"Whosever Will": A Review Essay -- By: J. Matthew Pinson

Journal: Journal for Baptist Theology & Ministry
Volume: JBTM 07:1 (Spring 2010)
Article: "Whosever Will": A Review Essay
Author: J. Matthew Pinson


Whosever Will: A Review Essay

J. Matthew Pinson1

It was interesting growing up Free Will Baptist in the religious culture of the South in the 1970s and 80s. It was dominated by the Southern Baptist Convention, which Martin Marty has called the “Catholic Church of the South,” owing to its ubiquity in Southern religious life. If you were an intellectually curious and theologically oriented Free Will Baptist, the finer points of soteriology were always forced to the forefront of your thinking. There was no way to avoid it: When a Southern Baptist asked you what church you were a member of and you said “Free Will Baptist,” it was unremarkable. The Southern Baptist said, “Everybody believes in free will. What makes you different?”

You braced yourself, because you knew what was about to happen. Before you could blurt out all the words “Free Will Baptists believe Christians can fall from grace,” your Southern Baptist friend would react in horror at the prospect that there were people who actually believed in the possibility of apostasy from the faith. But no Southern Baptist would react negatively to your belief that God had granted all people—including the reprobate— the freedom to resist his gracious, universal calling in salvation.

In those days, at least in my neck of the woods, Southern Baptists didn’t mind being called Calvinists. They just said they were “mild” Calvinists. Some joked about being “Calminians,” but it was unsurprising that “Missionary Baptists” had moderated their Calvinism. But they would never have thought of themselves as Arminian. After all, Arminians believed—horror of horrors—that a believer could apostatize!

So when I read Whosoever Will, it seemed uncontroversial. It seemed very familiar to me—much like the “mild” Calvinism of the “Catholic Church of the South” in whose theological shadow I grew up—and from whom I was a friendly but persistent dissenter.

Whosoever Will is a fascinating and thought-provoking book. Of course, like many such works that arise out of church conferences, there is some unevenness both in style and scholarly perspicuity. Some of this seems to be by design, with some of the authors, for example Paige Patterson and Richard Land, taking on a more pastoral and conversational tone, and others, for example David Allen and Steve Lemke, tending more to utilize scholarly conventions. However, it appears that the whole book is designed to be read by pastors and other church leaders who are interested in Christian theology, not just professional scholars. So while I think some of the chapters could have gone into more depth, on the whole the work strikes a good bala...

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