C. Michael Patton and Rhome Dyke · The Theology Program · 65 minutes
Lecture by C. Michael Patton, Th.M., and Rhome Dyke, Th.M., from The Theology Program, published on their public channel. Study notes below from Medina Community Church.
Theology, the teachers warn at the start, sometimes gives assurance and sometimes takes it away, and a class that only ever left you more confident would not be doing theology. This session turns from what God does to what we do: conversion, the faith and repentance that answer the effectual call. It dismantles the modern idea of faith as a leap into the dark, and then wades into a debate that split evangelicalism: what does a person actually have to do to be saved? Listen for the two Mormon missionaries at Patton’s door, and for Peter’s ten years.
The course has covered the grounds of salvation: the eternal decree behind it and the atonement beneath it. Now comes its application: how does all of that enter a life? The answer is conversion, which the teachers will argue includes both faith and repentance, and then justification, the doctrine Luther said the church stands or falls upon. A word of honesty first: theology can bring assurance and it can unsettle it, faith to the unfaithful and doubt to the faithful, as one theologian put it to his students, and both are part of doing the work. Mark 1:15 sets the terms: the kingdom is at hand; repent and believe the gospel. John the Baptist preached it before the cross and the apostles preached it after; the content of the believing filled out, but the summons never changed: repent of something, believe in something.
Ask the street what faith is and you will hear: believing what you cannot see, a blind leap. On that definition faith makes up what knowledge lacks, so the less you know, the more virtuous your faith. The teachers reject this root and branch, and Patton tells of the Mormon missionaries at his door. He never opens the Greek with them; he goes straight to their doctrine of faith. Their final answer is always the same: pray, and God will give you an inner assurance the book is true. But that is circular and purely subjective, and any religion at any door can say exactly the same. Once faith is a contentless inner leap, every religion is equal, and Christianity has nothing to offer but a competing feeling.
Against the leap, the Reformers analyzed faith into three elements, and the first is knowledge, notitia. There is no contentless faith, no faith in faith. Today it is considered virtuous to be a believer in general, and embarrassing to believe that anything in particular; even Christians say I have faith and go blank when asked, faith in what? The theology program exists, the teachers say, to answer precisely that question: what is it that we believe? Even the gospel gets preached as all you need is faith, with the faith never defined. And bare content is not enough either: Patton once wrote a seminary paper on the christology of demons, cataloguing everything demons in the New Testament confess about Christ, and found their belief set matches many churchgoers’: they know who he is.
The second element is assent, assensus: agreeing that the content is true, and there are degrees of it, which is why the man in the gospel could cry, I believe, help my unbelief, and why Thomas doubted until he saw. The teachers refuse to shame the seeking of grounds. When Moses asked how Israel would ever believe God had sent him, God did not demand a blind leap; he gave signs, the staff, the hand, the water, and the people believed. That is the character of God: he supplies the grounds for faith. Scripture keeps pointing to two anchor events: the Old Testament forever recalls the exodus, and the New Testament the resurrection. Establish those, and God has proven himself reliable in history, so that when your circumstances shout that he does not love you, faith is not leaping into the dark but stepping toward the God who raised Jesus. Reason does not shrink faith; it shows faith to be the only logical step, as it was for Thomas on his knees: my Lord and my God.
Knowledge and assent together, the Reformers said, qualify you to be a demon, for the demons believe and shudder. The third element is trust: the volitional resting of yourself on what you know and affirm. Not every step of life comes with its own evidence; God is good, and your life looks bad; God is in control, and everything looks out of control. Trust runs on the established record: the God of the exodus and the empty tomb can be rested on where present evidence is thin. Faith, then, is knowledge of the gospel, assent that it is true, and trust that stakes yourself on it.
The other side of the coin: the Greek word means a change of mind, a change of thought and attitude with regard to sin and righteousness, issuing in a changed way of life. The texts keep repentance and faith inseparable. At Pentecost, when the crowd is pierced to the heart and asks what to do, Peter says repent and be baptized, and belief goes unmentioned because true repentance assumes it. Acts 3: repent and return, that your sins may be wiped away. John the Baptist demands fruit in keeping with repentance from the Pharisees, because the only visible proof of a changed mind is a changed life. And Paul tells Agrippa in Acts 26 that he preached that people should repent, turn to God, and prove their repentance by their deeds. In the New Testament world, belief without action was not yet a conceivable category; our culture has since split what they held together, which is why James 2 feels like a problem to us and not to them. The thief on the cross shows the minimal case: dying, hands nailed, he could do nothing, and still his repentance showed, rebuking the mockery he had every reason to join.
Now the discomfort the class can feel coming: if repentance produces a changed life, and repentance is required for salvation, must people change their lives before they are saved, which is salvation by works? But if you drop repentance, what do you do with the texts that demand it, and have you not licensed antinomianism, fire-insurance Christianity, saved and living however you please? Say yes to repentance and you have one set of problems; say no and you have the other. The debate that follows is the church trying to live between them.
In the 1980s John MacArthur published The Gospel According to Jesus, charging that American evangelicalism had bred nominal Christians by preaching a gospel that changes nothing, and he has continued the argument in Hard to Believe. The lordship position: salvation includes faith and repentance as two sides of one coin, and in repentance the believer commits to give up all known sin, making Christ Lord, sovereign over the life, not merely acknowledged as God. Its adherents are weighty: MacArthur, Demarest, Stott, Sproul, Kennedy. The free grace response came from Zane Hodges, at the radical edge, and Charles Ryrie, with most dispensationalists and much of Dallas Seminary: salvation is by faith alone; repentance is a change of mind; submitting to Christ’s lordship is something only an already-born-again person can progressively do.
