weapon forged against one opponent. It is a standing warning to every congregation, mine included, that churchhood can be forfeited, that the lampstand can be removed, as the risen Christ Himself warned the church at Ephesus (Revelation 2:5). Degeneration is a category before it is an accusation.

The question is placement. And by the controlling standard the New Testament gives for testing claims to apostolic authority, fidelity to the apostolic message, I do not see how the conclusion can be avoided. A body that has anathematized justification by faith alone, formally, at a general council, and has never rescinded that condemnation, reaffirming the substance of Trent in its authoritative teaching down to the present day, has not merely erred about the gospel. It has bound itself, on its highest authority, against the gospel. The gospel is constitutive of the church. A body may possess antiquity, offices, sacraments, and an institutional continuity reaching back centuries, but none of these can preserve apostolic churchhood where the apostolic gospel itself is formally condemned. Rome has retained the offices, the vestments, the word church on the door, and her claim to the line of hands. What she anathematized is the thing that made any of it a church.

So when Rome declares that my congregation is not a church in the proper sense, I return the judgment, and I return it on better authority. She measures by the hands and finds us wanting. Scripture measures by the message, and by that measure it is Rome that has left the apostolic succession.

Not in a single month, and I want to be exact here, because the previous article in this series traced the degeneration across four centuries of paperwork, and error was being taught from Roman pulpits long before Luther was born. What happened in January 1547 is something more solemn than the beginning of a drift. At Trent the gospel of justification was not neglected or obscured, as it had been for generations. It was identified, examined, and formally cursed. From that day the departure stopped being a drift and became a definition, bound on the whole communion by its highest authority. And the anathema has never been lifted. The authoritative teaching since Trent has left its doctrine standing: the Catechism of the 1990s expressly reaffirms the substance of Trent on justification. And when questions arose after Augsburg, even a commentary in the Vatican’s own newspaper stated plainly that approval of the Joint Declaration “does not undo the binding teaching of the Council of Trent.” Sproul did not overstate it when he wrote that at the moment Rome condemned the biblical doctrine of justification she “ceased to be a legitimate church.” The Reformers did not abandon the apostolic gospel. Rome finally answered their confession by anathematizing it.

Is the Reformation over? The Reformation ends on the day the anathema of Trent is lifted, or on the day we surrender the gospel it was aimed at. Neither has happened. So, no.

The people inside

Now the part I most want you to read slowly, because everything above concerns a system, and you do not know a system. You know your Catholic mother. Your grandfather with his rosary. The neighbor who lit a candle for your family when you were ill, and meant it.

Notice first that Rome herself distinguishes the system from the souls. The very declaration that un-churches us goes on to grant that those baptized in our communities are, by their baptism, joined to Christ and stand in a real though imperfect communion with the church. Rome judges our system and leaves room for our people. I am bound to be at least as careful in the other direction, and Scripture requires more than care. It requires hope. God has always had His people in unlikely places. There were seven thousand in Ahab’s Israel who had not bowed the knee to Baal, a remnant Paul himself points to when he wants to prove that God has not abandoned a people in the midst of their apostasy (Romans 11:2 to 4). And the Lord knows those who are His (2 Timothy 2:19). There are men and women inside the Roman communion whose actual, functioning trust is in Christ alone, whatever the system around them teaches, because the Spirit of God is not stopped at institutional borders and never has been. Where you find a sinner resting on Christ crucified and not on his own merits or anyone else’s, you have found a brother or a sister, and the verdict of this article does not fall on them.

But let me not turn that hope into a sedative. The kindest thing you can do for the Catholic you love is not to assume the best and say nothing. It is to speak of Christ, plainly and warmly and without one ounce of superiority, remembering that the difference between you and them was never your intelligence or your virtue. It was grace. A system that curses the gospel is a reason for more urgency toward the people inside it, not less. Nobody is saved by being right about Rome. People are saved by hearing of Christ, and believing.

The curse and the gift

One last thing, and it is the thing that keeps this whole subject from curdling into hardness.

Go back to Galatians 1, where the anathema comes from, and read the sentence Paul wrote immediately before it. The Lord Jesus Christ, he says, “gave himself for our sins to deliver us from the present evil age, according to the will of our God and Father, to whom be the glory forever and ever. Amen” (Galatians 1:4 to 5). The doxology comes before the curse. The same chapter that damns every other gospel first adores the God of this one.

