Path: christian
Newsgroups: soc.religion.christian
From: craigj@cs.uq.oz.au (Craig Jones,,,Pgrad,)
Subject: Calvinism?
Organization: Department of Computer Science, The University of Queensland
Reply-To: craigj@cs.uq.oz.au
Approved: christian@aramis.rutgers.edu

I saw a book the other day on Calvinism, and I read the back cover but
it seemed to assume that you already had knowledge of it's tenets (or
whatever).  I think it has something to do with predestination or
something.  Could anybody in the group explain what it is?


+===================================================================+
|                                    c/- Computer Science Department|
|  ,-_|\      Craig Jones               University of Queensland    |
| /     \_    Post-Graduate Student     ST LUCIA  QLD  4072         |
| \_,-._/ here                          Australia                   |
|      v                                                            |
|          Net: craigj@lacewing.cs.uq.oz.au                         |
+===================================================================+

[An odd book that already assumes you know the subject...

Calvinism has meant different things in different contexts.  In the
broadest sense, it refers to one of the three major strands of the
Reformation (Lutheran, Reformed = Calvinist, and "Left Wing").  In
this sense it involves specific approaches to the relationship between
OT and NT, the sacraments, church government, free will and grace, and
a number of other issues.  t's a bit hard to summarize all of that in
one posting.  Among the major positions:

  the OT and NT are not completely different covenants.  Even
	those in the OT were saved by grace.  Calvin tends to
	deemphasize Law, rather than separating Law into
	ceremonial and moral (which tends to be the Lutheran
	approach).

  believes in the real presence, but contact with Christ's
	body is through the agency of the Holy Spirit.  Contrasts
	with Lutherans, who saw Christ as physically present,
	though not replacing the bread and wine, and Zwinglians,
	for which communion is just a memorial.

  church government is based on elected deacons and elders,
	with higher-level groups to provide support and
	discipline.

Calvinism historically has been associated with groups that wanted to
transform society.  While church government is often seen as a detail,
for many Calvinist groups it formed a way of creating a broad base of
trained and disciplined lay leadership, committed to implementing
Christian ideals.  It transformed Geneva, England (for a time),
Scotland, and much of the U.S.

At its narrowest, the term refers to double predestination and some
related doctrines.  These emphasize God's sovereignty, and assign to
humans a role that is simply a recipient of God's grace.  By limiting
Calvinism to predestination, we're probably doing an injustice to
Calvin himself, since it emphasizes just one part of his thought, and
carries it in a direction that he would probably not be entirely happy
with.  (In particular, I question whether he would say that Jesus died
only for the elect.)

Calvin's own position on predestination is fairly clear.  He believes
that God is ultimately responsible for who is and is not saved.  There
is not full symmetry between the two situations.  God doesn't
intervene with a negative equivalent of grace to prevent the non-elect
from choosing him.  However by not giving them the irresistable grace
that he gives the elect, he does decide their fate.

Note that Calvin does believe that people make real decisions.  Those
who are not elect actually decide to reject God.  This decision
reflects their character, which is that of sinners, and they are
responsible for it.  However in a different sense God is also
responsible, since he knows that without grace the person will choose
in this way, and he decided for one reason of another not to give that
grace.

Of course the primary point of the doctrine isn't damnation, but
grace.  What he is primarily trying to defend is the idea that those
who are saved are saved only because of the intervention of God.  He
considers it religiously important to realize that God's grace comes
before anything we do to merit it, allow it, or cooperate with it.
Nor does it come by virtue of God foreseeing that we will later merit
it, allow it, or cooperate with it.

As far as I can see, God's responsibility for the damnation of the
non-elect has less of a positive significance.  Mostly it just sort of
"falls out" as the obvious logical consequence of the other side.
Various attempts to teach a "single predestination" were being tried
at the time.  This is the idea that our salvation comes entirely from
God, but the damned are damned entirely by their own choice.  He had
seen enough of these attempts to realize that ultimately there's no
way to absolve God of responsibility for the fate of those on whom he
does not bestow grace.  Attempts to do so typically ended up creating
confusion.  Since Paul does not blush to talk of God hardening men,
Calvin sees no reason why he should either.  