The free grace critique, which the teachers present fairly while agreeing with parts: lordship misreads the word Lord, for when Romans 10:9 requires confessing Jesus as Lord it echoes Joel’s Yahweh, a confession of his deity, not a promise of submission. It misreads repentance, which should progressively turn a life but does not do so instantaneously. It puts sanctification before salvation: requiring a person to give up all known sin before conversion demands of the unbeliever what no believer has achieved, not even Paul, and quietly makes the giving-up the ground of assurance, so that the converted homosexual’s salvation, ten years on, rests on his continued turning rather than on Christ. It proves too much: if everything must be given up to get saved, everything must stay given up to stay saved. And Romans 12:1 beseeches people who are already brethren to present themselves, a believer’s dedication, not a condition of conversion.
The lordship critique cuts the other way. Free grace can devalue the severity of sin and stop preaching God’s righteousness, offering a Christ who died with no real reason to die and asking for a trust with no conviction beneath it, half a gospel. It can undermine repentance itself, though its better spokesmen answer that both faith and repentance are gifts of God, so no works are smuggled in. And it can cut the vital nerve between justification and sanctification: the God sovereign enough to justify is sovereign enough to sanctify, and he does not save people into a permanent carnality; justification can be expected to bear fruit, though God is the only fruit inspector. At the radical edge, Hodges held that a person could believe, abandon the faith entirely, die in unbelief, and still be saved; the teachers reject that outright.
Patton’s way between the camps turns on how you define repentance and who inspects the fruit. Repentance is a changed disposition toward sin itself, not merely a changed opinion about Christ, and it will produce a changed life; John the Baptist was right to demand fruit. But no one can dictate the schedule. Peter, a true believer and a pillar, harbored prejudice against Gentiles for some ten years until the vision on the rooftop and the walk into Cornelius’s house, where he could still say out loud how unlawful it felt. God dealt with it in his own time. So we cannot say, I gave up these sins at conversion, and if you did not give up yours the same way, you are lost. What we can require is what the gospel itself contains: the knowledge that you are a sinner in need of a Savior, and trust in what Christ did to save you from your sins. Get those two and repentance is inside them, for no one sees himself a sinner and trusts a sin-bearer without a changed disposition toward sin. Frontload the gospel with more and you have based salvation on the extra; empty it of sin and conviction and it is not salvation that is being offered. Believers, the teachers finish, are not people who once believed and once repented; we are believers and repenters, present tense, and when the Spirit convicts, as he did Peter, the disposition shows itself again.
One edge of the lordship concern the teachers keep: the New Testament does call some hearers to question their faith. James asks whether a faith without works can save. The terrible scene in the Sermon on the Mount, Lord, Lord, did we not do all this in your name, ends with depart from me, spoken to people who really thought they believed. Where there is no conviction, no changed disposition, no fruit at all, Scripture itself asks whether the faith is the right kind, and a teacher who forbids the question may be insulating nominal Christians from the only warning that could wake them. Assurance is real, and it is the next session’s subject; but God may let assurance waver in a sinful season precisely because he loves us. What must one do to be saved? The Philippian jailer’s question gets the course’s answer: know yourself a sinner in need of a Savior, and trust in what Christ did for you.
Each opens the chapter in your ESV app or on esv.org.
Tap an answer. A wrong guess points you back to the outline; when all seventeen are right, the lecture is marked complete on this device.
1. What honest warning opens the session?
2. What continuity does Mark 1:15 establish?
3. Why does Patton skip the Greek with the Mormon missionaries?
4. What follows if faith is a contentless inner leap?
5. What did Patton’s seminary paper on the christology of demons find?
6. How did God answer Moses’s worry that Israel would not believe him?
7. What are the two anchor events faith keeps returning to?
8. Why do knowledge and assent without trust qualify you to be a demon?
9. Why is belief unmentioned in Peter’s Pentecost answer, repent and be baptized?
10. What does the thief on the cross show about repentance?
11. What provoked the lordship salvation debate?
12. What does the free grace camp argue from Romans 10:9?
13. Why does requiring the surrender of all known sin before conversion trouble the teachers?
14. What extreme of the free grace side do the teachers reject outright?
15. What do Peter’s ten years prove about fruit inspection?
16. What is the course’s answer to what one must do to be saved?
17. When does the New Testament itself call hearers to question their faith?
All seventeen correct. Lecture 7 is complete.
Run your own faith through the three elements. Where is it thinnest, in the content you could articulate, the assent you actually feel, or the trust you rest your weight on? What would strengthening that element look like this month?
The teachers say our culture split belief from action in a way the New Testament never did. Name one thing you say you believe that your calendar and bank statement do not yet know about. What would it mean to repent, in the lecture’s sense, at that point?
Peter carried prejudice for ten years before God dealt with it. Is there a conviction the Spirit has only recently brought to you about something long tolerated? How does his patience with Peter shape both your repentance and your judgments of other believers’ progress?
Mark 1 gives the summons that never changed from the Baptist to the apostles: the time is fulfilled, the kingdom of God is at hand; repent and believe the gospel.
The lecture’s own reference points: John MacArthur’s The Gospel According to Jesus and Hard to Believe on the lordship side, with Ryrie and Hodges answering for free grace, and Charles Swindoll’s The Grace Awakening, invoked for the danger of frontloading the gospel, already on the course list. The next session takes up the doctrine on which Luther said the church stands or falls: justification.