Pink on The Sovereignty of God–Iain H. Murray

Author A. W. Pink

Category Book Excerpts

Date February 27, 2025

From time to time we receive questions about the editing of the Banner of Truth edition (first printed 1961) of A. W. Pink’s The Sovereignty of God. Here we reproduce the text of Chapter 16 of Iain H. Murray’s The Life of Arthur Pink, which deals at length with these questions:

As we have seen, it was in the area of his opposition to Arminian belief that Pink found himself especially isolated in the years when he sought public ministry. His book The Sovereignty of God (1918) did much to shut doors on him. Yet after his death, when a major renewal of belief in Calvinistic theology occurred—in no small part aided by his writings—it was the rediscovery of the sovereignty of divine grace, and the certainty that Christ’s redeeming work cannot fail, that gave his writings so much appeal to many. An extraordinary reversal occurred: the truth once so widely rejected had become a magnet and while Christian authors popular in Pink’s lifetime faded from view, he became widely read.

It is said that in 1982 Zondervan Publishing House was steadily selling between 1,500 and 2,000 copies of his Exposition of the Gospel of John every year. Baker Book House at that date had published twenty-two titles by Pink, with combined sales of almost 350,000 copies.¹ There was the same success with his Life of Elijah and Profiting from the Word, published by the Banner of Truth. Of all his titles, however, it is The Sovereignty of God that has done more than any other in redirecting the thinking of a younger generation. The Banner of Truth republished it in 1961, and to date it has sold more than 177,000 copies, plus others in foreign translations.

Pink did not adopt the title of Calvinist, nor did he require a person to be a Calvinist in order to be a Christian, but he did believe that the truths usually identified with that name are vital ones and, more than any other, it is his book The Sovereignty of God that explains why. But the edition of Sovereignty revised by the Banner of Truth in 1961 was not identical with the first edition of 1918, and this is a subject that needs explanation. We have already noted that the 1918 edition was revised by Pink in 1921.² Then another revision was done by him when he was at Morton’s Gap, Kentucky, in 1929. In the Foreword to that edition he wrote: ‘During the last ten years it has pleased God to grant us further light on certain parts of his Word, and this we have sought to use in improving our expositions of different passages. But it is with unfeigned thanksgiving that we find it unnecessary to either change or modify any doctrine.’³ The reader needs to keep these dates in mind in what follows.

How far Pink changed the book in 1929 we cannot tell, for while the text of this third edition has been reprinted many times since, no copies of the editions of 1918 or 1921 have been available to us to make a comparison. But what is certain is that, had he revised it again after 1929, more changes would have been made as his understanding of Calvinistic belief matured. From the 1930s onwards his references to hyper-Calvinism become very noticeable and strongly critical.⁴ The characteristic of that system of thought is the teaching that it is not the responsibility of gospel hearers to believe savingly on Christ. But Pink came to see that his own teaching on human responsibility was defective in the 1929 edition of The Sovereignty of God.

In part his deficiency at that date concerned a confusion in terminology, a confusion which endangered his whole argument. It has been near universally believed in Christian theology that human responsibility means that men are free moral agents – they are not machines, deprived of voluntary choice. But in 1929 Pink denied ‘free moral agency’ (pp. 171, 175, 177, 2 82 etc. ),⁵ apparently on the grounds that he believed it had been destroyed by the Fall of man. He wrote, ‘Strictly speaking, there are only two men who have ever walked this earth who were endowed with full and unimpaired responsibility, and they were the first and last Adams’ (p. 303). Such a statement inevitably suggests that sin has diminished if not removed the responsibility of everyone else for ‘the natural man is not a “free moral agent”‘ (p. 177). Pink said this because he wanted to safeguard the biblical truth that man’s fallen nature renders him spiritually dead and thus unable, without divine grace, to obey God. No Reformed Confession, however, has ever sought to present inability in terms of the cessation of free agency and voluntary choice. It is over what determines choice that Reformed doctrine differs from that of others.⁶

