Category Archives: Classical Arminianism

Matt Frost Critiques Arminius’ ‘Actualism’/Salvation; And I Say Some Stuff Too

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Here Matt Frost—Barthio-Lutheran theologian—offers a critique of Jacobus Arminius (the purported founder of what we know today as Arminianism, but from reading Arminius, directly now, I would claim that what defines fatimamarymost Arminians today and what defined Arminius’ theology yesterday are not corollary, or they are different); and in particular, Matt is critiquing based upon my little claim that Arminius was trying to offer his own version of theological actualism in contrast to the substance metaphysics supporting the “Calvinist’s” understanding of salvation and predestination that he (Arminius) is arguing against. Here is Matt Frost’s response to Arminius (and his ‘actualism’ i.e. oversimplified what is, is):

Such a theology of glory. The cross need never be mentioned; it is not central, not substantial, but accidental. It is not the shape of the thing, but merely the opening gambit. The decree is the thing.

The problem is that Arminius’ “actualism” here is actualism of the human person in history, as the central agent involved in the question of salvation. We are what we do, and the matter of salvation follows accordingly. God has possibilized salvation in Christ, and it is the believer who actualizes it. The proximate cause of salvation here is always belief and perseverance; only the ultimate and mediate/instrumental causes belong to God. This is the problem with the decretal understanding of salvation: it becomes the “law of the land,” which does not fulfill itself. It sets the terms of salvation, terms which are either met or not by human agents.

By comparison, Barth’s actualism (for example) declares that God is what God does, and that the matter of salvation follows accordingly. There is no decree. There is action, the primary fact, and announcement of that action, the secondary fact. Faith does something else: it leads toward moral behavior concordant with God’s accomplished salvation, when we understand and trust that fact. By trusting in God’s grace we begin to become what we are in Christ—our existence begins to conform to our essence—but we are that regardless of the relative possibility of our absolutely impossible existences in sin.

Either Arminius presumes (which he seems to) that there are human beings who shall be judged righteous on the basis of their perseverance in faith, and therefore saved, or he’s proposed a system in which all fail and all are therefore damned in divine foreknowledge. Grace in such a system as he proposes is (as in so much of scholasticism) the provision of effective assistance, and of reward. And it can be this because the assumption underlying it is that there is something worth saving, and that salvation and damnation are on the basis of worth. Salvation is a reward, the attainment of which has been made possible and then announced, and its achievement is left to human agency under the mask of divine foreknowledge. God has only achieved the salvation of the willing, and “election” is the election of a self-selecting group of people who choose salvation by sufficiently embracing the given means.

Have I mentioned I don’t like it? 😉

I think Matt is right! That is why our mode of Evangelical Calvinism, along with Torrance (and Barth) sees humanity’s humanity grounded and conditioned by Christ’s vicarious humanity for us. Instead of salvation being left to human agency under the mask of divine foreknowledge; salvation is left to Spirit anointed human agency under the mask of the divine life that the Son has always shared with the Father. There is no wondering whether salvation will be accomplished, in our scheme; salvation has been accomplished by the surety of God’s own person. It is not something that needs more accruing—by our perseverance in good works—it is someOne who has already finished the work of the Father by the Holy Spirit’s creative and recreative work through the Son’s obedience to become a man, and ultimately His obedience unto death, that makes salvation sure. Thus all we can do is participate in this by the Holy Spirit as we are united to the priestly humanity of Jesus Christ.

See what Matt is rightly critiquing is a form of semi-Pelagianism (moralizing) that he sees at work in Arminius’ theology; and it is this same conception of grace (and moralizing) that is present, not just in Arminius, but in the Calvinism (of which he was a part) of his day. This is the critique of Calvinism that I was first introduced to by Ron Frost in seminary, and it is still one I hold to today; viz. that any time we commodify grace (i.e. created grace), and see it as a quality that we can habituate in as the process by which we attain enough merit before God to then be found worthy to become initiate in the pilgrimage (think ‘viatore’) of salvation (i.e. Medieval conception of salvation), or as that which secures our process in the perseverance of good works (classical Arminian and Calvinist conceptions of salvation); then salvation becomes contingent upon “my” (and your) earning power—as if we could earn more “chips” from the meritorious achievement of Christ (which is how the Roman Catholic Church operates, as the dispenser of grace or merit chips)—and not based on the personal life of God for us in Jesus Christ. We are condemned to a world of obsessively and introvertedly looking at ourselves before we might ever be able to (reflexively) look at Christ. We, if we do this (along with Arminius), have just, at least engaged in the Nestorian (if not Ebionite) heresy of placing divinity in competition with humanity; when in fact the incarnation declares that these two have been reconciled and recreated by the Spirit in the second person of the Trinity, in the Son of God, Jesus Christ.

