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Teaching Them to Observe the Doctrine of Salvation: Tiessen's Accessibilism Vs. Jesus' Exclusivism

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Teaching Them to Observe the Doctrine of Salvation: Tiessen's Accessibilism Vs. Jesus' Exclusivism Teaching Them to Observe the Doctrine of Salvation: Tiessen’s Accessibilism vs. Jesus’ Exclusivism by Steve W. Lemke New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary for the Annual Meeting of the Evangelical Theological Society in San Diego, November 2007 Introduction In his recent book Who Can Be Saved? Reassessing Salvation in Christ and World Religions,1 Terrance Tiessen proposes his own accessibilist answer to the question raised in the book’s title. Following his recent intriguing book surveying theological perspectives on divine providence, Providence and Prayer: How God Works in the World,2 Tiessen in this volume addresses another crucial issue confronting contemporary Christianity – how Christian exclusivism can be maintained in a pluralistic world. As his title suggests, he is proposing a reassessment of traditional Christian soteriology. Tiessen, who is professor emeritus of theology and ethics at Providence Theological Seminary in Manitoba, Canada, seeks to answer two key questions in the book: “How does God save people?” (p. 12) and “How do the (world’s) religions fit into God’s purposes in the world?” (p. 477). These two main questions are broken down into nineteen more detailed questions which serve as the chapter titles of the book.3 After an introductory section that surveys other 1 Terrance L. Tiessen, Who Can Be Saved? Reassessing Salvation in Christ and World Religions (Downers Grove: InterVarsity, 2004). All parenthetical references in this paper refer to this book. Tiessen presented an early outline of his proposal in a paper presented at the 2002 annual meeting in Toronto of the Evangelical Theological Society. Tiessen’s paper was entitled “God’s Work of Grace in the Context of the Religions: A Reformed Proposal.” Tiessen also published an earlier work on this subject, an ATLA monograph entitled Irenaeus on the Salvation of the Unevangelized, (Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow, 1993). 2 Terrance Tiessen, Providence and Prayer: How Does God Work in the World? Downers Grove: InterVarsity, 2000. For a critique of this book, see Steve Lemke, “God's Relation to the World: Terrance Tiessen Proposal on Providence and Prayer,” Criswell Theological Review n.s. vol. 1, no. 2 (Spring 2004):205-213; and Steve Lemke, review of Providence and Prayer: How Does God Work in the World? by Terrance Tiessen, in The Southern Baptist Journal of Theology 6, no. 1 (Summer 2002):114-118, available online at http://www.sbts.edu/pdf/sbjt_2002SpringComplete.pdf. 3 Tiessen, Who Can Be Saved?, chapter titles. These are listed in Appendix 2. 2 options, Tiessen proposes his version of accessibilism in thirty theses.4 Fleshing out these thirty theses provides the primary content of the book. Tiessen, who was reared on the mission field as a child of missionaries, generally favors the importance of missions and the ultimate necessity of Christ for salvation. Most of his affirmations are positive and evangelical. However, some of his accessibilist theses and their implications are controversial for exclusivist evangelicals. One of Tiessen’s driving concerns is how few people will come to salvation under the conventional exclusivist standards of salvation only through personal faith in Jesus Christ as Savior and Lord. Therefore, his accessibilist proposal denies “ecclesiocentrism” and contends that salvation may be obtained (a) apart from the proclamation of the gospel by the church, (b) through means of another world religion, (c) without necessarily becoming a Christian, (d) without a conscious commitment to Jesus Christ as Lord and Savior, (e) by an infant or mentally incompetent person, and (f) through a “last chance” decision after this life. This paper will identify seven problematic theses of Tiessen’s accessibilism and critique them in light of the teachings of Christ. An Unnecessary but Interesting Excursus: Tiessen and Calvinism Another key issue which seems to drive Tiessen’s project is his effort to address acknowledged “difficulties in Calvinism” (242) regarding election. Tiessen describes himself as writing from a monergistic Calvinist perspective (69). As he advocates in much greater detail in his book on divine providence,5 Tiessen affirms middle knowledge Calvinism (158). However, at points it is difficult to ascertain how Tiessen’s views correspond to traditional TULIP Calvinism. Total depravity – While the “total depravity” doctrine holds that unregenerate sinners are dead in their sins and thus utterly incapable of doing anything to please God, Tiessen suggests that Native Americans who had never heard the gospel were god-fearers like Cornelius who “were sincerely seeking the gospel”(61), that God is “more pleased” with unregenerate children who honor their parents than regenerate children who do not do so (399), that people can be “good” without being “saved” (423), that a non-Christian community may better approximate God’s ideal than does a Christian community (417), and indeed that (even in their fallen state), “everyone is made in the image of God and is seeking ways of dealing with the awareness of and the hunger for God that is intrinsic to our human being” (359). These affirmations of the goodness of unregenerate persons would seem to fly in the face of the doctrine of total depravity as most Calvinists understand it. 4 Ibid., 22-30, and as addressed throughout the book. These theses are listed in Appendix 1. In this paper, they will be referenced simply by number. 