This is not to say that in 1929 Pink was unconscious of the need to show that men are accountable to God. On the contrary, his purpose in his chapter on ‘God’s Sovereignty and Human Responsibility’, retained in the 1929 edition of his book, was to meet the question ‘how the sinner can be held responsible for not doing what he could not do’. But in addressing this question he advanced a theory which he believed could cut what he called ‘the Gordian knot of theology’, namely, ‘The Scriptures distinguish sharply between natural inability and moral inability’ (p. 188). Using this distinction, then, it could be said that Blind Bartimaeus had ‘natural inability’ – he lacked the ability to see – thus differing from men in general whose ‘inability’ is a moral one; it lies, not in the lack of natural faculties, but in their depraved hearts. ‘The sinner’, Pink argued, ‘possesses natural ability, and this it is which renders him accountable to God’ (p. 191 ).

So the unconverted person will be held accountable for not doing what he has ‘the natural ability’ to do, that is to say, read the Bible, use the means of grace, cry to God about his inability and so on. ‘The fact of man’s responsibility rests upon his natural ability’ (p. 200). This argument is supposed to show that God does not, after all, call on men to do what they cannot do, namely, believe on Christ, and so the problem of responsibility is supposedly solved. Yet Pink himself, in a passing sentence, contradicts his case in the following words: ‘Each sinner who hears the gospel is “commanded” to believe ( 1 John 3 :23). Therefore every sinner is responsible to repent and believe’ (p.195).

It may be that Pink inserted the last quotation in his 1929 revision without considering how it ran counter to an earlier statement that responsibility depended on ‘natural ability’. Certainly the ‘Gordian knot’ was not cut after all. It is the more strange that he allowed his earlier explanation of ability to stand in the 1929 edition in that, only two years earlier, when he was in the midst of his first encounter with hyper-Calvinism, he had written an article in Studies in the Scriptures entitled ‘Gospel Responsibility’. In this article his theory that God requires of men only what it is within their ‘natural ability’ to perform is entirely, and rightly, abandoned.⁷ He wrote:

There are some who say, The unregenerate are dead, and that ends the matter – they cannot have any responsibility. But this is manifestly erroneous … The hyper-Calvinist is fond of asking, ‘Would any sensible man go to the cemetery and bid those in their graves come forth! Why, then, ask anyone who is dead in sins to come to Christ, when he is equally incapable of responding?’ Such a question only betrays the ignorance of the one who puts it. A corpse in the cemetery is no suitable analogy of the natural man. A corpse in the cemetery is incapable of performing evil! A corpse cannot ‘despise and reject’ Christ (Isa. 53:3), cannot ‘resist the Holy Spirit’ (Acts 7:51), cannot disobey the gospel (2 Thess. 1:8); but the natural man can and does do these things! God demands of men what they are unable to render Him. We may not understand it, but there it is . . . The gospel contains a call and command from God for all to whom it comes to obey it.⁸

In later articles on the same subject Pink confirms that his mature understanding of responsibility was not as in the text of the 1929 edition. In articles on ‘The Doctrine of Man’s Inability’, published in 1940, he has no hesitation in saying that it is necessary to insist upon both the freedom of the will and free agency, and the distinction between natural and moral inability has gone.⁹ He had come to recognize that man’s free agency and God’s control of all things are both biblical facts. ‘These two things we must believe if the truth is not to be repudiated: that God foreordained everything that comes to pass; that He is in no way blameworthy for any man’s wickedness, the criminality thereof being wholly his. The decree of God in no wise infringes upon man’s moral agency, for it neither forces nor hinders man’s will.’ ‘In all God’s dealings with mankind . . . He exercises His high sovereignty but in no way destroying their moral free agency. These may present deep and insoluble mysteries to the finite mind, nevertheless they are actual facts.’ ‘The Fall has not resulted in the loss of man’s freedom of will, or his power of volition as a moral faculty.’¹⁰