I am streaming now, time to stop.

Jacobus Arminius’ Argument Against Supralapsarian Double Election From Creation

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Here is one of many ways that Jacobus Arminius sought to undercut the supralapsarian double election teaching of some of the Calvinists of his day (and it should be noted that Arminius was of their number, ecclesially). This is Arminius finally offering his self-defense of his views on such things, which up until now had only been caricatured by his detractors as they made inferences from what some of Arminius’ students taught and preached from arminiustheir respective pulpits in Holland. Here is Arminius in his Declaration of Sentiments:

IX. This Predestination Is Diametrically Opposed to the Act of Creation

1. By virtue of its intrinsic nature, creation is a communication of that which is good; however, creation is not a communication of good when its purposive intent and design is set up to attain a predetermined reprobation. That which is good may be judged and determined to be good according to the mind and intention of the donor and according to the goal or purpose for which it is bestowed. In this instance, the intention of the donor would have to been to damn, an act that could only affect created beings, and the goal of the creative act was the eternal damnation of those beings. In which case, creation was not a communication of any good, but rather a preparation for the greatest evil—according to the very intention of the creator and the actual result of the event as designed. For such an event, the words of Christ are appropriate: “It would have been better for that one not to have been born” [Matt 26:24]. [W. Stephen Gunter, translator, Arminius and His Declaration of Sentiments: An Annotated Translation with Introduction and Theological Commentary, 116.]

This is representative of one of many arguments and articles that make up this particular article on predestination and creation. Arminius is offering a series of arguments from different angles that seek to undercut supralpsarian double election teaching. You can see how his argument is very scholastic, syllogistic, and succinct—Arminius was no dummy!

What do you think about Arminius’ argument against double election from creation? Do you think his major premise, i.e. that creation is a communication of that which is good …, is the best way to argue against this doctrine (if you are so inclined to in fact argue)? And what does this reveal about Arminius’ own theological orientation, relative to his methodology? I mean, what does making a primary argument from creation say about Arminius’ chosen theological methodology? [Hint: It is something I have argued against more than once, and as a theme of my blogging against classic Calvinism]

One thing is for sure, though; to read Arminius, directly, throws him into a light that really overshadows what has become known as Arminianism today. Arminius was really more of a Calvinist than anything else (methodologically, conceptually, and so forth). He moved and breathed within that context (the Calvinist or Reformed one), and he sought to work with the same material datum that his opponents worked with; that is, working from an Aristotelian based metaphysics and conception of reality (or now known as classical Theism today). This is why I usually lump classical Arminians in with classical Calvinists; their approaches aren’t dissimilar at the material principled level (de jure), but instead, their disparity comes at the level of chosen emphases and referent. They both work from a conception of God that is heavily decretal (a God who works through a set of predetermined decrees).

Part 1. The Classical Calvinists V. The Arminians: An Introduction to the Problem (Divine Sovereignty & Human Responsibility)

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This post represents the first of many (I think, we’ll see how that goes) on engaging the issue of God’s Sovereignty and Human Responsibility in the realm of salvation. I had intended on getting into the text of John Webster’s Barth’s Moral Theology: Human Action in Barth’s Thought, in this post; which is where I will be endeavoring to explicate a way beyond the impasse represented by the polarizing ends of either framing this issue of salvation in terms of God’s sovereignty and/or Human Responsibility, as if these can be pulled apart this way (which as we will see, they really can’t, or shouldn’t be). But given the breadth and depth of this topic, I think this post will have to contain itself with some necessary ground clearing that will provide a little more context to what I will be intending to resolve, or reframe. So this post will be just that, an exercise in ground clearing through problematizing the issue at hand: i.e. God’s Sovereignty in salvation and Human Responsibility just the same.

Thus, the following will be a minimalist comparison, and abductive exercise in teasing out the differences that have provided fuel for the fire of the long contested debate that has inhered between those rascally Calvinists and curmudgeonly Arminians over the last few centuries. In order to accomplish this task what better place to go than the documentary source of the debate in the first place; to Holland we must go! We turn then to the 5 Articles of the Remonstrance which Jacobus Arminius penned (by and large), which have provided the space for Arminian theology to grow in; and then the response from the Calvinists, their Canons of Dort (which later became popularized by the acronym TULIP). We will not look at the whole of either document (although I will have linkage to both of them so you can survey them in total for yourselves, if you like); instead, for our purposes, I will only be comparing what I deem the most salient points of contact for us. That is, we will pay attention to the ‘points’ that illustrate the difference (or maybe the similarity, surprisingly in some ways) that has provided the kindling for the fire that continues to burn between the Calvinists and Arminians. Here is the first article of the remonstrance:

Article 1.

