Sorry, Riley, but I have to.
I pray and worship God like a Calvinist, but preach and proselytize like an Calvinist. Just not a hyper-Calvinist.
Contrary to popular opinion, Calvinism does not teach that we should sit on our rear ends and wait for God to do something. A sound view of the sovereignty of God in election rather teaches that we should work even harder and more faithfully than even those who hold a free-will view, because it’s not too late, it’s never too late for God to do a crazy work on someone’s hard heart. Even if they show zero signs of softening, or listening to what we’re saying/doing, we cannot give up because we do not know whom God has called, and we do not know if God intends to use our work to draw a person to Himself. So we must treat everyone as if they were elected, and we were the only conduit of the Spirit’s electing work in their life. Just saying…
I believe what you are referring to is Treyvinism.
No, I understand Calvin’s real passion for the glory of God. Ironically and seemingly illogically, I’m not really talking about Calvin or even Calvin’s ideas, I’m talking about the ‘calvin-culture’ that has evolved around many complacent Christians who find the sovereignty of God as an excuse for a non-convert, rather than a trust and a striving goal.
When I say I’m an Armenian by prosylitism, I mean that I would go to the the ends of the earth, to the ends of logical argumentation, to the ends of compassion and love, to the ends of all human ability to convert a person (in an ideal world, of course… my sin ends up kind of jacking me up in that area most of the time, i’m talking about my ideology here…), never ‘giving up’ and saying ‘It’s up to God now’ unless I was specifically told to close that door. To me that is what makes logical sense. Now, again, as I parenthesised (new word), this is in an ideal world where I lay aside all my distractions and do it. I’m just saying. Trusting the sovereignty of God in the moment means that I know that God oversees everything and has planned everything I will do, not to mention ‘charting out all of his moves’ as well. I will never say, however, “Perhaps this person is not elect” because that defies soteriological reason, and puts the sovereignty of God in a nice little box that one can manipulate.
The pitfall of many people in this interesting kind of Calvinist ideology is ever thinking that the sovereignty of God means that they stop and God “picks up the rest of the work.” First of all, that undermines God as the coordinator of not only the cultivation but the seed-planting as well, and undercuts the human’s call to spreading the Bread of Life and the Gospel. So when I say Armenian by proselytistic thought, I mean that the Sovereignty of God never has a start and end point to me. I do my work to the very best I possibly can, to the ends of the earth, never ‘getting to a point where I just trust God.’ I hope and pray and desire and yearn that I will trust God through and through, never stopping to fulfill the duty to which I have been called.
P.S. nice debunking by the way!
Question… and I’m not trying to imply anything more than what I’m asking… why does it matter what you call it (“proselytizing” like a Calvinist or Armenian)? Why can’t one just DO it because we’re commanded to?
I proselytize like Jesus. Does that mean I win?
Way to out-debunk me, Andrew. Job well done.
Just so there’s no confusion here, I knew exactly what Riley meant, I just couldn’t resist our little tradition of trying to debunk everything that gets said, of course all in good fun. This post was almost entirely a joke.
@Molly: well, yes and no (to the second question). Every way that you evangelize will have an ideology behind it, whether you think about it all the time or not. Your methods, your attitude, your targets, your perseverance–all our drastically affected by your perspective on the sovereignty of God, especially as it relates to salvation. But you do have a good point that the fact that it gets done is the important thing.
In answer to your first question, though, it matters because if a Christian doesn’t think about how God is involved in salvation, they may very likely be approaching evangelism from a false foundation, and it’s possible that they might be misleading people (and being ineffective in ministry). Also, if a Christian don’t care at all about the topic, then they either aren’t reading the Bible and so aren’t stumbling across difficult passages, or they just don’t care. And I’m not sure which is scarier. Now, I’m not saying that the theology of salvation (soteriology?) must be of utmost importance to a Christian, but we should all have some understanding of it, and at least have somewhat of a position on such an important issue.
And don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying you have to be a Calvinist to be a Christian. Lots of great men of God weren’t. And I mean lots. But they did believe something. And before you say “then it doesn’t matter”, let me give an example. Consider infant baptism. What would you think if you walked up to a pastor at a nondenominational church and asked him what he thought of it, and he responded “Oh, I don’t really know, and I don’t think it’s a big deal. The important thing is that people get baptized.” That would be kind of sketch, because paedobaptism and credobaptism are very different, and though someone who believes in paedobaptism can in good faith immerse someone who doesn’t (our Presbyterian pastor in Mexico dunked Jeremy, Daniel, and Kate), you’d want to be sure he understood what baptism was.*
I guess what I’m saying is, it’s hard to tell someone what salvation means without having a position on how much of a role God’s sovereignty plays in it. It’s possible that when describing what “getting saved” means, to say “it’s man reaching up to take God’s outstretched hand” and to say “it’s God reaching down to grab an unwilling, blind man and pull him up” is simply describing the same thing from different perspectives, because man must do the believing and confessing, though it is God who works in him both to will and to do. However, if you don’t pick a side, all you can say is that “getting saved” means ‘doing that Jesus thing’ or something.
Does any of this make sense? Are y’all tracking with me?
*Although I do think it’d be hard for a credobaptist to sprinkle a baby, but that’s because the credobaptist position inherently excludes paedobaptism. So maybe this analogy isn’t perfect.
@Andrew: haha.
You’re right Molly. I don’t want to be of Apollos or Cephas but of Jesus. My point was what you believe affects how you act or ‘vote.’ So take away Calvinism and Armenianism, and we can relate it doctrinally without taking labels. I want to share the Gospel with a fath that it is all God’s: for Him, by Him, to Him, and through Him. Also I want to work and learn to pray as if my own passion for other lost, hurting people was the only thing that would move the throne of God to action.
I’m “trackin” with you guys, of course
. What I think my comment comes down to (after thinking about it) is this – I have trouble talking about this stuff because I know that if I’m honest with myself, no matter how I want to label or analyze my “approaches” to sharing the Gospel, I know that I’m not doing it nearly enough. To make a blanket statement, if I can, I think that most of us just simply AREN’T doing it on a day-to-day basis (I’m not trying to pass judgment on you guys, of course. Like I said – blanket statement, for the sake of my argument). I feel like the first step in doing this right or having the right attitude is simply DOING it. AKA I don’t think the problem is that we’re all sharing the Gospel as if God is Sovereign or not – I think the problem is that we’re not sharing the Gospel. Maybe this is what Paul was talking about when he said, “What then? Only that in every way, whether in pretense or in truth, Christ is proclaimed, and in that I rejoice” (Phil 1:18). Is Christ really being proclaimed in our schools?
Obviously, I understand the importance of understanding this stuff – I wasn’t trying to belittle this discussion. Just sharing my convictions.
You’re absolutely right. We aren’t doing it, at least not as much as we ought. But I don’t think “just doing it” is a sustainable method to fixing that problem. I think if we can understand better who God is, and how much He loves us, and how much we have in Christ, we will not be able to help ourselves from preaching the Gospel. Though that’s not to say that we shouldn’t just do it, because we should.
By the way, I just listened to both of Paul Washer’s sermon’s on Song of Solomon that you recommended, and they were really good. I’m going to go back through them again soon so I can take some notes. That was simultaneous one of the most challenging and encouraging sermon(s) that I have ever heard.
Link
Yeah – I listened to them on the way to UMHB one time, and the sun was setting and so the sky was all pink and pretty… my eyes were teared during like the entire last half of the message!