This understanding is vital for a right understanding of the biblical teaching on conversion. In the 1929 edition of Sovereignty, Pink still wrote as if allowing the need for the activity of the human will in conversion would be to deny the necessity of grace, and so he spoke of God ‘coercing’ and ‘compelling’ obedience. He baulked at the idea that it lies ‘within the province of man’s will to accept or reject Christ’ (p.169). He anticipated the objection that Joshua said to Israel, ‘Choose you this day whom ye will serve,’ and sought to answer it by quoting Romans 3:11, ‘There is none that seeketh after God’, as though the first text cannot mean what it says because ‘the Word of God never contradicts itself’ (p. 157).¹¹

Consistent with the above, the truth that the gospel is good news to be pressed on individuals for their acceptance was absent in the 1929 edition of Sovereignty. Along with hyper-Calvinists, he still wanted to reject the idea that gospel invitations are an ‘offer’ of Christ. ‘The gospel is not an ‘offer’ to be bandied about by evangelistic peddlers’ (p. 257). Rather, he thought, it was to be presented primarily as a witness and testimony – ‘no mere invitation, but a proclamation’. Gospel preaching was a statement of facts by which the elect are brought to faith while ‘God suffers’ it ‘to fall on the ears of the non-elect’.

But even as the 1929 edition went into print, Pink’s thought was developing. Perhaps such revision as he did for that edition was done the previous year. At any rate, in an article on ‘Accepting Christ’, published in Studies during 1929, he stated that there is a sense in which the call to ‘accept Christ’ can be justified, and that, certainly, all hearers of the gospel are to be directed to ‘receive’ the Saviour: ‘Of our Saviour it is recorded that He wept over Jerusalem because her children would not come to Him. No heartless fatalist was He. The great apostle to the Gentiles wrote, “Knowing therefore the terror of the Lord, we persuade men” (2 Cor. 5:11). Do you do this, brother preacher?’¹²

By 1936 Pink speaks fully and pointedly of the error of hyper-Calvinism, and especially of its denial that ‘it is the bounden duty of all who hear the gospel to savingly trust Christ’.¹³ Now, instead of attempting explanations, as he had done earlier, he quotes a warning from John Newton:

Unless we keep the plan and manner of the Scriptures constantly in view, and attend to every part of it, a design of ‘consistency’ may fetter our sentiments, and greatly preclude our usefulness. We may easily perplex our hearers by nice reasonings on the nature of human liberty, and the Divine agency on the hearts of men; but such disquisitions are better avoided.¹⁴

This is very different from his earlier confidence that the problem of human responsibility is ‘capable of a simple and satisfactory conclusion’. Instead he now warned, ‘If we resort to human reasoning it will inevitably follow that it is quite useless to exhort the unregenerate to turn unto God and come to Christ . . . the things of God cannot be encompassed by human reason.’¹⁵

By the 1930s Pink had thus come to see more clearly how hyper-Calvinism inhibited earnest gospel preaching. ‘It is blankly denied that the gospel calls upon the unsaved to be reconciled to God, or that He requires anything from sinners in order to the forgiveness of their sins.’¹⁶ Whereas true preaching must urge all hearers to respond to the gospel: ‘The evangelist’s message is that there is salvation in Christ for all who receive Him as He is offered in the gospel and put their trust in Him … God is willing to be on terms of amity with the sinner, yet He will not be so until the sinner submits to those terms.’¹⁷ ‘Life is offered in the gospel to those who believe in Christ. Under the law it was unobtainable by fallen men; in the gospel it is proffered as a free gift.’¹⁸

To a friend he writes: ‘The gospel is as free as the air, and 1 Timothy 1:15 gives us full warrant to tell a murderer in the condemned cell that there is a Saviour for him IF he will receive Him . . .The ground on which any sinner is invited and commanded to believe is neither God’s election, nor Christ’s substitution, but his particular need of responding to the free offer of the gospel. The gospel is that Christ died for sinners as sinners (not “elect sinners”) and is addressed to their responsibility.’¹⁹

All these, and many other quotations that could be given, show how Pink’s understanding developed after 1929. After that date he plainly criticized what had been his own mistake: ‘Far too many Calvinists, in their zeal to repudiate the free-willism of Arminians, have at the same time repudiated man’s moral agency.²⁰ He no longer saw any inconsistency in a Christian’s believing in God’s sovereignty and singing

O happy day, that fixed my choice
On Thee, my Saviour and my God!