[Conditional Election – corresponds to the second of TULIP’s five points, Unconditional Election]

That God, by an eternal and unchangeable purpose in Jesus Christ his Son before the foundation of the world, has determined that out of the fallen, sinful race of men, to save in Christ, for Christ’s sake, and through Christ, those who through the grace of the Holy Spirit shall believe on this his son Jesus, and shall persevere in this faith and obedience of faith, through this grace, even to the end; and, on the other hand, to leave the incorrigible and unbelieving in sin and under wrath and to condemn them as alienated from Christ, according to the word of the Gospel in John 3:36: “He that believes on the Son has everlasting life: and he that does not believe the Son shall not see life; but the wrath of God abides on him,” and according to other passages of Scripture also. [See all the Articles, here]

So the emphasis falls on those who ‘shall believe’ as the basis of God’s choice of them in election. Old school theologian, and Arminian theologian, Henry Thiessen states the logic of this article very clearly when he writes,

[…] It was an act of grace [election], in that He chose them “in Christ.” He could not choose them in themselves because of their ill desert; so He chose them in the merits of another. Furthermore, He chose those who He foreknew would accept Christ. The Scriptures definitely base God’s election on His foreknowledge: “Whom He foreknew, He also foreordained, … and whom He foreordained, them He also called” (Rom. 8:29, 30); “to the elect … according to the foreknowledge of God the Father” (1 Pet. 1:1, 2). Although we are nowhere told what it is in the foreknowledge of God that determines His choice, the repeated teaching of Scripture that man is responsible for accepting or rejecting salvation necessitates our postulating that it is man’s reaction to the revelation of God has made of Himself that is the basis of His election…. [brackets mine] [Henry C. Thiessen, Lectures In Systematic Theology, (Grand Rapids, MI: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1971), 344.]

This could be a more contemporary rendition and elucidation of what was originally written in the first article of the Remonstrant back in 1610. So God’s election to salvation, in this schema, is based on his ability to look down the corridor of time, see those individuals who will respond in the affirmative to His call of salvation; and then it is on this basis, that God is said to elect these individuals. God’s election is contingent on the choice of the person, God’s election in salvation is grounded in the human being’s Yes or No to Him.

And then the seventh article, in response, from the Canons of Dort:

Article 7: Election

Election is God’s unchangeable purpose by which he did the following:

Before the foundation of the world, by sheer grace, according to the free good pleasure of his will, God chose in Christ to salvation a definite number of particular people out of the entire human race, which had fallen by its own fault from its original innocence into sin and ruin. Those chosen were neither better nor more deserving than the others, but lay with them in the common misery. God did this in Christ, whom he also appointed from eternity to be the mediator, the head of all those chosen, and the foundation of their salvation.

And so God decreed to give to Christ those chosen for salvation, and to call and draw them effectively into Christ’s fellowship through the Word and Spirit. In other words, God decreed to grant them true faith in Christ, to justify them, to sanctify them, and finally, after powerfully preserving them in the fellowship of the Son, to glorify them.

God did all this in order to demonstrate his mercy, to the praise of the riches of God’s glorious grace. [see in full the Canons of Dort here]

In contrast, then, to the Remonstrance; the Calvinists, the Canons of Dort make clear that they believe that God’s choice of humanity is not contingent on the individuals who choose Him. Instead, salvation, for the Dortians is grounded in God’s choice of particular, and thus ‘elect’ individuals. The emphasis is on God’s choice and not man’s or woman’s.

Summary

Hopefully this has been an effective exercise in highlighting the historic differences between the classical Calvinist and Arminian distinctions on this highly debated topic. In the next post I will resummarize this debate, and use this as the backdrop towards a solution to this conflict that is provided through the grammar and theo-logic of Karl Barth and John Webster. For the classic Calvinist and Arminian salvation is either based solely on God’s choice or Humanity’s. But the reality is, is that it can be both; and the both can still all be grounded in God’s choice without denigrating the Human choice and responsibility therein.

What is Classical Theism?: And what impact does this have on the American Church?

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So what is Classical Theism? I often refer to it, and yet I do so without much explanation. This post, in part, will seek to remedy my dearth of explanation, and hopefully allow you to better discern how classical theism has seeped into the walls of your church, or into the Christian academic context in ways that I will contend have subverted the kind of Christian ‘depth spirituality’ that our Christian ‘Triune’ God has invited us to through his Son and by the Holy Spirit.

