Evangelical Calvinism, part 2

A common acronym or mnemonic for Calvinism is TULIP:

1. Total Depravity
2. Unconditional Election
3. Limited Atonement
4. Irresistible Grace
5. Perseverance of the Saints

When rightly understood, these points are helpful for understanding Biblical teaching about God's role and man's role in salvation. The problem is - they're often not rightly understood. How can any description of the atonement as "limited" cause anything but problems? But, even with its short-comings, the ideas are concise and the verbal packaging is catchy, which makes it hard to replace.

I'm daring to propose a rework. Instead of another acronym, not as catchy and not as well-ordered, I'm just restating the five points, in order, but with some parallelism: two adjectives or two adverbs followed by a prepositional phrase. Perhaps this has similar mnemonic value but with a bit more clarity.

1. Unable and Unwilling in Sin - In his sinful state man is unable and unwilling to seek God. Man may appear to have some civic good, or some interest in spiritual things, but in his heart there is no true desire for God. Man is hopelessly lost and completely dead in his sin. (Rom 3:11, Eph 2:1)

2. Elected and Predestined by God - From all eternity God chose a people for his own glory. He looked at sinful humanity and graciously decided to save some, but not all. His choice was not conditioned on seeing something in us, but is hidden in the mystery of his will. We cannot see who is elect, but when we look back at our own salvation, we know that it was God who did it. (Eph 1:4, Rom 9:16, 2 Thes 2:13)

3. Specifically and Actually Saved by Christ - Christ laid down his life for his sheep. Even though Christ's death is genuinely offered to all, it was specifically intended for God's elect. Christ's death is not merely potential salvation: it is actual salvation for his people. However, Christ is rightly held up as the savior of all men because he is offered to all and he is the only hope for every man. (John 10:14-15, 1 Tim 4:40, Tit 2:14)

4. Regenerated and Called by the Holy Spirit - God works by his Spirit through the preached Word to bring his people to faith. At some specific point in time, God's Spirit regenerates a sinful man so that he hears and responds to the gospel in faith. God desires that all people hear the message of salvation, but only those in whom the Spirit moves will actually believe. (Rom 10:14, John 3:5, 1 Tim 2:4, 1 Cor 1:23-24)

5. Sanctified and Secure unto Glory - God's sovereign work of salvation continues throughout the believer's life. After conversion, God's Spirit tirelessly and unfailingly works to conform us into the image of Christ. And we have the Spirit as a seal, a guarantee, that we will be brought into glory. Christ will not lose even one of his sheep. (Rom 8:29, Eph 1:13-14, 1 Thes 5:23-24, John 10:28)

This is an understanding of salvation that gives God all the glory. We humbly receive and respond to his grace. However, even though God sovereignly moves in ways we cannot see, we are not passive. We must hear and believe. We must join in God's work of bringing the gospel to all. But in doing so, we know that it is God orchestrating everything from beginning to end. To God be the glory.

Evangelical Calvinism, part 1

Paul begins his letter to the Ephesians writing, "Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who has blessed us in Christ with every spiritual blessing in the heavenly places, even as he chose us in him before the foundation of the world, that we should be holy and blameless before him. In love he predestined us for adoption as sons through Jesus Christ, according to the purpose of his will" (1:3-6).

But later in chapter 3 he writes, "Of this gospel I was made a minister according to the gift of God's grace, which was given me by the working of his power. To me, though I am the very least of all the saints, this grace was given, to preach to the Gentiles the unsearchable riches of Christ, and to bring to light for everyone what is the plan of the mystery hidden for ages in God who created all things" (3:7-9).

And here we face a dilemma. What does it mean that God elects and predestines? The plain meaning is that God chooses who will be saved and how they will be saved and for what purpose they will be saved. All the credit for salvation goes to God and none goes to man. But what about a Christ-like desire to seek and save the lost? Why strive to bring the gospel "to light for everyone" if not everyone is elect?

Historically the Christian church has debated this in a variety of contexts. Protestants divide into Calvinists (those who agree with John Calvin's interpretation) and Arminians (those who agree with Jacobus Arminius's interpretation). Presbyterians and Reformed and Anglicans side with Calvin. Lutherans may not like the label, but on the fundamentals they also are in Calvin's camp. Methodists and Pentecostals and most Baptists side with Arminius. But the modern evangelical church has chosen a middle road: undecided.

Here are some possible reasons:

We desire to be broad and inclusive, to focus on the essentials and leave the non-essentials aside. Protestantism has a long history of splitting over creeds and dividing over this and many other doctrines. We'd like to avoid any divisive teaching if it's not essential.

