David J. Engelsma
The Southern Presbyterian theologian, Robert L. Dabney, attempted to defend the false doctrine that today is popular as “the well-meant offer of the gospel,” in an essay that he titled, “God’s Indiscriminate Proposals of Mercy.” The book in which the essay appears and from which I quote and to which I refer is Discussions: Evangelical and Theological, volume 1 (the Banner of Truth Trust, 1967), pages 282-313. It is fitting that the article appears in a publication of the Banner of Truth organization.
What Dabney thought about what is now called the “well-meant offer of the gospel” is significant. Dabney was a conservative Presbyterian theologian in the nineteenth century (1820-1898). He is regarded as one of the two greatest, conservative Presbyterian theologians of the nineteenth century, if not of all time. Conservative Presbyterians regard Dabney as authoritative regarding the Reformed faith. Dabney’s defense of the doctrine now known as the “well-meant offer” should not go unchallenged, therefore, for the sake of the confession of the gospel of grace in Presbyterian circles.
It is noteworthy, and disconcerting to the contemporary proponents of the theory of a “well-meant offer of the gospel,” that Dabney refused forthrightly to affirm a will of God to save the non-elect, as is the bold, if not brazen, affirmation of the Calvinistic advocates of a “well-meant offer.” As a Presbyterian theologian, Dabney recognized the full-blown Arminian heresy implicit in such an affirmation. The proponents of the “well-meant offer,” who do affirm a will of God for the salvation of all humans, cannot, therefore, appeal to Dabney for support of their Arminian doctrine of their gracious offer to all humans. On the contrary, Dabney condemned their doctrine of the “well-meant offer” as the Arminian heresy. He rejected it.
Dabney’s doctrine was that God has “pity,” or “compassion,” upon all—at least, upon all who hear the gospel. But since this pity, according to Dabney, is a pity that desires the salvation of all humans, Dabney, in spite of his better, Reformed instincts, made himself guilty of the error of the “well-meant offer” theology. That is, he taught a will of God for the salvation of the non-elect, despite his expressed objection to the doctrine as the Arminian heresy. The title of his essay expresses the error: “Proposals of Mercy.” The necessary source of serious, merciful proposals of salvation to all humans is a will of God for their salvation. Dabney’s indiscriminate proposals of mercy are the same as the contemporary “well-meant offer.” The implications of Dabney’s proposals of mercy, to which I come shortly, prove this assertion beyond all doubt.
Dabney opened his essay by observing that the argument for their heretical theology that is based upon these (alleged) indiscriminate proposals of mercy, that is, a “well-meant offer,” is the strongest argument for the Arminian heresy in the Arminian arsenal (p. 282). The controversy over the issue of indiscriminate proposals of mercy, or a “well-meant offer,” is not a tilting at windmills, but a life-or-death jousting between Reformed orthodoxy and the Arminian heresy.
Heroic as were his efforts to defend indiscriminate proposals of mercy, that is, a “well-meant offer,” without bluntly and expressly affirming a saving (ineffectual) love of God for all humans, Dabney could not avoid committing himself to this doctrine of Arminianism, indeed to a bold, explicit statement of this heresy. He fell into the heresy, almost against his will. Remember, he rejected the doctrine of a will of God for the salvation of all humans. Nevertheless, he fell into this heresy necessarily. He could not escape doing so. For this belongs to the essence itself of the doctrine of indiscriminate proposals of mercy, or the “well-meant offer.” If the gospel is indiscriminately a proposal of mercy, or a “well-meant offer,” to all hearers, God loves all humans with a love that wills (desires!) their salvation. And then, the saving love of God is ineffectual in itself—for many to whom God mercifully proposes salvation perish in unbelief. Thus, the notion of indiscriminate proposals of mercy is the compromise of the Reformed faith, and of the gospel of salvation by grace, in its entirety.
