Leaving Calvinism: Comments from Ex-Calvinists #10
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:
Juan Gill writes:
How did you become a Calvinist?
I’m from Paraguay and I am 25 years old. I was an agnostic until I came to Christ when I was 18 years old, in 2012. 6 months later, the brother who led me to Christ, taught me how he sees Ephesians 1, and taught me about predestination... And that’s how I [became a Calvinist].
What did you find most compelling about Calvinism?
In that time, it taught me how the glory of God is everything, and that He can do everything He wants without giving answers. Then, little by little, I embraced everything about everything about Calvinism
Why did you begin to question your Calvinistic convictions?
There was a division in my church in 2016, about Calvinism. The Calvinists initiated a “war” between the ones who left my church, and the ones who decided to stay. I decided to stay with my church, even if I was a Calvinist, because I didn’t agree with that attitude of the Calvinists. Most of the ones who followed those leaders, now are departed or separated from Christ, and are in the world.
... [Eventually, on his journey out of Calvinism] I realized not only that Calvinism wasn’t biblical, but also I realized that Calvinism was the doctrine that lead me to coldness in the first place, and other brothers, who were cold or in apostasy.... [But] now I know that the Bible doesn’t contradict itself, and I know how to live my Christian life without worrying if this or that was predestined or not, and I take care more of my spiritual life.
Thanks for reading. God bless you all.
This testimony is unusual for the X-Calvinist corner in that the person never became a Calvinist, but shares his story of almost becoming a Calvinist. However, it seems worth including here ...
Steve Sabin writes:
How did you become a Calvinist?
... While at a Foursquare church in my 40s, two friends that I met there were (unbeknownst to me) Calvinists. They began gently challenging some of my beliefs, primarily God’s sovereignty regarding salvation in particular and all events in general. I vividly remember a weeknight Bible study where we were going through a book by Dutch Sheets on intercessory prayer. One of my Calvinist friends was leading the study and the book asked what I presumed was a rhetorical question with only one obvious conclusion: “If Jesus prayed, ‘Thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven’, does this means that God’s will is always accomplished?” My theology said “no, God’s will is not always done – He is not willing for any to perish, yet some do – so prayer must in some fashion influence the outcome of events in ways that are not pre-determined in advance.” However, for some in the group (including my Calvinist friend who led the study), this simple question created a gigantic and passionate debate. It was so substantial that the Bible study essentially met for a few more sessions and then disbanded because we could not seem to move past that point... There was no animosity within the group, but it was as though everyone lost interest at the thought of studying prayer and its effectiveness if the outcome of what you were praying about had already been infallibly decreed and “could not be otherwise”...
Although the Bible study did not continue, my friend (the leader) continued to challenge my conceptions of God’s sovereignty. To him, it meant absolute control of everything. I instinctively pushed back, because my reading of the Bible as a whole (and the offer of salvation in particular) didn’t seem to make any sense under a fully deterministic scheme.
Not long afterwards, during dinner with my other Calvinist friend, he asked me this question, which I think he believed was airtight logic from which nobody can escape: “Do you believe that God already knows where you will spend eternity? If so, what makes you think you are free to alter that outcome?” (It took me awhile to recognize the error in logic: he made the mistake of conflating foreknowledge with causation. Knowing something is not the same as causing something.) ...
Around the same time, I was reading Romans 9 and it puzzled me. I remember being very agitated and having a sick feeling in the pit of my stomach: “What if my friend was right? What if God’s sovereignty is only consistent with hard determinism, and some are elected to salvation while others to damnation?"... I felt there was no other satisfactory explanation for what I was reading than the Calvinist interpretation... I was also struggling with the little “mental puzzle” about God’s foreknowledge that my Calvinist friend had posed. I later worked it out, but until that occurred, I remember feeling a sense of panic and dread. “Is this the God that I have spent my life studying about, loving, and serving?”
Still later, I was in a Christian bookstore, browsing. I picked up something by R.C. Sproul where he essentially said (I’m paraphrasing): “Nobody has trouble with salvation they don’t deserve but everyone seems to have trouble with damnation they don’t deserve.” These types of statements increased that feeling of dread I was having and kept gnawing at me. Was this theology true? It felt more like I was being forced inexorably to surrender to something hateful than that I was running to embrace something wonderful. The gravitational pull toward Calvinism felt liked being sucked into a black hole. It was going to obliterate everything I thought I could rely on and nothing in scripture could be taken at face value any longer. For example, John 3:16 and 2 Pet 3:9 no longer meant what they appeared to say. God had cleverly disguised a different meaning therein and one must have the secret TULIP decoder ring to understand what “whosoever” “any” and “all” really meant. It felt like there was no light within Calvinism because although it purported to give answers, rhyme, and reason to the scriptures, it actually made Christianity pointless. Instead of freely responding to God with love as a child to a father or a wife to a husband, this was spiritual coercion – even rape. Or actually even worse. It was the equivalent of Stepford Wives – automatons that could do nothing other than as decreed.
