How to Recognize Provisionism and Why the Difference Matters

Have you ever found yourself defending the doctrines of grace and sensing that your answers were not landing? Not because they were weak, but because the person across from you was not standing where you thought he was standing? I have, more often than I would like to admit, and it took me a long time to work out why.

Here is what I finally saw. Most of us who hold to Reformed theology carry a mental map with two camps on it. On one side stand the Calvinists, on the other the Arminians, and every disagreement about salvation is a skirmish across that line. I carried that map for years, and I answered every critic as though he were standing in the Arminian camp. The problem is that a large number of the people we are arguing with today are not on the map at all.

What exposed the map was a pattern I could not explain. In conversation after conversation I would lay out the biblical teaching that fallen man cannot come to Christ on his own, expecting the familiar Arminian reply, that God gives a prior grace which makes the sinner able to respond. The reply never came. Instead the man would deny the premise altogether. Fallen man is perfectly able to believe, he would say, and the only thing he needs is to hear the message. The entire apparatus of Arminian theology, built to solve the problem of human inability, was sitting unused, because the person I was talking with did not believe there was any inability to solve.

A recent article by Jeremiah Knight gave me the language for what I had been seeing, and I am grateful for it. Many of the people who argue against Reformed theology today are not Arminians, and they do not claim to be. They hold a different position with a different name, and it changes how the whole conversation should go.

First, Some Fairness to Arminius

Before I describe the position I kept meeting, I owe the classical Arminian a word of fairness, because on the point at issue he and I stand together. Jacob Arminius, the man whose name the system carries, taught the total inability of fallen man in language as strong as any Reformed confession. In his Declaration of Sentiments (1608) he wrote that fallen man “is not capable, of and by himself, either to think, to will, or to do that which is really good.” In his Public Disputations (XI.7) he said the free will of fallen man “has no powers whatever except such as are excited by Divine grace.” His followers put the same conviction into the third of the five articles they presented in 1610: apart from being born again, man “can of and by himself neither think, will, nor do anything that is truly good.”

So the Arminian confesses that the sinner cannot come. His solution is prevenient grace. The word simply means grace that comes first, and on that point Reformed theology has no quarrel, since we also say that grace comes before faith. The difference is what the grace does. The Arminian says it restores an ability the sinner may use or refuse. The Reformed believer says it does more than restore an ability. It changes the sinner himself, giving him a new heart with new desires, so that the man who would not come now comes freely, because he wants to. That is a real disagreement, but notice what kind it is. It is a disagreement about how grace works, between two men who both confess that without grace no one would come at all.

What Provisionism Actually Says

The position I kept running into has a name, though many who hold it have never heard it. It is called Provisionism. The term was popularized over the last decade, largely through Leighton Flowers and his Soteriology 101 ministry, and it has spread through podcasts and social media until it has become the default view of a great many online critics of Reformed theology.

I want to state it fairly, and in its own terms. Provisionism teaches that God has taken the initiative by providing salvation in Christ and by sending the gospel into the world. It teaches that the Holy Spirit draws sinners, and that He does so through the gospel as it is preached. It denies that Adam’s fall left mankind unable to respond to that gospel. It denies that anyone must be born again before he can believe. And it denies that the Spirit must first overcome an inherited inability before faith is possible, because on this view there is no such inability to overcome. The message itself, carried by the Spirit, is sufficient to enable any hearer to respond.

I do not have to guess at this. In an article titled “The Role of the Holy Spirit” on the Soteriology 101 site, Leighton Flowers calls the classical Arminian’s prevenient grace an unnecessary concession. The gospel itself, he argues, is already a sufficiently gracious work of the Spirit, so there is no reason to invent a second one. Then he asks the question that gives the whole system away. What is there to re-enable, he says, if “the ability to respond to God’s powerful truth was never lost”? That is the position, in the words of its leading advocate. The ability was never lost.

Now put that beside what Arminius said and the difference is plain. The classical Arminian says the sinner cannot believe unless grace first enables him. The Provisionist says the sinner was never unable in the first place. He is not offering a different answer to the problem of inability. He is denying that the problem exists.

This is why a Reformed Christian who answers a Provisionist as though he were an Arminian will get nowhere. He is explaining how God overcomes an inability that the Provisionist says was never there.

