The Problem Is Not Grace

I want to make the issue as plain as I can.

I am not arguing that fallen human beings can save themselves. I am not denying the necessity or priority of divine grace. I am not denying God’s exhaustive foreknowledge, His providence, or His sovereignty over creation. I am arguing that classical Reformed theology begins with a particular definition of sovereignty - an exhaustive and immutable decree determining everything that comes to pass - and then repeatedly qualifies the biblical text until nothing in Scripture is permitted to challenge that definition.

When Scripture says all, we are told it means some.

When Scripture says God does not will that anyone perish, we are told it means He does not will that any of the elect perish.

When God says He takes no pleasure in the death of the wicked, we are told this describes only His revealed disposition, while His eternal decree still infallibly determines that many will never receive the grace necessary to repent.

When the apostles warn Christians that they must persevere or face destruction, we are told the warnings are real - but also that no elect person can finally fall, because the warnings are merely instruments by which an already immutable decree is carried out.

And when we ask whether human beings make any genuinely causal difference, we are told that they are “secondary causes,” even though the identity, desires, choices, actions, and final destinations of all those secondary causes were supposedly settled by the primary cause before any of them existed.

At some point, this stops looking like a theology being corrected by Scripture and starts looking like Scripture being continually managed in order to protect a system.

Christ Assumed the Humanity He Came to Heal

First, the Incarnation.

A qualification is necessary. If someone says that Christ assumed “pre-fall humanity” and means only that Christ was completely without personal sin, guilt, corruption, or a will inclined toward evil, then there is no disagreement. Sin is not an essential constituent of human nature. Christ did not need to become sinful in order to become truly human.

But if “pre-fall humanity” means that Christ assumed a protected form of humanity insulated from our mortal, passible, post-fall condition - our condition of hunger, exhaustion, sorrow, suffering, temptation, and death - then there is an immediate problem with Hebrews.

Hebrews does not say that the children shared one kind of flesh while Christ assumed something merely analogous to it. It says that, because the children share in flesh and blood, He likewise shared the same things. It then says that He had to be made like His brothers in every respect. Hebrews 4 supplies the explicit boundary: He was tested as we are, yet without sin. Sinlessness is the exception; shared humanity is the rule.

Christ did not assume our personal guilt or a disordered moral will. He did assume the humanity now held under death. He became hungry, thirsty, weary, grieved, capable of suffering, and capable of dying. He did not observe our condition from the safe distance of an untouched Adamic existence. He entered it and defeated death from inside it.

This is the context of St. Gregory of Nazianzus’s famous statement:

“What He has not assumed He has not healed.”

The reference is Gregory of Nazianzus, Letter 101 to Cledonius, Against Apollinarius, often cited as Epistle 101.5 and presented as chapter 32 in the modern Cambridge edition. Gregory’s immediate opponent denied that Christ possessed a complete human mind. Gregory’s answer was that the whole Adam had fallen and therefore the whole human nature had to be assumed and healed. In the same letter he explicitly rejects the idea that Christ’s flesh descended from heaven rather than being “from here and from us.”

The later Chalcedonian confession expresses the same reality by saying that Christ is of one substance with the Father according to His divinity and of one substance with us according to His humanity. Even the Westminster Confession says that the Son assumed human nature with its essential properties and “common infirmities,” while remaining without sin. Therefore, my criticism is not directed at every Reformed Christology indiscriminately. It is directed at any account that places Christ’s humanity in a category so protected from our actual condition that His solidarity with us becomes mostly verbal.

That position is not necessarily identical to ancient Docetism in its strict historical form. Classical Docetism denied that Christ possessed a real human body or truly suffered at all. But the position can still move in a Docetic direction: Christ appears to enter our condition while His humanity remains fundamentally unlike the humanity He came to heal.

The problem is the same evasive instinct. The scandal of the Incarnation is that the eternal Son truly became what we are, sin excepted. He did not merely appear among us in an idealized Adamic humanity. He assumed our nature from the Virgin, entered our mortality, suffered in the flesh, and raised that same humanity from the dead.

What Does “All” Actually Mean in Greek?

