As I Was Saying . . .

My my my my my.

Everybody: My my my my …

Here’s the thing: when it comes to discussing things Christian on the Web, there are certain key words or phrases that might as well be button-like icons that, when clicked on, guarantee a programmed response.

Provocations include:

Double predestination is not only daft but evil, making God the author of sin.

Double predestination is the key to understanding God’s sovereignty. And what’s more, if there aren’t infants in hell, the doctrine of imputation is incoherent.

The Pope is the Antichrist.

The Pope is the Vicar of Christ on earth, and anyone who does not acknowledge his authority at the successor to St. Peter is outside the true.

Mormons are not Christians but are members of a quasi-Christian sect.

Mormons restored true Christianity.

Women should be ordained. And once ordained, there is no credible reason for preventing their becoming bishops.

Women should not even be allowed suffrage in the church. It leads to ordination, which leads to heresy.

The emerging church is the future of evangelical Christianity.

The emerging church has already left evangelical Christianity behind and is now headed for Wackyville.

Hell is merely for a “time,” and then its denizens are either saved or annihilated.

There is no hell.

Joel Osteen is a winsome witness for Christ.

Joel Osteen made me throw my television out a second-story window. And I’m not apologizing to the kid it landed on.

You know what I mean.

So, yes, I couldn’t resist clicking on that very first button. And press it I did. Hard. And out came pretty much the response I expected.

But believe it or not, I didn’t do it for that reason. I did it because this was an issue that at one point in my life I needed to resolve for myself or lose my faith altogether. And I am not alone on that score. Not by a long shot. (Please, again, read Professor Thuesen’s book.)

I emphasize the “for myself” because, while I know what I believe, and also what I reject, about the ways of God with men, I do not think for a moment that I have resolved the “problem” of divine sovereignty and human freedom, or reconciled the contradictions, or put the matter to rest, for goodness’ sake. For that I would have to stand outside time itself. I have enough trouble smooshing myself into an R train at night . . .

It never fails to amaze me how some people equate their “system” with Christ. Calvin did not die for you. Neither did Augustine or Thomas Aquinas or Luther or Zwingli or Wesley or Dwight L. Moody. Calvin didn’t even construct a system, per se. Read his magnum opus—it is not a work of systematics. That wouldn’t come until, what—Turretin? With his Elenctics completed in 1685? So nobody got the whole Christian thing straight before then? Or is it before the publication of the Westminster Confession of Faith? This is what I mean by taking a step back and letting some light and air get between you and your ideology, because at the end of the day, if it’s Calvinism (or any other ism) or die, you’re dead.

I consider myself a confessional Lutheran. If someone wants to call Luther a fat drunken lout who only wanted to sleep with a nun and who was nutty to believe that justification by faith alone and baptismal regeneration were compatible—so what? Don’t worship in a Lutheran church. Or read some serious Lutheran theology. Luther did and said some terrible things. No one is ever going to put a plaster statue of Marty on their dashboard, or cry out, “Save me, St. Martin!” And thank goodness. I think sometimes we must be saved not only from our sins but also from our saints.

Nevertheless, and notwithstanding, I find Luther’s theology of the Cross very meaningful and the Lutheran wedding of the Old Faith and the evangelical important. But again—so what? Theologies, systems, confessions—these are helps, aids, of historical significance in calling out how the church(es) responded to controversies at different times and in different places. They can help explicate the meaning of the Cross, but Calvary and Christ’s death must have some objective significance beyond our personal, denominational interpretations or we are lost in a sea of subjectivity.

I say this from personal experience. I know all about this defensiveness. Been there, done that. And I know all the arguments—I probably know them better than you. I can quote Scripture too. And have.

Another thing I find very silly about debates such as these is that all too often defenders of double predestination treat it as if it were the sine qua non of the Gospel, of the Christian faith itself. Great jumping dust bunnies, any quick perusal of a Christian-history or historical-theology text will tell you that it was nonexistent until Augustine, and then always a minority report. Even within the Reformation camp, Melanchthon and Arminius, a Lutheran and a Reformed Protestant, knew it was untenable—and for solid biblical, traditional, and commonsensical reasons.

One last time, a little perspective: To believe that before you were born God had already decided that you, as an individual, would spend eternity in heaven or in hell, merely because it pleased him to do so, his being God and all, irrespective of anything in you or about you—and that you were also responsible for your fate and that this is justice—demands the serious rejiggering of the definition of “responsible” and “justice.” And “authenticity” and “freedom” and “reality” and the “sanctity” of human life, and a lot of other words we use to talk about the human condition.

Tell me you believe, however, in a mythological monster who delights in human suffering as an expression of his absolute power and that we are merely hapless victims—well then the doctrine of double predestination becomes at least intelligible, albeit in a frighteningly sick way. But tell me that it’s also the condemned’s fault, and I’m going to drive you to a pharmacist to re-up your meds.

One could argue, as has been done, that no one is forced to commit any one particular sin, and that, as the rules are written, it takes only a single sin to separate oneself from a holy God. This is meaningful only in a grammatical sense. That one cannot not sin is the point. The game is rigged against everyone if it is admitted from the get-go that there is nothing we can do about our fate. To say that that is what “grace” means is, again, to say nothing at all. If God must declare “Bob, you’re in” even before there is a Bob and “Sally, you’re out” even before there is a Sally for there to be such a thing as grace—well, one might as well call Sophie’s Choice an act of grace.

