One reason I have not joined the Calvinists
is because they are not completely right about me. I don't say
that with indignity, but simply as a fact. I have no grounds for
any dignity of my own other than the fact that I was created in
the image of God (Jas.3:9). When I was an unrepentant sinner the
Calvinists had categorized me correctly as one who, in my pride
and revolt, had refused to accept the fact that I could not in
my fallen state choose God on my own initiative. But, those who
know me as a Christian who has considered but not joined the
Calvinists, categorize me as one they suspect of having a
lingering pride that wants to take some meritorious credit for
having had faith to believe.
"You did not choose Christ," they say, "He
chose you.," My humanistic thinking, they say, is the reason
that I have not joined their view.
I will confess that I am still a sinner who
often overestimates my own importance and on occasion have been
in prideful revolt against my Lord. But even in those times I
have not really been disposed to reject Christ. The point I am
making is this: It is not some lingering boastfulness that keeps
me from crossing the Calvinist threshold. I am not convicted by
the Spirit of doing such boasting and I am confident that a
child of God would be convicted of such a thing at some point in
his life if it were part of his stance.
My stance is that whoever has not heard the
gospel is disposed to reject faith in God because of his sinful
nature, but because of the image of God, that lingers in every
man's make-up, he is also capable of believing it when he hears
the gospel. He is capable of being enlightened as John 1:9
indicates: "The true light that gives light to every man was
coming into the world." This act of belief, of course, is not a
consequence of man's initiative, but is one possible response to
the grace of the gospel proclamation which is God's initiative.
I am dependent on God who gave me the grace (because I had no
will to have his grace) to be able to respond to him (Romans
9:16). God's initiative in bringing the gospel shows
("enlightens") a man that he is deceiving himself, which allows
him to rightly place his faith if he will (Jn. 7:17).
By the gospel, God's grace grants us freedom.
Faith is the act of receiving that freedom. At times, when the
Bible speaks of "the faith" as being a gift of God, I understand
it as a figurative way (metonymy) of alluding to the "granting"
being done. I understand it this way because of the numerous
times that faith is referred to as a condition for salvation.
Grace awakens us to the possibility of believing. But, believing
is our responsibility; faith is our responsibility. Otherwise we
could not be chided by the Lord; "O, ye of little faith!"
It is God, for example who says to sulking
Cain, "Do thou rule over it; [sin]." Cain is made responsible.
It is God who initiates things. What God speaks to Cain is the
gospel. [1] Cain is informed by God about what is good for him
and he then has the possibility of knowing that he can do the
good because it is God Himself who would add the power for Cain.
Will Cain have faith?
In this incident (Gen. 4:6,7), to "rule over
it" is to stop being angry at God, to put an end to resulting
despair and to master evil. Cain did not accept God's decision
to recognize Abel's sacrifice and not his own. Cain did not
accept the will of God so expressed. He does not believe that
God loves him anyway. He thinks God is unjust. The good, then,
is to accept the decision of God whatever it might be, including
the will which gives preference to Able. if Cain will by faith
be in agreement with that will he would find the strength from
God to master anger, despair and evil.
MINIMIZE THE FALL--NOT
Everything of which a man is capable of from
birth is a gift of God. Paul says (1 Cor.4:7), "what have you
that you did not receive? If then you received it, why do you
boast as if it were not a gift?" Even the capacity, when faced
with God's word to have faith in God or to keep trying to put
faith in some other object, is a gift from God in which I do not
boast. There is in all men an essential part of their humanity
that may be touched by the proclamation of the gospel. [2] In
this sense all of us have within ourselves (by God's gifting)
the capacity of responding to the gospel in true faith.
There is no "method" for obtaining grace.
Grace cannot be grace and be subject to our control. But when
the Spirit blows where it wills and God's good news comes to us,
as it did to Cain, it is not an opportunity for "obtaining"
grace; it IS grace!
I am sometimes accused of wanting to preserve
an autonomy before God; that I am following the age old heresy
of human pride which cannot tolerate everything being dependent
upon the grace of God, including the predetermination of my
response. It seems clear to me, however, that my response is
dependent on the grace of God. There is nothing in me that has
escaped the "fall" unharmed. God's grace is needed to restore
me.
