4.3: Therefore: the elect are found among people of every religion

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

Here is the position stated with care, because precision protects it from caricature. And one distinction should be posted before it: the premises of this section (immediate regeneration, worldwide election) are drawn from explicit statements of Scripture; the conclusion (regenerate elect persons living and dying within other religions) is an inference from those premises. No single verse states it in so many words. It is held here because it follows from what the verses do state, and because the alternative requires exceptions Scripture never makes; but it is offered as a reasoned and hopeful inference, not as a quotation.

The sovereign grace believer does not teach that other religions save. No religion saves, not Hinduism, not Islam, not Buddhism, and, it must be said plainly, not Christianity as a religious system either. Christ saves. Salvation is in no other name (Acts 4:12), by no other blood, through no other mediator. What the sovereign grace believer teaches is that the application of Christ's finished redemption by the Holy Spirit does not wait upon human agency. God has His elect in every nation (Acts 18:10: "I have much people in this city", said of pagan Corinth before they were converted), and He quickens every one of them at His appointed time, whether or not a preacher ever reaches them.

A regenerated person in an unevangelized village two centuries ago, who never heard the name of Jesus, was saved the same way an infant is saved and the same way Abraham was saved before the gospel era was complete: by the sovereign application of Christ's atonement to one chosen in Him before the foundation of the world. One definition must be fixed here, because without it the position can be misheard as "regeneration without faith." The claim is not that a regenerate adult possesses no faith. The claim is that saving faith may exist materially, as a Spirit-created reliance upon divine mercy, before, or even without, its ordinary explicit Christian form under gospel revelation. This is the same structure the Reformed tradition uses for the believing infant: the habit or seed of faith, distinguished from its conscious and doctrinally informed acts (see Objection 54). What is denied is not faith but vocabulary. Such a person would show the fruit of the Spirit's inward work, a God-ward reverence, a conviction of sin, a hunger for mercy, the law written on the heart (Romans 2:14-15: Gentiles "which have not the law... shew the work of the law written in their hearts", a passage read variously as describing natural conscience, Christian Gentiles fulfilling the law by the Spirit, or a hypothetical judgment standard, and which may therefore show no more than natural conscience, but which at minimum shows a divine witness at work where no Scripture has gone, and which in the elect accompanies something more), without ever being able to name the Savior who purchased them. Their ignorance of Christ's name no more nullifies Christ's purchase of them than an infant's ignorance nullifies it.

Job lived outside covenant Israel, in the land of Uz, with no Scripture, no temple, no priesthood, and declared, "I know that my redeemer liveth" (Job 19:25). Melchizedek was priest of the most high God outside Abraham's line entirely. The Ninevites repented at one reluctant sermon because God had already granted repentance. Cornelius was a devout man whose prayers and alms came up before God before Peter arrived (Acts 10:4). Peter's preaching brought him gospel light, church order, and baptism, but the fear of God was already wrought in him. The Ethiopian eunuch was worshipping and reading Isaiah before Philip ever explained it. In each of these narratives the record is at least fully consistent with God's inward work preceding the messenger, and in several of them (Lydia's opened heart, Cornelius's memorial) the text states the priority outright. The messenger found sheep already quickened; he did not create them.