To be fair, Calvinists can just as easily turn the tables and say: “But if we’re truly free to embrace or reject the Gospel message, unless you’re a universalist, there are a whole lot of folks who are going to reject it, and so be lost. And then the question becomes, Why?

“Say Pastor X preached the gospel all his adult life, was a fine, upstanding example of a Christian shepherd, father, husband, and teacher. One day he learns his wife and child were carjacked and shot dead. Overwhelmed by the pain of it, he raises his fist to Heaven and rejects the very idea of a loving, sovereign God. What kind of Divine Father would permit such a thing to happen, when a simple redirection of the car or a heavier foot on a gas pedal— making a yellow light rather than stopping at a red one—would have spared two innocent lives?

“If God wanted all to be saved, then he wanted Pastor X to be saved. And if God knew Pastor X would lose his faith and reject Him because of this horrific loss—why permit it to happen in the first place?”

Dunno. And neither do you. I am unconvinced by the “middle knowledge” and “open theism” arguments (at least to date). But what I’d like to believe, and that’s all I can do, as I do not know, is that God’s grace is greater than one man’s anguished act of rejection in the face of horror. Which is what makes God great—and defined by his love and not by his sense of justice.

What I also believe is that God Almighty, under no compulsion but merely as an expression of his love, overflowing from the relations among the persons of the Trinity, began a great work of creation some timeless time ago, culling from chaos not only the marvels of the universe but a family to enjoy him forever, formed in defiance of the purely natural and natural selection. And I believe that the pain of that creative process is ongoing and is the pain of this life, and that the pain of the Cross is the human/divine matrix in which our final destiny is realized and our rebirth is effected, our creation completed, and that nothing a finite creature does in this life could merit in and of itself an eternal reward. This, too, is a way of looking at how a gracious God operates in a dying world.

That there are some who will be separated from God when their life’s sojourn is complete, I believe as well. But punishment can be remedial, intended to change a person’s behavior; preventative, intended to literally restrain the person from doing it again; and/or retributive—a just punishment for a given infraction. And so I also believe that whether punishment after this life is eternal or temporary—acknowledging that notions of the temporal become meaningless in the afterlife—is an open question. Which is just my way of saying I don’t know—and neither do you. (Ooops, have a feeling I just clicked on another one of those buttons. Damn Apple Magic Mouse…)

There’s another strangeness at work here. In the heat of these debates there is inevitably tossed around the idea that to defend a notion of grace that is coterminous with double predestination is in some way to defend God’s honor, his majesty, his dignity. Otherwise, you are allowing the merely human into the discussion of what “motivates” a perfectly free God, making the Creator somehow dependent on the creature, and therefore less than God.

This is why I sometimes think we’re talking about two different religions.

In Christianity, we have a God who allowed himself in the Incarnation to be manhandled by a bunch of grungy Roman soldiers, mocked, whipped, nailed to two pieces of wood, and left to die naked—in front of his own mother. I think it is fair to say that such a God is not nearly as concerned about his honor as we are—at least as we conceive of the notion of honor. That we owe God honor goes without saying—but that is because he endured such a thing for us. And I can only say for us and not for some because I have rejected the very idea of double predestination.

To say we owe God honor simply because he is God, without any reference to the Cross, which is the only way I know God at all, is to say Russians owed Stalin honor because he could have had any one of them sent to the Gulag with a wiggle of his mustache. This is to worship pure power. This is to worship in servile fear. But perfect love, as we know, casts out fear. And perfect love is realized not in the power to damn but in the power to give new life.

Kenosis. Self-limiting. These too describe God, yes? At least God as revealed in Jesus Christ? And his setting up of terms—If you do X, I’ll do Y—this too has biblical warrant? And the X is Believe? And faith is always in Scripture contrasted with works? So faith cannot be a work? Whether faith is a gift or whether the fact that we need only believe to be reconciled to a holy God is the gift is also an open question. I don’t know. And neither do you. You may know what you believe, as do I, but that’s not the same thing. (But you know that.)

I appreciate the support of those who understood what I was saying, or at least trying to say. And I also I appreciate the importance some Christians give to the notion of double predestination, believing it to be at the heart of their understanding of what it means to have a truly gracious God. I would only ask this latter group to, again, take a step back and consider the full implications of what this means. (I should also note that because I disagree vehemently with Calvinists on this issue does not mean I see nothing of value in the Reformed tradition. The preaching of C.I. Spurgeon, Martyn Lloyd-Jones, and my own former pastor Tim Keller have been very important to me at different points in my life. And ironically, the one thing to take away from Calvin’s Institutes most probably is not his views on predestination, which actually comprise but a small portion of the book, but his abhorrence of idolatry—and that is something we can all respect. One day I will relate my own entry into and exit from the Reformed world. It began with a near-death experience. No, not one of the “walk into the light” variety, which we now know is more a matter of brain swelling and CO2 emissions, but that other kind. The left for dead in the street in a mugging kind. But that’s for another time. I’m already way long here.)

And as for the one or two who decided they had to get personal because, well, that’s what they do, that’s their shtick (always for the sake of the Gospel, of course), sorry, but I can’t possibly take you as seriously as you take yourselves. The burden would be unbearable.

And now back to our regularly scheduled programming.