Justified True Belief

(●) A will that cannot turn to God without grace still makes free choices, even its answer to grace. + Two friends are drying dishes after a church supper. One of them has spent the autumn reading Martin Luther, and somewhere between the soup bowls and the serving spoons he announces that Christians do not believe in free will. Luther wrote a whole book against it, he says, and called it The Bondage of the Will. His friend has just spent a full minute deciding whether to dry the good glasses first or leave them for last, and she says so. She chose, and nobody made her. What could it possibly mean to tell her she has no free will? They are both right. The trouble is that one phrase is doing duty for two different things. In the church's long arguments over grace, "free will" has often meant a power in the fallen will (the will as it has been since Adam's first sin) to turn itself to God. That is the sense fought over in the Reformation, the sixteenth-century quarrel that split the Protestant churches from Rome. When the scholar Erasmus of Rotterdam defended free will against Luther in 1524, this is how he defined it: "a power in the human will, by which, a man may apply himself to those things which lead unto eternal salvation, or turn away from the same." Luther answered him the next year with the book the friend had been reading. Its Latin title, De servo arbitrio, means the enslaved will. The bondage of the will is the teaching that, since the fall, nobody can turn to God unless God's grace, his help given freely and never earned, comes first. "Free will" has a second meaning, and it is the one the woman at the sink had in mind. A choice is free when nothing settles it but the person who makes it, for reasons of his own. Its ordinary mark is that he could have chosen otherwise. Philosophers argue over whether our choices are free in this sense. So there are two questions here, and they are not the same question: - Can a fallen person turn to God without grace? Every major Christian tradition answers no, and that answer is the bondage of the will. - Is a choice ever settled by nothing but the person who makes it? The answer to the first question does not settle this one. The bondage of the will answers the first question, and it leaves the second where it found it. A will that cannot turn itself to God still makes free choices, and when grace comes, the answer it gives is one of them. Keep the two questions apart, and three things can be held together: - Nobody turns to God without grace. - That inability leaves a person's other choices his own, the sins he commits among them. - The grace that draws a person to God can be refused, so his answer to grace is his own as well. Held together, they rule out three positions that Christians have actually held: - The monk Pelagius held that a person can do the good God commands without grace going first. - Some read the bondage of the will as one case of a larger truth, that every choice anyone makes was settled before he made it. That larger claim is called theological determinism, the view that God's decree, his eternal plan for all that happens, settles every choice. It is the view of the American theologian Jonathan Edwards and of most Reformed theologians today. • The Reformed churches, whose members are also called Calvinists, are the Protestant churches that trace their teaching to John Calvin, the Reformer of Geneva. Presbyterians are among them. - The Reformed also hold that the grace which draws God's elect, the people he has chosen to save, cannot be refused. It is often called irresistible grace. Ruling out the last of these takes a side in a quarrel the Reformation itself fought (P4, D14). It is the side of the Dutch theologian Jacobus Arminius and of John Wesley, the founder of Methodism. The Catholic Church took it at the Council of Trent, the council it called in answer to the Reformation, and the Lutheran churches took it in the Formula of Concord, the statement of faith they drew up in 1577. The argument is deductive: if its premises, the claims it starts from, are true, its conclusions cannot be false. The premises do not have to be beyond all doubt. Each needs only to be more plausible than its denial. Who holds what, on theological determinism: - Support: Jonathan Edwards gave it its classic defense in 1754, and John Feinberg defends it today. - Oppose: Jacobus Arminius, who held that the fallen will can do nothing good toward God without grace, rejected it in 1608, and William Lane Craig argues against it today. The argument that follows denies that the bondage of the will leads to theological determinism.

