The Crux of the Free Offer of the Gospel. Sam Waldron. Greenbrier, AR: Free Grace Press, 2019. 143 pages, softcover, $18.00.

Well-Meant Offer versus Limited Atonement

Noteworthy also is Waldron’s laborious effort to ward off the charge that the well-meant offer necessarily implies, and leads to, universal atonement. To this issue, he devotes an entire chapter. The Baptist theologian wants to maintain limited atonement. But his valorous efforts on behalf of a limited atonement, despite his confession of universal grace in the preaching, are futile. First, he has the weight of history against him. Again and again, theologians and churches have developed the theology of the offer into the doctrine of universal atonement, as Waldron himself acknowledges. Two well-known, fairly recent instances are the Christian Reformed Church, at the prompting of its theologian, Harold Dekker, and “Reformed Baptist” theologian, David Allen—Waldron’s colleague—in his recent book, The Extent of the Atonement. Both of these dramatic instances of the development of the well-meant offer into the doctrine of universal atonement are known to Waldron.

Second, the doctrine of the offer carries the seed of universal atonement in itself.  If God loves all with a saving love and sincerely desires the salvation of all, He must have given Christ to die for all. For apart from the cross, there is no saving grace and can be no sincere offer of salvation, that is, an offer that extends to the hearer the grace of salvation in the desire of God for the salvation of that hearer. Without a cross for all, there can be no sincere desire of God for the salvation of all, nor a sincere offer to all. Here, Waldron is hoist with his own petard. His argument is that there can be no serious call, or command, or (rightly understood) offer, without a gracious, saving purpose of God in the command. But likewise, on Waldron’s reasoning, there can be no gracious, well-meant offer without a basis in universal atonement. A love that desires salvation without hypocrisy, as surely the love of God must be, must provide for this salvation in the only source and fountain, namely, the cross. Can an offer be sincere if there is no salvation provided for and available to the one to whom God makes the offer? If God says to a reprobate, “I love you with a saving love in Jesus Christ and ardently desire your salvation,” as is the theology of Sam Waldron, Joel Beeke, Richard Phillips, R. Scott Clark and a host of other theologians of the well-meant offer, does not the reprobate perceive God to be saying, “I gave Jesus Christ, whom I am now offering to you sincerely, to the death of the cross for you?” And is this not in fact what the preacher of the well-meant offer is actually saying? Offering salvation, he is well-meaningly offering Christ Jesus, and well-meaningly offering Christ Jesus he is offering Christ Jesus crucified and risen. There is no other salvation than that of the cross. There is no other Christ Jesus to offer than Christ Jesus crucified.

The Jesus Christ of the well-meant offer of Sam Waldron is both a deceiver and a failure. He is a deceiver in that there is, in fact, no salvation in His cross for many to whom He well-meaningly offers salvation. It is with Him as it would be with me, were I lovingly to offer a million dollars to a wretch on Skid Row, when in fact my bank account was empty. The Jesus Christ of the free offer is a failure inasmuch as many whom He lovingly, sincerely desires to save perish nonetheless.

Why are so many enamored of this “Jesus”? this Arminian and Pelagian “Jesus”? this impotent, beggarly “Jesus”? 

The crux of the free offer is the cross of Jesus Christ. Is it for all indiscriminately, or for some only? Is it the source of the saving grace of God for all without exception, or the source of grace for the elect, and the elect only? And is it availing, not only in its accomplishment of redemption when Jesus died, but also today when it is preached? Or, is it inefficacious when it is preached, failing to save multitudes to whom it comes in the saving grace of God towards them? Genuine Calvinism confesses that the purpose of God with the preaching of the cross is the salvation of the elect, and the elect only, and that it is the will of God, the only will of God, “by the blood of the cross” “effectually [to] redeem…all those, and those only, who were from eternity chosen to salvation and given to Him by the Father” (Canons of Dordt 2.8). 

