Partial Calvinism: Why I am neither Arminian nor Calvinist but closer to the Latter

Warning: this is a very long post! It is about 10 pages. The renewed interest in Reformed Theology among evangelicals in recent years has been a matter of great interest to me, but I have been concerned that the debate about that among evangelicals has not dealt with the issues I consider most important. This is my attempt to address that.

Partial Calvinism:

I have always had difficulty accepting the 5 points of Calvinism from the acronym TULIP even though I agree that election and predestination are very much Biblical concepts. The 5 concepts represented by the TULIP acronym (Total Depravity, Unconditional Election, Limited Atonement, Irresistible Grace, Perseverance of the Saints) include 4 that I have at least some reservations about. The P is the one for which I don’t really have any objections.

I agree that salvation is always God’s initiative: He decided to redeem man, He set up the plan of salvation, He sent Christ into the world, and Christ in John 6:44 and again in John 6:65 makes it clear that no one comes to Him unless the Father draws him. God is the initiator. This is also seen in the Old Testament in passages like Deut. 7:7-8, Jer. 31:3 and Jer. 13:11, Ezek. 36:22-23, 32, Psalm 106:7-8 and many others regarding how God has drawn Israel (His people) to Himself and has done so for on His own initiative and for His own glory. For this reason I would consider myself a partial Calvinist: the Wesleyan idea that anyone can come to Christ at any time does not come to grips with this part of the gospel. As a result, the term election must at least mean that God must initiate, both corporately for mankind (by initiating the coming of Christ in the first place, by initiating the creation of a chosen people through whom Christ would come, by initiating all of this from the beginning) and individually by the conviction of the Holy Spirit which He initiates. These are things most Baptists and most evangelicals have historically held to be the case, and so most evangelical Christians have been at least partial Calvinists. It is not clear to me that the Pentecostal movement holds to these truths, however, so the global growth of Pentecostalism, especially in the global south, may now make this partial Calvinism less the norm than it once was. We must come to Christ on His terms and at His time, not our own.

Whether God takes this initiative through the Spirit with everyone is not totally clear in Scripture. Passages like John 12:32 where Jesus says ‘if I be lifted up I will draw all men to Myself’ is as near an answer as we find in Scripture, and the word ‘all’ is used on a range of ways in the Bible including places like Romans 11:26 that says ‘and thus all Israel will be saved’ where ‘all’ means all of those who are of faith, not every person in the nation. Paul argues at the beginning of Romans that all men have knowledge of God by nature and by conscience, though it is not clear whether the Spirit initiates conviction of sin with everyone. Paul also argues that God remains just even if He does not; we simply do not know whether He convicts everyone at some point.

But the Bible also makes clear that we must respond in faith to His initiative. ‘How shall we escape if we neglect so great salvation?’ (Heb. 2:3) is a statement that assumes our responsibility to respond; Stephen’s sermon in Acts 7:51-53 makes clear that it is possible to resist the Holy Spirit in the rejection of Christ, quite specifically accusing the Jewish unbelievers to whom he is preaching of ‘resisting the Holy Spirit’; Paul’s sermon in Acts 13 culminates in his warning to them that forgiveness is available through Christ but they must ‘take heed’ lest they reject it. Jesus in Matthew 11:20-24 pronounces judgment on Chorazin and Bethsaida for they were confronted directly by God in Christ Himself, yet made the choice to reject Him. He says that Sodom and Gomorrah would have repented in similar circumstances. If it is possible to be confronted by Christ and reject Him, is it not also possible to be confronted by the Spirit and reject Him? Again in Matt. 12 He condemns a group of scribes and Pharisees and says the men of Nineveh will rise up in judgment of them. Again, the initiative of God in coming to them is rejected. In both of these passages in Matthew the issue is their choice when confronted by God. Choice is the issue. When Jesus sends out the disciples in pairs in Matthew 10 and Luke 9 He tells them to ‘shake of the dust of your feet’ against those who choose to reject the gospel it is choice that is the issue. Choice remains a requirement. All of this calls into question the concepts of Irresistible Grace and Unconditional Election.

