In a recent blog post¹, Prof. David Engelsma seeks to bolster his position that in the experience of salvation man’s activity precedes God’s activity by appealing to the order of means and end. His argument is positively that he and the Protestant Reformed Churches (PRC) teach that repentance and faith are means to the ends of forgiveness and justification respectively, but they are not causes of these ends. Negatively, his argument is that the Reformed Protestant Churches (RPC) and her leaders blunder around in the word of God, misunderstand the order of means and end as one of cause and effect, and thereby deny any order in salvation. According to his argument, this results in their being unable to call anyone to faith and repentance, lest they make faith and repentance conditions to salvation. I argue here that his argument is not only misplaced; but also, in common with other leaders of the PRC, he uses the entirely proper order of means and end to make room for prerequisites in salvation. I will argue that Professor Engelsma misrepresents the order of salvation to teach prerequisites and misuses the call of the gospel in service of the former. In other words, he misuses the call of the gospel in the service of his misrepresentation of the order of salvation.

Misuse of the Call of the Gospel

That there is an order in God’s application of salvation, we do not deny. I will describe and define that order later. As part of his position that in a certain aspect of salvation man’s activity precedes God’s activity, Professor Engelsma appeals to texts of scripture that contain the call or address of the gospel. He does this both in his writings against Reverend Lanning and in his more recent blog post. On the basis of such texts, he argues for an order of salvation in which certain activities of man, chiefly his repenting and believing, precede acts of God. I will deal with these texts before describing the Reformed truth of the order of salvation.

The texts used by the professor are Malachi 3:7; James 4:8; and Acts 2:38, 10:43. In his June 2021 letters to family and friends taking issue with a sermon by Reverend Lanning, he argues that God’s returning and drawing near to us follow our returning and drawing near to him. He bases his position partly on the future tense of the verb in James 4:8: “he will draw nigh to you.” In other words, his position depends on a time element, so that the tense of the verb tells us when God fulfills his promise (after our act). This is also how he uses the texts in Acts in his recent blog post. From Acts 2:38 he concludes that God’s remitting of our sins follows our repenting. From Acts 10:43 he argues that our believing precedes in time God’s remission of our sins. This he concludes from the tense of the verbs: “The present tense, ‘believeth,’ precedes a future tense, ‘shall receive.’’’ For the professor a time element is the primary relationship between God’s activity and ours in these texts. And that is crucial for his whole position on the order of salvation, for in this way he makes the order of salvation a temporal order.

I believe the professor is mistaken when he uses such texts—those containing the call of the gospel—to teach an order of salvation. The purpose of the call of the gospel is not to teach the order of salvation. That is to say, texts like those used by Professor Engelsma say nothing about such an order. Rather, the purpose of the call of the gospel is twofold: it gives to the elect what is commanded, while it hardens the reprobate. In the case of the elect, the Holy Spirit as the Spirit of Christ speaks that call in the heart of the sinner in such a way that the Spirit gives the sinner what is commanded. The call comes in the form of a command: repent and believe! That command lays upon man his obligation: he must repent and believe. The Spirit uses that command to make the elect conscious that he cannot perform what is commanded. The Spirit does so by applying that command to the heart of the elect in such a way that he becomes deeply conscious that he is completely unable to obey it, that consequently he is completely hopeless and lost. This is the internal or effectual call, which gives to the sinner what God commands: it works faith in the elect sinner, making him conscious of his misery and that his only hope is Christ.

