More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
Read between
August 12 - August 13, 2020
for a loving person, the issue would never be whether hurting someone else was “fair,” but whether it was kind.
a just person would not give you a sinful desire, meticulously arrange the circumstances that would lead to you act on that sinful desire, and then stringently punish you for doing that which he had made certain you would do.
if I were to stay a Calvinist, I would no longer know what to do with my Bible.38 Because if I were to go on treating it like a truthful, reliable revelation of God, it would only be because I didn’t have the spine to live out my convictions with consistency.
if the Bible teaches that God unconditionally ordains people for eternal damnation, we lose the Bible because we lose a trustworthy God—the Bible becomes impossible. I didn’t know how to disagree.
when everything is about God’s glory, everything else—love, justice, goodness, mercy, wrath, meaning, existence—fades to black.
Leaving Calvinism was difficult because it had been a good home. It had taken me in when I desperately needed a rescue. It had taught me to prize God’s glory above comfort, scripture above my opinions, and a God-centered approach above a human-centered approach.
God Looks Like Jesus
God looks like Jesus. Not some of the time, not part of the time, not most of the time, but God has always, does always, and will always looks just like Jesus because Jesus is God.
all our prevailing images and understandings of God must crumble in the earthquake of Jesus’s self-disclosure . . . If we do not allow Jesus to change our image of God . . . then we cannot profess him as [Lord].”46 Everything we think we know about God must submit to that which is revealed in Jesus, and when we fail to let God define himself in Jesus because we think we know better, we commit idolatry.
scripture not only suggests but demands that we be ruthlessly Christocentric in our theology.
the character of Jesus is the character of God. God would never do something Jesus would find morally reprehensible, so if you can’t find it in Jesus, then you really ought to think twice before you claim you’ve found it in God. While it is true that Jesus is not the exclusive revelation of God, it is also true that Jesus is the exhaustive revelation of God’s character, God’s heart.
Jesus is the exact representation of God’s nature, and there is no hidden God lurking in Jesus’s shadow, and we know this because the Bible tells us so.
if you cannot worship a guy you can beat up, you can’t worship Jesus.)
However, the question for Jesus and Calvinism is not “Is Jesus rough?” but “Are the character and teachings of Jesus compatible with the core claims of Calvinism?” Namely, God’s creating the reprobate so he could damn them forever. When we look at Jesus, are we attracted to Calvinism or repelled away from it? Or perhaps most to the point, does the God of Calvinism accurately depict the God revealed in Jesus?
the cross offers us the deepest glimpse into the very heart of God.
As Jürgen Moltmann notes, we can see God’s hands all over creation, but it is only in the crucifixion that we see God’s heart.59
does the God on the cross look like the God of Calvinism?
No!
“When the crucified Jesus is called the ‘image of the invisible God,’ the meaning is that this is God, and God is like this . . . The nucleus of everything that Christian theology says about ‘God’ is to be found in this Christ event.”63
God could have dealt with sin in any way he pleased. God could have done whatever he wanted with us. God could have annihilated us or thrown us into the eternal trash heap. But God chose the cross. The Creator dies at the hands of his creation so it (we) doesn’t have to get what it deserves. And yet this same crucified God also meticulously planned and carried out the eternal damnation of the creatures he had died for?65 The God who would stoop so low as to be crucified and buried is the same God doing the eternal crucifying of countless souls for things he made sure they would do? The one who
...more
the God who loves so much so as to suffer crucifixion loves so little so as to glorify himself in the damnation of humans he created to damn.
Never once do we have any indication that Jesus is the source behind the suffering of others.
Jesus consistently revealed God’s will for people by healing them of their infirmities.”66 This sets up a rather awkward dilemma in Calvinism wherein God the Father is making people suffer and God the Son (Jesus) is healing people of the suffering the Father is inflicting. How was I supposed to believe God would inflict eternal suffering on people for sins he ordained they commit, when Jesus (the exact representation of God) always healed people of their sufferings? For me this was neither mystery nor paradox, but sheer divine schizophrenia. It opened up a fissure in the very heart of God by
...more
You can’t have a “crucified-for-sinners God” and a “creates-sinners-in-order-to-crucify-them God.” If you want to be biblical, you can’t have a God who is only half like Jesus, because if God is only half like Jesus, he’s nothing like Jesus. So while Romans 9 might be a roaring tiger devouring “free-willers,” the crucified Jesus was a mangled lamb that devoured my Calvinism, which brings us to Revelation 5 and a journey to the center of the universe.
at the center of the universe—is . . . a mangled lamb. The Lion of Judah is a mangled lamb. The King of the universe limps to his throne a mangled lamb. Surely there must be some mistake. But as John watches, all of heaven falls down around him, falls down before the mangled lamb, and they begin worshiping him. At the very center of the universe, there is the worship of a mangled lamb.