(P1) Nobody turns to God without grace. + This is the teaching the Reformers called the bondage of the will. On this one point every major Christian tradition agrees. (1) Scripture describes a will that cannot turn itself to God. - Paul says that "the mind that is set on the flesh is hostile to God, for it does not submit to God’s law; indeed, it cannot" (Romans 8:7), and then, flatly, "Those who are in the flesh cannot please God" (Romans 8:8). • By "the flesh" Paul does not mean the body. He means human nature as it stands when it is turned away from God. - He tells the Ephesians that "you were dead in the trespasses and sins" (Ephesians 2:1), and that God, "even when we were dead in our trespasses, made us alive together with Christ" (Ephesians 2:5). The dead do not raise themselves. - Jesus says it to the disciples themselves: "apart from me you can do nothing" (John 15:5). - Think of it this way: a man who has spent years in a prison cell can still pace the floor, write letters, sing, sleep and argue with the guard. What he cannot do is open the door, because the key is on the outside. Luther's own word for the fallen will as it stands before God was exactly that: a captive. (2) The church settled this against Pelagius. - Around the year 400 a British monk named Pelagius, living in Rome, heard someone quote a prayer from the Confessions of Augustine, bishop of Hippo in North Africa, and he was scandalized by it: "Give what Thou commandest, and command what Thou wilt" (Confessions 10.29.40). If God has to give what he commands, Pelagius reasoned, the sinner has an excuse for not doing it. - His own account of the good life gave God the first part of it and man the rest: "The 'ability' we place in our nature, the 'volition' in our will, and the 'actuality' in the effect. The first, that is, the 'ability,' properly belongs to God, who has bestowed it on His creature; the other two, that is, the 'volition' and the 'actuality,' must be referred to man, because they flow forth from the fountain of the will" (quoted by Augustine, On the Grace of Christ 4.5). • Pelagianism is the church's name for that view: that human nature, as God made it and as it still is, can do the good God commands, with grace helping only from outside, by teaching and example. - The church answered at the Council of Carthage in 418, which held that grace does not merely show us what to do but gives the strength to do it, and again at the Second Council of Orange in 529, which held that nobody can so much as begin to believe unless grace goes first (canons 5-7). • A council is a meeting of bishops called to settle a question of teaching, and its canons are the numbered rulings it issues. - Augustine's prayer is the whole doctrine in nine words. The command stays exactly where it was, and the power to keep it is asked for from the one who gave it. (3) Every side of the Reformation's quarrel confessed it. - Luther and Calvin taught it, and so, more surprisingly, did the men they are usually set against. Jacobus Arminius wrote that "the free will of man towards the true good is not only wounded, maimed, infirm, bent, and weakened; but it is also imprisoned, destroyed, and lost" (Public Disputation 11). - His followers came to be called Arminians, and also Remonstrants, after the remonstrance, or formal protest, they laid before the Dutch authorities. They put the same teaching in the third of their five articles in 1610: fallen man "can of and by himself neither think, will, nor do any thing that is truly good." - The Synod of Dort, the great assembly of Reformed churches that met at Dordrecht in 1618 and 1619, condemned much in those articles nine years later. It did not condemn the need for grace. - On the Catholic side, the Council of Trent condemned in 1547 anyone who said a person could believe, hope, love or repent as he ought without the prevenient inspiration and help of the Holy Spirit (Session 6, canon 3). Prevenient, from a Latin word for coming before, means that the Spirit's help goes ahead of any believing or repenting. - John Wesley taught that no one is ever left with nature alone: "No man living is entirely destitute of what is vulgarly called natural conscience. But this is not natural: It is more properly termed preventing grace" (Sermon 85). "Vulgarly" means commonly. Preventing grace is the older English name for what is now usually called prevenient grace: the grace that goes before any turning toward God. - The Westminster Confession, the Presbyterian statement of faith drawn up in England in 1646, was written by men who disagreed with Trent about a great deal, and with much that Wesley would later preach. It says the same in its own words: fallen man "hath wholly lost all ability of will to any spiritual good accompanying salvation" (9.3). (4) The bondage concerns the will's power toward God. - What it denies is that a fallen person can turn himself to God, believe, love God, or please him, unless grace goes first. - What it does not say, taken by itself, is anything about the choice of what to cook for supper, or whether to tell a neighbor the truth about the dent in his car. - One verse is often made to carry the whole doctrine alone: "No one can come to me unless the Father who sent me draws him" (John 6:44). It does say that no one comes without the Father's drawing. But the agreement of the councils and confessions does not rest on that verse read by itself. What the verse adds beyond it is disputed (D8). Therefore, as every major Christian tradition has said in its own words, nobody turns to God without grace.

