The Joy of Calvinism: Knowing God's Personal, Unconditional, Irresistible, Unbreakable Love
208
The Joy of Calvinism: Knowing God's Personal, Unconditional, Irresistible, Unbreakable Love
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Overview
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781433528347 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Crossway |
| Publication date: | 02/29/2012 |
| Pages: | 208 |
| Product dimensions: | 5.50(w) x 8.50(h) x 0.52(d) |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
God Loves You Personally
When Jesus died and rose again, he saved you.
Let me ask you a question. Do you love humanity? Now let me ask you another question. Do you demonstrate love to every person you meet?
Almost everybody "loves humanity." It's easy to "love humanity." In fact, it's much easier than loving any particular individual person — even a person you're naturally inclined toward. Myself, I find it much easier to "love humanity" than to love my best friends, my spiritual family in the church, my daughter, or even my wife. After all, these people frequently annoy me, defy me, and make demands on my time and energy; "humanity" never does any of that. And these are the people I actually want to love! As for loving my enemies — well, give me "humanity" any day of the week.
Of course, the reason it's so easy to "love humanity" is that we never actually have to deal with "humanity" in real life.
We only have to deal with individual people. And you know what they're like.
This is just another way of saying that "loving humanity" is easy because it doesn't require you to love. A pastor of mine once said that love is not an emotion; love is a way of behaving. And it's a pretty difficult, strenuous form of behavior under most circumstances! The emotional experience — the feeling — that we call love is supposed to come to us as the byproduct of loving behavior.
It's partly a support that helps us do the behavior and partly a reward for doing the behavior. To make the emotion the main thing you care about, and put the behavior second — or worse, to want the emotion without the behavior at all — is selfish and deeply wicked. Yet that's what we all tend to do.
When we separate the emotion of love from loving behavior in our real relationships, things go off the rails pretty quickly.
We get conflicts, we get coldness, we get resentment, we get betrayal. Above all, we discover that the emotional experience of love, which we wanted so badly, has itself disappeared or radically diminished.
That's what's so great about "loving humanity." Because it's not a real relationship, there's nothing to go off the rails. You can sit there wallowing in the emotion, just like a pig in filth, without ever lifting a finger for anybody, and you never pay a price.
That's why, when I write ironically about "loving humanity," I don't just put the word "humanity" in sarcastic scare quotes.
I put the word "loving" in sarcastic scare quotes, too. When you "love humanity," not only do you not really deal with humanity, but you don't really love. Real love is personal.
Real love is doing concrete things for concrete individuals.
The Personal Intimacy of God's Love
If that's the way it is for us, how much more so for God? God's love is always real love, so God's love is always personal. To begin with, because God is perfect, he doesn't try to cheat the system the way we do. When he feels the emotion of love, it's always because he's doing the behavior. And he always knows that the behavior is what really counts.
But although God's love is personal, it's not as personal as ours. It's much more personal than ours!
Think about it: how well do you really know other people? You can't read minds. You can't read hearts. You can't read spirits. The vast majority of what's going on inside other people — even the people you're closest to — is a complete mystery to you. In fact, you don't know about or understand half of the mental, emotional, and spiritual things going on inside yourself! So consider how little you really know about other people.
It's not that way for God. He knows it all. The people he loves are completely transparent to him. And they are transparent not just at one point but across time. Before God even made you, he already knew every single thing you were ever going to do, say, think, feel, wish, or imagine over the whole course of your life.
And this knowledge is not abstract, like something written down on a piece of paper that God reads, or even something God just knows intellectually, "in his head." God is not remote from us. He's fully present in every particle of creation. The entirety of the infinite God is inside you right now. He knows you with a closeness so intimate we can't even begin to imagine it. A mother breastfeeding her newborn child or a married couple joined in the conjugal act don't have anything even remotely like the closeness to one another that God has with you right at this moment.
And this intimacy is not just at this moment but at every moment. It can never be any other way. God cannot stop being God, so he can't stop being all-knowing and all-present. God's love is always personal. He doesn't have any other kind of love to give, because any other kind of love would not be the love of a God who was God.
