At the tomb of Lazarus, Jesus says, “Lazarus, come out!” (John 11:43). And at his words, the dead man awakes again and walks out of the tomb. He is obedient to the call of the Lord. Indeed, the call of the Lord is what seems to enable the obedience, and even the hearing of the command!
Reformed theologians have historically taken as a picture of what happens in conversion. In God’s calling of sinners from death to life in the gospel (Eph. 2:1-10), those who were dead to God, hear the proclamation of the gospel and find themselves alive anew in Christ. This has traditionally been termed “the effectual call.”
And while this is a mainstay of Reformed theology, there have historically been numerous questions and controversies surrounding it, even down into the present day. For instance, who does the calling? And is the calling that awakens us to new life identical with the outward preaching of the Word? Or what is the semantic content of the call? What is God saying? Or is he even saying anything? Is the language of calling more symbolic or metaphorical? If he is saying something, how different is it than human speech? What about the relationship between calling and regeneration, or rebirth? Are they distinct things? If so, is there a logical order between them? Do you have to be reborn before you can hear God? Or do you have to hear God in order be reborn? Or what about illumination and testimony? The questions just keep coming.
While I’ve read a bit about it in the past, I haven’t been able to take a significant amount of time on the subject. Which is why I was pleased to see this new volume Called by Triune Grace: Divine Rhetoric and the Effectual Call by Jonathan Hoglund in the IVP series Studies in Christian Doctrine and Scripture. Written originally as doctoral dissertation, in this study Hoglund puts forward a carefully-constructed proposal for thinking about the effectual call in trinitarian perspective.
I won’t give a full-on review try to give a general impression of what you’ll find within.
Integrated. In Called by Triune Grace, Hoglund has given us a model of biblical, historical, and dogmatic reasoning at are fully-integrated. So, you’ll find plenty of sections engaging key biblical material in their historic context, in conversation with recent interpreters, lexical studies, and so forth. Specifically, Hoglund engages Paul’s theology of the call in letters like the Thessalonians, Romans, and others. He also tackles key material in the gospel of John with care and erudition. He wants to show that there is a solid grounding for thinking of the effectual call on multiple levels of biblical discourse, across the canon, and not mere “proof-texts” here and there.
You’ll also find careful examinations of historic contributors to the theology of the effectual call like Augustine, Calvin, Francis Turretin, John Owen, Jonathan Edwards, Claude Pajon, Friedrich Schleiermacher, as well as the more recent proposals of Michael Horton, Kevin Vanhoozer, and Oswald Bayer. These expositions serve both to demonstrate the range of (primarily) Reformed theologians approaches to the issue, as well sharpen the theological questions we have to wrestle with in treating it properly.
But these sections aren’t hermetically-sealed. So the historical sections have an eye on exegesis and the exegetical sections freely consult both historic and contemporary interpreters of the text. What’s more, all of this is done in a dogmatic key. Which is to say that Hoglund is reading Scripture and history in order to settle constructive, dogmatic questions about how the Church is supposed to confess the work of the Triune God in salvation today.
Triune Rhetoric. Materially, Hoglund is concerned to show that a proper dogmatic account has to take seriously the semantic content of the call–that in the effectual call, God doesn’t deal with us as blocks of stone and wood, but as communicative agents made in his image. That’s something the whole tradition has tried to be careful about, by the way. And yet Hoglund thinks that recent suggestions by Vanhoozer and Horton about the importance of the category of communication for the effectual call are helpful for developing our theology of the call.
He presses beyond them, though, in his deployment of the category of rhetoric as an appropriate analogy for thinking about the effectual call, especially once placed in Trinitarian perspective. To boil everything down into an inadequately distilled form, it’s about capturing the ethos, logos, and pathos of the Triune God’s summons of persons from death to life in Christ. After throwing in all the necessary caveats about the unified activity of the Trinity ad extra, appropriations, etc. Hoglund assigns these three components to the persons of the Trinity and works it out all very cleanly and suggestively.
I was about to try and summarize it all for you, but I realized it’s a bit ambitious to do so without doing damage to the proposal. I’ll simply note that Hoglund is careful to establish that: (a) the whole Trinity is at work in the act of divine persuasion; (b) this persuasion is communicative, not bypassing our intellect, and so is tied to our understanding of the actual content of the summons to trust Christ as our saving Lord; and (c) it is a divine persuasion, such that the Spirit’s work in illumining our mind, will, heart to find Christ beautiful is efficacious in a way that is beyond that of any other speaker, not just quantitatively, but qualitatively.
Honestly, I’m not doing the book justice. It’s a clear, but comprehensive piece of work and I highly commend to anyone interesting in the questions surrounding the effectual call and salvation.
Soli Deo Gloria