Much has been written about the nature of this choice and of free will, with perhaps the work of Jonathan Edwards as the most thorough. The heart of that argument in support of a ‘strong’ view of election is that man’s will is fallen and man does in fact choose what he wants; man gets what he wants, which is rebellion against God, and so God remains just even if He does not confront every man by the conviction of the Spirit and only confronts the elect with the Spirit. This argument does not, in my opinion, do justice to the various passages above where the entire focus is on choice and ceasing resistance; this argument also requires a particular understanding of what it means to be ‘dead’ and ‘slaves’ in sin, especially in Romans 6, and also a particular understanding of the Romans 9 passage about ‘hardening whom He will harden’ and ‘vessels prepared for destruction’; more on that below. This argument also does not do justice to the Imago Dei as it focuses on the will as if only the will is involved in salvation. The image of God in man is bigger than just the will; more on that below as well.

To me the great strength of Calvinism is its emphasis on how serious sin really is. At the heart of our sins (our behavioral sins) is our sin (our sinfulness by nature) which is in rebellion against God. As C. S. Lewis said, the issue is not that we are fallible creatures with a few imperfections; we are rebels who must lay down our arms. We are at war with God seeking total autonomy, and this is a capital crime even as seeking to overthrow our government is a capital crime. We seek the death of God in order to become our own god. And so we are ‘dead’ in sin and ‘slaves’ to sin. The Calvinist argument regarding total depravity is that ‘dead’ means totally dead and is not used as imagery by the apostle Paul. We are completely dead and cannot even respond to the Spirit without first being regenerated by the Spirit to have some life in us to make us able to respond in faith. The Calvinist view of being a slave to sin is similar; we are totally enslaved to sin and cannot become free until first regenerated by the Spirit. This eliminates the idea that Paul is using imagery or descriptive language here, that he is instead offering a literal definition of ‘dead in sin’.

The difficulty I have with this is that Paul uses exactly the same language to describe believers in Christ, who are now ‘dead to sin’ and ‘free from sin and slaves to righteousness’ in the same chapter of Romans 6. If ‘dead in sin’ when used of a sinner means totally dead and unable to respond to the Spirit, then ‘dead to sin’ for the believer must also mean totally dead to sin and unable to sin. Yet we know it does NOT mean that for the believer. The believer is still capable of sinning and must choose to obey the Spirit. So I find the Calvinist argument for ‘dead’ and ‘slave’ to be untenable. These are images and descriptions, not strict definitions. The ‘dead’ of the sinner is the same kind of ‘dead’ as for the believer. So, the strict Calvinist view of Total Depravity goes too far. While I agree that our depravity is total in the sense that it affects every area of life; it does not mean we are as completely depraved as we could be, but it does mean no area of life or thought escapes from sin. And it does not mean that we are as ‘dead’ as the strict Calvinist view asserts. But it also does not mean that the will is neutral; as mentioned above, God must initiate. Left to ourselves, we would not seek God or choose from a neutral position. It does mean that something remains, even though we are described as ‘dead’, to respond when God initiates, just as there is also something that remains to respond to temptation to sin even though we are ‘dead to sin’. The ‘dead in sin’ and ‘dead to sin’ concepts are very much parallel concepts.

