Devotional 58: The Means of the Call: The Word and Spirit Working Together

The Confession Read

This effectual call is of God's free and special grace alone, not from anything at all foreseen in man, who is altogether passive therein, until, being quickened and renewed by the Holy Spirit, he is thereby enabled to answer this call, and to embrace the grace offered and conveyed in it.

— Westminster Confession of Faith, Chapter 10, Section 2

Introduction

Picture a patient on the operating table. The anaesthetic has taken hold; his conscious life is suspended. Every incision, every stitch, every decision belongs to the surgeon who wields the scalpel. The patient contributes nothing, does not guide the hand, does not know what is being done, until he wakes and discovers that something decisive has happened to him while he was altogether passive. And when he does wake, the first thing he does — breathe, open his eyes — is evidence that the surgeon's work has succeeded, not the means by which it succeeded. The analogy is imperfect, as all analogies drawn from the body must be when applied to the Spirit's work upon the soul. Yet the Westminster Divines were reaching for something like it when they wrote that man is "altogether passive" in effectual calling until the Holy Spirit quickens and renews him. In Section 1, we traced the scope of God's call: its source in election, its timing in providence, its means in Word and Spirit, its paradox of the sinner coming most freely because made willing by grace. But Section 1 left a question unanswered: how can a dead man come freely? How can a will bound to sin choose Christ? How can a mind that counts the gospel foolishness suddenly find it the very wisdom of God? Section 2 answers that question by pressing the logic of grace to its necessary conclusion. If the call is effectual, if it actually accomplishes what it intends, then the power that makes it effectual cannot reside in the one who is called. It must reside in the One who calls. Man is not a co-worker with God in his own spiritual resurrection. He is the dry bones in the valley, lying silent until the breath of God enters them. He is the corpse in the tomb, motionless until the voice of Christ commands him to live. And then, being quickened, he rises, he answers, he embraces — not as one who has contributed to his own life, but as one who has received it as a gift so pure and unmerited, entirely of grace, that boasting is excluded forever.

