by Matthew Pinson | Mar 5, 2014
Even though we offer 40 programs of study, from biology to teacher education, from business to psychology, ministerial training remains the core of what we do at Welch College, and we hope to expand that one day soon with the addition of master’s-level seminary education.
The ministerial program is alive and well at Welch College. More than half the men on our campus are preparing for some sort of preaching ministry, and our ministerial students take every opportunity they can to preach the Word of God.
The frequent preaching tours these students take throughout the academic year exemplify their dedication. On these tours, a vanload of ministerial students will go to a certain region and then fan out to preach and represent Welch College at churches in that area. I thought my readers would be interested in this letter I received recently from Eric Brown, a pastor in Alma, Georgia.
Please pray for these Welch ministerial students as they prepare for Great Commission ministry in the context of the local church.
Dear Dr. Pinson,
Recently the South Georgia Association of Free Will Baptists was blessed to host a Welch College preaching trip. The young men who came exceeded our expectations. They did a fantastic job representing themselves, the College, and Christ in an impressive way. The other pastors who hosted a student described them as confident, respectful, outgoing, and best of all great preachers. This has been one of the best crops of “preacher boys” sent our way. They represented well the biblical vision of the man of God I know that you’re personally committed on producing at Welch.
I hosted junior Dustin Walters. He is a gifted young man who is well on his way to becoming a great preacher. I look forward to hearing great things from him in the future.
Thanks for all your hard work at the helm of our Flagship College. Praying for your strength and influence to permeate a generation of young men for Free Will Baptists and God’s glory!
Sincerely,
Rev. Eric L. Brown, Pastor
Pine Level Free Will Baptist Church
Alma, Georgia
by Matthew Pinson | Feb 28, 2014
It’s my privilege to announce a late luncheon with the theme “Advancing the Gospel through Online Learning” at the upcoming Forum14 conference at Welch College. This event will be held Monday, March 10, at 1:30 p.m.
At Welch College, our mission is to educate leaders to serve Christ, His Church, and His world through Biblical thought and life. This mission is repeated in our catalogs, syllabi, and website. It’s reiterated in chapel services, classes, and promotional events.
A good mission statement communicates through what it does not say as well as through what it says. Notice that our mission does not limit itself to people who can live in a dorm and attend classes during the workday.
We have designed our online programs with the adult learner in mind—that working adult who desires ministry training on the associate’s or bachelor’s degree level, or who wants to complete an associate’s degree in business or general studies for professional advancement, or individuals who just want to complete that degree they never finished.
Through Internet technology, we’re bringing the classroom to you, to help you succeed in finding your place in fulfilling this great mission. Finally, there’s a way to receive the quality Christian education you desire in a way that’s flexible—100% online—with hands-on faculty and support staff. And what’s more, it’s affordable, with full financial aid opportunities available.
In just a few weeks, on March 9-11, Welch College will host its Forum14 conference. Servants of God from around the world will speak on important issues. Workshops and seminars will provide opportunities to deal with a number of ministry issues. I invite you to attend the “Advancing the Gospel through Online Learning” luncheon Monday, March 10, at 1:30.
If you are interested in a fully accredited, Bible-based degree program, this is for you. You probably know of people in your congregation who could become more effective in their work in the local church through this kind of program. If you’d like to attend, let us know (luncheon space is limited), using the contact link or envelope icon above.
I look forward to seeing you there!
by Matthew Pinson | Feb 24, 2014
Recently I came across the following quote from John Fawcett’s Christ Precious to Those Who Believe. Fawcett (1739-1817) was a British Baptist minister, theologian, poet, and hymn writer (most famous for writing “Blest Be the Tie That Binds”).
This quotation gets to the heart of why we are so often unhappy and lack joy in life. I love the way Fawcett ties the lack of happiness when we lose temporal things we enjoy to Augustine’s concept of ordinate (proper, well-ordered) loves or affections, an idea C. S. Lewis talks about in The Four Loves.
“When the loss of any temporal enjoyment casts us into excessive despondency and dejection—it is evident that what we have lost, was the object of our inordinate love. The most innocent attachments cease to be innocent, when they press too strongly upon us! To cleave to any created object, and to look for happiness from it—is to make an idol of it—and set it up in God’s place. Should this object be a friend, a brother, a wife, or a child—the idolatry is still odious in the eyes of that God, to whom we owe our chief affection. Our warmest passions, our most fervent love, desires, hopes, and confidences—should always have God for their object. It is His desire that our happiness should not center in any of the good things of this life.”
by Matthew Pinson | Feb 21, 2014
I am excited to have my good friend Russell Moore speak at this year’s Forum14/Bible Conference March 9-11. Dr. Moore and I have had a growing friendship since he first delivered the Leroy Forlines Lectures at Welch College several years ago. He has since been back to our campus a number of times to visit and speak.
Dr. Moore was recently named president of the Southern Baptist Convention’s Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission. Before that, he was academic vice president at Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Kentucky. He is author of a number of books, including The Kingdom of Christ (Crossway) andTempted and Tried (Crossway).
