On 6 July, Bob Wilkin of the Grace Evangelical Society published a response to one paragraph of my article of 19 June, The Fringe of Focused Free Grace. Since he named me, and since some readers will take his reply as a sufficient answer, the record needs a brief correction. This post is that correction, and it will be my only one.
The correction
Wilkin attributes to me the view that Martha “believed that if she persevered in good works, then she would gain everlasting life,” and that this belief “was sufficient for her to be born again, even though she did not know it.”
I hold no such view. I have argued the contrary, at length and in print; most recently, in When Believing Is Never Enough (24 June), which rejects every form of works-conditioned faith and every perseverance test attached to it. The position Wilkin describes is not mine; it is a construction built on the assumption that anyone who denies his definition of faith’s content must default to a works gospel. That assumption is the very thing in dispute, and assuming it is not the same as defending it.1
The concession
My article predicted that GES would be “forced into the awkward move of claiming that to believe Jesus is the Christ just is to believe Him for everlasting life — which effectively concedes the messianic-identity thesis whilst refusing to name it.”
Wilkin’s response performs the move exactly: “to believe that Jesus is the Christ is to believe that He guarantees everlasting life to all who believe in Him.” Asserted, not argued — and with no acknowledgement that the assertion was the predicted concession.
More telling still is his own exegesis of the pericope. On Wilkin’s reading, Martha’s “Yes, Lord” affirms the promise of vv. 25–26, and “then she stated why she knew that was true: because He is the Christ, the Son of God.” Read that again. If the Christological confession is the why — the ground of Martha’s certainty — then the identity is the premise and the assurance is the entailment. Person first, promise flowing from the Person. That is the thesis of my article, restated with different emphasis and offered as its refutation.
Wilkin adds that in John’s Gospel “to believe in [pisteuō eis] Jesus is the same as to believe that [pisteuō hoti] He is the Christ.” Quite so — and note what that equivalence does: it makes the hoti clause carry the content of faith. The hoti clause is a statement of identity. The equivalence is the messianic-identity thesis wearing GES colours.
He does land one fair observation: my paragraph did not work through the fact that Martha was answering a question. But the structure of the dialogue cuts against him, not for him. Jesus poses a question about His promise — “Do you believe this?” — and Martha answers with a confession of His identity, and the narrative treats her answer as fully adequate. John himself translates promise-belief into identity-confession. Grounds are prior to what they ground; Wilkin’s own “why” puts the confession in the premise slot.
What actually remains in dispute
Strip away the misattribution and the concession, and the residual disagreement is narrow. Both of us hold that the identity and the promise are locked together; Wilkin’s own analysis grants that the identity grounds the promise. What remains is a single question: whether conscious grasp of the promise, including its irrevocability, is a condition of the new birth — such that a person who believes that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, in the full Johannine sense of those titles, is nonetheless unregenerate if uncertain of never dying spiritually.
Neither John 11 nor John 20:31 states that condition. Wilkin’s reply assumes it in every paragraph and defends it in none. His reading also requires at least three interpretive questions to be settled in his favour without argument: the referent of τοῦτο in “Do you believe this?”, the sense of “shall never die,” and the equivalence of “the Christ” with “the Guarantor of irrevocable life.” Three unargued settlements do not amount to what the verses “clearly” say.
What remains unanswered
The response engages one paragraph. It does not touch the ὅτι clause of John 20:31, which names the content of faith in John’s own words; the grammatical argument concerning εἰς ζωὴν αἰώνιον in 1 Timothy 1:16; the asymmetry test, which exposes which formulation is doing the salvific work; the Synoptic and Petrine witness; or the Johannine idiom of believing εἰς τὸ ὄνομα αὐτοῦ. Those arguments stand as written.
I said in 2024 that I would not organise my work around this controversy, and I will not. The article of 19 June makes the case; this post corrects the record; the file is closed. Readers who want the substance should read the arguments themselves rather than either party’s account of the other.
- Lest the same construction be attempted from another angle: I affirm the eternal security of the believer without qualification. The dispute is not whether John 11:26 entails the believer’s security — I take it that it does — but whether a conscious affirmation of that security is the propositional content of saving faith. Entailments of a truth are not conditions for believing it. ↩︎
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