May God End the Warfare Between Calvinistic Christians and Arminian Christians!
May God End the Warfare Between Calvinistic Christians and Arminian Christians!
An essay in response to the charge that:
“If God commands all to repent, and yet withholds the only grace that would make repentance possible, how is that command sincere?”
That sounds quite logical, friend. But we are not to process what is revealed in God’s Word with human logic, but by exegeting and harmonizing EVERY revealed pertinent passage that deals with any subject at hand. Your version in this unending debate is being used by both sides. I am 84 years old and was highly educated on my journey to become an Episcopalian priest and seminary teacher, finishing the course work for a PhD in theology. We were trained by getting saturated with what the community of scholars were concluding. But God mercifully enabled me to get reconverted into a childlike mindset toward His Word, so that I finally could embrace EVERY passage that Jesus and His apostles taught, love them all with an EQUAL passion, and work hard to tie them together. In this 500+ year debate between “Calvinists” and “Arminians” the one thing I have observed among them which they have in common is for each group to pick their favorite group of passages and interpret them in a lovely childlike grammatically natural and literal sense – the way that we ALL already read serious literature like history and chemistry books. But then they each use that group of passages to invalidate the other set of passages that their theological opponents take in the same childlike way. They have been doing it for a full HALF of a millennia, with no result that honors God, except to show the unbelieving and Satan-inspired world that one must never expect to find among sincere Christians that unity for which Jesus prayed SO earnestly in John 17, and which Paul commanded: “Now I appeal to you, brothers and sisters, by the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, that ALL of you be in agreement and that there be NO divisions among you, but that you be united in the SAME mind and the SAME purpose” (1 Corinthians 1:10).
To me, Calvin and Luther do not need to have ever even EXISTED. It was PAUL who wrote those easy to understand but scandalous chapters of Romans 8 & 9, NOT Calvin. And anyone who loves Jesus, Paul and the rest of His holy apostles, HAS to submit to the authority of their words in good faith. And ALL of those Spirit inspired works were written to be understood by the typical disciples of Jesus: surrendered, Pentecostally Spirit-experienced fishermen, carpenters, 0nd farmers who formed the GREAT majority of the “saints” to whom most of the Epistles were addressed.
In the mid-1970’s I finally learned how to look on life and read God’s word like a fisherman instead of a scholarly academic. When a fisherman or farmer sees that word “predestine” he likely just looks it up in a dictionary and discovers that it virtually ALWAYS means some version of creating a destiny beforehand. And because he is just a simple farmer who had surrendered unconditionally and without qualifications to His beloved Master Jesus, he knows that the reason he had been “called” by Jesus was because God had both “foreknown” and consequently “predestined” him to be called. Simple carpenters and auto mechanics who have surrendered their thinking to Jesus may not be academically educated, but they are wonderfully consistent in following directions written by their acknowledged experts – and, to them, Paul is one of their experts.
But, if they have been TAUGHT by their leaders to love ALL of God’s Word, they will take the same attitude when they read 1 Timothy 2:3, “God our Savior, who desires ALL men to be saved and to come to the knowledge of the truth..” Simpletons that they are, it will never OCCUR to them that only one of those passages can be true, or that the simple reading of one passage will somehow force the other passage to be interpreted by a different set grammatical rules – since there is nothing within God’s Word that suggests such a thing to them. They may go to their graves puzzled how BOTH can be true, but they know that both MUST be true and both true when understood in the same way that carpenters and fishermen read all the other serious books they have read – because BOTH were inspired by the same God, and they both made sense to HIM, or He would not have inspired them!
But if he was determined to find out why God said them BOTH, he knew that he would have to “think outside of the box” and come up with a way in which God could WANT “all men to be saved” (and “SO loved the world”), and yet only “call” some of them. But it would distress his simple heart were he to see other groups of disciples forming theological “clics” that use God’s inspired passages as “brickbats” to throw at each other and prove that the other side was some kind of “SUB-Christian.”
We really need to learn from those carpenters, farmer, and fishermen disciples!
I worked hard on these revealed passages for some decades, thinking like the converted fisherman that I had become, and have finally come to see just HOW much sense they both make once you understand the proper context for such terms as “foreknown” and “predestine,” AND the dynamic nature of what God means by “salvation”! It is too long to be written out here. It is a chapter in a two-volume catechism of Biblical and ancient Christianity that has been published. I can email that chapter to any who are tired of the fruitless and destructive debating, if you will send your email address to me at ReedMerino@gmail.com
Reed Merino, M.Div.
ReedMerino.com
