true universalism of grace. There is confessedly no direct Biblical support for the doctrine: it is simply a postulate of the universalism of God’s will of sal- vation in connection with the confinement of grace to the means of grace. The Scriptures teach that no man can be saved without a knowledge of Jesus Christ in his saving work. This is transmuted into its opposite that no man can be lost without a knowledge of Christ in his saving work; and then in the interests of this proposition provision is made for every man to be brought face to face with the offer of the gospel under favorable circumstances, if not in this world, then in the next. No doubt some such invention was necessary if the Lutheran premises were to be sus- tained. But one would think that the necessity for such an invention in order to sustain these premises were a sufficient indication that these premises were best abandoned.
Having by this invention avoided the fact that the provision for salvation is in point of fact not universal, the Lutherans have by no means escaped from their difficulties. They are faced with the even greater difficulty, common to them and the Arminians, of accounting for the failure of God’s grace, now safely conveyed to all men, to work the salvation of all men. And here there is no outlet but that of the Arminians, namely to bring in surreptitiously the discredited naturalism, and to attribute the difference in the effects of grace to men’s differences in dealing with grace. The Lutherans have their own way, however,
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THE PLAN OBISALVATEON
of introducing this naturalism. They are emphatic that man, being dead in sin, cannot coóperate with the grace of God, a difficulty got over by the Armin- ianism by the postulation of a graciously restored ability for all men, earned for them by the sacrifice of Christ and applied to them automatically. But they suppose that, though dead in sin, man can resist, and successfully resist, almighty grace. Resistance is, however, itself an activity: and the successful re- sistance of an almighty recreative power, is a pretty considerable activity—for a dead man. It all comes back, therefore, to the Pelagian ground that, at the decisive point, the salvation of man is in his own power: men are saved, or men are not saved, accord- ing to natural differences in men. Thus the grace of God is fundamentally denied and salvation is com- mitted, in the last analysis, to man himself.
The upshot of the whole matter is that the attempt to construe the gracious operations of God looking to salvation universally, inevitably leads by one path or another to the wreck of the evangelical principle, on the basis of which all Protestant Churches, (or rather, let us say, of the supernaturalistic principle, on the basis of which all Christian Churches,) professedly unite. Whether this universalism takes a sacerdotal form or a form which frees itself from all entanglement with earthly transactions, it ends always and every- where by transferring the really decisive factor in sal- vation from God to man. This is not always clearly perceived or frankly admitted. Sometimes, however,
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it is. Professor W. F. Steele of the University of Denver, for example, clearly perceives and frankly admits it. To him there can be no talk of “almighty grace." Occupying a position which is practically (whatever we may say of it theoretically) indis- tinguishable from the bumptious naturalism of Mr. W. E. Henley, the first article of his creed is a hearty belief in the almightiness of man in his sphere of moral choices. “When one says," he tells us,” “I believe in God, the Father Almighty,’ he means it with reserve, for in the domain of man’s moral choices under grace, man himself is almighty, according to God’s self-limitation in making man in his image and after his likeness." God himself, he goes on to de- clare, has a creed which begins: “I believe in man, almighty in his choices." Obviously a man in this mood is incapable of religion, the very essence of which is the sense of absolute dependence on God, and is altogether inhibited from evangelicalism, which consists in humble resting on God and God alone for salvation. Instead of the great Gloria soli Deo ring- ing in his heart, he proudly himself seizes the helm and proclaims himself, apart from God, the master of his own destiny. Moralism has completely extruded religion. Did not Luther have precisely the like of this in mind when he satirically describes the moralists of his day in these striking words: “Неге we аге al- ways wanting to turn the tables and do good of our- selves to that poor man, our Lord God, from whom we are rather to receive it"? [107]
THE PLAN OF SALVATION