Prevenient Grace: What It Is and Why Calvinists Object

Prevenient grace is the grace of God that goes before a person's conversion, awakening and enabling a fallen will to respond to the gospel without guaranteeing that it will. The name comes from the Latin gratia praeveniens, grace that precedes. Catholic, Orthodox, Wesleyan and Arminian Christians all teach a form of it, and Reformed theology answers with effectual calling, a grace given to the elect that reaches its end without fail. Both sides are guarding something true, and both are answering one question in the same way: whether the fallen will can turn to God. The Many Beings Framework argues that the question uses a single word for two different things, and that once they are separated, the dispute loses its force.

Key takeaways

• Prevenient grace is grace that goes first. It convicts, calls and enables before conversion, and in the Wesleyan-Arminian form it can be refused.
• The doctrine is older than Arminius. The Council of Orange (529) and the Council of Trent (1547) both teach that grace precedes the first movement of faith.
• The Reformed objection asks why one person says yes and another no. The semi-Pelagian charge is weaker, and classical Arminianism answers it.
• Frame-Indexed Classical Theism keeps what both sides protect. With Wesleyan-Arminian doctrine, grace goes first and refusal is real; with Reformed irresistible grace, God's act is undefeated. Its one reservation is what the fall removed: a faculty of choice, or the righteousness that faculty could never produce.

What is prevenient grace?

Prevenient grace is the work of God that precedes and prepares a sinner's response to the gospel, so that the response becomes possible without becoming certain. Older English called it "preventing" grace, where prevent still meant to come before, and that is the word John Wesley and the Methodist Articles of Religion use. On the Wesleyan-Arminian account it convicts of sin, calls, illumines the mind and frees the will enough to respond, while leaving the response open.

Wesley placed it at the start of a sequence. In his sermon on working out our own salvation, this grace comes first, then convincing grace, which Scripture calls repentance, and then salvation proper in its two branches, justification and sanctification. Elsewhere he compared repentance to the porch of a house and faith to its door.

Most Christian traditions teach some grace that goes first, a point the debate often obscures. Roger Olson points out that Calvinists hold such a grace too, understood as always effective and given to the elect. The dispute concerns two questions: whether this grace reaches everyone or only the elect, and whether it can be refused.

Behind both questions stands the doctrine this grace was built to answer, total depravity: the teaching that sin has so bound the fallen will that no one turns to God unaided. If the will is bound, something must go before it. What goes before, and what it does to the will, is where the traditions part.

Where did the doctrine come from? Augustine, Orange and Trent

The doctrine was first worked out by Augustine of Hippo against Pelagius, who taught that a fallen person could repent and believe without God's inward grace. Augustine argued that grace must prepare the will before it can turn, and his followers carried that conviction into the next century.

The decisive statement came at the Council of Orange, a synod of fourteen bishops under Caesarius of Arles that met on 3 July 529. It condemned the teaching later called semi-Pelagianism, which allowed the first step toward faith to come from the human will. Its conclusion states: "The sin of the first man has so impaired and weakened free will that no one thereafter can either love God as he ought or believe in God or do good for God's sake, unless the grace of divine mercy has preceded him." Canon 18 puts the order in one line: "That grace is not preceded by merit. Recompense is due to good works if they are performed; but grace, to which we have no claim, precedes them, to enable them to be done." The same council declared anathema anyone who believes that God foreordains people to evil, and Pope Boniface II confirmed its teaching.

The Council of Trent carried this forward in its sixth session (1547). Its fifth chapter teaches that in adults "the beginning of the said Justification is to be derived from the prevenient grace of God, through Jesus Christ." The same chapter holds both halves of the later Protestant debate in a single sentence: the sinner "is also able to reject it; yet is he not able, by his own free will, without the grace of God, to move himself unto justice in His sight."

Catholic theology then refined the vocabulary. The Catholic Encyclopedia distinguishes preventing grace, which comes before the will's free decision, from co-operating grace, which accompanies it. It also distinguishes efficacious grace, which infallibly reaches its effect, from merely sufficient grace, which "also confers full power for action" yet goes unfruitful when the will freely resists. What makes efficacious grace infallible divided Thomists from Molinists, and the dispute ran long enough that Pope Clement VIII convened the Congregatio de Auxiliis at the end of the sixteenth century to hear it.

How did Arminius and Wesley develop the doctrine?