The effectual call of the gospel as the power to give faith and repentance is described in Canons 3–4.10–12. Article 10 teaches that the elect obey the call of the gospel and are converted because God gives what he requires. Regarding the elect’s obedience to the call, the article declares, “It must be wholly ascribed to God, who as He has chosen His own from eternity in Christ, so He confers upon them faith and repentance.” The effectual call as the wonderwork of God is further elaborated in this and the next two articles. It is defined as an internal call of the Spirit that “pervades the inmost recesses of the man” (11). By the power of the Spirit of Jesus Christ, the call of the gospel works conversion, giving faith and repentance, so that article 12 may conclude triumphantly, “So that all in whose heart God works in this marvelous manner are certainly, infallibly, and effectually regenerated and do actually believe” (Confessions and Church Order, 168–69). The Canons’ teaching in these articles is astounding and beautiful. Taken together, articles 10–12 constitute a beautiful doxology to the God of our salvation. They declare emphatically that with regard to our conversion, God does it all. The child of God exalts in the Canons’ ringing declaration that the call of the gospel is God’s power to give us faith and repentance. That is the purpose of the gospel call. To claim that the gospel call sets out an order of salvation in which man’s activity precedes God’s activity is a clear contradiction and denial of the Canons.

Lately, Professor Engelsma has variously argued that faith precedes justification; our activity of returning to God precedes God’s act of returning to us; and our drawing nigh to God precedes God’s drawing nigh to us. Yet others in the PRC say faith precedes assurance and / or our entrance into the kingdom of heaven. Irrespective of which particular blessing of salvation they have in mind, their point is that faith precedes salvation in some respect. When they speak of faith, they have in mind the activity of faith; they have in mind man’s act of believing. The problem with their teaching is not that they make faith an activity of the believer. The believer actively and consciously believes in Christ and repents of his sins. The believer out of this active faith exercises himself unto a life of good works. No doubt about it. But that is not the issue. The issue is that they place man’s activity where it doesn’t belong. They place man’s activity of faith in the order of salvation. But only God’s acts belong in that order. My point here is axiomatic, and it is this: when these men put man’s acts where only God’s belong, this is the express result of their appeal to texts that contain the call of the gospel. It is their appeal to these texts that leads them to establish an order in which man is first.

It is the heart of Reformed soteriology that when we speak of the order of salvation, we speak of those acts that are necessary for salvation, acts that impart and effect salvation. And never does an act of man impart or effect salvation. Only Christ’s acts impart and effect salvation, which is to say, Christ is the heart of Reformed soteriology. To insert man’s acts into the ordo salutis² is to put man where only Christ belongs. Man’s activities of faith and repentance are only ever the results of God’s acts that cause and give man’s activities. This is to say, man’s activities are only ever privilege for him; and God is to be thanked for giving us the privilege to believe in his name.

I draw attention to the fact that Professor Engelsma is not alone in grounding his position that activities of man precede acts of God in the call of the gospel. Rev. K. Koole did the same thing in the Standard Bearer three years ago. There he wrote the following:

If a man with his household was to be saved and consciously enter into the kingdom, placing himself with his family under the rule of Christ as his Lord and Savior, he was called, he was required, to respond obediently to the call and command of the gospel—“Repent and believe, that thou mightiest [sic] be saved with thy house.”³

According to his view, a man’s act of believing precedes God’s act of granting him conscious entry into the kingdom. In the same article Koole also appealed to two texts that contain the gospel call (Acts 2:37–38, 16:30–31) as the basis for teaching an order of salvation in which activities of man precede acts of God. This understanding of the call of the gospel as establishing an order of salvation in which man is first in some aspect is current orthodoxy in the PRC.

In his blog post Professor Engelsma charges the leaders of the RPC with the logical fallacy of post hoc, ergo propter hoc. I suggest it is rather Professor Engelsma who is guilty of fallacious reasoning. I suggest that in his use of the commands of the gospel, he is guilty of trying to get an indicative out of an imperative. He argues that because the imperative is prior to the promise in the texts—“Return unto me, and I will return unto you” (Mal. 3:7) and “Draw nigh to God, and he will draw nigh to you” (James 4:8)—this means that our act of returning is prior to that which is promised. The form in which the gospel call comes is that the obligation is first. He reasons from this order that the fulfillment of the call—our repenting and believing—is also first. But is not this false reasoning? Because the imperative is first in the language of the call, he reasons that man’s activity is before God’s activity. The call or command is first because it addresses man’s obligation; it confronts man, who is a sinner, with the nature of God. The call or command is what God requires, but it does not follow that man can perform what is required, nor that man’s activity precedes the operation of the promise of God. The theology of salvation is that the promise of God is logically prior to man’s activities, indeed that the promise is the cause of man’s activities. That is why we preach the theology of salvation in which Christ is the fulfillment of God’s promise and then call men to Christ. Simply put, the order of the gospel address is not the order of God’s work of salvation. That might be the implication of man, but it is manifestly not the gospel implication.