Classical Theism, in a nutshell, was given its most salient and popular form through the work of medieval theologian, Thomas Aquinas. At its most basic level Classical Theism (‘CT’ from this point on) is the integration of Aristotelian philosophical categories with Christian theology (this is often referred to as Thomism, which signifies that Thomas Aquinas is its primary proponent and developer in the history of the church). Princeton theologian, Bruce McCormack describes it in even more general terms this way:

Classical theism presupposes a very robust Creator/creature distinction. God’s being is understood to be complete in itself with or without the world, which means that the being of God is “wholly other” than the being of the world. Moreover, God’s being is characterized by what we might think of as a “static” or unchanging perfection. All that God is, he is changelessly. Nothing that happens in the world can affect God on the level of his being. He is what he is regardless of what takes place—and necessarily so, since any change in a perfect being could be only in the direction of imperfection. Affectivity in God, if it is affirmed at all, is restricted to dispositional states which have no ontological significance. [McCormack, ed., Engaging the Doctrine of God, 186–87, cited by Bobby Grow in Evangelical Calvinism, 96.]

And Fuller Theological Seminary theologian, Veli – Matti Kärkkäinen cites process theologian David Ray Griffin’s description of CT, who describes it in similar terms to McCormack’s description, but with even more nuance:

  • Pure actuality: According to the philosophy of Aristotle, everything that exists is a combination of form and matter; thus, everything possesses both actuality and potentiality. Potentiality for Aristotle meant a lack of perfection; it implied that something was yet to come. Therefore, to preserve God’s perfect nature, Christian thinkers had to deny potentiality in relation to God. Consequently, God is absolute actuality, pure form, and there is no matter to actualize his potentiality.
  • Immutability and impassibility: While these two attributes are not identical, they are related. The former suggests that God does not change, while the latter refers to the impossibility of God’s being acted upon. Often—but not always—immutability was interpreted in the sense that God cannot be “moved” in a true emotional sense; where Scripture seems to suggest that God grieves or rejoices, such passages were considered mere metaphor.
  • Timelessness: God’s eternal existence is timeless, outside of time. While the majority of classical theists beginning with Augustine (according to whom God created time as part of creation) accept this statement as true, it has been and is a disputed issue. This element, therefore, is not a decisive feature of classical theism.
  • Simplicity: God is not composed of parts as is everything else that exists. This attribute of God is, of course, related to many others, such as his changelessness. If God has no parts, God cannot change, since there are no parts for him to lose or gain.
  • Necessity: This attribute has two aspects. On the one hand, God’s existence is necessary in the sense that it is impossible for God not to exist. Everything except God exists contingently (is dependent on God). On the other hand, necessity means that the divine essence itself—”the particular package of attributes God possesses”—is necessary. It is no accident, and it cannot be otherwise; God cannot be other than as he is.
  • Omnipotence and omniscience: These attributes follow from what has been said before. Omniscience means that God knows all truths and holds no false beliefs. Omnipotence means that within the “limits” of God’s own attributes, God possesses the capacity to do everything. [Veli- Matti Kärkkäinen citing David Ray Griffin in, The Doctrine of God: A Global Introduction, 54-5.]

Does this sound like a God you know? This sounds exactly like the God that I knew for years, ever since childhood! But I had a paradigm shift in seminary. Like I mentioned in my last post, I was introduced to thinking about God in Trinitarian ways by Ron Frost; in ways that emphasize and think of God in personal, relational, filial, and loving terms that are given shape by pressing into the Christian truth that God is God as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit—and in no other way.

All of these hallmarks, noted above, have been integrated into a theological and biblical format that stands behind the kind of Christianity that you as an American (or Western) Evangelical or Reformed Christian experience day in and out as you contemplate the God you are introduced to on Sundays, and whenever else you might listen to sermons, Bible teaching, or attend your local Bible College and/or Seminary (in general, and most likely!). Conceiving of God in this way, the predominate way, has drastic implications for how a person conceives of God, Christ, Salvation, the Church, Mission, and Spirituality (etc.). In other words, this affects everything!

So the question is: Do you want to follow a God who is philosophically conceived (and thus not very personal and intimate), or do you want to follow a God who has revealed himself to be a loving Father of the Son by the communion of the Holy Spirit? If the former, then you will adopt classical Arminianism, classical Calvinism, Open Theism (ironically); if the latter, you will most likely adopt what Ron Frost calls ‘Affective Theology’, or our Evangelical Calvinism, or even carefully nuanced forms of an evangelical Barthianism.

I will being writing more on this in the near future, but between this post and the last one, there is plenty to chew on.

