Leighton Flowers; one more time. He continues to assert that his soteriological position is not semi-Pelagian; and this is understandable, who would want to have that as the label of their soteriological theory. Flowers has been under critique by folks like James White (someone I equally consider semi-Pelagian in soteriological theory), more recently by Jordan Cooper, and even by me (even though Flowers only seems inclined to publicly respond to people with bigger social media platforms). The charge from these guys, and me, is that Flowers’ theory of salvation suffers from what in the history would be identified as semi-Pelagianism. I have already attempted to sketch the basics of Flowers’ understanding of salvation here, so we won’t rehash that. But in response to this ongoing critique of his position he just posted another, more brief, response to his despisers here. Just watch what he says in this latest dispatch of his, and listen very carefully to how he tries to thread the needle between an anthropology (which is his) that is most definitely of the species, semi-Pelagian, and the opposite pole of God’s unilateral and de jure movement in the accomplishment of salvation in Jesus Christ. As you will notice, Leighton likes to use illustrations and analogies; we might say that Flowers is willing to die by the illustrations and analogies of a thousand deaths. You will also notice that Flowers often uses biblical ‘parables’ and superficial referral to descriptive events in Scripture in order to build his soteriological superstructure; this is not an advisable hermeneutic. For someone who says they only want to go where the Bible goes, you would think they would want to also operate with a critical biblical hermeneutic that pays close attention to the literary and theological features of said text.

At bottom, Flowers rejects the concept that a person is ‘born’ with a moral or spiritual incapacity to say yes or no to God in Christ in the Gospel offer. Flowers believes that a person ‘retains’ said ‘moral’ capacity, post-fall, to recognize their need for Christ when confronted with the Gospel. We might say that Flowers’ theory operates with a sort of occasionalism or situationalism in regard to the Gospel power. That is, Flowers seems to think that in any given moment a person can simply say yes or no to God, when confronted with God in Gospel, of their own resources. Flowers will say, along with his statement of faith, that he affirms that God takes the ‘first step’ towards humanity (this would be de jure or objectively)—and he believes this is a sufficient response and workaround the charge that he suffers from semi-Pelagianism—but that at the in se level the person confronted with this objective Gospel reality, even as the Holy Spirit has used a variety of occasions or situations to ‘woo’ said person, has the ‘moral capacity’ within themselves, some sort of inherent original creational capacity, resistant to the noetic effects of the fall, to say yes or no to the Gospel offer. As I noted in my last Flowers post, this fits well with, at least, semi-Pelagian theory.

One of the theologians Flowers depends on, in order to evade the charge of semi-Pelagian, is Adam Harwood of New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary (where Flowers earned his DMin degree). Harwood, in an article attempting to ‘shed’ the charge of semi-Pelagian, relative to his and Flowers’ et al. view, shares the pertinent articles of confession from their statement of faith:

Article 2, “(W)e deny that any sinner is saved apart from a free response to the Holy Spirit’s drawing through the Gospel.”

Article 4, “We affirm that grace is God’s generous decision to provide salvation… in freely offering the Gospel in the power of the Holy Spirit, and in uniting the believer to Christ through the Holy Spirit by faith.”

Article 5, “We affirm that any person who responds to the Gospel with repentance and faith is born again through the power of the Holy Spirit. He is a new creation in Christ and enters, at the moment he believes, into eternal life.”

Article 8, The call to salvation is made “by the Holy Spirit through the Gospel.”[1]

I have emboldened the parts of the articles that ought to illustrate, for the careful and perceptive thinker, of the sort of ‘sleight-of-hand’ this statement, and its proponents, like Harwood and Flowers represent, are attempting to engage in (albeit with genuine intention). In particular, we see the statement affirming that grace is God’s generous decision to provide salvation; this is the de jure or objective component I was noting earlier. In article five, as I’ve emboldened, it says that ‘any person who responds (this would be the de facto, in se, or subjective response) to the Gospel becomes a ‘new creation.’ These are exactly the points that demonstrate the sub-grace anthropology this position suffers from. I say sub-grace because it thinks of grace in qualitative or substantial terms, in abstract terms that only think grace as a mechanism that God brings salvation through to individual respondents. But this isn’t how the Bible thinks of God’s grace; the Bible thinks of God’s grace as the all encompassing reality of God’s life for us, for the creation itself. Just as ‘in the beginning God created the heavens and earth,’ was His first act of grace (as Ray Anderson so helpfully identifies), ‘in the beginning was the Word and the Word was with God, and the Word was God,’ as riff on Genesis 1.1, is the climax of that first act of God to create to begin with. In other words, and this is where Flowers et al. goes clearly off the rails, and this because of his anemic biblical hermeneutic and commitment to a nuda or solo Scriptura, God’s grace cannot and should not ever be thought of apart from God’s free choice and election to be for and with us, and not be God without us, in Jesus Christ. This is what the original creation was funded by, as we see God’s first narratival act in Scripture is, indeed, to create when He didn’t have to; and it is this same creatio ex nihilo that funds the recreatio ex nihilo actualized in the resurrected humanity of Jesus Christ. This is what Flowers et al. fail to grasp in this whole discussion about an abstract moral or spiritual incapacity for God; they don’t think theologically whatsoever; they don’t seem to recognize that there is a theological taxis (order) to the canonical flow and deep-context of Holy Scripture. They fail to recognize that Scripture has a robust Trinitarian ground and grammar, and as such reduce this whole discussion of anthropology vis-à-vis moral incapacity for God, to an abstract locus (think of the Ramist methodology that funds the scholasticism of Post Reformed orthodoxy) that is detached from its theo-logical dimensional ground in the pleroma of God’s triune life for us in Jesus Christ.

