One of the issues I struggled with deeply in the past is Calvinism… election… predestination, pick your term (but two are biblical for sure). I love the way Spurgeon addressed the question once about how he reconciled election and free will, simply stating that he didn’t have to reconcile friends.
Today I stumbled on a new post on the J. C. Ryle Quotes website and I’ve fallen in love with his viewpoint on the issue as well…
The plain truth is, that God’s scheme of salvation is like a ladder let down from heaven to earth, to bring together the holy God, and the sinful creature, man. God is at the top of the ladder and man is at the bottom. The top of the ladder is far above, out of our sight, and we have no eyes to see it. There, at the top of that ladder, are God’s eternal purposes, – His everlasting covenant, His Election, His predestination of a people to be saved by Christ. From the top of that ladder comes down that full and rich provision of mercy for sinners which is revealed to us in the Gospel.
The bottom of that ladder is close to sinful man on earth, and consists of the simple steps of repentance and faith. By them he must begin to climb upwards. In the humble use of them he shall mount higher and higher every year, and get clearer glimpses of good things yet to come.
~ J.C. Ryle
via J. C. Ryle Quotes
The one clarification I would make is that we shouldn’t mistake Ryle’s words as meaning that salvation is a long-term process. Ryle, Spurgeon, Calvin and I would all agree that conversion is the miracle of a moment while sanctification is the process of a lifetime.
For the record, I’m not a Calvinist. For the record, I’m not threatened by Calvinism and some of my greatest heroes are/were Calvinists (W. A. Criswell, Charles Spurgeon, George Whitefield). And for the record, I’m definitely not an Arminianist either.
If you haven’t heard, Time Magazine has declared “New Calvinism” to be third on it’s list of 10 world-changing movements. (Mark Driscoll explains the differences between old and new Calvinism. I like Mark Driscoll, John Piper, and Al Mohler, all of whom the article names as leading voices among modern Calvinists who definitely have a heavy influence in modern evangelical thinking.
I don’t want to use this post (or the comments) to debate the theological issue of Calvinism itself. Rather I wanted to offer some of my own personal reflections on this movement in the form of what I appreciate about it and what annoys me. Feel free to disagree. I’ve already said I will love you anyway.
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W. A. Criswell defined teaching (from the pulpit) as “instructing a man in the will and ways of the Lord,” and preaching as “seeking to drive a man’s will God-ward.” There is a raging debate today over how much freedom people really have. A renewed fascination with Calvinism has brought this debate to the forefront. I’m not opening the whole can of worms here – just this one point. Preaching should be directed to the will of a person. Decisions count.
If you carry Calvinism as far as many, you’ll begin to say that there is no free will or free agency with man. This morning I read from Spurgeon’s evening sermon from December 27th, 1874 called Rightly Dividing the Word of Truth. Spurgeon never started a sermon softly. The second sentence declares “This every Christian minister must do if he would make full proof of his ministry, and if he would be clear of the blood of his hearers at the last great day.”
What Spurgeon said just moments later, however, issues a clarion call for addressing the will of our human hearers…
Remember, dear hearers, if the preacher does not push you to this–that you shall be converted, or he will know the reason why; if he does not drive you to this–that you shall either willfully reject, or cheerfully accept Christ, he has not yet known how rightly to handle the great ’sword of the Spirit, which is the word of God.’
We all do what we want every moment of the day. We make choices and decisions that impact eternity and preaching that does not appeal to the will of man fails to satisfy the expectations of the Great Commission. In case you wonder where I stand on the issue of God’s grace and His role in our salvation, I agree just as strongly with what Spurgeon said later in the same message:
The Lord alone must save you as a work of gratis mercy, not because you deserve it, but because he wills to do it to magnify his abundant love.
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The sovereignty of God is an ever-mysterious issue that we must struggle with and come to terms with as we seek to have an understanding of God’s role. Salvation is all of Him and not of us at all. But there is a receiving, an accepting of Him that must be decided in the human heart upon the call of one sent with the gospel.
Preach to change the mind. Preach to move the emotions. And preach to drive the will of man God-ward.