That God knows us so completely and intimately is, of course, what makes it so amazing that he loves us so much — given how horrible the things going on in us are. In our saving relationship with Jesus, do we love Jesus personally? How much more must Jesus love us personally?
Jesus has done — and is still doing — so much for us that it is difficult to really believe he did all of it for each one of us personally, because he loves each of us personally. But it's true. And if we want to understand Jesus's work in saving us, then we need to get this clear and keep it clear. When Jesus created the universe; when Jesus guarded, guided, and governed his chosen people for thousands of years; when Jesus "emptied himself" and became a man; when Jesus bore years and years of servitude; when Jesus suffered under Pontius Pilate; when Jesus was crucified, dead, and buried; when Jesus descended into hell on the cross; when Jesus rose again from the dead and ascended into heaven; when Jesus sits at the right hand of God the Father almighty, making intercession for us and advocating our cause — all this he did for you, personally. All along, as he did each and every act, he knew you completely and intimately. Each and every thing he did, he did to save you, personally.
He was doing it for you so personally that it would not have been any more personal if he had actually announced your name at each step. "Moses, I am sending you to tell Pharaoh to let my people go for the sake of Stephen Ford, born in Fairfax, Virginia, on October 6, 1973, so that he will become my adopted brother, be cleansed of his sin, and come into the blessedness of my kingdom forever and ever."
The Horrible Implication
Why do we find this so difficult to keep in our heads? Why do we have such a tendency to depersonalize the love of God?
No doubt it's partly just our inability to fully understand anything about the infinite God. We struggle to grasp even the most limited aspects of God's being as it really is. And when we have struggled and struggled, we understand so little that we're still overwhelmed by the mystery. Limited minds like ours just can't keep everything we know about God always at the center of our attention. And since we're not just limited but lazy and self-centered, it's no wonder if we habitually slide back into more limited conceptions of God. They're so much easier, so much more comfortable.
But I think there's another reason we tend to shrink from seeing God's love as personal. It's because God doesn't save every person.
If we picture Jesus doing all of his work for us personally, and we also know that not every person is saved by Jesus's work, the natural and obvious conclusion is that Jesus does not do his saving work for all people. We may say that Jesus loves those he doesn't save, even loves them personally, in some other way. But we could not say that Jesus's saving love — the love that does the work of salvation — was exercised on behalf of the lost.
In fact, since Jesus knows the lost every bit as completely and as intimately as he knows his own people, the exclusion of the lost from Jesus's saving work would also have to be a personal exclusion. It would have to be as though Jesus said, at every step of his work, "Moses, I am not sending you to tell Pharaoh to let my people go on behalf of Jason Rutledge, born in Omaha, Nebraska, on March 17, 1965. I am not doing anything to make him my brother, cleanse him, or bring him into my kingdom. He is lost forever, because I have not chosen him."
We recoil in horror — I do as much as you — from this thought. At first blush, everything in us seems to rise up in unison against any such suggestion. That's why, for thousands of years, Christian theologians have struggled to find some way to articulate how Jesus could do saving work on behalf of all people, and yet the lost remain lost.
Depersonalizing God's Love
All the attempts to solve this problem begin by depersonalizing God's saving love. They can't help but do so; there is simply no getting around it. Because God is all-powerful, whatever he tries to do must succeed. Any "solution" to a theological problem that pictures God attempting to do something and failing must go right out the window. Whatever work God sets his hand to must be effective. But if God wants to save all individuals personally, and God always accomplishes what he wants, then all individuals must be saved — which we know isn't true.
So the only way to solve this problem is to say that God's saving love is not directed at individuals personally. If we want to say God does not exclude specific individuals personally, then we must also say he does not save specific individuals personally. If the saving is personal, the excluding must also be personal. Therefore if we want God's saving work to be universal, it cannot be personal. And, in fact, this is precisely what all the proposed solutions to the problem do say, in one way or another.