It was a special privilege to be at Dr. Moore’s recent installation as president of the ERLC at Capitol Hill Baptist Church, Washington, D.C. (see his address “A Prophetic Minority: Kingdom, Culture, and Mission in a New Era” here:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hrVfcbRNpwo). In this new role, he will be one of the most visible evangelicals in public life, representing evangelical Christians on the major news networks and in other public venues.
One thing I like about Russell is his ability to speak the truth in love. Even when he says things that, to a secular public, are very difficult truths, he says them in a way that is loving and intelligent and deserves a hearing. He calls it “convictional kindness in the public square.”
Too many religious conservatives who have spoken to issues of public life have done so with a scowl, and too many others have put all their eggs in the political basket, almost believing that politics was the real savior in the modern world. But on the other extreme, too many evangelicals have been politically quietist, retreating from the public square and cultural engagement.
In his new role, Russell Moore will avoid both these extremes. He is taking on the mantle of Carl F. H. Henry in The Uneasy Conscience of Modern Fundamentalism. This balance is so needed in today’s evangelical environment, with people on one hand calling for evangelicals to be silent for a time in the public square, and people on the other hand redefining the mission of the church as much in terms of saving the whales as saving souls.
At his core, however, Russell Moore is simply a powerful preacher of the Word of God. I encourage you to come to Forum14 to hear him.
by Matthew Pinson | Feb 19, 2014
Recently I read a blog post by Roger Olson on how one does not have to agree with Arminius to be an Arminian. It can be found here.
Olson made several good points in the article, and he is certainly correct in his main assertion that one can differ from the finer points of Arminius and still be an Arminian. Despite his desire to carve out a place for Open Theists in the Arminian camp, which of course would have been very troubling to Arminius, it’s a good and thought-provoking post. I agree especially with his view that Molinism is inconsistent with Arminianism.
Yet the main thing that stuck out to me about Olson’s essay was his comment about Arminius’s views being a kind of “evangelical synergism” (a term he borrows from Donald Bloesch). Thus he says, more than once, that Anabaptists like Balthasar Hubmaier and Menno Simons were precursors of Arminius in this “evangelical synergist” mold.
I used to think in this same vein. One of my first published articles was entitled “A Free Will Baptist in the Reformation,” and it was about the sixteenth-century Anabaptist Balthasar Hubmaier—that great feet-washing, believer-baptizing, libertarian-free-will-affirming Anabaptist who also had a view on church and state much more like Thomas Helwys and the English Baptists in the following century than the mainstream Anabaptists of his own century.
But it was when I was doing a doctoral seminar paper on the soteriology of the first Baptists, John Smyth and Thomas Helwys, for Prof. Richard Greaves at Florida State University that I began to see a difference between the synergism of John Smyth, who became a Mennonite soteriologically, and the much more grace-oriented views of Thomas Helwys. He parted ways with Smyth in large part because the latter had embraced Mennonite views and left behind more Reformed views of original sin and of justification by the imputed righteousness of Christ.
Helwys would never have wanted to be called a synergist. He wanted to eschew any hint of cooperating or working together with God in salvation. He even disliked the term free will! I began to see, largely through the work of Alvin Beachy’s The Concept of Grace in the Radical Reformation, that Anabaptist notions of grace, including those like Hubmaier’s, Menno’s, and Smyth’s, were semi-Pelagian, unlike those of Helwys or Jacobus Arminius [1].
I began to shy away from the use of the word synergist, and came to believe that thinkers like Arminius and Helwys, who had a much more gracious emphasis in their soteriology and doctrines of human depravity and inability than the Anabaptists, would have done the same.
Recently I came across a book, Jacob Arminius: Theologian of Grace, that argued that Arminius himself was a synergist. The authors, Thomas McCall and Keith Stanglin, say, “Some scholars have denied that Arminius is a ‘synergist,’ yet his definition of subsequent grace is precisely ‘synergistic,’ which is simply the Greek equivalent of ‘cooperative’ (derived from Latin).” Their main culprit, whom they cite in the footnote, is me [2].
Like my colleague at Welch College Robert Picirilli, I do not think Arminius called himself or would ever have called himself a synergist because of the semi-Pelagian implications of the term. It implies that people are working together with God in bringing about their salvation. Stanglin and McCall themselves quote Augustine himself a few paragraphs later using the same language of subsequent cooperating grace as Arminius used. Arminius’s use of this same phrase does not render him a “synergist,” and he wouldn’t at all have been comfortable with the term.
I would say of Arminius what Gregory Graybill says of Martin Luther’s associate Phillipp Melanchthon in his recent monographEvangelical Free Will. Conversion for Melanchthon, Graybill insists, “was a passive reception of merit rather than an active cooperative work that earned merit. It was not synergism!” Graybill distinguishes Melanchthon’s view from that of Peter Lombard, which “required God and the human working together in synergism.” Just as it is unfair for Lutheran theologians to attribute a term to Melanchthon that was readily associated with his later followers, it is even more unfair to saddle Arminius with a term that he did not employ which was foreign to his theological context [3].
