On the topic of regeneration, some in Pelagian and Semi-Pelagian circles have taught that God’s grace illuminates the mind and affections and if the person then wills to choose Christ, God’s grace aids the person’s will in repenting and believing. They say that this is a work of God’s grace and Holy Spirit; some have called it “moral persuasion.” However, these Pelagians and Semi-Pelagians deny that the Spirit gives new life to a dead heart and infuses strength to the renewed will enabling the sinner to repent, believe, and come to Christ in faith.
John Owen argued well that this Pelagian and Semi-Pelagian view overthrows “the whole grace of Jesus Christ… to render it useless; for it ascribes unto man the honor of his conversion, his will being the principal cause of it.”
Owen then said that this Pelagian or Semi-Pelagian view contradicts the prayers of the Scriptures and God’s people:
There was no argument that the ancients more pressed the Pelagians withal than that the grace which they acknowledged did not answer the prayers of the church, or what we are taught in the Scripture to pray for. We are to pray only for what God hath promised, and for the communication of it unto us in that way whereby he will work it and effect it.
Now, he is at a great indifferency in this matter who only prays that God would persuade him or others to believe and to obey, to be converted or to convert himself. The church of God hath always prayed that God would work these things in us; and those who have a real concernment in them do pray continually that God would effectually work them in their hearts. They pray that he would convert them; that he would create a clean heart and renew a right spirit in them; that he would give them faith for Christ’s sake, and increase it in them; and that in all these things he would work in them by the exceeding greatness of his power both to will and to do according to his good pleasure.
And there is not a Pelagian in the world who ever once prayed for grace, or gracious assistance against sin and temptation, with a sense of his want of it, but that his prayers contradicted his profession. To think that by all these petitions, with others innumerable dictated unto us in the Scripture, and which a spiritual sense of our wants will engage into, we desire nothing but only that God would persuade, excite, and stir us up to put forth a power and ability of our own in the performance of what we desire, is contrary unto all Christian experience.
Yea, for a man to lie praying with [persistence], earnestness, and fervency, for that which is in his own power, and can never be effected but by his own power, is… ridiculous; and they do but mock God who pray unto him to do that for them which they can do for themselves, and which God cannot do for them but only when and as they do it themselves. Suppose a man to have a power in himself to believe and repent; suppose these to be such acts of his will as God doth not, indeed cannot, by his grace work in him, but only persuade him thereunto, and show him sufficient reason why he should so do,—to what purpose should this man, or with what congruity could he, pray that God would give him faith and repentance?
John Owen, The Works of John Owen, ed. William H. Goold, vol. 3 (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, n.d.), 312–313.
In other words, it isn’t biblical for us to pray that God would persuade someone to believe. It’s not biblical for us to beg to God that someone would convert himself. In fact, it’s even contrary to experience! As Owen said, it’s mocking God to pray for him to do what man can do for himself.
This entire discussion is found in volume 3 of Owen’s Works, pages 311-313.
Shane Lems
Hammond, WI, 54015
The Reformed Reader Blog 