Regardless that Dabney avoided stating that God loves all humans, and that with a love that desires (wills!) their salvation, the truth is that a saving pity—a pity over the unsaved state of humans—is love. This love desires the salvation of the objects of this pity, or compassion. A father pities his child living in unbelief and unholiness because he desires, or wills, the salvation of his child. Pity is a strong desire for the deliverance of the object of the pity.
So much was Dabney himself committed to the reality that God’s pity for all is a loving will of God for the salvation of all that, in the first part of his essay, which is largely philosophical, he found it necessary to defend himself against the charge that this will of God, expressed in indiscriminate proposals of mercy, is frustrated by the will of the sinner. This, of course, would be the denial of the sovereignty of God in salvation and the making of the will of God dependent upon the will of the sinner.
Dabney’s solution to his serious problem was to deny that God’s indiscriminate proposals of mercy are frustrated by the contrary will of sinners. They are frustrated, but they are frustrated by other desires, or wills, of God Himself. In God there is a will to save all humans in pity for all of them. But there are other wills of God. These other wills in God over-rule His will to save all, so that His will to save all is not realized. One desire, or will, of God frustrates the other desire, or will, of God. “God does have compassion for the reprobate, but not express volition to save them, because his infinite wisdom regulates his whole will and guides and harmonizes (not suppresses) all its active principles” (p. 309).
This solution to Dabney’s problem of a will of God to save all that is not realized is as God-dishonoring as the Arminian doctrine that the will of the sinner frustrates the will of God to save him. For Dabney’s solution has God at loggerheads with Himself. With one sincere will, or desire, He wills the salvation of all humans; with another will, He contradicts this will to save all. One divine will frustrates another divine will. One is inclined to advise Dabney’s god of indiscriminate merciful proposals to make up his mind. On the other hand, one is tempted to sympathize with him for not being able to make up his mind.
Dabney’s solution of his problem that a will of God (for the salvation of all) is over-ruled by other wills of God (that only the elect be saved) is the denial of that attribute of God that Christian theology has described as the “simplicity” of God. God’s perfections are not only in harmony with each other, but also they are one in Him.
Theologically, such a conception of God, as having two wills in conflict regarding the salvation of sinners is unbiblical. The God of Scripture is not of two minds or wills, forever at odds with Himself whether He shall do this or that. Particularly with regard to the salvation of sinners, He has and carries out the one will of election. The mystery of His will of the salvation of guilty, lost sinners made known to us in the Scriptures is “according to his good pleasure which he hath purposed in himself” (Ephesians 1:9). God has one will, one good pleasure, and one purpose for the salvation of sinners in His pity, and this is the decree of election.
Ephesians 1:5 calls this will of God for the salvation of sinners “predestination.” Rightly translated, verse 5 makes the motivation of this predestination God’s love: “In love, having predestinated,” etc. “Love” in the text includes all aspects and manifestations of love, specifically pity, so that the text can rightly be understood to say, “In pity, having predestinated us,” etc. The pity of God is particular—for the elect, and for the elect only. And this pity is effectual; it saves every one upon whom it falls. Nothing and no one frustrates it, least of all God Himself.
Well aware that he was skating on thin orthodox ice with his indiscriminate proposals of mercy, Dabney avoided declaring in so many words that God loves all humans and wills their salvation. This was, in fact, his doctrine, but he was much more cautious in teaching it than are the defenders of the theory of a “well-meant offer of the gospel” today.
Nevertheless, Dabney could not successfully escape committing himself to the Arminian doctrine that God loves all humans with a love that desires, and thus wills, their salvation. He committed himself to this heresy by appealing to Ezekiel 18:32 as a biblical basis of his indiscriminate proposals of mercy (pp. 307, 308). Ezekiel 18:32 has been the favorite passage of the Arminians since the time of Jacob Arminius himself. The text reads: “For I have no pleasure in the death of him that dieth, saith the Lord GOD: wherefore turn yourselves, and live ye.”
