If one takes the commandments of the Bible seriously, particularly the “repent” and “believe” commands, then one must assume that human beings have the ability to choose to obey these commands.
The above statement carries with it a presupposition and an ambguity:
- Presupposition: God never commands what is impossible.
- Ambiguity: Must we assume that all human beings have the ability to choose?
For me, as the autumn of 2003 drew to a close, the presupposition was sacrosanct. My best reasoning for this was something along the lines of this: “If God never allows us to be tempted beyond our ability to resist (1 Cor. 10:13), then God does not command us to do something that He does not provide, in some way, the ability to do.” But even that is assuming something that isn’t necessarily true: that 1 Cor. 10:13 applies to all men. The passage affirms that all men are tempted similarly, but it does not automatically affirm that all men have the ability to overcome temptation, and thereby to obey God at will.
I didn’t press my own reasoning too far, though; I just rested on it, comfortably… until the Holy Spirit, through Paul, made me uncomfortable with it. Reading Romans is either an exercise in learning that we have nothing in ourselves that commends us to God, and no reason to think that we have anything to do with our own salvation in terms of our fallen humanity choosing or doing something, or an eisegetic “striving after wind” as we listen carefully to what Paul says, and then reject his arguments in favor of something that does not give all the glory to God. By the time I got through teaching Romans 9, I was unable to say any longer that God does not choose exactly who will be saved, and by exception, then, who will be damned.
But I was conscious that becoming a complete fatalist or determinist in this regard would be an equally poor handling of the Word of God, precisely in those areas where man is called to choose. I (and our group) clung tenaciously to Deuteronomy 30:19 as if it answered the question. Sure, sure, we all said (following the teacher and Wesleyan/Arminian tradition for centuries), nobody denies that God predestines the elect. But what does it mean to predestine? The teacher taught us that the Greek was clear: predestination is really foreknowledge. He chose us because He looked into the future and saw that we chose Him.
But then I would turn back to Romans:
So then it does not depend on the man who wills or the man who runs, but on God who has mercy.—Romans 9:16
For once Jewish terminology stood me in good stead. I thought I knew what “the man who runs” meant: it meant the works of a man, the way he walks taken to the nth degree as he runs to do what he has willed to do. It was clear if we just read the chapter in context that works had nothing to do with it, and everybody agreed; it was also clear that the choice of a man had nothing to do with it, and nobody agreed.
And not only this, but there was Rebekah also, when she had conceived twins by one man, our father Isaac; for though the twins were not yet born, and had not done anything good or bad, in order that God’s purpose according to His choice might stand, not because of works, but because of Him who calls, it was said to her, “The older will serve the younger.” Just as it is written, “Jacob I loved, but Esau I hated.”—Romans 9:10-13
They weren’t born, they had not done anything good or bad, and the whole point is not that God knows the future and foreknew that one would love Him and one would hate Him, but that the choice stands “because of Him who calls.” He called Jacob because He loved Jacob. He didn’t call Esau because He hated Esau. And He hated Esau before Esau was born, and loved Jacob before Jacob was born. If it were on the basis of their future love of Him, or their future belief or works, then it would say so, but instead the chapter resounds over and over with the refrain that God chooses. In case this is misunderstood (and many think that this must have something to do with prophecy or nations or bloodlines, and the teacher could certainly deal with the predestination of races much better than the predestination of individuals), Paul goes on to discuss Pharaoh, making it clear from the Old Testament that Pharaoh was raised up so that he could be destroyed, as a tool to give glory to God, and with no regard for Pharaoh’s rights as a human or as an individual, or his happiness. There’s a “purpose-driven life” for you: Pharaoh’s purpose was to be destroyed for everyone to see, in rebellion and sin and judgment, to demonstrate the power of God and His mercy to His people Israel.
