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The article’s author, Molly Worthen, writes that “In little more than a decade, (Driscoll’s) ministry has grown from a living-room Bible study to a megachurch that draws about 7,600 visitors to seven campuses around Seattle each Sunday, and his books, blogs and podcasts have made him one of the most admired — and reviled — figures among evangelicals nationwide. Conservatives call Driscoll ‘the cussing pastor’ and wish that he’d trade in his fashionably distressed jeans and taste for indie rock for a suit and tie and placid choral arrangements. Liberals wince at his hellfire theology and insistence that women submit to their husbands.” Now up to this point, all is fine with me, or some of it is, anyway. Perhaps not so much that submission thing. As I read this article, I remembered what I often say. It’s not good form to criticize other churches. Different experiences for different people. This might not be my cup of tea, but he is reaching hundreds of people who otherwise would not be at church. And I believe all of that. But what really caught my attention in this story was what followed. The author writes that “what is new about Driscoll is that he has resurrected a particular strain of fire and brimstone, one that most Americans assume died out with the Puritans: Calvinism, a theology that makes Pat Robertson seem warm and fuzzy.” Wait a minute, I thought. I like to think that I am, and that we Presbyterians are, and that we Third Presbyterians are – somewhere at home in the universe called Calvinism. What is going on here? So I read on. Here is the Calvinist message she describes: “You are not captain of your soul or master of your fate but a depraved worm whose hard work and good deeds will get you nowhere, because God marked you for heaven or condemned you to hell before the beginning of time.” (January 6, 2009) Now this is just one article. The Times is not the arbiter of everything, but it is an arbiter, so I feel the need to pay attention. What surprised me was the feeling I had, some kind of need to defend a tradition that has – to be sure – elements of what is going on in this so-called “New Calvinist” church, but that has other elements that are compelling to me and perhaps to you. Another way to ask the question is this – what do you think of when you think of Presbyterianism. Do you think of “predestination,” a doctrine that can portray God as an often arbitrary, unfair judge? Do you think of another doctrine, called “total depravity,” that we are worms, wretches, to use the language of “Amazing Grace?” Let me say that yes, John Calvin wrote about predestination and total depravity, so to pretend he didn’t would be to ignore the past. And Calvin really needs no defending from us. But part of our reclamation project may be to place all of this in a much broader context. Let me play my hand now. When people ask me what Presbyterians believe, I respond in lots of ways. But I respond that two notions are at the heart of our beliefs – the sovereignty of God and salvation by grace. Both seem like phrases loaded with theological insider language. But they are not. * Sovereignty simply means that God is God of all of life – not just some, not just the religious part. All of life. When that gets messy, it gets messy. When it feels complex, it feels complex.
* Grace indicates that in matters of salvation, being saved in this life and the life to come, that it is not up to us. It is up to God. That flies in the face of what we’ve been taught, what our culture believes. That we can save ourselves. That we are in charge. That we are masters of our own destiny.
What makes me uneasy about the portrayal of Calvin by these so-called “New Calvinists” is not that they are wrong, though they are in some matters. What worries me is their emphasis. Predestination, for Calvin, was a concept with which he dealt very carefully. It was a pastoral matter for Calvin, meant to address the fear and anxiety of his sixteenth-century world. He wrote about it but did not preach about it. Because he believed in a sovereign God, he wanted us to understand that that God had the freedom to act as God would choose. And because the biblical story – from the fall onward, not to mention human history, testifies to the fact that we human types do tend to mess things up, we are, therefore, depraved. That might not be the word I’d choose, and it’s not a message that will win popularity points, either about God or about us. But I’ve appreciated its honesty. A friend of mine from another theological tradition recently shared with me her appreciation for John Calvin, because, as she got older, she realized that Calvin understood human nature pretty well. Where the “New Calvinists” and I would part is on the nature of God – that indeed God is sovereign and is free to act as God would choose, but that the biblical witness is that God is a loving, merciful judge. A judge, yes, but one who judges wisely and with compassion and love, who ultimately acts in judgment through the life and witness of Jesus. Put another way, I would rather this God be in charge in absolute sovereign freedom, than any other kind of god, or my own humanity. And though grace is challenging to understand, it really is, at heart, a reminder that we are accepted, welcomed into God's care, not by our own doing, not because we’ve earned it or bought it, but because this God, in sovereign freedom, has welcomed us in, like a child at home. Perhaps the difference is a matter of emphasis. I don’t know. So there – I’ve played my hand. All of the other things we’ve considered this fall, and will consider, about John Calvin – vocation and worship, politics and the church – are situated within this framework. Sovereignty and grace. God