In the address of the gospel, there is a certain order. The order is always command (or call) followed by promise: believe, and you will be saved; return unto me, and I will return unto you; draw nigh to God, and he will draw nigh to you. Upon this order Professor Engelsma has hung a whole theology. The theology is that man’s activity of repenting or returning to God precedes God’s activity of returning to man; that man’s activity of believing precedes God’s activity of drawing near to us, which is our assurance; and now according to his blog post, man’s activity of believing precedes God’s act of justification. That this theology is restricted to the aspect of man’s experience of salvation makes no difference, for man’s experience of salvation is salvation. I will prove this with one text. Romans 5:1 teaches that to be justified by faith is to have the conscious experience of justification (which is peace with God). To put it another way, the conscious experience of justification is what it means to be justified. The experience of salvation is salvation.

The order upon which this theology hangs is that of the order of the gospel address—imperative (command) followed by promise. Professor Engelsma reasons thus: because the imperative is first, that which the imperative requires—man’s returning to God—must also be first. In other words, Engelsma gets an indicative out of an imperative. He reasons that because the command “return unto me” is first in the address of the gospel, man’s activity of returning is also first in the order of salvation. This means that which is promised in these texts—God’s returning to us in the sweet experience of his fellowship—waits upon a prior activity of man. In this way our activity is the power to realize the promise instead of the promise of God being the power to give us faith and repentance. In other words, the gospel has just been overthrown. And this is so not least because Engelsma makes the order of salvation a temporal order, one in which man’s activity of returning precedes God’s activity in time. This is evident from his appeal to the future tense in the promise of the gospel address: “and he will draw nigh to you.” He bases his argument on the time element.

To imply an indicative from an imperative is the same fallacy committed by both the well-meant offer men and by hyper-Calvinists. It is the position of the former that to preach the command of the gospel—repent and believe—to all men implies God’s intention or purpose to save all who hear. From the imperative they imply the indicative, namely God’s intention. It is the position of hyper-Calvinists that to preach the command of the gospel—repent and believe—to all men implies that all men have the ability to repent and believe. From the imperative they imply the indicative, namely that man is not totally depraved. It seems to me that Professor Engelsma’s line of argument—that man’s activity comes before God’s activity because the command to repent is first in the order of the gospel address—is a version of the same fallacy.

The same mistake is made by Engelsma and all in the PRC who over the last six years have argued from the commands of the gospel that our activities of repenting and believing precede salvation in some aspect. Engelsma lately has made use of two texts for this purpose. He has used Malachi 3:7: “Return unto me, and I will return unto you, saith the Lord of hosts.” He has also used James 4:8: “Draw nigh to God, and he will draw nigh to you.” I refer here to his June 17 email addressed to “Dear Forum and Terry.” It is the burden of his correspondence to teach that our activity of returning to God precedes God’s activity of returning to us. Where does he get this from? He gets it from the order of the gospel address in these texts; he gets it from the word order of the imperative preceding the promise. I will let him speak for himself:

Does he [Reverend Lanning] deny that God draws nigh to us in the way of His drawing us nigh to Himself, so that our drawing nigh to Him precedes our experience of His drawing nigh to Him [sic (us)]? Does he deny what James 4 is teaching?…

The truth is that God works in a certain order…

God is always first in salvation, but with regard to the assurance of salvation He works in the order of drawing me to Himself as the way to draw nigh to me…

Does the passage [Malachi 3:7] not teach that there is a sense in which Israel’s returning to God, by His efficacious call, precedes Israel’s enjoyment of these blessings.⁴

The logical fallacy involved in Professor Engelsma’s attempt to get an indicative out of an imperative is an implication of his misusing the call of the gospel to teach the order of salvation, an order of salvation in which man’s activity precedes God’s. As I have argued, this is completely wrongheaded because the call of the gospel does not define the order of salvation; that is not its purpose.

