I expected scholarship, depth, dignity, gravity, insight, moderation, deliberation, and leadership from Lee Gatiss of the Church Society. That expectation was not met. It was and is clear that those expectations were quite wrong and quite misplaced. This is Anglican sophmorism at its finest. Just another reason for old school (moderated and modified) Calvinistic Episcopalians—who are Reformed—to pull away from anything in the West. Lee is just another sophmore in the Anglican trajectory.
Article
reprinted from
Cross†Way
Issue
Winter 2013 No. 127
(C)opyright
Church Society; material may be used for non-profit purposes provided that the
source is acknowledged and the text is
not
altered.
FIVE
POINTS OF CALVINISM? By Lee
Gatiss
People
often speak about the “five points of Calvinism.” Now I want to make it clear
right from the start, that I don’t believe in five point Calvinism. I am not a
five point Calvinist.
Please
don’t jump to any conclusions. I have more to say!
I believe
that God loves his world. Psalm 145:9 says “The LORD is good to all, and his
mercies are over all his works.” In Matthew 5:44-45, Jesus tells us to love our
enemies, so that we will be like our Father. So I believe in the universal love
of God.
I
passionately believe that we should evangelise the whole world. We should be
promiscuous about it. Everybody needs to hear about Jesus, and whoever comes to
him he will never drive away.
Jesus’
blood is so precious that it would be blasphemous to say it wasn’t completely
sufficient to pay for the sins of anybody. He’s the saviour of the world. I
don’t believe that God has limited the power of the atonement. What Jesus did
on the cross is the most powerful thing in the universe!
I believe
sin has affected people to their very core. But people are not as bad as they
could be. The Fall has affected us, but that doesn’t mean we have no capacity
to make choices. I don’t believe that what we do in this life is irrelevant and
makes no difference to God. I believe we have to put our faith into action, or
it is just dead faith.
We are
not robots. God has not predetermined everything so that we don’t need to use
our minds and our hands to get out there and work for him. I think it is
heretical to use the doctrine of predestination as an excuse for being lazy.
Now, you
may think at this point that I am not what you expected! But I wanted you to
hear me affirm with all my heart the things which you might think a Calvinist
would only say defensively, or things you might think a Calvinist wouldn’t say
at all.
OK, so
what did I mean? First, I said I’m not a five point Calvinist. Well, what is
five point Calvinism? It’s usually defined using the English acronym TULIP:
total depravity; unconditional election; limited atonement; irresistible grace;
perseverance of the saints.
I can’t
find these five things listed in Calvin’s Institutes. Calvin doesn’t
seem to have a section on “the five points.” And strangely, in my edition of
his Institutes, he doesn’t even get to talking about predestination until about
page 900.
And
that’s my point. Calvin himself said so much more than just five points. So
following him would mean believing in 20 points, or maybe 100 points. Where’s
the doctrine of the Trinity in these “five points”? And yet you couldn’t say
you were following Calvin if you were an anti-Trinitarian.
Where’s
the doctrine of the sacraments in the five points? And yet Calvin spent huge
amounts of his time writing about the Lord’s Supper and baptism.
Surely
Calvin was a Protestant Reformer? So he believed in sola fide, sola gratia,
sola scriptura -salvation by faith alone, through grace alone, and the
authority of scripture alone. But they are not mentioned in the so-called five
points.
So I’m
not a 5 point Calvinist, because Calvinism is about so much more than just
these five points.
Maybe I
could say I’m a twelve point Calvinist?
But if
we’re going to boil it all down, why not be a one point Calvinist? I believe
that “God saves sinners.”
When it
comes to salvation, it’s God who does it. Not me doing my best and God
accepting that.
Not God
doing his part and me doing mine. God saves.
He
doesn’t save people who are worthy: God saves sinners. He doesn’t look
into the future and see I will be a worthy person and therefore save me on the
basis of my great potential. No, God saves sinners.
He
doesn’t make salvation possible. He actually saves people. He didn’t
just make it possible IF I add my own hard work and faith. He came to save me,
and save me he has. One point Calvinism: God saves sinners.
