Objection 55

From Sovereign Grace and the Scope of Election: A Comparative Examination of Attainment Theology and Grace Theology, with Particular Attention to the Question of Whether God's Elect Are Found Among All Nations and Religions

You are telling me that my grandmother, my pastor, and generations of saints who lived and died in this teaching were all deceived. Would God permit His own people to be so wrong?

Answer. Turn the question over and notice what it assumes: that the standing of persons rises and falls with the accuracy of their system. That is the attainment premise itself, wearing grief as its argument. The doctrine of this study is gentler to the grandmother than her own system ever was, for it holds that her salvation never rested for one moment on the precision of her doctrine, but on the purchase of Christ and the quickening of the Spirit, neither of which waited on her theology being correct, any more than they wait on any theology being present at all. If the thesis of this document is true, then the praying grandmother is safer than her system taught her she was, not lost because her system erred.

Has God permitted His people to hold error? He always has, in every generation; there were seven thousand in Israel who never bowed to Baal, unknown even to Elijah, who thought he stood alone (1 Kings 19:18), and the summons of Revelation 18:4 is addressed to "my people" while they are still inside Babylon. God's children have been found inside systems far more corrupt than any considered in these pages, and no communion in church history has held everything rightly. What He has never permitted is that one of them should be lost by it: "this is the Father's will... that of all which he hath given me I should lose nothing" (John 6:39). The question that remains is not whether the grandmother was deceived on some points. Every saint who ever lived was, on some points, and so is the writer of this study, and so is its reader. The question is whether her hope stood in what she got right. If it did, no one in any system is safe. If it stood in Christ, she is home, and the reader honors her best not by defending every doctrine she was taught, but by resting in the same Person she rested in.