Scripture Foundation

The Confession's insistence on man's passivity does not rest on a theological system imposed upon the Bible. It rests on the testimony of Scripture itself. Where Section 1 displayed the divine initiative in calling, Section 2 presses deeper — into the spiritual condition of man before that call arrives and the nature of the Spirit's work in making the dead alive. Ephesians 2:1-5 — "And you hath he quickened, who were dead in trespasses and sins: wherein in time past ye walked according to the course of this world, according to the prince of the power of the air, the spirit that now worketh in the children of disobedience: among whom also we all had our conversation in times past in the lusts of our flesh, fulfilling the desires of the flesh and of the mind; and were by nature the children of wrath, even as others. But God, who is rich in mercy, for his great love wherewith he loved us, even when we were dead in sins, hath quickened us together with Christ, (by grace ye are saved)." Paul addresses Gentile believers in Ephesus, giving us the fullest description of the unregenerate state in Scripture. The word is nekroi — dead ones. Not sick, not weakened, not misguided, but dead. Dead men do not cooperate with their own resurrection, do not prepare themselves for quickening, do not respond to invitations. They lie in the grave, utterly passive, unable to contribute the smallest motion toward their own revivification. The language is deliberately jarring: you were dead, yet you walked — dead men walking, animated not by the life of God but by the prince of the power of the air, driven by lusts that were themselves the evidence of death rather than life. Then comes the great adversative: "But God." Against the dark backdrop of spiritual death, divine mercy breaks through. The verb is synezoopoiēsen — He made us alive together with Christ. This is not medicine for the sick but resurrection for the dead. God is the subject of every saving verb, and Paul adds the parenthetical that strips away any possibility of human contribution: "by grace ye are saved." The perfect tense — chariti este sesōsmenoi — declares a completed action with abiding results. The passivity of man in this passage is absolute. You did not quicken yourself — the dead do not ask, do not prepare, cannot respond until life is first given. And yet the quickening was the very thing that enabled you to respond. The life God gave was the life that cried out, "Lord, I believe." This is the logic of effectual calling: "altogether passive therein, until, being quickened and renewed by the Holy Spirit, he is thereby enabled to answer this call." 1 Corinthians 2:14 — "But the natural man receiveth not the things of the Spirit of God: for they are foolishness unto him: neither can he know them, because they are spiritually discerned." Paul writes to a divided Corinthian church, drawing a sharp line between the wisdom of this age and the wisdom of God. His argument centers on this verse, which answers every notion that the natural man possesses capacity for spiritual perception. The "natural man" is the psychikos anthrōpos — the man whose operating system is psychē, mere natural life, the life of the soul apart from the indwelling Spirit of God. He possesses intellect, emotion, will, and conscience; he can reason, evaluate, judge, and choose. But all these faculties operate within a closed system, a system bounded by the creation and blind to the Creator. When this natural man encounters "the things of the Spirit of God" — the gospel of a crucified Messiah, the righteousness that comes by faith, the hope of resurrection, the mystery of union with Christ — he does not receive them. The verb dechetai means to welcome, to take to oneself, to embrace. The natural man may understand the words intellectually; he may even find them interesting or aesthetically compelling. But he does not receive them into the center of his being. Why? "For they are foolishness unto him." The Greek mōria gives us our word "moron." To the natural mind, the cross is an absurdity, a contradiction, a stumbling block. And then Paul adds the decisive clause: "Neither can he know them." The word gnōnai here is not mere intellectual apprehension but that deep, personal, saving knowledge of which Christ speaks when He says, "This is life eternal, that they might know thee the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom thou hast sent." This knowledge the natural man cannot attain, not because he lacks intelligence, but because he lacks the Spirit. The things of the Spirit are "spiritually discerned" — pneumatikōs anakrinetai — examined, judged, and appropriated by a faculty that the natural man simply does not possess. He is like a man born blind trying to judge a painting, or a man born deaf trying to evaluate a symphony. The deficiency is not in the object but in the subject. The gospel is glorious; the problem is that the natural man has no organ for perceiving glory. Here the passivity of man is unambiguous. The natural man cannot receive or know the things of the Spirit. He is not wounded but disabled, not reluctant but incapable — his blindness is native, and requires new eyes. The Spirit must illuminate the human heart before it can receive divine truth, and that illumination is a sovereign act in which the natural man is, until accomplished, altogether passive. Titus 3:5 — "Not by works of righteousness which we have done, but according to his mercy he saved us, by the washing of regeneration, and renewing of the Holy Ghost." Paul writes to Titus, a young pastor on the island of Crete, giving him a compressed summary of the gospel that is to be preached to a notoriously difficult congregation. The passage is striking for its thorough exclusion of human merit and its concentrated language of divine renewal. "Not by works of righteousness which we have done" — the negation is comprehensive. Every act of human righteousness, whether performed before conversion or after, is excluded from the ground of salvation. And then the positive ground: "according to his mercy." The word eleos in the Greek carries the sense of compassion for the miserable, the kindness that stoops to lift what cannot lift itself. Mercy presupposes misery and helplessness. If man could contribute to his own salvation, the operative category would be justice or reward. But mercy is the language of those who have nothing to offer. The means by which mercy saves is described in two phrases that have shaped the church's vocabulary ever since. "The washing of regeneration" — dia loutrou palingenesias — links the outward sign of baptism with the inward reality of new birth. Palingenesia means rebirth, the beginning of a new existence. This is not improvement but genesis — a creation out of nothing that parallels the original creation when God spoke light out of darkness. "Renewing of the Holy Ghost" — anakainōseōs pneumatos hagiou — extends the image to ongoing renovation of the whole person. The Spirit washes; the Spirit renews. The sinner receives. The passivity of the one being washed is as plain as water poured over a child. John 1:12-13 — "But as many as received him, to them gave he power to become the sons of God, even to them that believe on his name: which were born, not of blood, nor of the will of the flesh, nor of the will of man, but of God." John's prologue opens in eternity — the Word was with God, the Word was God — and then turns to the tragedy of rejection. But not all reject: those who receive Christ, who believe on His name, are given the right to become children of God. John writes exousia — the authority, the power, the status that no earthly lineage can confer. But then John, as though anticipating a misunderstanding that would plague the church for two millennia, immediately clarifies the origin of this believing reception. The ones who received Christ, who believed on His name, "were born, not of blood, nor of the will of the flesh, nor of the will of man, but of God." The birth that makes one a child of God does not arise from blood — from Jewish descent, from covenant lineage, from religious heritage. It does not arise from the will of the flesh — from natural desire, from human effort, from moral striving. It does not arise from the will of man — ek thelēmatos andros — from the decision of a husband who wishes to father a child, or more broadly, from any human volition whatsoever. The three negations are exhaustive. Every conceivable human source of spiritual birth is ruled out. The one remaining source is God. "But of God" — all' ek theou — the short, stark affirmation that leaves no room for human contribution. The new birth is a divine begetting. And just as no child begets itself — the child is altogether passive in its own conception and birth — so no believer originates his own spiritual life. The faith that receives Christ is real; the believing is genuinely the believer's act. But that act is the fruit of a birth that preceded it, a birth in which the believer did not cooperate, could not cooperate, and was, in the precise language of the Confession, "altogether passive."

