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.