Similarly, when Paul says in Romans 9 ‘what if’ God has made some vessels for wrath and some for mercy, the Calvinist argument is that God did exactly that, rather than seeing this as a hypothetical question that Paul asks in order to defend the justice of God. I disagree with this reading of Romans 9 as well. The entire Romans 9-11 passage is Paul’s reflection on the issue of why so few of the Jews have come to faith compared to the response that was happening among the Gentiles. Why have the Jews chosen to reject the Christ? Paul admits that he is grief-stricken by this and does not fully understand it. Yet he defends the justice of God by saying that even if it were so that God had chosen some for destruction he would still be a just God, which is the part of Jonathan Edwards’ argument that stands. God would still be just in judging sin for man is still sinful. If God had never provided any plan of salvation He would be just in judging sin. He does not owe anyone forgiveness any more than a government owes a chance at reprieve to someone trying to overthrow the government. If He were to choose to have mercy on some while hardening others that would not be unjust. As mentioned above, if He does not convict everyone through the work of the Holy Spirit, He remains just. Paul goes on to argue that still some are saved from the Jews, and that the eschatological plan for Israel is still unfolding until ‘the fullness of the Gentiles has come in’ (Rom. 11:25) after which time ‘all Israel will be saved’. He had already argued that ‘they are not all Israel who are from Israel’ (Rom. 9:6) so ‘all’ is only those in Israel who are of the faith. These entire 3 chapters are a defense of God’s justice in His dealings with Israel but it is not a positive assertion that God has definitively assigned some people to wrath. Hence the ‘what if’. Then at the end of this passage in Rom. 11:33-36 Paul concludes with an exclamation about all of this saying, “O the depth of the riches both of the wisdom and the knowledge of God! How unsearchable are His judgments and unfathomable His ways!” The Calvinist view of this is that this is an exclamation that we cannot fully understand how God could have some elect and some destined for wrath; I see it as an exclamation of how we cannot fully understand how God chose Israel to bring Messiah into the world and yet only a remnant of Israel would believe, which is the whole purpose of the discussion in chapters 9-11. The entire nation is ‘elect’ and yet only some are saved, those of faith. It is also an exclamation of the unfathomableness of the mind of God which can at the same time have an elect people and a people who are accountable to choose to respond in faith. There is election and there is accountable choice, at the same time. And Paul does not try to resolve this mystery. He argues in favor of both of them, using Jacob and Esau to argue for election in chapter 9 and using the joining of Hebrew and Gentile under ‘whoever believes upon the name of the Lord will be saved’ in chapter 10. It is a typical rabbinic argument, not a typical western philosophical argument that we try to read it to be. When Paul sums up his argument about election in Rom. 9:30-33 he asks, “What shall we say then? That Gentiles, who did not pursue righteousness , attained righteousness, even the righteousness that is by faith; but Israel, pursuing a law of righteousness, did not arrive at that law. Why?” The obvious answer to this ‘Why?’ would be ‘because of God’s election of the Gentiles’ in light of the rest of this chapter. But that is not Paul’s answer; instead, his answer is “because they did not pursue it by faith but as though it were by works”. Man, whether Jew or Gentile, remains responsible to choose faith in Christ. So Paul puts election and free will side by side without seeking to resolve the mystery of how they both exist together. This is exactly what one would expect from a Pharisee.

This unwillingness to allow the mystery in election is a problem with the Reformation view of election, and it is related to the problem of sin; more on that below.

There is also some further mystery about election. Israel was elect as a nation and yet only some believed. So Paul argued that only a remnant is the true Israel. Yet in spite of that, Paul goes on to argue in Rom. 11: 25-32 that during the time of the Gentiles ‘from the standpoint of the gospel they (Israel) are enemies for your sake’ and yet ‘they are beloved for the sake of the fathers; for the gifts and calling of God are irrevocable.’ That is, Israel the nation remains in some sense elect even though they are unbelievers and enemies of the gospel during the times of the Gentiles. Election is not as cut and dried as we might like.