What the Divines Meant

The phrase "altogether passive" troubles many readers of the Westminster Confession. It sounds harsh, almost demeaning. Are we not personal beings, made in the image of God, capable of choice and response? Does this language not reduce us to blocks of wood, to lifeless instruments in the hands of an impersonal force? To understand what the Divines meant, and equally important what they did not mean, we must place this section in its historical context and trace the fine distinctions the Assembly was drawing. The seventeenth century had competing accounts of conversion. At one extreme, the Socinians denied original sin and taught that man comes to faith by unaided reason. At the other, radical Antinomians taught that the Spirit overwhelms the human faculties so thoroughly that man is saved as an unconscious object. Between them, Rome at Trent had formalized that grace is necessary but not sufficient. The will's cooperation distinguishes the saved from the unsaved. The Arminians at Dort took a similar line: the decisive factor making the call effectual is the free choice of the human will. The Westminster Divines rejected all these positions. Against the Socinians, they insisted that man's nature is fallen, his understanding darkened, his will enslaved to sin. He cannot, by his own natural powers, believe the gospel. Against the Antinomians and Enthusiasts, they insisted that the Spirit works through the Word and that the person who is called remains a person, with intellect, will, and affections, throughout the process. The Divines did not teach that man is a block of wood or a stone. When they wrote "altogether passive," they were making a precise theological claim about the order of operations in conversion, not a psychological description of the experience. "Altogether passive" means that the first movement in effectual calling is God's, not man's. Before the sinner can answer the call, he must be quickened by the Spirit. Before he can embrace the grace, he must be renewed. The quickening and the renewing are acts of God upon the sinner, not acts of the sinner toward God. In these acts, the sinner is the recipient, not the agent. He does not initiate; he does not cooperate; he does not contribute. He is, to use the language of Ephesians 2, dead, and the dead do not assist their own resurrection. But then, "being quickened and renewed by the Holy Spirit," something remarkable happens: the once-passive sinner becomes active. He is "enabled to answer this call." The word "enabled" is crucial. It does not mean that the Spirit does everything and the sinner does nothing. It means that the Spirit gives the sinner the capacity he lacked, and having received that capacity, the sinner exercises it. The quickened heart beats; the renewed will chooses; the enlightened mind understands. And the very first act of the quickened soul is to "embrace the grace offered and conveyed in it." The call does not merely point to grace; it conveys it. The call is the channel through which grace flows, and the embrace of faith is the hand that receives what the call brings. The Divines were also answering a more subtle error within Reformed circles: the notion that election renders the call unnecessary. By insisting that the call is the means by which grace is "offered and conveyed," they anchored conversion firmly in the preached gospel. The Spirit quickens through the Word — not through private revelation or inner light — and the Word preached actually conveys the grace it proclaims. When the effectual call sounds, Christ Himself is offered, and the quickened sinner receives Him. Historically, the Divines advanced Dordtian orthodoxy with greater precision. The Canons of Dort had taught irresistible grace; Westminster sharpened the point with "altogether passive." If grace is irresistible, it must be because the will is renewed so that resistance is no longer desired. And by stating that the effectual call is "not from anything at all foreseen in man," the Divines cut the ground from every version of foreseen faith — whether Arminian or the Lutheran intuitu fidei. Faith is not the condition of election; election is the cause of faith. The calling is "of God's free and special grace alone" — free because unconstrained by anything outside God, special because given only to the elect.

