A Critique of TULIP, Part 9: Concluding Remarks

In this series, we have analyzed the soteriological system known as TULIP. Now we may summarize our conclusions as follows:

1. God’s sovereign acts in choosing the elect are eternal in nature and are outside of our notions of time.

2. While God’s acts of election are sovereign, they are not arbitrary and are intended to save those who would choose to worship him freely at the end of days.

3. The positing of God as on in our temporal state has necessitated a conflict between God’s sovereignty and man’s freedom.

4. This placing of God in time flowed from Cartesian presuppositions that crept into Christianity in the early modern era.

5. Man may be said to be totally depraved in the sense of completely unable to be saved apart from God’s grace but not in the sense that he is incapable of objectively good acts.

6. God’s election is not conditioned by anything we have or will do in our earthly lives. It is not, however, arbitrary. God chooses to save those who will freely wish to be with Him and worship Him forever after the end of days.

7. The sovereign choice of God in sending Jesus to atone for use was limited in its eternal scope but unlimited in its temporal sufficiency. It is offered to all but only the elect will respond and persevere.

8. Saving grace given to the elect is irresistible over the span of one’s life but its draw may be resisted at any one point in time.

9. The elect will persevere but this does not imply those who fall did not have faith. They may have had faith by natural grace and their own emotions but rejected it later.

10. Although absolute assurance is not possible, one can have reasonable assurance through the fruit they bear and their desire to follow the Lord.

Thus my evaluation of TULIP is that, while it has founded on the Bible, it does distort portions through the modernist presuppositions of the era when the theology developed. However, in fairness it should be pointed out that the Arminian opponents of Calvinism within the Reformed movement were just as guilty of modernist presuppositions.

Moreover, it might have been unavoidable that the modernist dilemma that would cause so many problems for the Christian faith would spread into the Church as well. Indeed, it is not only the Reformed tradition in particular and Protestantism in general that has been affected. The false dichotomy between God’s sovereignty and man’s freedom that forms the debate over TULIP has spread outside the Reformed camp as other traditions have taken their turns in answering the Calvinist claims.

The problem is not that TULIP is true or false but that the question it asks is not legitimate. TULIP presumes a choice must be made between God’s sovereignty and man’s freedom and this is clearly not the case. Moreover, this is not the only false dichotomy that has been foisted upon the Church due to the confusion of modernism over the applicable categories. There are others as well with artificial splits between faith and works and between Bible and Church that are also part of modernist thinking.

None of these choices ever occurred to anyone prior to the early modern era. This is why both Catholic and Protestant apologists can find applicable quotes from the Church Fathers that seem to be on either side of the debate over sola scriptura or sola fide. Often both will quote the same Church Father for opposing views. It is not that they believed in Scripture alone or Scripture and tradition. It is that they would never have thought of considering the two apart from each other. They also never considered the Bible and the Church in opposition. They also never considered faith and works in opposition.

These dichotomies are modern constructions that were devised to combat perceived corruptions in the Western Church and have no place in the history of Christian belief prior to that time. It is understandable how it developed since it was brought on by the “back to the sources” approach encourage by the Renaissance movement that preceded it. The error was not in combating corrupt beliefs that has entered the Church but in the canonization of a corrective to the status of a universally applied mandate.

To understand how this applies, consider the following: There was undoubtedly a lack of Scriptural understanding in late medieval Catholicism. No one – not even Catholic historians – denies this fact. Beliefs had crept in that had their origin more in folk piety than prior Christian tradition. Thus the current tradition was considered untrustworthy. In order to combat this, we should go back to the sources: the tradition was to be tested by Scripture. Thus we have a battle between Scripture and tradition where none had existed before.

Moreover, not everyone agreed on what Scripture stated. Luther and the Anglicans kept more of the Catholic belief and praxis than did the Reformed and they kept more than the Radical Reformers. Each step away from tradition was justified as moving towards Scriptural truth but this was a decontextualized Scripture that was reinterpreted according to the norms of their own day and their own theological disputes.

As the battles raged during the Reformation, the Catholic Church sought to stem the tide with its own reform at Trent. The tactical error they committed here was that they accepted the categories set forth in the Reformation by accepting the dichotomies as facts on the ground and merely contradicting the Protestant beliefs.

This is perhaps a major reason the Orthodox – who have never understood the battles in the Western Church – think Protestants and Catholics are two sides of the same coin. Churches in the west may argue about the answer to the questions but both presume the questions are legitimate.

If the Church is ever to be one, we must be willing to go back and reexamine these missteps. TULIP is just one example of the effects that modernism had on Christianity. In the future, I will do a series on dispensationalism that will point out another invented system of modernist Christian thinking. For now, I hope that the discussion given in this series will let you see the argument over TULIP may not have an answer because we are asking the wrong questions.

A video form of the above essay:

A Critique of TULIP, Part 8: Perseverance of the Saints

We now turn to the final point of TULIP – the Perseverance of the Saints. This is the odd one of the five points since the differences are not quite as polarized as in the others. There is in fact not two but any number of positions on this question and Calvinists and Arminians may have differences within their own camps that differentiate them. These differences may be summed up in the answers to the following three questions:

1. Can saving grace be resisted?
2. Can one “lose” their salvation?
3. Can one know with assurance that one is among the elect?

The first is merely a restatement of the fourth statement of TULIP (Irresistible Grace). Obviously Calvinists say no and Arminians say yes. The second question is brought about by the occurrence of apostasy from the Christian faith. The third is brought about from the difficulties on both sides from answering the second. There is no easy answer to these questions because there of the same misunderstanding that arises from the very assumptions guiding the debate.