Find Spurgeon’s Expository Encyclopedia at Amazon.com
Calvinism. Predestination. Foreordination. Foreknowledge. Election. These are good, Bible words that have become the focus of a whole lot of debate. I used to be a Calvinist, but have come to define my own beliefs about God’s sovereignty without referencing the famous theologian. I still struggle with the issue of God’s sovereignty, and one of my great pet peeves is those who think they have it all figured out and neatly packaged in five nifty points.
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One of the most familiar verses in the New Testament is actually a quotation from Joel. In chapter two, verse thirty-two of his prophecy, Joel declares, “And it shall come to pass, that whosoever shall call on the name of the Lord shall be delivered.” (in Acts 2:21 the word “delivered” is rendered “saved”) But the verse, quoted in its entirety, includes an intriguing note: “…as the Lord hath said, and in the remnant whom the Lord shall call.”
Here are two sides of the same issue – God’s sovereign salvation. He has sovereignly declared that anyone who will may be saved. Yet He is calling to Himself a remnant. Of course, in the Old Testament prophetic books, the “remnant” is referring to faithful Israel, or at least the portion of Israel which survives conquest and captivity. But the idea that God is saving a remnant seems to carry throughout Scripture.
We will never be able to understand all of the details, but the reality is that nobody gets saved without being chosen, yet anyone may be saved. No one comes to know Christ unless they are called of God as part of His remnant, yet anyone may know the Christ who offers Himself to all without price.
Like train tracks which never cross, these two doctrines are impossible to understand together. We fall to our extremes, but God’s will is that all be saved, yet He has made provision that all whom He calls will be saved. Like the old song says, “whosoever meaneth me!”
Have you heard a teenager say, “But all my friends are doing it?” Our usual reply is a sharp rebuttal such as, “If all your friends jumped off the Empire State Building, would you do it too?” The darker side of my humor enjoys the cartoon depicted by Gary Larsen in which an enormous pile of bodies is mounting next to a building where a person is poised on the edge, ready to leap. The caption reads, “If everybody jumped off the Empire State Building, after a while it wouldn’t hurt so bad.”
The message of the church to young people today is so often, “Don’t go with the flow, dare to be different!” We realize the serious mistake of giving wholesale assent to whatever popular opinion dictates. We stand on issues such as abortion, homosexual rights, and gambling no matter what the majority rules. All of this is very biblical considering the mountain of Scripture that speaks to us about the doctrine of personal separation from the world.
What happens, however, when we call people to forsake their following of popular secular opinion merely to exchange it for a blind following of ecclesiastical opinion. More simply stated, is it wise to declare null and void any possible argument against what mainstream Christian culture establishes to be so?
We live in an age of media giants who use marketing to shape popular opinion far more than even our most powerful educational institutions. The Christian subculture, unfortunately, follows this trend, even if unintentionally.
John MacArthur has often commented that one of the most neglected Christian virtues today is that of discernment, and he is absolutely correct. To question is to be disagreeable, and to be disagreeable with Christian pop-culture is paramount to being heretical and downright odd! Perhaps we should realize that if many heroes of the past had not presented their questions, we may not have many of the great confessions and creeds that helped to preserve a biblical faith against the work of cultists.
Personally, I’m rather concerned with the swelling tide of Calvinism that is sweeping Baptist seminaries and churches. I’m upset about the number of Bible translations produced each decade under the guise of giving modern readers a more pragmatic rendering of the old, old story (note: Since each publisher seems to want to have their own translation, or two or three, we might go so far as to question the motives behind this translation pandemonium). I’m alarmed at how quickly certain philosophies of ministry take root which seek to strip the Bible of any specific guidance in any area other than theology proper. Heaven forbid we question whether a Christian music artist should be an exact replica of a drug-ridden punk rocker, whether Christian teenagers should really be getting fashion advice from porn-producers such as Abercrombie & Fitch, or whether the Nude Reviled Substandard Perversion is okay as long as it’s understandable!
I say, let’s be discerning! Let’s “try the spirits, whether they be of God…” (1 John 4:1) Let’s “withdraw [our]selves from every brother that walketh disorderly, and not after the tradition which he received from us…” (2 Thessalonians 3:6) Let’s “stand fast, and hold the traditions which ye have been taught, whether by word, or our epistle.” (2 Thessalonians 2:15)
We need to return to discernment, to thinking, and to a willingness to express and debate these and other issues rather than blindly accepting whatever is handed down from the day’s most popular Christian resource providers. Let me think on my own two feet and if I don’t show up at the next “Christian rock” concert waving a neon green copy of the newest translation and covered in pseudo-Christian/gothic tattoos, you’ll know I have good personal reasons!