Theological Depth

The doctrine of man's passivity in effectual calling has occupied Reformed theologians from the Reformation to the present day, not as a speculative curiosity but as the necessary consequence of a biblical anthropology consistently applied. If man is dead in sin, truly dead, not merely sick or weakened, then the grace that quickens him must be monergistic: the work of one. Calvin addresses the question in Book II of the Institutes, where he treats the bondage of the will. The natural man is "so enslaved by sin as to be able neither to will nor to do anything but evil." The will is not destroyed; it remains a faculty of choosing, but it is bound to sin as its object. It chooses freely in the sense that it chooses what it wants, but what it wants is always and only sin. For the will to choose God, it must first be set free, and it cannot set itself free — the very faculty that would choose freedom is itself in bondage. This is why, for Calvin, regeneration must precede faith logically, even if the two are simultaneous in experience. The will that believes is a will that has already been renewed. The faith that embraces Christ is a faith that has been created by the Spirit. And that creation of faith is a work in which the sinner is, in Calvin's phrase, "merely passive, like a stone, until, by the Spirit's power, he is raised up to newness of life." Calvin is careful to add that this passivity pertains only to the initial moment of regeneration. Once the will is renewed, it acts — genuinely, freely, responsibly. But the renewal itself is not an act of the will; it is an act upon the will, and in that act, the will is the recipient, not the agent. Thomas Goodwin develops this insight in his treatise The Work of the Holy Ghost in Our Salvation. Goodwin distinguishes between "the first infusion of the habit of grace" and "the first acts that flow from it." The infusion of the habit — what we would call regeneration — is entirely God's work. Man is passive under it as the earth is passive under the rain that softens it, or as the eye is passive when light falls upon it. But once the habit is infused, the soul acts. It sees; it understands; it wills; it embraces. These acts are genuinely the acts of the person, and they are acts for which the person is responsible. But they flow from a fountain that the person did not dig, and they are sustained by a power that the person did not generate. Goodwin is particularly helpful in explaining why the passivity language does not imply coercion. A coerced act is performed against the inclination of the will — a man dragged to the altar while his heart remains elsewhere. But the quickening of the Spirit does not drag the will; it changes the will's inclination. The man who comes to Christ after regeneration comes because he wants to come, with all the desire of his renewed heart, like the prodigal running to his father on feet made swift by grace. He was passive only in the moment when those feet were given to him. William Perkins, whose Golden Chain maps the ordo salutis with lapidary precision, teaches that effectual calling comprises two parts: the offer of grace and the receiving of grace. The offer — the external call — comes through the Word preached. But the receiving requires an inward work of the Spirit. Perkins writes that "in the first act of conversion, man is merely passive, because the grace whereby he is converted is not wrought by any natural power that is in him, but by the supernatural power of the Holy Ghost." Yet Perkins immediately insists that this passivity is not the whole story. The Spirit's work "doth not abolish the will, but change it; not take away the nature of the will, but the corruption of it." The will that receives Christ is a real will, making a real choice, in a real act of faith. But the capacity to make that choice is a gift given in a moment of passive reception before the first active choice was made. Perkins presses this point pastorally. The believer who understands that his first motion toward God was preceded by God's motion toward him will never boast or look down on the unconverted as though his own wisdom made the difference. And the believer who knows his faith is the fruit of regeneration, not its cause, will never despair when that faith wavers — for the ground of his standing is not the strength of his faith but the faithfulness of the God who quickened him. What God began without man's help, God will complete without man's hindrance. John Murray, the Westminster Seminary theologian, in Redemption Accomplished and Applied, draws a careful distinction between regeneration and effectual calling that illuminates the Confession's language. For Murray, regeneration is the act of God by which the principle of new life is implanted in the soul. Effectual calling is the act of God by which the regenerated sinner is summoned to Christ through the gospel. Regeneration is the giving of ears; effectual calling is the speaking of the word that the new ears can hear. Both are monergistic, acts of God alone, but they have different functions in the ordo salutis. Regeneration is the secret, inward work of the Spirit that makes the dead alive. Effectual calling is the outward-inward summons that the now-living sinner can and does answer. This distinction helps resolve a tension that many feel when reading the Confession. If man is "altogether passive" in effectual calling, how can the call be something he answers? Murray's answer is that effectual calling, in the full sense, includes both the passive quickening and the active response. The Confession's phrase "until, being quickened and renewed" marks the transition point. Before that point, passivity. After that point, activity. But the entire complex — quickening and answering — is what the Confession means by "this effectual call." It is a call that summons and quickens, invites and enables, offers and conveys. And the conveyance happens at the moment when the passive recipient becomes the active believer — when the dead man, hearing the voice of the Son of God, lives and rises from the grave. Murray also notes a point often missed: the Confession says man is "altogether passive" in the call, not that he remains unconscious after it. The passivity pertains to the divine act of quickening, not to the human act of believing that follows — the two are simultaneous in experience even if the quickening is logically prior. The believer's consciousness registers only the call and the response: "I heard the gospel, and for the first time I truly heard it, and I believed." The Spirit's hidden work remains hidden, known by its fruit and not by its process.