Stanglin rightly chides scholars for importing decontextualized dogmatic categories into their understanding of Arminius that are far-removed from his context. But I think to saddle Arminius with the designation “synergist,” when it was so far-removed from his own Reformed theological categories and terminology, is to de-contextualize Arminius’s thought.
I think Picirilli and Arthur Skevington Wood’s approach is preferable: that Arminius’s views do not represent “a form of synergism in which God’s work and man’s work cooperate, but rather a relationship in which God’s will and work within man [are] welcomed in an attitude of trust and submission” [4]. Arminius would have been much more comfortable with the language used by my colleague at Welch College, Leroy Forlines, who, in his book Classical Arminianism, uses the terminology of “conditional monergism” rather than synergism [5]. This approach is shared by Arminius scholars such as Carl Bangs and William den Boer, as well as Episcopius scholar Mark Ellis [6].
This same train of thought is pursued by scholars such as Southeastern Seminary professors Kenneth Keathley and Jeremy Evans, and Notre Dame’s Richard Cross. In various writings, these gentlemen make the case for “monergism with resistibility of grace.” Both Evans and Keathley have latched onto Richard Cross’s argument in his article “Anti-Pelagianism and the Resistibility of Grace.” [7]
Cross asks, “Suppose we do adopt . . . that there can be no natural active human cooperation in justification. Would such a position require us to accept the irresistibility of grace?” (Evans, 260). Cross, along with Keathley and Evans, thinks it would not. Evans calls this “monergism with resistibility of grace.” Keathley and Evans cite Cross’s “ambulatory model,” according to which the sinner is like an unconscious person who is rescued by EMTs and wakes up in an ambulance and does not resist the EMTs’ medical actions to save his life.
This attempt to maintain a libertarian free will posture on divine sovereignty and human freedom while avoiding the notion of synergism reminds me of Arminius’s desire to maintain “the greatest possible distance from Pelagianism.” [8] Evans remarks that this approach means that “the only contribution the person makes is not of positive personal status, as strands of Pelagianism and Semi-Pelagianism hold,” because salvation is “wrought by God (Eph 2:8-9). So people do not “pull [themselves] up by [their] own bootstraps.” Instead, saving faith is a “gift freely given from above and does not reside in any natural capacity of the person (Phil 1:28-29).” Furthermore, Evans maintains, affirming monergism together with resistible grace “helps explain how God desires that none perish (1 Tim 2:3)” (Evans, 261).
So I think it’s a good idea for Arminians to find ways to avoid the terminology of synergism. I think scholars such as Forlines, Picirilli, Wood, Bangs, den Boer, Ellis, Cross, Keathley, and Evans have good instincts in wanting to stay away from it. And I think Arminius (and Helwys) would have agreed.
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[1] Beachy, The Concept of Grace in the Radical Reformation (Nieuwkoop: B. De Graaf, 1977).
[2] Stanglin and McCall, Jacob Arminius: Theologian of Grace (New York: Oxford UP, 2012), 152-53.
[3] Graybill, Evangelical Free Will: Phillipp Melanchthon’s Doctrinal Journey on the Origins of Faith (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2010), 297.
[4] Picirilli approvingly quoting Wood in Grace, Faith, Free Will (Nashville: Randall House, 2002), 162. See Wood, “The Declaration of Sentiments: The Theological Testament of Arminius,” Evangelical Quarterly 65 (1993), 111-29.
[5] F. Leroy Forlines, Classical Arminianism: A Theology of Salvation (Nashville: Randall House, 2011), 264, 297.
[6] Bangs, “Arminius and Reformed Theology” doctoral dissertation, University of Chicago, 1958 (where he boldly states, “Arminius was a monergist” [166]); den Boer, “‘Cum delectu’: Jacob Arminius’s Praise for and Critique of Calvin and His Theology,” Church History and Religious Culture 91 (2011), 83-84; see also den Boer, God’s Twofold Love: The Theology of Jacob Arminius (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2010); Ellis, Simon Episcopius’ Doctrine of Original Sin (New York: Peter Lang, 2006), 84. This perspective concurs with what Richard Muller said in an earlier work: “It is difficult to label [Arminius’s approach] synergism” (Muller, “The Priority of the Intellect in the Soteriology of Jacobus Arminius,” Westminster Theological Journal 55 [1993], 70. In a more recent article, however, Muller characterizes Arminius as a synergist: “Arminius and the Reformed Tradition,” 29).
[7] Cross, “Anti-Pelagianism and the Resistibility of Grace,” Faith and Philosophy 22 (2005), 199-210; Keathley, Salvation and Sovereignty: A Molinist Approach (Nashville: B&H Academic, 2010), 88, 103-08; Evans, “Reflections on Determinism and Human Freedom,” in Whosoever Will: A Biblical-Theological Critique of Five-Point Calvinism (Nashville: B&H Academic, 2010), 253-74; cf. Kevin Timpe, “Grace and Controlling What We Do Not Cause,” Faith and Philosophy 24 (2007), 284-99.
[8] The Works of James Arminius (Nashville: Randall House, 2007), 1:764.