Still later, I heard R.C. Sproul on the radio where he described his own journey to Calvinism. Again, I’m paraphrasing from memory, but he basically said: “I could not withstand the arguments of my professors. I finally had to surrender to the blows of their logic and scripture.” It pretty well described how I was feeling about Calvinism – a miserable, grudging surrender instead of a joyful epiphany. [Calvinists often shame anyone who tries to use logic to poke holes in Calvinism, accusing them of basically being bad, unhumble Christians who elevate human wisdom over God. And so it's very ironic that Calvinists would be forced to accept Calvinism because of the logic of Calvinist arguments ... but then they turn around and shame Christians who use logic to fight/question Calvinism. So it's okay to use logic to get into Calvinism but not to get out of it!?! Very hypocritical, Calvinists!]
I can thus be characterized as somebody that was given the brochure, prospectus, and guided tour for Calvinism. It was accompanied by a sickening feeling of having no choice but to embrace it ... yet all the while feeling that the God I knew from scripture was very, very different from the one being described to me by my Calvinist friends and Calvinist scholars. It prompted me to do my own research because I felt I either had to accept it or find an alternative – but the one thing I could not do was ignore it. It kept gnawing at me and would not rest until addressed.
... [Regarding Calvinism's view of God's "sovereignty"] The sovereignty argument never really resonated with me. I never equated sovereignty with “total control” and assumed that only a truly sovereign God was big enough to create people with free will, yet within constraints and without subverting His sovereignty. A God that controlled every outcome, as in Calvinism, seemed to me to be a smaller, and less powerful God than one that could sustain free will and yet still accomplish His overall purposes....
... [Regarding TULIP] Things can be internally consistent with one another while being consistently false.
... [When he began to question Calvinism] I never accepted Calvinism, but as I said above, a sense of dread that it might be true compelled me to search it out. I felt a lot of unrest during that season, because the logic seemed at first to be irrefutable. Indeed, it instilled a sense of panic.... – if scripture really taught what Calvinists assert, then I had no choice but to hold my nose and accept it. But did scripture really teach what Calvinism asserted? Could I ever get to the place where I loved and embraced what it taught, or would I forever have to hold my nose as part of crucifying my flesh and giving God His proper glory?
At the end of the day, for me, it was that the attributes of God I read about in scripture did not match the attributes of God being presented to me by Calvinism....
What primarily led to you abandoning Calvinism?
Because I had been taught at an early age to read the Bible without relying on commentaries, and because I had established the habit in my 20s of reading through the entire Bible chronologically each year, I resolved to just read through it again from cover to cover, Genesis to Revelation, and make a special note of reading with the five assertions of TULIP in mind – and whether I could honestly find support for them in scripture. My Bible now has hundreds of embedded notes as a result of this effort. What I found were many passages that flew in the face of Calvinism. In contrast, there were only a few dozen that seemed to support Calvinism. It came down to two things:
1. The preponderance of the evidence – hundreds or thousands of scriptures comprising overall themes of free will, salvation being extended to all, total depravity but not total inability, etc. versus a few dozen [Calvinist] “proof texts” – all of which could be interpreted differently than Calvinists asserted, without doing violence to the scriptures, the character of God, or the plain meaning of words and universally accepted grammatical constructions.
2. That if God intended to state what Calvinism asserts, He did an exceedingly poor job of it in the scriptures. It is not visible to the naked eye at all and requires almost everything one has learned about the meaning of words and grammatical structure to be turned on their head. There is a very real double-speak going on in Calvinism where the same words are exchanged between Calvinists and non-Calvinists, but with very different meanings. Ironically, Calvinists try to make their theology palatable not by doubling down in the deterministic direction, but mostly by trying as hard as possible to give the appearance of choice, but then qualifying by successive degrees of restriction upon that choice until it no longer exists in any meaningful sense. It becomes CINO (choice in name only). I found the attempt by Calvinists to control the debate by hijacking the definition and plain meaning of words to be especially egregious in my readings and in listening to their teachings and discussions and debates.