Suppose you are a Calvinist. As mentioned, the first question must be answered in the negative. Since grace must always succeed, the answer to the second question also must answer in the negative. Once grace has entered one’s life, there is nothing that can stop it from reaching its fruition. Thus once salvation is gained, there can be no loss.

Yet this presents a great dilemma. Everyone knows someone who was a devout Christian and left the faith. Here we are not speaking only of children who leave as young adults – one could always claim they were previously only following their parents’ expectations – but those who came to faith as adults and then left. How do we explain this happening if salvation can not be lost?

The standard explanation is that they were never among the elect. But then how can we tell who is among the elect? In the past, the standard answer was by the fruit they bore. This was one of the motivations for the common practice among the Puritans to keep strict records of how they spent their time. If one could see that they were doing God’s work and not being idle, then they were likely among the elect.

The problem is that many who left the Christian faith were, by anyone’s account, bearing fruit. They lived their lives as good Christians should, were active in the life of the church, led many to faith, and in all respects were ideal Christians. But they did not persevere. Apart from denying they really meant it when they did all those positive things, the only other answer was to mumble something about God’s mysterious ways that raises more questions than it answers.

The classic Arminian solution has been to deny that grace must persevere. Grace is always available freely but man may reject it at any time – including after initially accepting it. While maintaining some level of consistency with the reality of apostasy, it does seem to leave salvation a less than assured affair. It also opens another possibility – if backsliding leads to sin, then the contrary would lead to a growing spiritual perfection. Thus the Holiness movement takes root with some Christians believing they no longer sin at all.

This delusional train of thought has led many Arminians to take at least one lead from their Calvinist foes and come up with the doctrine of “Once Saved – Always Saved”. It states that once a sinner has made a personal decision for Christ, they can never lose their state of grace and hence their salvation. Of course, this presents them with the same difficulties as the Calvinists have but even worse since they have no doctrine akin to that of Unconditional Election to fall back upon.

To illustrate this, remember that God under the Arminian theory elects those who would decide for Him. So He elects them and allows them to exercise their free will. But then at some future date, He would have to look even further in the future and realize they would later apostatize and then un-elect them. Surely this confused exercise of will indicates a less than sovereign God.

The cure for this condition of confusion suggested by some is even worse than the illness – they believe that apostasy does not count if it comes after their coming to faith. Thus once saved – only saved still saves even when the saved no longer believes in God. This makes God as deterministic as in Calvinism only with inconsistency as a highly questionable bonus.

Again the way we avoid this issue is to realize that election is outside of time and it manifests itself inside of time. The problems of perseverance disappear once we not insist that faith can only come from saving grace and not from natural grace. One can have faith from natural grace combined with the excitement of their own emotions; those with this faith may do mighty things in Christ’s name. But, in the end, they will fall by the wayside.

But why does God let this happen? Why not save them? The fact that many overlook is that God’s decision to save is sovereign but not arbitrary. There is a reason for His choice of who to elect. Eventually all those who have been elected will be freed from any hint of our current fallen nature and will choose to serve and worship Him always. However, some would even balk at this just as the fallen angels did. They simply will not serve and they will have no part in the New Jerusalem. God will save His own.

Understanding this and that God’s election is in eternity and our coming to faith is in time, we can answer the three questions as follows:

1. God elects us in eternity and those He elects will be saved. The saving grace He bestows upon the elect will bring them to persevere in the end. Although they may resist at individual moments of time, they will be carried by grace to safety in Christ. If we understand that grace operates over the span of a lifetime and not in a single moment of time, then any difficulties represented by resistance at a specific moment becomes irrelevant.

2. From the point of view of eternity, salvation cannot be lost because it is not a temporal event. However, faith can be gained and lost. Even among the elect, it may ebb and flow as we in our natural weakness face the trials of life. For the elect, faith in Christ will be preserved. For others, faith may arise for a time but will not take root without the power of the Holy Spirit.

3. In the most absolute sense, only God can truly know who is among the elect. Yet this does not mean one cannot have some reasonable assurance of salvation. If you are following the Lord and are hearing the Word preached and have been baptized and have been coming to his table and are have the hope of Christ risen, then there is good reason to believe you are among the elect. In fact, if you actually care about being among the elect, then this is a good sign. It is when you no longer care what happens after you die that is a concern.

As in the previous points, the error here was caused by not separating God’s eternal perspective from our temporal one. Once again, this leads to the misnomer that eternal sovereignty and temporal freedom cannot be reconciled. And once again, the overcoming of this presupposition overcomes the associated problems.

A video form of the above essay:

A Critique of TULIP, Part 7: Irresistible Grace

The doctrine of Irresistible Grace, the fourth point of TULIP we cover, states that the grace of God producing faith in men is always efficacious. That is, the grace of God will always produce the intent – man who is dead in his sins has no choice in the matter. The Arminian view is that grace makes man able to choose God freely and some accept and are saved while others resist and are damned.

The question is, of course, framed by the earlier point of Unconditional Election. If election is unconditional, then certainly it follows grace needs to be irresistible. Similarly, if election is conditional, then grace must be resistible to supply the condition. It should follow then that the same error of confusing eternal and temporal perspectives applies here.

The thing we again need to keep in mind is that God’s sovereign election is in eternity outside of time and is applied in time over the span of one’s life. Our will, while free, is weak and can succumb to spiritual pressure. This pressure can be negative as in the case of temptations or positive as the call of God’s grace. In the case of grace, it is in fact a great tide that we cannot fight and merely assent at some moment in time to follow – we may freely to choose to do so but it is because we can no longer fight the force of grace working on our soul.

Thus in time, we may see grace as a single conversion event but in reality it is with us throughout our walk and even before as it sets the stage for our commitment to the Lord Jesus Christ. Grace works on us through a series of events: our conversion (if we were not committed to Christ from our youth), our baptism, the prayers of our Christian brothers and sisters, our own prayers before the Lord, the reception of the Holy Communion, through to our final perseverance in the faith.

