Gracious Ability, from Wilbur F Tillet, Personal Salvation

This document is chapter six from…

Tillett, Wilbur Fisk. Personal Salvation: Studies in Christian Doctrine Pertaining to the Spiritual Life. United States: Publishing House of the M.E. Church, South, 1903.

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VI.

GRACIOUS ABILITY.

“For when we were yet without strength, in due time Christ died for the ungodly.” “For if through the offense of one many be dead, much more the grace of God, and the gift by grace, which is by one man, Jesus Christ, hath abounded unto many.” “But where sin abounded, grace did much more abound.” “For sin shall not have dominion over you: for ye are not under the law, but under grace.” (Rom. v. 6, 15, 20; vi. 14.)

“By the grace of God I am what I am: and his grace which was bestowed upon me was not in vain.” (1 Cor. xv. 10.)

“My grace is sufficient for thee: for my strength is made perfect in weakness.” (2 Cor. xii. 9.)

“For by grace are ye saved through faith; and that not of yourselves: it is the gift of God.” (Eph. ii. 8.)

“For the grace of God that bringeth salvation hath appeared to all men, teaching us that, denying ungodliness and worldly lusts, we should live soberly, righteously, and godly, in this present world.” (Tit. 1l. 11, 12.)

In his lapsed and sinful state, man is not capable, of and by himself, either to think, to will, or to do that which is really good; but it is necessary for him to be regenerated and renewed in his intellect, affections, and will, and in all his powers by God in Christ, through the Holy Spirit, that he may be qualified rightly to understand, esteem, consider, will, and perform what is truly good. I ascribe to divine grace the commencement, the continuance, and the consummation of all good. And to such an extent do I carry its influence, that a man, though already regenerate, can neither conceive, will, nor do any good at all, nor resist any evil temptation without this preventing and exciting, this following and cooperating grace .- James Arminius.

Libertas a peccato et a miseria per gratiam est; libertas vero a necessitate per naturam. Ipsa gratia voluntatem praevenit praeparando ut velit bonum, et praeparatam adjuvat ut perficiat .- Peter Lombard.

The doctrine that whatever God claims from us he is ready to work in us by his Spirit dwelling in our hearts places the moral life of man in a light altogether new. Apart from the gift of the Spirit, we could obey God only by our own moral strength, which experience has proved to be utter weakness. But now every command is a virtual promise, for it declares what God proposes to work in us. We have learned the prayer of Augustine: “Give what thou bidst, and then bid what thou wilt.” – Joseph Agar Beet.

The doctrine of the impartation of grace to the unconverted in a sufficient degree to enable them to embrace the gospel must be admitted. In consequence of the atonement of Christ offered for all, the Holy Spirit is administered to all. The virtues of the unregenerate man are not from man, but from God .—Richard Watson.

VI.

GRACIOUS ABILITY.

The doctrines of sin and atonement must always be studied together. Neither can be understood without the other. By studying these doctrines together we learn that, while man is a fallen sinner, he is a redeemed sinner. His present spiritual state, as affect ed by both sin and atonement, is well defined by the term “gracious ability.” As a subject of personal salvation man is appealed to as one who, though lost and needing a Saviour, is yet possessed of moral ability that makes him responsible for his lost condition.

Erroneous Types of Doctrine Distinguished. – The doctrinal system called Pelagianism makes nothing of the fall of man, and practically denies that there is any such thing as original sin; original sin consisteth simply in the following of Adam’s example. According to this theory, men have by birth and by nature no more bias to sin than Adam had in his primitive state, as he came from the hand of the Creator.

While this doctrine makes nothing of original sin, it in like manner makes little or nothing of atonement, and nothing of grace. Man’s freedom of will, according to this theory, suffers from no moral disabilities whatever as a result of the fall or of what may be called race sin. At the opposite extreme from this system of doctrine is that type of theological thought which is known as Augustinianism or Calvinism: it represents man as by nature totally depraved.

Unregenerate men are fitly compared to Ezekiel’s valley of dry bones. They are by nature morally incapable of exercising free will, by either accepting or rejecting the conditions of personal salvation; they are dead. Not until they are regenerated by the effectual call of the divine will have they any capacity for good. Fallen men are represented as massa perditionis, utterly incapable before regeneration of any moral good.

