Is Grace Resistible?

The Spirit “opens the gate of our hearts, to the Father and to one another— from inside.”

I often think the surest way to convert an unbeliever to the truth of the gospel would be to charge him or her with preaching from the scriptures for a set of Sundays. If the LORD Jesus had not already called me to preach, he surely would have called me to faith through preaching. Once you dare to hold your gaze upon the text, the claims it makes are both dizzying and astonishing, absolutely upending “conventional” Christianity.

For instance, having worked with the Gospel of John from Ascension to Trinity Sunday, I simply cannot recover from the promise Christ makes to us prior to his departure— I suppose I never truly sat with it long enough for the gospel of it to saturate me. Through the Spirit, Jesus tells his disciples, both and his Father will come and make their home in us.

Not in heaven.

In us.

You.

Me.

The dwelling place of the Triune God is not a location above the clouds at a cosmological remove. The heaven of the Father and the Son is each one of us in whom the Spirit has taken up residence. Which means, as I tried to proclaim on Sunday, eternal life does not begin when you die. It begins when the Spirit arrives, alighting upon you— as Jesus prays before he goes to the garden— in the knowledge of and faith in the Triune God’s name. Thus pentecost is not only the fulfillment of Jesus’ promise, it is the answer to his prayer.

But the promise does more than answer the prayer of Mary’s boy and Pilate’s victim. As Robert Jenson notes in his essay “Triune Grace,” it also resolves, or reconfigures, one of the oldest and most intractable debates in the history of Christian theology.

The question: whether grace— that is, the Holy Spirit— is resistible.

Calvin says no.

Arminius says yes.