We desire to be humble before deep and mysterious truths. Who can really say how God works? We expect God to explain it in heaven, so let's get on with what we do know.

Finally, we desire to be practical and effective. Our understanding of evangelical is to be actively bringing the gospel to the lost. Any teaching that seems to hinder this is a problem.

However, in ignoring or remaining undecided on election, we are ignoring core teaching of the Bible. The Bible tells us what God is like and how God works. If its teaching challenges our reason, then our reason needs to be challenged. If there is mystery, let God define where it is. In matters of faith, where God has revealed, we should study; where God has not revealed, we should not speculate.

With this submissive attitude toward God's Word and sound doctrine, the Bible speaks clearly to both matters:

1) God has elected a people unto salvation, without regard to any goodness they have or choices they will make. "We love because he first loved us" (I John 4:19).

2) God eagerly desires us to to preach the gospel to all people, without regard to whether they are elect or not. "For God so loved the world that he sent his only begotten Son" (John 3:16).

Some may think this is a blend of Calvinism and Arminianism: it is not. This is simply Calvinism. The Arminian view is quite different. It holds that God is not sovereign. He is only hopeful. He wants everyone to be saved and has made it possible, but it remains for man to actually make it happen. So get out there and make it happen.

The correct "middle road" for evangelicals is not remaining undecided on these issues: it is holding a robust doctrine of how God saves along with a robust doctrine on evangelism. The challenge is how to understand the work of evangelism, our ministry of reconciliation, in light of what God has revealed about how he saves.

Again, we look to Paul's words. In Romans 9 he explains how not all ethnic Israel is included in spiritual Israel, and the reason is God's election, not man's choice. In verses 14-18 he says, "What shall we say then? Is there injustice on God's part? By no means! For he says to Moses, 'I will have mercy on whom I have mercy, and I will have compassion on whom I have compassion.' So then it depends not on human will or exertion, but on God, who has mercy. For the Scripture says to Pharaoh, 'For this very purpose I have raised you up, that I might show my power in you, and that my name might be proclaimed in all the earth.' So then he has mercy on whomever he wills, and he hardens whomever he wills."

But right after that, in Romans 10:1 in writes, "Brothers, my heart's desire and prayer to God for them is that they may be saved." His reverence for God's sovereignty did not hinder his desire for evangelism: it enabled it. He believed in a God who works all things together for his glory and our good. He brought the gospel to the nations with the confidence that God was the one actually doing the work. This is the model for an evangelical Calvinism: believing God's sovereignty in salvation, and correctly understanding it as a motivation for evangelism, done in God's way, for God's glory.

What do you see up there?

I've been a fan of star-gazing for a while. My aunt asked me what I see when I look up in the sky. Here's my answer:

I don't see colorized, "close-up" pictures (which are amazing, but romanticized.) Instead, it's black-and-white and very small in my binoculars or a low-powered telescope. But this captures something very true: the universe is a huge, mostly empty, cold place.

I enjoy imagining where I am, like finding your home on a world map, thinking about where you stand in relation to everything else. It puts life into perspective. I know our modern worldview sees man as a small speck riding on the outside edge of an impersonal galaxy. And that's true. But we are able to imagine the whole. We can measure it. We can even figure out a bit of how it all works. So we have a smallness and a greatness at the same time. It's very easy for me to forget that when consumed by the daily grind of life.

So getting out and looking at the stars, or tracking a planet, or whatever else is happening in the sky, is a way for me to reset my perspective. And I find that invigorating.

Seeing concurrency

Modern computer programming makes extensive use of concurrency. Concurrency means two or more paths of code executing at the same time on the same set of resources. Ever since Windows 3.11 allowed us to Alt-Tab between windows, we have all been "multi-tasking".

Concurrency is a powerful way to maximize the use of a system. While one process or thread is waiting on data from a disk drive, the operating system automatically switches to another thread ready to process data from the Internet. A typical system runs with dozens, even hundreds, of processes or threads.

But programming concurrent systems is difficult. The interaction of these various processes and threads creates bugs including dead locks, live locks, and race conditions. Modern debugging tools can help a bit, but it usually boils down to brute force to root out these issues. I've spent countless hours figuring out why the whole system is coming unglued only to discover one synchronization lock out of place.

How is it that we can make extensive us of concurrent programming, but yet it so difficult? How can a topic which is taught in the first year of any computer science program still be baffling to a career software engineer? I believe it's because we lack the ability to see concurrency directly. We know about concurrency. We can explain what it is. But sometimes the interaction of just two threads can surprise us, let alone the interaction of hundreds.