However,
Calvin didn’t invent all these abbreviations. He wasn’t the only theologian to
believe all these points. And he certainly wasn’t the first to talk about
predestination and such things. So the label “Calvin-ist” is misleading.
A better
label would be “Reformed.” When we talk about Reformed theology, we’re talking
about the kind of soteriology (doctrine of salvation) and the kind of
sacramentology and the kind of Trinitarianism that was shared by Calvin and
many other Reformers in the 16th century, such as our very own Thomas Cranmer,
and others such as Bullinger, Bucer, Vermigli, Perkins, and Beza. They were
French, German, Italian, English.
So, I
don’t believe in five point Calvinism. I believe in the Bible. I believe God
saves sinners. But if you want more than that, I believe the Bible is best
summarised in a broad tradition of theology called Reformed, which yes,
includes Calvin, but was certainly not started by him and is certainly not
limited to him.
Now,
where does this TULIP come from? Well, it’s supposed to be a summary of the
teaching of the Dutch Synod of Dort (1618-1619). The Dutch love tulips; it
seems appropriate. But the acronym TULIP wasn’t invented until about 400 years
after the Synod. And though it’s funny, and clever in a way, in other ways it’s
extremely unhelpful.
Often,
people who believe the things affirmed at Dort have to spend so long explaining
what they mean by total depravity and limited atonement, that
it’s not really a helpful shorthand. (Total depravity doesn’t mean we’re as bad
as we could be; limited atonement doesn’t limit the cross’s power).
One of
the objections to the Reformed view of the atonement is this: if Jesus only
came to save those given to him by the Father, then what’s the point of
evangelising everybody?
This is a
strange objection, for this reason: nobody thinks that everybody is elect. The
Reformed think God elects people in eternity and sends Jesus to save those
people, who are regenerated by the Holy Spirit, who preserves them and gets
them to glory.
The
Arminian, or non-Reformed, view is that God elects people on the basis of
foreseeing their faith. That is, God looks into the future and says, “Oh look,
Lee is going to have faith in me.
“Argyris
is not. So I will elect Lee.” If you don’t believe, you don’t get saved. And if
you’re not saved, you’re not elect.
So the
point is: both Reformed and non-Reformed think there’s only a limited number of
people in heaven. So only a limited number of people are elect. And the
(faulty) logic says that if not all are elect, we can’t preach to everyone.
So this
argument, usually used against Reformed doctrine, actually works against
Arminianism as well. If limited atonement means we can’t evangelise everyone,
then so does limited election, and limited ultimate salvation.
The
Thirty-nine Articles say the basis for our actions is the revealed will of God,
not his eternal plan. So if he tells us to evangelise the world, to be holy, to
love - we evangelise all, we work hard at sanctification, and we make an effort
to love people. We don’t ever say, “Well, Lord, you chose me before the
foundation of the world. So it doesn’t matter if I obey you or not.”
As John
Stott used to pray, “May your written word be our rule.” We do what he says, as
our Lord.
But the
word also reveals to us that he is a sovereign Lord. He’s in charge. So we know
whatever WE do, HE remains in the driving seat. His will is done.
God’s
grand plan is revealed to us as a comfort and an encouragement. It is not
revealed to us so that we can draw wrong conclusions from it, which overturn
his explicit commands.
Yet we
also know from the scriptures that God intended from the start only to finally
save the elect.
We have
both views, but must be careful not to confuse them. We don’t know who is elect
and who is not. So if the word says preach to all, we preach to all, even if we
cannot reconcile in our heads how indiscriminate preaching can be reconciled
with equally clear teaching on God’s ultimate sovereignty.
Our job is
not to make it all into an intellectual jigsaw puzzle. Our job is to live and
die for the spread of the gospel and the glory of God, confident that God will
save sinners.
That’s
why, in the end, Reformed theology is not about Calvin, or Cranmer. It’s not
about TULIPs.
It’s
about God, his glory, and his grace. Now that is something we can believe in.
This is a
shortened version of a lecture given at the Greek Bible College in Athens,
October 2012.
Lee Gatiss is Director of Church
Society
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