Misrepresentation of the Order of Salvation

Over the summer Professor Engelsma argued hot and heavy that an activity of man’s—his repenting or returning—precedes God’s activity of returning to man. This was all ostensibly to refute Reverend Lanning, who, it was claimed, had gone off the edge within a mere few months of being put out of the PRC. In response to the professor, Sword and Shield ran a whole issue criticizing his position. There was also my article in the September issue of Sword and Shield demonstrating that the current theology of the PRC is an overthrow of the doctrine of 1953.⁵ That article exposed the false teaching that faith and repentance as activities of man precede acts of God in salvation. It did this by arguing for the election theology of Reverend Heys (who represented the orthodox fathers of 1953), the theology that made faith and repentance flow from election and thus made faith and repentance first of all God’s acts for salvation. Most recently the professor wrote his blog post, in which he doubles down on his theology of man’s activity preceding God’s by appealing to an order of salvation. I will argue that the professor wrongly conflates two things that are really opposites, namely logical order and temporal order.

It seems the only way one can argue—as the Protestant Reformed denomination does today through her leading theologian—that faith and repentance as man’s activities must precede acts of God is to cut faith and repentance off from election and place them in a temporal order of things. In their teaching, election does not govern salvation, for if it did, they would say what Reverend Heys said, namely that God confers faith and repentance upon the elect. I emphasized this point in my recent article not only because Reverend Heys’ theology is the orthodox theology of 1953, but also because the truth that election governs salvation is precisely the theology of the Canons of Dordt.

This Reformed creed defines for us the precise relationship between the order of God’s acts and man’s activity. According to Canons 1.9, faith and repentance are the effects of election:

Therefore election is the fountain of every saving good, from which proceed faith, holiness, and the other gifts of salvation, and finally eternal life itself, as its fruits and effects, according to that of the apostle: He hath chosen us (not because we were, but) that we should be holy and without blame before him in love (Eph. 1:4). (Confessions and Church Order, 157)

Since an effect follows a cause, it ought to be clear that election is the cause of faith and repentance. And if election is the cause, it follows that God is first in faith and repentance. That is exactly what I argued at length in my previous article: faith and repentance are first of all God’s acts. And more than that, anyone who says otherwise contradicts his own confessional standards because what the creed teaches here is the confessional statement on the order of salvation. The order is this and this alone: all of salvation in every aspect, including its experience, is caused by God’s sovereign decree of election as the one controlling principle. As such, to say that election is the cause of every aspect of salvation is to say that God is first in every aspect of salvation, including its experience.

In addition to 1.9, which I cited, there is also 1.6, where we read, “That some receive the gift of faith from God and others do not receive it proceeds from God’s eternal decree, For known unto God are all his works from the beginning of the world (Acts 15:18)” (Confessions and Church Order, 156). That faith proceeds from election means election is the cause of faith. Election precedes faith logically as the cause of faith. There is also 1.8, where we read concerning election, “According to which He hath chosen us from eternity, both to grace and glory, to salvation and the way of salvation, which He hath ordained that we should walk therein” (Confessions and Church Order, 156). The idea expressed here is that God has not only chosen us to a certain end, namely salvation; he has also appointed the way to that end—“the way of salvation.” And the way to that end implies a certain order, the order of salvation. That order is defined for us in the next article (9) as a logical order of cause and effect—“faith, holiness, and the other gifts of salvation” proceed from election “as its fruits and effects” (Confessions and Church Order, 157).

