Underground Exiles

Founders Ministries | John Calvin on Evangelism and Missions.

Another good examination of John Calvin’s emphasis on evangelism and missiology, this time written by Founder’s Ministies of the Southern Baptist Convention.

Read and enjoy!

Let me start this post by saying that I am categorically not denying that the doctrine of Eternal Security can’t be misused.  I think it can be, and horribly so.  The reason I believe so many people misunderstand and misteach the doctrine of eternal security, is because they screw up on teaching what salvation is and means.  If you get salvation wrong, then you are going to get eternal security wrong by extension.  To illustrate what I mean, look at it like this.  If you pollute a stream at its head, then it’s going to be polluted downstream, too.   If you mess up what salvation is, you are necessarily going to screw up what it means to be eternally secure.  If you want to get salvation right, first and foremost, you have to go to the Bible, which declares that its central message is the good news of salvation from sin and death.

Contrary to popular belief, salvation isn’t a single act, but instead is provided by God for believers in three distinct stages.  As well, there are pre-salvation acts by God that are incredibly important for understanding the salvific process.

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So I had another conversation this morning at church before the service started surrounding the question of free will.  There is a dear, dear lady at the Well who walked up before church started and noticed that our pastor had a copy of Erasmus and Luther’s debate on Free Will.  She picked up the book and said she’d never read anything by Erasmus and thought she might be interested in the book.

Seeking to engage the conversation, I mentioned that Pastor Todd had loaned me the book several years ago, and that I thought Luther’s writing in Bondage of the Will was by far the best piece of writing he’d every produced.

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I recently interviewed with a church on the South Carolina coast, and the conversation with the gentleman I would have been working with left me a little upset.

On a good day, at most I’m a four and a half point Calvinist.  Other days, I’m maybe a three-point or at most four-point Calvinist.   I still just can’t figure out where I fall on the Limited Atonement question, so I often oscillate back and forth.  I didn’t become a Calvinist by just jumping on a bandwagon; I arrived here after throwing myself against the Gospel of John and the Letter to the Romans for about 2 years.  For reasons of biblical faithfulness, I hold to a Reformed theology.

The gentleman I would have been working for on the coast is an all-out Arminian.  These two teams of Calvinist and Arminian have been holding different theological positions for several hundred years - the argument between them ain’t new by any stretch.

So as I sat and talked to this man, he was the most hostile person to Reformed theology that I’ve ever met.  I was actually taken aback at the amount of venom he spoke with; to be honest, I was shocked, since I’m not that angry about folks holding to Arminian theology.  I believe since I arrived at being a Calvinist by a lot of theological reflection, then obviously an Arminian must have as well.  I think that stands to reason.

At any rate, our conversation got me thinking down a particular vein: why can’t we get along?  I’m convinced that there are good, biblical reasons to be Arminian in your theology.  I don’t think that the Arminian position says anything the Bible doesn’t say, I just don’t think it says everything the Bible does.  Nevertheless, it’s not heresy; this is an in-family debate.  I can’t think of a single Calvinist I know personally that would berate or browbeat someone of a Wesleyan Arminian theology.  Why is it then that Calvinists have the reputation of being bullies, when it’s the Arminians I know that are hostile?  I just don’t understand it.

There are only three questions I have to have answered to be able to work with someone:

1. Do you love Jesus?
2. Do you love the Bible?
3. Do you desire to see people reached with the gospel?

As long as the answer to all three questions is yes, I can work with you, no matter what you believe about election and predestination.  As long as we both love the Bible, we can disagree, and still have a place to go back to to settle our disagreements, since we both hold Scripture to be the final authority.

Has anbody else experienced this?

For those of you who aren’t aware, I happen to hold Pastor Mark Driscoll of Mars Hill Church Seattle in pretty high regard. While reading through some articles at the Resurgence I came across this article, which absolutely broke my heart.

I highly recommend reading this, and hope all of us realize that it is often the “tolerance monitors” who are the most intolerant bunch around.

We should all remember that it is our duty to humbly submit to Scripture and its authority, not to stand over it as though we had authority…