Calvinistic Controversy / Embracing a Sermon on Predestination and Election and Several Numbers, Formally Published in the Christian Advocate and Journal.

by Wilbur Fisk

3. Another bearing of this hypothesis, and one which I think must prove fatal to it, is, that the Scriptures represent this change to be chiefly in the affections, whereas this doctrine makes it exclusively in the will. That the Scriptures place the change in the affections chiefly, I suppose will not be denied. If it should be, without stopping here to quote specific passages, or use many arguments, one consideration alone will be sufficient to set the question at rest.—True evangelical holiness consists in love to God and man; and sin is loving the creature rather than the Creator. The apostle brings into view both the regenerate and the unregenerate state in this passage—“Set your affection on things above, and not on things on the earth.” Numerous are the passages which teach that love to God is the essence of the Christian character. The affections, therefore, are the seat of this change. But we are told by this new theory the change is in the will. It is only to resolve to serve God, and we are converted.—Either this theory, therefore, or the Bible account of this matter must be wrong.

To avoid this difficulty, it may be said, that a change of the will implies a change of the affections. But this is changing the position—which is, that a decision of the will is regeneration. If however this new position be insisted upon, it can be reconciled with the phraseology used only by making a change of the affections a mere subordinate part of regeneration, whereas the Scriptures make the change consist essentially in this. But there is still a more serious difficulty in this idea, that the change of the will implies a change in the affections. It necessarily implies that the affections are at all times under the control of the will. But this is as unphilosophical as it is unscriptural. It is even directly contrary to the observation and knowledge of men who have paid only common and casual attention to mental phenomena. The will is oftener enthralled by the affections, than the affections by the will. Even in common and worldly matters let a man try by an effort of the will to beget love where it does not exist, or to transfer the affections from one object to another, and how will he succeed? Will love and hatred go or come at his bidding? You might as well attempt, by an act of the will, to make sweet bitter, or bitter sweet to the physical taste. How much less can a man, by an act of the will, make all things new, and transfer the heart from the grossness of creature love to the purity of supreme love to God. The Apostle Paul has taught us his failure in this matter. When he “would do good, evil was present with him.” “For,” says he, “the good that I would do, I do not; but the evil which I would not, that I do.” And this is the fact in most cases of genuine awakening. Resolutions are formed, but the current of the unsanctified affections sweeps them away. Over the untowardness of the unregenerate heart the will has, in fact, but a feeble influence; and this is the reason why the man, struggling with the corruptions of his heart, is driven to despair, and exclaims, “O! wretched man that I am, who shall deliver me from the body of this death?”

We shall see hereafter how the action of the will is indispensable in regeneration; but not in this direct way to change and control the affections, by the power of its own decisions. When I find my will capable of doing this, I must have an essentially different intellectual character from the one I now have.

Since the Scriptures make the new birth a change of affections, and this theory makes it a change of volitions; and especially since the affections cannot be transferred from earth to heaven by a mere act of the will, therefore the doctrine which teaches and implies these views must be false.

4. This idea of the character of sin and of the new birth makes man sinless, at particular times, even without regeneration. I do not mean by this that he is not obnoxious to punishment for past unholy volitions. But if sin consists only in voluntary exercise, whenever the mind does not act; or whenever its action is not under the control of the will, there is nothing of sin personally appertaining to the man.—When the action of the will is suspended by an all -absorbing emotion of wonder or surprise—in sound sleep when the mental states, if there are any, are not under the control of the will—in cases of suspended animation, by drowning, fainting, or otherwise—in short, whenever the mind is necessarily wholly engrossed, as is often the case, by some scientific investigation, or matter of worldly business, not of a moral character, then, and in every such case, whatever may be the guilt for past transgressions, there is no personal unholiness. And by the same reasoning we may show that the regenerate pass a great portion of their time without any personal holiness!