Jacobus Arminius inherited this tradition and pressed it against the Reformed doctrine of his day. In a 1608 letter to Hippolytus a Collibus he wrote: "Free will is unable to begin or to perfect any true and spiritual good, without grace." He described that grace in full: "This grace goes before, accompanies, and follows; it excites, assists, operates that we will, and co-operates lest we will in vain." Arminius affirmed human inability as firmly as his opponents did. His difference lay in what grace does with that inability.

A year after his death, some forty-three ministers met at The Hague on 14 January 1610 and signed the Remonstrance, drawn up by Jan Uytenbogaert. Its third article teaches that fallen man "can of and by himself neither think, will, nor do anything that is truly good (such as having faith eminently is)." Its fourth names "prevenient or assisting, awakening, following, and co-operative grace," and adds that this grace "is not irresistible, in as much as it is written concerning many that they have resisted the Holy Ghost." The Synod of Dort answered the five articles in 1618–1619.

John Wesley gave the doctrine its widest reach. In sermon 85 he wrote: "Salvation begins with what is usually termed (and very properly) preventing grace; including the first wish to please God, the first dawn of light concerning his will, and the first slight transient conviction of having sinned against him." Wesley held that no one lives in a state of mere nature. Conscience itself "is more properly termed preventing grace," and so "no man sins because he has not grace, but because he does not use the grace which he hath." In Predestination Calmly Considered he spoke of "a measure of free-will supernaturally restored" to fallen humanity.

The Methodist Articles of Religion fixed the doctrine in Article VIII: we have no power to do good works acceptable to God "without the grace of God by Christ preventing us, that we may have a good will, and working with us, when we have that good will." That article remains official teaching in the United Methodist Church and the Church of the Nazarene, and it is shared across the Wesleyan-Holiness family.

Volume One gives Arminius and Wesley a chapter each in Resolving the Free Will Dilemma.

Is prevenient grace in the Bible?

The phrase is absent from Scripture, so the honest question is whether the doctrine is present. Its defenders appeal to four texts, and its critics read the same four differently, so each should be read in its setting.

The first is the prologue of John, which speaks of the Word coming into the world:

"The true light that gives light to everyone was coming into the world." (John 1:9, NIV)

Wesley read this as an inward light given to every person. Sam Storms, following Thomas Schreiner, replies that the verse could as easily describe common grace or general revelation. The verse is contested, and both readings fit its context.

The second is Jesus's saying in Capernaum:

"No one can come to me unless the Father who sent me draws them, and I will raise them up at the last day." (John 6:44, NIV)

Both sides agree that no one comes without being drawn. They disagree about whether the person drawn is always the person raised, since the verse joins the two in one sentence.

The third is the Arminian's strongest text for a drawing that reaches everyone:

"And I, when I am lifted up from the earth, will draw all people to myself." (John 12:32, NIV)

John adds that Jesus said this to show the kind of death He was going to die. Arminians take "all people" at full extent; Reformed readers take the scope differently. The fourth is Paul's summary of the gospel:

"For the grace of God has appeared that offers salvation to all people." (Titus 2:11, NIV)

Read in its paragraph, this is the grace that appeared in Christ and now teaches His people to live godly lives. Taken together, these texts establish that grace goes first and that the offer is made to all. A universal restoration of the will's faculty is an inference drawn to hold those two truths together, and whether the inference is necessary is the real question.

Why do Calvinists reject prevenient grace?

Calvinists reject the universal, resistible form of prevenient grace on three grounds: it leaves the decisive difference between believer and unbeliever in the person, they find no text that teaches it in that form, and it treats the dead in sin as though they were ill. Reformed theology teaches its own grace that goes first: effectual calling, often summarized as irresistible grace. The Canons of Dort deny that regeneration leaves matters so that, "after God's work is done, it remains in human power whether or not to be reborn or converted." They also deny that a believer "distinguishes oneself by free choice from others who are furnished with equal or sufficient grace for faith and conversion." The target of that second line is a universal grace that can be refused.

R. C. Sproul gave the first objection its sharpest form in Chosen by God. "The $64 question for advocates of prevenient grace is why some people cooperate with it and others don't." If two people receive the same grace and one believes, the difference between them lies somewhere other than grace. If it lies in the believer's humility, wisdom or earnestness, then he has something to boast about, and Scripture excludes boasting. The Council of Orange had already cited Paul on this point, asking with him what anyone has that he did not receive (1 Corinthians 4:7).