Michael Horton, Roger Olson, and James White: They are all wrong …

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I just watched two little clips of Michael Horton and Roger Olson in their recent discussion about Calvinism and Arminianism; which took place at Biola University in California (here & here). And then I followed up these two little clips by listening to James White [here] (of his Alpha and Omega Apologetic Ministries) critique Roger Olson’s recently released book Against Calvinism (which by the way was what prompted the coming together of Horton and Olson at Biola—they have also had conversation on Horton’s ‘White Horse Inn’ broadcast in the past about the same subject). What continues to intrigue me about this debate (the one between Arminians and Calvinists—both classic versions of that) is that neither side of this debate seems to want to recognize that the impasse they are facing will not be solved until at least they deal with their informing assumptions about God—but more importantly, and directly related, their understanding of God’s Self-revelation in Christ. James White, for example, mockingly cajoles Olson’s book and points against Calvinism as surfacey shallow blather that have been around for years, and refuted over and again; he thinks that engaging Olson’s book is a waste of time (which makes me wonder why he devoted at least one hour if not two hours to it on his internet radio show). White, in the video I link to above, rebuffs Olson by simply asserting that “that’s not what the Bible says.” In other words, for some reason White seems to think that there is only one way to read Scripture; apparently, and he owns that way. And yet, it seems that someone like Roger Olson sets himself up for this kind of beating around the head; since he tries to out-pace his classic Calvinist counterpart by engaging in the same kind of thought experiments about God and God’s relation to creation and humanity in particular. I guess the most troubling thing about this kind of fiasco (what I think it is), is that neither Olson, nor Horton, nor White try to think these kinds of questions through the most revealing point of contact that God has with man; through the Incarnation and/or hypostatic union of God and humanity in Christ. What they need is what Muller and David Gibson after Muller categorized as Karl Barth’s approach to interpreting Scripture and his Christology; that is, they need to adopt a ‘principled’ intensive methodology that sees Christ as the bedrock of all things scriptural—that sees Christ as the depth of Scripture’s witness and authority, and thus seek to parse out the relation and dynamic of God’s sovereignty and human freedom within this interstice, and not one, which I think is imposed back upon God through the logico-deductive schemata deployed by Horton, Olson, and White as they engage in biblical exegesis.

I will have to flesh out what I have reflected upon above at a later point. But I find this song and dance (the one that Horton, Olson, and White are fiddling) to be out of touch with what’s really going on in God’s Self-revelation of himself in Christ for us.

I Love You! I Disdain [westminster] Calvinism!

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Why? Why? Why do I disdain classic Calvinism and Arminianism so much? Do I think it’s a game, and I just like to play “I’ll joust you games on the internet;” does this make my world go round? NO! I disdain classic Calvinism and Arminianism (classical theism for short, and through the rest of the post labeled CT) because it places people in bondage; people I love, YOU! My close family members! My family members in the church (even our local church, and we attend a Calvary Chapel of all places)! Some people must think I have a vendetta against CT; I do! Why? Am I disgruntled with it? Yes! Why? Because there are people I love (both known and unknown) who are trying to live through the strictures that the God of CT (Calvinism & Arminianism) has placed them in; a yoke of bondage (Gal. 5:1), and they’ve been conditioned to think that this is God’s freedom. These people I love live in a matrix that has conditioned them to think that their Calvinist-Arminian God (or maybe just their ‘Evangelical’ God) is a God who is defined by his ‘power’ and by his ‘Law’; and further, they have been cajoled into thinking that God is a navel gazer, or more explicitly that ‘God is for God’—or that God is inward curved, and that this inward curvature (or inward fixation) defines God’s glory. People I love and care for deeply have submitted themselves to this God, and, for some it is costing them their lives, their sanity, their hope. This is why I disdain Calvinism and Arminianism. It’s because I love YOU!

From Whence Is Human Freedom?

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I am reposting the following because I am working the next couple of days, and so don’t have the time to develop some things I would like to in response the discussion I have been having with Nathan in this thread. Some have asked what ‘grace all the way down’ might mean (in the thread and post I am referencing). Some of you are wondering how I might move differently than a classic Calvinist or Arminian in framing human action as grounded in a theological-christological anthropology—thus ultimately recasting, and somewhat avoiding the usual categories of working out of ‘the bondage of the will’ dialogue. So in lieu of me writing an actual post that would articulate how I might proceed; this post, and maybe one more tomorrow will have to suffice until I can do a proper (new) one. Somebody might think that some of the language from Barth sounds like what Billings is critiquing in the Arminian, but it’s not. Since Barth’s construct grounds what it means to be human, dogmatically, in the elect humanity of Christ for us. This is the piece that classic Arminianism (and Calvinism) is missing; i.e. ‘the classic way’ operates with a competitive view between Divine-human action vis-ĂĄ-vis human action simpliciter. Meaning that the classic approach, does not ground humanity from the humanity of Christ in an objective gracious way. Instead, it sees humanity as abstracted from the humanity of Christ in need of union with his humanity which is only actualised through their cooperation with God in salvation by habituating in the ‘created grace’ (which becomes the impersonal intermediary that binds elect or foreknown humanity to Christ’s humanity). More to be said. Here’s Barth on the vicarious humanity of Christ as ‘God with us’, which becomes the recreated humanity through which our humanity elevated to what it means to be human; or free for God.