That is the right order, and it explains the severity. Paul does not curse because he is quarrelsome. He curses because something has been given, He gave Himself for our sins, and a gift that cost the blood of the Son of God is not going to be traded away politely, not to an angel, not to an apostle, not to a council, and not to the slow erosion of a generation that finds the whole dispute embarrassing. The anathema is the fence around the gift.

The Reformation was never, at bottom, a protest. It was a refusal to let go of a gift. It still is.

He gave Himself for our sins to deliver us. To Him be the glory forever and ever. Amen.

About this series

This is the third in a series of articles on the teaching of the Roman Catholic Church. When I refer above to “the first article” or “the previous article,” these are the pieces I mean. Each can be read on its own, and each builds on the one before it.

Two Anathemas: Is the Reformation Over? (this article)

Counted, Not Made: The Righteousness That Is Not Your Own (August 28, 2026). How God justifies a sinner by reckoning Christ’s righteousness to him, what the Council of Trent taught in its place, and whether the ecumenical agreements of the 1990s changed anything.

Forgiven, and Still in Debt: How the Indulgence System Was Built, and Why It Is Still Running (September 1, 2026). How purgatory, the treasury of merit, and indulgences grew out of Trent’s teaching that a debt of punishment remains after sin is forgiven, and why the system is still in use today.

Sources

Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, declaration Dominus Iesus, August 6, 2000, section 17, on the ecclesial communities which “are not Churches in the proper sense,” and on the baptized in those communities being incorporated into Christ. Signed by Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger with the approval of John Paul II.

Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, Responses to Some Questions Regarding Certain Aspects of the Doctrine on the Church, June 29, 2007, fifth question, applying the judgment to the Christian communities born of the Reformation. The document closes by recording that Benedict XVI ratified and confirmed the Responses and ordered their publication.

Council of Trent, Session VI (January 13, 1547), Decree on Justification: chapter 7 (the single formal cause of justification) and canons 9, 10, 11, 12, 13 and 30. For the fuller positive teaching of the session, see the first article in this series.

Pius IX, Ineffabilis Deus, December 8, 1854 (the Immaculate Conception). First Vatican Council, Pastor Aeternus, July 18, 1870 (papal infallibility, defined de fide). Pius XII, Munificentissimus Deus, November 1, 1950 (the bodily Assumption).

R. C. Sproul, “Is the Reformation Over?”, Tabletalk, September 2009, page 7, for the judgment quoted above, for the observation on the Marian decrees of the last century and a half and the 1870 definition of infallibility, and for the contrast between the earlier language of heretics and schismatics and the Second Vatican Council speaking of separated brethren. See also Sproul, “Misunderstanding Vatican II,” Ligonier Ministries, for the argument that the differences are greater now than in the sixteenth century; and “Has the Roman Catholic Church Changed Since the 16th Century?”, video with transcript, Ligonier blog, October 2, 2019, a republication of earlier recorded teaching, for the sentence quoted.

Evangelicals and Catholics Together, First Things, May 1994. The Gift of Salvation, 1997. Joint Declaration on the Doctrine of Justification, October 31, 1999, with “Some Reflections on the Joint Declaration on the Doctrine of Justification,” L’Osservatore Romano, weekly English edition, April 4, 2001, page 10, whose key sentence continues by naming the First and Second Vatican Councils alongside Trent. All examined in detail in the first article of this series.

The Baptist Confession of Faith of 1689, chapter 26, paragraph 3.

Michael S. Horton, “What Still Keeps Us Apart?”, in Roman Catholicism: Evangelical Protestants Analyze What Divides and Unites Us, edited by John Armstrong (Moody Press, 1994), pages 245 to 266, which reproduces relevant canons from the sixth session in full, including the qualifying clause of Canon 9 discussed above.

Scripture quotations are from the English Standard Version, 2025 text edition.

What About the Unforgivable Sin?

Posted on by

A word for the believer who is afraid

If you are reading this because you are afraid you have committed the unforgivable sin, I want you to know first of all that you are not alone. Every pastor hears this question sooner or later, and it is almost never asked lightly: “What if I have done the one thing God will never forgive?”

