Programmed by God or Free to Choose?

Five-Point Calvinism Under the Searchlight

Ward

• Publisher: Resource Publications
• Year: 2008
• ISBN:
  9781498275422
• Topic: Teología y religión
• Subtopic: Religión

Are we in fact more than just inert clay in the divine Potter's hands? This book seeks to prove conclusively from Scripture that mankind's freedom to seek God was not retracted at the fall, and that all humanity's sins were borne on the cross by the Lord Jesus Christ. The five points of Calvinism under scrutiny, often known by their acronym, TULIP, are a resume of doctrines formulated at the Council of Dort in 1619. This council maintained that the fall of Adam resulted in the inability of man to seek, or even to desire to seek, God. The Council of Dort declared that only those who have received prior regenerating grace are in fact capable of seeking Him. As you read this book, you will see that God has sovereignly decided to preserve genuine human freedom of choice, and that this brings Him glory and delight. You will also see that predestination is not about who is destined to become a Christian, but about whom a Christian is destined to become.

1

Who Were John Calvin and Some of His Contemporaries?

Born in 1509 in Picardy, France, John Calvin was greatly impressed as a young man by the calm way in which a Christian martyr faced death at the stake. In about 1527, he left Roman Catholicism, and sometime later experienced the new birth. Very insecure political and social conditions eventually caused him to flee to Switzerland. There in 1536, when Calvin was aged twenty-seven, the first edition of his Institutes of the Christian Religion was published in Basle, just nine years after he had left Roman Catholicism. Although it originally comprised only six chapters written in Latin, Calvin greatly enlarged the work over the next twenty-four years, and it was soon translated into French and subsequently into English.

Calvin’s desire to create a “holy commonwealth” was in part fulfilled in Geneva. By then the city had thrown off the authority of both the Roman Catholic bishop and the duke of neighboring Savoy. The Swiss town of Bern, recently won over to the Reformation, had helped in this, but Geneva itself had not yet become a member of the Swiss Confederation. By the treaty of February 1544, during Calvin’s tenure, Geneva became for a time an independent entity to which gospel ministers from France fled, seeking shelter from persecution.

William Farel, from Gap, in southeast France, an ardent preacher of righteousness, had unwittingly brought the population of Geneva to the verge of civil war before the magistrates hastily restored order by acceding to some elements of reform. However, for all his forcefulness, Farel felt unequal to the task of following through on fully reforming the city, and when young Calvin was passing through, Farel pressed him into service by threats of severe censure if he declined. Calvin capitulated.

Calvin’s own convictions on the relations between church and state soon led to more friction. He rightly and persistently maintained that the church itself was meant to be independent, and that it alone could determine what form liturgical matters should take. Above all else, he affirmed that only the church had the right to excommunicate uncooperative souls. The magistrates resisted this latter assertion, and Calvin was briefly banished from Geneva to Strasbourg because of his insistence. Nevertheless, he was recalled in 1541 and, after another brief tussle in 1553, the point was finally conceded that ecclesiastical discipline should be exercised by the church and not by the civil authorities.

Even so, the city council, which tended to wage a continual war of wits with Calvin, possessed extensive powers in civil and religious matters. Calvin assumed that every member of the city-state of Geneva was also under the discipline of the church, and citizens were required to sign a confession of faith or leave the city.

When Servetus, a medical doctor whose religious views differed radically from those of Calvin, was put on trial elsewhere and imprisoned by the Roman Catholic hierarchy, he escaped and was later recognized as he passed through Geneva. Calvin ordered his arrest and he was put on trial, convicted, and burned at the stake with the approval of both Calvin and other Reformers. Servetus denied the divinity of the Holy Spirit, and said that Jesus was not the eternal Son. A highly intelligent but pugnacious man, who could also be explosive, vitriolic, and offensive with those who disagreed with his theology, he nevertheless did good research in the medical field. He is credited for having traced the circulation of the blood twenty-five years before William Harvey did so. Writing voluminously on religious topics, he attacked Calvin with vicious abuse, accusing him of being “a liar, a fool, a cheat, and a scoundrel.” We can sympathize with Calvin’s desire to get rid of him!