This reminds me of Immanuel Kant's view of human perception. Now, just in case it's not obvious, I don't know squat about Kant. I've read a bit about him, and I've read a bit of him, but just enough to know that I don't actually know anything about Kant. That said, he believed that the certainty we feel in the realms of mathematics and science, in the accuracy of our perception of space and time, is due to our sense perception being space-and-time oriented. "The sensible world and its phenomena are not entirely independent of the human mind, which contributes its basic structure." (http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/kant/).

I think this is why multi-threaded and multi-process programming is difficult. We can't see it. Our natural sense perception is to see time as a single, linear stream. This is how we experience life day to day. So this is how we understand computer code: a single, simple flow of instructions starting at the top and working its way to the bottom.

But we can imagine time in multiple, cyclical streams. I've been a big fan of Doctor Who since Tom Baker days, as he careened though space and time in a British police box. You probably have your favorite time travel story. I think time travel in pop culture and concurrency in computing have a lot in common. But imagining something is not the same as really knowing it.

So how are we able to make such extensive use of concurrency? It's our ability to abstract. Abstraction is the creation of a higher-level representation which hides lower-level details. Abstraction allows us to take a oily, noisy car engine and stick it inside of a shiny, clean auto-body and drive around town with ease. Abstraction allows anyone to play music on an iPod with a touch of a finger, even thought that single touch requires millions of transistors to operate at the speed of light with logical perfection.

So it is with concurrency: we create abstractions which hide the concurrency so that the vast majority of code works in a simple, linear flow of instructions. We isolate the difficulties of synchronizing threads, solve the concurrency problems, then spend the vast majority of time programming within the abstraction of a single-threaded environment.

This understanding of how concurrency is managed reflects the humility and glory of man. We have an incredible ability to create powerful, wonderful electronics. And at the same time we lack the ability to see the interaction of two simple threads.

Marriage in the balance

This week our Supreme Court considers the constitutionality of gay marriage. I predict they will not repeat the mistake of Roe v. Wade and remove the issue from public debate prematurely. But it will fall short of a win for traditional marriage. Maybe I'm too much of a pessimist, but it seems the cultural shift in favor of normalizing homosexuality is unstoppable. The youth have decided, and they are growing up fast.

As a conservative Christian, there are many ways to see this:

First, traditional Christianity will be seen as bigotry. But this creates an opportunity to show love. If everyone has me pegged for an intolerant, hate-filled dinosaur, it creates a space to show what tolerance and love is. Jesus ate with prostitutes and sinners, but without condoning prostitution or sin. Maybe God is going to humble the church to the point where we can serve as Christ did.

The debate about the definition of marriage hides the underlying issue: is marriage definable? As a Christian, the answer is no. I received the institution of marriage. I received it from God, from tradition, from natural law, from my Mom and Dad. The Western world is blazing new ground by defining marriage. Greek and Roman men played with homosexuality, but they returned home to wives, kids, tradition and honor. They knew that another generation had to be born and raised if society would go on. It seems our modern affluence and independence has freed us from these concerns.

Or has it? Our modern welfare state, Medicare and Social Security, depends on the next generation paying for the care of the previous. And, given that everyone to date has taken out more from these programs than they have put in, it depends on the growth of that next generation. What happens when the drive for family and children is diminished? It doesn't have to be erased: what if these trends simply lower birth rates? The system collapses in on itself.

But we don't have the ability to discuss societal effects. The issue swirls around individual rights. "Don't I have the right to define marriage as I want?" But there is no absolute "I". There is both an "I" and a "we". One person's right to define marriage as he or she wills implies the duty for another to recognize that definition. Without that recognition, the definition means nothing.

Finally, this will put incredible pressure on other areas of our society. How well can Christians participate in public schooling and free markets and free speech in the context of state-sanctioned, state-promoted homosexual marriage? We've been numbed by decades of extra-marital sex in TV and movies. We know the stats about divorce rates and pornography and drug use. But redefining marriage is different. It creates a public standard of approval or disapproval by which someone can be measured, like bowing down to the statue of Darius or offering a pinch of incense to Caesar. Do you acknowledge the norms of our society, or are you on the suspicious outside?

So we will all discover what the effects of this will be. As a Christian, I need to trust in God, love my neighbor, and wait for God to make all things right. We need to show respect to all people, made in the image of God and loved by God. And, maybe most of all, I need to love my wife and, to the best of my ability, show my children what God created marriage to be.

Covenant theology terms

While the reformed doctrines of the Covenant of Grace and Covenant of Works explain good theology, they often cause confusion because they don't line up well with the Bible's own use of the term covenant. It's a tension between systematic and biblical theology.