Sometimes a second fear comes tied to the first. A verse surfaces from memory, usually in the old King James wording: “For as he thinketh in his heart, so is he” (Proverbs 23:7). And the mind runs like this: “If I think I have committed that sin, and the Bible says I am what I think, then doesn’t my thinking it make it so?”

Let me take those two fears one at a time. Both answers come from the same place: what God’s Word actually says.

What Jesus Actually Said

The warning comes in Mark 3 (Matthew 12 tells the same story). Jesus had been healing the sick and setting people free from evil spirits in full public view. The crowds pressed so hard around the house that He and His disciples could not even eat (v. 20). Then a group of religious leaders arrived from Jerusalem with their verdict: “He is possessed by Beelzebul,” and “by the prince of demons he casts out the demons” (v. 22).

Think about what those men were looking at. People who had been in bondage were walking free in front of their eyes. And these trained teachers of the Bible looked straight at the work of God’s Spirit through God’s Son and called it the work of hell.

It is to them that Jesus says:

“Truly, I say to you, all sins will be forgiven the children of man, and whatever blasphemies they utter, but whoever blasphemes against the Holy Spirit never has forgiveness, but is guilty of an eternal sin” (Mark 3:28-29).

Mark then tells us plainly why Jesus said it: “for they were saying, ‘He has an unclean spirit’” (v. 30). The wording suggests they kept on saying it. This was not a dark thought flashing through a troubled mind at two in the morning. It was an accusation made in public, again and again, by men who had seen the evidence with their own eyes.

Notice, too, how the warning opens. Before Jesus names the one sin that will not be forgiven, He throws the door wide open to every other: “all sins will be forgiven the children of man, and whatever blasphemies they utter.” Mercy is the first word in the warning.

Here is something easy to miss. In the very same chapter, Jesus’ own family said something terrible about Him too. They went out to seize Him, “for they were saying, ‘He is out of his mind’” (v. 21). At that time not even His brothers believed in Him (John 7:5). Yet later we find them among the believers, praying together with the apostles (Acts 1:14). Two harsh things were said about Jesus in one chapter, and one group was welcomed home. What separated them was the heart behind the words.

In his first letter to Timothy, the apostle Paul called himself “a blasphemer, persecutor, and insolent opponent.” Yet he went on, “But I received mercy because I had acted ignorantly in unbelief” (1 Timothy 1:13). If the man who once hunted Christians found mercy, there is mercy for you.

What Kind of Sin Is This?

So what was the sin Jesus warned about? It was not a slip of the tongue or a terrible thought that flashes through the mind. It was knowing, hardened hostility toward the work of God in Christ: looking at what was plainly the hand of God and deliberately calling it the devil’s. These men were not confused. They saw clearly, they understood what they saw, and they chose to call the light darkness.

Phil Johnson makes a point I have found helpful for people in your situation. This is a sin of the heart, not merely of the lips, and he does not believe a person necessarily commits it simply by saying the words. If saying the words is not enough, then a thought you never wanted, or a word that slipped out in a dark moment, is not enough either.

And here is something every Christian can rest in: God keeps His people from this sin. R. C. Sproul put it simply: “I believe that the Lord of glory who has saved us and sealed us in the Holy Spirit will never let us commit that sin.”

I believe the same, and for the reason Jesus Himself gives. He never loses any of His true sheep. “My sheep hear my voice, and I know them, and they follow me. I give them eternal life, and they will never perish, and no one will snatch them out of my hand” (John 10:27-28). The Father’s will is that the Son “should lose nothing of all that he has given me” (John 6:39), and I cannot for a moment imagine Jesus failing to do His Father’s will.

One more thing is true of the person who commits this sin: he does not care. As Sproul said, “those who commit it are so hardened in their hearts they do not care that they commit it.” John Calvin taught the same thing long ago. Such people are left with no desire to repent at all.

Your Fear Is Not the Act

Now look at the great difference, because it is worth slowing down to see. The scribes were not afraid. They were publicly accusing Jesus of doing His work by Satan’s power, and earlier in the same chapter the Pharisees had already gone out to plot “how to destroy him” (Mark 3:6).

You stand in exactly the opposite place. The scribes looked at Christ and wanted Him gone. You look at Christ and are terrified that He is gone from you. They called His work evil. You call Him your only hope.