(P2) A heart that cannot turn to God can still refuse a particular sin. + The bondage is about which way the heart faces, and the men who taught it drew their line right there: bound toward God, still choosing in the ordinary business of life. "Can" is meant in its full sense. With everything up to the moment of choice left exactly as it was, the person could still refuse the sin, or could have refused some earlier choice that led to it. (1) The bondage belongs to a condition, not to a deed. - You might think that refusing a sin is already a small turning toward God, so that a heart unable to turn could refuse nothing at all. The answer lies in the word "sin" itself, which covers two things. The Westminster Shorter Catechism names both: "Sin is any want of conformity unto, or transgression of, the law of God" (Q. 14). • A catechism is a summary of the faith set out as questions and answers, for teaching. The Shorter Catechism is the Reformed one of 1648. • A want of conformity is a condition, a heart that falls short of what the law asks. A transgression is a deed. - Actual sin is the deed: the lie told on Tuesday, the money taken from the till. The condition every child of Adam is born into, a heart not set on God, is what the catechism calls original sin. It counts both in the sinfulness of fallen man: the corruption of his whole nature, "commonly called original sin," together with "all actual transgressions which proceed from it" (Q. 18). - The bondage belongs to the condition. The commandment Jesus put first asks for love: "You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind" (Matthew 22:37). Love of that kind cannot be produced by deciding to have it. A particular deed done inside the condition is another matter, and it can still be refused. - Think of a husband who no longer loves his wife. He cannot switch the love back on by deciding to, however hard he tries. He can still refuse to lie to her this afternoon. (2) The Reformers drew the line in their own words. - Luther wrote that a man "has, as to his goods and possessions, the right of using, acting, and omitting, according to his Free-will," but that "God-ward, or in things which pertain unto salvation or damnation, he has no Free-will, but is a captive, slave, and servant, either to the will of God, or to the will of Satan" (The Bondage of the Will, section 26). - The Lutheran churches wrote the same line into their confession of 1530: the will "has some liberty to choose civil righteousness, and to work things subject to reason," but it "has no power, without the Holy Ghost, to work the righteousness of God, that is, spiritual righteousness" (Augsburg Confession, article 18). • Civil righteousness is the outward decency the law asks of anyone: paying debts, keeping promises, keeping one's hands off a neighbor's goods. The Reformers granted it even to people without faith, and denied that it is the righteousness God requires. - Calvin drew the line between earthly and heavenly things: government, the household, the crafts and the liberal arts on one side, and on the other "the pure knowledge of God, the method of true righteousness, and the mysteries of the heavenly kingdom" (Institutes 2.2.13). - Calvin is also the hard case. Two chapters later he wrote that God turns and bends the wills of men even in outward matters, so that whatever freedom their choice has is subject to his disposal (2.4.6-7). His readers still argue over which Calvin to believe. - Think of the prisoner from (P1) again. His captivity is real, and he still decides whether to write to his mother this week. (3) The Reformed confessions leave ordinary choices standing. - The Westminster Confession says that "God hath endued the will of man with that natural liberty, that is neither forced nor by any absolute necessity of nature determined to good or evil" (9.1). God's eternal decree, it says, does not take away "the liberty or contingency of second causes," but establishes it (3.1). • A second cause is a creature through which God works: the rain that waters a field, the person who makes a choice. • Contingency is the old word for a thing's being able to go either way. Whether it rains on Saturday is contingent. That two and two make four is not. - The Canons of Dort grant that "the glimmerings of natural light" remain in fallen man, by which "he retains some knowledge of God, of natural things, and of the difference between good and evil, and discovers some regard for virtue, good order in society, and for maintaining an orderly external deportment." The same article adds that he "is incapable of using it aright even in things natural and civil," and that he holds the light back in unrighteousness, "by doing which he becomes inexcusable before God" (III/IV.4). • To use the light aright is to use it as the law asks, from a heart that loves God. That is the condition again, and it is exactly what the bondage takes away (P1). The article blames a man for what he does with the light, and nowhere does it say he does not choose. - One Reformed historian has complained that readers on both sides mistake the Reformed teaching that God determines salvation for a determinism of every human act, down to the buttering of one's toast. - What the Reformers and their confessions meant by the freedom they granted is disputed, among Reformed historians as much as anyone (D4). What they plainly said is where the bondage stops, which is short of the choices of ordinary life. That is all their testimony is asked to show. (4) Aquinas held that each sin can be refused, though not all of them together. - There is a difference between saying something of each item on a