Undeception

One of Calvinists’ staple arguments in favor of monergism is the inference that positing God as relying, in some sense, upon our decision to participate in salvation is actually a demotion of God, a heinous and (usually) heretical inversion of man’s sovereignty over that of God’s. On Facebook today, a Calvinist posted the following statement:

It is no less blasphemous to proclaim Allah to be god than to proclaim the one true God to be a slave of your own will and whim.

I’m pretty sure he meant to state it in reverse order: it was an attack on non-Calvinists rather than Muslims. I think his point was that those who “proclaim the one true God to be a slave…” are no better than Muslims.

One of his friends concurred, asking rhetorically, “Where in the whole Bible does [God] give man authority over Him?”

That brought me into it.

I responded that, while I might quibble with the specific formulation of this question, the whole concept of prayer changing things, Moses changing God’s mind about killing the whole mass of the children of Israel, Abraham bartering with God over Sodom, etc. clearly portrays God as allowing people to decisively influence His actions. Why is it spitting in His face to entertain the belief that this same economy prevails even in the area of salvation? Even though I dislike it being framed in terms of “authority”, it is no less true that delegating authority is not ceding authority, but a mark of authority.

Someone else responded to my comment succinctly: “So, for God, the future changes?”

Without wanting to get into Open Theism, I responded that the fatal problem is in saying that because God has apparently (as Scripture presents it) chosen to respond to human action that He is therefore being forcibly enslaved to our own will and whim. These sorts of conclusions are based off of overreaching desires to systematize that disregard much of Scripture’s testimony.

The chief “faults” of non-Calvinists are that they don’t take their logical systems too seriously when applying them to God’s sovereignty and man’s will, and that they take the depictions of God as He interacts with man throughout Scripture too seriously.

Non-Calvinists see no need for fancy footwork to explain away the fact that the biblical authors are clearly trying to portray God as “repenting” of certain actions based upon some factor, such as pre-Flood mankind’s sinful behavior or Moses’ prayer. They see no reason to deny that “Ye have not because Ye ask not” means anything other than “God’s giving is actually contingent upon your asking.” They have encountered no logical rationale necessitating the conclusion that soteriologically related petitions such as “Choose life!” and “Repent!” were imperatives merely chosen to sound exactly like they demand human response, when all the while they were simply code phrases for “Just hang tight while I enact my plan to redeem and damn whomever I already decided I was going to.”

Yes, the Bible says that it is God who called and predestined; it says that some are, whensoever He wills, just plain SOL. If, as I doubt, it does indeed logically and necessarily follow from those propositions that our actions cannot influence God decisively, then you’re stuck with Scripture contradicting itself — which I’m fine with, by the way, but most Calvinists aren’t! We shouldn’t rely so heavily on our logic and our ability to systematize away the tensions in Scripture that, when we consequently run roughshod over clear depictions like I mentioned above, we end up excommunicating those who aren’t willing to do so despite their honest confession of God as sovereign. That is my main beef with the majority of Calvinists I have encountered.

[Let me preface the main post with an acknowledgement of the obvious: I haven't been around these parts for quite a while, and for a number of reasons. First of all, I have described before my tendency to pursue one train of thought for long periods of time. Lately, it's been political theory, and although I was bringing a bit to this blog for a while, it began to seem that the blog was losing integrity. I decided to move all my political rants to Twitter and, to a limited extent, Facebook. Another major reason is that I have stated my position on most subjects that interest me, and I haven't found the motivation to rehash those topics in a way that's not being done more interestingly elsewhere. If I can't bring something new to the table, I'd just as soon not bother.]

Okay, so speaking of something (relatively) new to the table, I’d like to offer up this wonderful, tragically unsung episode of Star Trek: Voyager that has haunted me since I first saw it on its first run (back in the nineties). It approaches the science vs. faith debate in a way I’ve nowhere else seen it done so well. I just found this episode on YouTube, but embedding is disabled, so I thought I’d break my silence to present you a link to the playlist of five clips that make up the episode (Unfortunately, the link was taken down. I’m sure you can Netflix it, though. The episode is called “Sacred Ground”.) Don’t miss it and rob yourself of the experience.

I think “Sacred Ground” is indicative of how useful story is for conveying the ineffable. Without a storyline like this one, I wouldn’t even know how to begin to explain the insight revealed in this episode (incidentally the directorial debut of cast member Robert Duncan McNeill, who played Lt. Tom Paris and who is currently a producer/director for Chuck). Sure, it’s not a novel concept, but there’s no getting around the effectiveness of this plotline and the entertaining philosophical/theological dialogue between Janeway and the monks. It gets at the heart of why so many scientists can be so sure of scientific, non-miraculous explanations of the universe and yet remain devout in their belief that God is responsible. This episode illustrates perfectly why it is that – despite the fact that I have never observed a miracle and find the ones reported to me to have limited credibility, and regardless of the fact that I am convinced there are naturalistic explanations for the origin of the universe, of the beginning of life, and of the diversity of life – nevertheless, the insistence of atheists upon materialism still rings so hollow to my ears. Just because we’ve done a great job explaining the how‘s of the natural universe (and not even all of them) doesn’t even imply that we’ve done away with any possible why‘s.

