⭐ The close of this thread — and the proof that it never closed. Two co-founders of the Holy Club at Oxford, co-workers in the same great revival, parted ways over the same question this thread has followed all along.
The issue
Can grace be resisted?
Claim
John Wesley: grace can be resisted, and faith is a free decision enabled by prevenient grace. He held, as Olson reports, that Calvinism's unconditional election, irresistible grace and double predestination offend against God's loving character, and he even said: “This is the blasphemy clearly contained in the horrible decree of predestination! … You represent God as worse than the devil; more false, more cruel, more unjust.” (Sermon 128, Free Grace, §§25–26)
Counterclaim
George Whitefield (1714–1770) and Edwards's side: grace is irresistible. They held, as Olson reports, that any Arminianism implies a denial of God's greatness and stands at a dangerous crossroads leading to atheism. ⚠ Whitefield, Olson notes, led a small group of Calvinistic Methodists away from the main body that followed Wesley, and during his preaching tours in North America became a close friend of Edwards.
What was at stake for salvation
⭐ Each side believed the other's teaching would destroy salvation, and neither was fighting to win: one feared that God's love would be cut away, the other that God's glory would be shared out. This has been the normal state of this thread for thirteen hundred years.
Aftermath
⭐ Olson's diagnosis is very clean: Wesley put the love of God at the center of his preaching and teaching, while Edwards made everything revolve around the glory of God — and every evangelical Protestant wants to bring the two together. ⚠ And Olson's last sentence is the real state of this thread, and the reason we mark Thread 3 as unresolved: the gulf between monergism and synergism, he observes, split them in two and made them suspicious of each other; both sides insisted that they could love the other while detesting and refuting the other's doctrine; and this split still runs through Anglo-American evangelical Protestantism today, and has become the fuse of endless controversy in evangelical theology.
⭐ Look back to where this thread began: in 405 Pelagius walked into Rome, saw how corrupt church life had become, and went looking for the cause. More than thirteen hundred years later, two friends who had led a great revival together parted over the same question — and neither stopped preaching the gospel, and neither stopped loving the other. The thread has no ruling at this point, and we do not give it one.