Grace is not a one-and-done event but a process. You are saved, you are being saved, and you will be saved. Salvation, as an eternal sovereign act of God, is not linked to temporal instances but is projected into them and grace is the conduit for the salvation by God in eternity. Furthermore, grace is not arbitrary but determined by God for those who would freely worship him and choose to be with him at the end of days.

So how does God’s grace work in our lives? For the Calvinist, grace appears in your life at a point in time, cannot be resisted, and preserves you to the end. For the Arminian, the grace given by the Gospel allows frees man to exercise his free will to decide for God. For Calvinists, the Arminian position appears equivalent to declaring man capable of perfection (and some extreme Arminians do take this view) while Arminians assert the Calvinist view reduces men to automatons (and some extreme Calvinists take this view).

For the Calvinist, the suggestion that grace can be resisted is a rejection of God’s sovereignty and implies that the grace of God cannot fulfill its purpose. For the Arminian, the purpose of grace is to free us to either accept Christ or reject Him. Acceptance allows us to strive against victory against sin, Satan, the world, and even our own flesh. For them, Calvinism nullifies the motivation for evangelism. For the Calvinist, the Arminian position adds to the finished work of Christ and implies His death is not sufficient.

When resolving the issue, we need again to remember grace originates with God in eternity and is not bound by our experience of the passage of time. The grace of God may appear in varying degrees – not all of it to save. For example, the very preservation of the cosmos is by the grace of God but that is not what is being discussed in terms of saving grace. Similarly, our bearing the image of God that gives us our intuitive knowledge of good and evil is by grace but is not saving grace.

The saving grace of God is His sovereign decision to save those who would worship Him but are condemned due to the sin inherited by all of us from the fall. This grace works through the lives of the elect to bring them to faith and preserve them in faith. This grace operates through events that open them up to the Gospel, the preaching of the Word, the Sacraments, prayer, and the Holy Spirit working in their lives. It is an error to believe that grace begins at some point in their lives; grace has always been with them leading them to that point and bringing them to faith in Christ that perseveres.

The error of seeing God as a temporal being the same as us leads us to believe that He must save us in one fell swoop and then preserve us. Those elect who have not yet come to faith are seen as without grace. While many conversions do occur in an instant, many others take years as the person’s attitude is gradually opened to the Gospel. What is going on here? Are they resisting the irresistible? Is God pulling His punches?

The answer is that grace is like a great tide that carries the person to faith despite their swimming against it. Saving grace is irresistible over the span of one’s life though they may fight it every step of the way. Even afterwards, the power of grace continues to move in the lives of the elect both in preserving them in faith and in the process of sanctification.

The question of how grace brings God’s plan to fruition brings us to the final point and the “P” of TULIP: Perseverance of the Saints.

The above essay in video form:

Christ is Risen!!

He is risen indeed!! On this day we in the West celebrate Jesus Christ’s rising from the grave and His conquest over death, I extend to all the hope and joy of Easter!!

A Critique of TULIP, Part 6: Limited Atonement

Probably no doctrine is more controversial within the system of TULIP as Limited Atonement. The very idea that Christ would have only come into the world to save some predetermined few is appalling to those whose image of Christ is closer to the idea of a merciful savior coming to redeem a dying world.

As in the previous two points of TULIP we have covered, Total Depravity and Unconditional Election, this point too is based in truth but a truth that can easily be distorted and in fact has been distorted. Once more we will see modernist presuppositions causing a complete misunderstanding on both sides as those who would take comfort in the belief oppose those who would be appalled by it – with Christians on both sides.

Lest we not get too far ahead of ourselves on this issue, let us first understand what Limited Atonement means. Essentially it states that Christ came for the elect and His sacrifice on the cross was intended for the elect and no one else. To Arminians, this presents God as being completely arbitrary and limits the power of the cross. For Calvinists, an unlimited atonement would allow man to resist God and limit the power of God’s grace. Clearly, both have points (at least on the surface) but their positions are contradictory. Both cannot be right.

A possible clue may be gained by noting the Scriptural passages used to defend each position. Since both groups accept sola scriptura, one would presume they have such passages. And so, Calvinists will appeal to various verses that mention Christ came to save those whom the Father had chosen for Him. Arminians will reply with their own verses mentioning that Christ was the savior of the world and propitiation for the world’s sins. Who is right?

The answer is both and neither. Again there is a confusion arising from equating eternal and temporal perspectives. All of the Calvinists’ passages refer back to the predestination of the elect. As mentioned in earlier installments of this series, this is an eternal sovereign act of God but it does not contradict the free will of men. All of the Arminians’ passages refer to the power of the Christ’s sacrifice in a moment in time and its power to forgive sins to any who choose to accept it. These two ideas are not contradictory but complimentary in nature – so long as we do not confuse God’s ways with ours.

Eternally, God chose a sovereign act of His will to save His own even though, through the fall of man, they could not be in His presence of their own accord. Thus, in the sense of the election, the atonement may be considered limited. However, within the temporal realm, Christ has also provided an unlimited sacrifice for all who may believe. Yet, those who believe are those who were predestined by God for grace so they may be with Him forever. While others may claim the cross at some point in their lives through their own emotions, they cannot fulfill this without grace. God’s election is not arbitrary but just and provides the means for those who would, in a new life apart from sin and death, choose to be with Him and worship Him forever.

Thus we may say the atonement in limited in the sense that not all will avail themselves of its forgiveness. We may say it is limited in the sense that not all will be given the grace to do so. But it is not limited in the sense of being offered to all. And it is not limited in the sense that not all who would want at the core of their being to worship God forever will be given the grace to persevere. In other words, it is limited in eternal efficiency but unlimited in temporal sufficiency.

