Questions about Regeneration and Faith

There are a few questions I would like to ask my Arminian [or if they prefer, synergist] friends. They grow out of my understanding of Romans 8:1 and following and rests on my understanding of Romans 8:8. My understanding of that passage (8:1-8) is that it is talking about the New Covenant experience of the true child of God. He is one who does not live his life habitually according to the flesh, i.e, the life that characterized the old creation in Adam, into which he was born and in which he lived, but one who lives his life habitually according to the Spirit. The passage is not talking about an option a believer has as to whether he/she will walk according to the flesh or the Spirit. Instead, it draws a distinction between those who are “in Christ” and those who are not. Those who are not in Christ mind the things of the flesh and those who are in Christ mind the things of the Spirit.

Even if a person should take the position that Paul is describing two “natures” in the believer, he will have the same problem. In chapter seven he had written “in me, that is in my flesh dwells no good thing.” That would assume that nothing pleasing to God could proceed from “the flesh.” It would appear that whatever view we would take of this verse, we would have to conclude that “flesh” is a negative quality and describes a state in which a person cannot please God. This is precisely what Paul unequivocally states in verse eight, “So then, those who are in the flesh, cannot please God.”

These are my questions for you:

1. Would you agree that a person prior to regeneration is “in the flesh?”
2. Would you agree that regeneration [new birth, creation, spiritual circumcision, spiritual resurrection etc.] is necessary for a person to no longer be “in the flesh?”
3. Would you agree that a person who is “in the Spirit” is a person in whom the Spirit of Christ dwells (v. 9).
4. Would you agree that no person is in-dwelt by the Spirit who is not born of God?
5. Would you agree that a person who is not in-dwelt by the Spirit is “in the flesh?’
6. Would you agree that to have faith in God’s promises is pleasing to God?

I would assume that you have answered all those questions affirmatively. Based on those answers, can you explain two things to me?

1. How can a person who is “in the flesh” i.e., unregenerate, please God by trusting him and his promises if those who are in the flesh cannot please God? Or do you believe that “hostility toward God” and faith in God are compatible?
2. If you believe those who are “in the flesh” are able to obey one commandment of God, why do you believe regeneration is necessary at all? If a person is able to obey one commandment, namely, God’s command to repent and believe the gospel, why can he not, in an unregenerate state, obey every command of God ?

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Justification, Sanctification, Faith and Perseverance

I thought it might be helpful to state a series of propositions about justification, sanctification, faith and perseverance in an effort to clarify what we believe in relation to these doctrines and how they relate to one another. Although I have not provided texts of Scripture to support each of these statements, I believe each of them is supported by God’s revelation understood in its proper context. Please consider each of them in the light of the Scriptures. I am happy to entertain comments, questions, or objections to any of them.