Let me know what you think!

I have been musing lately about how my stance on the creation/evolution controversy would impact other areas of theology if applied consistently. The stance I’m referring to is my conviction that viewing the history of the natural universe as a string of miraculous interventions into nature is hopelessly misguided. I have argued that the atheistic science apologists and the fiat creationists find themselves in agreement on a falsehood, namely that there’s either a natural or a supernatural explanation for the physical phenomena of the cosmos. While agreeing in principle with those two groups, the God-of-the-gaps philosophy known as Intelligent Design tries to bridge the gap a bit and posits an admixture of natural and supernatural explanations that end up sounding arbitrarily inconsistent: the leading ID advocates accept common descent as predicted and confirmed by the scientific method but paradoxically insist that the theory of evolution is insufficient to explain natural phenomena without the aid of Someone/something (nah, just Someone) else whose interventions must remain unrecoverable by the scientific method. One is left wondering where the natural explanations stop and the supernatural ones begin, or even why one must stop for the other to begin.

Continue Reading →

Jeremiah 18 and Romans 9: a shared metaphor

In talking with Calvinists, there is always one passage that they pull out that in effect tells Arminians/non-predestinarians to “shut up and color.” This passage is the potter/clay metaphor of Romans 9. Most Bible scholars acknowledge that Paul’s potter metaphor was drawn, at least in part, from Jeremiah 18. Here’s the relevant passage (Rom 9.18-24 NET):

You will say to me then, “Why does he still find fault? For who has ever resisted his will?” But who indeed are you – a mere human being – to talk back to God? Does what is molded say to the molder, “Why have you made me like this?” Has the potter no right to make from the same lump of clay one vessel for special use and another for ordinary use? But what if God, willing to demonstrate his wrath and to make known his power, has endured with much patience the objects of wrath prepared for destruction? And what if he is willing to make known the wealth of his glory on the objects of mercy that he has prepared beforehand for glory – even us, whom he has called, not only from the Jews but also from the Gentiles?

Contrast this with Jeremiah 18.5-12: Continue Reading →

In a recent post on his popular blog, Al Mohler, the president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, presented a predictable take on the origins debate. He states,

I have not said that one can’t be a Christian and believe in evolution. It is entirely possible to be a confused Christian or a confused evolutionist . . . or both. Nevertheless, the dominant theory of evolution — the theory as taught and defended by the world’s leading evolutionary scientists — explicitly rules out any supernatural design or interference at any point in the evolutionary continuum. That fact alone makes the theory incompatible with any legitimate affirmation of divine creation or of biblical theism.

I am frankly amazed that one so learned and esteemed should display such an obvious oversight concerning the most fundamental of the philosophical and theological grounds for theistic evolution (TE). Even in the purest form that affirms absolute naturalism and denies overt divine intervention in the process, theistic evolution affirms that God alone is responsible for setting the universe as we know it into place, but that the “divine creation” occurred by laws He and He alone created and set in motion. It does not rule out supernatural design but rather views God’s design as taking place at a higher level of sovereignty. The universe was created and life developed into human life because God purposed that they do so. TE in its fullest form does indeed rule out “interference at any point in the evolutionary continuum”, or rather, it renders such interference superfluous. The Author of nature did not need to step in and manually execute the actions of the Creation subroutine after He struck the “enter” key to run what He had already carefully programmed.

Later he triumphantly quotes a TE who happens to be a theology professor at the Claremont School of Theology apparently partial to open theism who tries to argue — with no success, from my vantage — that “[t]heologies that emphasize God as deeply involved in natural, open-ended processes seem better able to make sense of evolution than do the classical accounts of an omnipotent God.” I can’t see how this helps anyone’s case, but Mohler doesn’t even attempt to deconstruct that argument analytically, choosing rather to herald it as proof that TE “is not biblical Christianity.” Of course, I can see why he accepts that theologian’s understanding of TE: Mohler agrees with this mistaken theologian that evolutionary advances which appear random preclude any intentionality, even on the behalf of God. I don’t understand how any theologian, whether at Claremont or SBTS, can accept such an anemic view of the sovereignty of God. Scripture consistently declares that God ordains events beyond our purposes.

Another thing that really bugs me is how TE opponents speak incessantly of “Darwinism” and reference Darwin as the man behind the curtain, pulling the strings for evolutionary theory despite his reported demise in the nineteenth century; they don’t consistently apply their criticism to Christians who accept the theory of gravity as “Newtonists” or some such. Both Darwin’s and Newton’s views have been tremendously modified and/or overhauled since they originally formulated them, so the men who first hypothesized what later became accepted as a workable theory can hardly stand in as representatives of the current views, unless of course you need to demonize those views and need a voodoo doll to burn. “Darwin” becomes a boogieman, used to marginalize the theory of evolution as a personality cult. This tactic is manifest in Mohler’s closing stinger, so typical of anti-evolutionists, “…and that is why there is such panic in the temple of Darwin.” Two favorite red herrings here: 1) evolutionary theory is a religion and 2) Darwin the man = the mounds and mounds of scientific evidence that have confirmed some of the basic notions he first articulated.

Come on, Al. You may have reached the top of evangelical academia’s heap, but that doesn’t give you leave to stop thinking critically.