My previous article, “The Elect, the Unbeliever, and a Reductio That Begs the Question,” dealt with an argument from Lutheran Jeremy Bamgbabe against the Reformed reading of the word “us” in 1 John 5:11.
Whoever believes in the Son of God has the testimony in himself. Whoever does not believe God has made him a liar, because he has not believed in the testimony that God has borne concerning his Son. 11 And this is the testimony, that God gave us eternal life, and this life is in his Son. 12 Whoever has the Son has life; whoever does not have the Son of God does not have life.
The argument goes like this. If “us” refers to believers or the elect, then an unbeliever could affirm everything in verse 11 while simply denying that he belongs to the group in view. He could say, “I believe God gave the elect eternal life, and I believe that life is in his Son. I just do not believe that I am elect.” Since verse 10 says the unbeliever has not believed God’s testimony and has made God a liar, the Reformed reading supposedly produces an absurdity: the unbeliever seems able to affirm the testimony exactly as stated while remaining the very person John describes as not believing it.
The conclusion drawn is that “us” cannot be restricted to believers or the elect. It must include the unbeliever himself. When John says God “gave us eternal life,” the “us” includes everyone, even those who never believe. This is then used to support the distinction between objective and subjective justification.
Objective justification is the claim that God has already accomplished and given the saving benefit to all people in Christ apart from faith, so that all people are objectively forgiven, acquitted, or justified through Christ’s work. Subjective justification is the individual’s reception and possession of that benefit through faith. (In fairness, this formulation is associated mainly with the Missouri and Wisconsin Synods and has been disputed among Lutherans themselves. My concern here is the argument as it has been presented to me.)
That distinction is then used to explain verses 11 and 12. Verse 11 says God “gave us eternal life,” while verse 12 says, “Whoever has the Son has life; whoever does not have the Son of God does not have life.” On this reading, eternal life is genuinely given to the unbeliever objectively in verse 11, while he does not possess it subjectively in verse 12 because he does not have the Son through faith.
But notice what has happened. The objective/subjective distinction now performs the same logical function the elect/non-elect distinction was criticized for performing. On the Reformed reading, the unbeliever says, “God gave eternal life to the elect, but I exclude myself from that group.” On the objective-justification reading, he says, “God objectively gave eternal life to everyone, including me, but I do not subjectively possess it because I do not have the Son.” In both cases, a distinction explains how someone can affirm the stated proposition while still remaining without life.
That is where the reductio can be turned around.
In my earlier article, I argued that the original reductio works only if “believing the testimony” means assenting to the proposition stated in verse 11. If that assumption is false, the hypothetical unbeliever has produced no contradiction. He may have affirmed a true proposition while still failing to believe God’s testimony in John’s sense.
The flipped reductio makes this clearer. Consider an unbeliever who accepts objective justification. He says, “I believe God objectively gave me eternal life in Christ. I believe this life is in his Son. I believe Christ accomplished this for me. I simply refuse to receive Christ or to have the Son.”
What proposition in verse 11 has he denied? None.
He affirms that God gave him eternal life. He affirms that this life is in the Son. He does not exclude himself from the referent of “us.” Yet he remains an unbeliever, and according to verse 12, because he does not have the Son, he does not have life.
So the objective-justification position itself allows an unbeliever to affirm verse 11 while remaining an unbeliever. If sincere assent to the proposition is enough to count as believing the testimony, this man has believed the testimony and remains an unbeliever. If assent is not enough because believing the testimony includes believing in and having the Son, then the original reductio fails, because the Reformed hypothetical was never a case of someone who had believed the testimony in John’s sense.
A careful Lutheran will object that my hypothetical man is incoherent. He will say that genuinely believing “God gave me eternal life in his Son” is not merely assenting to an objective fact. It is trusting the promise as applied to oneself, and therefore already involves saving faith. The man who says those words while refusing Christ is not really believing the testimony.
But notice the shift. The argument began by insisting that verse 11 speaks of an objective gift given to the unbeliever prior to faith. Yet when the flipped reductio is pressed, the defense moves to subjective reception: the unbeliever cannot truly affirm the testimony unless he personally trusts and receives Christ. In other words, the objective/subjective distinction is being used one way to establish the doctrine and another way to protect it from the reductio.
More importantly, this reply concedes the point at issue. Believing the testimony is not exhausted by assent to the proposition in verse 11. It includes trust and reception directed toward the Son. But once that is granted, the original Reformed hypothetical no longer works either. A man may assent to the statement that God gives life to the elect while still refusing the Son, and therefore he has not believed the testimony in John’s sense.
John’s grammar fits this conclusion well. In verse 10 he says the unbeliever “has not believed in the testimony,” ou pepisteuken eis tēn martyrian. That is noteworthy because pisteuō eis is John’s characteristic construction for faith directed toward the Son. It appears in the same verse, ho pisteuōn eis ton huion, and throughout the Gospel (John 3:16, 18, 36). Its appearance with “the testimony” is unusual. The construction alone does not settle the quality of the believing, but the fact that John uses the same idiom for the testimony and for the Son in a single verse makes it unlikely that he regards believing the testimony as bare assent that can exist apart from trusting the Son. The same construction appears two verses later, where believers are described as “you who believe in the name of the Son of God” (v. 13, tois pisteuousin eis to onoma).
This also answers the repeated question, “What proposition has the unbeliever contradicted?” 1 John 1:10 is sometimes cited in response: “If we say we have not sinned, we make him a liar.” There the denial is explicit. But John’s wording in 5:10 does not require an explicit verbal contradiction. His charge is that the unbeliever has failed to believe God’s testimony concerning his Son.