Paul writes in 1 Timothy 2:4:

ὃς πάντας ἀνθρώπους θέλει σωθῆναι hos pantas anthrōpous thelei sōthēnai

The grammar is not especially mysterious.

πάντας is the masculine accusative plural form of πᾶς, meaning “all” or “every.” It agrees directly with ἀνθρώπους, the accusative plural of “human being” or “person.” θέλει means “wills,” “desires,” or “wants,” and σωθῆναι is the passive infinitive “to be saved.”

The direct translation is:

“Who wills or desires all human beings to be saved.”

There is no noun meaning “kinds,” “classes,” “categories,” or “groups” in the phrase. Paul did not write “some people from every kind.” He wrote πάντας ἀνθρώπους - all human beings.

Now, context can sometimes restrict a universal term. No careful argument should claim that πᾶς must mechanically refer to every individual in every sentence in which it appears. But any restriction has to be demonstrated from the context. It cannot simply be inserted into the translation because a theological system requires it.

Saying “all kinds of people” is therefore not a translation of the Greek phrase. It is an interpretive paraphrase. It may be defended as an inference from the context, but it is not what πάντας ἀνθρώπους lexically says.

And the context does not make the restrictive reading obvious. Paul first commands prayer for all people, then specifically mentions kings and people in authority - groups Christians might have been tempted to exclude. He then grounds that prayer in God’s desire for all to be saved, in the existence of one God, one mediator between God and humanity, and Christ’s self-giving as a ransom for all. The movement of the passage is expansive, not restrictive. Kings are an example of people who must not be excluded; they are not a dictionary definition proving that “all” secretly means “some from every social category.”

The interpretation of St. John Chrysostom is particularly relevant here - not because a Greek-speaking Father is individually infallible, but because modern interpreters frequently claim that the restrictive reading is simply what the Greek naturally means.

In his seventh homily on 1 Timothy, Chrysostom takes Paul’s statement to mean that Christians should pray for everyone. He explicitly includes Gentiles, pagans, and heretics and grounds that universal prayer in the fact that God wills their salvation. He does not explain “all” as “a few people from every class.”

That does not end every possible exegetical debate. It does, however, prevent a modern restrictive interpretation from presenting itself as the obvious conclusion of the Greek language. A major Greek-speaking Christian interpreter, far closer to the linguistic and ecclesial world of the New Testament than we are, understood the language universally.

The same issue appears in 2 Peter 3:9:

μὴ βουλόμενός τινας ἀπολέσθαι ἀλλὰ πάντας εἰς μετάνοιαν χωρῆσαι

A straightforward rendering is:

“Not wishing any to perish, but all to come to repentance.”

τινας means “any” or “some persons,” while πάντας means “all.” The word “elect” does not appear in the sentence. Reformed interpreters may argue that “any” and “all” are contextually limited by the preceding phrase “toward you,” but that is a contextual and theological argument. It is not something supplied by the meanings of τινας or πάντας themselves.

The same pattern becomes even more difficult to maintain in Ezekiel. God does not merely issue an external command to the wicked while concealing a fundamentally contrary disposition. He swears that He takes no pleasure in the wicked person’s death and calls that person to turn and live. The contrast is between what God desires - repentance and life - and what the sinner persists in choosing.

To be fair, careful Reformed theologians do not generally say that God delights in damnation considered simply as damnation. They distinguish between God’s revealed or preceptive will and His decretive will, and they argue that He decrees judgment for the manifestation of justice and glory while not delighting in death in itself.

I do not need to misrepresent that distinction in order to criticize it.

The real question is whether God can be said to desire the salvation of a particular person in any meaningful salvific sense when, according to the same system, God has eternally decided not to give that person the only grace that would certainly bring him to repentance.

St. John of Damascus gives a very different account of antecedent and consequent willing. He says God’s original and antecedent will is that all should be saved. Punishment is consequent upon human rejection and “has its origin in us.” He explicitly says that wicked acts are not the object of either God’s antecedent or consequent will but are permitted because rational creatures possess freedom.

That preserves a real distinction without turning God’s universal saving will into an outward declaration whose opposite result was immutably selected from eternity.