The former doctrine makes man to do everything, and God virtually nothing, in the matter of personal salvation. The latter makes God to do everything, and man does virtually nothing except as he responds to the workings of irresistible grace. Semi-Pelagianism believes that man has been weakened or sickened by the fall, so that his natural state is one of moral weakness and insufficiency; he has by nature ability to begin the work of his own salvation, but unless grace comes to his rescue his natural strength will give out.

The Scriptural Doctrine Stated.— As distinct from these views, the Scriptures seem to teach, as to the moral status of the unregenerate world, that, but for the atonement, man would be, by nature, as a result of the fall, morally dead and incapable of any exercise of free will in meeting the conditions of salvation; but as a matter of fact, no man is in a mere state of nature. Grace arrested man in his fall, and placed him in a salvable state, and endowed him with gracious ability to meet all the conditions of personal salvation.

Fallen man has never been without the benefits and influences of the atonement. Uppermost among these benefits is what is called prevenient .grace, a certain gracious influence of the Holy Spirit upon the heart and will of man that goes before regeneration. It does not act irresistibly upon any man, but is imparted to all men, and is the foundation of that gracious ability for fulfilling the conditions of salvation which all possess, and which is the ground of their responsibility for continuing in sin.

Personal salvation is therefore a matter of cooperation between the divine and the human will, between God and man. We thus hold that there is some good in unregenerate human nature; it is not wholly evil, as the old Calvinistic divines taught; but the good that we find in unregenerate man is due not to nature, as the Pelagians and Semi-Pelagians teach, but to grace. Hence this doctrine is well designated by the term “ gracious ability.” The Scriptures, while making much of the power of sin in human nature, also make much of grace and the gracious influence of the Holy Spirit which is a result of the atonement.

Moral Freedom Is of Grace, — “The fact that man is, since the fall, still a free agent is not more essentially a necessity of his moral nature than it is the effect of grace. Its universality has this for its result, that all who are born into the world are born into a state of probation; otherwise the human spirit would have fallen back under the law of physical necessity, or in that of diabolic bondage to evil. Unredeemed spirits are responsible, but their responsibility is no longer probationary; they are responsible for a state of guilt that has become determined by their own first act become habitual. The difference put between them and us is the mystery of redeeming mercy.

The children of men are in bondage to sin; this is the character which is stamped upon them by inheritance. But the bondage is not hopeless, nor is it to any mortal necessary. All men have a natural capacity of freedom to act as well as to choose, to perform as well as to will; but this, their very nature, is itself grace.” In this paragraph from Dr. William B. Pope we have a statement which differs from what we have said above more in phraseology and form of expression than in the essential idea conveyed.

The Teaching of Jesus – Jesus recognized a mixture of good and evil in men before their conversion. They were not wholly good; some, indeed, had but little good in them; but it is also true that they were not wholly bad. “The teaching of Jesus,” says Dr. G. B. Stevens, “lends no support to the doctrine of total depravity. All men are not as bad as they can be. There can be no greater contrast between the teaching, so long common in theology-that, in consequence of original sin and native depravity, all men are utterly destitute of all goodness and wholly inclined to all evil-and the attitude which Jesus assumed toward men. In even the worst of men he found a spark of goodness. He never regarded the lost as irrecoverable.” His entire teaching is “absolutely inconsistent with the idea that all men are and have been from their birth morally dead and incapable of any right desires, high aspirations, or noble efforts. The contrary was the conviction of Jesus and the presupposition of all his work.”

Gracious Ability a Result of the Atonement – We thus see that gracious ability and prevenient grace are a result of Christ’s atoning work. The effects of the righteousness of the Second Adam are coextensive with the sin of the first Adam. What we lose in Adam, we gain, and more than gain, in Christ. “For if through the offense of one many be dead, much more the grace of God, and the gift by grace, which is by one man, Jesus Christ, hath abounded unto many.” “As by the offense of one judgment came upon all men to condemnation; even so by the righteousness of one the free gift came upon all men unto justification of life.” That is, the benefits of Christ’s righteousness and atoning death are coextensive with the effects of Adam’s sin. If through the first Adam man became a sinner, through the Second Adam he became a redeemed sinner. Christ’s atonement did not remove the effects of the fall and place the race back where Adam was, in a state of moral innocence; but it provided for all the consequences of Adam’s fall, and for the ultimate and entire removal of all sin.