Throughout Romans Paul includes in each passage about election a parallel section about personal responsibility for choosing faith. In this section of Rom. 9-11, the ‘what if’ section about election in chapter 9 is followed by chapter 10 with its great passages of 10:9 (“if you confess with your mouth and believe in your heart that God raised Him (Christ) from the dead, you shall be saved”) and 10:13 (“for whoever will call upon the name of the Lord will be saved”). This is characteristic of Paul in Romans and also of John in his gospel. The passage about slaves to sin in Romans 6 is followed by the exhortation to choose to present ourselves as slaves to Christ; the Romans 3 passage of how all are condemned in sin is followed by Romans 4 about Abraham and righteousness by faith. The great passage of John 10:22-30 about the Good Shepherd and how His sheep hear His voice and follow, no one can snatch them out of His hand because the Father has given them to Him and so on is immediately followed by John 10:31-39 castigating those oppose Him for their unbelief. The passage in John 8:31-38 about those in sin being slaves to sin unless the Son makes them free indeed is immediately followed by 8:39-47 where their unbelief is what keeps his opponents among the Jews from being true sons of Abraham. This side-by-side presence of both election and personal free will is characteristic of these 2 books and is also characteristic of Pharisaic Judaism. Rabbi Akiva, who was executed by the Romans during the Bar Kochba rebellion of 120 AD, is credited with saying ‘All is known yet there is free will’ as the characteristic formulation of Pharisaic Judaism about this coexistence of election with free will. The writing of Paul the former Pharisee is very much in line with this; he discusses them both side by side and does not try to resolve the remaining mystery about this. Rather, he exclaims in Romans 11:33-36 that we cannot fully understand God’s ways. Paul never stopped being Jewish; when he was arrested at the end of Acts he was in the Temple being Jewish; his method of going ‘to the Jew first, and then to the Greek’ (see Rom. 1-3 where he repeats this several times) in his missionary journeys and his arguments in the synagogues that Jesus is the Messiah show his life-long conviction that he was fulfilling his Judaism rather than abandoning it. To read Romans as if he had abandoned his Jewish views on election, which is what Calvinism does, is to take a very late (sixteenth century in the Reformation) and very Western (European Gentile) view of Romans while overlooking both the typical Jewish view of election (which Paul never renounces and none of his writing conflicts with) and overlooking the characteristic
side by side presentation of election and personal responsibility for belief in his writing. It is well known that some of the Reformers, Luther especially, were anti-Semitic and Reformed theology remains suspect among Messianic Jewish believers as a result. It seems to me that their anti-Semitism also affected their reading of Romans in causing them to disregard the Jewishness of Paul and the Jewish roots of his doctrine. Paul’s teaching about the nature of what happens to our body and spirit after death, his understanding of the Torah in prophecy of a coming Messiah, his understanding of election, and his understanding of the governance of a congregation whether a synagogue or a church are all very consistent with his Jewish roots and the common views of Pharisees of his time. The Reformed view overlooks this and projects 16th century Gentile thinking back onto a first century Jew who had found the Messiah.

Similar to this Jewish view of God’s role election is the Jewish view of God’s role in sin, and also the historic Christian view of God’s role in sin. Augustine wrote that all that happens is ordained by God, and that includes the evil that happens. By that Augustine does not mean that God sins but that if sin exists then God in some sense must allow it and in at least some sense ordain its existence. To try to simplify that, God does not force sin to happen but He does ordain its existence. In some sense God elects sin to be. To say that God has foreordained the elect but does not force Himself on them is a similar idea; they are still elect, and God still must initiate or they would not on their own come to faith, but He does not force them to come to faith any more than He forces sin to come about but still ordains sin. Just as ‘dead in sin’ and ‘dead to sin’ are parallel ideas, the issues of ordaining election and ordaining all that happens including evil are parallel ideas. Calvinism agrees with this view of God’s role in sin but takes a very different approach to election, and that ignores the parallelism of these two ideas.

When addressing the problem of sin, the question is how it can be that God ordains the existence of sin without being the author or agent of sin. The typical Reformed answer is that God doesn’t have to actively do anything, he just leaves us to ourselves. Yet that does not explain how the sinner chooses sin A instead of sin B when sin B is needed to carry out God’s plan; so the Bible says ‘God hardened Pharaoh’s heart’. That certainly sounds active. Yet the Bible maintains that God does not sin. This remains a mystery; and still the answer that is given to how God can ordain sin without causing sin is ‘He doesn’t have to’ cause it. It seems to me that the answer to ‘how can God assure election without doing violence to the human choice’ is exactly the same: He doesn’t have to. There remains in man the Imago Dei that can respond to the Spirit. This too remains something of a mystery: how can God assure the salvation of the elect without actively causing it by forcing it to happen? Yet the Bible says this is the case. Calvinism refuses to allow any mystery here while it does allow some mystery in the parallel case of the problem of sin.

The cause of the Reformation was the state of the Catholic church which had, in my view, tried to remove the work of the Spirit and tried to ‘objectify’ everything in the church into acts controlled by the Church, by way of sacraments, indulgences, specified acts of penance and so on. This attempt to make everything objective resulted in an arrogance in the Church that was based on the authority of the Church in all these matters. The Reformation rightly confronted all of this in its emphasis on the ‘solas’: sola gratia, sola Scriptura, sola fide. However, the attempt to over-objectify election, by removing all mystery, makes a similar error in my opinion, and it quite often has resulted in a kind of arrogance among Calvinists. The ‘caged stage’ of over-zealous Calvinism is one expression of this, but I think the underlying issue is not merely a phase.

