I read with sadness today of the passing of Robert Reymond. I never met the good doctor personally, unfortunately, but our paths crossed literarily. He first provided a thorough and entertaining endorsement of The Potter’s Freedom:
The Reformed community has given Norman Geisler a “free” pass for too long with respect to his pronouncements on God’s sovereignty and free will. James White’s book, The Potter’s Freedom, is the much-needed antidote to his flawed (and failed) attempt, in typical Thomistic fashion, to synthesize what cannot be synthesized. As soon as he insists that “God’s grace works synergistically on free will,” and that the “one condition” for receiving race, namely, faith, “is logically prior to regeneration” (pp. 233-34), he falls away from the thought of the sixteenth-century Reformation and stands in concert with the synergism of Rome. It is high time that he who has warned the members of the Evangelical Theological Society to “beware human philosophy” should heed his own warning and listen less to Aquinas and more carefully to Holy Scripture.
Then, a few years later, he and I debated church governance in the 2004 work, Perspectives on Church Government: Five Views of Church Polity. As I recall, we had 2500 words to respond to the other positions, max. Well, I used 2498 in response to Dr. Reymond, and I think he used about the same in response to me. I thought our interaction was the most pointed and direct of the entire work. I still think that work has much value today.
I have always recommended (and used in classes) Dr. Reymond’s A New Systematic Theology of the Christian Faith. Of course, I disagreed with him on other points (Romans 7, Philippians 2, etc.), but I always appreciated his forthrightness and passion. A good brother has gone to be with the Lord, but he has left a rich legacy that has benefitted many.