list, taken singly, and saying it of the whole list taken together. A man can lift each brick on a pallet one at a time. He cannot lift the pallet. - Thomas Aquinas, the great theologian of the thirteenth century, described the fallen will exactly that way. A person in grave sin and without grace, he wrote, can avoid any one grave sin taken singly, but not all of them, because his will clings by habit to the wrong end, some good other than God, and no one can keep up for long the watchfulness it would take (De veritate 24.12). - Augustine had compared sin to the limp of a crooked leg, which cannot take a single step without limping. Aquinas answered that the picture holds in one way and fails in another. A leg cannot choose whether to use its crookedness, so every step limps. Free choice can, and so "it is not necessary for it to sin in every one of its acts." But like the leg, "it is not possible to avoid all sins" (De veritate 24.12). (5) A sin can be refused at the moment or earlier. - A man drinks too much at a party and then drives home. By eleven o'clock he cannot steer straight, and he swerves into a parked car. At eleven he could not have avoided the swerve. At eight, with his third drink in his hand and his keys in his pocket, he could have handed the keys to a friend. He is blamed for the crash because he is blamed for the choice that led to it. • Philosophers call his responsibility for the choice at eight direct: responsibility for a choice a person could have refused when he made it. His responsibility for the crash they call derivative: responsibility for what follows from such a choice. - Sins that arrive by surprise, the flash of temper, the sharp word before any thought, are often derivative in just this way. Each of them could have been caught by a watchfulness the person chose or neglected earlier, though no one keeps that watch without a break (D1). - Scripture addresses a particular sin as something the sinner is to master. God said to Cain, before the murder, "sin is crouching at the door. Its desire is for you, but you must rule over it" (Genesis 4:7). Cain was not being told to do the impossible. Keeping his hands off his brother was a matter of civil righteousness, which the Reformers granted even to people without faith. - Judgment, too, is by deeds: "the dead were judged by what was written in the books, according to what they had done" (Revelation 20:12). Therefore, a heart that cannot turn itself to God can still refuse a particular sin, at the moment or earlier, which is exactly where the teachers of the bondage drew their own line.

(P3) A choice is free when nothing settles it but the one who makes it. + This is free will in the second sense, the one the woman at the sink had in mind. The bondage answers a different question. (1) The source of a free choice is the person who makes it. - Go back to the woman at the sink with the good glasses. Nothing settled which she would dry first. She did. - Put generally, a choice is free when nothing that came before it, no state of the brain, no pull of desire, no decree from outside, was enough by itself to settle which way it went, and the person settled it, for reasons of his own. He is its source, the one it comes from. - A choice of that kind is not a coin toss, either. A coin toss happens to no one. A choice is made by someone, and there are reasons it was made. (2) The ordinary mark of a free choice is an open door. - In the ordinary case, a person who chose freely could have chosen otherwise, with everything before the choice exactly as it was. Ask the woman at the sink whether she could have left the good glasses for last, and she will tell you of course she could. That is how anyone would test a claim of freedom at a kitchen table. - It is the mark and not the definition. The difference matters, because the freest beings of all have no door open to evil. (3) God and the saints are free without being able to sin. - Scripture says that "it is impossible for God to lie" (Hebrews 6:18) and that "God cannot be tempted with evil" (James 1:13). Yet there is no freer being than God. The saints in glory, the redeemed in heaven, will not be able to sin, and they will be freer than they ever were. - Augustine put it in a single sentence: "the first liberty of the will was to be able not to sin, the last will be much greater, not to be able to sin" (On Rebuke and Grace 12.33). The first liberty was Adam's. The last belongs to the saints in glory. - So freedom cannot simply mean having two doors open. What makes the saint's goodness free is that nothing but his own love of God settles it. A definition that made a missing alternative fatal would take freedom from God himself. (4) The two senses of free will ask different questions. - The bondage denies the fallen will a power, the power to turn itself to God. The definition of a free choice asks about a source, whether anything but the person settled the choice. - Augustine drew the same line against the Pelagians: "who of us will say that by the sin of the first man free will perished from the human race? Through sin freedom indeed perished, but it was that freedom which was in Paradise, to have a full righteousness with immortality" (Against Two Letters of the Pelagians 1.2.5). - Scripture's word for the lost liberty is slavery: "everyone who practices sin is a slave to sin" (John 8:34), and "if the Son sets you free, you will be free indeed" (John 8:36). The slave in that sentence still chooses. What he lacks is the freedom only Christ gives. Therefore, a choice is free when nothing settles it but the one who makes it, whether or not he has any power to turn to God unaided.