Puritan Application

First, examine the ground of your standing before God. The Confession teaches that the effectual call is "not from anything at all foreseen in man." This means that nothing in you — no foreseen faith, no foreseen goodness, no foreseen receptivity — moved God to call you. Your calling is of grace alone. Now apply this to yourself. When you trace the origin of your spiritual life, where does the trail end? If it ends in your decision, your sincerity, your wisdom in choosing Christ while others chose the world, you have not yet grasped the doctrine of effectual calling. But if it ends in the free and sovereign grace of God, who loved you when you were dead in trespasses and sins and quickened you for reasons known only to Himself — then you have begun to understand the gospel. Let this truth humble you. You are not a Christian because you are wiser or better than your unbelieving neighbour. You are a Christian because God, for reasons that lie wholly within Himself, called you by His grace. The only appropriate response to this is the one Paul gives: "By the grace of God I am what I am." Second, if you are not yet a believer, stop waiting for something in yourself to make you ready for grace. Many sit under the preaching of the gospel for years, waiting for their hearts to soften, for their repentance to deepen, for their faith to strengthen — as though these things could come from anywhere but the Spirit of God. They think they must prepare themselves, must make themselves fit, must attain some level of sincerity or sorrow before they can come to Christ. But the Confession teaches that you cannot prepare yourself because you are dead, and the dead do not prepare for resurrection. The preparation you need is not something you can produce; it is something the Spirit must give. Your duty is not to wait for feelings but to hear the call of the gospel and to cast yourself upon Christ. If you find that you cannot — if your heart is hard and your will is bound — then cry out to the God who quickens the dead. Tell Him that you cannot come, and ask Him to draw you. The prayer of helplessness is a prayer the Spirit delights to answer. Third, let the doctrine of man's passivity guard you against every form of spiritual pride. Pride is the native breath of the fallen heart, and it does not die easily. Even after conversion, the old man looks for reasons to boast. He notes his own faithfulness in prayer while others neglect it. He observes his own doctrinal soundness while others stray into error. He congratulates himself on his spiritual growth while others stagnate. But the doctrine of effectual calling cuts the root of every such thought. You did not awaken yourself from the sleep of death. You did not open your own blind eyes. You did not soften your own stony heart. Every spiritual good you possess — faith, repentance, love, holiness — is the fruit of a quickening you did not cause and could not have cooperated with. If you have advanced further in sanctification than another believer, it is because the same grace that quickened you has carried you further, not because you are a better subject of grace. "What hast thou that thou didst not receive? Now if thou didst receive it, why dost thou glory, as if thou hadst not received it?" Let this word from 1 Corinthians 4:7 search your heart and silence your boasting. Fourth, do not let the mystery of God's sovereignty in calling diminish your urgency in evangelism. It is tempting to hear the doctrine of effectual calling and conclude that evangelism is unnecessary — if God will call His elect in His own time, why preach? The apostles never drew this conclusion. Paul, who wrote Ephesians 2 with its stark language of spiritual death, was also the apostle who said, "I am made all things to all men, that I might by all means save some." He knew that God alone quickens the dead, and he preached as though the eternal destiny of his hearers depended on his preaching, because, under God, it did. The gospel is the means by which the Spirit calls the elect. To withhold the gospel from any person is to act as though you know the secret decree of God, which you do not. The elect are hidden among the crowd, and the net must be cast wide. Preach Christ to all; plead with all; pray for all. And leave the quickening to the Spirit, whose timetable is perfect. Fifth, and finally, discover here the deepest ground of assurance. The believer who knows that he was altogether passive in his quickening knows something else as well: that the God who began the work without his help will complete it without his help. If your spiritual life depended upon your own faithfulness, you would have cause to fear every day — for your faithfulness wavers, your zeal cools, your love grows dim. But it does not depend upon you. It depends upon the same free and special grace that called you in the beginning. The God who quickened you when you were dead will keep you now that you are alive. The God who gave you the heart of flesh will preserve its tenderness. The God who enabled you to answer the call will enable you to persevere to the end. Rest in this. Not in your grip on Christ, which is feeble and faltering, but in Christ's grip on you, which is almighty and unfailing. The passivity of your beginning is the pledge of your security. What grace began, grace will finish.