Professor Engelsma’s teaching of an order of means and end is to the same purpose as that of Reverend Koole in the Standard Bearer. Koole tried to escape the charge of making faith a condition to salvation by citing an order in which one thing follows another—that to say B follows A does not necessarily mean that A is the cause of B. It is simply that God joins certain activities together so that one is necessary for the other to take place. He wrote,

We point out that to teach that A is something that is necessary for B…does not necessarily mean the enjoyment of B depends on A…All one is teaching is that activity A is a necessary element for the enjoyment of blessing B, and that by God’s own gracious determination. Not because the enjoyment of blessing B is caused by activity A…But because they are two things God has determined to join together, and that most graciously.⁶

But this was disingenuous on his part because it was exactly his teaching that faith was something we do for, or in order to obtain, salvation. As I explained in my article, he taught that faith was something we do that meets requirements of God, so that faith is not part of salvation but is a requirement we meet for salvation, and that is to make faith a condition.

What Koole was alluding to in his attempted cover for teaching prerequisites was the aspect of logical order in which faith is a means or instrument of salvation.⁷ But although Koole appealed to this, he was really using it as a cover. His real objective was to smuggle conditions into the PRC again. If anyone in the PRC still seriously doubts this, let them read his articles on Witsius. Without ever bothering to tell his readership that Witsius was a conditional covenant theologian, Koole used him to teach that our obedience gains for us blessings of salvation.

Engelsma also appeals to the logical order of means and ends in his recent blog post. He does so in order to claim that the leaders of the RPC are guilty of making a logical fallacy. Without repeating his line of reasoning (the interested reader may read his blog post, which is printed earlier in this magazine), he arrives at the conclusion that the leaders of the RPC are completely unable to call anyone to faith and repentance and so are unable to preach the gospel. Very strange, but I seem to remember Reverend Lanning being the only Protestant Reformed minister to publicly, consistently, and urgently call a whole denomination to repentance for over two years. But then, as someone said, “Facts are troublesome things.”

In his blog post Professor Engelsma purports merely to teach the well-established Reformed order of salvation. Speaking of this order, Rev. Herman Hoeksema wrote, “When we speak of the ordo salutis, we must understand this order in a logical rather than a temporal sense.”⁸ The current theologians and leaders of the PRC try to dress up their version of the order of salvation in orthodox clothes. They appeal to the logical order of means and ends—perfectly sound and orthodox in itself—but they use it to justify a temporal sequence of salvation. Their emphasis is wholly different—it is on the time element. Witness the emphasis put by Professor Engelsma upon the tense of the verb in James 4:8: “Draw nigh to God, and he will draw nigh to you.” Engelsma’s emphasis falls upon the future tense; in fact, the matter of the future tense is to his mind that which clinches his whole argument. Regarding this he wrote, “The future tense compels every reader to acknowledge that in some sense our drawing nigh precedes God’s drawing nigh, and that God’s drawing nigh follows [his emphasis] our drawing nigh.”⁹ He returns to this argument in his recent article. Quoting Acts 10:43, “Whosoever believeth in him shall receive remission of sins,” he argues that due to the future tense of the verb, a blessing of God follows in time an activity of man. This is why he wants to make the aspect of salvation we call our experience the context for introducing prerequisites into salvation. Our experience is always a temporal matter. Time is essential to experience. I savor a fine cup of tea in time—it takes time to savor it.

However, contrary to what the professor says, the time element of the verb is not primary in these texts. The texts are in the form of a call or an admonition accompanied by a promise, of which there are multiple examples in the word of God. “Believe in the Lord Jesus Christ, and thou shalt be saved” is another example. The promise in each occasion may be in the form of a future tense of an English verb, but that is not the emphasis. The emphasis is the declaration of the counsel of God that he wills (purposes) to save those who believe or to draw near to those who draw near to him. The emphasis is upon the promise of God as a statement of the unchangeable purpose of God, not that God must work in a strictly temporal order.