Here is a great statement from Barth on the vicarious humanity of Christ,

[T]he answer is that we ourselves are directly summoned, that we are lifted up, that we are awakened to our own truest being as life and act, that we are set in motion by the fact that in that one man God has made Himself our peacemaker and the giver and gift of our salvation. By it we are made free fro Him. By it we are put in the place which comes to us where our salvation (really ours) can come to us from Him (really from Him). This actualisation of His redemptive will by Himself opens up to us the one true possibility of our own being. Indeed, what remains to us of life and activity in the face of this actualisation of His redemptive will by Himself can only be one thing. This one thing does not mean the extinguishing of our humanity, but its establishment. It is not a small thing, but the greatest of all. It is not for us a passive presence as spectators, but our true and highest activation—the magnifying of His grace which has its highest and most profound greatness in the fact that God has made Himself man with us, to make our cause His own, and as His own to save it from disaster and to carry it through to success. The genuine being of man as life and activity, the “We with God,” is to affirm this, to admit that God is right, to be thankful for it, to accept the promise and the command which it contains, to exist as the community, and responsibly in the community, of those who know that this is all that remains to us, but that it does remain to us and that for all men everything depends upon its coming to pass. And it is this “We with God” that is meant by the Christian message in its central “God with us,” when it proclaims that God Himself has taken our place, that He Himself has made peace between Himself and us, that by Himself he has accomplished our salvation, I.e., our participation in His being. [Karl Barth CD IV/I, p. 12]

This is the kind of stuff I am looking for. A theological anthropology, that is Christological; that honors the integrity of created humanity by giving humanity its place in the recreated humanity of Jesus Christ for us. It is a participationist humanity that we are given as a gift, we don’t possess it in ourselves. The giveness of humanity is where humanity flourishes through its relation in the divine life (i.e. the proper order) in Christ. This early section in IV/I is entitled “God with Us.”

the “classic” Order of Salvation and its Pastoral Implications

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When classic Calvinists speak of regeneration before faith it is informed by something. I want to suggest that it is informed by a philosophical perspective known as Aristotelianism (a la Aristotle), mediated through Thomas Aquinas’ assimilation of Aristotle; all of this came to be known as ‘conceptual’ scholasticism. Anyway the impact that this makes is that ‘regeneration’ becomes a ‘quality’ or a ‘thing’ or a ‘substance’ that elect people are given. Then they are able to cooperate with God (‘freely’) by using this ‘grace’ to appropriate salvation by ‘faith’. So in this account then, the regeneration that proceeds faith for this elect person is actually a ‘thing’ (it is a created grace) instead of a ‘person’ (who ‘is’ uncreated grace). The real problem with this view is that it makes salvation a predicate (or dependent) upon ‘man’s determination’/’man’s cooperation’; instead of vice versa. Salvation is not a ‘predicate’ of man (this is a ‘man-centered’ view of salvation), instead man’s life is predicated upon God’s life in Christ, or salvation.

This is a fundamental problem that classic Calvinism and Arminianism are afflicted with, and one that Evangelical Calvinism seeks to provide some healing from (for those who have been so afflicted).

On a pastoral note, I wonder why pastors, in general, would consciously teach their flock theological notions that ultimately de-personalize salvation; thus having deleterious impact on the daily spirituality of those they are seeking to edify? I think, of course, the answer to this question is that said pastors are themselves under the delusion that what they are teaching is Gospel-Bible truth. That is, that what they are teaching about salvation, like the kind signified by the TULIP (or FACTS for the Arminians), is in fact coordinate with what Scripture teaches. They, in general, do not have the time or the resources (although some do) to make a critical distinction between what they are teaching, and the metaphysics that is informing what they are teaching from Scripture (in fact many of these pastors are unaware of even the terminology of metaphysics). Most of these kinds of pastors follow what I like to call the Textus Receptus (the “Received Text”) version of theology and biblical interpretation. Meaning that they believe that the theological tradition (what they perceive as ‘conservative’ or ‘traditional’) they think through is both tried and true, and Gospel faithful. Yet, it is this approach that I am claiming is uncritical, and ultimately damaging to those who are exposed to it. I could say more, but I have said enough for this post anyway. Below is a video I came across of Phil Johnson (of Pyromaniac fame) interviewing his pastor, John MacArthur. In the first moments (at right around 27:45) of the video, John MacArthur verbalizes the typical approach of many Evangelical (Calvinist, not Evangelical Calvinist 😉 ) pastors in America that I just noted.

