Donald John MacLean on John Knox (c.1514–1572), the Gospel Offer, Common Grace, and God’s Universal Love

The Gospel Offer, Common Grace, and God’s Universal Love

Knox’s strong articulation of double predestination was accompanied by a belief in a gospel offer genuinely made to all who hear it, and a love and grace of God that was common to all. He clearly stated that the gospel offer extends beyond the elect.⁹⁶ He noted that the word of God works ‘diversly in the heartes of those to whom it is offered’.⁹⁷ God ‘of his great mercie’ had ‘of late yeares offered againe to the unthankfull world’ the ‘light of salvation’, but instead of being received that light had enflamed the hearts of men with ‘rage and crueltie’.⁹⁸ The reprobate who had grace offered to them ‘oppugned and obstinately refused’ it.⁹⁹ This gospel offer is to be identified with the ‘Generall vocation, by the which the world by some manor of meanes is called to the knowledge of God’. Knox distinguished this ‘generall vocation’ from the ‘vocation of purpose, which apperteineth to God’s children onely’.¹⁰⁰ He acknowledged that while few were ultimately chosen, ‘many are called’.¹⁰¹ Nevertheless, there were qualifications Knox placed on the gospel offer. First, those who were within the visible church heard its teachings and exhortations in a degree those outside the Kirk did not.¹⁰² All within the visible church had the external call to salvation.¹⁰³ Second, and perhaps somewhat inconsistently, Knox appeared to restrict the external call to the penitent. He held the gospel call in Isa. 55 was not to ‘all indifferently’ but only to ‘such as do thirst’.¹⁰⁴ He limited the call to repentance to ‘those that thirst, that hunger, that mourne, that are laden with sinne’.¹⁰⁵ There seems an undeniable tension, even disjunction, between this limitation and his clear teaching that the reprobate despise and reject what is offered to them.¹⁰⁶

Knox ‘constantly denied’ that electing love was common to all.¹⁰⁷ However, he also held that ‘God both blesseth and loveth in bestowing temporall benedictions, upon such as in his eternall counsell he hath rejected, and therefore hateth’.¹⁰⁸ Allied to this was his clear teaching ‘that the most wicked men are participant of God’s mercie in temporall felicitie’.¹⁰⁹ These ‘graces’ and ‘mercies’ which were ‘common to all’ had to be sharply distinguished from the mercy and grace that was shown only to the elect in Christ Jesus, but that was not to deny there was such a category as common grace and mercy.¹¹⁰ These temporal mercies included the restraining operations of God’s Holy Spirit.¹¹¹ Knox argued that grace and mercy were shown to the reprobate for two reasons. The first was for the good of the elect. Common gifts, for example, however they were abused by the reprobate, ultimately produced some benefit for the Church. The second reason was for ‘God’s goodnes to be praised’. That God was good to even his enemies ultimately brought glory to his name.¹¹²

Again, Scottish federal theologians held similar views on these matters. So, for example, Rutherford articulated very clearly his belief in a common grace and a common love of God for all distinct from God’s electing love and grace. He held that ‘it is a state of common grace to be within the visible church’.¹¹³ Simply to be in an external covenant with God was a favour from God, expressive of his common grace and mercy.¹¹⁴ Rutherford also maintained a universal love for all. He believed that God in some sense loved all his rational creatures, ‘yea, even his enemies’.¹¹⁵ One evidence of this love was that God ‘sends the gospel to many reprobates, and invites them to repentance, … with longanimity and forbearance’.¹¹⁶ But this love was not electing love and was not ultimately intended to secure the salvation of any.¹¹⁷