Throughout this series thus far, we have touched frequently on the topic of grace. This discussion now leads us to a discussion of the scope of grace and the “I” of TULIP: Irresistible Grace.

Video form of the above essay:

A Critique of TULIP, Part 5: Unconditional Election

We have already discussed man’s state before God and pointed out how early modern presuppositions led to the error of placing God in a temporal framework and forced Reformed theologians – both Calvinists and their Arminian opponents – to make a choice between God’s absolute sovereignty and man’s free will. Now we will deal with the fact of God’s election of man and its scope.

The same sort of confusion that tempers the idea of Total Depravity also is played out here. The separation between Calvinists and Arminians is much clearer in the case of election since it is focused on God’s actions rather than man’s state before God acts. The problem is again that both sides assume God’s action is a temporal one and thus there needs to be a clear choice between God’s total sovereignty and man’s freedom of will.

If God were Himself temporal, as the prevailing paradigm of the time suggested, then the Calvinists’ view of His absolute sovereignty would demand His choice not be affected by anything present in any individual. They also support this view by noting that through sin man was already spiritually dead and thus could not offer anything for God to consider in His election anyway. Thus God must select them on His own without any reason apart from His choice to save some when all should perish.

Arminians believe this sort of arbitrary election sentences man to never be free – either before or after God’s grace works upon them. In their view, the Calvinist system implies man merely goes from being a prisoner of sin to a prisoner of grace without ever making a choice for either side. Thus, they cannot avoid being under sin and now they cannot avoid being under grace. If God can make such arbitrary decisions, then why not save all of mankind and not just a few? Why hold men to a standard they were born incapable of meeting and then arbitrarily decide to pull a few back from the abyss? They ask forcefully is this a God of love?

Their solution is that God foresees that some when offered salvation would refuse and some would accept and so God chooses to elect those who would choose Him. Thus there is a role for man but God must still elect them. Thus God’s election, while sovereign, is not arbitrary.

Calvinists recoil at what they see as this infringing upon God’s power. They reply we are not to judge God’s work as just or unjust and since we are all reprobate sinners then any act of God to save even one is more than is due. Besides, foreknowledge only applies to what exists and the future presumes God’s election in the past. This would lead to a vicious circle where you can only foresee the future but the future presumes the election. Can God truly be sovereign if he needs to keep peeking at the end of the book to write each page?

The truth is that both sides have legitimate reasons for doubting the veracity of the other position. The Arminian view does presume an ad hoc solution that, while maintaining some consistency, makes all manner of circular judgments. If man is dead in sin, there is nothing that can affect God’s judgment since we are all equally dead. If God is using foreknowledge, anything He sees presumes an election has already occurred and God’s grace is drawing the elect to Himself.

The Calvinist view is not off the hook either. If God’s purpose is for us to freely worship Him, then what does a deterministic salvation accomplish and what would prevent us from sinning once we are restored at the end of all things? If we are never to be able to freely worship God, then does this not reduce us to little more than His puppets? Such questions does not challenge God’s sovereignty but the supposed solution that mere men deduced over a millennia and a half after Christ had died on Calvary. Is it reasonable to know there only Calvinists knew something so vital that was sheltered from the rest of Christendom for so long a period?

The truth is that Reformed theology was very much shaped by early modernism and its Cartesian presuppositions and these distorted certain aspects that helped foster the predicament described above. As has been noted throughout this series, the major problem was the belief in the absolute objectivity of space and time for all of existence. Thus, while perhaps giving God’s transcendence some lip service, they operated as though God was in fact operating within our same spatial temporal framework.

Once we realize that God is operating outside of time and man inside of time then the problem evaporates. God’s creation is eternal and He knows our ultimate stand with or against Him in eternity. He does not need to peek ahead since He is the author of all of time. The election takes place outside of time knowing our standing in eternity that is just as final as was the angels. However, since we are brought into a fallen world, even His own are corrupted and God elects to call His own to Himself through the work of Jesus Christ who lived the life of perfect obedience and gave Himself as Son of man so we might share in eternal life as adopted sons of God.

Thus God is not looking at us in time but outside of this time in the New Jerusalem. Some souls will eternally cling to God; many will eternally rebel against God. God calls His own to Himself through Christ’s sacrifice. It is a complete total and sovereign act of mercy to save all who were sentenced to death through a fallen world so that those who in eternity would cleave to Him might live forever in His presence.

Thus God’s election is indeed sovereign and in eternity as God sees man to his very being apart from this fallen world in a way man could never even see himself. And still man does retain his freedom and in the end of all days will be able to freely worship His creator with all of His being – no longer either a prisoner or puppet but one who has been set free to spend eternity in the presence of the Most High.

With this perspective, we no longer need see Christ’s sacrifice as some act of retribution of a blood staved deity who killed His innocent Son to save those who rebelled. Instead, we know those who are dead can only offer more death. God in His grace has accepted the one true offering of the death of one so pure He would conquer death. And for this purpose and His love for His own, God entered this fallen world as the Second Person of the Blessed Trinity became incarnate, lived the perfect life, gave Himself in a supreme act of self giving where He even forgave His murderers, and then conquered death to begin the restoration of a fallen world. It was not out of vengeance but love that Christ went upon the cross and through His life, death, and resurrection that all of history was changed.

But changed for whom? Who is given this offering? For whom did Christ die? We shall discuss this next when we turn to Limited Atonement.

Video form of the above essay:

A Critique of TULIP, Part 4: Total Depravity

The first principle to cover and the “T” in TULIP is the belief in Total Depravity. In understanding what this principle means, we should first define what it does not mean. Total Depravity does not mean the individual with or without grace does the most depraved thing at all times. While one may certainly assert that Calvinists do not have an optimistic view of human nature, they certainly were aware that men were not running through the streets acting decadently at every conceivable moment; but they were also aware that men were capable of acting decadently at any conceivable moment.