The story is told of a group of people who disagreed over the issue of predestination so they divided themselves into two separate camps. One camp existed for the predestinarians and another for those who emphasized the free will of man. A single undecided man was stranded in between. Since he wasn’t sure what to do, he went and tried to join the predestinarian camp. They refused to allow his entrance, saying, “You can’t be here if you choose to be here, you must be called.” So in concession, he made his way to the free will camp. They too, rejected the poor man, stating, “You can’t be here if you were sent, you must choose to be here of your own free will.”
I have often felt like that man in my own struggle to understand and reconcile God’s sovereignty and man’s free agency. My own struggle began shortly after my surrender to the gospel ministry, as I entered the student body at Central Baptist College in Conway, Arkansas. Calvinism and the “doctrines of grace” were a constant source of controversy among the overzealous ministerial students. We would often stay up until the wee hours of the mourning in our dorm rooms, debating the eternal decrees of the Almighty. Our pursuit was not so much to understand the God who had saved us, but rather to have a keen grasp on our theology, and if I might admit, to entertain ourselves by feeling intellectually astute.
My pursuit of an understanding continued as I devoured the writings of John Calvin, Lorraine Boettner, and R. C. Sproul. John Piper’s popularity had not yet reached our small school in central Arkansas but we were quite familiar with the scholarly perspective of Dr. John MacArthur. (May I make an aside to say that these are godly men who have done much good for the cause of biblical inerrancy and other areas of conservative theology.) I was particularly drawn to the well-known Reformed writers because of the great appeal of their emphasis on the “five solas:” (in English only…) the Scriptures alone teach us salvation by grace alone through faith alone in Jesus Christ alone to the glory of God alone. I affirm these solas to this day, but I no longer believe them to be the product of the Reformation, but rather the natural conclusion of a right exegesis of the Bible. Thankfully the Reformers simply stumbled onto truths held by the ancients, and by ancestral Baptists throughout their centuries of underground faith as well.
Only a few years ago, I would have proudly labeled myself a Calvinist and I had my arguments in tact to defend my position. I found myself teaching these truths in my pulpit ministry, unwilling to give a universal invitation to anyone who would want to be saved. Rather I qualified my invitations with such phrases as, “If God is dealing with you, then come…” My intent was to avoid “casting my pearls before swine.” I had two basic approaches to defending my incorrect theology. One approach was to run to the familiar proof texts such as Ephesians 1:3-14, John 6:43-46, and Romans 8:28-30. The other was to twist my opponents’ words using human logic. In fact, my first confession would be that Calvinism had a strong appeal to my own appetite for that which was intellectually challenging.
That Calvinism is a logical system cannot be denied. If in fact all are totally depraved and unable to respond to God, then God must unconditionally elect some to believe. If He elects some, yet they cannot believe on their own, then He must draw them and give them faith. Further, if He draws them and gives them faith, then they surely could not be lost, so His grace must be irresistible. And if only some will be elected, drawn, and saved, then Jesus must have died only for the elect, else His blood would have been spilled in vain and the non-elect would, in their own damnation, cause God to judge their sin twice. The perseverance of the saints must be a right doctrine if God’s sovereignty in electing lines up with His wisdom of the future lifestyle of the elect. So it all made sense to me. Being able to state the doctrines of grace and convince others of their truthfulness fed my own ego and gave me the feeling of being in the ranks of the world’s great theological thinkers. But what I felt was Calvinism’s great strength (the fact that it was ultimately logical to the intellectual person) turned out to be Calvinism’s great weakness.
The Bible is full of paradoxes. Believers are alive and dead at the same time. We are servants and sons. We are saints and sinners. We are chosen, and free! None of these paradoxes are logical. None of them make any human sense but when we see the Scriptures through a heart of faith, they seem sensible to us after all. Calvinism ultimately creates a mindset that blocks out the possibility of man having anything at all to do with his own salvation. Indeed, man cannot purchase it with his good works, nor can he suffer for its penalty and be freed from sin’s curse. Nonetheless, the Scriptures plainly record the necessity that man, in his divinely granted freedom, choose Christ of his own volition. The logic of Calvinism sees only the sensible side of God’s sovereignty but can never reconcile it with man’s freedom to act in faith.