It is clear that Professor Engelsma is attempting to conflate two things that do not belong together—logical order and temporal order. You might as well try to mix oil and water. So, although in his blog post he alludes to logical order—that of means and ends—at the same time he teaches temporal order. This is clear from two considerations. First, he explicitly makes the order temporal when he hangs his argument on the future tenses of verbs, which is to say, he hangs it on the time element. Second, the relationship of his order is between man’s acts and God’s. Engelsma insists as strictest Reformed orthodoxy that in the aspect of the experience of salvation, certain acts of man precede acts of God. Since man’s activity can only precede God’s in time, it follows that the professor’s order of salvation is temporal.

What is becoming clearer with every email and blog post the professor writes is that he and the denomination he represents have a completely opposite soteriology from the RPC. The PR denomination now has a soteriology in which man can be said to be first. The Reformed Protestant denomination has a soteriology in which God is always first. And this is because the denomination believes and confesses an order of salvation in which acts of God follow other acts of God; whereas the Protestant Reformed denomination now believes and confesses an order of salvation in which certain acts of God follow acts of man. The attempt to explain this away by continually crowing like roosters, “Oh, but these acts of man that precede God’s are God-worked” is mere sophistry. If they are God-worked, then they are acts of God, in which case God’s act precedes man’s. You simply cannot have it both ways. You cannot say man’s activity of returning precedes God’s act of returning and that God causes man’s activity of returning. If God causes man’s activity, then God’s activity is first.

Perhaps a reader might say at this point, “I can see that the PRC and the RPC have a different soteriology. Well and good, but what has all this got to do with your charge that the Protestant Reformed denomination now teaches conditions in salvation? What is the big picture here?” The big picture is this: the Protestant Reformed denomination now teaches an order of salvation in which man’s activities come before God’s in time. That necessarily means that God’s acts follow man’s, so that God waits for man to act. This makes man’s activity a prerequisite, for God requires man to perform some act before he (God) does something. The big picture is simply this: anytime man’s activity precedes God’s, you have a prerequisite, and a prerequisite is a condition—that which a man must do, perform, exercise, or bring forth before he can obtain or receive something from God. And do not let the leaders of the PRC off the hook here. Do not, under any circumstances, not for one moment, give any heed to their favorite get-out-of-trouble-card for this, namely man’s act is God-caused. To claim that man’s activity is caused by God and that man’s activity precedes God’s is a contradiction, for if God causes man’s activity, then God’s act is first. They want to have it both ways.

A Question Answered

In his blog post Professor Engelsma poses questions to those like myself who oppose his recent writings. He asks, “Do they deny that the end follows the means? Do they deny that the (God-worked) repentance of the sinner precedes forgiveness? Do they deny that an active faith precedes justification?” The first thing to say about these questions is that the professor is talking about our activities of repentance and faith. This is clear from his description of faith and repentance four paragraphs prior to his questions. There he refers to faith as “believing” and to repentance as “the sinner’s repenting.” The second thing to say is that he is speaking about the order of means and end. In this order he places both faith and repentance. He does so when he writes, “…because the PRC teach that forgiveness of sins follows repentance, as God’s way of forgiving sins, and because the PRC teach that justification follows believing, as God’s way of justifying the elect sinner…” Thus the professor places repentance in the same category as faith as a means of salvation. He says that repentance is God’s way (means) of forgiving our sins.

In answer to the professor’s questions, I respond by declaring that I most certainly deny repentance as a means of salvation. To say repentance is a means of salvation is to say it is an instrument of salvation. And this contradicts the truth that faith is the alone instrument of salvation.

He also asks, “Do they deny that an active faith precedes justification?” By this he means, do we deny that man’s activity of faith precedes God’s act of justification? I do indeed deny this. It is the burden of this article and my previous one to argue for historic Reformed soteriology in which certain acts of God follow other acts of God, not the PRC’s recent doctrinal development in which acts of God follow acts of man. I affirm that the faith that justifies is God’s act as much as justification itself is God’s act.