The right understanding of the text is not here my concern. My concern is to note that the text teaches a will of God for the salvation of sinners and that this saving will of God has its origin and explanation in the love of God for these sinners. This understanding of Ezekiel 18:32 is indisputable. If now Dabney’s doctrine of indiscriminate proposals of mercy is founded upon Ezekiel 18:32, Dabney’s doctrine is the teaching of a saving love of God for all humans without exception and of a will of God for the salvation of all without exception. Undeniably, according to Dabney, this love and this will are ineffectual, for whatever reason. And this is sheer Arminianism, Arminianism with a curious twist perhaps, but Arminianism.
Similarly
revelatory is Dabney’s appeal in defense of his doctrine to Luke 19:41, 42,
Jesus’ weeping over Jerusalem (pp. 308, 309). This passage too was
appealed to by Dabney in support of his doctrine of indiscriminate proposals of
mercy, or, in the language of today, a “well-meant offer” of salvation.
Whatever the right explanation of the passage may be, it obviously teaches a
love of Jesus for sinners and His will, or fervent desire, that these sinners
be saved. This was the explanation of Dabney. Christ weeps over the
reprobate (Dabney used the word). Christ “felt … tender compassion” for
these reprobates. His compassion concerned the “doom of reprobation,”
that is, the compassion of Jesus in the passage concerned the salvation of
sinners. And according to Dabney’s interpretation of the passage, this love and
will of Jesus concerning the salvation of sinners fails to save many of
them. The love of Jesus “lament[s] those whom yet it did not save.”
So much was Dabney’s doctrine of indiscriminate proposals of mercy one with the Arminian heresy of universal, ineffectual, saving grace in the gospel that Dabney taught universal atonement. He taught universal atonement as the necessary implication of his doctrine of indiscriminate merciful proposals. Dabney taught universal atonement on the basis of John 3:16: “For God so loved the world,” etc. (pp. 309-313). John 3:16 surely proclaims a saving love of God and a will to save from sin. This saving love and this will to save were expressed and manifested above all in the incarnation and death of Jesus. According to Dabney, this love and this death had as their object and (would-be) beneficiary the “world” of all humans without exception, particularly including Judas Iscariot. This understanding of John 3:16, in defense of his doctrine of indiscriminate proposals of mercy, exposes Dabney’s doctrine of indiscriminate proposals of mercy, as it does today the theory of a “well-meant offer of salvation,” which likewise implies universal atonement.
According to its proponents in the Reformed camp themselves, including Robert L. Dabney, the doctrine of a “well-meant offer of salvation,” described by Dabney as “indiscriminate proposals of mercy,” necessarily implies universal atonement.
By this time, candid Presbyterian and Reformed theologians must acknowledge the relationship between the doctrine of a “well-meant offer” to all to whom the gospel comes—Dabney’s indiscriminate proposals of mercy—and the heresy of universal atonement. This relationship is evident in the content itself of the two doctrines. If God loves and sincerely desires the salvation of all humans, as is the doctrine of the “well-meant offer,” He must have expressed this desire, or will, in a death of Christ for all. At the very least, He must have made the fulfillment of this desire possible in a death of Christ for all. If the cross is anything at all, it is the revelation and expression of the love and saving will of God for sinful humans.
In addition to the intrinsic meaning of a “well-meant offer,” or indiscriminate proposals of mercy, the history of the theology of the doctrine of a “well-meant offer” demonstrates the friendly relationship between the “well-meant offer” and universal atonement. In the case of Dabney himself, the doctrine of indiscriminate proposals of mercy led an otherwise Calvinistic theologian to deny the third point of the “Five Points of Calvinism”: Limited Atonement.
Similarly, the history of the doctrine of a “well-meat offer” in the Christian Reformed Church (CRC) demonstrates that the doctrine of a “well-meant offer” leads to, indeed demands, the heresy of universal atonement by a confessionally Reformed Church. In a series of articles in the Reformed Journal magazine, beginning in 1962, CRC professor, Harold Dekker, contended that Christ died for all humans without exception. Among other grounds adduced by Dekker for this heresy was the decision of the CRC in 1924 that God is gracious to all humans in a “well-meant offer of salvation.” Against the Reformed tradition of the CRC and against the creedal testimony of the second head of doctrine of that Church’s Confession, the Canons of Dordt, Dekker argued that the universal grace of the doctrine of a “well-meant offer of the gospel,” which the CRC had adopted in 1924, necessarily implies universal atonement. The CRC approved both Dekker’s argument and the doctrine of universal atonement.