The Effects of the First Adam’s Sin and the Second Adam’s Righteousness Compared and Contrasted.— The ultimate effects of Adam’s sin and Christ’s atonement, however, are both conditioned upon man’s free agency. As we have seen, the personal guilt of Adam’s transgression was not, and could not be, imputed to his descendants, no one of whom ever has been, or ever can be, lost and sent to hell on account of Adam’s transgression alone. Original sin is not, in itself alone, culpable and justly punishable; at least not until the individual arrives at the age of moral accountability, and refuses to fulfill the conditions (repentance and faith) divinely provided for its suppression in regeneration, after which time he may justly be held responsible for his original sin and all its consequences.

In like manner, no man will be saved and sent to heaven on account of Christ’s righteousness alone, which, while it made possible the salvation of all, necessitated the salvation of no one. That is, while Adam’s sin and Christ’s righteousness both materially affect the problem of man’s sin and salvation, they do not in any way set aside the great and universal law of moral free agency and probation; by which every man has the deciding of his own destiny. Man’s gracious abilities through Christ are quite equal to his moral disabilities through the fall.

The fallen state, with original sin and the accompanying benefits of Christ’s atoning work, doubtless furnishes as favorable conditions for human probation as did the unfallen state without Christ. A pair of scales in equilibrium is suited to testing the weight of substances. If a pound weight be placed on one side, so as to destroy the equilibrium, it may be restored in either of two ways: by removing the weight there, or by placing an equal weight on the other side.

Why God chose the latter method instead of the former; why, instead of ending the fallen race by putting Adam and Eve to death then and there, and creating a new, unfallen race, he chose to allow them to live and become the progenitors of a fallen race, and to redeem that race by the incarnation and death of his Son, we may not be able to explain further than to say that no wrong has been done to man, the probationer. But the wisdom, goodness, holiness, and love of God are manifested far more in the redemption of fallen man than they could have been by the mere creation of one or many unfallen beings like Adam and Eve.

          ‘Twas great to speak a world from naught;
                   ‘Twas greater to redeem.

Original Grace Coextensive with Original Sin. – We therefore conclude that grace is quite as “original” as sin is. “Every writer of Scripture, as well in the New Testament as in the Old, constantly connects evil with the system of deliverance from it. Sin is always discussed, defined, dwelt upon in all its development and issues, at the foot of the altar in the Old economy and at the foot of the cross in the New.

The first effect of the redeeming intervention was to preserve the nature of man from sinking below the possibility of redemption. The fall was the utter ruin of nothing in our humanity, only the depravation of every faculty. Original sin, as condemnation in the fullest sense, and as an absolute doom, never passed beyond Adam and the unindividualized nature of man. It was arrested in Christ as it regards every individual, and changed into a conditional sentence.

Original sin is the sin of Adam’s descendants as under a covenant of grace. What it would otherwise have been we can never know. There would then have existed no federal union of mankind. The souls of Adam and Eve would have added only two more to the spirits of evil. Original sin and original grace met in the mystery of mercy at the very gate of Paradise.”

 

THE WORK OF GRACE.

Grace! ‘tis a charming sound!
Harmonious to my ear!
Heaven with the echo shall resound,
And all the earth shall hear.

Grace first contrived the way
To save rebellious man,
And all the steps that grace display
Which drew the wondrous plan.

Grace taught my wand’ring feet
To tread the heavenly road,
And new supplies each hour I meet
While pressing on to God.

Grace all the work shall crown,
Through everlasting days:
It lays in heaven the topmost stone,
And well deserves the praise.

                                               Philip Doddridge.

 

REFERENCES TO CHAPTER VI.

W. B. Pope: Compendium of Christian Theology, Vol. II., pp. 55-61, 79-86, 358-371.

N. Burwash: Manual of Christian Theology, Vol. II., pp. 212-224.

R. Watson: Theological Institutes, Part II., Chapter XXVII.

T. O. Summers: Systematic Theology, Vol. II., pp. 62-90.

John Miley: Systematic Theology, Vol. II., pp. 242-252.

M. Raymond: Systematic Theology, Vol. II., pp. 308-319.

L. F. Stearns: Present-Day Theology, pp. 348-860.

J. A. Beet: The New Life in Christ, pp. 37-45.

A. A. Hodge: Outlines of Theology, pp. 888-847.

J. Watson: The Doctrines of Grace, pp. 11-26.

D. D. Whedon: Essays, Reviews, and Discourses, pp. 78-102.

L. Rosser: Initial Life.

J. C. Granbery: Sermon on Grace Abounding over Sin.

S. M. Merrill: Aspects of Christian Experience, pp. 9-23.