I was raised in the Christian Reformed Church, a Calvinist denomination. While I considered myself a Christian (and I still do), by the time I was in high school, I was finding Calvinist theology increasingly troubling. Over a number of years, I encountered the Society of Friends (Quakers), which spoke in a more compelling way to my religious concerns. I now worship as a Quaker, and I am a member of the Society of Friends. However, I consider Calvinism and Quakerism to be two different but essential ingredients in my religious faith.
Recently, my mother sent me an interesting book, Calvinism in the Las Vegas Airport, by Richard J. Mouw (Zondervan, 2004). The author takes off from a scene in the movie Hardcore, in which a dedicated Calvinist attempts to describe his beliefs to a Las Vegas prostitute. She finds them repellant. Richard Mouw writes his book to explain why he finds those same core beliefs --- the beliefs I was brought up with --- comforting and inspiring.
As I read Mouw's book, it clarifies for me some of the reasons I left Calvinism for Quakerism, as well as some of the parts I still hold to. Mouw organizes his book around the TULIP mnemonic that describes the basic elements of Calvinist theology.
Before responding to these TULIP points individually, I want to pick out another theme of Mouw's that underlies the five points: the sovereignty of God. Calvinists are girded against (what they perceive as) attacks on God's sovereignty by people who want to emphasize human power, will, and responsibility.
However, I want to go even farther than sovereignty, emphasizing the transcendence of God. Not only does God have sovereign power over our world, including us as people, but He transcends our world. God is not only greater than we know, but He is greater than we can know. (With apologies to J. B. S. Haldane.)
One consequence of God's transcendence is that we must be humble about how well we understand Him and His desires and intentions. I know that I see "through a glass darkly", and I only perceive some portion of the truth. Everyone else is in the same fix, but they may have some portion of the truth that I lack, and I should hope to discern that if I can. I should be humble and cautious about denying the truth of someone else's beliefs. However, since God is transcendent, there is one belief I can deny with confidence: if a person says that he understands God's will completely, he is simply wrong.
We humans constantly struggle to understand God and His will for us. We use metaphors based on things in our experience, in order to help us understand God, even in a limited way. We use what we know about the love of a father or a mother for a child, as a metaphor for God's love for us. We use the sovereignty of an absolute king over his people (much more familiar and compelling in 1619 when the Canons of Dordt were written than in these days of democratic governments), as a metaphor for the sovereignty of God over the people He created. To cope with God's transcendence, the usual metaphorical move is: "Imagine the greatest human love, or the greatest human power. God's love and power are much greater than that."
Changes in human knowledge and human technology have brought new experiences, which provide new grounds for metaphors. I will draw on new metaphors, because I think they help us understand certain aspects of God that are not revealed as well by the older metaphors. But all of them are just metaphors, and no matter how many of them we use, they can only reveal a small part of the transcendent truth of God.
One particularly unattractive aspect of Calvinism is the belief in total depravity: the belief that humans are utterly, thoroughly, and inescapably sinful. Writers like Mouw try to soften the impact of this teaching, but it is an uphill battle, particularly since some evangelical preachers trumpet with great enthusiasm, even glee, how terrible we all are.
By contrast, one of the fundamental tenets of Quakerism is, "There is that of God in every one." We are told, "Walk cheerfully over the Earth, answering to that of God in every one." In practical terms, non-violent conflict resolution is effective because it appeals to that of God in the oppressor. It depends on the faith that, no matter how evil the enemy, there is that of God within them, and it may be possible to reach it. This has succeeded in practice, many times through history. (It has also resulted in martyrdoms. Are these failures, or witnesses to faith?)
If we restate the Calvinist position as, "There is that of the Devil in every one", to complement the Quaker, "There is that of God in every one", then we have a pair of opposite truths that I can accept together. Superficial Quakerism can fall into a sunny but unrealistic optimism, thinking that everyone is basically good, through and through. Superficial Calvinism (which is often explicitly taught) says that everyone is evil, through and through. Neither of these can be right. If Man was created in the image of God, this cannot have been completely eradicated. But the Fall is real, too, and we each have a reservoir of evil that can not be eliminated either.
I believe that the way to salvation requires a deep humility. We need to come before God, abandoning all our pride, and say, "I can't do it by myself. Please save me." And He does.