Similarly, in the correspondence with Harold J. Bradshaw, referred to earlier, Pink vigorously defends the word ‘offer’ over against the Gospel Standard Article that denied ‘the gospel is to be offered indiscriminately to all’.²¹

He wrote to Bradshaw:

I regard Article 29 as unsatisfactory, really meaningless. The Greek word (euaggelizo) used for the preaching of the gospel signifies ‘to announce glad tidings’. But what ‘glad tidings’ can there be in it for sinners unless it presents an all-sufficient Saviour for their acceptance (‘worthy of all acceptation’: 1 Tim. 1:15 ), and what is that but an ‘offer’? Again, can one reject unless there had been something offered to him? Yet Isaiah 53:3 charges the Jews with having ‘rejected’ Christ—see also Matthew 21:42, and John 12:48.’²²

In the articles of 1936 on ‘Duty Faith’, from which we quoted above, Pink gives us some information on what had contributed to his change of understanding. As well as searching the Scriptures, he had been reading more of the Reformers and the Puritans and in doing so he reached the conclusion that, on this subject, certain eighteenth-century writers had departed from the teaching of ‘so many eminent saints of God who preceded them’. To prove this he gives a lengthy series of quotations beginning with these words from John Calvin, ‘The mercy of God is offered equally to those who believe and to those who believe not.’

The eighteenth-century defection, Pink believed, had begun with John Gill and others who, in turn, influenced Augustus Toplady and William Huntington. He traces to Huntington, particularly, the thinking adopted by a number of nineteenth-century Strict Baptists and Independents:

Personally, we have often lamented the fact that Mr Gadsby, and later, Mr Philpot, followed (what we believe was) the error of Wm. Huntington, instead of adhering to that path which had been almost uniformly trodden by the Reformers and Puritans.²³

He had himself still relied on Augustus Toplady in the 1929 text of Sovereignty in order to answer the appeal of the non-Calvinist based on the words, ‘Why will ye die, O house of Israel?’ (Ezek. 18:31). Anxious to avoid any impression that God sorrowed over the destiny of the lost, Toplady (following Gill) wrote on that text: ‘It so happens that the “death” here alluded to is neither spiritual nor eternal death . . . the death intended by the prophet is a political death; a death of national prosperity, tranquillity and security.’²⁴ That was not Pink’s later understanding.

He specifically criticized Gill for his misinterpretation of Paul’s words in 2 Corinthians 5:20, ‘Now then we are ambassadors for Christ, as though God did beseech you by us: we pray you in Christ’s stead, be ye reconciled to God.’²⁵ The statement means exactly what Paul said!

Pink’s thought thus evidently matured, and it leads us to recognize a lesson: not all the opposition he encountered for his teaching was due to the offence of the truth. His zeal for the doctrines of grace would surely have been more effective in his early life if he had then enjoyed the more balanced understanding of later years. We have seen above how, at the age of thirty-two, he wanted to press on Herendeen the belief that the nonelect were ‘necessarily created unto damnation’.²⁶ Herendeen was quite right to be unreceptive. Similarly Pink later had good reason to understand very differently the ‘lengthy duel’ he described having with Alesor Marshall, in 1921, over whether the gospel is an ‘offer’.²⁷ At that date Pink had not learned the truth of Richard Baxter’s aphorism, ‘Overdoing is undoing.’ He was later to be very clear in affirming that it is as the truth is presented in its biblical proportions that it is most likely to be received among believers.