The Disagreement Begins Before We Ever Reach the Word “All”

There is a prior issue that must be addressed: What paradigm of interpretation are we using?

The apostolic authors and the early Greek-speaking Church did not approach Scripture as autonomous modern individuals armed with a lexicon, a concordance, and a private systematic theology. Their exegesis was not reducible to what is now called the grammatical-historical method, even though they certainly cared about words, context, history, and argument.

They read all of Scripture as one divine economy centered in Christ.

Jesus begins with Moses and the prophets and interprets the Scriptures as speaking about Himself. Paul identifies Hagar and Sarah with two covenants and explicitly calls his interpretation allegorical. Elsewhere he says Israel’s rock was Christ. Hebrews reads the tabernacle, priesthood, sacrifices, and promised rest as realities fulfilled in Christ and His body. Their reading was historical, but it was also typological, Christological, ecclesial, and sacramental.

That does not mean they believed anyone could invent whatever symbolic meaning he pleased. Their interpretation was governed by a public apostolic confession - what the Fathers frequently called the rule of faith.

Irenaeus explains the danger through his famous mosaic illustration. A person can possess all the correct biblical jewels and still rearrange them until the beautiful image of the King has been transformed into the poor image of a fox. The problem is not necessarily that the interpreter lacks biblical quotations. The problem is that his controlling picture tells him how to arrange them. Irenaeus charges the heretics with adapting the sayings of the prophets, Christ, and the apostles to a theological scheme they had already accepted.

His answer is not autonomous private interpretation. He points to the faith publicly received from the apostles, preserved throughout the churches, and proclaimed as one coherent whole. Origen likewise begins On First Principles by observing that Christians disagree even over the highest doctrines and therefore need a definite rule: the teaching transmitted from the apostles and preserved in the churches.

None of this makes every Father individually infallible. The Fathers sometimes disagreed, sometimes interpreted poorly, and sometimes required correction by the wider Church. Nor does speaking Greek automatically make someone theologically correct.

But it does mean that their reception of Scripture is serious historical evidence. Their nearness to the linguistic, liturgical, and theological world of the early Church cannot simply be dismissed whenever it conflicts with a much later system.

No one reads Scripture from nowhere.

Every interpreter brings known and unknown commitments: assumptions about freedom, causation, justice, sovereignty, human nature, the Church, tradition, and what kinds of meanings Scripture is allowed to possess. The modern Protestant who says, “I have no tradition; I simply read the Bible,” usually has a tradition that has become invisible to him precisely because he takes it for granted.

The Reformed interpreter has a tradition. Westminster is a tradition. Calvin’s distinctions are a tradition. The decretive framework, compatibilist definition of freedom, and particular account of divine willing are inherited theological commitments. They may be defended, but they are not identical with the biblical text itself.

That is why the question is not merely:

“What does this isolated Greek word mean?”

The fuller question is:

“How did the apostolic and early ecclesial world understand the whole pattern of Scripture, and what later presuppositions are causing us to rearrange that pattern?”

When the actual Greek phrase says “all human beings,” when the context repeatedly moves toward universality, and when an influential Greek-speaking Father reads it as including pagans and heretics, the burden rests upon the person restricting it. He cannot simply declare his restricted interpretation to be “the Greek meaning” and then accuse everyone else of allowing tradition to corrupt the text.

Appealing to the Indwelling Holy Spirit Does Not Resolve the Hermeneutical Problem

At this point, someone may answer:

“The same Holy Spirit who inspired Scripture indwells believers and leads us into the truth. Therefore, we do not need to submit our reading to the Fathers or the historical Church.”

I affirm the illumination of the Holy Spirit. The issue is not whether the Spirit illuminates Scripture. The issue is whether my private identification of a particular interpretation with the Spirit’s illumination is itself infallible.

That is precisely where the appeal becomes question-begging.

In a dispute between two Christians who both claim the indwelling Spirit, saying, “The Holy Spirit showed me that my reading is correct,” does not demonstrate the reading. It assumes the very conclusion being disputed: that this particular interpretation is the one produced by the Spirit.

The Holy Spirit is infallible. I am not.