This is precisely what faith as instrument means. It is absolutely true that faith is an activity of the believer. The believer consciously comes to and relies upon Jesus Christ for all his salvation. He is called to come, to believe, to trust; and he must, for God commands it. But as the alone instrument of salvation, faith is first of all and essentially union with Christ. And in the order of salvation as I have defined it in this article as one of logical order, faith as union with Christ and not as man’s act can be said to precede other blessings of salvation. Again, I do not say faith as man’s act precedes God’s acts. Since faith as union with Christ is God’s work alone, man being completely passive therein, we may say that faith precedes other works of God. Uniting us to Christ by faith is exclusively God’s work, just as grafting a shoot from one tree into another is exclusively the work of the horticulturalist and not of the shoot. The result of God’s act is that a man now lives one life with Christ and thus becomes a living branch in him. As a living branch he manifests the life of Christ in the activity of faith; he actively and consciously believes, seeks, comes to, receives, and rests upon Christ. Nevertheless, this activity is but the effect of God’s act.

That the instrumentality of faith is rooted in faith as the bond of union with Christ and not in something the believer does is exactly Rev. Herman Hoeksema’s doctrine of faith. Does he take as the starting point for his doctrine of faith as instrument the activity of the believer? This is what he says: “The only proper conception of the relation between justification and faith is that faith is a means or instrument that God gives his people, whereby he unites them with Christ and whereby they receive him and all his benefits” (Reformed Dogmatics, 2:106). This “proper conception” enables him to write these beautiful and soul-stirring words:

We must maintain that faith is God’s own work, the work of his free grace within his people, the spiritual means of God, the spiritual power (habitus), whereby God ingrafts them into Christ through the Holy Spirit, and whereby he causes all the blessings of salvation to flow out of Christ to them. It is the bond to Christ whereby their souls cleave unto him, live out of him, and receive and appropriate all his benefits. (2:72)

Hoeksema’s doctrine of faith, that it “is God’s own work”—that it is first of all God’s act—flows from his order of salvation, in which election is first as the cause of all salvation. This is what enables him to write,

Along the entire line of the application of salvation, from regeneration to final glorification, the work of salvation never proceeds from man, but always from the living God through Jesus Christ the Lord…Ephesians 1:4 points to the deepest source and cause of this union of Christ and his church and of this application of all his benefits unto his body: “According as he hath chosen us in him before the foundation of the world.”…The whole work of salvation, therefore, rests in and flows out of God’s eternal good pleasure. (2:14–15)

To teach, as Professor Engelsma does, that man’s act of faith precedes God’s act is to make salvation proceed from man. We in the RPC take our stand with Hoeksema, for when we deny that acts of man ever precede God’s acts, we affirm that salvation always proceeds from the living God through Jesus Christ the Lord. And this brings me to my final point, for when we affirm this, we affirm the doctrine of our Canons of Dordt.

The Canons and the Order of Salvation

The reason the professors, ministers, and members of the PRC want to emphasize a temporal order of salvation rather than a logical order is simply this: in the Reformed faith logical order is the order of election, and in that order God is always first. And if they can make the order primarily about time, then they can more easily dispense with election in their theology. Emphasizing a temporal order in which man does something and then God does something enables them to cut the tie with election. In this way they can very really make man’s activity first. And this is why in my previous article I made such a play of the language of contrast and qualification now employed by the men of the PRC. Oh yes, and this they will trumpet from the rooftops when it suits: they unquestioningly believe in election. At the same time, they almost always place man’s responsibility, specifically his activities of faith and repentance, in a relationship of contrast, even of opposition, to election. Since the Protestant Reformed denomination has now returned to the mire of conditional theology, she must sever the bond between election and faith and repentance. Where election is consistently maintained as the source and cause of salvation, so that all of salvation is the result of election, it is impossible to teach faith and repentance as conditions. If election is the cause of faith and repentance, then faith and repentance are first of all acts of God for salvation. If this is so, they cannot at the same time be acts of man for salvation, that is, acts whereby man does something before he can receive something from God.