Waldron and his universal grace allies would respond that Christ did indeed die, two thousand years ago, for the elect, but that He ought to be preached today as crucified for all who hear the gospel. If God is proclaimed as loving all with a saving love for all, the cross must be preached as a cross for all, because God’s saving love is realized and revealed in the cross of Christ. In Waldron’s theology, however confused, the former truth is the decretal view of the cross, whereas the latter is the divine will of command. But the apostle proclaimed the cross to the saints at Ephesus and to the church down the ages as a cross for the elect church and for the elect church alone: “Christ loved the church, and gave himself for it [the elect church]” (Eph. 5:6). In the language of Waldron’s confused theology, Ephesians 5 teaches that the love of Christ and the cross are particular, not as the message of the will of the decree and of the secret will of God, but as the message of the will of precept and of the revealed will of God.

After Waldon has done his very best to reconcile his “Free Offer” with limited, or particular, atonement (something impossible to be done, as Waldron himself is forced to acknowledge), he throws up his hands in despair at accomplishing this impossibility. He does this by the hoary, familiar tactic of the advocates of the well-meant offer: he appeals to “mystery.” “[I] want to admit that there are mysteries involved in the relation of the free offer and particular redemption I do not fully understand” (129). What Waldron means by “mystery” is sheer contradiction that mocks both the believing mind and the harmonious revelation of the gospel in Scripture. What Scripture and the historic Reformed faith mean by “mystery” is essentially different: a truth that is unknown and unknowable to the natural mind of man, but that God has revealed by His Word and Spirit to His church. This revelation is not contradictory, and therefore unknowable, nonsense, as is Waldron’s theology of limited atonement (the gracious will of God for the salvation of some only) and of the well-meant offer (the gracious will of God for the salvation of all humans without exception). Appeal to “mystery” by the advocates of the well-meant offer at the point of the failure of the attempt to harmonize the offer with the particularism of the biblical gospel is both the admission of the defeat of the effort to harmonize and the warning that the free offer is the enemy of particular, sovereign grace in the body of Reformed theology, that is, in the confession of the gospel by the advocates of the free offer.

In short, the Bible does not proclaim a revealed message of salvation—a saving grace of God for everyone—that contradicts the eternal decree of election.

As for the text which Waldron makes the foundation of his defense of the well-meant offer, and with which he begins his book, John 5:34, it proves far too much, if it be explained as the expression of the well-meant offer. The text has Jesus saying to His Jewish enemies, “But I receive not testimony from man:  but these things I say, that ye might be saved.” The explanation of Waldron is that Jesus purposed, intended, desired, came into the world to achieve, and worked at the salvation of every one of the Jews to whom He spoke, indeed of every Jew of the Jewish nation at that time, if not of all time. Because Jesus came to do the will of the Father who sent him (v. 30), if it is the will of Jesus to save all the Jews, head for head, this is also the will of the Father, that is, the will of election. And, if Sam Waldron’s explanation of John 5:34 is right, this was the will of the Father in sending Jesus into the world in the incarnation, as well as the will of the Father in all the ministry of Jesus, including His redemptive death, that is, universal atonement.

But, according to Waldron, the will of Jesus and the will of the Father in sending Jesus failed, an astounding admission and a blasphemous assertion. Jesus did not accomplish the salvation of many of the Jews. The reason was that the wicked will of many of the Jews frustrated the saving will of Jesus and of God His Father. Necessarily, then, the reason for the salvation of those Jews who believed was their own will, by which they distinguished themselves from their unwilling compatriots. This blatant heresy, Waldron gladly embraces, promulgates, and defends. Denial of this teaching of Sam Waldron brands one as a hyper-Calvinist!

No doctrinal error is too much in nominally Calvinistic circles today if only it serves to defend and advance the precious teaching of the well-meant offer! To this impotent offer (which saves not one human more than God has elected), the entirety of the gospel of sovereign, particular grace and of the Canons of Dordt is gladly sacrificed.