In nuce: Flowers et al. is looking for a silver-bullet verse or cluster of verses from the Bible that proves that he is wrong, and the rest of the classical tradition is right in regard to this idea that humanity is or is not morally or spiritually capable to say yes or no to God of their own volition (even as the occasion of ‘wooing’ is set by the Holy Spirit). But this whole quest is a reductionistic one that ignores a doctrine of creation/recreation as that is taught and ‘understood’ by Scripture’s reality in Jesus Christ. Robert Dale Dawson gets at this in a very precise way as he is commenting on Karl Barth’s doctrine of resurrection:

A large number of analyses come up short by dwelling upon the historical question, often falsely construing Barth’s inversion of the order of the historical enterprise and the resurrection of Jesus as an aspect of his historical skepticism. For Barth the resurrection of Jesus is not a datum of the sort to be analyzed and understood, by other data, by means of historical critical science. While a real event within the nexus of space and time the resurrection is also the event of the creation of new time and space. Such an event can only be described as an act of God; that is an otherwise impossible event. The event of the resurrection of Jesus is that of the creation of the conditions of the possibility for all other events, and as such it cannot be accounted for in terms considered appropriate for all other events. This is not the expression of an historical skeptic, but of one who is convinced of the primordiality of the resurrection as the singular history-making, yet history-delimiting, act of God.[2]

Reference to this summative passage from Dawson might seem out of place in our current discussion, but it is not! Indeed, this passage is rather illustrative, and thus instructive for our purposes of critique towards Flowers&co. Flowers et al. get lost in a reduction of the text of Holy Scripture when they reduce it to a datum to be scoured for proving this abstract or that abstract doctrine. Doctrines that are strained out through a Ramist locus methodology that have no necessary attachment to the broader theological soundings and reality that the text of Holy Scripture bears witness to; viz. the ineffable and inexhaustible riches of God’s triune life. Because of this approach, Flowers’ et al. miss the creation/recreational themes that are present from the very first verse of the Bible. As such, they don’t even start to think of anthropology/soteriology and other ologies within and from a theological ontology that necessarily starts from the ‘new creation’ reality of the resurrection. They fail to realize, even as Barth realized it in full, the very fact and need for the incarnation and atonement of God in Jesus Christ for us, reveals to us (or it should!) that we indeed have been plunged into a spiritual incapacity for God; of the sort that what was required was that God assume our sinful humanity in Christ, take it to the cross, put it death, and raise it anew in the resurrected RECREATED vicarious humanity of Jesus Christ. This is God’s ‘grace all the way down,’ and it decimates any attempt to even start the discussion that Flowers et al. are currently lost within. The biblical discussion worth having is an Athanasian one (see his little book On Incarnation), not the Augustinian one that Flowers, along with his Calvinist and Lutheran orthodox counterparts are having. But this is the point: Flowers, for all his bluster about “being biblical” is starting his biblicism in just as strident of a theological place as anyone else; it is just that his starting point suffers from the entailments that give rise to debates about semi-Pelagianism, and other abstractions that a properly formed, Christ concretized theological ontology and hermeneutic elide from the get go.

The incarnation and resurrection of God in Christ itself indicates, without question, that humanity outwith God’s grace all the way down, is most certainly spiritually incapable of saying yes to God; since Jesus is God’s Yes and Amen for us. If Jesus, in His vicarious humanity, in His resurrected humanity is God’s Yes and Amen for us, then only those in ontic and ontological participation with Him, as He assumed our humanity that we by the Holy Spirit’s adoption might come to assume His, are spiritually capable ‘from there!,’ in echo of His Yes and Amen for us, to say yes and amen to the Father’s free offering of salvation in the Son’s choice to be us, for us, and in us. These are biblical categories, of Chalcedonian pattern, that Flowers et al. are clueless of. He is not open for correction in this area, and thus will continue on in the misguided foray of attempting to thwart “Calvinism” at the cost of his own theological soul. The bottom line point is that we are spiritually capable to say yes to God because of the recreational ground of God’s Grace that He has provided for in the new humanity of Jesus Christ. We are capable for God because God in Christ was first capable for us and in us. QED

Addendum: You all might be interested in reading this short post as a supplement to this post. While Flowers doesn’t speak in these sort of nuanced terms, it is hard to see him even thinking in the terms of ‘cooperative grace’ or the semi-Pelagian notion of grace that we see described in ‘habitus grace’, as that is operative in the Roman soteriological framework. I think I might another post using the definition by Muller with more direction focused on Flowers, hopefully for a final time. I just don’t think he is interested in thinking through these things in the sort of nuanced way required.

[1] Source.

[2] Robert Dale Dawson, The Resurrection in Karl Barth (UK/USA: Ashgate Publishing Company, 2007), 13.