The Question That Settles It

Two old errors need to be told apart before I go further, because they are often run together. Pelagius, in the early fifth century, denied original sin. Man, he taught, is born as Adam was made, with natural powers sufficient to obey God’s commands. Pelagius used the word grace, but by it he meant things like the law, forgiveness, and the example of Christ, helps given from outside. What he denied was what Augustine contended for, that God must work inwardly on the will before a fallen man can obey. The church condemned that at Carthage in 418. I am not charging Provisionists with it. They preach the cross, the necessity of the gospel, and faith in Christ alone, and they should never be charged with what they do not hold. But a milder error grew up in the wake of Pelagius. It admitted that man is fallen and that grace is necessary for salvation, while allowing that the beginning of faith can come from man’s natural powers, without any prior inward enabling by the Spirit. Later generations gave that view the name semi-Pelagian. The difference between the two is real. The Pelagian says nature is enough for obedience. The semi-Pelagian says grace is needed for salvation, but the first step of faith can be taken without an inward work of grace. It is the second, and only the second, that I have in view.

Provisionists object strongly to being called semi-Pelagian, and the reason they give deserves a hearing. Semi-Pelagianism, they say, is the teaching that man takes the first step and God responds. But in their view God took the first step. He provided the Savior, He sent the gospel, and His Spirit draws people through it. So, they say, the charge does not stick.

Here is the question I would put to them, and I think it is the question that matters here. When you say the Spirit draws a sinner through the gospel, what does that drawing do to the sinner? Does it change anything in him, so that a man who could not believe now can? Or does it simply bring the gospel to a man who already possessed the ability to believe it, and press it upon him?

A thoughtful Provisionist will say that I am treating his view as unaided nature when he affirms a powerful work of the Spirit through the gospel. I take the point, and I am not disputing that the Spirit works through the Word. Every Reformed confession says so. The question is what that work accomplishes in the hearer. If the sinner already possesses the moral ability to believe and the Spirit’s work is to present and press the truth upon him, then the ability came from nature, and the Spirit’s part was to appeal to it, not to create it. If the sinner lacks that ability and the Spirit’s work gives it to him, then the ability came from grace. Those are two different doctrines, and the shared vocabulary of Word and Spirit does not make them one.

If the sinner already possesses that moral ability, then whatever we call the position, the capacity to believe is being located in nature rather than in an inward enabling work of grace. And that is the precise claim the church examined and rejected at the Second Council of Orange in 529. Canon 5 says that not only the increase of faith but its very beginning, and even the desire to believe, come to us as a gift of grace through the inspiration of the Holy Spirit amending our will, and not by nature. Canon 7 is more pointed still. It condemns anyone who says we can assent to the preaching of the gospel through our natural powers, without the illumination and inspiration of the Holy Spirit. Read that carefully. Orange did not deny that the gospel must be preached. It denied that hearing the preaching is enough for a man whose will has not been inwardly changed.

A few honest qualifications. The word semi-Pelagian was coined roughly a thousand years after Orange, so the council did not condemn a label; it condemned a doctrine. Orange was a regional council, not an ecumenical one, though Rome ratified it two years later. And Orange tied grace to baptism in ways that no Reformed Baptist can accept. None of that touches what the council said about where faith begins. I am not claiming that Provisionists read the fifth-century writers and copied them. I am saying that on this one point, the sinner’s ability to assent to the gospel by his natural powers, their teaching is the teaching Orange weighed and rejected, whether or not anyone today knows the history.

What Scripture Says About the Unconverted Man

The claim we need to test is this: that fallen man can believe the gospel when he hears it, without the Spirit first overcoming an inherited inability to believe. So let us take that one claim to the Bible. Three things stand out.

1. Scripture describes his condition as death and hostility, and it uses the word cannot. “And you were dead in the trespasses and sins” (Ephesians 2:1). Paul is not describing a man who is inactive, because in the very next verse he says the same dead men were walking, following the course of this world. Spiritual death is a living rebellion. But it is still death, and the remedy is not something the dead man does: “But God, being rich in mercy, because of the great love with which he loved us, even when we were dead in our trespasses, made us alive together with Christ” (Ephesians 2:4-5). Then Romans 8 removes any hope of a loophole: “For the mind that is set on the flesh is hostile to God, for it does not submit to God’s law; indeed, it cannot. Those who are in the flesh cannot please God” (Romans 8:7-8). And lest anyone take “in the flesh” as a passing mood, the next verse defines it. To be in the flesh is to be without the indwelling Spirit; to be in the Spirit is to have Him (Romans 8:9). Paul is describing a condition, not an attitude. Faith pleases God. If the man in the flesh can produce it unaided, Paul has overstated his case.