The Spirit’s testimony is certain. My ability to distinguish His illumination from my habits, fears, loyalties, confessional formation, and unnoticed presuppositions is not automatically certain.

A person may possess complete psychological certainty and still be mistaken about the source of that certainty. The indwelling Spirit gives genuine communion with God and genuine illumination; He does not give each individual Christian personal exegetical inerrancy. If He did, sincere Spirit-indwelt Christians could not arrive at contradictory interpretations.

Even the Westminster Confession acknowledges both sides of this problem. It says inward illumination is necessary, but it also says that councils, ancient writers, doctrines of men, and “private spirits” must be examined. It identifies the supreme judge as the Holy Spirit speaking in Scripture. But that formula does not make the hermeneutical problem disappear. It returns us to the same question: Which interpretation accurately represents the Spirit speaking in Scripture, and by what publicly available criteria is that determined?

An appeal to personal illumination may explain why someone feels convinced. It does not publicly establish why his interpretation is true.

The early Church did not solve that problem by denying the Spirit’s activity. It sought to discern the Spirit within the apostolic rule of faith, the public confession of the churches, the canonical whole of Scripture, and the worshiping life of the body of Christ. Irenaeus’s answer to heretical proof-texting was not, “My private spiritual experience is stronger than yours.” His answer was that the texts must remain arranged according to the apostolic image of the King.

Therefore, an appeal to the indwelling Spirit cannot be used as an escape hatch from historical, grammatical, ecclesial, and theological accountability. Otherwise, “The Spirit told me” becomes an unfalsifiable way of canonizing one’s own presuppositions.

What the Reformed System Actually Claims About Responsibility

The Reformed system should be represented fairly.

It is not simply “uncomfortable with personal responsibility” at the pastoral level. Reformed pastors and elders regularly exhort people to repent, run the race, resist temptation, pursue holiness, examine themselves, and persevere. They do not ordinarily tell their congregations to become passive because everything has already been decreed.

Their formal answer is that God ordains not only the final end but also all of the means leading to that end. Preaching, warnings, pastoral correction, prayer, sacraments, discipline, and personal effort are secondary causes through which God brings the elect to the perseverance He has decreed.

Westminster therefore says both that God unchangeably ordains whatever comes to pass and that events occur through secondary causes that may be described as necessary, free, or contingent. It says God foreordains all the means by which the elect reach glory. It also says that those truly effectually called cannot finally fall, and that their perseverance depends not upon their free will but upon the immutable decree of election.

So the Reformed response is not:

“Responsibility does not matter.”

It is:

“Responsibility is one of the decreed means by which the elect infallibly reach their decreed end.”

The person with ears to hear receives the warning, runs the race, is sanctified, and perseveres because God decreed both the warning and the effect it would produce.

That is the strongest version of the position.

But it does not resolve the deeper problem.

The Canons of Dort make the underlying asymmetry especially clear. They say the non-elect are passed by in God’s eternal election and are not granted saving faith and the grace of conversion. Westminster likewise says that only the elect are effectually called and saved, while others are passed by and ordained to dishonor and wrath for their sins.

Calvin defines predestination as God’s eternal decree concerning what He willed to occur with every person and says some are preordained to life and others to damnation. Luther is not simply identical to later Westminster Calvinism, but in The Bondage of the Will he similarly denies salvific freedom to the fallen will and describes it apart from grace as bound to evil.

John MacArthur did not create this logic. His statements - such as the claim that everyone would lose salvation if losing it were genuinely possible - are popularized expressions of a much older confessional commitment. Westminster itself says the perseverance of the truly regenerate is certain and does not depend upon their free will.

Why the Appeal to Secondary Causes Does Not Solve the Problem

The problem is not that a Reformed theologian literally denies that secondary causes produce any effects.

A sermon may move someone to fear. A warning may alter his immediate behavior. A decision may move his body to act. In that ordinary instrumental sense, secondary causes remain causes.

The deeper question is whether the secondary cause makes a genuinely decisive and personal difference in explaining why one person finally repents while another does not.

Under an exhaustive, immutable decree, the answer has already been settled before either person exists.

