It has been awhile since I have blogged. And the more recent entries are more full of links and videos than they are of my actual writing. I have been blessed by being able to write about my faith and the glory of our great God over the past year, and I have been encouraged especially by some of the stories of those who have read and been helped early on. I do want to continue writing.
I am recently married! My wife is wonderful, and we are learning how to build our lives together. I also started teaching this semester. Both of these take a lot of time, and that is a very good thing. How lame if I only blogged all the time and never actually lived! Nevertheless, writing is one of my passions, and sharing my faith is as well. My writing pace at first was frenetic; then it slowed to a stop. Now I would like to find a good place in the middle somewhere.
In looking for a writing project, one of the first places I look is toward what I am currently reading. I have recently picked up John Calvin's Institutes of the Christian Religion. Calvin was a reformer, and if you have not heard of him, he is a very polarizing figure in the history of Christianity. Most Christians love him, hate him, or have never heard of him. Usually that hinges on whether or not you believe you decisively chose God, or God decisively chose you for salvation. This is not a debate I will resolve in this blog post. Calvin's Institutes were basically his systematic theology. Given his influence in Geneva and Europe at large, this book heavily influenced later Reformed theology and is prerequisite reading for his later commentaries on specific books. It went through several revisions until he was happy with it and felt it was in a complete form, and today the book I hold is 1001 pages thick... I certainly have some reading to chew on.
Today's world is thick with the air of tolerance. Not the kind of tolerance that fights for your freedom to believe what you want and live according to the dictates of your conscience, whether right or wrong, but the kind of tolerance that refuses to say that anyone is right or wrong. The very concept of truth is thrown to the ground and steamrolled like an antiquated novelty from a bygone time. Our culture is permeated with an antagonistic distrust of truth or its personal response - conviction.
Today's church breathes in this air, too, and too often, in cowardice, we abdicate the concept of truth and the firm conviction that we have truth in God's revelation to us. With no firm ground underneath our feet, Christianity becomes a religion about our experience, the way we feel when we sing songs or read the Bible or help other people. A real God who is there and breaks into our existence, who rightly is worshipped as the center of all the universe is replaced by us and our subjective feelings as the center of things. When Christianity wimps out on its proclamation of truth, and when we forsake our fundamental identity as witnesses of our risen Savior and Lord, we become just another voice in our postmodern world, indistinguishable from all the other voices. May it not be so!
We should not be allergic to true conviction. The pattern of this world would tend to do this to us if we do not resist it. Our conviction allergies, caught as we have gone out into the world to proclaim, tend to follow us back into the Church as we seek to minister to each other and proclaim God's Word to each other. How often do you receive or give Biblical rebuke or correction? If Church is mainly about my own personal entertainment experience - which is the case if don't really believe in truth - then rebuke and correction will be completely foreign. How seriously do you take and how seriously does your church take the need to learn the full counsel of God in our discipleship?
I am a Calvinist. I am a Christian first, but I am also a Calvinist. Just like I am a Christian first and also a Baptist. To say I am a Christian means decisively saying some things that will be offensive to people who are not. To say I am a Christian does not mean that I understand everything about God or the Bible or life. To say I am a Christian does not mean that I agree with every Christian about everything, and it does not mean that I agree with everything Christians have done in the past. But nevertheless, I do not shirk the label Christian because of any of these things. Likewise, I don't want to shirk being called a Calvinist simply because of the negative connotations some have with that label.
I have felt the modern aversion to the concept of truth and the idea of having convictions and saying things that will offend. I think that many will point to Calvinism and Arminianism, and they will rightly say that neither fully expresses the truth about God and his world, and that is true. Our knowledge of God, even with Scripture, is limited. (Limited though it is, I believe our knowledge of God through Scripture is sufficient, and he has given us what he means for us to know.) Certainly, our attempts to systematize and see the unity and connections among Scripture will be limited, but that certainly does not mean that they are useless. On the contrary! Finding the connections among Scripture bring it to life so that our quiet times in the Word are not just random bits of information without context. Our God is one, and he speaks with one voice through Scripture, and what a journey and delight it is to pursue that voice in all its variety and richness and truth! May it come alive for you!
I certainly think some conceptions of God are closer than others. I think atheists are way off. I think Hindus and Buddhists are a bit closer because they at least allow the supernatural. Judaism and Islam see a single God. Mormons and Jehovah's Witnesses are very close to Christianity, but they differ at massively important spots as well. But eventually we move into denominations. I would say that Catholics are Christians, but I would have some significant disagreements with them. There are some first-order differences, which might place you outside the bounds of orthodoxy, and there are second-order differences, like what is the correct method of baptism, and for the latter it would be uncharitable and false to say they are not Christians over a minor disagreement. (Not everyone would agree to which differences go into which category.) When we abdicate truth and conviction, who cares about denominations anymore? But if you care about truth, and if you investigate Scripture, inevitably you are going to disagree with other Christians at certain points.
Admitting to the label of a Calvinist is a gentle rebellion against today's modern and post-modern aversion to labels and claims to truth. I still believe in mystery and I do not understand everything, but on reading Scripture, I tend to agree with Calvin about the main points, though not about everything. I do not believe that Calvinism is an extra-Biblical add-on that distorts Scripture. Rather, I believe that it is the most accurate statement of what I believe to be the true interpretation of Scripture. If I did not believe that to be the case, I am sure that someone else would have expressed a better overall interpretation of Scripture, and for shorthand, I would have taken the guy's name and said, "I follow Jesus above all, but I generally tend to agree with this guy." I believe God chose me because I believe Scripture points me in that direction, and experientially and personally, I simply see God's grace toward me in my own case, and in my salvation I give him all the glory. He drew me! That is all.
Whew! That was a bit longer than intended... But all that to say, Calvin is an important figure in Protestant history. This book represents his thought well, and it is a primary source. I want to read through it and blog my thoughts as I go. I hope you are not turned off by the specificity of my journey. But hey, many in the world are turned off by the specificity of God in choosing a particular people and being born as a Jewish baby at a particular time to a particular young family in a particular place. We do not serve a vague force, but a personal Trinitarian God who descended to mankind and took on human flesh for our salvation in a rescue mission the beginning of which was called Christmas! Hallelujah!
