Response From Bruce Ware

I e-mailed Bruce Ware, expect­ing no response, and he actu­ally sent me quite a detailed response. I asked him the fol­low­ing questions:

This [God of the Pos­si­ble, Gre­gory Boyd] has caused me much tur­moil in the light of my Reformed The­ol­ogy. Am I guilty of the crime of tak­ing Scrip­ture at prima facia as Boyd does in his (incom­plete) exe­ge­sis? How can I be assured that I don’t take Eph­esians 1:4,11 for what I want it to say but dis­re­gard John 12:32 for uni­ver­sal Pre­ve­nient Grace? Can I be assured I do have a Bib­li­cal, sys­tem­atic theology?

Lastly, I’ve heard that you are an Amyral­dian­ist. If I may, can I ask if this is true; and if so, why do you hold to the neces­sity of deny­ing Lim­ited Atonement?

His responses

If your ques­tion is this, “Are we sus­cep­ti­ble to mis­in­ter­pre­ta­tion due to uncrit­i­cal bias?” the answer is, “Yes.” Just as total deprav­ity is the human con­di­tion, so prone­ness to mis­un­der­stand­ing due to bias is like­wise. So, what do we do?

  1. Acknowl­edge this before God and plead for help.
  2. Seek, under God, to exam­ine biases and pre­vi­ously held the­o­log­i­cal beliefs in light of Scripture’s teach­ing itself.
  3. Be deter­mined to endeavor to “go with the Bible” even if this means that cher­ished the­o­log­i­cal views must be adapted.
  4. Real­ize that the areas we are most prone toward bias are ones in which our cur­rent cul­ture sways opin­ion and shapes values.
  5. Avoid syn­i­cism while being deeply hum­bled at the task of com­ing to know cor­rectly what God has revealed in Scripture.
  6. Pur­sue truth with all your heart, since this is where our true free­dom is found, and God’s desire is for his peo­ple to enter more fully into his truth.

I’m not Amyral­dian, but my posi­tion has some affini­ties to his. If you’ve not seen or read Michael Thomas’ The Extent of the Atone­ment, I strongly rec­om­mend it. You’ll see how the young Calvin­ist move­ment strug­gled with this issue from its ear­li­est days, and many Calvin­ists have adopted some ver­sion of a 4-point view. My own posi­tion I pre­fer to call the “Mul­ti­ple Inten­tions” view of the extent of the atonement.

He attached infor­ma­tion on the “Mul­ti­ple Inten­tions” view of the atone­ment and an arti­cle titled, “Divine Elec­tion To Sal­va­tion: Uncon­di­tional, Indi­vid­ual, and Infralap­sar­ian” writ­ten by him. This is exciting!