The decree settles the persons involved, their inherited condition, their circumstances, the preaching they encounter, the desires with which they respond, whether effectual grace is granted, whether that grace infallibly produces conversion, and whether they finally persevere. The secondary causes are active within the sequence, but they do not determine which possible final outcome becomes actual. That distinction has already been made by the decree.

In other words, the secondary causes may explain how the decree unfolds, but they do not explain why this outcome rather than another ultimately occurs.

The primary cause has already decided that.

This is where the appeal to secondary causes begins to feel like a game of moving words around. The warning is real, but the elect person cannot finally perish. The choice is real, but no person can choose an outcome different from the one immutably decreed. The call is universal, but saving efficacy was intended only for particular people. The non-elect person is told to hear, but the grace that would certainly give him ears to hear was never intended for him.

The Reformed response is often:

“He could come to Christ if he wanted to. No one is forcing him to remain away.”

But that conceals the very issue being disputed. According to the same system, fallen people will never savingly want Christ unless God effectually changes their will, and God has eternally chosen to grant that effectual change only to the elect.

So yes, the non-elect person acts voluntarily in the compatibilist sense. He does what he wants.

But who alone determines whether his desires will be effectually healed?

Who alone determines whether the preaching will become an irresistible saving call or remain merely external?

Who alone determines whether he will be given the faith and grace of conversion?

Within the system, the answer is God.

The final distinction between the believer and the unbeliever therefore cannot ultimately be the different ways in which two grace-enabled persons respond. It is God’s prior decision to effectually produce one response and not the other.

At that point, calling the human choice a “secondary cause” does not do the moral work it is supposed to do. It changes the vocabulary without changing the closed causal structure.

Irenaeus understood biblical exhortations very differently. He argues that God gives counsel to all without compulsion and that human beings may genuinely obey or disobey. For him, the prophets and apostles exhort precisely because it lies within the person’s grace-given agency to heed or reject the counsel. He explicitly connects praise and blame with a real capacity to do or refrain from doing.

That does not mean man independently manufactures goodness. It means God’s grace does not replace the person as an agent.

Grace initiates, calls, enlightens, strengthens, heals, and sustains. But the person’s response remains a genuinely human response. God does not repent in my place. God does not believe in my place. God gives everything necessary for repentance and faith, but I truly repent and believe through the grace He supplies.

Receiving a gift is not the same as earning it.

Taking hold of a rescuer’s hand is not the same as rescuing oneself.

Cooperating with a physician is not the same as healing oneself.

And saying that a person can resist grace does not mean the person possesses some independent power greater than God. It means that God sovereignly chose to create rational persons rather than mechanisms and does not ordinarily compel the love and communion for which He created them.

This Does Not Lead to Open Theism

None of this requires open theism.

The false dilemma is:

Either God exhaustively causes every future choice, or He cannot exhaustively know future choices.

That simply does not follow.

Knowledge, as knowledge, is not an efficient cause of the thing known.

God’s knowledge of an act entails that the act certainly occurs, because God cannot be mistaken. But it does not follow that God’s knowledge causally necessitates the act or changes the kind of act it is.

The distinction can be stated simply:

It is necessarily true that whatever God knows is true.

That does not mean:

Everything God knows occurs by causal necessity.

The first is the necessity of God’s knowledge being infallible. The second would be the necessity of the creature being irresistibly determined. They are not the same proposition.

God may infallibly know that tomorrow a person freely and grace-enabledly repents. The repentance is certain with respect to divine knowledge, but it remains voluntary with respect to the human agent. God knows the act precisely as the kind of act it is: a free, personal, grace-enabled act.

Nor does this mean that God waits inside time to discover what we will do. His knowledge is not acquired after the creature acts, as though the creature supplies God with previously unavailable information. God eternally and immediately knows the entire created order. The object of His knowledge may be a genuinely contingent created act without His act of knowing being temporal, uncertain, or passive.

St. John of Damascus makes the distinction directly:

God “knows all things beforehand, yet He does not predetermine all things.”

He says that God foreknows what lies within human agency without predetermining it, does not will wickedness, and does not compel virtue. In the same discussion he says that without God’s cooperation and help we cannot will or accomplish anything good, while also affirming that we may abide in virtue or depart from it. That is neither Pelagian self-salvation nor open theism. It is exhaustive foreknowledge joined to grace-dependent creaturely freedom.