being God of all the world, and we being accepted as who we are so that we can live grateful lives praising this gracious God. *** I often wrestle with sermon titles. We don’t put our sermon titles on the sign out front, thank goodness. We do identify them several months in advance to meet our newsletter deadline. Alternate titles for today would have been something like "A Sermon about Sovereignty and Grace,” or, better yet, “October 11, 2009.” But when I began exploring the issues raised from the book of Job, which we will consider briefly today and more fully in the next two weeks, another sermon came to mind. It wouldn’t have won any awards for marketing savvy either, but it remains one of the most famous sermons ever preached in the United States, though they weren’t the United States then. Jonathan Edwards is sometimes called the greatest American theologian. His ministry unfolded in New England in the middle of the 1700’s. His well-known 1741 sermon was called “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God.” It was a version, minus the torn jeans and tattoos and text-messaging, of the message heard in Seattle and elsewhere. Its title says it all. Here was Edwards’ central point: “There is nothing that keeps wicked men, at any one moment, out of hell, but the mere pleasure of God. By ‘the mere pleasure of God,’ I mean his sovereign pleasure, his arbitrary will, restrained by no obligation, hindered by no manner of difficulty…” He continues: “He is not only able to cast wicked men into hell, but he can most easily do it….They deserve to be cast into hell...” Well now. That may be the theology we understand to be the theology we’ve rejected, or that others believe. And I think that’s right. But I also think it permeates our history and our culture. It is what people who don’t come to church, or believe in organized religion, say they don’t like about us – the judgementalism. Who would? The tagline for Third Presbyterian Church is “Seeking the Light," after all, not “turn or burn,” or as a friend of mine says, "smoking or non-smoking.” But can we sift out any value here? Edwards’ point was not to condemn; clearly, in his mind, that was God’s business. Edwards’ point was to awaken, to scare the hell out of us, almost literally. Whether a New or Old Calvinist, Edwards was a Calvinist. So yet again, there is an issue of emphasis. *** So it was for Job. His story is known to us primarily as one who suffers a great deal – the loss of wealth and land, physical afflictions, the deaths of loved ones. We speak of the “patience of Job,” but the book of Job is a continuing dialogue about these matters. Here is where I think Calvinism, Reformed theology, the heart of Presbyterianism, can help us. The book of Job does not explain the mystery of suffering, why bad things happen to good people. It also does not explain why God does what God does. But it does explore matters of faith in the face of suffering. We might not face all that Job faces. But we might. Those we love, or we ourselves, will get sick and suffer. Brokenness – of hope, of relationships, of our spirits – will happen. Tsunamis will rage, flood waters will rise, the earth will quake. Bad things will happen. For John Calvin it was the death of an infant son, followed soon there after by the death of his wife, at the age of 45. It was political exile, revulsion, rejection. It was the constant pain of illness that meant that Calvin felt ill every day of his adult life. Like Job, who called himself a “laughing stock,” Calvin experienced religious and political rejection. These are not the experiences upon which we would build a church marketing campaign. But they are the experiences of life, the true realities of the living of our days. And the best of Calvinism, that which emphasizes God’s sovereignty and grace, looks neither for easy answers nor magic formulas. Job wrestles with God – but he will not give up on God because he believes with all his heart and soul that God has not given up on him. He will complain to God, take his bitterness to God. But rather than being a sinner in the hands of an angry God, or whatever 21st century hellfire version of that looks like, Job says that while I cannot perceive God, or always behold God, that God is there, and that God knows the way that I take. That is plenty. That is enough. *** We do not like the word “mystery” because we want easy or clear answers. But we know better. We know that life is messy and complex. I can live with that mystery, the idea of a sovereign God whose plan for me and plan for the world is beyond my understanding, but whose ultimate vision is one of love and mercy and hope. To leave things to chance, or to my own devices, seems like such an unsatisfying option. This does not mean that we ignore what is around us, or not work to change things, living with our heads either in the clouds or the sand. Calvin was a realist and so we are called. But hear what George Hunsinger writes about Calvin, and see if it resonates with your own life and experience: “The gospel’s promise was not necessarily one of health and prosperity. It was the promise of sustenance in the midst of afflictions and of deliverance in the life to come...grounded in the sovereignty of God…” (“Calvin at 500,” Theology Today, July 2009, page 133) That makes us not worms nor wretches nor sinners in the hands of an angry God. It does make us humans in need of redemption, living in a world aching for transformation and hope. But we know that. And the good news is that that’s the business, the agenda, of this sovereign God, who we trust in the face of mystery and complexity, who we trust because we believe in grace, who knows us and finds us and loves us and saves us. Amen.
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