The Effectual Call

It is argued by Garrett that the gospel is the instrument of God's spirit to effect regeneration. He cites James 1:18, 1 Peter 1:23-25, and 1 Corinthians 4:15 as proof.

However, Garrett admits freely, as he must or deny that God is the author of regeneration, that the efficient cause of regeneration is God's spirit alone:

"A surgeon, when he operates, will often directly touch his patient and also use instruments.  The surgery would be both mediate and immediate.  God"operates" upon the heart in regeneration."

Now, an examination of 1 Corinthians 2:14 proves that the natural man cannot discern anything that is spiritual, which includes the gospel. The key element here is that until God's spirit first "touches" the natural man directly, no instrument can convey or effect any spiritual truth.

So, Garrett is not really advocating "gospel regeneration" in the same sense as the Campbellites. What he is really arguing is that the whole process of the effectual call includes man's repentance and belief immediately after, in a logical sense, God has imparted the gift of faith by the direct operation of the Spirit; only then is a man fully regenerate.

In a real sense, this debate is about semantics. There are two conclusions Brother Garrett draws from the three texts listed above. (1) He defines 'born again' or 'begotten' in these texts in terms of his view of effectual calling, which is a combination into one term of what modern Primitive Baptists refer to (in separate terms) as regeneration and 'gospel conversion'. (2) He wants to argue that these texts establish a pattern according to which God effectually calls.

The problem is, as we have seen, John 3:8 was viewed by the framers of the 1689 London Confession and John Gill to refer solely to the work of the spirit in being born of God. Now, how can Garrett's citations define being begotten or born again as equal to the effectual call, when this text plainly teaches that being born of God is by the Spirit alone? John 3:8 does not indicate that one must enter the kingdom of God (John 3:5) that they (after being born of the spirit) can see (John 3:3) to meet the definition of 'born of God'.

If we define the effectual call in terms of John 3:8, which speaks to the germination of the elect by the spirit alone, as in 1 John 3:9 (as Gill sees 1 John 3:9), then, manifestly, Garrett's cited texts cannot reconcile to this definition because the sense of being born of God in John 3:8 is requisite for 'seeing the kingdom of God', which plainly is a more fundamental sense of germination than is found in Garrett's cited texts.

Therefore, Garrett's texts either presume that this fundamental germination of John 3:8 has been done already, or the texts combine the process of the germination of John 3:8 with gospel belief.

In other words, Garrett's texts do not imply that God's spirit did not initially germinate them (manifestly), they only imply that belief in the gospel and the outward manifestation of the spirit's work were the result of the preached word. No one denies that. Now, Garrett wants to consider the whole package as the "effectual calling" of God, but these texts do not refer to it as that or as "regeneration".

So how can his proffered texts be said to provide a biblical definition of the effectual call when it is obvious from John 3:8 that it is not always the case that the effectual call is both by the word and spirit? This inconsistency is also reflected in the London Confession, but at least there they distinguished between 'ordinary' and 'extraordinary'.

But, even if we say of infants, the mentally incompetent, or any other elect person incapable of being outwardly called by the gospel (this is how the framers referred to it) - that they are regenerated "extraordinarily" by the spirit alone, as the framers of the 1689 Confession evidently thought, in what sense would this not be "ordinary"? They certainly far out number the mentally competent. It seems a misnomer to regard them as "extraordinary" from John 3:8, which refers to a spiritual effect that is clearly not limited in context (as Christ began to teach Nicodemus anyway though he could not understand 'heavenly things') to whom it is applied by the framers of the LCF.

Therefore, it is scriptural and logical to define the effectual call by the lowest common denominator of being born of God presented in the Scripture, distinguishing evangelical belief from the germination of the elect with the principle of grace that Gill understands from 1 John 3:9.