The problem is that many in the Calvinist fold often do extend the meaning to the point where they almost seem to revel in announcing everyone’s depravity. They equate the fact that man cannot save himself apart from the grace of God with the view that man cannot ever do anything objectively good at any single moment in time. The confusion is again one of conflating eternal and temporal views.

Calvinists will often cite Scripture pointing out how man can never please God. However this is because God never sees our acts in isolation as we do but within the totality of our lives. Without grace, we will either have lived a life for God or for ourselves. We actually do have a choice at each moment of our life to decide and we do not choose the objective evil at all moments within our lives. But God sees past the individual incidents to our very core being that is connected to our actions at every passing moment of our lives.

From God’s eternal perspective, He sees not our individual behaviors at particular moments but the interrelated thoughts and deeds of our lives that are connected to the core of our souls. And this is the real problem: sin is not something we do but something we are. With sin entering the world, the image of God within us is corrupted and we are prisoners of sin. The problem thus is not that everything we do is evil in God’s sight but that we are evil in God’s sight. It is not our actions but ourselves that are at issue.

For those under grace, when this grace becomes effective in our lives, it is not that we are changed instantly into a sinless being but that a new force enters our lives – the work of the Holy Spirit. This is applied in two ways: by convicting us of our own fallen state to allow us to trust in Christ and to begin changing our lives and conforming it to live for God. It cannot change the past nor eradicate the affect of sin on the remainder of our lives – we will always remain fallen creatures in need of Christ – but it does make us a new creation so that we are no longer a prisoner to sin and can begin to conform our lives in accordance with God’s plan for us.

Thus far much of what I have said would not be overly controversial to most Christians and that is the odd thing about Total Depravity – it is not the content but the context that is the issue. That is, it is not the doctrine of the fall of man that is in dispute but how it is understood – in this case within the framework of the other four points of TULIP – that make it objectionable. This is one of the reasons why those Christians outside the tradition where the debate has raged have such a hard time understanding it. Often none but those who are arguing understand why they are disagreeing.

To understand the confusion more fully, it might help to look at it in its original context. Consider the following statement:
That man does not posses saving grace of himself, nor of the energy of his free will, inasmuch as in his state of apostasy and sin he can of and by himself neither think, will, nor do any thing that is truly good (such as saving Faith eminently is); but that it is necessary that he be born again of God in Christ, through his Holy Spirit, and renewed in understanding, inclination, and will, and all his faculties, in order that he may rightly understand, think, will, and effect what is truly good, according to the Word of Christ, John 15:5, “Without me you can do nothing.”

Many exterior to the Arminian/Calvinist battles who hear these words that speak of man’s apostasy and the necessity of the complete dependence on Christ for renewal might think this is the Calvinist idea of total depravity. This is the difficulty of taking each of the points in isolation from the others. The passage I cited above is the third article of the Remonstrants – the movement that coalesced around the teaching of Arminius and outlines the Arminian position of Deprivation that the Calvinist view of Total Depravity opposed.

Thus anyone can see the difference between the two positions is not on man’s bondage to sin without the grace of God. If some Arminians may caricature Calvinist views, then clearly some Calvinists are caricaturing Arminian views when they claim Pelagianism. Both views are completely in agreement on the point of man’s inability to save himself apart from the grace of God. The difference between the two positions is not where one stands on man’s state before grace but where one stands when grace enters the picture. It is at this point that they diverge and the resulting rancor develops. The Arminian view on this is that man can be transformed by God’s grace while the Calvinist view is that man will always be sinful to his core.

Of course, this too is an oversimplification of the matter as only the most hyper of Calvinists would reduce men to automatons and thus relieve them of any true responsibility under the law. Similarly, only the most Pelagian of Arminians would state that man is capable of living a sinless life and thus reduce the post-conversion Christian reliance on Christ to mere emulation.

Most Protestants will fall somewhere in the continuum but retain a tendency one way or the other. The basic question that truly separates the groups is this: Is salvation a monergistic or synergistic process? A monergistic view of salvation is that God is solely responsible through grace without regard to anything done by the man whatsoever. A synergistic view is that man has free will and, through cooperation with God’s grace, has some role in the process of salvation. Here we have the core of the issue and the one that both informed the selection of both the Remonstrants’ principles and the Calvinists’ reply to them in the canons of the Synod of Dort.

Calvinists and Arminians alike are ready to defend their views based upon passages from Scripture that supposedly undermine any opposing view and some on each side will point to witnesses in Church history (sometimes the same witnesses!) to support their views. The problem is not with the Bible or the ancient theologians but the inherently modernist presuppositions of Reformed theology that shaped the question on both the Calvinist and Arminian side and how it has driven the question in disputes with other traditions. Both Calvinism and its Arminian counterpart are products of early modernism and in their readings of both Scripture and the great theologians of the past interpret statements from a different time, place, and context through the philosophical presuppositions operative in the Reformation period.

In particular, the soteriological questions that were the center of the Reformation had focused on the state of man and hence on the temporal. God’s view of man was also seen as focusing each man’s state at a given time and thus also seeing God’s view of man as inherently temporal. This approach was easily reconcilable with the emerging Cartesian order that would see Euclidian space and linear time as absolute objective realities – a view reinforced by the Newton’s great clockwork universe – and even God Himself seemed to operate temporally.

If God and man are operating on the same temporal framework, then God can be seen as existing in time rather than transcending it. This subtle error naturally leads to a distorted perspective that necessitates the polarities between God’s sovereignty and man’s freedom. For if one assumes God and man are operating within the same temporal framework, then God’s predestining men for salvation and man deciding to follow Christ are logically incompatible.