At the center of the universe, there is not a black hole of deity, endlessly collapsing in on self, but a suffering, crucified, mangled lamb, endlessly giving away self.
“For no man can a lay a foundation other than the one which is laid, which is Jesus Christ” (1 Cor 3:11).
Many who are young and restless end up Reformed because they see no other compelling biblical options—if you say yes to glory, sovereignty, and the Bible, you must say yes to Calvinism.
had known that the character of the God revealed in Jesus, the crucified God, did not appear to jibe with the God of Calvinism.
God is revealed to be one who freely chooses to share himself with others. God has the right to do with us as he wishes, and God wishes to relate to us.
God’s self-glorification—self-esteem
“What the New Testament means by ‘love’ is embodied in the cross . . . The content of the word ‘love’ is given fully and exhaustively in the death of Jesus on the cross; apart from this specific narrative image, the term has no meaning.”
This is what we speak of when we speak of the love of God: sovereign, free, self-giving, suffering, crucified love.
in loving us, “God does not give us something, but Himself; and giving us Himself, giving us His only Son, He gives us everything.”
God’s love shows itself to be in contradistinction to human love.
God doesn’t love us in order to take something from us (glory, worship, praise)—that’s what needy, greedy, human love does. God loves because he loves—the only love in existence that doesn’t need a reason.
As Miroslav Volf says, “We don’t have to give up on the idea that God seeks God’s own glory. We just need to say that God’s glory, which is God’s very being, is God’s love . . . In seeking God’s own glory, God merely insists on being toward human beings the God who gives.”83
far from limiting God or undermining his glory, God’s love is the ultimate expression of his freedom, sovereignty and glory.
The gravity of God’s glory is rooted in his giving, not his taking,
What in the world would move God to do such a thing? He tells us to call it love. It’s the real mystery.
It was the God who does not need us but does not want to be without us—not because we deserve it, but because it’s just who he is. And for me, this was a glory far beyond that of the self-glorifying God of Calvinism.
So when it comes to free will, the question is not “Do you think you have free will?” but “What does God say about free will?”
Interesting, as a free willer I have never started with humans or my own free will (which you had to admit absolutely exists and no one can deny it), I always started with GOD who has free will, who created human beings in HIS image, including the free will to choose to give love, like God has done in human history. Once again, this whole perspective is a mistaken Calvinist perspective of those who have already been where this author arrived after letting biblical revelation speak for itself—which is where I’ve been all along. Not arrogant or prideful, simply the truth. I’m glad to see a former Calvinistic come to where we free willets have always been.
Far from being another power-grabbing, insecure, anxiety-ridden god of the ancient Near Eastern pantheons, the Creator God is so secure and free that he has the power to give power away. He is not anxious about his rule or insecure about his sovereignty. He does not grab or hoard—he gives.
Although God has every right to issue only commands, he often issues invitations. God is always sovereign, but that means he—and not we—gets to decide what shape that sovereignty takes. And apparently, God’s sovereignty makes room for human freedom so that God and humans can have a personal, and not merely causal, relationship.
I agree with this, and again, is what I have always believed.
free will grounds and permeates the biblical narrative.
But as noted earlier, there are certainly other ways to read the biblical story. You could argue that God actually pre-determined the events in Eden and that God never surrenders any of his control over creation. As Bruce Ware says: The sole criterion for understanding the nature of divine sovereignty is simply this: whatever God tells us in Scripture about his lordship and sovereign rulership over the universe is what we should believe . . . From the beginning of the Bible to the end (quite literally), readers are constantly encouraged, in account after account, to think of God as in control
...more
it is in this act of voluntary, gracious self-giving and self-limitation that Jesus most reveals what God is like, for this is what God has been doing from the beginning.
Exactly!
To be clear, God can be as in control as he wants to be, and scripture certainly leads us to believe that God can and often does intervene decisively, even manipulating circumstances to bring about his will. But God has willed that he will not necessarily always get his way.
God wants to love and be loved more than he wants to be in complete control:
Roger Olson sums up God’s self-limiting sovereignty well: Doesn’t this limit God’s power and sovereignty? No, because God remains omnipotent; he could control everything and everyone if he chose to. For the sake of having real, personal creatures who can freely choose to love him or not, God limits his control. Still, God is sovereign in the sense that nothing at all can ever happen that God does not allow. Nothing falls totally outside of God’s supervening oversight and governance.
And here we find a bit of an irony. As a Calvinist, I labeled free-will theism humanistic. I thought the God of free-will theism was merely a projection of human ideals and concepts, and this is often the case. However, the same accusation can be made of Calvinism. A ruler who absolutely, unequivocally exerts the full measure of his control at all times, leaving no room for dissension or contrary wills? That’s not the most divine thing I’ve ever heard—sounds like little black holes of self projecting a supermassive black hole of Self into the heavens. I say that tongue in cheek, merely
...more