The Covenant of Works is God's requirement of perfect obedience, broken by Adam and fulfilled by Christ. The Covenant of Grace is God's plan to save his people by grace, first promised to Adam after the fall, then renewed throughout redemptive history until it was fulfilled by Christ. This framework helps us understand salvation by grace alone, through faith alone, and in Christ alone.

The Bible says much about covenants, but it uses different terms. The covenants in the Old Testament include those made with or at the time of Noah, Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Moses, Joshua, and David. The prophets also speak of a coming New Covenant. There is obvious continuity between some covenants (from Abraham to Isaac to Jacob), but less obvious continuity for others (for instance Noah or David).

In the New Testament, the terminology is simple: Christ has instituted the New Covenant and we are living under that now. The New is contrasted with the Old Covenant. The New Covenant is the goal of redemption history, the culmination of all previous covenants, so understanding what this covenant is and how it differs from the old is important. In Galatians Paul explains how the New Covenant is both continuous with the Abrahamic covenant but radically different from the Mosaic covenant.

The Covenant of Grace doctrine correctly teaches the continuity between the Old and New Covenants, but in the desire to emphasize continuity, it often de-emphasizes the importance and priority and newness of the New Covenant. This is illustrated in Berkhof's Systematic Theology when he begins his one page treatment of the New Covenant: "Little need be said respecting the New Testament dispensation of the covenant." I guess the New Testament has a lot to say about it, even if Berkhof doesn't.

Also, it's a common mistake to confuse Covenant of Works for the Old Covenant. This could be corrected by better teaching, but I think the terminology is prone to the mistake. One reason is that there's extremely little Biblical support for the term "Covenant of Works" (Hosea 6:7 and what else?) I think some renaming of the doctrine, without the word covenant, would be helpful.

Of course, changes like this take time. There is tremendous value in the Westminster Confession of Faith and other reformed confessions that define the Covenant of Grace and Covenant of Works. These should not be changed quickly or lightly. But our systematic theology and confessions should always be open for revision and clarification because they are written in submission to the Bible.

Cliff jumping

Only a few days from the fiscal cliff, it's my turn to weigh in on what this all means. Of course no one knows. The experts don't. Our political representatives don't. So there's no harm in my throwing in an opinion.

First in my mind is that the national debt ($16.3 trillion) will never be paid; it will only be serviced (there were a few years under Clinton and Bush when the dot-com bubble created surpluses and debt was paid down, but that was the exception.)

If this is true, then the debt should be viewed as the required payment as a percent of the annual budget. Right now it is $360 billion per year from a $2,600 billion per year budget. That's 14%.

But this payment is variable. It is determined by the interest rate on Treasury bonds, and those are bought and sold on the open market. The free market determines the rate. Greece learned that this year. Right now our interest rate is around 2 or 3 percentage points. Greece's rate in 2012 fluctuated between 18 and 30. So, when private investors determine that the risk on US debt is too great, our rates will go up in the same way.

When this happens, the Fed will try to hold the rate down by purchasing bonds on the open market. It does this with new money, created out of thin air. Of course, they've already been doing that for the last couple years, in small amounts, with little observable effect. But these small moves are setting policy for the big dance.

What will a substantial and sustained influx of new money mean to the little guy? Inflation. It is the inevitable result of deficit spending. It's the hidden tax that sneaks up and takes money from your back pocket. The rich mitigate it by purchasing real assets that rise with inflation. The poor don't know what just hit them.

Do you remember Ross Perot's dire warnings about the national debt? I still remember the little guy and his alarming charts. Our annual deficit in 1992 was around $290 billion and our national debt was around $3.6 trillion. Those numbers aren't alarming now, courtesy of inflation. And that was modest inflation.

This is why I'm not overly concerned about the fiscal cliff. It was a compromise between conservatives and liberals, signed into law by President Obama, which actually cuts spending. Yes, it raises taxes too, but this is the nature of a compromise. It was supposed to be a poison-pill compromise, one that would be avoided by both sides. But, amazingly, what it actually does is reduce the deficit. Maybe there is no way for either side to actually cut the deficit and take credit for it. Instead, we have to cut by blaming the other side. Is this so bad?

So I think we should let things take their course. Over the cliff. There will be short-term pain. The media will show the poor on the street, then cut over to House Republicans making speeches. It won't be pretty. It won't be fair. But what is a greater long-term help to the poor: more social programs or less inflation? Republicans should refute the charge that they are dismantling the social safety net or weakening national defense. A safety net based on deficit spending is not safe. An army funded by deficit spending is self-defeating.