Have you ever come home from church confused? Not because the preaching was cold or careless, but because it was earnest, searching, reverent, and somehow you still left unsure whether the gospel was actually for you. You could nod along with many familiar phrases. And yet when the benediction came, Christ seemed further away than when you walked in.
I know that experience well. For years, I sat under preaching that loved the doctrines of God’s sovereignty and election and the work of the Holy Spirit, and meant to honour them, but that had quietly wrapped the cross in barbed wire. The intention was to protect it, to keep unworthy hands off something holy. However, the effect was to keep needy sinners away from the one place they were commanded to run.
That is exactly the burden of a small, sharp book I highly recommend: Salvation Has Become Complicated: A Plea for Being Simply Reformed, by Johan Blaauwendraad. Blaauwendraad was no academic theologian. He was a Dutch professor of engineering and, for nearly twenty years, an office-bearer in the Gereformeerde Gemeenten (Dutch sister to the Netherlands Reformed Congregations in Canada and the USA. He wrote, by his own description, “as a concerned church member,” asking out loud what many in the pews were feeling but had no language for. The little book landed like a stone in a still pond, and it has been quietly comforting confused believers ever since. I received permission from the translators to distribute the English PDF version online.
Preaching Is Proclamation
Blaauwendraad begins where the Reformation began: preaching is proclamation. It is not a cautious description of what might, someday, happen in the rare elect soul. It is a herald’s announcement, made to everyone in earshot, that there is a free and general offer of grace, together with the command to repent and believe. (If that sounds like an overstatement, I’ve gathered evidence in this blog post: universal gospel appeals are everywhere in Scripture.)
He simply lets the Canons of Dort talk: “the promise of the gospel is, that whosoever believeth in Christ crucified, shall not perish, but have everlasting life. This promise, together with the command to repent and believe, ought to be declared and published to all nations, and to all persons promiscuously and without distinction” (II.5). No one is excluded. As Theodorus van der Groe put it, “You John, you Peter; you may freely say, ‘we poor sinners… therefore also come to Thee, and leaning upon thy sincere and general offer in Thy holy gospel, we humbly receive Thee.'”
Ebenezer Erskine compared the gospel to a letter delivered to your door with a check inside, made out in your name. “The fact that the letter has been addressed to me,” Erskine said, “gives me the right to present this check to the bank for payment.” That is the warrant of faith: not the depth of your conviction, not a sufficient quantity of sorrow, but the bare promise of a God who has bound Himself with an oath. To refuse that promise is not modesty; it is disobedience, even the exceeding wickedness of not believing in Christ. “Not a single condition is requisite for this coming,” Blaauwendraad insists. “The offer of grace is free, sincere, and unconditional.”
Faith and Justification Belong Together
In the theology of the Reformers, faith and justification are not two events with a gap between them. They are two sides of one coin. The moment the Spirit makes the gospel call effectual and a sinner receives Christ, God immediately imputes to him the righteousness of Christ. “Embracing Christ results in the immediate acquittal by the Father,” Blaauwendraad writes. “This is even true for the one who is most ‘hard of hearing.'”
The Heidelberg Catechism speaks exactly this language. To believe is to receive, to take hold of, to embrace. To embrace Christ is, in the same instant, to be clothed in His righteousness. There is no waiting room between faith and forgiveness. (That assurance is closer than many believers dare to think, as the Belgic Confession itself teaches.)
How It Got Complicated
So what changed? Over time, Blaauwendraad argues, a new and more complicated system crept in, what he calls the doctrine of “milestones.” On this scheme, the Christian life becomes a long staircase of distinct, datable experiences. Regeneration comes first, but for the already-quickened soul Christ is at first a hidden Person. There must come a separate revelation of the Word, then a revelation of the Person, then conscious justification “in the court of conscience,” then (later still) being led into the heart of the Father. Each stage is its own crisis, its own milestone, and a believer can be stalled for years between them. I’ve written about what happens when Reformed experiential preaching goes bad in exactly this way, and about the quiet despair of the soul who waited for the milestone and felt that “but nothing happened.”
One minister explained it to him with a banking illustration: at regeneration the money has already been transferred into your account by God, but you don’t know it until much later, when the statement finally arrives in the mail: the conscious experience of justification. Until that statement comes, the book candidly admits, the believer “is at bottom yet an enemy of sovereign grace… He must still be fully stripped and learn to despair of all his own righteousness. Only then does he partake of conscious justification.”
Notice what has happened: the free offer is now reserved for “sensible sinners.” Regeneration, not faith, has become the pivot on which everything turns. And the things the Reformation held inseparable (the offer, faith, justification) have been chronologically pried apart and scattered across a lifetime.
You Can Add It to the Word, but You Cannot Draw It Out
Blaauwendraad’s test is bracingly simple. Where is this in the standards? “In not one single answer of the Heidelberg Catechism, in not one article of the Canons of Dort, nor in one article of the Belgic Confession of Faith will you find such ideas and concepts.” Search Calvin, Olevianus, Hellenbroek: you will look for the milestone system “in vain.” His verdict on the whole apparatus of stages and distinctions is a sentence worth memorizing:
“These various ideas find little or no support in God’s Word. You can add them to the Word, but you cannot draw them from it.”
— Johan Blaauwendraad, Salvation Has Become Complicated
And he is honest about the pastoral cost. This complicated preaching is often prized as the most experiential and faithful of all, so that a minister who simply offers Christ to everyone is suspected of being “shallow.” Meanwhile the very people the system means to comfort are left hindered, examining themselves for a milestone instead of fleeing to a Savior; endlessly asking whether they are really elect when they should be looking to Christ. “Is it not true,” he asks, “that God’s children are now hindered by these complicated distinctions?”
Simply Reformed
The cure is not less doctrine. It is the recovery of the old, plain “trio”: offer, faith, justification, held tightly together as the Reformers held them. Blaauwendraad is careful and generous throughout. He never doubts the sincerity of the ministers he disagrees with, and he gladly affirms that faith is a sovereign, one-sided gift of God to a dead sinner. The character of grace is not his quarrel. The administration of grace is: how the Lord, in His Word, tells us to preach it and receive it.
His prescription is bang on: “In our time we are very much in need of a dash of Luther, a teaspoon of à Brakel, and a cup of Van der Groe.” (For the Luther part of that recipe, you could do far worse than to read Luther on Galatians.) A little more of the free promise. A little more of believing being commanded as a present duty, not merely awaited as a distant gift.
And the book ends, rightly, in hope. “There are yet many good things in Judah,” he writes. God still dwells among His people in spite of our detours, and “in our congregations there is still a simple life of faith which knows little about our concerns.” That simplicity is not shallowness. It is the gospel with the barbed wire taken down: Christ crucified, freely offered, immediately embraced, and ours.
If any of this names something you have felt but could never quite say, read the book for yourself. The English translation is available as a free download from Free Grace Baptist Church: Salvation Has Become Complicated.