No one can deny Calvin’s intellectual greatness or his tireless work in seeking to reform the Church. He lived frugally in selfless devotion to what he believed to be the will of God. His mother had died when he was only six years old. In 1540, Calvin married Idelette, a widow with two children. Early in their marriage the couple lost three children, two having been born prematurely and the third dying in infancy. Then, after only nine years together, Idelette died, probably of tuberculosis, when Calvin was just forty years old.

Calvin remained French, never becoming a citizen of Geneva. He could be temperamentally unpredictable, often showing gentleness and compassion toward others, but at other times being coarse and angry, especially with those who disagreed with his theology. His frequent and painful health problems undoubtedly affected his disposition.

Calvin had an intriguingly restricted view of congregational singing. His recommendation was to “sing psalms, simply, with no harmony.” Was this one more indication of his austere and solemn temperament? He maintained this attitude towards music in church, although there were many gifted and devout composers of his epoch who wrote wonderfully harmonious church music based on Scripture.

After his sermons, Calvin would customarily bid the congregation to fall down before God’s majesty, asking Him to grant grace both to them and to all peoples on earth. He invited them to do this in spite of having written that there were people on earth whom God had no desire or intention of saving.

Calvin, at the age of fifty-five and aware of his approaching death, met for the last time with his fellow ministers. He was by then very frail and unable to get out of bed, but clear in mind. He passed under review his long ministry in Geneva, expressing himself in a strange mixture of devotion, self-justification, and bitterness. Part of what he communicated to the fellow ministers gathered around his sickbed, included regrets that he felt his efforts had been worth nothing and that he was a miserable creature. He maintained that he had wanted to accomplish great things but that his shortcomings had always clung to him. He then declared, significantly, that he had not falsified a single passage of Scripture, nor had he, to the best of his knowledge, interpreted it wrongly. Most significant of all, he stated that changes were dangerous and sometimes harmful. Why did he say this? Was he reluctant to bring into focus, and seriously question, his own understanding of the exact nature of God’s sovereignty, election to salvation, grace, predestination, and free will? Could he have been resisting a growing awareness that his position on election was flawed after all? Are all changes by nature harmful? Are we witnessing here a certain intellectual rigidity that overrides willingness to change? Was he strongly emphasizing the old nature, described in Romans chapter 7, without exulting in the Spirit’s liberating and transforming work described in Romans chapter 8? Paul exulted in being seated in heavenly places in Christ (see Ephesians 2:6), and there is a note of great triumph in his conscious enjoyment of an unfading heavenly inheritance. It would seem tragic if Calvin, after all the trials he endured, failed to rejoice in the assurance of his Savior’s closeness and the rewards and bliss that undoubtedly awaited him in heaven.

Nobody would deny that our experiences tend to color our view of God. Who would question, having studied human behavior, the role that temperament tends to play in our religious preferences? The tragic losses of affection and poor health that Calvin experienced may partly explain his spiritual austerity. For years he suffered from insomnia, digestive troubles, and bleeding hemorrhoids. Towards the end of his life, he also developed painful kidney stones, ejecting several through the urinary canal, tearing it in the process. We must acknowledge and honor Calvin’s perseverance and dogged devotion to what he felt called to accomplish in spite of severe suffering.

During just twenty-four years of intensive spiritual ministry, Calvin succeeded in writing more than forty-five published books, including his commentaries on many books of the Bible, his three volumes of tracts, and what is considered to be his crowning achievement, Institutes of the Christian Religion. He died in poverty in 1564.