5 Tiessen, Providence and Prayer, chapters 12-14. 3 Unconditional election – Tiessen forthrightly challenges the doctrine of unconditional election by agreeing with Neal Punt that “God consigns someone to destruction (hell) only on the basis of what that person does”(233), and indeed Tiessen concludes his chapter on “Who Is Able to Believe?” with the assertion that God gives sufficient revelation to save persons “if they respond appropriately” (358). Tiessen is thus asserting that election is in some way conditional on human response. Tiessen notes Pascal’s complaint that the problem with the Jesuit concept of “sufficient grace” was that it was not sufficient for salvation. Tiessen concedes these “difficulties in Calvinism” regarding election for which no adequate answer has been provided, namely how those who have no ability to respond positively to God can be held accountably by God. Tiessen proposes an alternative view of God’s “universal sufficient enabling grace” (241-242). Tiessen’s accessibilist proposal seeks to avoid these problems concerning election and human response by proposing a neo-Amyraldian “universal sufficient enabling grace” in which God provides everyone with a universal at-death revelatory experience with a final opportunity to confess Christ (239-258, 487-497). While Tiessen’s proposal avoids the hypothetical universalism of Amyraut, it does not resolve the problem voiced by Pascal because in Tiessen’s proposal God’s enabling grace is not efficacious, and therefore not sufficient for salvation. However, he appears to make election conditional on human response. Limited atonement – Although Tiessen seems to affirm the traditional doctrine of a limited atonement at times (90-91, 487-490), his Thesis 14 asserts that “God’s saving grace is universally sufficient so that, on at least one occasion in each person’s life, one is enabled to respond to God’s self-revelation with faith response that is acceptable to God as a means of justification.” Thus Jesus’ sacrifice on the cross is universally sufficient, and everyone will have an opportunity to respond to the gospel. Not only that, but the central contention of Tiessen’s accessibilism is that salvation extends beyond the church, such that some persons who are unaware of even the name of Jesus Christ can share in the same salvation as Peter and Paul. Tiessen affirms in his Thesis 16 that “we have reason to be very hopeful concerning the proportion of the human race that will enjoy life with God . .” So the number of the saved is not a small minority, but is much larger than is commonly expected. Irresistible grace – According to Tiessen’s Thesis 8, “God’s knowledge of what people would do if they heard the gospel does not make salvation more accessible, but it enables him to bring about the salvation of the elect without coercion.” God’s grace is thus not coercive or irresistible. Tiessen asserts that the “hardening” of heart spoken of in Scripture “results when people resist and refuse grace” (244). Clearly, then, that such grace is resistible. Perseverance of the saints – Tiessen contends that the warning passages in Hebrews were “designed to keep the elect from irrevocable apostasy” (490). His interpretation of these passages in Hebrews seems to leave the door open for former believers to lose or renounce their salvation, in contradiction to this classical Calvinist tenet. 4 The sovereignty of God – In addition to these ambiguities about the traditional points of the TULIP, Tiessen also appears to have a low view of the sovereignty of God. While Tiessen describes himself as being within a monergistic Reformed perspective that “affirms God’s complete control of all things in his creation” (394), the God he describes comes across as impotent and incompetent. Tiessen’s proposal of a last-ditch “at death encounter with Christ” is apparently offered as a stopgap measure for all those for whom God has been incompetent to reach with sufficient revelation during their lives. Tiessen’s God is forced to work through other world religions to reach those whom He is apparently incapable of reaching through the proclamation of the gospel, and even in this Tiessen rejects that God does so by “intentional instrumentality” (394). Evidently the salvation of these persons is out of God’s control or design. So thoroughgoing Calvinists might question whether Tiessen appropriately identifies himself as being within the Calvinist camp, and some who lean toward the Arminian camp may wonder what the real distinction is between their own position and that of Tiessen.
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