5. According to the theory we are opposing, regeneration, strictly speaking, means nothing. The work of grace, by which a sinner is made meet for heaven, embraces two essential points, pardon and renewal. The former is not a positive change of character, but a relative change, from a state of condemnation to a state of acquittal. But as regeneration, if it have any appropriate meaning, cannot mean a mere change of relation, any construction or system that forces such a meaning upon it does, in fact, do it away. Hence, being born again, being renewed, being created anew, being sanctified, being translated from darkness to light, being raised from the dead, and numerous other scripture expressions, are figurative forms of speech, so foreign from the idea they are used to express, that they are worse than unmeaning—they lead to error. But if these expressions mean any thing more than pardon, what is that meaning? This doctrine makes the principal change take place in the neighbourhood of the will; not in the will itself, meaning by that, the mental power by which we put forth volitions. This faculty of the mind is sound, and needs no change—all the other mental susceptibilities are sound, the essence of the mind and the susceptibilities of the mind are perfectly free from any moral perversion. It is the mental action that is bad.—What is there then in the man that is to be changed? Do you say his volitions? But these he changes every hour. Do you say, he must leave off wrong volitions, and have right ones? This too he often does. “But he must do it with right motives,” you say, “this acting from right motives is the regenerate state.” Indeed! Suppose then that he has resolved to serve God, from right motives, what if he should afterward resolve, from false shame or fear, to neglect a duty, is he now unregenerate? This is changing from regenerate to unregenerate, from entire holiness to entire unholiness with a breath. Truly such a regeneration is nothing. But you say, after he has once submitted, he now has a “governing purpose” to serve God, and this constitutes him regenerate; aye, a governing purpose that does not govern him. Let it be understood, you cannot divide a volition; it has an entire character in itself; and if it be unholy, no preceding holy volition can sanctify it. Hence every change of volition from wrong to right, and from right to wrong, is a change of state, so that regeneracy and unregeneracy play in and out of the human bosom in the alternation of every criminal thought or every pious aspiration. Is this the Bible doctrine of the new birth? And yet this is all you can make of it, if you resolve it into the mere action of the will.

6. This doctrine of self-conversion, by an act of the will, is directly contrary to Scripture. It would be tedious to me and my readers to quote all those passages that attribute this work directly to the Holy Spirit, and that speak of it as a work which God himself accomplishes for, and in us. There is one passage which is much in point, however, and is sufficient of itself to settle this question. “But as many as received him, to them gave he power to become the sons of God, even to them that believe on his name. Who were born, not of blood, nor of the will of the flesh, nor of the will of man, but of God,” John i, 12, 13. This is a two-edged sword—it cuts off, as we have remarked before, passive and unconditional regeneration on the one hand; and also, as we may now see, self conversion by an act of the will, on the other. I know not how words can be put together, in so small a compass, better to answer the true objects of destroying these two opposite theories of regeneration, and asserting the true theory. Here is, first—the receiving of Christ, the believing on his name—this is the condition. Second, Christ gives the “power,” viz. strength and privilege, to become the sons of God. This is the regeneration. Third—This becoming “the sons of God,” or being “born,” is not in a physical way, by flesh and blood, nor yet by human will, but of or by God. Can any thing be clearer or more decisive?

Indeed the very terms, regeneration, born, birth, &c, imply of themselves another and an efficient agent; and then to connect these with the Divine agency, as the Scriptures have done some half dozen times in the phrase, “born of God,” and several other times in the phrase, “of the Spirit:” to have this called being “begotten again,” and the like, is enough, one would think, if words have any meaning, to show that man does not change his own heart. The same may be said of the terms resurrection, translation, creation, renewal, and various other terms the Scriptures use to express this change. Jesus Christ claimed that he had “power to lay down his life, and to take it again;” but this is the only instance of self-resurrection power that we read of; and even this was by his Divine nature; for he was “quickened by the Spirit,” and raised “by the power of God.” But these theorists teach that man has power to lay down his life, and then, after he is “dead in trespasses and sins,” he has power to take his life again. Truly this is giving man a power that approaches very near to one of the Divine attributes. To Christ alone does it belong “to quicken whom he will.” To change the heart of the sinner is one of the Divine prerogatives, and he that attempts to convert himself; and trusts to this, will find in the end that he is carnal still. For “whatsoever is born of the flesh is flesh, but whatsoever is born of the Spirit is spirit.”

Let me not here be misunderstood. I shall endeavour to show, in its proper place, the conditional agency of man in this work. I have only time to add, in this number, that I consider those scriptures which press duties upon the sinner as applying to this conditional agency. And even those strong expressions which sometimes occur in the Bible, requiring the sinner to “make himself a new heart”—“to cleanse his hands and purify his heart,” &c, will find an easy solution and a pertinent application in this view of the subject. For if there are certain pending conditions, without which the work will not be accomplished, then there would be a propriety, while pressing this duty, to use expressions showing that this work was conditionally, though not efficiently, resting upon the agency of the sinner.

In my next I shall endeavour to show that there is no intermediate Calvinistic ground between the two theories examined in this number. If that attempt prove successful, and if in this it has been found that the two theories examined are encumbered with too many embarrassments to be admitted, then we shall be the better prepared to listen to the teachings of the Scriptures on this important and leading doctrine of the Christian faith.