This is the first and most fundamental dividing line between Calvinism and all other theological traditions. Everything else that divides Calvinism from non-Calvinism is merely a consequence of this first and fundamental division. The Calvinist, seeing that the only way to "solve" this theological problem is to depersonalize the love of God, pulls back and refuses to do so. All others press on, accepting the depersonalization of God's saving love. If it means they can avoid accepting the horrible thought that God chooses to exclude specific people from salvation, then depersonalizing God's love is a price they're willing to pay.
Every tradition besides Calvinism claims that God's saving love is aimed not at particular individuals but at humanity in the mass. God may well love individuals as individuals, personally. But that aspect of his love is not what saves people. Jesus did not die on the cross and rise again from the dead because he loved you personally — loving you, the individual whom he knows completely and intimately. He did it because he loves people in general, in the abstract.
In short, Jesus died on the cross and rose from the dead because he "loves humanity."
It is important to clearly grasp the difference between saying God loves all people — loves each of them personally, as individuals — and saying God "loves humanity" in the abstract. It is one thing to say God loves you personally, and also loves me personally, and also loves this person, and that person ... and so on until we have included every individual in the whole human race from Adam to the last person born at the end of history. It is a very different thing to say God "loves" the theoretical concept of "humanity" — that he loves the abstraction, the mass as mass, impersonally.
At the risk of trying your patience, I must insist on pressing this point. Everything else in this book hangs on it. All theological traditions besides Calvinism claim the saving "love" for "humanity" that led Jesus up to the cross and down to the grave, and then back up out of it, is a love that does not embrace any specific individuals at all. If it did, that would put us right back where we started with our problem. If the love that led Jesus to the cross is a love for any individual people, then either it is a love for all individual people or only for some. We don't want it to be only for some, because that thought is horrible. But if it's for all people then either they're all saved (which we know is not true) or God's work fails in its purpose (which we also know is not true). So God's saving love is either a personal love that embraces some and not others, or it is not a personal love at all; it embraces no individuals. It is entirely abstract.
Offering Salvation Systems
Depersonalizing God's love has far-reaching consequences. If God's saving love is impersonal, it follows that Jesus's saving work — even his death on the cross and his resurrection — do not actually save any individual person. When Jesus died and rose again, he did not accomplish anyone's salvation. If he had, this would imply his saving work had personally applied to that individual.
We can't have it both ways. Jesus's death and resurrection do not actually save you unless you, personally, are the object of their effectiveness. And if Jesus died and rose again not for you personally, but for "humanity," then his death and resurrection by themselves have no personal effectiveness for you. How could they, when they were not done for you?
Instead, the most we can possibly say on this view is that Jesus's saving work makes salvation available. And that is what all theological traditions besides Calvinism do say. In their various ways, they portray the saving work of Jesus as creating a system of salvation. All it does is create the system.
Jesus does his work to make salvation available. Individuals are not actually saved until they avail themselves of the salvation system through some other process.
In the Roman tradition, the salvation system Jesus created is the church — not the church in the sense of all believers, but the church as a concrete institution, what has traditionally been called the "visible church." You get plugged into the salvation system through the ordinances of the visible church, especially through the sacraments. You first receive salvation in the sacrament of baptism, which is the basis of your justification; you build up your holiness through both faith and good works, especially by participating in the sacrament of the Mass; and you remove the guilt of your sins by confessing them and performing compensatory works in the sacrament of penance.
In the Lutheran tradition, the salvation system Jesus created is the "means of grace," especially the gospel but also including the sacraments of baptism and the Lord's Supper. You get plugged into the salvation system by using the means of grace — most importantly by believing the gospel, but also by using the other means. The relationship between the gospel and the other means of grace has been a subject of much debate in Lutheran circles, but they all agree that the only way to be saved is through the means of grace.
In the various Arminian traditions, the salvation system Jesus created is simply the gospel. You get plugged into the salvation system by believing. Your salvation is accomplished when you are confronted with the gospel and make your choice to believe — or else not. Different Arminian systems have different theologies of this moment of decision; for example, they integrate it in different ways with the work of the Holy Spirit. But for all of them, it is the moment of decision that saves you.
