Confessions of a former Calvinist

[Poly]

As many of you already know (because I've mentioned it only a hundred times), I am a former Calvinist. I was all of my life up until about 6 years ago. The church I grew up in was extremely hardcore/predestination. I look back now and realize that so much of what I said I believed about God, I really believed because men, whom I thought were extrememly wise, said it was true. I listened to how they interpreted scripture and took it as gold all the while saying that this is what I believed because I've checked it out with scripture. I'd have to say that 75% of the church did this same thing. The other 25% were the ones who were doing the misinterpreting of scripture, telling the rest of how we should believe. We kept close ties with many other Reformed Baptist churches and they were no different. I knew all the arguments. I could clobber you with what I thought was the truth about Romans 9 and Ephesians 1. I regret that I was arrogant in my thinking yet I was always one of the ones preaching the loudest on what a humbling doctrine it was. One thing that stands out about a Reformed Baptist is that you'll always hear them say how humbling the sovereign grace message is. They say this because they are supposedly humbled at themselves being one of the "elect" that God chose to be saved. But in reality there is quite a bit of pride in a Reformed Baptist. They may be humbled by the fact that God chose them but they think highly of themselves that God supposedly revealed this truth of election to them. Some men wanted to come accross as intimidating in their supposed great knowledge. Especially when one Reformed Baptist church got together with another either at a conference or some kind of ministry. It was as if there was this underlying understanding of how we were special and stood out to God because we understood this profound doctrine and God must have entrusted us enough to reveal it to us. Of course no one would dare admit that they thought this way. And when we came across things that were contradictory in the bible to predestination and it couldn't be interpreted in such a way to fit the sovereign grace doctrine, then of course you simply brought in the old anthropomorphism argument. We always felt as if we were doing this great thing for God in accepting something that He put in scriptures which He intended all the while for us not to be able to understand. And all the while trying to maintain that we were "humbled". (Is this hitting home with any of you Reformed Baptists out there? [sarcasm]NO, of course not[/sarcasm]. )

Fortunately, I was faced with the question "Was God capable of giving man a complete and totally free will without any involvement of Himself in that will?" Of course this was an incredibly hard question for me to have to deal with so I avoided it for a long time. After all, the message of predestination was all I had known and it was ingrained in me since I was a child. If I denied that, then I would deny the very foundation that I thought made up my entire Christian walk. (not to mention I'd have to eat a lot of crow). But I couldn't avoid it any longer.

If what I was preaching, about God being omnipotent was really true, then I had to face the realization that allowing man his own will to choose his own path could NOT be beyond God. If it was then God could NOT be the powerful God I always said He was. This time I chose to diligently study the word for myself to see if I had been pursuaded to believe certain things about passages in the bible. After much time of digging and searching I saw how I had been wrong for so many years. And when I see a passage now where God says things like "Now I know", He really meant that He knew something at that time that he totally did not know before. I now think of God as even more powerful because I now realize that God will bring about His glory no matter what. I believe He can do this despite man's complete free will. And I don't mean "complete" as the Calvinist claims he believes yet feels it's totally controlled by God at the same time, I mean totally FREE will! THAT is what a True sovereign and powerful God is.

 

[Lighthouse]

:thumb:

 

[Lucky]

Originally posted by Poly

And when we came across things that were contradictory in the bible to predestination and it couldn't be interpreted in such a way to fit the sovereign grace doctrine, then of course you simply brought in the old anthropomorphism argument.

Can you please explain what that means for me? I've heard it before, looked it up even, but I'm still not sure I get it.

 

[Poly]

Originally posted by Lucky

Can you please explain what that means for me? I've heard it before, looked it up even, but I'm still not sure I get it.

