WESLEYAN WISDOM: Reflecting on the mystery of trouble Donald W. Haynes, Jul 24, 2008
Donald W. Haynes
By Donald W. Haynes UMR Columnist
Editor’s Note:This is the first of two columns on United Methodist Arminianism.
My father died of cancer when I was 12. When I was 19 and a pastor, I had the funeral for a child who was killed on a bicycle. Years later I buried a young doctor and his father who were drowned at the beach. Next, it was a young family of four killed by a drunken driver.
When national tragedies occur, such as Hurricane Katrina, 9/11 terrorist acts and the current floods in Iowa and Missouri, some preachers inevitably go on camera to interpret these events as evidence of God’s punishment.
These experiences compel me to speak out against an increasingly common belief: that our destinies are pre-determined.
Whenever we face tragedy or personal loss, we ask, “Why?” Or perhaps, “How could a good God let this happen?” We figure that either God is good, but too weak to prevent tragedies, or all-powerful but capricious in inflicting disease, pestilence, natural disasters, economic hardship and even death.
The easiest, the most logical and therefore generally accepted belief about why bad things happen is that God causes them because God is in total control. In Christian theology, this belief is called “Calvinism,” having been systematized by a 16th-century Swiss lawyer named John Calvin.
Calvinism’s sovereignty
Calvinism begins with the premise is that God is totally sovereign, and follows that premise to its logical conclusions, including:
God is omnipotent, therefore God is in total control of everything that happens.
If God knows what is going to happen, God causes it to happen—to foreknow is to predestinate.
God pre-determines who is to be saved and who is to be lost.
Rick Warren’s amazingly popular book, The Purpose-Driven Life, is an example of popularized Calvinism. In it, he writes: “Your birth was no mistake or mishap, and your life is no fluke. [God] was not at all surprised by your birth. In fact, he expected it. He thought of you first. It is not chance, fate, nor luck, nor coincidence that you are breathing. Many children are unplanned by their parents, but not unplanned by God.”
Come now! That means that God—not two young adults high on drugs, not an oppressive husband, not a boy who forces a girl and not a girl who forgets her birth control pill—is responsible for every birth.
Think of making God responsible for crack babies, multiple children born to single young women and the teen moms, for whom high schools now have childcare centers! United Methodism cannot go there!
As it is with birth, so it is, for the Calvinist, with death. When someone dies, someone else will always say, “Well, it was her/his time to go,” or “The Lord knows best.” Conversely, when someone is not killed in a demolished car, someone will say the opposite, “It was not his/her time to go,” or “s/he was spared for a purpose.”
If we pressed this to its logical conclusion, we would never go to a doctor, never have surgery, never worry about habits, foods or safety. If somewhere there is a ticking clock set to ring out the timing of our death, why do we make any effort to prolong our lives?
John Wesley warned that Calvinism can tend to destroy our zeal for good works. We sing, “Rise up ye saints of God, have done with lesser things; give heart and soul and mind and strength to serve the King of Kings.” Someone once said that Calvinists should sing: “Sit down ye saints of God, there’s nothing you can do. God is in charge of everything and has no need of you.”
Theologically, this is called “predestination.”
A woman was giving her testimony at a Christian women’s banquet about how her husband and father-in-law were killed when their stunt planes collided in midair. She closed by saying, “I have been through a lot, but I know now that it was all God’s plan.” She seemed not to realize that if this were God’s plan, the colliding of two stunt planes was not human error but God’s seizing control in the cockpit.
We also see a rather capricious view of Calvinism when some preacher says that 9/11 was God’s punishment of America, whether the preacher is a fundamentalist who says God inflicted the punishment because of homosexuality or a liberation theology preacher who says God inflicted the punishment because of white oppression.
With doctrines like this on our television screens, and in the Calvinistic books being studied in United Methodist Sunday school classes and small groups, this old Wesleyan feels compelled to raise again the banner of our Armininian theology.
United Methodists and all other churches that trace their roots to John Wesley do not believe in predestination. God can know the path we are on is a blind alley or is leading us to the edge of a cliff, but that does not mean that God is causing us to pursue our present path!
In Bristol, Wesley published his 1740 sermon, “Free Grace,” which addresses the aspect of Calvinism that insists God elects only some to be saved, and by inference, condemns others to be lost. It is an invective against Calvinism. Though he later mollified his rhetoric, we need to hear it for these times:
“To say that Jesus Christ the Righteous was not willing that all men should be saved is to represent him as a mere hypocrite and dissembler. It can’t be denied that the gracious words that came out of his mouth are full of invitations to all sinners. To say, then, he did not intend to save all sinners is to represent him as a gross deceiver of the people. You represent him as mocking his helpless creatures by offering what he never intends to give. Him ‘in whom there is no guile’ you make full of deceit, void of common sincerity! You represent God as worse than the devil.”
A neglectful God
The opposite of Calvinism is Deism. “Deus” is the Latin word for “God.” Deism developed in the 18th century, more as a philosophy than a theology, but many clergy began to preach it and many laity from that day until now believe it. It was the prevailing theology of Wesley’s day and of the U.S. Founding Fathers, especially Jefferson.
Deism insists that God has absolutely no control over history or human affairs. It is called “the watchmaker theory”: God made the world like a watchmaker makes a fine watch that keeps perfect time for a season, but when it breaks, the watchmaker knows nothing about it. There is no ongoing relationship between the watchmaker and the watch; in the same way, for the Deist, God is the creator but not “our heavenly Father.”
Deism was the theology that Jefferson inferred with his language, “Nature and Nature’s God” (note that he capitalized “Nature”). The creator's gifts to us were life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. It’s as if God said: “You have enormous gifts and opportunities and I have created a marvelous world for you to live in—go for it! You are on your own! Best of luck! But if you fail or fall, don’t call Me.”
Methodism does not believe in Deism!
Most people, though they would deny it, are actually “practicing Deists.” That is, we make our decisions, adopt our core values and live out our days as if, in the words of a Deist poet, “I am the captain of my ship; I am the master of my soul.”
No one needs to fear that we are beyond God’s love and care. Let this be our UM prayer: “Jesus keep me near the cross, there a precious fountain/ Free to all—a healing stream flows from Calvary’s mountain.”
The Wesley brothers departed from the prevailing theology of their day by proclaiming what we must recover in our own time:
“Come sinners to the gospel feast; let every soul be Jesus’ guest. Ye need not one be left behind for God hath bid all humankind!”
Dr. Haynes is a retired clergy, Western North Carolina Conference. e-mail: dhaynes11@triad.rr.com.
Donald W. Haynes
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