[Note: “Common Grace”
or “Free Offer” advocates frequently appeal to Dabney’s essay to suppose that,
although God does indeed have one will, He nevertheless can have two contrary
volitions with regards to the same individual—a will to judge them for their
wickedness and also a will for their being saved.]
Rev. Martyn McGeown
[Source: Protestant Reformed Theological Journal, vol. 51, no. 2 (April 2018), pp. 57-59]
“According
to Dabney, God’s dealings with reprobate sinners are analogous to George
Washington’s dealings with a British spy, Major Andre, toward whom Washington
‘exuded genuine compassion,’ although he ‘signed his death warrant with
spontaneous decision.’ … According to Dabney, … God genuinely pities the
reprobate and genuinely desires their salvation, but God restrains His own
compassion out of other, equally important concerns, such as the desire for
justice, just as Washington, who genuinely pitied Andre, executed him by mastering
his pity ‘by means of wisdom, justice and patriotism’ … God somehow masters
His pity toward the reprobate, so that although He desires, but does not
purpose (and certainly does not accomplish) their salvation, He ultimately
destroys them in His just wrath. Are we to imagine in the perfect heart of God
a struggle between justice and mercy (genuine pity and compassion), in which
justice, and not mercy, prevails? This is what Dabney … want[s] us to imagine.
[Dabney
comments on John 3:16] that ‘so loved the world’ does not refer to the decree
of election, ‘but a propension of benevolence not matured into the volition to
redeem, of which Christ’s mission is a sincere manifestation to all sinners.’ …
But Dabney’s exegesis is not only wrong; it is absurd and unworthy of a
Reformed theologian. John 3:16 concerns
God’s redemptive love, for the text speaks of God’s giving His
Son. Of course, God’s love is His
volition (will) to redeem! Verse 17 even teaches, ‘For God sent not his
Son into the world to condemn the world; but that the world through him
might be saved’ (my italics).
God’s purpose in sending His Son (giving His Son to the cross) is
the salvation of the world, which world does not include the reprobate, whose
salvation God has not purposed. God does not have ‘a propension of benevolence
not matured into the volition to redeem’!
If
that is the meaning of God’s will expressed in the ‘offer’—‘a propension of
benevolence not matured into the volition to redeem’—how is such an offer
preached? I have never heard anyone preach the offer with these words: ‘God
loves you, but perhaps He loves you only with a propension of benevolence not
matured into the volition to redeem you. God loves you in the sense that He
pities you and desires your salvation, but He may perhaps not have purposed
your salvation.’ Instead of preaching that way, the ‘free offer’ preachers that
I have encountered preach thus: ‘God loves you, and Christ is willing to save
you if you will only believe,’ which sounds almost exactly, if not exactly,
like what an Arminian preacher would say.”
################
[See also the following critiques of the same essay of Dabney:
https://commongracedebate.blogspot.com/2023/01/dabney-indiscriminate-proposals-of-mercy.html
https://commongracedebate.blogspot.com/2023/01/dabney-indiscriminate-proposals.html
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