Tulips and Daisies

In my Systematic Theology class today, the topic was predestination. The professor began by explaining the Calvinist perspective, using the TULIP acrostic. He then joked that while the Calvinists have their TULIPS, the Arminians have their daisies. Then he gave the punchline: "Each petal alternates, 'He loves me,' 'He loves me not,' 'He loves me,' 'He loves me not.' The class laughed.

Maybe I should lighten up a little, but I didn't find it very funny. It seems to me that it is the Calvinist, not the Arminian, who is in a situation where he or she must ask, "Does He love me? Or does He not?" Arminians believe that God loves everyone and that Christ died for all. Calvinists, on the other hand, believe that it pleased God, prior to any human action, to create some people for the purpose of experiencing eternal joy (the elect) and some people for the purpose of experiencing eternal suffering (the reprobate). Therefore, for the Calvinist it is logically possible that he or she is reprobate ('He loves me not'), but this possibility does not exist for the Arminian. The Arminian doesn't have to guess. He or she knows: God loves me.

So the joke doesn't work. What I suspect my professor intended by the joke, however, was not that the Arminian has reason to doubt God's love, but rather reason to doubt his or her salvation. Since the Arminian believes that human will has a part to play in whether or not the grace of God is received, supposedly this leaves the Arminian in a state where assurance of salvation is impossible.

However, even if my professor had delivered the punchline as "He saved me...he saved me not...," I would still find the joke unfair. The truth is that both the Calvinist and the Arminian have logical reasons for doubting their salvation. The Calvinist may doubt that he or she is actually one of the elect, and the Arminian may doubt that he or she has actually chosen to receive God's grace. The truth is that so long as one does not believe that Christ's work on the cross is both universal and irresistible, then there is always a logical reason to wonder: "He saved me? He saved me not?" Arminians believe the former but not the latter. Calvinists do not believe the former but do the latter. Consequently, both have logical reasons to doubt.

Calvinists often like to appeal to the P in their acrostic - perseverance of the saints - as grounds for an assurance of salvation which Arminians supposedly lack. The doctrine of perseverance of the saints states that anyone who is truly one of the elect will persevere in their faith until the day they die. The problem with this assertion is that the doctrine of perseverance of the saints does not claim that everyone who currently believes (or *thinks* they believe) in Christ will persevere until the end. Rather, the doctrine of perseverance says that anyone who is truly elect will persevere until the end. Therefore, this doctrine may be of some assurance to a person who is still professing faith on his or her deathbed, but for those of us who are still alive and well, physically speaking, it doesn't provide any assurance because it has nothing to say about whether we ourselves are elect; only that the elect endure to the end.

The truth is that neither Calvinism or Arminianism in themselves can provide an individual with assurance of salvation, and the former can't even provide assurance that God actually loves you. The flower joke from class upset me because it both misrepresented Arminianism and ignored the similar problems raised by Calvinism.

This leaves us with the question: is it possible for a person to have assurance of salvation? I think it is possible, both for Calvinists and Arminians. But I do not think this assurance is a purely cognitive, rational thing. I think it has to do with the internal witness of the Holy Spirit, something that we experience through communion with him - spirit to spirit. I'm not saying we have to feel saved in order to actually be saved, but I am saying that the experience of feeling assured cannot rest on purely rational grounds. But that is an issue that deserves fuller attention in another post.

Charles Wesley on Reprobation. I Think We Would Have Gotten Along.

The Horrible Decree

Ah! gentle, gracious Dove;
And art thou grieved in me,
That sinners should restrain thy love,
And say, "It is not free:
It is not free for all;
The most Thou passest by,
And mockest with a fruitless call
Whom Thou hast doomed to die."

They think Thee not sincere
In giving each his day:
"Thou only draw'st the sinner near,
To cast him quite away;
To aggravate his sin,
His sure damnation seal,
Thou show'st him heaven, and say'st, Go in, -
And thrusts him into hell."

Sinners, abhor the fiend:
His other gospel hear -
"The God of trust did not intend
The thing His words declare;
He offers grace to all,
Which most cannot embrace,
Mock'd with an ineffectual call
And insufficient grace.

"The righteous God consign'd
Them over to their doom,
And sent the Saviour of mankind
To damn them from the womb:
To damn for falling short
Of what they could not do,
For not believing the report
Of that which was not true."

Two Mysteries: One Way of Viewing the Calvinism v. Arminianism Debate

I think a lot about the Calvinism vs Arminianism debate. For the uninitiated, Calvinism and Arminianism are paradigms for interpreting the Biblical Scriptures. There is a lot of overlap between them in terms of what they affirm and what they deny, but the reason they are typically viewed in opposition to one another is because of their differing views over the issue of predestination.

Both paradigms affirm that Heaven and Hell are realities, but disagree over the role of human decision in determining who goes where. Calvinists believe the Bible teaches that God has chosen who will go to Heaven and who will not prior to the creation of the world. Some people have been chosen for salvation, others for condemnation. Those who have been chosen for salvation will manifest their chosen-ness by coming to faith in Christ at some point in their lives, whereas those who have been chosen for destruction will never come to faith. Arminians, on the other hand, believe that God has chosen to make it possible for all people to come to faith. People, then, have some actual power of choice to say "yes" or "no" to the love, grace, and revelation that God offers (whether this is precisely what classical Arminianism argues I can't say for sure, but it is what most people who call themselves Arminian today actually believe).