When we discuss the differences between theological traditions, these are the differences we tend to focus on. What is the salvation system we need to use? Is it the sacraments?
Belief? The "means of grace"? Yet the most important issue is usually overlooked. Are you saved by a salvation system or by Jesus himself? That is the difference between Calvinism and all other systems.
Personal Substitution
I call this the most important issue because it creates a deep and radical difference in how we view the work of Jesus. It is the difference between the man who manufactures life vests and the man who pulls drowning people out of the water, between the man who makes a scalpel and the man who uses it to cut out a cancerous tumor and save a patient's life.
Creating a system to do something is a fundamentally different thing from actually doing it. Thus, saying that Jesus creates a salvation system rather than saving us gives us a fundamentally different perspective on the cross and the empty tomb.
The people who make life vests and surgical scalpels are of course doing important and worthy work. But we don't give them nearly the honor we give to the people who actually save lives — and rightly so. Thus, if we change our conception of Jesus from the person who saves us to the person who creates the salvation system, our esteem for his work must change as well.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "The Joy of Calvinism"
by .
Copyright © 2012 Greg Forster.
Excerpted by permission of Good News Publishers.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
Acknowledgments,
Introduction: Rejoice ... Always?,
Detour: Five Points about Calvinism,
1 God Loves You Personally When Jesus died and rose again, he saved you.,
2 God Loves You Unconditionally Nothing is more important to your heavenly Father than saving you.,
3 God Loves You Irresistibly The "new birth" in the Holy Spirit is a radical, supernatural transformation.,
4 God Loves You Unbreakably You can do all things, persevere through all trials, and rejoice in all circumstances.,
Conclusion: The Joy of Calvinism,
Appendix: Questions and Answers,
Notes,
What People are Saying About This
“A refreshing, clearly-written, thought-provoking, truly enjoyable book that will help overcome many misconceptions and deepen people’s faith and joy in God each day.”
—Wayne Grudem, Research Professor of Theology and Biblical Studies, Phoenix Seminary
“Forster pulls few punches with his critiques both for Calvinists and also their opponents—this vigor is what makes this exploration of joyous Calvinism so welcome and challenging.”
—Collin Hansen, Editorial Director, The Gospel Coalition; author, Blind Spots
“Concerned that some of the negative press which Calvinism receives is actually provoked by Calvinists themselves, Forster here offers a refreshing restatement of the Reformed faith. In the tradition of the personal, pastoral confidence and joy one finds in the Heidelberg Catechism, he presents an account of the Reformed understanding of salvation that is accessible, reliable, and delightful. A super book to read for oneself or to give to Christian friends who may never have understood the joy that lies at the heart of Calvinism.”
—Carl R. Trueman, Paul Woolley Professor of Church History, Westminster Theological Seminary; author, The Creedal Imperative and Luther on the Christian Life
“Calvinism has been the target of countless caricatures, but none so misguided as the notion that it is the enemy of joy. Forster insists rightly that Calvinism is ‘drenched with joy,’ and has done a masterful job of accounting for the beauty and delight intrinsic to biblical Calvinism. I pray this book gets a wide reading.”
—Sam Storms, Lead Pastor for Preaching and Vision, Bridgeway Church, Oklahoma City, Oklahoma
“Forster does a wonderful, twofold service for God’s people in this book—he retrieves Calvinism from portrayal as a dark and distasteful version of Christianity and, instead, presents it as an attractive and beautiful expression of biblical religion. Forster speaks with deep wisdom rooted not only in a well-informed theology, but also in his own experience as he wrestled with the sufferings of life and ultimately found comfort in the God who is profoundly merciful and sovereign in Christ. I highly recommend this book for all who seek godly encouragement and joy in the midst of life’s trials.”
—David VanDrunen, Robert B. Strimple Professor of Systematic Theology and Christian Ethics, Westminster Seminary California