A Presuppositional Response to the Calvinist Critique of Preceding Grace
John 6:44, John 12:32, Preceding Grace, Enabled Depravity, and Christocentric Election
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Thank you for raising a substantive objection. Before addressing John 6:44, John 12:32, Ephesians 2, and human response, I think we need to identify several presuppositions already at work in your argument. Everyone
You are not approaching these passages from a theological vacuum. Neither am I. The question is therefore not whose interpretation has presuppositions, but which presuppositions best account for the entire biblical witness.
The Presuppositions Driving the Critique
Your argument appears to assume the following:
1. If God draws salvifically, that drawing must always be irresistible.
2. All grace related to salvation must have the same effectual or regenerative function.
3. “Dead in sin” must be interpreted with all the properties of a literal corpse.
4. If God gives grace that can be resisted, God’s purpose has failed.
5. If human faith is not irresistibly caused, it must therefore be autonomous, meritorious cooperation.
6. Election can refer only to individuals eternally selected before creation, leaving no Christocentric mode of election through subsequent union with Christ.
Those are precisely the assumptions CLARE Theology disputes. If they are simply built into the argument, Calvinism wins before the texts are actually examined.
1. Does helkō Mean “Compel by Irresistible Force”?
You wrote that the Greek ἕλκω / ἑλκύω (helkō/helkyō) literally means “to compel by irresistible force.” That is too strong lexically.
LSJ gives the basic range as “draw, drag,” but also includes metaphorical uses such as drawing to oneself or attracting. Abbott-Smith distinguishes physical dragging from metaphorical “draw, lead, impel.” Thayer likewise distinguishes physical dragging from metaphorical drawing by inward influence. In these lexicons, John 6:44 and John 12:32 are treated as metaphorical uses, not as proof that the lexical meaning itself is “irresistible grace.”
Therefore, pointing to Paul being physically dragged in Acts 16:19 or a fishing net being hauled in John 21:11 does not prove that every metaphorical use of the same verb carries the same degree and mode of force.
The same word does not imply an identical mode of force in every context. Context determines the force of the metaphor.
2. CLARE Can Affirm Effectual Drawing in John 6:44
“No one can come to me unless the Father who sent me draws him, and I will raise him up on the last day.” — John 6:44
CLARE Theology need not deny that John 6:44 describes an effectual drawing. In fact, CLARE can understand this passage as the Father’s effectual drawing of the Eternal Elect.
The Eternal Elect may resist Preceding Grace for a time, but God’s ultimate saving purpose toward them cannot fail. They will come. CLARE calls this Irresistible Saving Grace.
The disagreement is not whether John 6:44 can be effectual. The disagreement is whether every gracious divine drawing mentioned elsewhere must therefore have the same soteriological function.
That conclusion does not come from the lexical meaning of helkō itself. It comes from a prior theological system.
3. What About John 12:32?
You make a legitimate contextual observation: Greeks approach Jesus in John 12:20, so some interpreters understand the “all” in John 12:32 as emphasizing Jews and Gentiles. That interpretation deserves consideration.
“And I, when I am lifted up from the earth, will draw all to myself.” — John 12:32
But there are two important qualifications. First, the Greek does not literally say “all peoples.” John uses πάντας (pantas), the accusative masculine plural of πᾶς (pas), meaning “all.” “People” is supplied in English. The phrase “all kinds of people” is therefore an interpretation of scope, not the lexical wording itself.
Second, CLARE Theology does not require John 12:32 to bear the entire doctrine of universal Preceding Grace. Even if, for argument’s sake, the Jew/Gentile interpretation were granted, other passages still have to be accounted for:
• John 1:9 — Christ gives light to everyone.
• John 16:8 — the Spirit convicts the world.
• Titus 2:11 — the grace of God appears bringing salvation to all people.
• Romans 2:4 — God’s kindness leads toward repentance.
• Romans 1:19 — God has made knowledge of Himself plain.
Preceding Grace rests on a cumulative biblical pattern of divine initiative rather than on a single interpretation of John 12:32.
4. The Critique Conflates Preceding Grace with Regenerating Grace
The objection claims that CLARE creates a grace that “attempts to save but fails.” But that assumes something CLARE explicitly denies: Preceding Grace and Irresistible Saving Grace are not the same operation with different success rates.
| Preceding Grace | Irresistible Saving Grace |
| Reveals, illuminates, draws, convicts, confronts, and enables genuine response. | Infallibly accomplishes God’s saving purpose toward the Eternal Elect. |
Therefore, saying Preceding Grace can be resisted does not mean, “God attempted regeneration and the sinner defeated Him.” God was not attempting irresistible regeneration in that operation.
The Calvinistic presupposition here is that if grace has any relationship to salvation, its purpose must always be infallible regeneration. But Scripture can describe real divine activity toward sinners without implying that every such activity infallibly regenerates them.
Acts 7:51 speaks of resisting the Holy Spirit. Romans 2:4 speaks of God’s kindness leading to repentance. Jesus speaks of people being unwilling to come.
If God sovereignly intends an operation to permit resistance, resistance does not defeat omnipotence. God accomplishes exactly what He intended that operation to accomplish.
5. Ephesians 2 and the “Corpse” Argument
“A corpse cannot be partially un-neutralized to decide whether it wants to be resurrected.” — objection summarized
The analogy is rhetorically vivid, but it imports characteristics of a literal biological corpse into Paul’s metaphor that Paul himself does not include.