God describes himself in ways that would be considered human form although we know He is not human. Like when it says "arm of the Lord" in Isaiah 51:9, it's talking of God showing His strength. We know that He doesn't have the arm that we are imagining when we picture this action but we get the point that is trying to be made over His greatness. This is considered anthropomorphism. But a Calvinist will give this definition to certain passages in the bible where it doesn't fit. For instance, they feel that when God says prior to the flood that "He regretted making man", it's just God speaking on our level. But if God cannot be moved, touched by or react to our emotions why is He trying to put this occurance in such a way that would make us think that He can? Again, His magnitude is great so it's fitting to put it in such terms as "stretching out His arm", or "arm of the Lord", but what is it that He is trying to convey to us by using such a picture that describes Him being moved and truly regretting something if everything is already planned in advance and fixed?

Hope this helps.

 

[Nathon Detroit]

Re: Confessions of a former Calvinist

Originally posted by Poly

As many of you already know (because I've mentioned it only a hundred times), I am a former Calvinist. I was all of my life up until about 6 years ago. The church I grew up in was extremely hardcore/predestination. I look back now and realize that so much of what I said I believed about God, I really believed because men, whom I thought were extrememly wise, said it was true. I listened to how they interpreted scripture and took it as gold all the while saying that this is what I believed because I've checked it out with scripture. I'd have to say that 75% of the church did this same thing. The other 25% were the ones who were doing the misinterpreting of scripture, telling the rest of how we should believe. We kept close ties with many other Reformed Baptist churches and they were no different. I knew all the arguments. I could clobber you with what I thought was the truth about Romans 9 and Ephesians 1. I regret that I was arrogant in my thinking yet I was always one of the ones preaching the loudest on what a humbling doctrine it was. One thing that stands out about a Reformed Baptist is that you'll always hear them say how humbling the sovereign grace message is. They say this because they are supposedly humbled at themselves being one of the "elect" that God chose to be saved. But in reality there is quite a bit of pride in a Reformed Baptist. They may be humbled by the fact that God chose them but they think highly of themselves that God supposedly revealed this truth of election to them. Some men wanted to come accross as intimidating in their supposed great knowledge. Especially when one Reformed Baptist church got together with another either at a conference or some kind of ministry. It was as if there was this underlying understanding of how we were special and stood out to God because we understood this profound doctrine and God must have entrusted us enough to reveal it to us. Of course no one would dare admit that they thought this way. And when we came across things that were contradictory in the bible to predestination and it couldn't be interpreted in such a way to fit the sovereign grace doctrine, then of course you simply brought in the old anthropomorphism argument. We always felt as if we were doing this great thing for God in accepting something that He put in scriptures which He intended all the while for us not to be able to understand. And all the while trying to maintain that we were "humbled". (Is this hitting home with any of you Reformed Baptists out there? [sarcasm]NO, of course not[/sarcasm]. )

Fortunately, I was faced with the question "Was God capable of giving man a complete and totally free will without any involvement of Himself in that will?" Of course this was an incredibly hard question for me to have to deal with so I avoided it for a long time. After all, the message of predestination was all I had known and it was ingrained in me since I was a child. If I denied that, then I would deny the very foundation that I thought made up my entire Christian walk. (not to mention I'd have to eat a lot of crow). But I couldn't avoid it any longer.

If what I was preaching, about God being omnipotent was really true, then I had to face the realization that allowing man his own will to choose his own path could NOT be beyond God. If it was then God could NOT be the powerful God I always said He was. This time I chose to diligently study the word for myself to see if I had been pursuaded to believe certain things about passages in the bible. After much time of digging and searching I saw how I had been wrong for so many years. And when I see a passage now where God says things like "Now I know", He really meant that He knew something at that time that he totally did not know before. I now think of God as even more powerful because I now realize that God will bring about His glory no matter what. I believe He can do this despite man's complete free will. And I don't mean "complete" as the Calvinist claims he believes yet feels it's totally controlled by God at the same time, I mean totally FREE will! THAT is what a True sovereign and powerful God is.