Beyond the appeal of the logic of Calvinism was the second draw upon my soul… the ability to line up with the great theological thinkers of my day. The popularity of Calvinism is growing, thanks to the growing popularity of some of its great advocates such as R. Albert Mohler, John Piper, and John MacArthur. As I mentioned before, I believe these to be godly and conservative men of profound intellectual insight and personal character. I so wanted to fit in with the great scholars of my day that I was willing to overlook apparent uncertainties about my theology. In reality, I was taking an apologetic approach to Calvinism within my own heart! I was consistently attempting to convince myself!
The final straw came for me in the summer of 2005 when I purchased and listened to the well-known sermon by Dr. Adrian Rogers entitled Predestined for Hell? Absolutely Not! One of my strongest arguments for Calvinism was my eisogesis of Romans, chapter nine. I listened, dumbfounded, as Dr. Rogers decimated every supporting argument I had given in asserting that God had created people who were forordained to damnation, simply to show forth His justice. Dr. Rogers’ masterful exegesis of this oft-studied passage convinced me to do a thorough re-evaluation of my own theology. Very few Calvinists today would claim to be hyper-Calvinists. In fact, any Calvinist I’ve ever met would always label those a little more extreme than themselves as the “hypers.” Suddenly I was faced with the evidence which proved my own leaning toward a hyper-Calvinist theology.
I began reading all that I could again on the subject of Calvinism, this time from an objective position. Formerly I had sought proof of Calvinism, now I simply wanted God’s answers to my deepest questions. My mind was stirred to re-consider my theological position, but my emotions were wrenched by a question I had subtly ignored when a loved one asked, “what if your little girl (two years of age at the time) isn’t chosen, but instead was created simply to be damned forever in hell?” Though an emotional reaction is never the basis for a solid affirmation of truth, I would beg the same question of any Calvinistic reader… what if all of your loved ones were simply “fitted for destruction?”
Dave Hunt reflects my final conclusion in this way, “…the ultimate aim of Calvinism… is to prove that God does not love everyone, is not merciful to all, and is pleased to damn billions. If that is the God of the Bible, Calvinism is true. If that is not the God of the Bible, who ‘is love’ (1 John 4:8, emphasis added), Calvinism is false…”
My confessions as a former Calvinist could be summed up in this way: I twisted various passages of Scripture so that I might have a system of theology that appealed to my intellectual ego, could reconcile itself with my own logic, and which would include me in a great class of Christian scholars, past and present. None of these motivations are glorifying to God, neither are they the motivations placed before us in Scripture.
Having recanted my affirmation of Calvinism, let me affirm my believe in a sovereign God who is always in control, but Who never forces or coerces converts to His Son. I believe in a God who sent His only Son to the cross so that anyone who believed on Him might be saved. I believe in a God whose knowledge is truly “past finding out” and who cannot be defined by any system of theology that is not firmly rooted in Scripture. Put simply, there is no acrostic that will summarize God. Sixty-six books, written over a span of 1500 years, at least seven genres of literature and multiple eras of God’s relating Himself in different ways to mankind were required to produce a single document that could even begin to tell of the mysteries of God’s deity and person. Calvinism is a partial explanation of God’s ways, presenting to us the sovereign God, divorced from His limitless love and His universal provision for the sins of all of His lost creatures. Let the reader beware that impenitence is damning, but let the reader behold the “great love wherewith He hath loved us.” To quote the Author of all theological truth, “And this is the Father’s will which hath sent me, that of all which he hath given me I should lose nothing, but should raise it up again at the last day. And this is the will of him that sent me, that every one which seeth the Son, and believeth on him, may have everlasting life: and I will raise him up at the last day.” (John 6:39-40)
Adrian Rogers, in his rebuttal of extreme predestination, stated it so well, “If you want mercy, you may have it.” I would urge you to fling yourself upon the foot of the cross where Jesus died and claim His mercy, receive His forgiveness, and take hold of the promise of a future resurrection to be with Jesus forever. For the Scriptures conclude with this great thought… “And the Spirit and the bride say, Come. And let him that heareth say, Come. And let him that is athirst come. And whosoever will, let him take the water of life freely.” (Revelation 22:17)
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