There's a packet of closely related ideas here in the Calvinist belief that God has selected in advance who will be saved (U), that only some are among the elect (L), and that if you are among the elect (or not) there is nothing you can do about it (I).
It's my impression that this is supposed to follow, as a logical proof, from God's omnipotence and omniscience, part of His sovereignty over the world. God's omniscience means that He knows who will be saved, and has known since the beginning of time. God's omnipotence means that if it happens that way, it is because He intended it to, so He must have elected those to be saved. We therefore get predestination, both in matters of salvation and in the ordinary physical events in the world.
Exactly where this leaves personal responsibility gets a bit sticky for Calvinists, which leads to a good deal of creative thinking and writing. They certainly don't want to let the individual off the hook, but they don't want to give him the power to affect his fate either, since that (apparently) reduces the power of God.
Here is where I hope a new metaphor will be useful, to allow us to reconcile God's omniscience and omnipotence with human free will and responsibility.
Visualize God sitting in His workshop with our universe spread out on a long table before Him. Our universe looks something like a spreadsheet, with the beginning of time off at the left side of the table and the end of time at the right side. Imagine that our moment in time is in the middle, though of course it could just as easily be close to one end or the other. All of space at our current moment in time is a slice across the sheet as it lays along the table. I can only visualize that slice as one- or maybe two-dimensional, but for God it is at least three-dimensional (maybe 13-dimensional if certain physicists are right).
God starts up His spreadsheet by placing a small block of densely packed photons at the left-hand edge. That's the Big Bang: "Let there be light!" The consequences of this and the laws He has embedded in this universe ripple across the sheet to the end of time. He looks at what He has done, and sees that it is good. He can glance from one end of our time to the other in an instant, and He can reach in to touch any point in our universe. He decides to change something, and the consequences ripple from there to the end of time. He is omniscient, and He is omnipotent. He has created the physical laws that ripple consequences through our universe, but He can override them when He wishes.
[This metaphor sets up an infinite regress of questions. What is God's workshop like? Where did it come from? Is He as omniscient and omnipotent in His universe as He is in ours? But this image is only a metaphor for a transcendent reality, intended to illustrate His relationship to our universe. Trying to extend this metaphor too far takes us beyond its usefulness, to the point where the questions are unanswerable or just silly.]
We live our lives inside that universe, spread out across the table in God's workshop. Nonetheless, He is willing to have individual relationships with each one of us. He created us to live, and to love, and to make moral choices. Sometimes we act in accordance with God's desires for us, and sometimes we sin. Some of us establish relationships with God, and others don't. Perhaps He reaches in to help us, or teach us, or test us, and perhaps He watches as we make our own ways through life. But at the moment He creates the Big Bang, our whole universe is laid out before Him, and He sees how our lives have worked out, as the consequences of our own choices within the physical and moral world He has created us in.
Back to Calvinism. I believe that Calvinist theology, based in early seventeenth century metaphors, could only understand God's omniscience and omnipotence in terms of unconditional election (U), or predestination. The spreadsheet metaphor suggests that we can be free agents, even while God, from His vantage point outside of our time and space, is omniscient and omnipotent. Limited atonement (L) follows from the simple fact that not everyone will make the personal decision to ask for salvation, not that God decides in advance who will be saved and who will not.
Irresistible grace (I) is my personal favorite, as it clearly is for Mouw and many others. In my own experience, God does reach in to touch my life, not to pull my strings and compel me to act a certain way, but to give me opportunities to make personal choices, and to teach me the consequences of those choices. Sometimes those opportunities are unexpected, and sometimes unwelcome. He has closed doors in front of me, to my intense disappointment, in order to direct my attention to other doors holding opportunities and blessings that turned out to be much greater.
Mouw points out that a critical issue for Calvinists, following from the sovereignty of God, is that it is God who chooses humans for salvation, not humans who choose to be saved or not. Here, I simply disagree with the Calvinist position. I believe that God, in His transcendent sovereignty, created humans with free will and moral choice. He placed us in this world to learn about His creation and to make moral choices, for better or for worse. His ability to intervene in our world is unlimited, but He wants us to make a free choice for salvation, not to be clockwork.