(C1) Therefore, a will in bondage toward God still makes free choices. + A person who cannot turn himself to God still makes free choices, and whether he commits a particular sin or refuses it is one of them. That follows from the three premises in two short steps, and it claims no more than they give. (1) A sin he could have refused is a sin he freely chose. - Start with a fallen man who cannot turn himself to God (P1). He can still refuse a particular sin, at the moment or earlier (P2). That is the first step. - Now suppose he can refuse it with everything before the choice left as it was. Then nothing before the choice settled whether he would sin or refuse. Yet one or the other happens, and it does not happen the way a coin comes down heads. Sinning and refusing are both things a person does, for reasons of his own, so he settled it himself, and by (P3) that is a free choice. That is the second step. - Each step has the form logicians call modus ponens, Latin for the way that affirms: if the first thing is true, so is the second; the first is true; so the second is. If it rained last night, the driveway is wet; it rained last night; so the driveway is wet. - Think of the premises as the links of a chain. If each link holds, the conclusion cannot slip out. (2) A will that chooses freely still cannot rise by itself. - None of this means a fallen person can climb back to God on the strength of his free choices. Choosing freely among the things of this life is not turning to God, and the claim that a fallen person can turn himself to God is Pelagius's, which (P1) refuses. - Augustine marked the line in a single sentence, late in his life: "Of our own accord we were able to fall, namely by free choice, but not also to rise up" (Retractations 1.9.6). Free choice is there in the falling, and the power to rise is not. (3) The church has long kept both free choice and the need for grace. - Aquinas described the position in nearly these words: "the Catholic faith takes a middle course, so saving free choice as not to exclude the necessity of grace" (De veritate 24.12). - On one side stood those who said the fallen man sins of necessity, and on the other stood Pelagius, who said he needs no grace. Both were refused for the same reason, since each gave up one of two things Scripture holds together. - Think of the prisoner once more. He cannot open his own door, and he still writes his letters. (4) The conclusion does not rest on the Reformers' vocabulary. - Whether Luther and Calvin meant freedom in the full sense of (P3) when they granted free choice in the things below them is disputed (D4). The conclusion needs only one thing from them: that the bondage, as they taught it, does not settle those choices. They said that much themselves. - Think of a boundary stone at the edge of a field. It tells you where one man's land stops, and it tells you nothing about what grows on the other side. - You might still ask whether something else settles those choices: a decree of God, say, or a chain of causes running back before the person was born. That is a fair question. Showing that nothing else settles them either is the burden of the whole case for free will, argued from what a choice is and not from what anyone confessed, and the bondage takes nothing from that case. Therefore, a will in bondage toward God still makes free choices, which is why the bondage of the will is not the denial of free will.

(P4) The grace that draws a person to God can be refused. + A person drawn by grace can still turn it away, and the view that says so is called resistible grace. Here the common ground runs out, since the Reformed churches hold otherwise (D12). (1) Scripture shows people refusing the grace that came to them. - Stephen, the first Christian martyr, told the Jewish council that was trying him, "You stiff-necked people, uncircumcised in heart and ears, you always resist the Holy Spirit. As your fathers did, so do you" (Acts 7:51). - Luke says that "the Pharisees and the lawyers rejected the purpose of God for themselves" (Luke 7:30). - Jesus lamented over Jerusalem, "How often would I have gathered your children together as a hen gathers her brood under her wings, and you were not willing!" (Matthew 23:37). To the leaders who searched the Scriptures he said, "yet you refuse to come to me that you may have life" (John 5:40). - Think of the wedding feast in the parable. The king "sent his servants to call those who were invited to the wedding feast, but they would not come" (Matthew 22:3). The invitation was real, and the table was set. The refusal was theirs. (2) God wants what they refuse. - God says through the prophet Ezekiel, "I have no pleasure in the death of the wicked, but that the wicked turn from his way and live; turn back, turn back from your evil ways, for why will you die, O house of Israel?" (Ezekiel 33:11) - Jesus wept over the city and said, "Would that you, even you, had known on this day the things that make for peace! But now they are hidden from your eyes" (Luke 19:42). - The pattern runs all through Scripture: a call the caller wants answered, a refusal, and the blame for the refusal laid at the hearer's door. The resistible reading takes the pattern at its word. The Reformed reading answers it with a serious distinction between two kinds of call and two senses of God's will (D12). (3) Three traditions have taught it in their own words. - Arminius said that the whole controversy