In his written works Calvin was seldom tender towards those who disagreed with him. Over a thousand years earlier, Augustine of Hippo (354–430), had recommended that those who had been baptized as infants, and who sought to be rebaptized as believers, be put to death. Neither Calvin nor Luther are recorded as having said anything to discourage the vicious persecution in Switzerland, Germany, France, Holland, and elsewhere of thousands of participants in the Radical Reformation. This parallel movement, although in some regions guilty of excesses, generally sought a complete return to all of the faith and practice revealed in the New Testament. They believed in the separation of church and state, and accepted for baptism only those who made a confession of faith in the Lord Jesus and His atoning work.

It was Augustine who, by his misinterpretation of the parable in Luke 14:16–23, introduced the notion of forcing people into God’s kingdom. Verse 23 speaks of compelling people to come and fill the banquet hall. Augustine also formulated the views on predestination that Calvin later adopted. There is no doubt at all that Calvin was more heavily influenced by Augustine, whom he very frequently quotes, than by any other earlier church leaders.

Meanwhile, the Radical Reformation had been under way long before the Reformation itself took root in Europe. Most Radical Reformers within Europe were dubbed “Anabaptists” (rebaptized), and included Christian streams that became known as Mennonites, Amish, Hutterites, and the Churches of the Brethren. Their principles usually included no coercion in matters of religious belief, and they practiced believers’ baptism by immersion or by pouring water over the candidate. Theirs was a simple lifestyle, and they emphasized a daily outworking of practical sanctification as well as what Calvinists called “forensic justification,” forensic referring to our legal standing before God. This means that once we are “in Christ,” we are declared righteous, even though our everyday behavior may still leave much to be desired. The sixteenth-century Radical Reformers emphasized the fact that both of these aspects need to be worked out in the lives of believers.

The Anabaptists focused on practical Christian living rather than on creeds and confessions of doctrinal belief. For them, spiritual reality was solely anchored on the solid rock of biblical truth under the daily guiding authority of the Holy Spirit. Also numbered amongst them were pacifists and those who rejected formal theological training.

John Calvin devoted no less than thirty-six pages in chapter 16 of his Institutes of the Christian Religion to defending and promoting in a most forthright way the baptism of infants, teaching that it is a New Testament rite that functions similarly to Old Testament circumcision. Sadly, in dealing with this topic, he allows for no differing opinion. Is it not intriguing that some Christian streams that vigorously oppose infant baptism today should nevertheless call themselves Calvinists? Many believers are ill informed, and are satisfied with just secondary sources as their authority in matters of religious truth. Go to Calvin, thou sluggard (see Proverbs 6:6), and study what the great man really had to say! You will find an abundance of excellent things that he taught, as well as some big surprises.

Both civil authorities and Reformed churches (that is to say Calvinistic and Lutheran) viewed Anabaptists as dangerous and heretical people. However, dozens of reliable historical documents attest to the fact that, in all major areas of Christian belief, most Anabaptists were indeed faithful followers of the Lord Jesus Christ, and should not have been judged as heretical. Thousands were hunted down and executed, including women and children. Many young children were taken from their parents and raised by loyal members of the official state churches. Finally, the violent persecution by Calvinists and other Reformers of those who disagreed with their convictions became so intense that waves of emigration began.

These led to the founding of colonies such as Plymouth in Massa-chusetts in 1620, less than one year after the closure of the Council of Dordt. At that time the Speedwell, a ship that soon linked up with the Mayflower, set sail from Delft Haven, Holland, carrying English-speaking expatriates, including Calvinists and Reformers of a more tolerant bent, all of whom sought to escape religious bigotry, dogmatism, and oppression.

Menno Simons (1496–1561), the father of the Mennonites, had been a Roman Catholic priest. When the authorities executed his brother, Peter, along with three hundred other Anabaptists seeking shelter from persecution in his hometown in Holland, Menno was profoundly moved by their shining testimony. Thus began a period of deep questioning, doubt, searching, and pleading with God, which he described as follows:

My heart trembled in my body. I prayed to my God, with sighs and tears that He would grant the gift of His grace to me a troubled sinner, create i...