2. Scripture says his problem with the gospel is not merely a lack of information but a lack of capacity to receive it. “The natural person does not accept the things of the Spirit of God, for they are folly to him, and he is not able to understand them because they are spiritually discerned” (1 Corinthians 2:14). Paul is not saying an unbeliever cannot follow the words or explain what Christians believe. Plenty can. He is saying the natural man cannot receive the message as what it is, God’s truth to be embraced, because that reception is a spiritual act, and the natural man is exactly the one who lacks the Spirit. This is the verse the Provisionist most needs to answer, because his system depends on the preached message being sufficient to enable the hearer, and Paul says the hearer, left natural, can only find it foolishness. Our Lord said the same thing twice in one chapter, to hearers who had listened to His teaching and remained in unbelief: “No one can come to me unless the Father who sent me draws him” (John 6:44), and “This is why I told you that no one can come to me unless it is granted him by the Father” (John 6:65).

3. Scripture locates the beginning of faith in God’s action, not ours. Believers are those “who were born, not of blood nor of the will of the flesh nor of the will of man, but of God” (John 1:13). Paul tells the Philippians, “For it has been granted to you that for the sake of Christ you should not only believe in him but also suffer for his sake” (Philippians 1:29), and the word he uses is the ordinary New Testament word for giving something freely and graciously, the verb built on the word for grace. Notice too what Paul places inside the gift. Believing and suffering stand side by side as two things granted for Christ’s sake. Whatever we make of the suffering, the believing is named as something given, not something the Philippians brought to the transaction.

Then there is 1 John 5:1: “Everyone who believes that Jesus is the Christ has been born of God.” The believing is present and ongoing; the birth is a completed act standing behind it. I will say honestly that the grammar alone does not decide the order, since Greek tenses can be pressed further than they should be. What decides it is John’s habit throughout the letter. He treats doing righteousness (2:29) and loving one another (4:7) as the marks and fruit of having been born of God, never as its cause, and he treats believing exactly the same way in 5:1.

Lydia belongs here, and I want to handle her carefully. Paul preached by the river at Philippi, and Luke tells us of one hearer that “the Lord opened her heart to pay attention to what was said by Paul” (Acts 16:14). Luke does not tell us whether the Lord opened the hearts of the other women listening, and I will not invent it. What he does tell us is enough. The preaching and the opening of the heart belonged together. Paul supplied the message; the Lord supplied the hearing. And Lydia, her heart opened, responded gladly and freely. That is the Reformed doctrine in a single sentence of narrative.

Two Objections

The Provisionist will say that this makes God unjust, since He commands what men cannot do, and that it makes men robots.

On the first, God’s commands have never been scaled to our ability. The law requires perfect love for God, and no fallen man has kept it for an hour, yet the command stands and the guilt is real. Our inability is not something that happened to us like a disease. It is moral. It is ours. It consists in our unwillingness, which is why Jesus could say to men with the Scriptures open in front of them, “yet you refuse to come to me that you may have life” (John 5:40). The man who cannot come is the man who will not come, and he is held responsible for the will not.

On the second, nobody is a robot. The 1689 Confession says it as well as it has ever been said. God calls His people “by His Word and Spirit,” enlightening their minds, “taking away their heart of stone, and giving to them a heart of flesh; renewing their wills, and by His almighty power determining them to that which is good… yet so as they come most freely, being made willing by His grace” (chapter 10, paragraph 1). No one is dragged to Christ against his will. The will itself is made new, and the new will comes running. That is what God promised through Ezekiel: “And I will give you a new heart, and a new spirit I will put within you” (Ezekiel 36:26). The Word is God’s appointed instrument, and the Spirit makes it effective. Word and Spirit together. That is the Reformed position, and it is not the Provisionist one.

Why Any of This Matters

Someone will ask why I am spending an article on a label. Two reasons.

First, a wrong view of man leads to a wrong view of grace. If the sinner supplies the believing out of an ability the fall did not destroy, then the decisive difference between the man who is saved and the man who is not lies in the sinner’s response rather than in God’s renewing of the sinner, and the deciding factor in salvation is finally human. Paul writes to rule that out: “So then it depends not on human will or exertion, but on God, who has mercy” (Romans 9:16). And it gives the wrong answer to a question that should have only one: “What do you have that you did not receive?” (1 Corinthians 4:7). I want to be clear about what I am and am not saying here. I am saying the Provisionist system undermines the grace it preaches. I am not saying that everyone who holds it is unconverted. A man may trust in Christ alone and be saved while holding a theology that, if followed to its end, would take the credit back. Many of us held muddled views of grace for years while resting on Christ, and God was patient with us.