I realize this post has multiple points being made; a little fragmented. But what I want to take note of is that my opening Dogmatic point (on the “order of salvation”) has real life, what some might call pastoral implications. What I am trying to highlight is that what some consider to be abstract dogmatic or theoretical contemplations has real life concrete ‘lay’ consequences. I am not necessarily trying to pick on MacArthur in this post, but I do think he is somewhat of a poster-boy for the kind of thing I am getting at in this post.

My Arminian Upbringing . . .

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About 15 years ago I stole my dad’s text book that he used for his Systematic Theology class in his Bible College days at then Southwestern Bible College in Phoenix, Arizona. They used Henry C. Thiessen’s “Lectures In Systematic Theology.” Southwestern is a Conservative Baptist College (now known as Arizona Christian University), I attended there for a semester when I graduated from high school back in 1992. I never totally read through Thiessen’s book, but I have flipped through it and read sections of it. One section was on Thiessen’s development of his doctrine of election. I wanted to quote what he says about election and foreknowledge:

(1) Election and Foreknowledge.  Election is a sovereign act of God; He was under no obligation to elect any one, since all had lost their standing before God. Even after Christ had died, God was not obligated to apply that salvation, except as He owed it to Christ to keep the agreement with Him as to man’s salvation. Election is a sovereign act, because it was not due to any constraint laid upon God. It was an act in grace, in that He chose those who were utterly unworthy of salvation. Man deserved the exact opposite; but in His grace God chose to save some. He chose them “in Christ.” He could not choose them in themselves because of their ill-desert; so He chose them in the merits of another. Furthermore, He chose those who He foreknew would accept Christ. The Scriptures definitely base God’s election on His foreknowledge: “Whom He foreknew, He also foreordained, . . . and whom He foreordained, them He also called” (Rom. 8:29, 30); “to the elect . . . according to the foreknowledge of God the Father” (1 Pet. 1:1, 2). Although we are nowhere told what it is in the foreknowledge of God that determines His choice, the repeated teaching of Scripture that man is responsible for accepting or rejecting salvation necessitates or postulating that it is man’s reaction to the revelation God has made of Himself that is the basis of His election. May we repeat: Since mankind is hopelessly dead in trespasses and sins and can do nothing to obtain salvation, God graciously restores to all men sufficient ability to make a choice in the matter of submission to Him. This is the salvation bringing grace of God that has appeared to all men. In His forknowledge He perceives what each one will do with this restored ability, and elects men to salvation in harmony with His knowledge of their choice of Him. . . . (Henry C. Thiessen, Lectures In Systematic Theology, 344-45)

Thiessen articulates a pretty classic version of an Arminian understanding of election: God’s choosing of individual people for salvation is based upon His foreknowledge and ability to look down the corridor of time and see who will place their faith in Him; and it is on this basis that God elects these individuals, and as corrollary, reprobates those who choose to stay in unbelief. You’ll notice that Thiessen is careful to frame this in a way that underscorse the fact that the person’s capacity to place their faith in Christ comes from God’s grace given to them; which then opens up a person’s ability to deliberate whether they want Christ or don’t. So we have an Arminian version of prevenient grace at play as well.

This is what I was taught about election, and things from early on in my life. My influence was pretty much Arminian theology like that articulated by Thiessen. Yet, it was somewhat of a hybrid form of Arminianism, since it also had a strong doctrine of the eternal security of the believer; which of course is why I was taught that our view was simply an “Biblicist” approach 😉 .

The Undoing of classic Causal Determinism in Theology through resurrection

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Here T. F. explains and undoes the usual understanding of how events in history and causation relate one to the other. He defeats the idea of causation, appropriated by Classical Theists, in general; and Classical Calvinists & Arminians, in particular, that there is a necessary relation between the event that happened, and the events that led to the happening. He makes a disjunction between Factual event and Necessary event; the former being that which we understand as an actual happen-stance of the past, and the latter having to do with the idea that because that happen-stance happened, that the events that led to its happening also were necessarily organised in a certain way in order for the the conditions of that event to be so — as if we, as historians (or scientists, theologians, etc), can absolutize causes based upon an idea of uniformitarian conception of Event. Obviously this is a little complicated, and not for the faint of heart, but I think it important to be grasped in order to understand what Evangelical Calvinists mean when we say that we eschew the logico-causal-determinism of ‘classic’ thought. Here’s T. F. Torrance (this whole discussion takes place in the context of TFT talking about resurrection):

