Nathan Pitchford’s Comments On Decisional Regeneration

Nathan Pitch­ford, in the com­ments of the last post, made what I believe to be the clar­i­fi­ca­tion that I was unable to achieve. I believe these com­ments are more poignant and clearer than my own. If you would like to con­tact Nathan please con­tact me, and I will give you his con­tact information.

First, I think it’s vital to dis­tin­guish between the fact of pray­ing ‘the sinner’s prayer,’ and the appeal either to pray the sinner’s prayer in order to secure sal­va­tion or to remem­ber the pre­cise time when one prayed the sinner’s prayer in order to assure one­self of sal­va­tion. The state­ment, ‘Pray this prayer, and you’ll be saved,’ may cer­tainly be mis­lead­ing; but given the con­text, the per­son thus admon­ished may pos­si­bly under­stand the expres­sion to mean, ‘Express your faith in Christ, because jus­ti­fi­ca­tion comes through faith alone.’ I see no prob­lem with this lat­ter mean­ing ’ in fact, such pas­sages as Romans 10 seem fully rec­on­cil­able with it. But in a way I agree with Chris, in that the act of praying the sinner's prayer has, in many circles, usurped the place of that to which the sinner's prayer should give expression, namely vibrant faith, particularly in the matter of assurance of salvation. I remem­ber count­less times, grow­ing up, when I doubted that I was truly God’s child, and the preacher or coun­selor asked me, ‘Do you remem­ber pray­ing for God to for­give you? Then you’re saved ’ don’t doubt it.’ This cer­tainly makes the mere act of pray­ing into some­thing it was never intended to be, some­thing that works ‘ex opera oper­ata’ (to bor­row the phrase from the bap­tismal regen­er­a­tion debate). What the Catholics think that bap­tism as a mere action does, many Evan­gel­i­cals think that the sinner’s prayer as a mere action does. The Epis­tle of I John gives many more legit­i­mate ways to dis­cern if one is truly God’s child, and none of them has to do with look­ing back to a past deci­sion, but with dis­cern­ing the legit­i­macy and vibrancy of present faith, the present ortho­doxy of belief about Jesus, and so on. This is the way to make one’s call­ing and elec­tion sure, but it is a way that peo­ple who teach that regen­er­a­tion occurs on the basis of a ‘deci­sion’ or ‘sinner’s prayer’ can­not really employ.

Any­way, just some ram­bling thoughts. Per­haps, Chris, you could go to greater lengths to make clear that pray­ing for forgiveness/grace is an appro­pri­ate, indeed nec­es­sary response to God’s work of regen­er­a­tion and gift of faith. But I think some of the oth­ers could think through, a lit­tle more fully, just what the moment of decision/prayer has come to rep­re­sent in Evan­gel­i­cal cir­cles, as the one work done by humans to meet God, and as the only deci­sive dif­fer­ence between those who, hav­ing heard the gospel, are saved, and those who remain lost, etc. In this dis­torted under­stand­ing of what a true prayer/plea even is, human voli­tion takes the place of faith which looks out­side of one­self, as the deter­min­ing fac­tor in sal­va­tion. So any­way, with­out dis­count­ing the legit­i­macy of cry­ing out to Christ for mercy, we should also think about how to frame our appeal in a way not likely to be misunderstood, especially given the context of contemporary evangelicalism.