Calvinists take solace in the claim that they believe salvation is totally a work of God (unconditional election, man’s passiveness until selective regeneration, regeneration prompting faith, etc.), while oftentimes either implying or explicitly accusing those who make salvation conditioned upon man exercising faith (exercising faith in response to hearing the gospel prior to regeneration or forgiveness) as being less than a total work of God or stealing some of God’s glory in the work of salvation. According to Calvinists, this conditional nature of salvation (as opposed to monergism and man’s total passiveness prior to regeneration) is supposed to emanate from, at best, a lesser view of salvation by grace and God’s sovereignty, which results in some sort of communal glory or credit between man and God for one’s salvation. Fortunately, Calvinism’s final conclusion is reasoned from Calvinism rather than Scripture.
The Bible is unmistakably lucid that salvation is totally a sovereign work of God and a reflection of His omnibenevolence. According to the unbeclouded teaching of Scripture, from conception to completion, God alone did the work of salvation and superabundantly provided everything necessary so that salvation could be unconditionally offered to each and all. Accordingly, the work of salvation is not conditioned upon faith, but rather it is more precise to say that the personal reception of the free and full salvation that God has wrought is what is conditioned upon faith. Even the act of faith is grace enabled as opposed to somehow originating outside of God’s design in either created or fallen man. To wit, no outside force influenced either the development or procurement of God’s plan of creation or redemption.
That is to say, by grace God bounteously provides every essential for a person to be able to walk in relationship with Him. This includes opportunity, necessary understanding, and a freed will to act. The basis for every sovereignly necessitated condition lies in and emanates from the grace of God rather than the merit, virtue, or otherwise contribution of man (Romans 3:21-31; 4:1-16). Thus, both the conditions and the ability to meet said conditions exist because of what is in and provided by God rather than what is in or deserved by man.
God then graciously bestows these so that man’s freedom of otherwise choice is simply an outcome of His sovereignly chosen and enabled precondition for enjoying His full fellowship. This is as true of Adam prior to the fall as it was of fallen Adam and his progeny after the fall. That a choice to receive God’s blessings and walk in them is always conditioned upon faith is the pervasive and coherent teaching of Scripture. What changes from prior to the fall, to after the fall, and then ultimately after glorification is what grace works God must accomplish and provide in order to make such blessing actually available and accessible.
For example, God created Adam, placed him in an environment that was conducive for Adam to walk with Him, while concomitantly being sufficient to provide Adam with the choice to cease to walk with God. We can understand this as creative grace enablement. That is the option that God laid before Adam, (Genesis 2:17-18). Hardly anything could be more clear (Genesis 1 & 2). When Adam and Eve chose to use their God-given creative ability to walk away from God and go their own way (Genesis 3:1-6), the opportunity for them to walk with God ceased to be available based upon God’s creative grace work. Unless God’s eternal creation plan comprehended such an eventuality, and accordingly incorporated additional grace provisions, man would never have the opportunity to walk with God in the same way that Adam did, even though all of man’s sensibilities regarding God were not obliterated by the fall (Genesis 3:8-13; Romans 1:18-32); thus, the opportunity Adam and Eve had prior to the fall ceased to exist.
Thankfully, we all know that God did not leave those He created irrevocably captive to their condign punishment. He always knew man would misuse his freedom, thereby eternally sequestering himself and his posterity from an intimate walk with their Creator. Correspondingly, God had eternally overcome such an egregious misuse of grace and freedom through His eternal coextensive creative/redemption plan, which included not only creative grace but redemptive grace as well. This becomes immediately evident (Genesis 3:21) and is encapsulated in His initial expression regarding the grander redemptive plan designed for all of mankind (3:15), which, other than God Himself, becomes the theme of Scripture.
Man’s freedom to exercise otherwise choice is a created force (libertarian free will); therefore, God is sovereign over it, and He can contravene it at any time, as He can any force. Consequently, whether this force is used for holiness or sin, it will not and cannot thwart His ultimate will, as is seen in Genesis in that God was neither surprised nor ill-prepared. This force is neither foreign nor supplemental to His will or salvation plan (as is sometimes understood or portrayed by Calvinists), but rather it is an inextricable component of His creative plan of making man in His very own image unto His glory alone!
Genesis, as well as the rest of Scripture, teaches that God desired to create man with such power, rather than limiting man to merely choosing what he only could choose through compatible freedom or being microscopically scripted by the precise decree of God. It seems that God’s creation of man with otherwise choice is the most obvious and unencumbered message of Genesis two and three if read without theological importations. Additionally, rather than this clear genesiacal message evanescing with God’s unfolding revelation, it actually becomes a supercolossally captivating theme of Scripture.
To wit, God placing a choice before man between two accessible options and then either blessing or judging man corresponding to the choice he makes is so omnipresent in the Scripture that it appears that one would have to write a myriad of books, create all kinds of biblically foreign concepts, interpret simple verses in light of complicated ones rather than the reverse, and develop unduly narrow definitions in order to convince even a few that such is not the case; further, to do so transmogrifies what began as “revelation” into a “veiling” only to be revealed by a few to a few.