Excellent post. :up:

 

[God_Is_Truth]

thanks for sharing Poly. i actually had never heard you say that you were a calvinist before. it's wonderful to read that you stopped just listening to other people's interpretations and started reading the word on your own.

John 8:32
Then you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free.

 

[Lucky]

Originally posted by Poly

Hope this helps.

It does.

 

[Poly]

Originally posted by God_Is_Truth

thanks for sharing Poly. i actually had never heard you say that you were a calvinist before. it's wonderful to read that you stopped just listening to other people's interpretations and started reading the word on your own.

John 8:32
Then you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free.

Very true, GiT. The above response to Lucky is a perfect example of seeking out the word for myself. It's reasoning out for yourself and being brave enough to admit, "Now wait a minute. That doesn't fit what I've been taught all these years." And that leads you to do more studying such as in Ephesians 1 where I had always been taught that this is huge in showing predestination to be true. And if you're told that by other people and happen to just scan the passage, then yeah, you might think this as well. But upon further investigation of the passage, when I read the whole context and not just the pointed verses that had been shown to me, I couldn't deny that God was not talking about individuals being predestined to be saved but about a people whom He would "gather to Himself" when the fullness of time came. It was clear to me that this passage had been misrepresented to me for so many years and that God was clearly speaking of the adoption of a people, who were not sons of God at one time and now the time had come to fullfill the "mystery" and now they were to be sons of God. It was astounding to me when I would see these kinds of revelations that I had missed because I was too prideful and basically too dumb in just believing those that I thought were wise in what they believed was scriptural.

 

[Clete]

Poly,

Wow! I could almost have written that oppening post myself! I didn't go to a Baptist church at the time but there's probably not a dimes worth of difference theologically speaking between my old church and pretty much any Baptist church I know of (except for the one I'm attending now.)
Otherwise it sounds like you and I had a pretty similar experience.
For me it all started with Bob Enyart's T.V. show that was being aired in Tulsa at the time. At first I thought he was way too harsh but after a while I understood what was happening and that he wasn't playing around for the sake of the cameras. It became clear that Bob really cared about these knuckle heads that called into his show.
His willingness to care enough to tell the truth without blinking coupled with the fact that he never ever got stumped in a debate or even remotely acted as if anyone ever brought something up that was a challenge to him intellectually was what caused me to believe initially that this guy has got something figured out that I don't!
When The Plot came out, I ordered it immediately and read it twice within two days. It was like a cool glass of water in the desert! I couldn't get enough. It was if I had been groping around in the dark for years and suddenly someone lit a candle!
After that, it was off to the races. I have learned more from Bob's ministry in the few years I been aware of it than all my previous years as a Christian. And as I've been a Christian since I was in third grade and I am know almost 35 years old, that's saying quite a bit.
God bless Bob Enyart and his ministry!

Resting in Him,
Clete

 

[Poly]

Originally posted by Clete Pfeiffer

Poly,

Wow! I could almost have written that oppening post myself! I didn't go to a Baptist church at the time but there's probably not a dimes worth of difference theologically speaking between my old church and pretty much any Baptist church I know of (except for the one I'm attending now.)
Otherwise it sounds like you and I had a pretty similar experience.
For me it all started with Bob Enyart's T.V. show that was being aired in Tulsa at the time. At first I thought he was way too harsh but after a while I understood what was happening and that he wasn't playing around for the sake of the cameras. It became clear that Bob really cared about these knuckle heads that called into his show.
His willingness to care enough to tell the truth without blinking coupled with the fact that he never ever got stumped in a debate or even remotely acted as if anyone ever brought something up that was a challenge to him intellectually was what caused me to believe initially that this guy has got something figured out that I don't!
When The Plot came out, I ordered it immediately and read it twice within two days. It was like a cool glass of water in the desert! I couldn't get enough. It was if I had been groping around in the dark for years and suddenly someone lit a candle!
After that, it was off to the races. I have learned more from Bob's ministry in the few years I been aware of it than all my previous years as a Christian. And as I've been a Christian since I was in third grade and I am know almost 35 years old, that's saying quite a bit.
God bless Bob Enyart and his ministry!