The second objection concerns Scripture. Sproul pressed it directly: "Does the Bible teach such a doctrine of prevenient grace? If so, where?" Schreiner argued in 1995 that the texts above teach something short of the Wesleyan doctrine, and Storms concludes that Scripture is silent on it.

The third concerns the depth of the fall. Paul describes sinners as dead:

"But because of his great love for us, God, who is rich in mercy, made us alive with Christ even when we were dead in transgressions—it is by grace you have been saved." (Ephesians 2:4–5, NIV)

The dead need raising, the Reformed critic argues, and a grace that leaves the outcome open treats death as illness. The objection belongs to the wider Reformed system summarized in the five points.

Is prevenient grace semi-Pelagian?

Semi-Pelagianism is the view that fallen people, though unable to reach righteousness without grace, can make the first move toward God without it, and that God waits for that first move. Classical Arminianism stands clear of that charge, because it places grace before the first good wish, and the charge lands more squarely on positions that deny any incapacity at all. Olson states the essence of semi-Pelagianism in one sentence: "The initiative is on the human side." It is associated with John Cassian and the monks of southern Gaul whom Orange corrected. The question it answers is who moves first, while Calvinists and Arminians agree that God moves first and disagree about whether His first move can be refused. Keeping the two questions apart is how the charge can be tested fairly.

Some Reformed writers extend the charge to Arminianism. John Hendryx calls the Arminian doctrine "a lesser degree of the same error as semi-pelagianism," because the decisive act of faith still arises from the person's own choice.

The Arminian reply is strong. Arminius denied that free will can begin any spiritual good without grace, and Wesley placed grace before the first wish to please God. On that point both stand with Orange, whose canons condemn a beginning of faith from nature. Olson argues that Arminius and his followers affirmed the necessity of supernatural grace for the first good movement of the will. The Society of Evangelical Arminians argues that the charge cuts both ways: Reformed compatibilists concede that the unregenerate would believe if they wanted to, so the question of natural ability presses on both sides.

The charge presses harder on a newer position. A 2012 statement by non-Calvinist Southern Baptists denied that Adam's sin incapacitated anyone's free will, and Leighton Flowers has argued that the gospel itself does everything the Arminian doctrine assigns to a separate grace, so that a further enabling grace is redundant. On this view, now often called Provisionism, God's initiative is real and comes first, carried in the gospel rather than in an inward restoration of the will, and a hearer who answers God's own appeal is answering grace. Olson judged the 2012 statement semi-Pelagian as written. Classical Arminianism affirms the incapacity Provisionism denies, so the two positions should be judged separately.

How does Frame-Indexed Classical Theism read the debate?

Frame-Indexed Classical Theism (FICT) is a research program in analytic theology that resolves classical theological dilemmas by diagnosing them as artifacts of a single error. It is the Many Beings Framework's position. Wesleyan-Arminian prevenient grace, Reformed irresistible grace and Provisionism each give a different answer about what grace does before faith. FICT argues that all three answer a question built on one word used in one sense, and that the dilemma dissolves once the word is read in its two senses.

The framework holds that there is one reality. God apprehends it in His own frame: timelessly, in one simple act, depending on nothing. We apprehend the same reality in the human frame: in sequence, in parts, as creatures who depend on Him for every moment. Certain words, freedom and agency among them, are said of each frame analogically, with related but distinct content. Treating such a word as though it meant the same thing in both is what the framework calls the Many Beings Fallacy.

Apply that to the question every side asks: can the fallen will turn to God? "Free will" names two things. The first is finite freedom, the power to choose among real alternatives, and it survived the fall. The Canons of Dort say as much: by the fall humans "did not cease to be human, endowed with intellect and will." The second is the power to secure righteousness, and even to perceive righteousness as a lived reality, and the fall removed that. Arminians hear "cannot turn" in the first sense and supply a restored faculty. Calvinists hear it in the second and place regeneration before faith. Each is right about the sense it hears.

Within the human frame, grace goes first. Christ's finished work is offered in the gospel, the Father draws, and the sinner's answer is his own. So is his refusal, and Stephen charged his hearers with it to their faces: "You always resist the Holy Spirit!" (Acts 7:51). That is the Wesleyan truth, and the framework keeps it whole. In God's frame, His knowing and willing are one eternal act, and no refusal defeats it. That is the Reformed truth, kept whole as well.

