4.2: Regeneration is not suspended on hearing a preacher

From Sovereign Grace and the Scope of Election: A Comparative Examination of Attainment Theology and Grace Theology, with Particular Attention to the Question of Whether God's Elect Are Found Among All Nations and Religions

This is the decisive point at which sovereign grace theology diverges from virtually all conditionalist systems, the attainment system included. The sovereign grace believer holds that the new birth is the immediate work of the Holy Spirit, "born, not of blood, nor of the will of the flesh, nor of the will of man, but of God" (John 1:13); "of his own will begat he us" (James 1:18); "it is the Spirit that quickeneth" (John 6:63).

If regeneration required a human preacher, then:

- Every infant dying in infancy would be lost, for none of them heard and believed a sermon. Yet David said of his dead child, "I shall go to him" (2 Samuel 12:23), words some interpreters take as no more than David expecting his own death, though the comfort David visibly draws from them, ceasing his fasting and worshipping, reads far more naturally as hope of reunion; and Jesus said "of such is the kingdom of heaven" (Matthew 19:14). - Every person born without the mental capacity to comprehend preaching would be lost. - John the Baptist could not have been "filled with the Holy Ghost, even from his mother's womb" (Luke 1:15), leaping in Elisabeth's womb at the presence of Christ before he had heard or understood a single word of gospel. He is a special prophetic case, granted; but a single genuine case settles the decisive question, for it proves that the Spirit's quickening work does not require conscious comprehension. - The eternal destiny of God's chosen would hang on shipping schedules, printing presses, missionary budgets, and the willingness of men, precisely the machinery that churches of the grace conviction have historically rejected as an insult to sovereign grace.

Let the force of these cases be stated carefully, because it is strong enough without exaggeration. The infant, the incapable, and John the Baptist do not by themselves prove that God ordinarily regenerates unevangelized adults; an opponent may classify them as extraordinary. What they do establish, and this is the load-bearing point, is that conscious gospel hearing cannot be an absolutely universal mechanism of the new birth, and therefore that God is able to regenerate apart from it. Once that ability is granted, the question is no longer whether God can quicken the unreached elect but whether He does. Here the strongest mainstream rejoinder must be faced squarely: a critic may grant every proposition above and still hold that God ordinarily ensures that elect, mentally capable adults eventually encounter the gospel, reading "every nation" to mean that God sends the gospel into every nation and gathers believers out of them. That reading is coherent, and no verse refutes it by name. What tells against it is providential history: whole centuries and continents have lived and died with no possible access to the message, and Scripture nowhere promises gospel arrival to every elect person, while it does promise that none of the given ones will be lost (John 6:39). The choice, then, is between an unpromised guarantee of access and an unpromised extension of the Spirit's freedom; and this study judges the second the smaller step, since the confessions already grant the Spirit's freedom for the incapable. But let the weight be stated exactly: the argument establishes divine ability firmly, and divine pattern as a reasoned and hopeful inference, not as a demonstrated frequency. The Spirit of God is not limited by geography, language, literacy, or the reach of any missionary society. "The wind bloweth where it listeth" (John 3:8), in first-century Judea, in every land of the twenty-first century, in places where no Christian has ever set foot.