Seminarian Musings

From what I've noticed, Calvinists tend to affirm three ideas:

(1) God is loving and good
(2) Some people will go to Hell
(3) God is completely sovereign over salvation

In my opinion, Calvinists need to choose which one of these three ideas to get rid of. They try to affirm all three, but they can really only affirm two of them at once. If God is truly loving and yet some people will still go to Hell, then God must not be completely sovereign over salvation (in other words, He must allow human beings some say in the matter). If God is loving and completely sovereign over salvation, then no one should end up going to Hell (Calvinists really should be universalists, in my opinion). If some people will go to Hell and God is completely sovereign over salvation, then God must not be really be loving.

In other words...

If (1) and (2), then not (3).
If (1) and (3), then not (2).
If (2) and (3), then not (1).

I'd be interested in hearing any ideas anyone has as to how to reconcile all three, because at this point I can't do it.

It seems to me that the one Calvinists are most willing to jettison first is (1) – the idea that God actually loves everyone. That disturbs me. That is the LAST one I'd be willing to stop affirming. The one I think it makes the most sense to let go of – or at least the one that we need to have a more nuanced understanding of – is (3).

Thoughts?

Grumpy Calvinist

Last night at The Hartford Project the speaker was asking the kids Bible trivia questions. She asked, "Who killed Abel?" One of the kids stood up. "Cain!" he said.

The speaker acknowledged that this was the correct answer. I started laughing to myself, though, because I imagined the incident playing out differently with a ridiculous caricature I'll call Grumpy Calvinist. Grumpy Calvinist would reply, "I'm sorry, that's wrong. The correct answer is GOD, because God is sovereign over all things."

Grumpy Calvinist would continue to ask a series of Bible trivia questions, each one being answered "correctly" by the children but incorrectly as far as he is concerned. To each answer he would offer the same correction: "I'm sorry, but..."

Our speaker last night gave candy to the kids who answered correctly, but Grumpy Calvinist would never do that. He would want them to learn that good doctrine is its own reward.

Soteriology: A Bunch of My Thoughts at This Point

NOTE: I started working on this post back in the summer. I worked on it for awhile, then abandoned it because I felt like the scope of what I was trying to talk about was just too broad. But a couple weeks ago I looked at it again and realized I had put too much work into it not to try and finish it (even if "finishing it" just meant getting it to a point where it was blog-worthy and ready for further refinement). I do think I'm biting off more than I can chew here, but as God helps me to sort through this stuff I have to start somewhere. So, here it is.

In 2007, I helped to staff a summer missions trip in Wildwood, New Jersey for seven weeks. It was a great experience - one of the best summers of my life. I learned a lot about what it looks like to live in community, to counsel those who are hurting, and to share about Jesus.

The theme of our project that summer was treasuring the Gospel, so most of our teaching focused on helping the participants to realize just how wonderful the Gospel message is. We spent most of our devotions in the book of Galatians, emphasizing freedom from legalism and assurance of salvation, and we spoke often about God's unconditional love - the idea that, because of what Christ has done, we can rest confidently in the knowledge that our redemption is certain. We told the participants that, because of Christ's sacrifice, God no longer sees our sin. We even asked them to evaluate themselves, only to hand their evaluations back with A-pluses at the top. Christ has earned your A+, we said. That's the good news.

Bridging the Gulf

I grew up going to a mid-size Covenant church in central Connecticut. When I was in high school we built a new, very modern sanctuary, but before that we had a smaller one with real pews and a lectern off to the side and blue drapes over the windows that looked like they had been installed in the sixties. In back there was a place for a choir, although most Sundays the space was empty because the choir only sang once a month. To the left of the choir-people who sat on the same side as the pastor's lectern there was a little alcove, and I remember when I was very small I used to imagine that God lived in that alcove. I suspected that if I walked back there and went inside, suddenly I would be under a starry Bethlehem sky and the baby Jesus would be there, glowing in the moonlight while a serene Mary and Joseph admired him silently.

If Calvinism is True, Was I Predestined Not to Like It?

Recently, a friend of mine was telling me about an experience he had on a summer missions trip with a ministry for college students. As was standard procedure for the ministry, students were sent out in pairs to start conversations with people and to share the Gospel. During one of these excursions, my friend happened to be paired with a student who was very passionate about Reformed theology. After the two shared an overview of the Gospel with a man who decided not to embrace it, the Reformed student said to my friend, “I don't know how you can have peace right now if you don't believe in the sovereignty of God. I have peace because I know God is in control of that man's salvation, not me. If God wants him to get saved, he'll get saved.”

If I had heard a statement like that several years ago, I might have nodded my head and smiled in passive (albeit halfhearted) agreement, but I just can't do that anymore. At the risk of being divisive, I'm going to come out of the closet and admit it: I don't like Reformed theology. 

Of course, I should be careful to define what I mean. I actually agree with the vast majority of Reformed theology. It's just the parts that get the most press that I don't like.