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Spirituality is serious beans folks. A handful of seriously serious beans.
Without going into a great deal of detail, and I know a good portion of my current audience already knows this story, but a powerful transition took place in my life over two years ago where I was faced with the fact that I knew a lot about God, but I never really knew God. This is easy to do when you have so much scripture thrown at you growing up that you think you already know all the good parts and no longer need to crack your Bible open.
In sense, you become inoculated to Christianity
After this transformation in my life I had an unfathomable desire to consume God's word. With this addiction came an unexpected, yet necessary and perfectly logical desire. I wanted to know why I believed what I did. I wanted to strip down every doctrine I had adhered to, every opinion I had argued for, and everything I thought Christianity was and seek purely after Biblical truth.
I wasn't prepared for how this decision was going to eat my entire Christian paradigm inside out. This happened in a few different areas, and it is probably better saved for possible blogs down the road. But this introduced me to some concepts that I was ignorant of beforehand. Ignorant either because I was completely unaware, or because I thought I understood what a particular concept was only to find I was oblivious.
It also introduced me to two words that were vaguely familiar, and yet I had no clue what they had meant at the time. Calvinism, and Arminianism.
When I found myself in a position where I craved to know what the Bible said about, well, anything, I found myself continually drawn to these fantastic resources made available by a group of people who are now being called (most recently by TIME magazine) as the "New-Calvinists." I found myself challenged more than I had at any other point in my life by sermons from John Piper, Matt Chandler, and the always controversial and Seattle's own, Mark Driscoll.
What struck me as strange was that they had a few (not many, but key) viewpoints that differed a great deal from my upbringing in the church. What was more difficult, was that they had very strong scriptural support for these views. I found myself digging deeper into the Bible, looking up Greek and Hebrew translations and cross-referencing the stitching out of my Bible trying to build the strongest foundation I could construct.
Throughout this period I slowly came to a conclusion that currently saddens me.
You see, I grew up in a Pentecostal Spirit Filled atmosphere. It has been my experience that these churches tend to be very strong when it comes to emphasizing the emotional aspect of the Christian walk. Now this isn't necessarily a bad thing either. The times in a church service that I have felt the most intimate with God has been in Spirit Filled churches. There's an openness that invites you into worship and draws you into feeling God's presence. The problem is that where the many Spirit Filled churches excel in passion, they drop the ball when it comes to intellectual doctrinal teaching.
This is where the Reformed church has been stepping in for the rebound over the last few years. I've visited Mars Hill a couple times since moving to Seattle and as controversial and... different as Mark Driscoll is, I can assure you that I learned so much at his church. Even my wife became extremely interested in his church, feeling like she had gained a great deal during our visits there.
There's only two problems here.
One: These "New-Calvinists" / Reformed / Resurgence churches proclaim to be Spirit Filled churches. From what I can tell, this is part of what separates the New-Calvinist from the older brand. This doesn't really change the fact that there's still a "difference" between churches when I've visited. Now granted, I've only visited Mars Hill twice and that isn't exactly a definitive sample size, yet their worship services have never matched up to the intensity that I've seen at my very own chapel services at Northwest University.
Two: Predestination. I just cant do it. For a scriptural paradigm that is supposed to be so definitively biblical, and for a group of people that emphasise the obviousness of predestination, I simply cant get it to stick.
As many verses as I can find that talks about God predestining us for anything, all of them can still be interpreted in a way that allows complete free will, and yet none of them (that I've found thus far) can explain some of the specific events that take place in the Bible.
Gen 3:22 has God kicking Adam and Eve out of the Garden of Eden "lest he reach out his hand and take also of the tree of life and eat, and live forever—” Many Calvinists explain that Adam and Eve "enjoyed free will" before the fall, and yet after the fall it appears that God is stating that he doesn't trust the free will of man to not eat from the tree of life. Where is the predestination?
Exodus 32:10-14 God is royally ticked at the Israelites and is about to smite the dickens out of them when not only does the Bible say that Moses reminds God of his covenant with Abraham, but that God changes his mind after listening to Moses. Predestination?
This doesn't count the fact that Abraham had what seems to be a relationship with God, interacts with God, and God takes Abraham's opinions into hand when making decisions.
Or in 1 Corinthians 9:27 that Paul says that he must discipline himself daily lest after preaching to others he himself should become a reprobate.
How can any of these things exist in a world with 100% complete no-compromise predestination founded from before the beginnings of creation?
As far as I can tell, it cant. Fee free to explain to me how if you can. There's a ton about Calvinism that I can dig to some degree, I wouldn't take it as far as Hyper-Calvinism, but there's some really smart people out there that are totally into Predestination, and I don't claim to be a genius but I'm not an idiot either, and I cant see how anyone can look past this.
If you have an opinion on the matter, please comment. I've been reading sermons, listening to sermons, reading scripture, reading defenses, trying everything I can to see how these things can be reconciled. I cant find it.
In slightly more lighthearted news, like I mentioned in my last blog, I ran for student senate at my university to rep the commuting students. Election day was last Monday, and the results haven't been announced yet, but I'm feeling pretty confident here because when I went to go cast my vote, I saw that I was the only one on the ballot for my constituency.
It was this that helped me feel not so bad when I voted for myself.
I was thinking about it on the way home, but what kind of victory is something when you had no one to race against? Therefore, in honor of our beloved President, I decided to name my pending victory after his first adventure into politics.
Ladies and Gentlemen, I expect an announcement for not my victory, but my Obamictory. Winning by virtue of having no one running against you. This is how the President first made it into state politics in the first place. With that kind of track record, who knows what I can accomplish next!
Seriously though, if you need to sign up for an account to comment on this blog, go do it. It takes two seconds and it wont hurt you a bit. Leave a comment on the topic of this blog. What is your opinion of Calvinism? New-Calvinism. Do you like Pie? I like Pie. What do you think of Predestination?
Was I predestined to have an Obamictory?
I think the answer to that is maaaaaybe!