The historic teaching of the church has been that man is a sinner both by nature and by choice. It seems to me that Calvinism insists that man is guilty only by nature. If man is incapable of making a choice for faith when confronted by Christ due to being totally dead, then he cannot be guilty of being a sinner by choice since he is not capable of any other choice. While Edwards and others insist that he still chooses and gets what he wants, they also insist he is not capable of choosing for Christ. This is a circular argument and the final conclusion is that man is not capable of choice and so is only a sinner by nature and that man’s nature is itself dead. Yet we do not see this kind of deadness in Adam and Eve or their descendants after the Fall in the Old Testament. They still can hear God’s voice calling them and can exercise choice, such as when Abel makes a satisfactory sacrifice and Cain does not, both by choice. The teaching that we are sinners both by nature and by choice is very consistent with the gospel passages above where Jesus condemns Bethsaida, Chorazin, and the unbelieving Pharisees solely for their choice in rejecting Him so the historic teaching that we are sinners both by nature and by choice is entirely Biblical. Calvinism undercuts that teaching with a view of man’s deadness that goes beyond the Scripture.

In regard to the question of whether election is ‘fair’, a common defense of the Reformed view is that God is just but that is different than the modern version of fairness and that grace goes beyond justice. R. C. Sproul, for example, uses a Venn diagram example by drawing a circle labeled ‘justice’ and outside that circle placing both ‘injustice’ and ‘non-justice’ with ‘mercy’ as a subset of ‘non-justice’. After all mercy is ‘not getting what we deserve’ and so is in that sense beyond justice. However I think that view does not do justice to Paul’s argument in Romans 3:24-26 where he argues that Christ died so that God can indeed remain just while also being the justifier (the grantor of mercy) to those who believe. This says to me that God’s grace is also within His justice because of the substitutionary work of Christ. I nonetheless agree that ‘fairness’ is not all that relevant because it is a subjective, man-centered value that changes in every culture. But it does not seem appropriate to argue that God’s mercy is outside of His justice.

