Category: 
I had some time to peruse part of the Godblogosphere today, and, while parts of it were interesting, a good chunk of it was downright depressing. Lots of folks seem abuzz that a Calvinist/Arminian-type debate didn’t happen at Liberty University (HT to brendt). Reading the he-said/he-said (women were apparently too smart to get involved with this lunacy) made me think of one of my favorite Shakespeare quotes:
“A plague o’ both your houses!”
-Mercutio, Romeo & Juliet, Act III Scene 1
As I was perusing the armchair quarterbacking, I found this lovely gem:
“Calvinism is the Gospel.”
- Charles Spurgeon, Sermons, Vol. 1, p. 50
As I’ve read everyone’s quotes from Mr. Spurgeon over the past months, I’ve been roundly unimpressed. This quote made me think of a couple more (one of them mine):
“I don’t believe in ‘-isms’.”
-Ferris Bueller, 1986
And mine
“Funny thing, I did a search in my concordance, and I didn’t get any hits on ‘Calvin’.”
-Chris Lyons, 10/17/2006
Just to be fair, there was also this quote from the other side of the debate:
Q: DIDN’T YOU SAY THAT CALVINISTS ARE WORSE THAN MUSLIMS?
A: Yes, absolutely. For a small portion of these people, just daring to question the Bezian movement is heresy. They will blog and e-mail incessantly. I call it a “Calvinist Jihad”, because just like Muslims, they believe they are defending the honor of their view.
I don’t mean to be crass, but it just seems like lots of folks fiddlin’ whilst Rome burns when I read all of the silly debating about Calvin and TULIPs and lots of folks with funny names like Arminius and Pelagius. (And of course, both sides had to throw a couple bombs at everybody’s favorite new boogeyman, the ‘Emergent Church’ (which has what to do with this silly debate?). A plague o’ both your houses!
Seriously, I ascribe to neither Calvinism or Arminianism, not out of intellectual laziness (which most of my friends would laugh if you ever accused me of it), but rather because I believe in a God much bigger than man-made systematic theologies. Like Newtonian Physics, most systematic theologies – like both of these – work within certain bounds, but completely fall apart outside of those bounds. God exists outside of time and space – anywhere and everywhere at once – and we, as beings trapped in 3.5 dimensions, have no language to begin to describe his perspective.
God is in complete control of the universe, and while there are some things He causes to happen, there are others He permits – based on the free will of those He created and the chaos that remains in creation, as a result of the fall. Regardless, His will is done.
“Can you fathom the mysteries of God? Can you probe the limits of the Almighty?” (Job 11:7)
We (including myself) spend an awful lot of time looking for heretics in the fold, shooting wounded Christian soldiers, bickering within the camps of God, and all the while I can hear the enemy laughing. He doesn’t need to do all that much any more, cuz’ the Christians are doing his job for him. We spend so much time nit-picking each other’s theologies that we have little time to actually live out what we were told to be – salt and light. And this is something the emerging church, for all its faults, has right. Meanwhile, the rest of us stand here on the deck of the Titanic arguing about whether or not we should be playing ‘Nearer My God to Thee’ or something more up-to-date, and whether or not adding drums to the mix will send us all to hell.
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This entry was posted on Tuesday, October 17th, 2006 at 11:48 pm and is filed under Moral Dilemmas, Religion/Philosophy. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
I have friends who are solid Calvinists, but even they flinch at Spurgeon’s arrogance. Seems a few o’ Calvin’s interpreters forget that the Gospel is about Jesus, not vindicating Jean Calvin.
But DANG, for YEARS my dad and I have joked about “a pox on both your houses”… and we’ve been quoting it wrong all these years.
I learned something today.
The pride of a sinner saved by grace is breathtaking. He even wants to subtley be self righteous about a doctrine that he espouses which he learned by grace from the author, and which will be proven woefully limited on the day we worship before the infinite glory of His very Person. We think we’re so smart!
Well said, Henry.
Chris, I’d only quibble with one part of this. Something this asinine isn’t “plain ol’ nutz” — it’s nutz with chocolate coating.
On a lighter note, in one of the many crowd shots last night on the NLCS (go Cards!), I noticed one guy with a Martin Luther t-shirt on. To paraphrase Larry the Cable Guy, I don’t care where you fall on the issue, that’s funny right there.
[...] First off, I do not claim Calvinism or Arminianism as a philosophy, as I’ve noted before, and I tend to find those who pick fights from both sides (even those dead and gone) to be somewhat arrogant blowhards on their turf (though for some reason, the Christian blogosphere seems to attract more rabid Calvinists than Arminians). I also am not trying to stake out a middle ground out of intellectual laziness, as some might proport. I just don’t find systematic theology all that useful, particularly if the ’system’ takes on more importance than the ‘theology’ (does the quote ‘Calvinism is the Gospel’ ring a bell?) [...]