Leaving Calvinism: Comments from Ex-Calvinists #11
Here is the last of the ex-Calvinist testimonies. The first one is 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 you want to read everything that everyone said, click on the link above:
Dana Steele writes:
I grew up in a Calvinistic Baptist church from age 11. The 5-points of Calvinism (TULIP) were taught regularly with great enthusiasm ... But it wasn’t until college that I began to understand and embrace the “Doctrines of Grace” and TULIP more fully....
I also learned to love the doctrine of election because it meant that God loved me personally and specifically in a unique way. Though it made me a little embarrassed to think that God did not love everyone this way, I was content to leave this as a mystery. Who am I to question God? I was just glad I was one of the lucky (I mean chosen) ones.
... [As A Calvinist] I had developed a sense of theological superiority.... I was fully persuaded that I was on the right side of the soteriology debate even though I had never seriously engaged a formidable opponent in the debate.... The problem was not that I didn’t understand Calvinism, the problem was I had never been seriously challenged in my beliefs. I had accepted superficial answers to the debate because I did not recognize there was any substance to the debate. I had approached the Scriptures already convinced unconditional election was true, so it was easy to find it in Scripture when looking for it. I couldn’t see past my Calvinistic lens. Calvinism was biblical and that was the end of the discussion for me. If I were to reconsider Calvinism, the Scriptures would have to point the way.
... I had heard my fellow pastors for years quote teachers like Luther, Calvin, Owen, Edwards, Spurgeon, Sproul, Piper and MacArthur. They promoted Ligonier Ministries and the Gospel Coalition. Although I was not an avid reader, I was familiar with these men and convinced that the vast majority of scholars and theologians were on my side. This “appeal to authority” was encouraging ...
Why did you begin to question your Calvinistic convictions?
In 2016 I decided to teach an adult Sunday School series on The Gospel Coalition series called “9-Marks of a Healthy Church.” I started with the booklet entitled “The Gospel” by Ray Ortlund, Jr. From the start, I was struck by his definition of the gospel which he called “the essential message Bible-believing people rally around.” Ortlund put it this way:
“God, through the perfect life, atoning death, and bodily resurrection of Jesus Christ, rescues all his people from the wrath of God into peace with God, with a promise of the full restoration of his created order forever – all to the praise of the glory of his grace.”
What struck me about this carefully crafted gospel statement was the complete absence of faith or any response at all on the part of man.... he offered no other connection between faith and salvation.
... I doubt Ortlund was intending to be controversial by neglecting to mention faith, but his overt monergism startled me and got me thinking. What is the role of faith in salvation? Why does the bible talk so much about faith if salvation is solely a work of God (monergistic)? As a Calvinist, I believed that God saves through regeneration. Faith is the result of regeneration.... Since all who are regenerated believe, the key question in determining who will be saved is not "who will believe" but rather "who will be regenerated". But as I thought about those things, I began to ask, “Is that biblical?” It was that question which started me on my path away from Calvinism.
... Suddenly, all the latent concerns and doubts I had about Calvinism began to surface. Does God decree sin? How does prayer change anything in a deterministic universe? Does God in fact love everyone and want everyone to be saved?...
I had become adept at suppressing my doubts in obedience to God’s transcendence. I had bought into the "tensions and mysteries" that held Calvinism together but now was seeing another solution, one that made more sense of the biblical texts.... I was reading [the Bible] for the first time without bias.
... I began to ask myself, “What if I have been wrong this whole time? Did God really create some as vessels of wrath and damnation to glorify Himself? Was there a better way to understand Romans 9? Maybe sometimes what I consider a plain reading of the text is actually biased by assumptions? What if God really does love the world? What if the reason we proclaim the gospel to all is that everyone can be saved by the gospel? What if Christ really is the propitiation, not just for my sins but the sins of the whole world? You mean the plain reading of these texts might actually be true?” I was blown away.
... So when I considered that the Word might actually be telling me that God loves the world and desires all to be saved, and sent his Son to make provision for all to be saved and invites all to be saved and grants grace and faith freely to the world, it was a wonderfully liberating feeling. I felt like I was being reintroduced to my God.
What primarily led to you abandoning Calvinism?
Simply put, I became convinced that the Bible does not teach Calvinism. It does not teach that regeneration precedes faith. It does not teach that Christ died only for the elect....
And this one is from a different Arminian website which also shares the same list of ex-Calvinist testimonies as the other one (but somehow this testimony ended up on the second website but not the first):
Xavier writes:
How did you become a Calvinist?
I came to faith in Jesus in the context of an Acts29 church. What is interesting about this denomination is how subtle they are with Calvinism ... the “doctrines of Grace” were not really taught explicitly; they were subliminally introduced.... Every online-resource I was bombarded with was from Desiring God, The Gospel Coalition, and other reformed-media. I immersed myself in all the voices that my friends did: John Piper, John MacArthur, Matt Chandler, David Platt, James White, Jeff Durbin, Tim Keller, R.C Sproul, and so many others.... For me, it just made perfect sense to follow what seemed like everyone else in my Christian community was doing. Now looking back, I realize I truly had no clue what I was getting myself into.
Why did you begin to question your Calvinistic convictions?
The doctrines of Unconditional Election and Limited Atonement bothered me from day one (once I understood their implications).... The problem was that I would read Scripture passages that seemed to imply an unlimited atonement, humans having the genuine ability to accept or reject God’s grace... The Calvinist interpretations to these texts were suspect to me (i.e “all” or “world” was in reference to the elect, if mankind can believe without effectual grace than it means they’re responsible for their salvation, all those who walk away were never saved to begin with, etc.)....
[Eventually, he found many intelligent people who disagreed with Calvinism.] I would eventually stumble into an entire “new” world of non-Calvinistic scholarship that really made it harder to hold on to these doctrines. Some of those men were Dr. Leighton Flowers, Dr. David Allen, Dr. Adam Harwood, Dr. Michael Brown, Dr. Braxton Hunter, Dr. Johnathan Pritchett, Dr. Ken Wilson, Dr. William Lane Craig, Dr. Jerry Walls, Dr. Roger Olson, Dr. Craig Keener, Dr. Thomas Oden, Dr. Tim Mackie, Pastor Mike Winger, Dr. Tim Barnett, Dr. John Lennox, Dr. Frank Turek, and many others. In a sense, it felt as if all these non-Calvinistic voices were hidden from me. I could not believe how much stronger their arguments against Calvinistic doctrine were...
... I realized that the only reason why the Calvinist world seemed so big and loud was because that’s all I was surrounded with. I originally thought most of the church believed these doctrines (in the past and present). I underestimated how their social media platforms played a big role in spreading their message to me and making it seem normal.