Finally, there is the issue of being made in the image of God. This matter of choice is of great importance in the matter of being made in the image of God, as also in the matter of man’s nature. I was greatly influenced by the writing of Francis Schaeffer in my college days, especially by Genesis in Space and Time and The God Who is There. It is interesting that Schaeffer was Presbyterian and taught at the Reformed seminary Westminster in light of the great emphasis all his writing places on the fact that man is not a machine. For man to be in God’s image he must be non-determined, he argues. Here is a summary from him on this topic from The God Who is There (page 112-113 of the 1990 edition of the trilogy of 3 of his books): “God, being non-determined, created man as a non-determined person. This is a difficult idea for anyone thinking in twentieth-century terms because most twentieth-century thinking sees man as determined. He is determined either by chemical factors, as the Marquis de Sade held and Francis Crick is trying to prove, or by psychological factors, as Freud and others have suggested, or by sociological factors, such as B. F. Skinner holds. In these cases, or as a result of a fusion of them, man is considered to be programmed. If this is the case, then man is not the tremendous thing the Bible says he is, made in the image of God as a personality who can make a free first choice. Because God created a true universe outside of Himself (not an extension of His essence), there is a true history which exists. Man as created in God’s image is therefore a significant man in a significant history, who can choose to obey the commandment of God and love Him, or revolt against Him….To ask that man should have been made so that he was not able to revolt is to ask that God’s creation should have ceased after He created plants and animals. It is to ask that man should be reduced to machine programming. It is to ask that man as man should not exist.” This does not sound very much like Reformed theology yet this concept that man is not a machine and that he is capable of meaningful choice runs throughout all of Schaeffer’s writing and is at the heart of his Christian apologetic. It is therefore not surprising that many within Reformed theology circles questioned whether he was really with them in their understanding of election. I don’t think that question was ever fully answered as you can still find it being debated online today. But I am convinced that Schaeffer was on target here. Man cannot really be in the image of God if he is not capable of meaningful choice. Man is not a machine. His choices matter and he will be accountable for them, including his choice of whether to accept Christ. If he cannot make that choice without first being regenerated, then what that says is that a vital part, perhaps the most important part, of being in the image of God is dead. The Reformed view of ‘dead in sin’ essentially means that the image of God in man died with the Fall in Eden. It means that man is a machine after the Fall. He is no longer a non-determined person. It would mean that though Crick and Skinner and Freud and others got the mechanism wrong, their view of man as determined, as a machine, was correct. This deterministic viewpoint is also at the heart of the desperate search for a genetic basis for LGBT behavior as they view it as something determined by genetics rather than a choice and a sin. They are desperately looking for some excuse to say, ‘I have no choice! I was made this way!’ Yet Scripture is very clear that the image of God in man is not dead; the Fall occurs in Genesis 3 but it is reiterated in Genesis 5 and Genesis 9 that the image of God is not dead and in fact that is basis for capital punishment in the case of murder. The reason homosexuality and other sexual perversions as well as adultery are also capital crimes in the Old Testament is because they are an assault upon the image of God, as is murder. If Schaeffer’s argument about man not being a machine was only true in Eden before the Fall, then it is irrelevant today. Yet his whole apologetic is based on fact that man still today is not a machine and still has to make meaningful choices including whether to accept Christ. This would imply that because the image of God remains, it is possible to respond to the Spirit when He convicts of sin and calls us to choose to accept Christ, even though we remain dependent on Him to initiate the confrontation that leads to the decision point. This is to say that the image of God is what keeps ‘dead’ from meaning ‘totally dead and incapable of choice’. If the image of God remains, then man is still not a machine and is still responsible for his choice for or against faith in Christ. This has to do with the image of God being more than mere will. The image of God has to include that which makes it possible to be in a love relationship with God. Perhaps ‘personhood’ is as narrow as that idea can be, as things like will or rationality or decision making are simply not enough to fully explain this. To accept the Reformed view of ‘dead in sin’ is to deny any meaningful content for what it means to be made in the image of God since the most essential part of that image is personhood and the potential for person to person fellowship with God the Person, the Personal God. If man is so dead that he cannot respond, then in what meaningful way is he still made in God’s image? Mere biological life, even with a brain that can reason, is also not nearly enough to be viewed as bearing the full image of God. God has made our bodily life such that it provides a venue and empowerment for this image of God to be expressed, and so the body cannot be ignored as meaningless within the concept of the image of God, but it is not sufficient. By itself it is just a machine. The capacity to make meaningful choice when confronted by God’s initiative is vital to the concept of being in God’s image rather than being a machine. The Calvinist view reduces man to something less than fully human; man is no longer man.

Recently (week of November 10, 2019) the Renewing Your Mind podcast has run a series of talks by R. C. Sproul on the work of the Holy Spirit. In one talk entitled ‘The Spirit in Creative Expression’ talks about beauty in the arts and also the image of God in man. One statement made was that wherever beauty is found the Spirit is there in some fashion, and then he went on to explain that even in unregenerate artists the ability to create true art is evidence of the residual image of God in man and therefore something remains of the Spirit in unregenerate man. I agree. But then another talk entitled ‘Regeneration-a Sovereign Act’ insists that nothing remains that can respond to the conviction of the Spirit. These 2 viewpoints seem contradictory to me; if something of the Spirit remains, then something is there to respond. You can’t have it both ways. To hold the position of irresistible graces requires the death of the image of God.

So then the Reformed view of election leaves man as less than man; it seems to me that it unintentionally also reduces God to less than God by insisting that the means of salvation must be reducible to human logic. It reduces the image of God in man to the will, and it reduces God’s work of election to something fully definable by human logic. We do not do that for the problem of sin wherein God can ordain the presence of sin without directly causing it but we insist on what mechanism He must use in election. I would compare this to miracles; modern man (modern meaning since the Renaissance) has mostly rejected miracles because man insists on defining what mechanisms God has available to do them. Yet the Creator surely has more mechanisms available to Him than we have been able to define in physics. If God can ordain evil without causing it He can surely do so for election as well. Our insistence on defining how He must work here seems problematic to me.

