Please note that I have not read the books I cite below cover to cover. My research is often done by reading sections, referring from there to sections in other books, looking things up in the index, etc.
As I understand it, the charge of preparation
ism is that it is a form of crypto-Arminianism that teaches one or more of the following (these are my own phrasings):
- Unregenerate man can use his natural abilities to perform preparatory works that make him a worthy recipient of grace or a ready vessel for grace.
- There is a stage prior to conversion for the elect, where he becomes so conscious of and tormented by his sin that he is content to be damned.
- A man can temporally be in between death and life while in this preparatory stage, neither damned nor saved but moving from death to life.
- Repentance is logically and temporally prior to faith, and there is no true faith without a prior repentance.
Perry Miller, Norman Pettit, and R.T. Kendall contended that a number of Puritans held to one or more of the above teachings. Beeke and Smalley, in
Prepared by Grace for Grace, defend most of those Puritans from the charge while conceding a few crucial points. Such Puritans include Thomas Hooker, Thomas Shepard, Richard Sibbes, William Ames, and William Perkins. All are defended by Beeke and Smalley as orthodox reformed on the whole, even as they did indeed write about and defend the concept of preparatory grace. They make this defense in part by citing other renowned theologians who also affirmed preparatory grace, such as Augustine, Thomas Aquinas, Martin Luther, John Calvin, Ulrich Zwingli, Heinrich Bullinger, Theodore Beza, Zacharius Ursinus, Richard Greenham, Richard Rogers, Arthur Hildersam, John Preston, Jeremiah Burroughs, Thomas Goodwin, John Flavel, John Bunyan, Edward Leigh, Isaac Ambrose, Robert Rollock, William Guthrie, John Cotton, Jonathan Edwards, Francis Turretin, Wilhelmus à Brakel, Herman Witsius, Peter van Mastricht, Peter Bulkeley, Samuel Rutherford, John Owen, and Cotton Mather.
The exceptions I alluded to above are that Beeke and Smalley show that Hooker and Shepard taught the second error I listed above ("content to be damned") and that Hooker, Shepard, and Giles Firmin taught the third error (the intermediate stage).
As I understand Beeke and Smalley, the orthodox position they defend on preparatory grace is something like this:
- Many things can function, in God's sovereign will, as means of grace to the yet-unconverted elect man.
- The ordinary, though perhaps not universal, experience of a converted man is to first become conscious of his guilt and need for a savior, then to turn to Christ as his savior.
- Slicing and dicing of exactly when a person who had such experiences was actually regenerated and justified is unfruitful speculation.
- As part of communicating the free offer of the gospel, it is fitting for a Christian to exhort a non-Christian to examine his own sin, to consider the merits of Christ, etc.
This is not to say that no theologians veered into a Neonomian or crypto-Arminian preparationism. For all their excellences, Hooker, Shepard, and Firmin did err. Richard Baxter seems to be another. Sinclair Ferguson, who wrote the foreword to Beeke and Smalley's book, considers the opponents of the Marrow Men (chiefly James Hadow and Thomas Blackwell) to be preparationists, according to his book
The Whole Christ.
