Who loved me, and gave himself up for me.—Gal. 2: 20
The evangelical note is formally sounded by the entirety of organized Protestantism. That is to say, all the great Protestant bodies, in their formal official confessions, agree in confessing the utter dependence of sinful man upon the grace of God alone for salvation, and in conceiving this dependence as immediate and direct upon the Holy Spirit, acting as a person and operating directly on the heart of the sinner. It is this evangelical note which determines the peculiarity of the piety of the Protestant Churches. The characteristic feature of this piety is a profound con- sciousness of intimate personal communion with God the Saviour, on whom the soul rests with immediate love and trust. Obviously this piety is individualistic to the core, and depends for its support on an intense conviction that God the Lord deals with each sinful soul directly and for itself. Nevertheless, in odd contradiction to this individualistic sentiment which informs all truly evangelical piety, there exists in Protestantism a wide-spread tendency to construe the activities of God looking to salvation not individualistically but universally, to assert, in one word, that all that God does looking toward the salvation of sinful man, he does not to or for individual men but to or for all men alike, making no distinctions. This is the characteristic contention of what we know as Evangelical Arminianism and of Evangelical Lutheranism and is the earnest conviction of large bodies of Protestants gathered in many communions, under many names.
On the face of it, it would seem that if it is God the Lord and he alone who works salvation, by an operation of his grace immediately upon the heart, (which is the core of the evangelical confession); and if all that God does looking to the salvation of men he does to and for all men alike, (which is the substance of the universalistic contention); why, then, all men without exception must be saved. This conclusion, it would seem, can be escaped only by relaxing in one way or another the stringency of one or the other of the assumed premises. It must either be held that it is not God and God alone who works salvation, but that the actual enjoyment of salvation hangs at a decisive point upon something in man, or something done by man (and then we have fallen out of our evangelicalism into the mere naturalism of autosoterism); or it must be held that God’s gracious activities looking to salvation are not after all absolutely universal in their operation (and then we have fallen away from our asserted universalism): or else it would seem inevitable that we should allow that all men are saved. Consistent evangelicalism and consistent universalism can coexist only if we are prepared to assert the salvation by God’s almighty grace of all men without exception.
Accordingly, there has always existed a tendency in those evangelical circles which draw back more or less decisively from ascribing a thoroughgoing particularism to God in the distribution of his grace, to assume the actual salvation of all men, provided, that is, that their sense of the complete dependence of the sinner upon God for salvation is strong and operative. Among the condemnations of errors included in the Summa Confessionis et Conclusionum of the Synod held at Debreczen on February 24, 1567, we find a clause directed against what are there called the “Holopradestinarii,” which runs as follows: “The Holy Scripture refutes by these reasons also the Holopraedestinarii, that is, those who imagine that the whole world is elected and that a universal predestination follows from the universal promise; and teaches that predestination is of a few, and is particular, and that the number of the elect is certain, and their catalogue extends to their very hairs. For the very hairs of your head are all numbered.”… But it does not at all follow from this doctrine that God is partial or a respecter of persons.” Who these sixteenth century Holopradestinarii were we have not been careful to inquire; but certainly, from that time to this, there have never lacked those who in the interests of protecting God from the charge of “partiality or respect of persons” have been inclined to hold that he has chosen all men to salvation and through his almighty grace brings them all to that blessed goal.
The most recent and perhaps the most instructive instances of this tendency are provided by two divines of the Church of Scotland of our own day, Dr. William Hastie, late Professor of Divinity in the University of Glasgow and Dr. William P. Paterson, now holding the Chair of Divinity, the Chair of Chalmers and Flint, in the University of Edinburgh. In his admirable Croall lectures on “The Theology of the Reformed Churches in its Fundamental Principles,” Dr. Hastie announces that “the word of the eternal hope seems to me the latest message of the Reformed Theology;” and Dr. Paterson takes up the hint and enlarges on it in the excellent chapter on “The Testimony of the Reformed Churches” included in his Baird Lecture on “The Rule of Faith.” Dr. Paterson considers that Calvinism contains in itself elements which are mutually repulsive,” in its “doctrine of everlasting punishment” on the one hand, and its “doctrine of election and irresistible grace on the other. Relief might no doubt be had, “when thought rebels against making God responsible” for the everlasting punishment of some “by a doctrine of reprobation,” by taking refuge in an Arminian or semi-Arminian type of thought.” This relief would be purchased, however, at the too dear cost of abandonment of concinity of thought, and of falling away from faithfulness to the evangelical principle, which is the core of Christianity. There remains, then, according to Dr. Paterson, no other way but to discard the doctrine of everlasting punishment, and to “resolve reprobation into a temporary lack of privilege and of spiritual attainment.” And he somewhat complacently remarks that “it is a curious circumstance that, while Calvinism has become unpopular chiefly because of its identification with a grim and remorseless doctrine of eternal punishment, it is the only system which contains principles—in its doctrines of election and irresistible grace—that could make credible a theory of universal restoration.”