Last week we started a series of Sonny’s Sayings on the different aspects of our faith that we have to hold in balance. Last week we talked about the balance between head and heart, and how all of one or the other and none of one or the other are a good thing.
This week, I want to spend some time talking about “Calvinism” and “Armenianism.” Now before you put your bulletin down for fear of big, long words, I am really talking about “predestination” and “free-will.” Still don’t put your bulletin down, because our faith is lived in the cross-hairs of how we achieve this balance.
A proponent of Calviism or pure predestination follows the acrostic of TULIP to understand their faith. T=Total depravity, U=Unconditional election, L=limited atonement,. I= irresistible grace, and finally, P=preservation of the saints. I’ll let you look those up if you want more information, but the essence of this line of thinking is that everything that happens is a part of God’s plan, including our salvation, and sadly, including our rejection of God’s salvation.
Free-will, or Armenian proponents, believe that we are able to opt out of God’s grace, and even sin our way out of salvation. As was the case last week, both sides have strengths and weakness in their thought process.
Calvinism taken to the extreme allows us to trust that the God who made all of us and who “knows all of our days,” will make things right again. But to the extreme, it also makes us into virtual puppets of God’s imagination, and our choices, and the choices of others around us, do not really belong to us.
Because salvation is connected to our free will to choose faith, Armenianism rightly causes us to consider the consequences of our actions, and makes our faith into more than an acknowledgement that Jesus is our Savior, and also about our actions in building the Kingdom. But it also, when taken to its logical conclusion, pushes the action of God, and God’s work inside of human reality out of the equation, because an act of God might affect our ability to choose freely.
And so we are left with a balance that must be achieved in our faith. For me, I soften from predestination and choose to talk about God’s plan and Gods dream, and I soften from free-will and choose to talk about God’s grace offered, completely undeserved, to any and all who will choose to accept it, and that in that grace is the offer to choose to live according to God’s plan for us.
The implication of how we reach a balance on this issue are too many to name, but if you think about it, this affects how we see salvation in the life to come, but also in the life we have now .
Blessings, Sonny