Resting in Him,
Clete

Ok, this is just wierd. Now I could have nearly written this post myself even down to the location of where you watched it. And rather than reading the Plot, I ordered it on tape, planning to listen to it over time, maybe a little bit each day. HA! I sat straight through it in one evening. Then I went to hubby and said "you gotta listen to this!"
I owe much to Bob's ministry.

 

[Turbo]

Have you "two" every seen Psycho? :shocked: :noid:

 

[Poly]

Originally posted by Turbo

Have you "two" every seen Psycho?

Maybe I need to see if "NarrowWay" posts under another name around here that I'm not aware of. :think:

 

[jaguar_prince]

And no man putteth new wine into old bottles: else the new wine doth burst the bottles, and the wine is spilled, and the bottles will be marred: but new wine must be put into new bottles.
Mark 2,22


Augustine (aren't we talking about "Confessions"?) was a Manichean for many years before he turned to Orthodox Christianity again. But Manicheism remained in his thought as an undercurrent, all the more insidious because it was hidden. Likewise, you don't grow up in a Calvinist environment without being conditioned by it very deeply. And in fact, although you may have rejected Calvin, you apparently didn't reject the Evangelical faith completely, which I think is a contradiction, for Calvin and Luther and Zwingli and Melanchton are all basically one. You seem to have settled for some mutilated form of Lutheranism without predestination, without realizing that by doing away with "bondage of the will" and predestination, you have in fact unsettled the whole system beyond repair. You are now driving a car without brakes, if I may venture this comparison.

You have certainly learned a lot but not enough to refrain from posting self-righteous, hateful, hysterical anti-homo tracts which neither heal nor spread light. If I may say so here, you still have a long way to go before becoming a true disciple of the cursed man hanging from the Tree of Life.

Jesus forgave the adulterous woman. And he forbade us to judge each other.

The trouble is that Christians, instead of remaining a handful of marginal, persecuted, laughed at people, people who don't lock their doors at night and even pat robbers on their shoulders and refuse to hand criminals to the police, people who refrain from taking oaths on the Bible and don't resist evil in any way, became the majority.

That is the point when everything went wrong with Jesus' message, for if you try to apply his rules to large social bodies there ensues a lot of evil. People should have the right to divorce. And if you don't have tribunals, violence will be unstoppable. Other rules went so much against the grain of conventional wisdom that people simply ditched them, preferring instead to follow good, old Jewish Torah. Indeed the Torah is a code of rules for a collectivity of average people while the Sermon on the Mount is meant for a few crazy exceptionally gifted individuals only.

So "Christians" had to keep an eye open while closing the other when applying Jesus' teachings. They closed their eyes on the question of voluntary poverty, on the question of mercy for sinners, on the question of oaths, on the question of non-violence in the face of evil, on the question of refusal to claim one's property, etc., etc.

But they opened their eyes wide open on the question of divorce and on "do not sin" in "John" 8. They opened their eyes like Jumbo Jet engines on the vociferations of Paul against homos and on the related verse in Leviticus while conveniently closing their eye on "Do not judge". And so on and on and on to the present awful mess.

But Jesus was speaking only for a few people who were willing to become outcasts and fools on the eve of the Great Transformation of the World.

The little improbably starry-eyed, mundane wisdom-denying, safety and success-indifferent flock of sheep became a big ponderous herd of self-righteous, judgmental hypocritical half-blind water-buffalos destroying everything under their hooves and polluting the whole atmosphere with their stinking discordant doctrinal farts, which they call the voice of the Holy Spirit !

Having said that, since it is possible to escape from the clutches of Calvin, it is certainly possible to stop being an irrational water-buffalo.

May God grant you to make this quantum leap soon !