What I have just described is election theology. It is the theology of the Canons, which establishes election as the controlling principle and cause of all salvation. Everything then flows from election as its source. That is, after all, what it means to be Reformed: we begin with the fundamental principle of a thing, and in light of that we explain all its component parts. When we adopt that approach, we see every part of salvation in its true light. And when the creed comes to explain faith and repentance, it does not (as do the Protestant Reformed today) take a lurch in another direction and begin to explain faith and repentance from the viewpoint of man’s responsibility. Rather, the creed sticks to its election theology and explains faith and repentance in terms of that theology. The following quotations from the Canons make this clear:

“That others who are called by the gospel obey the call and are converted is not to be ascribed to the proper exercise of free will…but it must be wholly ascribed to God, who as He has chosen His own from eternity in Christ, so He confers upon them faith and repentance” (3–4.10, in Confessions and Church Order, 168). Notice the teaching here is that God confers faith and repentance upon the elect; that is, God puts his elect in possession of these gifts; God works these things in them. This is confirmed by the opening line of the next article: “But when God accomplishes His good pleasure in the elect, or works in them true conversion…” (my emphasis).

“All in whose heart God works in this marvelous manner are certainly, infallibly, and effectually regenerated and do actually believe” (3–4.12, in Confessions and Church Order, 169). I believe. Why? Because God worked faith in me.

“Faith is therefore to be considered as the gift of God, not on account of its being offered by God to man, to be accepted or rejected as his pleasure…but because He who works in man both to will and to do, and indeed all things in all, produces both the will to believe and the act of believing also” (3–4.14, in Confessions and Church Order, 169). And at this point we have come full circle, for the creed has taken us right back to the origin and source of faith: “That some receive the gift of faith from God and others do not receive it proceeds from God’s eternal decree” (1.6, in Confessions and Church Order, 156). That is the order and the only order of salvation known to the Reformed faith—the order of election. And in that order God is first, always first, in each and every aspect.

When we adopt the approach of the Canons, we get things in their proper places. When we start right (with election), we end right. Conversely, when we start with man and his responsibility, we will only ever get to man. The teaching of the Canons on faith and repentance is that God produces these gifts in us. The idea is that for the one who produces something, for that one it is required. God requires faith and repentance for salvation, and God meets his own requirements for us and in us. That is also clear from article 22 of the Belgic Confession, which teaches that all things required for our salvation are in Jesus Christ. Since faith and repentance are certainly required for our salvation, it follows that Christ has met the requirements for them too.

To put it simply for our present controversy about the order of salvation, faith and repentance are first of all God’s acts. They are activities of the believer—no one disputes that—but they are activities of the believer because they are first of all acts of God. As Canons 1.9 so beautifully puts it, they are the fruits and effects of election, and they proceed from it, so that God gives them and causes them. Canons 3–4.12 makes the same point:

So that all in whose heart God works in this marvelous manner are certainly, infallibly, and effectually regenerated and do actually believe. Whereupon the will thus renewed is not only actuated and influenced by God, but in consequence of this influence becomes itself active. Wherefore also, man is himself rightly said to believe and repent by virtue of that grace received. (Confessions and Church Order, 169)

We repent and believe actively and consciously, no doubt about it, but only as the effect of God’s act. This article stresses that it is in consequence of this influence that we become active. God’s act is first and is the cause; my activity is the result. Repentance and faith are first of all God’s acts, and only as such is there any possibility they can be my acts.

We do not deny an order in salvation. But we do deny that man is first in any respect. “For of him [God], and through him, and to him, are all things: to whom be glory for ever. Amen” (Rom. 11:36).