However the idea that God is in control of everything is important to
Calvin for another reason.  Calvin believes it's important for people
to believe that God is responsible for everything.  Ideally a
Christian should see all of life as a gift from God, even the things
that from our perspective look bad.  This only works if God's plan
includes the actions of bad people as well as good people.

Many more recent Calvinist interpretations have tended to be
determinist.  But Calvin himself does not think in a mechanistic way.
We should avoid reading Newton back into Calvin.  Jonathan Edwards, on
the other hand, does use something akin to determinism in his elegant
defense of predestination.  His book on freedom of the will is a gem
of precise definition, careful thinking, and lucid writing.  It is
certainly a consistent development of Calvin's ideas.  But I don't
think one should imagine that Calvin himself was thinking along those
lines.  Calvin never loses sight of the fact that the God works
through the personal presence of the Holy Spirit.

It is probably a mistake for Calvinists not to say a bit more about
the asymmetry between grace and reprobation than they do.  God is
responsibible for salvation and damnation in somewhat different ways.
Although God is in an ultimate sense responsible for the damnation of
those who he does not choose, Calvinists want to be very clear that
God is not the author of sin.  He is responsible for damnation in the
sense that withholding his grace makes it inevitable.  But he is
responsible for salvation in a more direct and stronger sense.  Calvin
wants to say with Paul that all the good we have we got from God.
Thus God is the actual source of our salvation and any holiness that
we may have.  He is not the source of sin in the same way.  By failing
to bestow grace, he makes it inevitable that sin will dominate some
people, but he isn't the actual source of that sin.

One of the problems with the mechanistic reinterpretation of Calvin is
that if you aren't careful grace becomes too similar to damnation.
Edwards carefully analyzes what necessity means in the context of
human lives.  His analysis is very useful as a way of explaining how a
person is responsible for his sin, but it is still an inevitable part
of God's plan.  However we have to make sure that the sort of
mechanistic thinking he uses in this analysis does not seep into our
idea of grace.  Grace is not simply a result of our heredity and
environment.  It is a personal indwelling of the Holy Spirit.  Edwards
obviously know this, but it's easier to lose track of this fact in his
work than in Calvin's.

Note by the way that I accept all of this only in a somewhat qualified
way.  I think the basic exegesis based on Rom 9 is flawed.  Paul
certainly talks about God hardening people.  But he is not thinking of
a decision by God from eternity that certain people would be damned.
Rather he is talking about temporarily delaying the Jews' acceptance
of Christ to provide an opportunity for the Gentiles to be grafted
in.  I have a separate essay on predestination (file "decision") that
deals with my views in somewhat more detail.

One concern I have is that in some ways predestination ultimately
defeats itself.  Sola fide started as a way to rescue people from the
problem of salvation by works.  Luther's initial problem was that he
couldn't ever believe he had done enough: repented completely enough,
etc.  Grace was good news to him because it means that his salvation
isn't up to him.  It depends purely on God.  So his own
insufficiencies no longer are of concern.  But this only moves the
problem back one step.  How do we know that God has chosen us?
Somehow this never bothered Calvin.  I guess he was very
self-confident.  But later Calvinists had a Reformed version of
Luther's suffering.  They didn't have to worry about whether they had
done enough, but how could they be sure that they were elect?  So we
had the whole unedifying set of discussions of how to tell whether
someone is elect.  (That whole business was very much not present in
Calvin, by the way.)  As I claim in my essay on
once-saved-always-saved, there is probably no theoretical way out of
this box.  Only in the context of a relationship with God can we
become confident of our salvation.  Doctrines and tests of savedness
quickly become self-defeating.

--clh]