Forster The Joy of Calvinism

Knowing God's Personal, Unconditional, Irresistible, Unbreakable Love
1. Auflage 2012
ISBN: 978-1-4335-2837-8
Verlag: Crossway
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 0 - No protection

E-Book, Englisch, 208 Seiten

The Bible's command to 'rejoice continually' seems impossible and, frankly, unreasonable. Yet despite the apparent difficulty in fulfilling this commandment, Gregory Forster argues that Calvinism holds the key-namely that 'real Calvinism is all about joy.' Forster passionately holds to this belief, and systematically demonstrates it by addressing popular misconceptions of what Calvinism is and is not. Dismantling negative expressions of Calvinist theology, Forster positively reiterates its fundamental tenents, showing how God's love is the driving force behind every facet of Calvin's doctrine of salvation. Written accessibly, The Joy of Calvinism is an important addition to the conversation surrounding Calvinism and its advocates. Skeptics and those who have had negative perceptions of Calvinism, as well as Calvinists themselves, will find this a helpful resource for clearing up the controversies and grasping the winsomeness of the doctrines of grace.

Greg Forster (PhD, Yale University) serves as the director of the Oikonomia Network at the Center for Transformational Churches at Trinity International University. He is a senior fellow at the Friedman Foundation for Educational Choice, the editor of the blog Hang Together, and a frequent conference speaker.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Forster, Greg

Leseproben

Introduction

Rejoice . . . Always?

The Bible commands us to rejoice all the time. God says that if there is even a tiny fraction of a split second when we’re not rejoicing, that’s disobedience. The command is shocking, bewildering, and—to be blunt—deeply offensive. It is impossible. It is as if God demanded that I lift a house over my head and threatened me with severe discipline if I failed.

We are, of course, prepared to accept some level of accountability for our emotions. We understand that we are corrupt sinners whose emotions are badly out of line with God’s standards. We love the wrong things, hate the wrong things, are thrilled or sickened by the wrong things, get sad or angry when we shouldn’t and don’t get sad or angry when we should, and experience emotions like grudge holding and vengefulness that no one should ever experience at any time whatsoever. Getting our hearts cleaned up is going to be a long, hard slog. We know that. It’s going to be painful, it’s going to be humiliating, it’s going to be death to self every day. If God were demanding that, we wouldn’t exactly be jumping up and down with excitement, but we’d be ready to hear it.

But God is not demanding that. God does not say, “Get to work fixing your emotions so that you will eventually get into a state of mind, heart, and will, such that you can and do rejoice at all times.” He simply orders us to rejoice at all times—right now, this moment—as though we had the power to do it at will, just like that.

This is really quite clear in the Bible. “Rejoice in the Lord always; again I will say, Rejoice” (Phil. 4:4). “Rejoice always, pray without ceasing, give thanks in all circumstances; for this is the will of God in Christ Jesus for you” (1 Thess. 5:16–18). For good measure, it even tells us to “rejoice in our sufferings” (Rom. 5:3).

What can it possibly mean?

I wrote this book because I believe Calvinism points to the answer. Obviously I’m not saying only Calvinists have joy. I’m saying that if you want to understand the command to rejoice at all times, and still more if you want to obey it, of all the places you might start looking for help with that problem, the best place to start is with Calvinism.

Failure to Communicate

It seems to me that Calvinists, myself included, have not been communicating well about our ideas. And we have tended to blame the audience for what are really our own failures in communicating.

Here’s what I mean. Our little daughter, Anya, has difficulty with language, and this has made it a challenge for us to teach her about God. At one point, I got it into my head to try a new way of helping her understand what’s going on during the worship service. Anya knew some things about God, but she didn’t understand what church had to do with him. So I decided to try using the fundamental principle of the Calvinistic understanding of worship, which is that the worship service is not primarily something we do for God, that it’s something God does for us. God is actively working in every part of the service; we participate, of course, but we are receiving much more than we are giving—we are far more passive than active.

So during each part of the service, I would tell Anya what God was doing. During the call to worship I would tell her, “God is saying hi to us!” During the sermon I would tell her, “God is telling us his Word!” During the benediction I would say, “God is blessing us!”

From all this, Anya learned exactly one thing: the pastor is God.