Scripture does not treat every correct acknowledgment concerning Christ as identical with saving faith, and 1 John 5 itself shows why. John says, “Everyone who believes that Jesus is the Christ has been born of God” (5:1), and that the one who overcomes the world is the one “who believes that Jesus is the Son of God” (5:5). Yet the demons cried out, “You are the Son of God,” because “they knew that he was the Christ” (Luke 4:41), and James says that even the demons believe (James 2:19). No one concludes that the demons were born of God. So in these passages John’s “believes that” cannot mean mere intellectual acknowledgment of a true proposition. Correct Christological propositions are not the same thing as saving faith in Christ.
Our Confession draws this line precisely. Saving faith includes believing “to be true whatsoever is revealed in the Word,” but “the principal acts of saving faith are accepting, receiving, and resting upon Christ alone for justification, sanctification, and eternal life” (WCF 14.2). “Receiving” corresponds almost exactly to John’s “having the Son.” The Reformed account therefore distinguishes assent from the receiving and resting that belong to saving faith.
There is also a contextual reason to read “us” as the believing community. Immediately after verses 11 and 12, John writes, “I write these things to you who believe in the name of the Son of God, that you may know that you have eternal life” (5:13). The people who have eternal life are explicitly identified as believers, and the verb is echete, the same verb as in verse 12. The purpose clause states what verses 11 and 12 were written to accomplish: assurance for believers that they have life. This also fits John’s repeated use of first-person plural language for the believing community elsewhere in the letter, as in 1:3-4, 2:25 (“this is the promise that he made to us, eternal life”), and 3:1-2.
The objective-justification reading must also separate life as given (v. 11, the aorist edōken) from life as possessed (v. 12, echei). Elsewhere in John's writings, when eternal life is said to be given to persons, the recipients are a defined people who actually possess it. Of the sheep, Jesus says, “I give them eternal life, and they will never perish” (John 10:28). In his prayer, the Son has authority “to give eternal life to all whom you have given him” (John 17:2), where didōmi appears on both sides: the Father gives a people to the Son, and the Son gives eternal life to that people. I present this as a pattern in Johannine usage rather than a proof about 5:11 on its own, but it places the burden where it belongs. The Lutheran reading needs edōken to describe a gift of eternal life that its recipients never have, and John’s usage elsewhere does not support that sense.
This brings us to the real question behind the objection. If the Reformed deny that Christ bore the sins of every individual, what true gospel content is presented to the non-elect hearer, and what warrant does anyone have to believe?
Every hearer can truthfully be told that Jesus is the Christ, that he is the Son of God, that eternal life is found only in him, that whoever has the Son has life, that whoever does not have the Son does not have life, and that whoever comes to him will be received. “All that the Father gives me will come to me, and whoever comes to me I will never cast out” (John 6:37). The same verse that grounds the coming of the elect in the Father’s giving also gives an unqualified promise to whoever comes. These are universal gospel truths, and they can be proclaimed to every sinner without asserting that Christ has already borne that sinner’s sins or objectively justified him.
The warrant for faith, then, is not prior knowledge that one is elect, nor prior knowledge that Christ made satisfaction for that individual. The warrant is Christ’s command and promise. This is the historic Reformed position, not a recent improvisation. In the covenant of grace, God “freely offereth unto sinners life and salvation by Jesus Christ; requiring of them faith in him, that they may be saved” (WCF 7.3). The ministry of the gospel testifies “that whosoever believes in him shall be saved, and excluding none that will come unto him” (WLC 63).
This exposes an assumption that runs underneath the objective-justification argument: that for an unbeliever to be culpable for rejecting Christ, God must first be able to say, “Christ bore your sins,” or “I have already given you eternal life.” That is not demonstrated from 1 John 5. It is part of the conclusion being inserted into the conditions for culpable unbelief. One cannot assume that culpable unbelief requires a personal declaration of accomplished redemption and then use that assumption to prove universal accomplished redemption.
For the same reason, the epexegetical hoti clause in verse 11 cannot settle the question by itself. The clause does give the content of the testimony: “that God gave us eternal life, and this life is in his Son.” But that does not mean verse 11 can be read in isolation. Verse 10 tells us what it means to believe the testimony, verse 12 tells us how the Son and life are related, and verse 13 tells us to whom John is speaking. It is inconsistent to reach back to verses 6 through 9 for the testimonial setting, and back to 1:10 to define “make him a liar,” while refusing to let verses 10, 12, and 13 inform what believing the testimony means and who “us” are. Context cannot be expanded when it helps an argument and restricted when it does not.
The issue comes down to a dilemma. The original reductio requires assent to the proposition of verse 11 to be sufficient for believing the testimony. Objective justification requires that it not be sufficient. If assent is sufficient, the unbeliever who affirms his own objective justification has believed the testimony and remains an unbeliever. If assent is not sufficient because believing the testimony means believing in and having the Son, then the Reformed unbeliever who merely affirms that God gave life to the elect has not believed the testimony either. The Lutheran may choose the second option and insist that faith is trust in the promise as applied to oneself, but that choice gives up the reductio and moves the debate to the question of warrant, where the Reformed answer is Christ’s command and promise.
The Reformed reading does not need to deny that verse 11 states the content of God’s testimony. It only needs to deny that correct assent to that content is the same as believing God’s testimony in the Johannine sense, and John gives us good reason to deny it.
The unbeliever’s problem is not that he has failed to identify himself as a member of a hidden class, nor that he has failed to believe a proposition about Christ having already borne his sins. His problem is that God has testified concerning his Son, eternal life is in that Son, and he refuses him.