Friday, August 26, 2022

Examples of Reformed Theologians Explicating Regeneration Precedes Faith in their Ordo Salutis

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)