I became what is popularly known as a “Calvinist” sometime in 1988.
It is a long and sordid tale, and to this day I am not quite sure what
happened. There were various factors in play, as there always are with
such things. The first was that I was preaching through Romans. I can
recall telling one of our elders that I did not know what I was going to
say when I got to “those chapters.” When I began preaching through the
book, I was not Calvinistic, and when I finished, I was. So that was one
factor. I got to chapter eight and decided, “Oh, well,” and just preached
what it said. After all, I had nothing better to do.
Another significant factor was that I had encountered openness theology
for the first time—the idea that chance governs some things, and
God doesn’t really know the future. The future does not exist in such a
way as to be known. My conservative evangelical instincts recoiled from
this, but because I was Arminian in all my “default” assumptions, I could
not answer this position, given my premises. That was a problem.
The third factor was that I was entranced with the idea of “worldview
thinking,” applying the Scriptures to every aspect of life. This was an
impulse that went way back, but it started to congeal in significant ways
in the early eighties. With some other Christians, I was involved in the
founding of Logos School, and one of our guiding principles had been
to teach all subjects as parts of an integrated whole, with the Scriptures
at the center. That’s all very well, but when you go out there and try to
find books by evangelical Christians on how the faith relates to politics,
banking, foreign policy, agriculture, literature, economics, art, architecture,
and medicine, you will quickly find yourself reading books by
almost no one but Calvinists. I became aware of this, and decided that I
would read Calvinists on anything except Calvinism. They were reliable
guides all over the world—everywhere but their hometown.
But my inability to answer the openness position battered down my
prejudices even at this point. I didn’t like this “chance business,” and
surely, I thought, the Calvinists would have something good to say about
chance. And so they did.
However, despite all this, I was still not prepared to ask Calvin into
my heart. But that reminds me. If anyone who is not Calvinistic picks
up this book for whatever reason, and his eyes happened to fall on the
first sentence of this paragraph, and he is not amused, I would hasten to
add that this was a joke, as in, not serious. That was another surprise.
Calvinists, it turns out, have a very robust sense of humor. “Was that an
example of it?” you ask. In reply I suggest that we just move on.
I was still not prepared for any of this to be true. There were two
things going on. One was the argument itself and the other was my
unwillingness to have the argument come to certain conclusions. I remember
where I was standing in my living room when I told God I was
willing for all of this to be true. “That’s awfully big of you,” the universe
said in reply, and I thought I detected a note of sarcasm, but it was a big
deal for me at the time. Up to that point I had not been willing for it to
be true. Once I acknowledged that I would be willing in principle to lay
down my prejudices, I did not immediately become a Calvinist. But I was
no longer prevented from that happening by an intellectual dishonesty
and pride. That surrender is why, when I got to that place in Romans,
the fruit just fell off the branch.
To change the metaphor yet again, when I fell down the Reformation
stairs, I hit my head on every step. I spent the first couple of years after
all this happened denying I was “a Calvinist.” This was because I had
no intention of being a partisan follower of Calvin, regardless of how
great he was. The church had had quite enough of the “I am of Paul, I
am of Apollos” factionalism, and I did not want to add to it. The irony
was I had learned all this Calvinism from Paul primarily—so I did not
want to say I was “of Calvin.” I did not want to do this because Paul had
been very stern with people who had claimed they were “of Paul,” and I
wanted to follow him, not Calvin, because I was . . . of Paul.
And of course, by simply calling myself a “simple Christian,” I should
have realized that I was not necessarily avoiding the problem. There was
a super-spiritual faction at Corinth as well, one that went well beyond
allegiance to Paul and Apollos. You see, they were “of Christ,” and it
appears that they may well have been the worst of the lot (1 Cor. 1:12).
There is an appropriate way to resolve everything in Christ (1 Cor. 3:22),
and there is a hyperfactional way to do it. There is a sectarian way to
be “of Paul,” and there is a God-honoring way to do it (1 Cor. 4:14–16).
But I did not know all this at the time, and so spent a goodly amount
of energy denying that I was a Calvinist, when it was obvious to pretty
much everybody that this was exactly what I was.
All I succeeded in doing was to make people believe that, in addition
to adopting this appalling theology, I had decided to cover it all over with
a layer of disingenuousness. It looked like I had taken the flinty rock of
predestination and poured the oil of insincerity all over it. So finally I
gave up, faced facts, and admitted that I was a Calvinist—but only as
a form of theological shorthand. Jonathan Edwards put it this way—“I
should not take it all amiss, to be called a Calvinist, for distinction’s
sake.”1 Aye, for distinction’s sake. Douglas Wilson from “A Study Guide
Calvin’s Institutes” available from Canon Press. Pastor Wilson’s journey
to become convinced of “Covenant Theology” or Reformed Theology has
a pleasure to read and help me relate to my own journey to the same
destination beginning in 1997 in Portland, Oregon.
