Lindsey sent me an amazing YouTube video. Justin Peters is being interviewed by three young Calvinists. You can see the video here. The video is 28 minutes long, but the main point comes within the first five minutes.
The video’s title is “Justin Peters Thought He Was Saved Until This Happened.” Peters raises a great question and, sadly, comes up with the wrong answer.
Peters thought he was saved in a Southern Baptist church at age seven. He comments, “I made a profession of faith…I made intellectual assent to all of the basic gospel facts but was not truly converted, but I thought that I was” (1:05-1:20). He later went to seminary and became an evangelist who preached in various churches. He said, “I knew that there was something wrong, but I didn’t know what was wrong” (1:30-35). “There seemed to be to me an inherent contradiction within the gospel itself, and that is basically that on the one hand, we teach that you cannot be saved by works. That much I understood. But in order to be saved, we would turn around and tell people they had to repent, which seemed to me to be doing a work because I thought repentance was something that I did. I had to will myself to turn from certain sins…And so how, on the one hand, can you say repentance is not a work, but in order to be saved, you have to repent, which was doing a work? It just seemed to me to be this massive inherent contradiction within the gospel that I could not understand. And I never had any lasting assurance of my own conversion” (1:38-2:36).
Before I give his solution, let me lay out his thinking.
Major Premise: Salvation is by faith, apart from works.
Minor Premise: Repentance is a work and is required to be saved.
Conclusion: There is an inherent contradiction in the saving message.
I suggest he should have thought differently:
Major Premise: Salvation is by faith, apart from works.
Minor Premise: Repentance is a work.
Conclusion: Repentance is not a condition of salvation.
Peters, however, came to a completely different solution to this “inherent contradiction.” In the video, he went on to say:
Genuine repentance is a work, but it is a work of God. God grants repentance to us. It’s a gift of God. Acts 5:30-31; Acts 11; and 2 Tim 2:24, 26 all talk about God’s repentance. So God actually saved me as a preacher (2:53-3:19).
According to Calvinists, faith is a work, and repentance is a work. But both faith and repentance are understood to be gifts of God.i So you cannot and do not believe or repent. God believes and repents for you.
But wait! That can’t be right. No one can believe for you. Not your parents. Not God Himself. According to John 3:16 it is the person who believes who has everlasting life. If God believed for us, then He’d have everlasting life, and we would not.
So Peters has not solved the inherent contradiction. If repentance is a work and we must choose to repent to be saved after God gives us the ability to repent, then we have done a work.
Peters did not say in the ensuing discussion that he is now certain of his eternal destiny. He cannot say that, for he cannot be sure that he will persevere (1 Cor 9:27), and he considers perseverance a condition of final salvation.
Later he said that Jesus’ message—presumably he was talking about Jesus’ saving message—was one of “self-denial, not one of having your best life now, but one of taking up your cross, which was a call to die for the gospel, denying yourself, putting to death the deeds of the body, crucifying your flesh, suffering for the glory of God” (13:30-49). Isn’t that work too?
Peters is right that repentance is indeed work. But it is not God’s work. It is a work we do (e.g., Jonah 3:10; Matt 12:41; Rev 9:20-21; 16:9-11).
Peters has a website with a doctrinal statement (see here). He explains salvation in this way:
Salvation is by grace alone through faith alone in Christ alone as recorded in Scripture alone for the glory of God alone. Sinners are totally depraved, meaning, that left to his own fallen nature, man has no inherent ability to save himself or even seek after God (Rom 3:10-11). Salvation, then, is instigated and completed solely by the convicting and regenerative power of the Holy Spirit (John 3:3-7; Titus 3:5) Who grants both genuine faith (Heb 12:2) and genuine repentance (Acts 5:31; 2 Tim 2:23-25). He accomplishes this through the instrumentality of the Word of God (John 5:24) as it is read and preached. Though works are wholly unmeritorious for salvation (Isa 64:6; Eph 2:8-9), when regeneration has been wrought in a person he will exhibit works, or, fruit, of that regeneration (Acts 26:20; 1 Cor 6:19-20; Eph 2:10).
So God gives us faith and repentance, and we believe and repent. At his website, under election, Peters says that evangelists should appeal to people to believe and repent to be saved: “Contrary to what many suppose, the doctrine of election in no way should hinder evangelistic efforts and/or appeals to people to repent and trust Christ” (emphasis added).
But if faith and repentance are works, then salvation requires us to do works. Peters has not solved the “inherent contradiction.”
Since John 3:16 mentions only faith in Christ, not repentance, it should be clear that repentance is not a condition of regeneration and that faith in Christ is not a work (cf. Eph 2:8-9). In fact, repentance is not found even once in John’s Gospel, the only evangelistic book in the Bible (John 20:30-31).
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i Faith is not the gift of God. In Eph 2:8-9, the gift of God is salvation by grace through faith. Compare John 4:10 and Rev 22:17. Repentance is also not the gift of God. God “grants” repentance, meaning He allows people to repent.
