(ABP) — Dick McCartney, my editor when I worked at the Oklahoma Baptist Messenger, used to wander into my office, bottom feeding for an editorial idea. “What should I view with alarm this week?” he would ask.
There are always plenty of things to view with alarm. But, thanks to a “Building Bridges” conference at Ridgecrest Baptist Conference Center Nov. 26-28, I'm a little less alarmed about creeping Calvinism in Baptist life.
I remain, however, just as befuddled by it, not a whit more attracted to it and just as certain it has severe potential to divide. A conference speaker even listed one advantage of Calvinism as prompting “better church splits.”
But if the general attitude of presenters is typical of the players in this debate nationwide, there is hope for civil, informed dialogue among people who hold different views. That bears celebrating.
Why are we talking about Calvinism at all? Why don't we leave such discussion to denominations that base their doctrines on Calvin's understanding of Scripture?
(We're forced into the conversation because in some Baptist academic circles — with the nucleus at Southern Baptist Theological Seminary and its president Al Mohler — there is a movement to convince us that our earliest leaders were, at heart and by theology, Calvinist.
And they are training our pastors this way. And those pastors are being called to churches filled with what they now perceive as an unregenerate congregation. And thus begins another conflict.
At the conference, Southern Baptist researcher Ed Stetzer said nearly 34 percent of 2004 graduates from Southern Baptist Convention-affiliated seminaries affirm the traditional five points of Calvinism. That is as opposed to 10 percent of pastors in the overall Southern Baptist population. So, Calvinism as a theological worldview is dripping steadily into our transfusion tube.
Conference participants quickly learned there are several breeds of Calvinists, and no one likes “hyper-Calvinists.” Non-Calvinists had little empathy for “Classic-Calvinists” either, but by golly, the “Baptist-Calvinists” were our kind of theological kinsmen — whatever that oxymoron means Malcolm Yarnell of Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary offered a “Baptist-Baptist” perspective that was not, shall I say, warmly received by the other hyphenated theologians.
Calvinism is basically a systematic theology, a framework by which to order both the simple and complex issues in the Bible. I have always appreciated the Baptist willingness to accept that frail humans with limited understanding do not have to shoehorn every question mark into someone's systematic theology. Calvinism shoehorns big issues into small spaces to explain unfathomable ideas. And as Yarnell said, it tends to offer answers to difficult questions based on ruminations about the system, rather than from a simpler scriptural answer.
Calvinism is most widely known by the five presuppositions for understanding God's grace, often referred to with the acronym TULIP. Its letters stand for the doctrines of:
— Total depravity
— Unconditional election
— Limited atonement
— Irresistible grace, and
— Perseverance of the saints.
Several of those doctrines bear explanation for laypeople as they grow in influence among Baptist pastors and theologians.
“Unconditional election” says God has predetermined and foreordained the eternal destiny of everyone, whether to heaven or hell, for his glory. It says humans are unconditionally elected by God for his purposes without any prior works, good or evil, by which God would judge them.
Put simply: Before you were born, God ordained your destiny for heaven or hell.
While you might think that such a theology would castrate evangelism, the irony is that every Calvinist speaker testified to the urgent need for evangelism. And, they pointed out, one of the most widely used evangelism “systems” for a decade was Evangelism Explosion, designed and produced by the Calvinist Presbyterian pastor D. James Kennedy, who died Sept. 5.
A second Calvinism “TULIP tenet” is limited atonement, which declares that Jesus did not die for everyone, but only a limited number of people.
Of course there is no shoe too small into which to horn a TULIP interpretation, but a simple reading (simplicity could be my problem) of I Timothy 2 and 4 appears to say Jesus wants “all men” to be saved and that Jesus gave himself “as a ransom for all men.”
Calvinist speakers said most Baptists actually do, functionally, believe in a limited atonement — because we are not universalists, believing all will be saved. The question is: What is the limiting factor in limited atonement? If all are not saved, what determines who is not saved?
I was taught an individual accepts or rejects by his own free will that salvation paid for by Christ and freely offered to all. Calvinists say the individual has nothing to do with it — that God chose way before he decided if the Mississippi River would flow north or south that he would create some creatures we call humans for eternal torment and a few lucky ones to spend eternity in his presence.
Calvinists see no irony in that, and their spirit does not recoil at the thought that God would intentionally create tenants for hell. They perceive that God is gracious to save any, when he isn't required to save a single person.
I did pick up a couple more themes in the Calvinist tenor that should give pulpit-search committees more questions to ask candidates. One is an emphasis on “church discipline.” The other is a conviction that too little church discipline has led to “unregenerate church membership.”
In other words, Calvinists, at the conference at least, appear to be pretty certain Baptist churches are filled with persons who are not saved, who are just as reprobate and destined for hell as anyone else who — well, as anyone else who God slated for torment while he was still contemplating creation.
To their credit — and to the shame of all Christians — Calvinists look across church rolls and see too many who claim the name of Christ but whose lives bear no witness to being changed by the power and love of Christ.
If church discipline is exercised more assiduously, Calvinists say, church rolls will be filled with Christians, instead of with unregenerate reprobates. I will not speculate how that position considers the efficacy of preaching, the “void” return of the Word, the power of the Holy Spirit or even limited atonement.
One more thing. Jeff Noblit, pastor of First Baptist Church, Muscle Shoals, Ala., is the one who said “The rise of Calvinism will produce better church splits.”
He said 2 Cor. 6:17 tells Christians to be separate. He said that verse tells “Christians they must split from false professors” of their faith. He did not say the verse is an admonition to be separate from non-believers.
“Most church splits are not good splits,” Noblit said, because “they are usually over power or worldly desires.”
A good split, on the other hand, is “over truth.”
“When a central doctrine is at stake,” he said, “the pastor must stand. Peace at all cost is the banner of the coward…splitting over essential doctrine is commanded and commendable.”
Maybe I am more alarmed than I thought.
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— Norman Jameson is editor of the Biblical Recorder, the newspaper of the Baptist State Convention of North Carolina.