The contrary testimony of the rest of John’s gospel is not allowed to shed light on the passage in John 5. In John 10, Jesus states that He did not come to save all the Jews. He came to save those Jews who are His sheep, in that His Father gave them to Him. There were Jews who were not His sheep. Them, He did not come to save (vv. 1–30). In John 6:38–39, Jesus teaches that He came down from heaven to do the Father’s will and that the will of His Father was that He save and lose nothing of all which the Father has given Him. In verse 44, He adds that the coming to Him which is salvation is not a matter of sinners accepting Waldron’s free offer, but the Father’s efficacious drawing sinners to Jesus. All of this, it should be noted, belongs to the revealed will of God.

When Jesus declares that all His ministry has as its purpose that “ye” might be saved, His reference is to the Jewish people who are God’s Israel, not every Jew who stood in His presence that day, or every Jew who was alive at that time, or every Jew who ever lived or would live. As Paul would explain in Romans 9, they are not all Israel, who are of Israel (v. 6). According to Romans 2:28–29, “he is not a Jew, which is one outwardly… But he is a Jew, which is one inwardly.” As the same apostle will clarify in Galatians 3:29, even among the physical descendants of Abraham, the Jews, it is only “if ye be Christ’s, then are ye Abraham’s seed, and heirs according to the promise.”

In John 5:34, those whom Jesus willed to save, in accordance with the Father’s will of election, were the genuine Jews, all those, and those only, who were the true Israel of God, according to election. And every one whom Jesus willed to save would be saved. In them, Israel would be saved, not by their own willing, but by the will of God in Jesus Christ.

Do Sam Waldron and his free offer allies really want a gospel of a failed Jesus and of self-saving Jews? A gospel of “so that ye might be saved,” but of many, if not a majority, of these “ye” who are lost nevertheless? Is this really to be the message now of the faith of the Canons of Dordt and of the Westminster Standards? And can it really be the case that vast numbers of confessing Calvinists will allow themselves to be frightened by the bogeyman of hyper-Calvinism into embracing this heretical doctrine?

Compromise of the Gospel of Grace

The well-meant offer of the gospel fatally compromises the gospel of salvation by grace. This is the fundamental objection of the Protestant Reformed Churches to the well-meant offer.  Our objection is not fundamentally that the well-meant offer, in the context of the doctrines of limited atonement and of predestination, is logically incoherent, although this is an objection, because the truth of Holy Scripture is not an unknowable mass of contradictory confusion. But the well-meant offer compromises the gospel of salvation by the grace of God. It is—essentially, inherently, obviously, and incurably is—the denial of salvation by the grace of God. It is the affirmation of salvation by the will of the sinner. If God loves all alike with His saving love (and the well-meant offer expresses saving love) and if in the gospel He comes to all alike with the same saving intention (and the well-meant offer has God coming to all who hear the gospel with a saving intention, even desire), the salvation of some, in distinction from others, is not the work of the grace of God (for He is gracious to all alike, with the grace of salvation [!]). The only explanation, then, of the salvation of some, in distinction from others, is that they themselves distinguish themselves by accepting the offer. Salvation is no longer the work of the grace of God. It is the work of the will of the sinner.

If the Reformed church world agrees that denial of the well-meant offer is hyper-Calvinism, it may slander me as a hyper-Calvinist to its heart’s content.

To be sure, the theology of the well-meant offer avoids the hyper-Calvinism that it presents as the main threat to Calvinism in our day. But the reason is that it is not Calvinism, the Calvinism of the Canons of Dordt and of the Westminster Standards, at all, whether hyper-, moderate, low, or hypo- or any other modifier. It is the heresy of Arminianism, cleverly disguised as the antidote to a hyper-Calvinism, which error becomes the bogeyman that is to scare Calvinists into the opposite error of universal, ineffectual grace—the well-meant offer of the gospel.

The theology of the well-meant offer—an ineffectual grace of God for all, implying that salvation depends upon the will of the sinner—may be approved by prominent theologians and even by a majority of Reformed churches, but it is disapproved by Holy Scripture: “[Salvation] is not of him that willeth, nor of him that runneth, but of God that sheweth mercy…Therefore hath he mercy on whom he will have mercy, and whom he will he hardeneth” (Rom. 9:16, 18).