I knew now that I couldn’t escape it: God chose who would be saved, period, and His choice was entirely based on what He wanted. Could I complain about that? Not according to Paul:
You will say to me then, “Why does He still find fault? For who resists His will?” On the contrary, who are you, O man, who answers back to God? The thing molded will not say to the molder, “Why did you make me like this,” will it? Or does not the potter have a right over the clay, to make from the same lump one vessel for honorable use, and another for common use?—Romans 9:19-21
Paul hears my question, and refuses to answer it, instead putting me in my place as a pot made by a potter. Every complaint I have ever heard suggesting that Calvinism is unfair or unjust, by the way, fits into this category. Apparently God made some people with the full intention that they would never be saved. (Just last night in family devotions we were reading 1 Samuel 2, and you should have seen how wide the children’s eyes got when we read 2:25b: “But they would not listen to the voice of their father, for the Lord desired to put them to death.” Why wouldn’t they listen? Because the Lord wanted them to be destroyed. It doesn’t say that the Lord desired to put them to death because they would not listen; it is the other way around. When that was brought home, it just highlighted even more a truth about our God that, to their childish minds, is probably best put this way: He’s not a tame lion.)
This is not the moment when I became a Calvinist; this is merely the moment when I was convinced of one of the five points: unconditional election, that God chooses the elect without any condition on their part whatsoever. They do not in and of themselves respond better than anyone else, they do not choose better than anyone else, they are simply chosen. There is so much more to it, but I had the U without the TLIP and I had to make something out of it. I didn’t follow this to its logical conclusion, because if I did, then I would have had to affirm total depravity and irresistible grace, and eventually the perseverance of the saints, and finally limited atonement. I wasn’t ready for any of that, and I didn’t care to push ahead that far. I didn’t even know what the five points of Calvinism were at that point, but I had taught each of the five points of Arminianism, I just didn’t know what Arminianism was and I didn’t teach it systematically. Arminianism flowed naturally from my man-centered theology, but suddenly somebody had just thrown an orange into my apple cart, and I had to do something with it.
I alluded last time to the fact that I believed that Christ acted as a sort of epistemological buffer between God’s view of reality and man’s; in fact I believed that reality was quite different for God, not just a different perspective, but a different reality—a different truth. I was still shaking off postmodernism, albeit slowly, and I thought that perhaps what is objectively true for God is not in any useful way objectively true for us. Maybe we are being given a theology lesson, or maybe Paul is comforting us in some way by emphasizing the sovereignty of God, but ultimately I decided to hold to two opposite opinions simultaneously. I believed, and taught, that God was sovereign, and that man had libertarian free will and the ability to please God by choosing to believe in Him. I didn’t understand what it meant that men are born slaves to sin, dead in their trespasses and sins, and totally unable to please God (including to choose to believe in Him or repent, things that without question please Him); I simply stuck by my Deuteronomy 30 guns. “Moses told Israel to choose life, therefore everybody in Israel was capable of choosing life, therefore all men now are capable of choosing life, therefore the choice is, for all intents and purposes, in any useful sense, in man’s hands, and not God’s.” I held this while simultaneously teaching that God chose who would be saved and not on the basis of foreknowledge. And this self-contradictory nonsense is what I blithely tossed off as the ultimate unifying theory that made Calvinism and Arminianism come together and make sense.
I can’t make this make any more sense than that, because it is truly nonsense. People getting the tapes were murmuring about my “Calvinist background” (which was nonexistent) again. The teacher was sure I was wrong about the Greek. And instead of learning how the gospel works, I was making it even more confusing than it had been before. So I finished the theory of God’s truth and how it necessarily differs from Bible truth or our truth (ugh) and got back to practical teaching—that is, practical Arminianism, leaving the choice in man’s hands. We can know that God chooses, I said, and that’s “true” but it isn’t “useful.” What is useful to us is remembering that the choice is up to us. Otherwise (as I said now, only to eat my words later), we have nothing to proclaim, because evangelism is pointless if God is the only One Who makes the choice.
And thus I reinvented the old “Calvinism is anti-evangelism” canard for the bazillionth time, and in (I thought) affirming God’s sovereignty, I rejected it entirely in favor of a man-centered gospel. All of this was to say, that at the end of Romans, I affirmed the truth of what Paul wrote, and then denied that it had any practical value or truth in this world in which we live. I had come full circle, and ended up where I started, only even more established in my belief that man is the last agent in his salvation, the one who holds the deciding veto, who says “yea” or “nay” in the final analysis, and inoculated against any other viewpoint.
That is, until I turned on the radio one rainy night on the way home.
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