By their silence concerning the controversy and its outcome in the CRC, of which controversy and outcome, they were well aware, the Reformed community of churches worldwide, which for the most part itself is committed to the doctrine of a “well-meant offer,” made itself complicit in the CRC’s approval of the heresy of universal atonement. On the basis of the doctrine of a “well-meant offer of salvation—Dabney’s indiscriminate proposals of mercy!
The doctrine of a “well-meant offer” implies universal atonement. This is evident in Dabney.
Dabney was at pains, and at some length, explicitly to reject and refute any explanation of John 3:16 that limits the humans who are part of the “world” to the elect.
In the course of his defense of his theory of indiscriminate proposals of mercy, which today goes by the name of a “well-meant offer of grace,” Dabney made one appeal to the Reformed Confessions. The creed, significantly, is Canons III/IV, 8: “As many as are called by the gospel are unfeignedly called,” etc. “Unfeignedly” translates the Latin original, “serio,” which means “seriously.” God’s call in the gospel is serious. It confronts all to whom it comes with God’s serious command that they repent and believe. But a “serious” call is not necessarily a merciful call intending the salvation of the one to whom the call is given by God. God seriously called Pharaoh to let God’s people go, with the divine intention thereby to harden the heart of the Egyptian monarch (Exodus 7; Romans 9:17). And in Romans 9 the apostle refers to this call of Pharaoh in order to illustrate and substantiate the apostle’s doctrine that the purpose of God’s call of the reprobate by the gospel is to harden them in their unbelief, not to save them.
According to Dabney, the meaning of the Canons is that in the external call of the gospel God’s “purpose” is that the call save all to whom it comes. The serious call is “a solemn and tender entreat[y]” on the part of God to all to whom the call comes, an “evidence of a true compassion” with regard to their lost estate (p. 307). Regardless that Dabney made this compassion a desire of God to save all to whom it comes, including those who perish, that is frustrated by another, more compelling will of God, his appeal to the article puts him squarely in the doctrinal camp of the Arminians. The Arminians explained the serious call of Canons III/IV, 8 as a gracious offer of God to all to whom it comes, in the sincere desire, or will, of God to save them all. Exactly this was also the doctrine of Dabney’s indiscriminate proposals of mercy. The Reformed churches drew up and adopted the Canons to refute and condemn this doctrine of universal grace in the preaching of the gospel.
That the compassionate call of the gospel—the proposal of mercy—expressing God’s will for the salvation of its objects, and manifesting pity for them in their lost condition, is particular and efficacious is the plain teaching of Romans 8:30: “Whom he did predestinate, them he also called: and whom he called … them he also glorified.” The merciful call is restricted to the predestinated. It is also effectual: it accomplishes the glorification of those who are called.
The lesson that Presbyterian Christians must take away from Dabney’s defense of the “well-meant offer,” which is the modern description of Dabney’s “indiscriminate proposals of mercy,” is a solemn, urgent warning. Even a theologian as otherwise sound as Dabney, and as determined to avoid the Arminian error of universal, ineffectual grace, could not avoid falling into the most grievous errors of the Arminian heresy.
His downfall was his erroneous conception of the call of the gospel as an indiscriminate proposal of mercy, or a “well-meant offer of salvation.”
Let all Reformed and Presbyterian Christians, indeed all who would confess salvation by grace alone, and thus glorify God, take heed!
(DJE,
21/12/2022)
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[See also the following critiques of the same essay of Dabney:
https://commongracedebate.blogspot.com/2023/01/dabney-indiscriminate-proposals.html
https://commongracedebate.blogspot.com/2020/04/dabney-on-free-offer.html
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