I do believe that since the fall, man is totally depraved (extensively); therefore, I do not believe in partial depravity. My difference with Calvinism is that we hold to essentially dissimilar views regarding what total depravity means, which is determined by two drastically different and irreconcilable views of man, i.e. freedom; accordingly, we differ regarding what it takes to make fallen man savable. Calvinists are correct regarding depravity as affecting every part of man. They are tragically mistaken in their understanding of the nature of man being comprised of compatible freedom.
“Depravity can be understood as an inability to initiate or attain salvation without the grace of God.”[1] As a result, man is so affected by the fall, that he, unlike Adam before the fall, must receive additional grace enablements beyond creative grace enablements in order to have a genuine opportunity to choose to walk with God. This includes such things as God’s redemptive love, Christ’s payment for sin, conviction of the Holy Spirit, drawing of the Father and Son, power of the gospel, etc. None of which were necessary for Adam and Eve prior to the fall because God’s provision of creative grace was sufficient.
In Calvinism, faith is the predetermined result of God’s creative and redemptive grace provision, whereas in Extensivism, choice is the predetermined result of God’s creative and redemptive grace provision. This means that whatever decision is made, it arises from grace provision and is therefore a grace choice rather than a meritorious or self-virtuous choice (Romans 4:16; Ephesians 2:8-10). Within God’s options, He could have created man to be able to only determinatively exercise a free choosing of faith, or He could have created man to be able to deliberatively exercise a free choice of faith, and the latter is no less a work of grace than the former, Calvinists asseverations notwithstanding.
Rather than succumb to the insistence of some Calvinists that this puts salvation in man’s hand, somehow makes man deserving or participating in the work of salvation, or makes God dependent upon man, it actually is a strong point of Extensivism and poignantly highlights Calvinism’s inadvertent low view of God’s plan, man’s creation, and the simple reading of Scripture. I see no biblical problem with believing that if a person trusts Christ, he will not perish, and if he does not he will (Luke 13:3, 5), and that God sovereignly and graciously determinatively provisioned for that choice to reside within man; such choice existing without any contrary or cryptic programs running in the background known to only a few, which ultimately reduce the former from true to trivially true.
Upon reflection, it does seem quite odd that one can become more comfortable creating non-biblically attested to covenants,[2] extra biblical decrees that trump the simple meaning of revelation, two will hypothesis (which secret soteriology will ultimately trump the revealed soteriology), a selective internal call for the elect only (making the preaching of the gospel a vacuous proclamation for most, and I would even say a misleading one), election as taught in the Scripture transmogrified into an unconditional election (thereby making every passage that reflects opportunity and the need to choose a ghastly phantom), substituting a good faith offer for the good offer of Scripture (offering what does not exist for the vast majority who hear), having a salvific love for the unconditionally elect while only a temporal love for His creation (which if understood biblically actually appears to exist in concert with salvific love not in lieu of it), and usage of such language in presenting the gospel that leaves every lost person who hears believing they can and should believe, all the while the Calvinist knows his words are actually an encryption for God calling out His unconditionally elect and actually have nothing to do with the non-elect except to further condemn them. All of this dependence upon speculative theology might at least cause one to temper such hubris pronouncements as mentioned above regarding those who disagree.
When I compare Calvinism and Extensivism, just based upon the unclouded teaching of Scripture and apart from speculative theology whose fecundity of producing other such speculations is vast indeed, it results in recognizing that God’s decision to condition the restoration of man’s walk with Him upon grace-enabled faith, seems so simple apparently too simple for some.
The understanding of Scripture presented here simply means that faith is the condition for receiving God’s work of salvation, but faith is not the basis or work of salvation. The basis of Adam’s relational ability and fallen man’s relational ability (salvation) is always the love of God for His creation (John 3:16). This fact is the same as with Adam because he related to God by trusting God’s word, which relationship was corrupted when he chose to distrust God’s word (Genesis 2:17-18). As the first man related to God by faith and broke his relationship by not trusting God, every subsequent person returns to God by faith (Acts 16:31, Hebrews 11:6), or remains separated from God for one reason; he refuses to trust God (Luke 13:3, 5; Acts 17:30), which is the ultimate sin of Adam. That dynamic has not changed. It further seems that since man will forever be finite, he will always relate to God by faith even though the range of options will change.
“If it is disagreeable in your sight to serve the Lord, choose for yourselves today whom you will serve: whether the gods which your fathers served which were beyond the River, or the gods of the Amorites in whose land you are living; but as for me and my house, we will serve the Lord” (Joshua 24:15).
[1] Norman L. Geisler, Baker Encyclopedia of Christian Apologetics (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Books, 1999), 756.
[2] Referring to the chapter title and part one in his Systematic Theology Charles Hodge states, “This statement does not rest upon any express declaration of the Scriptures….Although the word covenant is not used in Genesis, and does not elsewhere, in any clear passage, occur in reference to the transaction there recorded, yet inasmuch as the plan of salvation is constantly represented as a New Covenant, new, not merely in antithesis to that made at Sinai, but new in reference to all legal covenants whatever, it is plain that the Bible does represent arrangement made with Adam as a truly federal transaction.” Charles Hodge, Systematic Theology, vol. II (Grand Rapids, MI: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1986), 117.
