Leaving Calvinism: Comments from Ex-Calvinists #8
Here is the next batch of ex-Calvinist testimonies (and those who never were Calvinists but who came face to face with it) from this post: X-Calvinist Corner. (It's an Arminian website, but I am not Arminian.) I am going to highlight some of the comments that stood out to me the most. If I add any comments of my own, it will be [blue and in brackets]. I made minor corrections for better grammar and punctuation. If you want to read everything that everyone said, click on the link above:
musicman707:
I was raised in the Presbyterian Church (USA) (that is, liberal Presbyterianism). The version of Reformed theology I encountered there is probably best described as “Calvinism Lite.”... Most Presbyterians I knew had a vague notion that nothing happens unless God causes it and that everything is pre-determined. Over time I found that this led to an attitude of fatalism and prayerlessness. As one of the parishioners I pastored actually asked me one time: “What’s the point of prayer if God’s already decided what’s going to happen anyway?” Even in my own life I found that the version of God’s sovereignty I had embraced had a stifling effect on my prayer life. I found it hard to pray believing prayers when deep down I felt as though my prayers didn’t really matter because God had already decided what was to be.... I found myself searching for more....
At that retreat ... I was also encouraged to ask Jesus into my heart– something I had never done, for they don’t talk that way in the Presbyterian church. I did ask Christ into my heart, and had the experience of being born again (as in John 1:12-13 and 3:3-15). To be honest, this experience of asking Christ into my heart and being born again came as a complete surprise to me. Prior to that I had assumed my relationship with Christ was settled because I had sincerely professed faith in him. But I had no assurance of salvation and had come to question if I really was saved.
After this experience my entire experience of the Christian life began to change. Before that, the concepts of God’s love and of his being my Father had been difficult for me to grasp or believe. After asking Jesus into my heart I came to experience God’s love for me and that He is my Father....
... These experiences caused me to re-examine my theology. They caused me to come to believe beyond doubt the truths of 1 Timothy 2:4, that God wants all men to be saved and to come to the knowledge of the truth, and also 2 Peter 3:9 that the Lord doesn’t want any to perish but everyone to come to repentance. These experiences also increased my understanding of the importance and efficacy of prayer, that God really does listen to us, and changes the course of events based on our prayers. I believe Calvinism encourages a feeling of fatalism that causes people to be unbelieving regarding prayer and God’s activity in the world and in daily life, and regarding His responsiveness to our prayers.
Last year I started law school. The first year of law school is spent learning how to “argue both sides”, which helped me to think about my arguments for Calvinism in a different way and forced me to face the logical conclusions of these doctrines. The past year also exposed me to the sickening depravity of man, especially through my course in Criminal Law. I had to look full-on at the idea that God had ordained these grotesque acts and was somehow glorified through them.
... I never so much “became” a Calvinist as I was literally under the impression that Calvinism was the only legitimate way of interpreting the Bible, and, quite frankly, that a departure from Calvinism would be a departure from true Christianity.
To be brutally honest, I hated Calvinism almost as soon as I started thinking about it directly (which was strangely years after I became a Calvinist, probably when I was 17-ish). You’ll have to remember though, that I was in an environment that made the Calvinistic system the only “real” system, so as I began hating Calvinism, in my mind, I was hating God. It was terrible. I felt as if God was a nightmare that I couldn’t escape from. The only real reason I didn’t walk away during this time was fear of damnation. To be fair and try to answer the original question in some way, I do remember enjoying the idea of eternal security. Even this was double-edged though, because there was always the fear that something would come to pass in my life proving that I wasn’t a “genuine believer.”
Why did you begin to question your Calvinistic convictions? What primarily led to you abandoning Calvinism?
I think God blessed me first with a deep unrest over Calvinism within myself. Over its doctrines. Over how convoluted the exegesis seemed to me. Over what it implied about God.... I think God’s intent for the 3-4 years I struggled through emotionally was that this time made me emotionally ready and desperate for a fresh look at the Scriptures. I was in such a place that, eventually, I was either going to abandon God wholesale or something was going to give....