1. Justification before God is a judicial declaration that occurs once for all through faith in God’s promise that whoever calls on the Lord’s name will be saved.
2. Justification imputes a God designed and therefore God approved righteousness [for this reason it is referred to as “the righteousness of God” or better “a God righteousness”] to sinners who deserve his wrath.
3. Justification has nothing to do with any personal righteousness that is produced by the Spirit in the believer’s life.
4. Jesus has fully satisfied all the demands of God’s law (obedience for a declaration of righteousness and death as the penalty for disobedience) and has therefore been declared righteous based on the strictest terms of the law. Paul told his readers “the doers of the Law will be justified.” The only doer of the law who ever lived was Jesus. By his perfect, continual and inward obedience to that Law, God declared him to be righteous in his sight. Because those in whose place he stood, as their head and representative, had broken the Law and were liable to its curses, he became a curse for us and thus exhausted the penal sanctions of the divine Law.
5. God accepts believers as righteous in his sight because we are united to him who is righteous in his sight. This standing in righteousness cannot progress any more than the spotless righteousness of Christ itself can increase. He bases his declaration on a righteousness that is totally outside us.
6. Sanctification, although completely distinct from justification, cannot be separated from it since both result from the believer’s union with Christ. The believer is justified because Jesus died for him; the believer is sanctified definitively because he died with Christ. Justification does not, in itself, produce sanctification, nor does sanctification produce justification. In that sense, these two works of God’s grace are completely distinct. They cannot be separated in that sense that there will never be a person whom God has justified whom he has not set free from sin’s dominion and in whom he is not carrying on his sanctifying work.
7. Both the declaration of righteousness and the ongoing work of sanctification are works of God’s grace. In justification, he is concerned to bestow on us a righteous standing; in sanctification he is concerned to work in us a practical holiness. Jesus’ redemptive accomplishments secured not only the believer’s justification but also his sanctification.
8. Though believers become partakers of both justification and sanctification through faith, sanctification is not a work that is accomplished through faith alone in the sense that the believer’s works of obedience are not involved. In response to the Spirit’s continuing work within believers, we are responsible to perfect holiness or sanctification in the fear of God.
9. Justification never increases or progresses. It is as complete as it will ever be the first moment a person believes the gospel. Sanctification progresses and will never be complete as long as we remain in the body. No matter how holy a person may become, his sanctification can never make him any more righteous in God’s presence than he was the first moment he believed.
10. Genuine faith results from God’s work of grace in the sinner’s heart. Not every experience of “faith” is genuine. Genuine and spurious “faiths” may appear so similar that the difference between them will be indiscernible. The only way to distinguish the genuine from the spurious is that genuine faith continues and produces the fruit of obedience.
11. The believer’s perseverance in faith adds nothing to his perfect standing. Persevering in faith is simply what true believer’s do. Those who turn back lose nothing they ever possessed. A faith that fails to persevere was not true faith at all. A person who began with a profession of faith in Christ but then turns back and begins to trust something or someone other than Christ, never genuinely trusted Christ to begin with and was never justified.
12. The apostles Paul and James did not contradict one another in their teaching. They were simply concerned with different questions. The question Paul was answering concerned what justifies before God, personal works of obedience to the Law or faith in Christ alone. His answer was that sinners are justified through faith alone, apart from the works of the Law. The question James was answering concerned the nature of that faith through which sinners are justified. Is justifying faith a dead faith or a faith that works and obeys? On this question, both apostles were in perfect agreement. Paul spoke of justifying faith as “faith that works by love.” Paul was concerned with what justifies; James was concerned with who are the justified. Are the justified those who “say they believe” or those whose faith gives evidence of itself by persevering obedience to Christ? The classic statement on this issue was that justification is through faith alone, but it is never through a faith that is alone.

“Decisional Regeneration” a “Straw Man” Argument?

The following is a copy of an e-mail I sent to the editor over at expreacherman.com. Since they will not post or respond to anything I send to them, I decided to post it here in hopes that some of their readers will find it.

You wrote:

The false idea and straw-man of decisional regeneration is built upon the error perpetrated by many Baptists (and other) religionists who preach that one can be saved or regenerated by coming forward to the altar, saying a sinners prayer or praying a prayer of commitment. They then presume the person is saved and regenerated. It must be clearly understood that regeneration does not occur because of an altar call, the sinner s prayer or a ‘commitment’.

I know you don’t have the courage to respond to this, but you need to at least be confronted with it. From what I read in the letter to which you referred, the person who wrote it did not say you teach “decisional regeneration” but that you are from the generation that gave us the idea. I was brought up in the tradition he/she[?] is talking about. I practiced what he/she is describing. It is not a straw man argument. I don’t think anyone intended to say walking the aisle or praying a prayer would regenerate a person, but that is what they said. First, they taught that sinners are “born again through faith.” Faith was viewed as a public profession of faith. People were invited to come forward and “be saved.” People in churches could tell you they saw a person “get saved,” by which they meant they saw them go forward to make a public profession.

I was taught to use the “sinner’s prayer.” Once a person “prayed to receive Jesus,” I was taught to welcome them into the kingdom of God, and assure them they were now a child of God. Further, I was told to warn them that if they ever doubted they were truly a child of God, they were calling God a liar because he had promised that if they would call on his name, they would be saved. All of this was based on a decision they had made. We have at least two generations who, based on that language, believe they are Christians because of that teaching. I repeat, it may not have been the intention of these teachers to convey the idea that sinners are regenerated by a decision, but that is clearly what they taught. If a person is born again through faith, and faith is a decision, then why would they not believe in “decisional regeneration?”