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.