Therefore, for all of these reasons I am only a partial Calvinist. It seems to me that strong 5-point Calvinism requires a misreading of Paul in regard to being dead in sin, requires a misreading of both Paul and Jesus in regard to our responsibility to choose, requires ignoring the Jewish foundations of Paul’s teaching, and requires minimizing the meaning of being made in the image of God. The Reformed view seems to me to try too hard to remove all the mystery from the doctrine of election while still keeping it in the doctrine of why God allows evil since both must be ordained by God; to me the two mysteries are much more similar than the Reformed view allows.

I consider the both of the ‘standard’ views, the one considered Arminian and the one considered Reformed, to be views that go beyond the Scriptures. The standard strawman of Arminianism says that people can choose to be saved at their own time and with their initiative, and the standard view of Calvinism is that man can do absolutely nothing, not even in response to the Spirit. What I see in Scripture fits neither of these entirely and so I find my view to be somewhere between where salvation is always God’s initiative but man must respond. Similarly, views of baptism, the Lord’s Supper, and marriage seem to have 2 extremes that I see as not totally in alignment with Scripture, either sacramental as ‘efficacious means of grace’ or as ‘mere symbols’ or memorials. Here again I think the Scriptural view is somewhere in between, with symbolism and serving as a memorial being important yet with warnings for when they are not taken seriously as practices that have some real effect (like ‘many are sick and some sleep’ in 1 Cor. 11:30). The Scriptures seem a bit more nuanced than we really like, and election is not as cut and dried as we might like.

The great strength of Calvinism is that it recognizes the seriousness and enormous impact of sin and it emphasizes the sovereignty of God; the great weakness is that in recognizing this it pushes beyond Scripture resulting in making man less than man and ironically even reducing God to less than God. The great strength of Arminianism is its emphasis on the need for man to make a decision, a personal commitment; its great weakness is that in emphasizing this it makes man more than man, having lost sight of the need for God’s initiative in salvation and not fully facing the impact and seriousness of sin. I have concerns with both views.

Marriage as Grace and Law

 

I just read Al Mohler’s book We Cannot Be Silent and he does a good job assessing the challenges to Christians by the sexual revolution.  He is exactly right in his discussion that it did not start with same sex marriage, and it will not end there. Others like Francis Schaeffer and Alastair MacIntyre went further back in history to trace how indeed this began much further back than what Mohler discusses, but in terms of the changes over the last century or so he does a good job. He is one of the few evangelicals who clearly and humbly recognizes that the evangelical church was completely out of touch in the 1960’s as the issues of contraception (The Pill) and abortion were developing, admitting that the Catholic church was engaged but evangelicals were not.  He is also clear about how Christians have been complicit in the destruction of both morality in general and marriage specifically by their lack of recognition of what was going on back in the 1960’s and 1970’s but also because liberal clergy, both Protestant and Catholic, were actively undermining Christianity rather than teaching truth.  The unthinking acceptance of the separation of sex and procreation from marriage by both The Pill and by no fault divorce made the parishioners in the pews contributors to the assault on marriage and the family as well. We need to change our teaching from the pulpit, our teaching in Bible studies, and our personal practice in the bedroom if we are to be faithful to the Bible. As he points out, Christian couples assume that so long as they are married there is no issue with using reproductive technology like in-vitro fertilization and contraception but that is simply not so. They also assume that as long as they are married there is no issue with personal practices (like sodomy) that were long forbidden by the Church, and that also is not so. Mohler is absolutely correct on all of these matters.

He is also correct that it will not end with same sex marriage, as the transgender revolution is already showing, and there is no reason to think it will end there either. Polygamy, polyamory, and who knows what else will continue to be pursued by the revolutionaries. The book was released in late 2015 and this has continued to be the case.

I do think he could have done more to present a picture of Biblical marriage that is more inspiring and aspirational, however. Presenting marriage only in terms of covenant, which is essentially a matter of Law, is accurate as far as it goes but I do not think it demonstrates how Biblical marriage provides a reality, a beauty, and a purpose to which same sex marriage can never aspire.

