Review of "The Race Set Before Us"

“Warnings function harmoniously with promises, not against or in spite of promises.”


That’s the conviction of by Thomas Schreiner and Ardel Caneday in their 2001 book, The Race Set Before Us: A Biblical Theology of Perseverance & Assurance. We can read in Scripture that God has promised to bring to completion the salvation of his people, and we can also read the warnings against falling away. Schreiner and Caneday outline four inadequate ways scholars have reconciled the assurances with the warnings, and they propose their own solution.

Those who hold the loss-of-salvation view believe the warnings indicate believers can fall away.

Those who hold the loss-of-rewards view believe the warnings indicate believers can lose reward but not salvation.

Those who hold the test-of-genuineness view believe the warnings are not addressed to believers but to hypocrites who profess faith in Christ but may have nothing more than false salvation. The authors calls this “one of the most common views in evangelicalism today” (29).

Those who hold the hypothetical-loss-of-salvation view believe that the warnings only caution what would happen if one could fail--an impossible situation.

Schreiner and Caneday believe that none of these answers are sufficient. Instead, God keeps his chosen ones in the race to the finish line by means of the warnings:

To be faithful to Scripture we must preserve the biblical tension between our responsibility to exercise faith and run the race, and the truth that any faith and work we have is a gift of God. If we exclude our role as human beings, we encourage a passivity and a laxity that is contrary to the biblical calls to exertion and effort that we have been investigating. On the other hand, if we rule out the idea that God is ultimately the one behind our believing and working, we introduce the idea that salvation is ultimately and finally our work. Both ideas must be firmly rejected. We are the ones who exercise faith and run the race, yet when we ask ourselves, ‘How does this become a reality in our lives?’ the answer is that we believe and continue running the race because God’s grace has grasped us and propels us to go forward. His work in our lives is the foundation for our work and faith (pages 314-15).

As the 19th century English Baptist pastor, Charles Spurgeon, put it from a sermon on Hebrews 6:4-6—

God says, ‘My child, if you fall over this precipice you will be dashed to pieces.’ What does the child do? He says, ‘Father, keep me; hold thou me up, and I shall be safe.’ It leads the believer to greater dependence on God, to a holy fear and caution, because he knows that if he were to fall away he could not be renewed.

The Race Set Before Us is nearly 350 pages long. For a shorter treatment of the same subject, Schreiner released the 130-page Run to Win the Prize: Perseverance in the New Testament a few months ago. For an even shorter overview, you can read “Perseverance and Assurance: A Survey and a Proposal,” in the SBTS theological journal.

Application for church leaders: God’s calling is effected through preaching; God’s keeping is effected through preaching, too—but not if there is no warning preached, and not if there is no sense among preachers and those who share leadership with them that such warning needs to be preached.