(a) Interpreting ordinary historical events

(i) Freedom and necessity in historical events

Let us try to understand this from a merely natural point of view. Think of a historical happening: in taking place it appears as a free happening. Once it takes place, it cannot be undone. Throw a stone through that window and you are engaging in a free act, but once it has taken place, the act cannot be recalled — we cannot turn it backwards as we can a film of the event. Thus once an event has taken place, it becomes ‘necessary’ — in the sense that it cannot now be other than it is. At this point, however, we are liable to suffer from an illusion, for we tend to think that because it is now necessary fact, it had to happen. This is the kind of optical illusion we suffer from on the golf course when our opponent putts a ball from the other end of the green and it goes right down into the hole — immediately that happens we somehow think it had to happen from the start, but what we have done in a flash is to read the final result back all along the line of the ball’s course into the free act behind it. It is through this kind of illusion or indeed delusion that some historians think that historical events are to be interpreted in the same way in which they interpret the events of natural processes as concatenated or linked together through causal necessity.

The distinction between causal necessity and factual necessity

But it is important to distinguish in historical happening between causal necessity and factual necessity, between causal determination of events and the fact that once they happen they cannot be otherwise. An historical event, once it has taken place, is factually necessary for it cannot now be other than it is, but an historical event comes into being through a free happening, by means of spontaneous human agencies. Certainly all historical events are interactions between human agents and nature, as well as interactions between agents and other agents — so that there are elements of causal determination in historical happening that we have to take into account, physical factors relating to the kind of patterns of space and time in which we live and work. But historical events are not by any means merely natural physical processes, for as happenings initiated and bound up with purposeful agents they embody intention which often conflicts with and triumphs over the course of events that nature would take on its own.

(ii) History is the interweaving of natural processes with human intention

It is this interweaving of natural processes and human agencies, of nature and rational intention, that gives history its complicated patterns. The course of events has often quite unforeseen results, for human acts may fail to achieve what would have been expected or may achieve far more than would or could have been anticipated. But in our interpretation of history we must never forget that in the heart of historical events there is free happening which bears the intention in which the true significance of history is to be discerned. Thus while we must appreciate fully the physical factors involved, we must penetrate into the movement of time in the actual happening in order to understand the event in the light of the intentionality and spontaneity embedded in it. The handling of temporal relation has proved very difficult and elusive in the history of thought, for it has so often been assimilated to logical relation and so transposed into something very different. The confusion of temporal with logical connection corresponds here to that between spontaneity and causal determinism in natural science. We can see this error recurring, for example, in notions of predestination where the free prius of the divine grace is converted by the scholastic mind into logico-causal relation, while the kind of time-relation with which we operate between natural events is imported into the movements of divine love and activity. It is a form of the same mistake that people make in regard to the resurrection, when they think of its happening only within the logico-causal nexus with which they operate in classical physics. (Thomas F. Torrance, Atonement: The Person and Work of Christ, edited by Robert T. Walker (Downers Grove, Illinois: IVP Academic, 2009, 249-50)

In keeping with Torrance’s usual mode of thinking from the Incarnation & Atonement (here the resurrection being the focus), he seeks to excoriate any ideas of logico-causal determinism as the lens through which profane historians would attempt to interpret the ‘historicity’ and ‘facticity’ of the resurrection itself — Torrance’s discussion here, is all taking shape within his line of thought associated with Kata Physin (or according to the nature of the thing, or his more popular method Theological Science). As he deconstructs the post hoc ways of what might be called ‘natural theology’ (meaning all modes of intellectual inquiry which make inferences from supposed stable events, works, physical nature, etc. to their “necessary causes”), by implication, he also gets at theological constructs (like classic Calvinism-Arminianism, Neo-Orthodoxy like Brunner’s) that operate with this same modus operandi.

The moral: There are unseen, unknown contingencies built into the nature of things themselves that make it impossible to accurately infer a stable causal chain of events from the event back to the cause itself. The answer to this, in relation to knowledge of God, is to see the event and cause conjoined together in the person-act of Jesus himself. It is from this vantage point that we then are set up to know God, in Christ, but no longer as some sort of deterministic causal agent; but instead, as personal, triune Divine agent who apocalyptically breaks into the contingencies of history re-creating them towards their telos or created purpose in Christ (cf. Col. 1:13ff) — the resurrection, then, being the instantiation of this within time-space history.

I doubt this has cleared much up, but if nothing else it helped me to write this out for my own process. I also would surmise that it is because of the nuance of this kind of thought, evinced by TFT, that Evangelical Calvinism will continue to have problems with making headway with the typical American Christian. It is easy to understand causal-determinism, because that’s what “we see” in “nature” all the time (there is an “apparent” coordination between how things appear to the naked mind’s eye, and how we then assume things in themselves “must” be — so it is natural to operate with a docetic understanding of things — but this is not Christian, nor Evangelical Calvinism — it is the mode of Classical Calvinism & Arminianism [and I realize this is hard teaching, who can hear it?]).