God is therefore not surprised by sin. He does not learn new facts. He does not lose control of history.

He creates and sustains every creature. He permits what He does not morally approve. He limits evil, judges it, redirects its consequences, and can bring good from it without becoming the determining cause of its wickedness.

Permission is not ignorance.

Permission is not impotence.

And sovereignty does not require God to become the positive determining cause of every evil act. God is sovereign enough to create genuine causes other than Himself, sustain them in existence, allow them to act according to their created powers, and still bring His purposes to completion.

The Cumulative Problem

Any one of the Reformed distinctions may sound plausible when examined in isolation.

“All people” can be made to mean all categories of people.

“Any” can be made to mean any of the elect.

God’s desire for repentance can be assigned to His revealed will, while the contrary outcome belongs to His decretive will.

Warnings can be called real because they are decreed instruments.

Choices can be called free because people act according to their desires.

Secondary causes can be called causal because they are temporal means through which the decree unfolds.

But the cumulative result is a system in which no biblical statement is capable of counting against the decree.

Every text that appears to teach a universal saving will is restricted.

Every text that presents a genuine divine-human conflict is redescribed.

Every warning that appears to place a believer’s final salvation in danger becomes the infallible means ensuring that no elect believer is ever finally in danger.

Every apostate is retrospectively declared never to have been truly regenerate.

Every person who perseveres proves he was elect.

Every person who falls proves he never was.

The system confirms itself under every possible outcome.

That is why the argument can feel like theological gaslighting. The reader is continually told that the words do not mean what they appear to mean, the warnings do not describe the danger they appear to describe, the invitations are not intended to become effective for everyone to whom they are addressed, and personal choices are genuinely decisive even though an immutable decree has already determined every final result.

I am not claiming that Reformed Christians are insincere, immoral, or uninterested in holiness. Many are deeply serious about Christ, repentance, Scripture, and pastoral care. My criticism is directed toward the internal logic of the system, not toward the secret motives of every person who holds it.

I am grieved because the pastoral consequences can be devastating.

Some people become obsessed with determining whether they were secretly elected.

Some are told that their sincere desire to come to Christ may itself be false evidence.

Some are taught to see every evil event as part of God’s meticulous secret determination.

Some conclude that God creates a history in which particular people will certainly remain unbelieving, withholds the only grace that would certainly rescue them, and then condemns them for the unbelief that He immutably ordained would never be overcome.

The Reformed confessions explicitly deny that God is the author of sin, and I take that denial seriously. But stating the denial is not the same as resolving the causal problem. If the decree infallibly fixes every creaturely action while the creature can never actualize an alternative outcome, the system still has to explain how God’s determining causality ends exactly where the evil character of the act begins.

The biblical and patristic picture is more coherent.

Christ truly assumed our humanity, including our mortal condition, yet without sin.

God truly desires the salvation of all and calls all to repentance.

Grace truly precedes, enables, and accompanies every movement toward God.

No human being can heal or save himself.

Nevertheless, the human person remains a real, grace-dependent agent who may receive, resist, neglect, or abandon what God gives.

God eternally and infallibly knows every response without His knowledge becoming the efficient cause of every response.

Those who are condemned are not condemned because God secretly created them for unbelief and withheld the only possible rescue. They are condemned for genuinely resisting the light and grace given to them.

This is not Pelagianism, because no saving good begins or succeeds apart from grace.

It is not open theism, because God’s knowledge is exhaustive, eternal, and infallible.

It is not universalism, because the grace genuinely offered to all can be resisted.

And it is not a limitation of divine sovereignty, because God is not less sovereign for creating rational persons rather than puppets.

The question is not whether God is sovereign.

The question is whether we are allowed to define sovereignty as exhaustive causal determination and then force Christ’s solidarity with us, God’s universal saving will, the apostolic warnings, human responsibility, and the historic Christian understanding of freedom to bow before that definition.

At some point, the decree must be judged by the revelation of God in Jesus Christ - not the revelation of God in Jesus Christ continually reinterpreted to protect the decree.