In his book, Reprobation and God’s Sovereignty (2022), Peter Sammons teaches that
.
. . the Reformed position affirms that God regenerates the heart and will;
which precedes and products faith. (Peter Sammons, Reprobation and God’s
Sovereignty: Recovering a Biblical Doctrine [Grand Rapids, Mich.: Kregel
Academic, 2022], 87)
In support of this understanding
of the ordo salutis, Sammons provides the following helpful footnote
quoting leading Reformed authors:
“The
Reformed view . . . teaches that before a person can choose Christ . . . he
must be born again . . . one does not first believe and then become reborn . .
. A cardinal doctrine of Reformed theology is the maxim, “Regeneration precedes
faith.” (R.C. Sproul, Chosen by God (Wheaton, IL: Tyndale House, 1986),
10, 72. “A man is not regenerated because he has first believed in Christ, but
he believes in Christ because has been regenerated.” Arthur W. Pink, The
Sovereignty of God (1930; repr., Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 1984), 55.
“Regeneration logically must initiate faith.” John MacArthur, The Gospel According
to the Apostles (Nashville: Thomas Nelson, 2000), 62. “When Christ called
to Lazarus to come out of the grave, Lazarus had no life in him so that he
could hear, sit up, and emerge. There was not a flicker of life in him. If he
was to be able to hear Jesus calling him and go to Him, then Jesus would have
to make him alive. Jesus resurrected him and then Lazarus could respond.
[Similarly,] the unsaved, the unregenerate, is spiritually dead (Eph. 2). He is
unable to ask for help unless God changes his heart of stone into a heart of
flesh, and makes him alive spiritually (Eph. 2:5). Then, once he is born again,
he can for the first time turn to Jesus, expressing sorrow for his sins and
asking Jesus to save him.” Edwin H. Palmer, The Five Points of Calvinism
(Grand Rapids: Baker, 1972), 18-19. “Abraham Kuyper observed that, prior to
regeneration, a sinner ‘has all the passive properties belonging to a corpse. .
. . [Therefore] every effort to claim for the sinner the minutest co-operation
in this first grace destroys the gospel, severs the artery of the Christian
confession and is anti-scriptural in the highest degree.’ Like a spiritual
corpse, he is unable to make a single move toward God, think a right thought
about God, or even respond to God—unless God first brings this spiritually dead
corpse to life.” James Montgomery Boice and Philip Graham Ryken, The
Doctrines of Grace: Rediscovering the Evangelical Gospel (Wheaton, IL:
Crossway, 2002), 74. (Ibid., 87 n. 9)