You are frightened that you have committed this sin. That fear is not the act Jesus was describing, however strongly you feel it.

Phil Johnson once told his congregation, “If you’re truly concerned enough that you might have committed it so that you pray to God for forgiveness, you haven’t committed it at all.” I say the same to you. The heart that has committed this sin has no fear of God left in it, and the very fact that you are troubled tells me yours has not gone cold.

That is a mercy worth noticing. But do not build your house on your feelings, because feelings rise and fall from one hour to the next. Your fear is only a sign. Your hope is a Person, and we will come to His promise in a moment.

You are also in good company. John Bunyan, the preacher who later gave us The Pilgrim’s Progress, walked through this very darkness. In the story of his own life, Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners, he tells of a temptation that hounded him for about a year: a thought that kept pressing him to sell Christ, to part with Him for the things of this life. One morning, worn out from resisting, he felt his heart give way and agree to let Christ go. He became convinced he had committed the unpardonable sin of Mark 3, and he tells us that for two years almost nothing would stay with him but the expectation of damnation.

What brought him out? A promise. These words of Jesus came to him with great sweetness, in the King James wording he knew: “him that cometh to me I will in no wise cast out” (John 6:37). He took special comfort in the words “in no wise,” which to him meant “by no means, for nothing whatever he hath done.” When Satan whispered that Christ surely meant sinners of a lesser kind, Bunyan answered him from the text itself: there was “no such exception; but him that comes, him, any him.”

The 1689 London Baptist Confession, the confession of faith our church holds, speaks to this with great tenderness. It says that true believers may have their assurance “shaken, diminished, and intermitted” (that is, interrupted), sometimes through sudden and fierce temptation. Yet they are never left without the seed of God and the life of faith, and by these they are kept from utter despair until the Spirit restores their peace.

The Lord Jesus is gentle with people like you. Matthew tells us Isaiah was writing about Him (Matthew 12:17-20): “a bruised reed he will not break, and a faintly burning wick he will not quench” (Isaiah 42:3).

What Proverbs 23:7 Really Means

Now to the second fear.

Many of us learned the verse in the King James wording, “For as he thinketh in his heart, so is he.” Pulled out of its setting, it can be made to sound like a law of the mind: whatever you believe about yourself becomes true of you. But read it where it sits:

“Do not eat the bread of a man who is stingy; do not desire his delicacies, for he is like one who is inwardly calculating. ‘Eat and drink!’ he says to you, but his heart is not with you. You will vomit up the morsels that you have eaten, and waste your pleasant words” (Proverbs 23:6-8).

This is a scene at a dinner table. With his mouth the host says, “Eat and drink!” In his heart he is doing arithmetic. The Hebrew word behind “calculating” appears nowhere else in the Old Testament, and it carries the idea of reckoning up a price. Picture a man smiling at you across the table while he prices every bite that goes into your mouth. Matthew Henry said such hosts “grudge their guests every bit they eat.”

The point of the proverb is simple: do not judge that man by his gracious words. What he really is, is what he is quietly calculating. The passage describes a stingy host whose welcoming words hide his unwillingness to share. It does not teach that thinking you are guilty makes you guilty.

Notice who is who at that table. The man whose inner reckoning defines him is the host, and the proverb is telling the guest to see through him. Nothing in the verse turns a guest’s fear into a guest’s guilt. Someone who fears they have cancer does not get cancer by fearing it. The fear only shows how anxious they feel. It takes a medical test to reveal the true condition of the body. In the same way, your fear cannot tell you the true condition of your soul. God’s Word can.

One more honest word. Bible scholars readily admit this line is hard to translate, and the standard Hebrew dictionary calls the traditional reading doubtful. A single, difficult line about a dinner host is no foundation on which to build a verdict against your soul. Your fear is not God’s verdict on you.

Remember, too, that the enemy of your soul can quote Scripture. He did it to Jesus Himself when he tempted Him (Matthew 4:5-6). He is quite happy to take a proverb about a stingy dinner host and try to turn it into a sentence of condemnation.

Where Your Assurance Rests

Your assurance rests on something far sturdier than your thoughts in the middle of the night. It rests on the promise of Christ:

“All that the Father gives me will come to me, and whoever comes to me I will never cast out” (John 6:37).