came down to one question: "Is the grace of God a certain irresistible force?" His own answer was, "I believe, according to the scriptures, that many persons resist the Holy Spirit and reject the grace that is offered" (Declaration of Sentiments). - The Remonstrants' fourth article of 1610 calls grace "the beginning, continuance, and accomplishment of all good," and then adds that "as respects the mode of the operation of this grace, it is not irresistible, inasmuch as it is written concerning many, that they have resisted the Holy Ghost." - The Council of Trent taught that when God touches the heart, a person "is also able to reject it" (Session 6, chapter 5), and it condemned anyone who said that the will, moved and stirred by God, "cannot refuse its consent, if it would" (canon 4). - Wesley preached that no one sins "because he has not grace, but because he does not use the grace which he hath" (Sermon 85). (4) God can give the grace he knows will be received. - You might worry that a grace anyone can refuse leaves God hoping for the best, unable to bring anyone to faith for certain. It does not. - Molinists, named for the sixteenth-century Spanish theologian Luis de Molina, are the Christians who hold that God knows what every free creature would do in any circumstance and governs the world through that knowledge. On this view God knew, for instance, what Peter would say by the fire in the high priest's courtyard if a servant girl asked whether he knew Jesus. - That knowledge answers the worry. Knowing what each person would freely do with any grace he might give, God can give the grace he knows will be freely received. - Think of a doctor who knows exactly which words his frightened patient will listen to. He does not force the patient's consent by choosing those words. - Why God chooses whom he chooses is a further question, and it stays open (D14). (5) Resistible grace rests on Scripture, not on Molinism. - Most Molinists also hold that grace can be refused, but their view does not require it. Some of them hold that the grace which saves cannot be refused, and a Calvinist can hold every one of his five points and still hold that God knows what every free creature would do, Peter by the fire included. • The five points of Calvinism are the five teachings the Synod of Dort set against the Remonstrants' five articles. One of them is that the grace which saves cannot be refused. - So resistible grace is a claim in its own right. It rests on Scripture's own pattern of call and refusal, and not on Molinism or on the philosophical case for free will. Therefore, the grace that draws a person to God can be refused, and when a refusal comes, it belongs to the one who refuses.

(C2) Therefore, a person's answer to grace is his own free choice. + When grace comes to a person, whether he receives it or turns it away is his own free choice. That follows from (P4) and (P3), with (P1) behind them, in the same way the first conclusion followed from its premises. (1) Nothing settles the answer to grace but the one who answers. - Once grace has come, both answers are open to him. He can receive it, since grace itself gives the power to turn (P1), and he can refuse it (P4). So nothing before his answer settled which it would be. He settled it, and by (P3) the answer is a free choice. - This is modus ponens again, and it needs nothing beyond those premises. - In Luke's telling of a parable much like the wedding feast of (P4), the invited guests give their answers in their own words. The first says, "I have bought a field, and I must go out and see it. Please have me excused" (Luke 14:18). The excuse was his own. (2) Grace still comes first. - No one answers who has not first been called, and the very power to receive is grace's gift (P1). "What do you have that you did not receive?" (1 Corinthians 4:7) - Paul holds both halves in one sentence: "work out your own salvation with fear and trembling, for it is God who works in you, both to will and to work for his good pleasure" (Philippians 2:12-13). The working out is commanded because God is at work, not in spite of it. (3) Receiving a gift is not earning it. - Think of a man drowning in a river who takes hold of a rope thrown from the bank. He could have pushed it away, and some do. Nobody on the bank thinks he rescued himself, and neither does he. - Paul's contrast runs between faith and works, not between faith and receiving: "by grace you have been saved through faith. And this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God, not a result of works, so that no one may boast" (Ephesians 2:8-9). (4) The first conclusion does not depend on the second. - Someone who holds that the grace which saves cannot be refused can accept (C1) and reject (C2). Lacking the freedom to refuse grace would not mean lacking freedom in anything else. - Some Reformed theologians have accepted (C1) and kept every point of their doctrine of grace, and one of them has argued that the Reformed confessions leave room for exactly that. - A Reformed theologian who kept all five points of his Calvinism was once asked about six cases, from Satan's rebellion and Adam in the garden to a Christian choosing between a red Bible and a blue one. Could the choice have gone either way? He said yes to every one. The first conclusion is open to him, whatever he makes of the second. Therefore, a person's answer to grace is his own, and whoever refuses it has refused for himself.