BOASTING IS FOR THE DECEIVED
An unbeliever indeed thinks that on his own
initiative he is able to choose to believe Christ. By scripture
we know that is not the case. At one point even I, a believer,
thought that on my own initiative I had chosen Christ, but as I
reflected on scripture (John 15:16) I had to admit the true
nature of the case. I am aware of the hideous thought that I
might have resisted and rejected the gospel call but that does
not become a boast for me. It is only the hollow boast of those
on Satan's side who would resist the creator and celebrate
instead that remaining withered and perverted aspect of the
divine image that is left in them: that is, the self-caused
choice in the face of God's initiative.
We know that what the unbeliever does is to
suppress the truth in unrighteousness (Romans 1:18). To suppress
the truth, men must know it. But a man deceives himself into
thinking that life is in himself. This is what Darwinists do.
Not wishing to believe that life comes from God they have
devised a theory that exchanges the glory of the incorruptible
God for an image in the form of corruptible man.
Even the unbeliever was created with
knowledge of God as a natural function because it is natural to
believe in God (Romans 1:19). But, because of the break with God
in Adam, we all suppress the truth about God. As Solomon says,
"Behold, this alone have I found, that God made men upright, but
they have sought out many devices (Eccl. 7:29)."
When I became a believer I saw that this had
been my nature; there came a renewing of my mind; I forsook the
thinking that life was of my choosing; that my freedom included
choosing life on my own. I didn't have to join the Calvinists to
see this, but I did have to respond to God's initiative.
CHARGES OF IDOL MAKING
There remains an aspect of the wrong opinion
about me that is acutely alarming to me and that has caused me
to consider very carefully the Calvinist position. It is the
charge that I don't join because I want to have a god in my
image; a god who is limited and smaller. Calvinists claim that I
am rejecting their glorious, unlimited God for a much less
glorious, limited god. By not joining them they say I am
insisting on reducing the kind of God that really exists.
It is true that men make idols so that they
can limit God. God judges us. He speaks to us and challenges us
about our sins and calls us to repentance whereas idols do no
such speaking. Idols are dumb; silent! They are convenient and
controllable and allow us to go on in our sins because they are
made after our image.
Calvinists say that by rejecting their
doctrine I am constructing in its place a god who is limited in
power, limited in knowledge, and reduced to one who changes like
a human who changes by maturing or by fickleness. They say it is
my idolatrous tendency to make God more like me and less like
the way they say He really is.
This is a very frightening charge because I
know Man has this tendency and I'm not excluded. The sinful
heart of an unbeliever tends to linger on in the believer. It is
called the "flesh" in the Bible. It hates God and wants to serve
a manmade god. So I know that in me is both a desire to have God
be less than He is and under my control, and a desire to be
surrendered to Him and under His unlimited control. I am
thankful that the latter is the stronger in me.
Although my heart cannot be trusted or
discerned by me directly, I can asses myself by certain outward
signs: Am I persisting in sins or am I turning from them? Am I
aloof or am I loving the brethren? Am I swallowed up in my own
thoughts or am I listening to God and reading His word and
conversing with Him? If I am doing the latter of these things it
is not likely that I am making a false god of my own invention.
I am grateful to the Calvinists for their charge because it has
made me careful not to put manmade limits upon God. But, I have
often wondered if this fear of idol making has wrongly been the
motivating influence in some people's conversion to Calvinism.
Those who do convert to Calvinism usually
don't have to abandon one Arminian concept that is not
completely correct, and that is the concept of time. Both
Augustine and much of today's Church have a different view of
God and time than that had by people of Bible times. In the next
chapter I will try to show how the earlier view of God and time
is the correct view that should change the way both Calvinists
and Arminians view time.
NOTES
Although there are circumstances where God
does mock and laugh at unrepentant sinners (Ps.2),
He is not doing this with Cain. I owe the commentary on Cain to
Jaques Ellul, _To Will & To Do_, Pilgrim Press.
In the parable of the sower and the seed,
even those who are illustrated by hard ground might
be touched by the gospel. These, however, have hardened
themselves. They have rejected a
response of faith and have let their hardness leave the seed for
Satan to remove. Others who
have initial faith do not continue in faith, but let the
testings of life overcome their faith (Jas. 1:21).