Second, it matters for how we speak to one another. If I keep answering a Provisionist as though he were an Arminian, we will talk past each other for the rest of our lives. Name the real position, put the real question, and the conversation can finally become an honest one. That is what I intend to do from now on.

So here is where I have landed. Many of those who argue against the doctrines of grace today are not Arminians and do not claim to be. Their position denies the inability that Calvinists and Arminians alike have always confessed, and on that point it conflicts with what the church insisted upon at Orange in 529, that the beginning of faith requires the inward enabling of the Spirit. I did not see it for a long time, and I argued badly because of it.

And if you are reading this and recognize your own position in it, may I ask you one thing? Take the question I put above to the Scriptures and let them answer it. What does the Spirit have to do to a sinner before that sinner will believe? Not what you remember of your own conversion, since none of us is a reliable witness to the order of events in our own heart, but what the Word says. If the Word says He must open the heart, give the new spirit, and grant the believing, then if you have come to Christ, something was done in you that you did not produce, and the God who did it deserves every bit of the credit. We were dead. He made us alive. To Him be the glory, forever. Amen.

Sources and Quotations

Jacob Arminius, Declaration of Sentiments (1608), the section on the free will of man: “But in his lapsed and sinful state, man is not capable, of and by himself, either to think, to will, or to do that which is really good; but it is necessary for him to be regenerated and renewed in his intellect, affections or will, and in all his powers, by God in Christ through the Holy Spirit.” The Works of James Arminius, vol. 1 (Nichols translation), online at ccel.org/ccel/arminius/works1.

Jacob Arminius, Public Disputations, XI.7: “In this state, the free will of man towards the true good is not only wounded, maimed, infirm, bent, and weakened; but it is also imprisoned, destroyed, and lost. And its powers are not only debilitated and useless unless they be assisted by grace, but it has no powers whatever except such as are excited by Divine grace.” Same volume.

The Five Articles of the Remonstrants (1610), Article III: “That man has not saving grace of himself, nor of the energy of his free will, inasmuch as he, in the state of apostasy and sin, can of and by himself neither think, will, nor do any thing that is truly good (such as saving Faith eminently is); but that it is needful that he be born again of God in Christ, through his Holy Spirit.”

The Second Council of Orange (529), Canons 5 and 7; ratified by Boniface II in 531. Canon 5 declares that the beginning of faith and the very desire to believe come to us by the gift of grace through the inspiration of the Holy Spirit amending our will, and not by nature, and that anyone who says otherwise is opposed to the teaching of the apostles. Canon 7 condemns anyone who says we can assent to the preaching of the gospel through our natural powers without the illumination and inspiration of the Holy Spirit. Text of Canons 5 through 8 at monergism.com/thethreshold/articles/onsite/Orange5-8.html.

Augustine, On the Grace of Christ, Book I (418), especially chapters 2 through 5 and 33 through 42, where he examines Pelagius’s professions of grace and shows that they refer to nature and free will, to the law and teaching, to the example of Christ, and to the forgiveness of sins, and never to an inward help given to the will itself. English text in Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, series 1, vol. 5, online at newadvent.org/fathers/15061.htm.

John Cassian, Conferences, XIII, chapters 11 and 12 (c. 428), where he holds that sometimes the first beginnings of a good will arise from nature, which God then meets and strengthens, and sometimes God stirs the heart first. This is the view later called semi-Pelagian. English text in Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, series 2, vol. 11, online at newadvent.org/fathers/350813.htm.

Leighton Flowers, “The Role of the Holy Spirit,” Soteriology 101, July 2019, at soteriology101.com/2019/07/19/the-role-of-the-holy-spirit/. The Provisionist statement of faith is published on the same site.

The Second London Baptist Confession of Faith (1689), chapter 10, paragraph 1: “Those whom God hath predestinated unto life, He is pleased in His appointed, and accepted time, effectually to call, by His Word and Spirit, out of that state of sin and death in which they are by nature, to grace and salvation by Jesus Christ; enlightening their minds spiritually and savingly to understand the things of God; taking away their heart of stone, and giving to them a heart of flesh; renewing their wills, and by His almighty power determining them to that which is good, and effectually drawing them to Jesus Christ; yet so as they come most freely, being made willing by His grace.”