An interesting conversation erupted during a recent celebration among friends. The topic was Calvinism—a particular branch of Christian thought taught by a devout Christ-follower named John Calvin who lived in the 1500’s. Calvin, like all of us, had some right ideas and some wrong ones. In a world run amok with fuzzy thinking about God, Calvin’s cut and dried theses have recently gained renewed interest among people who are serious about following Jesus. Even TIME magazine has weighed in with an article on The New Calvinism in a larger piece about the Ten Ideas That Are Changing The World.

The piece of Calvin’s teaching that seems to garner the most interest is an idea referred to as “election” or “predestination.” It is the notion that long before the foundation of the world God decided who would be eternally saved and who would be forever damned. Proponents of the theory cite God’s (arbitrary?) selection of Noah to build the ark and survive the flood, his (arbitrary?) selection of Abraham to survive the wrath that rained down on Sodom & Gomorrah, and Paul’s discussion of pre-destiny in Romans 9 which was set in the larger context of understanding the juxtapositions between Christianity & Judaism. What they miss is “the rest of the story” that isn’t there. We don’t know the larger context of God’s dealing with humans around Noah and Abraham. We only know of God’s interaction with them. So the notion that God’s selection of those men was arbitrary is an argument made from silence; a largely unconvincing approach to forensics. (An example of an unconvincing and I believe fallacious argument from silence would be the notion that since Jesus never preached against homosexual behavior it must not be a sin. It is wishful thinking that won’t hold water against the light of all scriptural evidence. But I digress.)

Calvinistic thinkers ask some good questions, many of which I don’t have the intellectual capability to answer. I’m an armchair theologian at best. Nevertheless, I have a problem—a very serious “I don’t want anything to do with that kind of God” problem—with the notion that God in His sovereign omnipotence made a list and put some people on the list for damnation, just because He could. It is inconceivable to me that a God who is presented in the Bible as loving toward His creation, and whom I have personally experienced as incredibly loving, kind, gracious, and gentle-handed, could behave with such capricious insensitivity. Yet my Calvinist leaning friends persist, in a non-arrogant  but matter-of-fact manner, that this is just the way it is: God picked some and He didn’t pick others and “Boy isn’t it lucky for us that we got picked. Thanks be to God for his gracious mercy—-to US.”

Hogwash!

This Calvinistic form of predestination is unsupported in the whole of the scripture which instead portrays a God who created people ostensibly because He wanted to be with them, who created them with the capacity to reject Him, and who actively pursues those who reject Him bidding them to return to Him, voluntarily subjugate their will (desire to “be” God themselves and exert their own form of weak-potency) to Him, and allow Him to again enjoy their fellowship as He watches over and cares for them. This is a picture of God that I believe to be Biblical and which is antithetical to the notion that “God’s got a “damn you” list.”

II Peter 3:9 says “….the Lord is patient not wishing for any to perish but all to come to repentance.” I Timothy 2:4 says that God “…desires all men to be saved and come to the knowledge of the truth.” The notion that God wants man to be saved and that He doesn’t wish for any to perish is incompatible with the idea that God created some people for damnation. It is illogical.

Omnipotence and God’s Image

My Calvinist friends argue that God is omnipotent—all powerful—and that as such it’s not possible for man to reject God because somehow that makes God less than all powerful. That’s a limited and monolithic view of an omnipotent God. The many-faceted representation of God in the Bible is of a God who—though He is all powerful—doesn’t force His will upon people. He allows them to choose and then experience the positive or negative consequences of their choice. In creating man with the ability to make such a choice God paid man a great tribute: He gave us god-likeness. That’s part of what it means to be created in God’s image.

God creating us in His image doesn’t stop at our endowment with the power to choose. It also speaks to the inherent way that men behave toward their offspring: instinctively we protect them. It is inherent in my father nature to protect my children, ferociously, like a father. Not unlike my Heavenly Father. This “inherent” nature, coupled with the ten major laws God handed down to Moses are the root of our human law that prohibits infanticide (except in the modern, “enlightened” world where killing your baby before it is born is acceptable ) and homicide. How could it be that this inherent nature draped upon us with the mantle of God’s image, and the commandment “thou shall not kill” could have come from a God who is Himself arbitrary in his damnation of some men while saving others? Where I’m from we’d say “That dog won’t hunt.”

God’s “Choosing” of Us

One of the points of Calvinist contention is in the idea communicated in Ephesians 1 where it says “God chose us in Him before the foundation of the world” and that he “predestined us to adoption as sons.” Calvinists view that to mean that God “made a list” and in a way I can concur. Where I differ from my Calvinst friends is in whose name is on that “list.” I believe every human was on God’s mind. He chose us all. But his choosing us doesn’t mean we chose Him. In college I repeatedly chose a lovely young woman named Bobbie to go out on a date with me. But she never would choose me. Instead she exercised her free will and said “no.” Repeatedly. I was powerless to change her mind because I’m not omnipotent. You see, “choosing” is a two-way street.

Man’s ability to choose or reject God doesn’t threaten God’s omnipotence. Rather it fortifies what I understand about the unique nature of His God-ness. The gods that men create tend to be all-powerful, and capriciously arrogant in the exercise of that power. They are gods like Calvinists describe. They have their way with men, with no respect for the nobility of the human they have created. They are unlike my God who chooses to yield His omnipotence to man’s will. This suppression of power is the notion that Jesus communicated in His famous Sermon on the Mount when he said “Blessed are the meek.” By definition “meekness” is “power with restraint.” God is unique when contrasted with the gods men create precisely because He restrains himself. He restrained Himself when He came in the man Jesus who Philippians 2 says though He was God “……didn’t consider equality with God a thing to be grasped and put on the very nature of a servant….found in appearance as a man.” God coming to earth in the form of a man named Jesus and constraining himself to the daily rigors of life as a man didn’t make him any less God. Instead it portrayed a picture of a God who would lower himself on our behalf—-a God who would put our interest above His own—because He loves us, wants us, chose us, and pursues us yearning that we would return to Him and abandon our petulant insistence on being our own God in favor of voluntary surrender to His supremacy.

Wow! That’s a god worthy of my devotion. That’s the God of the Bible.

The Main Thing

Much loved friends who’ve read this far, I understand your desire to make sense of it all. I don’t pretend to know all or even most of God. But I do know that Jesus is His exact representation. Jesus who told the story of looking for the one lost sheep and the one lost coin; Jesus who endured separation from the Father and cried as He was forsaken; Jesus who smothered and bled on a splinter-filled timber for me. The God who He exactly represents cannot be the nasty God you  portray who choses (prefers?) that those who bear His image be eternally damned.

In our effort to understand God better, and our study under the many who would teach us about Him, let’s let them decrease as He increases. Let’s not fail to emphasize the study, and emulation of  Him. Let’s have less of John Calvin, and more of Jesus Christ.