Repentance Before Faith?

“Repentance, an entire change of mind and purpose, turning from sin and all self-righteousness, as a helpless, lost sinner, and turning to God, comes before faith in Christ. ‘Repent and believe the gospel.’ Then when one has believed on Christ his is born again: ‘Whosoever believeth that Jesus is the Christ is born of God.’” (The New Testament Church, Evangelist T. T. Martin, ch. 2, pg. 14)

Problems with this view:

  1. Repentance before faith is insincere. Indeed it is impossible to be sincerely convicted by that which one does not believe.

  2. Repentance before faith is not pleasing to God. “Without faith it is impossible to please Him” (Hebrews 11:6). It follows that if any repentance that takes place prior to faith cannot please God.

  3. Repentance before faith is a denial of total depravity. “The wicked, through the pride of his countenance, will not seek after God: God is not in all his thoughts.” (Psalm 10:4) To repent is to seek reconciliation with God, an act which man in his fallen state, untouched by the regenerating grace of God, cannot perform.

  4. Turning to God without faith is impossible. It is impossible to sincerely turn to a God in which one does not believe.

  5. The gospel reveals the righteousness of God TO FAITH. (Romans 1:17) The unregenerate have no faith (II Thessalonians 3:2) and thus gospel repentance is not possible for them because they cannot receive the message. This is why Christ taught, “Except a man be born again…” (John 3:3). In so doing He explicitly taught that regeneration precedes the exercise of faith in time.

  6. The verb tenses of scripture. Close examination of verb tenses employed in passages like John 1:12-13, John 5:24, and I John 5:1 prove that regeneration comes BEFORE faith. “Whosoever believeth (present tense, active voice - done by the subject) that Jesus is the Christ is born (perfect tense - an action which is viewed as having been completed in the past, once and for all, not needing to be repeated; passive voice - subject as recipient of the action) of God.” (I John 5:1a) To draw that out more clearly, if the first moment of belief occurred at high-noon, then regeneration occurred in the morning or before.

These observations distinguish Primitive Baptist theology from quid-pro-quo Arminianism that dominates the Christian landscape. Moreover, it also distinguishes us from and the garden variety “Calvinism” with which it is often incorrectly conjoined. When we say “regeneration precedes faith” we mean that regeneration occurs chronologically before the exercise of faith. This is not some so-called “logical but not chronological order.” It is a temporal and sequential ordering of two events in time. .

That distinction carries massive theological implications that all Christian’s do well to explore.

- Elder Daniel Samons

Daniel Samons