Needless to say, I changed my approach to communicating with Anya about God. I’m greatly relieved to report that we’ve cleared up this unfortunate misunderstanding, and Anya is making great progress learning about the Lord. Recently, she overheard a woman in a coffee shop misuse the name of Jesus as a swear word. Anya understood nothing about what she was hearing except the name Jesus, but when she heard that name, she immediately piped up and said in a loud voice, “Jesus loves me!” (The woman mumbled something about being more careful with what she said in front of children.) You can imagine what a relief it is for my wife and me to see that we’re now successfully conveying these precious truths about God and Jesus to our daughter. Not to mention that she’s already witnessing her faith!

It makes a big difference how you communicate your ideas. It’s not just what you say; it’s how you phrase and frame it. The difficulty I faced with Anya wasn’t simply that she has trouble processing information. The bigger problem was on my end—I was presenting the information to her in a way that invited misunderstanding. When I changed the way I communicated, she was able to understand me.

We Calvinists need to do the same.

Beyond Formulas to Joy

In this book, I use “Calvinism” to mean the soteriology—the understanding of how sinners are saved—that has developed over time in the faith tradition that traces its history back through Calvin. The Calvinistic faith tradition is really much more than that, of course; it has a distinctive approach to pretty much everything. But our understanding of how sinners get saved is what most needs clarifying.

The world misunderstands what Calvinists believe about salvation. The misunderstanding is not just on the margins, but radical—almost as radical as Anya’s misunderstanding about God. I think that’s because we usually present what we believe in a way that invites misunderstanding.

Real Calvinism is all about joy. But for some time now, defenders of Calvinism have tended to communicate about it only in highly technical, formulaic, and (especially) negative terms. To take only the most obvious example, the notorious “five points of Calvinism” are now virtually the only terms in which Calvinism is formulated. The five points that we now use didn’t even exist until the twentieth century and weren’t widely used until the second half of that century.1 Even then, they used to be just one framework among many for talking about Calvinism. But today, these five vague phrases abbreviated by a clever acronym (TULIP) have come to be completely identified with Calvinism. If you tell people you want to defend Calvinism, you’re saying you want to defend the five points. What else could “Calvinism” possibly mean? (If you’re not familiar with the “five points” and want to know more about them, see the appendix, question 2.)

Bafflingly, this has happened even though many Calvinist writers seem to agree that the five points are a lousy way to describe Calvinism! The five points use highly technical and idiosyncratic terms that invite misunderstanding. And they’re almost entirely negative; they tell you a lot about what Calvinists don’t believe but very little about what Calvinists do believe. It sometimes feels like Calvinists first invoke the five points, then apologize for invoking the five points, and then explain how the five points don’t really mean what they seem to mean and aren’t really saying what they seem to be saying. This can’t possibly be the best way to introduce people to what we believe.

What makes this especially puzzling is that Calvinists usually don’t have this problem when they write about John Calvin the man, or other great heroes of faith within the Calvinist tradition, or just about anything else besides Calvinism itself. They will write with great eloquence about Calvin’s passion for God and his pastor’s heart for bringing God’s Word and God’s comfort to ordinary people, or about Augustine or John Newton, or the beauty and purity of the Reformed worship tradition, or the real spiritual presence of Christ in the Lord’s Supper. But when the subject is Calvinism itself—the distinctive theology that provides the underlying basis for all the other beautiful Calvinistic things they write so eloquently about—they suddenly shift gears and retreat to formulas and technicalities.

The trouble is that people outside the Calvinistic tradition only hear the formulas and technicalities. They don’t hear what we say “within” Calvinism; they only hear what we say about Calvinism. So while Calvinists produce reams and reams of positive, spontaneous, and devotional religious writings, the outside world never knows. If it hears our devotional voices at all, it never associates that devotion with our Calvinism; it thinks we’re pious in spite of our Calvinism, not because of it. “Calvinism” to the outside world means only the formulas, technicalities, and negations.

As a result, the substantial reality of Calvinistic religion, the affirmative faith from which it draws all its energy and vitality and joy, is almost completely unknown to the outside world. Even most of the people who worship in Calvinistic churches, and are thus nominally “Calvinists,” don’t understand what really makes Calvinistic religion such a precious treasure. Because we don’t communicate clearly, our own congregants have a very inadequate grasp of what lies at the heart of Calvinism. As a result, they’re robbed—in whole or in part—of the everyday experience of devotional joy that a robust and well-formed Calvinistic piety always produces, and in which, as Calvinists, they ought to be living.

What would happen if we talked about other theological topics, such as the divinity of Christ, the way we usually talk about Calvinism?2 Consider two different historic confessions of the divinity of Christ, both of which play essential roles in Christian theology and history. First,...