The framework's one reservation concerns a device rather than the doctrine. On its reading the fall took righteousness from the finite will and left the will itself in place, so a universal restoration of a lost faculty of choice answers a loss the framework locates elsewhere, and it judges that device unnecessary. What the device was built to secure stands: from the human frame the Wesleyan-Arminian and Reformed accounts describe one work of grace, as our article on total depravity argues, and the reservation touches only what each says the fall removed. Righteousness is what no finite chooser can produce, so what grace supplies is Christ's righteousness brought within reach of faith:

"For it is by grace you have been saved, through faith—and this is not from yourselves, it is the gift of God—not by works, so that no one can boast." (Ephesians 2:8–9, NIV)

Orange's conclusion still stands on this reading. No one believes unless the grace of divine mercy has preceded him, because faith receives what it could never have made.

Critics will press from both directions. A Wesleyan or Catholic reader will say this is Provisionism with new vocabulary, and that a finite will able to receive Christ edges toward the natural beginning of faith Orange condemned. The framework's answer is that it affirms the incapacity Provisionism denies, and that both the object of faith and the drawing toward it are grace. A Reformed reader will say that if refusal is real in the human frame, the decisive cause seems to rest with the creature. The answer there is that there is one reality and both reports of it are true, and Volume One makes that argument at length. The pressure remains for readers on either side. The statement of Frame-Indexed Classical Theism sets out the framework in one place.

Volume One carries this reading of grace, freedom and sovereignty through the major positions; download it free.

The four answers compared

Each answer protects something, and the table shows what each leaves open.

Frequently asked questions

What is the difference between prevenient, justifying and sanctifying grace?

In Wesleyan theology these are three movements of one grace. The first goes before conversion, awakening conscience, conviction and the first desire for God. Justifying grace pardons the sinner and restores him to God's favour through faith in Christ. Sanctifying grace follows, delivering the believer from the power of sin and renewing him in God's image. Wesley described the whole as one salvation, beginning with the grace that goes before and continuing through justification and sanctification.

Do Catholics believe in prevenient grace?

Yes. The Council of Orange (529) taught that no one believes in God unless grace has preceded him, and the Council of Trent (1547) derived the beginning of justification from "the prevenient grace of God, through Jesus Christ." Catholic theology holds that this grace can be resisted. It distinguishes sufficient grace, which gives real power to act, from efficacious grace, which infallibly reaches its effect.

Is prevenient grace the same as common grace?

They overlap in effect but differ in purpose. Reformed common grace restrains sin and gives everyone some knowledge of God, with no saving purpose. The Wesleyan grace that goes before aims at salvation, drawing each person toward faith. Wesley called conscience itself preventing grace, and Arminian writers note that Reformed descriptions of common grace can look very similar. The difference lies in what God intends the grace to accomplish.

What is the difference between prevenient grace and irresistible grace?

Both are grace that goes before faith. The Arminian form is given to all and can be refused, so it makes faith possible without making it certain. Irresistible grace, as the Canons of Dort teach it, is given to the elect and brings them to faith without fail. Frame-Indexed Classical Theism, set beside both, holds refusal real in the human frame and God's act undefeated in His own.

Does everyone receive prevenient grace?

Wesleyans answer yes. Wesley held that no one lives in a state of mere nature and that every conscience bears some light from God. Reformed critics object that Paul ties faith to hearing the gospel (Romans 10:14–17), so a grace given to those who never hear breaks the pattern. The Many Beings Framework holds that grace goes before every true response to God, and that the offer of the gospel is made to all.

Where to go from here

The doctrine was built to hold two true sentences together: grace goes first, and the sinner who refuses is responsible for refusing. It holds them, and that is why it has lasted from Orange to the Church of the Nazarene. The question it answered, whether the fallen will can turn, was the part that needed indexing, because "free will" was doing double duty in it.

Volume One sets out that indexing and carries it through Calvinism, Arminianism and Molinism, and it is free to download. The book page for Resolving the Free Will Dilemma describes the argument chapter by chapter, and the series takes the same discipline into evil, time and providence.

Related reading

• Limited Atonement
• Irresistible Grace
• What Is the Unforgivable Sin? Scripture, Views, and Fear