Prayer

O God of all grace, who didst call us out of darkness into Thy marvellous light, we come before Thee with hearts bowed low at the remembrance of what we once were. We were dead, and we did not know it. We were blind, and we thought we saw. We were enslaved, and we boasted of our freedom. And hadst Thou left us to ourselves, we would have remained in that state forever, hearing the outward call of the gospel and never answering it, understanding with the mind what the heart could not embrace, and perishing at last within sight of the cross. But Thou didst not leave us. According to the good pleasure of Thy will, for reasons hidden in the deep counsels of eternity, Thou didst call us with an effectual call. Not because Thou didst foresee anything in us — for there was nothing in us but sin and death to foresee. Not because we were more receptive, more sincere, more worthy than others — for we were children of wrath, even as they. But solely of Thy free and special grace, Thou didst quicken us when we were dead, didst renew us when we were corrupt, didst enable us to answer when we could not even hear. The quickening was Thine; the answering is ours. The renewal was Thine; the believing is ours. And yet even the answering and the believing are Thine, for they flow from the life Thou gavest and are sustained by the Spirit Thou sendest. We bless Thee for the mystery of monergistic grace. We confess that it humbles our pride at every point. We cannot look upon the least spiritual good in ourselves and say, "This is mine, the fruit of my wisdom, the product of my will." All is of Thee. The faith that receives Christ was planted by Thy hand. The love that cleaves to Christ was kindled by Thy Spirit. The obedience that follows Christ was wrought in us by Thy power. We are debtors to grace from first to last, and we shall spend eternity confessing the debt without ever discharging it. O Holy Spirit, quickener of the dead, renewer of the heart, apply this truth to our souls in power. Where pride lingers, mortify it. Where fear assails, comfort it with the remembrance that what Thou hast begun Thou wilt complete. Where zeal has cooled, rekindle it with the fire of a love that does not originate in us and therefore cannot fail. And for those who hear the gospel and have not yet answered, for those who sit in pews week after week and are not yet quickened, we plead Thy sovereign mercy. Open their hearts as Thou didst open Lydia's. Breathe into their dry bones as Thou didst breathe into the valley of death. Call them by name, as Thou didst call Lazarus from the tomb, and let them come forth to newness of life. And when the days of our earthly pilgrimage are ended, and the call that drew us to Christ becomes the call that gathers us into glory, we shall see with undimmed eyes what we now confess with stammering tongues: that salvation is of the Lord, from its first stirring in a dead heart to its final consummation in a new creation. To the only wise God our Saviour, who is able to keep us from falling and to present us faultless before the presence of His glory with exceeding joy, be glory and majesty, dominion and power, both now and ever. Amen.