In regard to the gospel offer the federal theologians were, if anything, more expansive than Knox. They clearly held that, in Durham’s words, ‘where the gospel comes, it makes offer of Jesus Christ to all that hear it’.¹¹⁸ Such a belief was reflected in their preaching: ‘we earnestly exhort you … to receive this gospel, to submit to the righteousness of faith, to open to him that is knocking at the door, to yield to him, and to give him the hand, that bygone quarrels may be removed, and taken out of the way.’¹¹⁹ Indeed, while Knox appeared to limit the gospel offer to those who are ‘thirsty’ (Isa. 55.1), James Durham explicitly refused to follow suit. In his own comments on Isaiah he pointed out that God directly invites those ‘without money’ to come; if ‘thirsting’ were required before coming, he reasoned, that would imply the possession of some ‘money’ on the part of the sinner. Thirst, then, was better attributed to those likely to come, rather than identified as a prerequisite to coming.¹²⁰ He noted further that no church could be as devoid of ‘preparations’ for grace as the Church of Laodicea described in Rev. 3, yet it received the full and free gospel offer.¹²¹

Just as Scottish federal theologians did not go beyond Knox in their teachings on reprobation, so they articulated a gospel offer, a common love and a grace that extended beyond the elect, and which was no less expansive than it was in Knox’s doctrine. Here again there is no evidence of a betrayal of his teachings or a hardening of earlier (Knoxian) predestinarian doctrine into something reprehensible and incompatible with his thought.
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96. Macleod correctly notes that ‘Knox … regarded the Free Offer as an axiom’. Macleod, ‘Dr T. F. Torrance and Scottish Theology’, p. 58. See also McDonald, John Knox, p. 100.
97. Knox, Works, vol. 5, p. 21.
98. Ibid., p. 23.
99. Ibid., p. 42. See also pp. 45, 71, 164–5, 260, 330, 401.
100. Ibid., p. 117.
101. Ibid., p. 128. Knox simply responds to the charge that God, by outwardly calling to salvation those whom he does not intend to save, acts hypocritically by calling it an ‘impudent lie’ (p. 128).
102. Ibid., p. 270.
103. Ibid., p. 285.
104. Ibid., p. 118.
105. Ibid., p. 404.
106. This is perhaps the only ground for justification of [Richard] Kyle’s exaggerated assertion [in “The Concept of Predestination in the Thought of John Knox,” WTJ 46.1 (Spring 1984): 53–77] that Knox was ‘by no means consistent with himself ’ in On Predestination; Kyle, ‘The Concept of Predestination’, p. 56.
107. Knox, Works, vol. 5, p. 61.
108. Ibid., pp. 284–5. For other, slightly more oblique references to God’s universal love, see pp. 58, 151, 270–1. Thus it is incorrect to say without clarification, as Kyle does, that Knox ‘denied God loved all human beings’; Kyle, ‘The Concept of Predestination’, p. 66.
109. Ibid., p. 86. See also pp. 86–7, 257. Ultimately the reprobate’s despising of the common grace and mercy of God undergirds the judgement of God on the reprobate. However, far from diminishing the reality of that goodness, it is only because genuine goodness, mercy and grace were shown to them that their condemnation is justly increased. See ibid., p. 262.
110. Ibid., p. 87.
111. Ibid., p. 255.
112. Ibid., p. 258.
113. Samuel Rutherford, The Covenant of Life Opened (Edinburgh: Andrew Anderson, 1655), p. 107.
114. Ibid., pp. 107, 340. He explicitly includes here ‘all within the Visible Church, whether Elect or Reprobate’.
115. Samuel Rutherford, Christ Dying and Drawing Sinners to Himself (repr., Edinburgh: T. Lumisden and J. Robertson, 1727), p. 550.
116. Ibid., p. 550.
117. Ibid., p. 550.
118. James Durham, Christ Crucified Or the Marrow of the Gospel in Seventy-Two Sermons on the Fifty-Third Chapter of Isaiah (Chris Coldwell, ed.; Dallas: Naphtali Press, 2001), p. 122.
119. Ibid., pp. 100–1.
120. Ibid., p. 80.
121. Ibid., p. 80.

Donald John MacLean, “Knox Versus the Knoxians? Predestination in John Knox and Seventeenth-Century Federal Theology,” in Reformed Orthodoxy in Scotland: Essays on Scottish Theology 1560–1775, ed. Aaron Clay Denlinger (London: Bloomsbury T&T Clark, 2015), 22–24.