Objection 56

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 do not know what you are asking. If I accept this, I lose my congregation, and perhaps my family. The cost of your doctrine is everything I have.

Answer. The cost is real, and it will not be minimized here. Christ named it without softening: "I came not to send peace, but a sword. For I am come to set a man at variance against his father" (Matthew 10:34-35), and He commanded that it be counted before building (Luke 14:28). Whoever tells you that truth is free has not read the Gospels. But three things should be weighed before the counting is done.

First, this study asks the reader, in the first instance, to believe something, not to do something. Conviction comes before, and sometimes long before, any question of membership, and what a settled conviction requires in a given family, congregation, and country is a matter of conscience, wisdom, and providence in which this study presumes to command nothing. Scripture itself records Joseph of Arimathaea, "a disciple of Jesus, but secretly for fear of the Jews" (John 19:38), and Nicodemus, and John calls them disciples while noting the cost of their silence; concealment is never celebrated, and openness is commanded where God gives opportunity, but the timing and manner of confession have always belonged to conscience under God, not to a pamphlet.

Second, notice what the fear itself is evidence of. A fellowship that can be retained only under threat of losing one's family is exercising exactly the leverage this study has examined; the fear is the system's method, made visible at the door.

Third, and last: the man born blind was cast out of the synagogue for confessing what he could not deny, and the record continues, "Jesus heard that they had cast him out; and when he had found him..." (John 9:35). He was found. Whatever the reader decides, and whenever, "the Lord knoweth them that are his" (2 Timothy 2:19), in every congregation and outside all of them, and the hundredfold promised alongside the persecutions (Mark 10:29-30) has never once failed of payment. No one keeps this doctrine's God by losing men, who does not receive back more than he lost, though sometimes not soon, and never in the currency he expected.