Let me say up front that I am not a supporter of covenant theology in general. Covenant theology proposes that covenants are typical of God’s actions even before the Creation and The Fall, proposing a Covenant of Redemption within the Trinity and a Covenant of Works before The Fall. Since the Bible makes no mention of any covenants until after The Fall, my opinion is that covenants are only necessary after The Fall, just like The Law (Torah) was only necessary after The Fall. The Trinity also has no need for covenants within itself. The operative principle within the Trinity is Love, not Law. So also between God and man before The Fall. As Paul points out in Rom. 3:20, ‘by Law is the knowledge of sin’.  Law is indeed necessary and obedience is required, both in terms of society and in terms of the Bible. But Law is not needed until after The Fall, and covenants are a matter of Law. In describing marriage, Mohler relies mostly on the idea of covenant. Marriage is indeed a covenantal relationship and that is necessary in this fallen world. But the goal of marriage as it was created in Genesis 1-2 is for more than just obedience to Law. On page 65 he says that the ‘why’ for Christians to define marriage as they do is simply “as an act of obedience to the living God.” While that is true as far as it goes, and to obey the Law of God is indeed good and profitable, obedience to Law does not provide insight into why God designed marriage as He did nor to provide some insight into how that design is a matter of beauty and something to be sought after.  He essentially argues that God designed us that way and we should therefore obey, which is true, but it doesn’t let Christian marriage shine as a light of beauty and aspiration to a lost world.  And I think a proper reading of Genesis 1-2 does provide insight into that beauty.

He comes close to getting there in the chapter about what the Bible says about sex, but doesn’t quite go far enough. What happens here reminds me of what he had already pointed out about the 1960’s: evangelicals had viewed contraception and abortion as ‘Catholic issues’ and as a result did not do any serious thinking about the Biblical issues involved. The Catholic Church got it right, and we evangelicals got it wrong. The same thing is happening here in regard to the theology of the body. In this chapter he proposes that we need a Biblical theology of sex and a Biblical theology of the body. He is right, but what he outlines is not quite enough, while the theology proposed by Pope John Paul II is much better. It is much better because what Mohler outlines is based essentially on Law while the Pope includes Grace while not ignoring Law.

The basic issue here is the Imago Dei, the image of God in us. John Paul II points out that in Genesis 1, and also in other passages that refer to the male/female creation including the teaching of Jesus; it is very clear that God made man as male and female in His image. That is, being made male and female is an inherent part of what it means to be in God’s image and marriage itself is an image-bearer. The Pope is not the only one to talk about this: Karl Barth, Frances Schaeffer, Christopher J. H. Wright and others also do. But the Pope went to great lengths of developing the idea and relates the oneness of male/female in marriage to the oneness of God in the Trinity, and he does it very well. (See other blog here for more on marriage as an image bearer: Marriage as Image Bearer) While Mohler brings up the image of God, he does not spend much time there. But this is where the beauty lies. The relationship within the Trinity expresses love, self-giving, creativity and fruitfulness from all eternity. The ‘they shall be one flesh’ of marriage echos the statement that ‘the Lord is One’ of the Shema. Marriage is a human embodiment of those attributes of God, in His image. Some of them, especially the gift of self for which the body is specifically designed as male and female (‘he who keeps his life shall lose it’) and the fruitfulness of procreation are totally impossible in same sex marriage.  Same sex marriage can only seek to counterfeit these things with bodily actions that deny and assault the design and testimony of the body itself, and fruitfulness is impossible without the counterfeit of reproductive technology. All of them provide a view of beauty and truth to which marriage is to aspire, an aspiration that goes far beyond Law-keeping.  Law-keeping is necessary, but so is the vision of what marriage was intended to be as a picture of the love of God within the Trinity. This is the grace part, to be gifted with an embodied glimpse of the eternal life of God. Nothing less than Biblical marriage can ever aspire to this.

Mohler’s book is much better than most of the evangelical books about marriage from the last 30 years in regard to the way things have developed in the last 100 years. It is really honest on the matters of contraception and divorce and how we evangelicals were totally deaf to the great issues of our time in the 1960’s while the Catholic church was seeking to do the right thing. However, he does not quite recognize that we are making that same mistake again by not emphasizing marriage as an inherent and beautiful part of what it means to be image-bearers, by not taking advantage of the teaching from Pope John Paul II’s Theology of the Body. We need both Law and Grace.