For example, if one follows Calvinists in emphasizing God’s sovereign election, then man can never decide to choose God. Since God is operating within the same temporal framework as man, this means that the sovereign election has no place to respond whatsoever. God picks us to come to faith at a certain time and we have no choice in the matter. Of course, the difficult questions of how one can be responsible in a matter over which they have no control and why some lose their faith never really gets answered except with a stifling determinism that can become its own source of pride.

Similarly, the Arminian view favoring man’s freedom must do so at the expense of God’s sovereignty. The question of how God can affect a sovereign election upon those who need to approve it ends up in strained theories of foreseeing those who would accept their election and then electing them. Such ad hoc solutions, while perhaps maintaining some level of logical consistency, strain the meaning of the words and do not present a natural understanding of the situation.

As has been pointed out in previous installments of this series, once we realize that God and man are not using the same frame of reference and that God is outside time and man is inside time, what was once contradictory can be resolved in a satisfactory manner. From outside of time, God’s election is total and complete and without any input from man whatsoever. Moreover, man could give no input since he is a temporal being who can only sense the present moment and not the totality of his existence.

However, this sovereign election – complete from the vantage point of eternity – is played out in separate moments of time in which we exercise our free will. God has eternally shaped those choices through grace but we nonetheless make them at each point of time. From any given moment of time, we are free but the workings of grace have determined the outcome from the beginning.

The key here is to understand the difference between the things we do and the things we are. Particular deeds we do may be good and right in isolation but even the sum of our deeds does not tell who we are. We may freely choose to follow Christ one moment only to neglect him the next. The fact that we can at one point choose Christ does not mean we are His. We must accept Christ totally on His terms and this can only be done though grace given by God in a sovereign act.

Thus Total Depravity is right if understood as the belief that man cannot save himself and God must sovereignly intervene. This is a position that would find agreement with all the Church throughout history. However, it can be distorted and in the case of TULIP this appears to be the case because of certain misconceptions that had crept into the system through the influx of early modernism into the larger culture at the time of the Reformation.

Now that we have discussed man’s state and how God operates, we should move on to how salvation is made effective. For this we turn to the next point of TULIP: Unconditional Election.

The above essay in video form (in two parts):

A Critique of TULIP, Part 2: Eternal Sovereignty and Temporal Freedom

Many confusing theological problems result from conflating the eternal and the temporal. The phrase “in the beginning…” in the Gospel of John speaks points to the Word not merely as existing at the beginning of time – for that would make the Eternal Word a mere creation - nor as existing before time as “before” only has reference within a temporal framework. Instead, it speaks of the Eternal Word as being outside of time. God’s eternal existence in three Divine Persons should not be compared to the immortality assigned by the pagans to their pantheon of gods as the existence of the latter was internal to the cosmos and even the gods were subject to the whims of fate. The Christian understanding of God is that He is the necessary existent being who is the Creator and source of the universe. God – Father, Son, and Holy Spirit – is self-existing and everything else is created, dependent, and other.

It is essential to resolving many surface contradictions in theology to understand that from God’s eternal perspective, all of time – past, present, and future – is now. For if God were to be a fully temporal being, He would be subject to time and could not exist without it. This would reduce God to a being whose own existence would need explaining rather than the necessarily existent being upon which all other existence rests.

As the sole eternal being, any act of God is complete in itself and not in need of anything to fulfill its purpose. Thus we may say that God is completely and totally sovereign. He creates the universe and time with it and from the eternal perspective all has been ordained for His own purposes that we in our finite minds could not possibly understand. Yet for His own purposes He chooses to reveal elements of the Divine Plan to us in our own terms through divine revelation.

Once we understand the complete otherness of God’s eternal perspective, we can resolve many of the false dichotomies that often face Christians. These polar opposites often arise as a byproduct of confusing God’s eternal existence with the temporal existence of the Word made flesh resulting from His sovereign choice to enter His own creation and be Incarnate. Add to this the work of the Holy Spirit in the lives of the faithful and even more confusion occurs.

To understand how this confusion may distort things, consider the doctrine of grace. All the major Christian traditions agree that we are saved by grace. Protestants will make a further distinction stating we are saved by faith alone and not by works. The Catholics and the Orthodox assert that works also are required of the faithful. Both sides will have their respective passages in Paul’s Epistle to the Romans and the Epistle of James to back their respective assertions. Each then goes about explaining the other side’s evidence away.

It is no wonder that secularists looking at us from the outside are prone to conclude the two Epistles are in fact contradicting each other. After all, if we can’t make sense of it inside the Church, why should they? The question is whether we as Christians are willing to step back and take a fresh look or continually fight the old battles.

First of all, we must understand the meaning of grace. Grace is the unmerited bestowing of favor upon a subject by his absolute ruler. It is not a reward for anything the subject has done for even perfect obedience would merely be the sovereign’s due from his subjects. Thus grace is not merely a gift but one that the subject is unworthy of receiving. The absolute sovereign owes the subject nothing under any circumstances and the subject owes the sovereign everything under all circumstances. We must be sure we do not treat the Lord Jesus Christ as a golfing buddy and understand He is the one to whom we owe our very existence and He owes us nothing.

From the eternal perspective of God, the grace bestowed upon us is sufficient and perfect and in need of nothing to fulfill its purpose. It just is. In God bestowing this grace, we are the passive recipients of a sovereign eternal act to which we can add nothing. This grace produces the faith in us necessary to believe in the risen Christ and to persevere to the end. The grace also begins the process of sanctifying us so that we may be better conformed to His will. Both the faith and the good works of the believer are both a result of God’s grace.

