Interlude
Saturday, February 28th, 2009 by dangracelyINTERLUDE: A PERSONAL JOURNEY
Why I Wrote This Book
***If you’re a Christian who has had little or no New Testament linguistic training (or, like me, barely a year of Classical Greek), you can still evaluate many Calvinistic arguments if you have a good working knowledge of the Bible and apply it logically. This is not to say that knowing the original biblical languages is unimportant. I am merely saying that one does not need to have such knowledge to know that dialectical conclusions are always false, regardless of what appeal to Scripture a theologian may claim. Unfortunately, in today’s relatively unchurched generation many Christians are prone toward accepting contradictions in their theology. To add to the problem, society’s emphasis on relativism has clouded many people’s judgment into accepting ideas uncritically. Thus in the jungle of today’s competing philosophies and theologies, more Christians ought to be taking the attitude of the philosopher Socrates, who believed his mission in life was to test every statement to see if it were true. Yet seemingly the opposite has happened. Indeed, I continue to be amazed that certain Evangelical authors put forth statements as though they were hardly familiar with the Bible, or as though logic and reason were less important to Christian thinking than an apologetic appeal to divine ‘mystery.’
***One of the books whose Calvinistic premises I recently felt ought to be challenged was Trusting God Even When It Hurts by Christian author, Jerry Bridges. This book came to my attention through somewhat peculiar circumstances, and my reaction to it caused the writing of this book. We will examine the writings of a number of Calvinist authors but will park ourselves for some time on certain claims which Bridges makes about the absolute sovereignty of God. Some of his conclusions seem to draw specifically from Arthur W. Pink, a well-respected Reformed writer of a few generations ago. (We will address some of Pink’s views in considerable detail in later chapters.) We will also consider in further detail the Reformed views of various authors, including Loraine Boettner, R.C. Sproul, Jonathan Edwards, and the philosophy/theology of James Spiegel (a Reformed philosophy professor). I chose these authors simply because they happened to come to my attention in the course of this study, and because they represent many of the main arguments of Calvinism.
***First, we will look at some statements by Jerry Bridges. My introduction to Bridges’s book began shortly after the only friend of mine with whom I discuss a full range of subjects—Christianity, art, music, philosophy, literature, and writing—told me that he no longer believed in the inerrancy of Scripture. This news shook me, but at the same time I understood that he had been facing some very difficult circumstances in life that had tried his faith. He had also become disenchanted with a well-known Reformed church in our area. Thus when I asked a certain pastor what book he would recommend for my friend, he suggested Bridges’s popular book, Trusting God Even When It Hurts. I read through it and found most of Bridges’s book devoted strongly to the Calvinistic doctrine of divine absolute sovereignty. Bridges feels this doctrine is beneficial for a person to believe, that is, if he is to understand the immanency of God’s design in everything he faces. For me, however, the book had much the opposite effect. It dredged up the Reformed arguments that had caused me to write an opposing essay about Calvinism some 15 years ago, after coming out of my own Calvinistic experience. I thus felt strongly that Trusting God would only further my friend’s disillusionment with God, and after some discussions about Bridges’s book with my brother David, who felt the same way as I, we both thought a fuller statement in the form of a book ought to be written to challenge many of the Reformed assumptions about the absolute sovereignty of God. (Of course others had done this from other desired angles, but it did not seem to me that enough such books had been written.) Perhaps Jerry Bridges, R.C. Sproul, etc., are men who deeply care about people. That fact alone, however, should not exempt them or any author from critical review, especially if such persons are having considerable impact on the Christian public.
***I mention all this to chiefly explain the as we go critical format of much of the rest of this book. Primarily, there are two approaches an author may use when trying to reach the reader. One is to map out one’s position with an outline, so that the investigation follows a fairly strict sequence of points and sub-points. Of the two methods this is the more classical approach, the easiest for the reader to follow, and the one which comes naturally to those with an especial gift for teaching. Sometimes associated with this method is the modern, scholarly distaste for colored statements designed to evoke emotion in the course of argument or that would show anything of anger on the part of the writer. By avoiding such prose the author is thought to appear more objective to the Western reader, because patience is assumed to safeguard the scholar against hasty thinking and false conclusions. It should be observed, however, that such a dichotomous chasm between conviction and emotion is often absent in biblical writings. At any rate, I realize I do not have the especial gift of teaching.
***The other method, the method of this book, is more in the manner of a personal, prophetic13 warning where the message is urgent and therefore less formally structured. Here the urgency of the moment overrides the kind of left-brain approach that would take the reader upon a natural step-by-step accounting of the argument. Therefore the remainder of this work is more of a reflection of my own personal journey of discovery, especially in the past six months.14 Neither the left-brain nor the right-brain method of presentation is superior to the other; the method preferred is simply a result of the author’s particular tendencies, his specific spiritual giftedness, and what the moment calls for. Discovering truth as we go is somewhat analogous to what Michelangelo would do when he ‘released’ a statue from a slab of marble. The Renaissance sculptor would ‘see’ a statue encased in the marble before him, and gradually reveal it by default, i.e., by removing everything that was not the statue. Even so, by making some use of the as we go approach, it is hoped that the chiseling off of shavings of theological error will eventually reveal a ‘statue’ of truth.
13 —i.e., here and throughout the book, by the term “prophetic” relative to our current day, I merely mean that which is proclamatory, though oftentimes those who give proclamation, i.e., proclaimers, are also strong in the gift of knowledge (implied in 1 Corinthians 13:2, where a link is suggested between prophecies and knowledge into mysteries).
14 And thus this book is not an exhaustive exposé of Calvinism’s distinctive elements. Incidentally, much of the revised and enlarged portions of this later edition (constituting about 25%+ of this book) were written about 2 to 2½ years later.