In the language the New Testament was written in, Jesus doubles the negative here, the strongest way that language can say “never.” The King James translators caught it with “I will in no wise cast out,” the very words that lifted Bunyan out of his pit.

And that welcome has already been paid for. The One who promises never to cast you out is the One who “himself bore our sins in his body on the tree” (1 Peter 2:24), and who rose again on the third day. He does not throw away those He died to save.

When your own heart will not stop accusing you, the apostle John has a word for you. He wrote to believers whose trust is in “the name of his Son Jesus Christ” and who, however imperfectly, seek to love one another “in deed and in truth” (1 John 3:18, 23). To people like that he says: “for whenever our heart condemns us, God is greater than our heart, and he knows everything” (1 John 3:20). Your heart is not the judge. God is, and He has already spoken in His Son.

So the question to ask is not, “Have I ever had a terrible thought?” Every believer has. The question is, “Where am I running?” If you are running to Christ, weak and frightened and empty-handed, you are exactly the person John 6:37 was spoken for. You have come to Christ, and He has received you. Your struggle with assurance does not undo His promise.

When the Fear Comes Back

It may come back. Bunyan’s did, many times, before it finally lost its grip. Sometimes the fear simply moves to a new address. Let go of Mark 3, and it settles on Hebrews 6, which says that for some who have fallen away it is “impossible . . . to restore them again to repentance” (Hebrews 6:4, 6). But a person who can no longer be brought to repentance does not lie awake longing to repent.

For Bunyan the new address was Hebrews 12:17. Esau, it says, “found no chance to repent, though he sought it with tears,” and that verse haunted Bunyan for months. But look at what Esau was weeping over. Hebrews tells us he “desired to inherit the blessing,” and Genesis records his cry: “Bless me, even me also, O my father!” (Genesis 27:34). His tears were for the blessing he had lost, and a few verses later he was planning to kill his brother (Genesis 27:41). Scripture never shows us a sinner coming to Christ for mercy and finding the door shut, and John 6:37 promises that it never will.

So let me be practical.

  1. Call it what it is. When the thought returns, treat it as an accusation. It is not new information from God.
  2. Answer it with the promise. Say John 6:37 out loud if you need to, and let Christ’s word have the last say.
  3. Stop digging for proof. Replaying the moment again and again, trying to find out whether you “meant it,” only feeds the fear. The scribes were publicly slandering the work of God’s Spirit. You are afraid of having lost Christ. Those are not the same thing, and no amount of digging will make them the same thing.
  4. Keep using the means of grace. Above all, be with God’s people when they gather on the Lord’s Day, and sit under the faithful preaching of the Word. This is where God ordinarily strengthens the faith of His people. Come to the Lord’s Table with them. Through the week, keep reading your Bible and praying. The fear loses its grip as Christ grows larger in your sight.
  5. Do not carry this alone. Talk to your pastor or elders if you have them. If you are not yet part of a sound, gospel-preaching church, find one. Let other believers pray with you and remind you of the promise when you cannot remind yourself.

I know this is painful. But you do not need to treat each return of this fear as fresh evidence that Christ has rejected you. A fresh wave of fear is only a fresh wave of fear. His promise still stands.

“Whoever comes to me I will never cast out.” He said it. He meant it. He has never once gone back on His word.

Hallelujah, what a Savior!

Sources

  • Scripture quotations are from the English Standard Version (ESV), unless otherwise indicated.
  • R. C. Sproul, Mark, St. Andrew’s Expositional Commentary (Reformation Trust, 2011), on Mark 3:28-29.
  • Phil Johnson, “What is the Unpardonable Sin?” sermon on Matthew 12:31-32, The GraceLife Pulpit, Grace Community Church, January 17, 2016.
  • John Calvin, Commentary on a Harmony of the Evangelists, on Matthew 12:31-32 and Mark 3:28-30.
  • John Bunyan, Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners, paragraphs 133-148 and 215.
  • The Second London Baptist Confession of Faith (1689), chapter 18, paragraph 4.
  • Matthew Henry, Commentary on the Whole Bible, on Proverbs 23:6-8.
  • Brown-Driver-Briggs, A Hebrew and English Lexicon of the Old Testament, on the Hebrew verb translated “calculating” in Proverbs 23:7.