Protestants will point to the fact that faith comes first and the works follow and therefore conclude faith is the only requirement. But many who have left the Church also had faith that in every respect was equal but did not persevere. It is often countered they were “never really saved” but this accusation seems to exist only to maintain logical consistency. Even they cannot tell the difference until it happens. The simple fact is those who fell away did have faith – but it was a faith born of their own experience and not by grace. Similarly, some might have both faith and works and later fall away for they too did not have the grace of God. Yet the Bible does seem to state in one place we are saved by grace, in another by faith, and in another by the combination of faith and works. What’s going on here?

The problem is resolved in understanding the differences between the eternal perspective of God and the temporal perspective of man. Divine revelation often presents eternal concepts in human languages that are inherently temporal. These languages are temporal for we are ourselves temporal beings. We can in points see the conflict clearly as in the prologue to the Gospel of John as mentioned above. Another place to see this tension is when Moses asks God for His name. God replies with a description of His essence in the great I AM. Regardless of time and place, God is and always will be and always was as all of time and space laid out before Him in an eternal now.

From this eternal perspective, our salvation is a single sovereign act of grace. From the temporal perspective, this act is played out in a series of seemingly separate acts that include our coming to faith, our being baptized, our receiving the Holy Communion, our acts of worship, our praying and being prayed for by others, and our persevering to the end. But all these acts are in movements in a symphony of the Holy Spirit that flows from a single sovereign eternal election.

Each of these separate temporal acts save our perseverance could in fact occur without grace. Many people have faith, are baptized, receive Holy Communion, worship God, pray and are prayed for, and in the end do not persevere. For in all of this, they do not have grace and it is grace that makes the soil fertile and allows the faith to set down roots.

From a temporal perspective, we have free will but it is rudderless and without any way of pleasing God. We may do individual acts that are objectively good, but without grace we are incapable of persevering to the end. With grace, we can begin to be drawn to Christ. We have always had the free choice to obey Him but now we have a desire in us born of grace that affects our choices and leads us to Him. From a temporal perspective, we still have free will but from an eternal perspective is has all been predestined.

The eternal election does not invalidate our temporal freedom. Like the captain of a ship in a great storm, you have the free will to choose a direction but the storm may overcome your choice. Limiting your choices at a particular time does not invalidate your freedom. After all, you may freely choose to leap tall buildings in a single bound, but gravity has its own voice.

Differentiating the eternal and the temporal perspectives also gives us an understanding of the eternal nature of the sacrifice of Christ. For God, every instant of the Lord Jesus Christ’s perfect life, blessed passion, atoning death, mighty resurrection, and glorious ascension are eternally present before Him as the Incarnation is one eternal act that foreordained all things. Thus, through Christ entering the world, the grace of God may be given by the power of the Holy Spirit to the faithful past, present, and future so they all may be reconciled to Him.

From our temporal perspective, salvation may be said to occur when the faith given by God’s grace becomes effective in our lives. But it may also be said that all the other elements given by God’s grace as part of our Christian lives – our entering the New Covenant through Baptism, our uniting ourselves with Christ in the Holy Communion, etc. - are also saving us in a continuing process. And it may also be said that when we finally persevere, we will have been saved. We may also say that we were saved when Christ died on the cross of Calvary nearly two millennia ago. And we may also say that God knew us from the beginning and we have always been accounted as saved.

The surface contradictions exist because of an eternal act being projected into the temporal realm and that these contradictions are merely different temporal frames of reference for the same eternal act. It is when we insist on a unique temporal frame of reference and deny others that we end up in theological quicksand. For errors are often not falsehoods but misapplied truths.

Video form of the above essay in two parts:

Historical Amnesia

I engaged in a few informal exchanges over the weekend that confirmed my opinion that one of the great problems of the West is a severe case of historical amnesia. We in the West have no idea where we came from, how events unfolded to arrive where we are, and where we are likely heading. We live merely for the now and have no inkling of our own culture and history.

What little we might know is transmitted through the distorted lens of a stifling political correctness that is mired in self-loathing and has effectively led to the cultural castration of the West. Our great contributions in philosophy (and related disciplines such as theology and science), literature, and the arts are often demonized as elitist while the most decadent and perverted products of our most debased psyches are celebrated as signs of our overthrowing puritanical demands on our conscience. We fail to grasp that freedom without virtue is mere license; knowledge without wisdom is mere facts; ethics without absolutes is mere custom.

One of those I engaged went by a moniker that, frankly, was little more than using the name of Jesus in a manner intended to offend. It was also quite interesting that this individual seemed to want to point out the immaturity of Christians. Of course, that he would use a term intended to mock the deeply held beliefs of others and would insert unsolicited rude comments on their pages was somehow considered an evidence of a higher calling.

When I pointed with some well placed sarcasm the glaring hypocrisy of his approach, he proceeded to quote Ayn Rand at me. Rand, the 20th century prophet of an unbridled greed so bereft of any ethical concerns that even many of her leading atheist contemporaries rejected her, has always held a strange appeal for those to whom Machiavelli seemed to compromising. I immediately questioned why someone would even consider citing someone like Rand as support for anything. I also supplied my own quote from William Shakespeare that speaks to the complete absurdity of the grand designs and conceits of men within the larger picture of passing time – a point that was completely lost on my erstwhile opponent.

In fact, he immediately became indignant and stated that whenever he used a quote, Christians would always attack the messenger. In return, I pointed out that perhaps this was a response to the logical fallacy of an appeal to authority. If one uses such witness to support one’s views, the character and quality of the witness is indeed an issue. If he had expressed things in his own words, then he might have had a legitimate complaint but it was obvious he was attempting to cite someone with more prestige than himself to bolster a weak argument.