All this being so, the question arises why Pink did not revise his book on Sovereignty after 1929. There is probably more than one reason. First, there was no demand for the book. It was after his death that reprints multiplied. Second, Herendeen claimed the copyright, and Pink was no longer in touch with him. It was only in 1949, three years before Pink’s death, that Herendeen was to reissue the 1929 edition, this time with a Foreword of his own in which there is no reference to the author. It is perhaps significant that Pink made not the slightest reference to the availability of this reprint in the pages of Studies.

In view of the known changes in Pink’s thought, the only alternatives for the Banner of Truth Trust, which began publishing in 1957 (five years after his death), were to revise the 1929 text or to leave his Sovereignty of God unpublished in Britain. To reprint the edition of 1929, as we regret has continued to be done in America, would have been to misrepresent Pink’s own final convictions on the issues stated above. Worse, an unrevised edition would have been calculated in places to enforce the very hyper-Calvinism which Pink came to recognize as a real danger to the biblical teaching. The revival of sovereign grace teaching for which he worked and prayed was one that would be accompanied by evangelistic passion.

To critique Pink’s Sovereignty of God as we have done is not to question the fundamental principle of his treatment of his subject. God is sovereign, and it is to the grace that is sovereign that every believer owes his salvation. God loves the elect with a special and invincible love. To uphold that truth Pink argued in his book for the denial of any broader love in which God shows compassion to all and is not willing that any should perish. But many Calvinists, from Calvin to Spurgeon, have believed both that God is sovereign and that he has a love for all people.²⁸ Christians of Arminian persuasion believe God commands that a sincere offer of salvation be made in his name to all men, which offer may be resisted. A biblical Calvinist believes the same, only he believes more. Not all resist because God has chosen them to salvation, while with others he ‘permits their self-destruction despite the entreaties of his benevolence’.²⁹

In his 1929 text Pink had no place for this broader understanding. Dealing with the rich young ruler, concerning whom Scripture says that Christ ‘loved him’ (Mark 10:21), he there argued that it could only mean the man was ‘one of God’s elect’, even although the last we hear of him is that he ‘went away grieved: for he had great possessions’. The only support he gave for his interpretation was that the text says that the young ruler ‘came’ to Jesus and therefore the promise applied to him, ‘him that cometh unto me I will in no wise cast out’.³⁰

Thereafter we have seen Pink move a good way from handling texts in that manner. He repudiated his earlier hyper–Calvinist interpretation of such texts as Ezekiel 33:11, Matthew 23:37 and Luke 19:41. In his later thought his views of divine compassion were certainly enlarged. Thus when quoting, ‘I have no pleasure in the death of the wicked,’ he adds the words of Lamentations 3:33 (‘For he doth not afflict willingly [from his heart] nor grieve the children of men’) , and comments, ‘We are told that judgment is “his strange work . . . his strange act” (Isa. 28:21), for it is not as agreeable to Him as His works of mercy. ‘³¹ He had ceased to believe that Christ’s compassion for the lost over whom he wept in Jerusalem was only human rather than divine compassion. He even went as far as saying, as we noted above, ‘God is willing to be on terms of amity [friendship] with the sinner.’ Yet Pink never withdrew from his belief, stated in the 1929 text, that the only love in God is love for the elect. At this one point the Banner of Truth revisers of 1961 went beyond what Pink himself would have allowed; their revision and abridgement removed his case that the love of God is always to be understood in exclusive terms.

Arthur Pink’s great concern, writing in an era when man-centred preaching was so prevailing, was to show that God is not helplessly waiting for the consent of the sinner before he can save him. He was indignant that such an impoverished view of God could ever be received. He had seen how the liberal presentation of the ‘love of God’ had near obliterated in the churches that ‘great love’ that redeems, keeps and saves to glory. For Pink sovereign grace was not an idea. It was the only explanation of all that he was, and of all that he hoped to be. The hymn he had begun to sing from his heart in 1908 he meant to sing for ever:

I stand amazed in the presence
Of Jesus the Nazarene,
And wonder how He could love me,
A sinner condemned, unclean.

How marvellous, how wonderful!
And my song shall ever be,
How marvellous, how wonderful,
Is my Saviour’s love to me.

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