In Ephesians 2, the spiritually dead are simultaneously walking according to the world, following the prince of the power of the air, living in the passions of the flesh, and carrying out desires. These “dead” people are active. Therefore, spiritual death cannot simply mean physical non-functionality in every respect.
CLARE agrees that spiritual death includes alienation from God, bondage to sin, condemnation, and inability to generate spiritual life from oneself. CLARE also agrees that God makes us alive. The sinner does not regenerate himself.
But this is exactly where the critic must understand two CLARE doctrines before assessing Preceding Grace: Hypothetical Total Depravity and Anthropology of Enabled Depravity.
Hypothetical Total Depravity
Hypothetical Total Depravity describes humanity considered apart from every gracious initiative of God. In such a condition, no sinner could produce saving faith, seek God independently, or rescue himself. Humanity would be spiritually dead and entirely unable apart from grace.
Anthropology of Enabled Depravity
Enabled Depravity describes humanity’s actual lived condition under God’s already-present gracious activity. The sinner remains fallen, sinful, unregenerate, dependent, and incapable of saving himself, yet the sinner is not untouched by God.
• Christ illuminates.
• The Spirit convicts.
• God reveals.
• The Gospel calls.
• Grace precedes.
CLARE does not teach a “half-resurrected corpse.” Preceding Grace is not regeneration. Regeneration remains God’s act.
6. “If One Believes and Another Does Not, Man Becomes the Decisive Cause”
This is probably the strongest objection. The question is: if two sinners receive Preceding Grace and one believes while the other resists, what distinguishes them?
First, CLARE does not teach that every individual receives a mathematically identical quantity of grace under identical providential circumstances. Universal does not mean mechanically identical. People receive different amounts of revelation, Gospel exposure, conviction, providential circumstances, knowledge, and opportunities.
But even if the hypothetical is granted, two people under equally sufficient Preceding Grace, the conclusion still does not follow unless another presupposition is added: if the response is genuinely human, it must be autonomous and meritorious.
“To the one who does not work but believes…” Romans 4:5
Paul himself distinguishes belief from meritorious works. CLARE therefore distinguishes between condition, instrument, and cause. Faith is the condition or instrument by which Christ is received. Faith is not the efficient cause of salvation.
The sinner did not provide the incarnation, Christ’s righteousness, the cross, the atonement, Preceding Grace, divine revelation, justification, regeneration, preservation, or glorification.
The sinner provides a response to salvation, not a contribution to salvation.
A critic may define monergism so narrowly that anything short of God’s causal determination of the very act of believing counts as synergism. But then the argument becomes circular: “Calvinistic monergism is true because I define salvation so that only Calvinistic monergism qualifies.”
CLARE’s claim is narrower and more precise: God alone is the efficient saving cause. The human being genuinely responds beneath and because of prior grace. A genuine response is not the same as a co-redemptive contribution.
7. The Critique Is Not Presupposing Christocentric Election
The objection also assumes that “the elect” can mean only those individuals eternally selected before creation. CLARE affirms those people and calls them the Eternal Elect. But CLARE’s doctrine of election begins even more fundamentally with Christ Himself as the Elect One.
Ephesians 1 repeatedly locates salvation “in Christ,” “in Him,” “in whom we have redemption,” and “in Him…you heard the gospel…and believed.” Therefore, election is not treated as an abstract decree detached from Christ but as fundamentally Christocentric.
| Eternal Elect | Preceding Elect |
| Elected in Christ before creation and therefore certainly brought to Him. | Come to Christ under God’s already-present Preceding Grace and, through union with the Elect One, become elect in Him. |
John 6:37 itself contains two statements that CLARE refuses to weaken:
“All that the Father gives me will come to me…”
“…and whoever comes to me I will never cast out.”
The first clause affirms the certainty of the Eternal Elect. The second affirms the certainty of Christ’s reception of the one who comes. The critic assumes that the second clause can describe only the identical group already mentioned in the first. CLARE asks whether that identification must be assumed rather than demonstrated.
The Fundamental Presuppositional Disagreement
The disagreement is therefore deeper than helkō.
| Presuppositions of the Critique | CLARE Framework |
| One mode of election. | Christocentric Election with two modes of election. |
| One effectual mode of salvific grace. | Resistible Preceding Grace and Irresistible Saving Grace. |
| Spiritual death read through literal corpse inability. | Hypothetical Total Depravity and Enabled Depravity. |
| Genuine resistibility treated as divine failure. | God sovereignly ordaining genuinely resistible gracious operations. |
| Human response treated as autonomous unless irresistibly caused. | Grace-enabled human response without co-redemptive contribution. |
That does not automatically prove CLARE correct. It means CLARE cannot be refuted merely by assuming Calvinism’s categories and then observing that CLARE does not fit them.
The question both sides must answer is: Which framework allows the greatest amount of Scripture to speak in its own context without forcing one class of texts to erase another?
That is the Claridian Method: Scripture first. Christ at the center. System underneath Scripture — even CLARE Theology.
Lexical References
• Liddell-Scott-Jones (LSJ), entry for ἕλκω
• Abbott-Smith Greek Lexicon, entry for ἕλκω
• Thayer Greek Lexicon, Strong’s 1670 (helkō)
• Interlinear text of John 12:32
DGMA Doctrine – Christ Over Everything
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