The spreadsheet metaphor shows us God in His workshop, where we individuals are microscopic elements in His spreadsheet. Nonetheless, He is willing to have meaningful individual relationships with us. I have felt Him act in my own life, and so have many, many others. But to help us understand that relationship, we need different metaphors.
The final element of TULIP says, "Once saved, always saved." Like the rest, it follows from God's omniscience and omnipotence, and it can be very comforting. But it lends itself to a particularly perverse interpretation: if someone appears in all ways to be saved, but lapses later in life, then they were never actually saved to begin with.
The spreadsheet metaphor restores the role for individual free will and responsibility. One can make a personal decision at one point in life, and a different one later. God sees it all from His omniscient perspective, outside of our time and space. The "perseverance" is just God's eternal knowledge of how it all comes out.
However, this answer raises a deeper question: What is salvation? Is salvation a "Get out of jail free" card, that one can acquire by having the right faith at one time, and can lose later? Is all that matters whether you are holding the card at the moment you die?
Whatever salvation is, it seems closely tied up to heaven and hell, and where you end up spending eternity. But what are heaven and hell, anyway? Images of clouds and harps, or brimstone and pitchforks, seem more likely to be metaphors than fundamental truths. The best answer I learned in my youth was that heaven is eternal communion with God, and hell is eternal isolation from God.
This still seems like quite a good answer. It has led me to the following speculation, which diverges quite a lot from Calvinist theology. Take it as speculation for now, but I have been contemplating it for a number of years, and I am starting to think I may actually believe it.
Christian theology seems to be pretty clear that we all, saved or not, have eternal life. The question is how we spend it. The concept of salvation is that a person who is saved spends eternity in heaven, while one who is not spends eternity in hell.
Eternity, on careful contemplation, can be a pretty scary concept all by itself. Sartre's famous play, No Exit, opens with three people finding themselves together in a small sitting room. Eventually it dawns on them that they are together for eternity, and that this is hell. A key line in the play is, "Hell is other people."
Suppose you wake up after your body dies, to discover that you are going to live literally forever. Pretty thrilling at first, released from fearing the end of existence. Then you think of all the things you can do, freed from physical constraints, like spending a few hundred years touring the world and perhaps even other planets. Then what?
Other people are there to talk and do things with. But as Sartre shows us, this could make eternity into hell. We have seen in this life that some people create their own hell, for themselves and those around them. What if there is no exit? Freedom from death is not necessarily a blessing. People could beg for an end to existence.
We tend to think of eternal life as eternal bliss or torment, but at least judgment has been rendered and our fate has been sealed, once and for all. Perhaps instead, eternal life is a terribly demanding environment for souls, and God places us on this earth for a few decades to prepare for it.
What are the survival skills that prepare an immortal soul for eternal life? Wouldn't they include love, humility, compassion, curiosity, and even humor? Wouldn't an active, intimate relationship with a transcendent God be essential? Wouldn't it require the ability to say to God, humbly and sincerely, "I can't do this myself. Please save me."
In this environment, there is no need for God to judge, sending souls to the right or to the left. Those souls who have a relationship with God, who can relate lovingly with others, and who have the humility to ask God for help, set to work at what needs to be done, and find that they are creating their own heaven. Those who refuse to know God, who think of self before others, and who cannot let go of their pride, create their own hell, personal, isolated, and eternal.
Instead of acting as a stern Judge, God acts as a loving Father and Teacher. He wants every one of us, His creations, through our own free will to join Him in eternity. He knows that not every one will be able to survive the demanding environment of eternal life. But through His prophets, if only we will listen, He lays out the lessons we need to learn. He even sends His Son, to teach us, to die at our hands, and then to rise from the dead, to show us the way.
This is just a metaphor. At best, it describes another facet of God's transcendent, unknowable reality. But I believe it does express an aspect of the truth that is sometimes invisible in Calvinist teachings.
For me, this is a portrait of the loving God I learned about at home as a child. I have come to know Him more personally as a Quaker. It is not God who is harsh, as He is so often portrayed in Calvinist theology. Rather, it is the environment of eternal life that is harsh and dangerous for the frail and finite creatures we are. But He has created us as moral agents, free to make our own choices for better or for worse, to learn His lessons or walk away from them, even if our choices sadden Him and condemn us. He is a loving God, who shows us what we must learn so that, rather than dying forever, we can join Him and live forever.