The quote itself is quite dismal. Full of the hyperbole that characterized much or Rand’s writing, it was long on bluster and short on content. More damaging, however, is that he did not use the full quote. Rand was actually making a dual attack – not just on God but on civil society. The nihilistic implications of her discourse would probably have undermined his views but those parts of the passage were omitted by the use of “…”.

I have little doubt he has never seen the full quote. It is on any number of atheists’ websites in the same abridged form and few of those who use the quote have seen its rejection of the idea of the social contract. They merely go about their attacks on Christ and His Church and embody fully the earlier mentioned words of Shakespeare in Macbeth concerning the vanities of men:

To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow creeps in this petty pace from day to day, to the last syllable of recorded time; and all our yesterdays have lighted fools the way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle! Life’s but a walking shadow; a poor player. That struts and frets his hour upon the stage, and then is heard no more: it is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.

The second encounter was in response to the famous production of Jesus of Nazareth. A particular commenter was positing once again the thoroughly discredited Zeitgeist theory and said no one had any evidence it was not true. I immediately started posting the evidence in vivid detail. His response was …..the Bible has been changed a lot. And this has to do with…what?

Of course, this is the fallacy of the “red herring”. You are unable to answer an argument against your view, so you change to a completely unrelated question that actually has no bearing on the subject. Needless to say, when I asked for an example of some substantial changes, he changed the subject to the Luxor Temple. When I called him on that one, he went in yet another direction. At that point I realized he was fairly hopeless and bid him adieu. There is a point where you need to realize that some people are analytically challenged.

The final encounter grew out of a response to a hilarious dissection of a vocal atheist’s incompetent “proof” for the nonexistence of God. It is quite obvious he had ventured into the deep side of the pool without his flotation device and was unable to remain afloat. Someone else who I believe is supposed to be a Christian posted a response to this critique that demonstrated he also had gone in over his head. Both of them were having problems grasping the idea that God was the author of time and not an object in time.

I made a few responses to this video, both responded, and it was obvious very quickly that neither had much in the way of philosophical sophistication. On more than one occasion, I had to point out they accused me of making statements that occurred nowhere in my posts. I don’t necessarily think they were being deceptive but simply were in a bit over their heads.

For an example, at one point the atheist used the usual canard about the evils Christianity had done and I immediately pointed out these evils pale in comparison to that of atheist regimes of the past including the regimes of Stalin, Mao, and Pol Pot. The response was that you can’t generalize about atheism based on these few examples but of course I was not doing this. I merely pointed out that atrocities could occur under any regime and the problem may be with us rather than with an inherited belief system. The intention was to discuss what belief system might best explain the nature of the problem but this was a futile attempt considering the nature of the discourse. It did however lead to a conversation with the Christian on the importance of Christendom to the liberty we now enjoy.

The fact is that the union of Athens and Jerusalem produced the cauldron in which the concepts of natural law were forged. The idea of universals of the former and that of man created in the image of God of the latter was a necessary backdrop for the unique framework by which an evolution to the idea of individual rights independent of the will of the ruler would occur.

The response – from a Christian no less – was to insist that other societies had produced similar ideas and offered the examples of Japan, India, and South Korea. Of course, Japan has only had individual rights since our destruction of their previous system after World War II, India was introduced to democracy from its years as a British colony, and even South Korea was not a functioning democracy until very recently. Historically, none of these cultures, despite their great accomplishments, had ever recognized the idea that men were endowed with rights from their very nature as made in God’s image and had imported these idea from the West. In fact, their rulers were often seen as representing the very will of heaven and had absolute authority on matters of life and death.

Yet he insisted on claiming that other societies have done so – insisting that Buddhism, Confucianism, and even Islam had similar concepts. When challenged on this point, he responded by accusing me of cultural insensitivity, blocking me, and deleting my comments. Not that is matters since I doubt anyone who watches his videos regularly would have any clue what I was talking about.

He seems to be confused between the idea of cultures having general accomplishments and having accomplishments in a specific area. Many cultures have works that extol the importance of virtuous leaders, and even that unbridled tyranny is an offense. But the offense is against heaven and not the subjects. The West is unique in assuming the idea that every subject had inherent rights that the rulers must respect and a violation of these rights could render the ruler illegitimate.

The fact that the West has not always been on the side of the angels does not mitigate this point. Our failure is in not living up to our ideals and not in fulfilling them. For example, the West is not rare in having sanctioned slavery but is rare in having repudiated it. When our hypocrisy is pointed out, it merely underscores the very standards we fail to achieve. In many other societies, including those with many admirable qualities we do not possess, reforms would never be considered.

These three discussions have confirmed my own earlier perception that we live in a post-historical era. That is not that history has ended but that we are so ignorant as to live as though it did not matter. Even the most primitive societies have understood the importance of the past and revered their ancestors and valued the wisdom of their elders. We reject their experience, force them into retirement, and shuttle them off to senior communities where they need not have impact on our daily lives. We do not respect our elders but envy our children and desperately seek to remain young forever.

We have long lived off the capital of our ancestors. Until recently, classical culture was part of any civilized person’s education. We now repudiate this heritage and seek to fill its place it with ideas that respond to contemporary fancies, do not reflect what is lasting, and will seem absurd to the next generation. Until recently, Biblical knowledge was a part of the landscape of our cultural discourse and the wisdom it possessed was referenced by not only Christians and Jews but Deists and even atheists. Now there is a complete illiteracy on this bedrock of our culture.

As these twin pillars of Athens and Jerusalem fade from our collective memories, so too does the context of the natural law it provided. If the source of our freedoms is not in the natural law, then from where does it originate? More and more it appears to be governed by our own fancies or, worse yet, the fancy of the state. Lord, have mercy upon us.

A video form of the above essay (in two sections):

Te Deum Laudamus

Praying the Te Deum Laudamus from the 1928 Book of Common Prayer.