Greetings,

JP

 

[Poly]

Originally posted by jaguar_prince

And no man putteth new wine into old bottles: else the new wine doth burst the bottles, and the wine is spilled, and the bottles will be marred: but new wine must be put into new bottles.
Mark 2,22


Augustine (aren't we talking about "Confessions"?) was a Manichean for many years before he turned to Orthodox....(blah, blah, blah,

That's an awful lot of judging for somebody who preaches against it.

You're just about the most despicable Calvinist I've come across yet because you try and use it to justify your homosexuality.

 

[Lighthouse]

Maybe j_p should just change his sn to fagqueer_princess. Since he doesn't seem to mind that he's gay.

 

[Clete]

Originally posted by jaguar_prince
You have certainly learned a lot but not enough to refrain from posting self-righteous, hateful, hysterical anti-homo tracts which neither heal nor spread light. If I may say so here, you still have a long way to go before becoming a true disciple of the cursed man hanging from the Tree of Life.

As you are a pervert, what I'm about to post gets terribly close to tossing pearls to the pigs but I can't resist.

Adam and Eve partook from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil and where condemned because it. We (the rest of mankind) are condemned by the Law. Both the Law and The Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil have a ministry of death because the Law is a fulfillment or a continuation of the ministry of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil.
God (Jesus) removed the burden of the Law from us by nailing it to the Cross. He also undid the curse at the Tree by becoming a curse for us by hanging on a tree.
What is the point of all this?
Jesus died in our place on the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, not on the Tree of Life you knuckle head! Nobody dies on the Tree of LIFE!!!

Now, talk to me some more about how much I haven't learned!

 

[Crow]

Originally posted by Clete Pfeiffer

As you are a pervert, what I'm about to post gets terribly close to tossing pearls to the pigs but I can't resist.

Adam and Eve partook from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil and where condemned because it. We (the rest of mankind) are condemned by the Law. Both the Law and The Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil have a ministry of death because the Law is a fulfillment or a continuation of the ministry of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil.
God (Jesus) removed the burden of the Law from us by nailing it to the Cross. He also undid the curse at the Tree by becoming a curse for us by hanging on a tree.
What is the point of all this?
Jesus died in our place on the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, not on the Tree of Life you knuckle head! Nobody dies on the Tree of LIFE!!!

Now, talk to me some more about how much I haven't learned!

:think: ....:chuckle: .....:idea:.....:ha:

:first: .....:darwinsm:

:crow2:

 

[Poly]

Originally posted by Clete Pfeiffer

As you are a pervert, what I'm about to post gets terribly close to tossing pearls to the pigs but I can't resist.

Adam and Eve partook from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil and where condemned because it. We (the rest of mankind) are condemned by the Law. Both the Law and The Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil have a ministry of death because the Law is a fulfillment or a continuation of the ministry of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil.
God (Jesus) removed the burden of the Law from us by nailing it to the Cross. He also undid the curse at the Tree by becoming a curse for us by hanging on a tree.
What is the point of all this?
Jesus died in our place on the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, not on the Tree of Life you knuckle head! Nobody dies on the Tree of LIFE!!!

Now, talk to me some more about how much I haven't learned!

That was just....just....
:BRAVO:

 

[Clete]

Poly or Crow,

Just out of curiosity...

On a scale from 1 to 100, how foundational would you say what I posted is to the Christian faith? (The higher the number the more foundational.)

And what percentage of Christians would you guess are aware of this teaching?

 

[titan]

Originally posted by Clete Pfeiffer

Poly or Crow,

Just out of curiosity...

On a scale from 1 to 100, how foundational would you say what I posted is to the Christian faith? (The higher the number the more foundational.)

And what percentage of Christians would you guess are aware of this teaching?

Clete:

I am a Christian and I have been for 21 years. I am unsure whether or not I get your point.

I certainly get ...

Christ paid the price for our failure to meet the law.

And

Now we no longer need to satisfy the law to have eternal life.

However it seems as if you were making some other point which went over my head. Please clarify.

Titan