Whenever there is an issue, one will usually find two issues. You believe, for instance, that it is immodest for a woman to wear pants. I believe, enlightened knight that I am, that it is not necessarily immodest. That’s an issue of disagreement. While it is certainly possible that it could go the other way, odds are that the second issue would work out this way. You believe it a grave problem that I don’t hold your view on women and pants. I, on the other hand, am profoundly indifferent to your view, quite content for you to go on holding it. Now we have a second disagreement. We differ on the relative importance of the first issue we differ on.
Shrewd politicians have learned how to use this to their advantage. Suppose, for the sake of argument, that you believe the federal government ought to spend more money on education. I, on the other hand, believe that no civil governments ought to spend any money on education. If you want to make progress, what do you do? Do you come after dangerous fanatics like me? No. I, you understand, am unlikely to budge and am unmoved by your attempts to marginalize me. You instead get after people between us, and charge them with failing to sufficiently condemn me. You accuse those who want the level of federal spending to remain constant of being soft on loonies like me. Why would you risk alienating those who are closer to you? To get them to move closer still. As you denounce them, they in turn will feel the need to prove their bona fides on the issue. Before this assault, my loonie views were a matter of indifference to these “moderates.” Now it is something they must loudly denounce, lest they get painted by you with my brush.
The strategy, of course, works for politicians of all kinds. It works in office politics. It works in family politics. And it works in church politics. It isn’t enough to disagree with theory A anymore. In order to avoid being tainted you have to stand up and declare theory A to be the very spawn of Satan. In some circles, for instance, it isn’t enough to believe in the five points of Calvinism. You must, in order to keep your Reformed credentials, believe that those who deny any of the five points of Calvinism go straight to hell when they die.
The world is full of issues, some of them subtle, all requiring wisdom. But the greatest wisdom is always needed for the second issue. The hard question is the proportion question. It is better, in the end, to enjoy the company of those who are wrong on a given issue, than those with whom we agree on the issue, but turn it into a matter of life and death when it need not be. Give me a peaceful Arminian any day over a fire-breathing Calvinist. Give me, on the other hand, a fire-breathing Calvinist any day over those Machiavellians who push their agenda by shooting at the peacemakers.
For many years I embraced that rather common eschatological position known as panmillennialism, the view that amounts to “I don’t know how things will go, but it will all pan out in the end.” Part of the reason I embraced this view was because my interest lay elsewhere. But part of the reason my interest lay elsewhere was because eschatology was so hard for me to understand. Here are three reasons why that is so.
First, God has determined to not lay out a clear, detailed framework about how He plans to end history. He has played His cards so close to the vest on the issue that Jesus told us, “But of that day and hour no one knows, not even the angels of heaven but My Father only” (Matthew 24:36). His reasons for not revealing more He has not revealed to us either.
Second, what He has determined to reveal He has chosen to reveal principally in apocalyptic literature. A sound theory of interpretation calls us to read different portions of the Bible in the genre that they come to us. We are not reading well when we take a metaphor and turn it into history, nor when we take history and turn it into metaphor. One of the central disagreements within the evangelical church about eschatology flows out of this problem. One school of thought not only reads apocalyptic literature as if it were designed to be read like a newspaper account, but often accuses those of us who won’t join them of “spiritualizing” the text, implying that such is one slippery step away from embracing theological liberalism. Few of us in our day are quite used to handling any apocalyptic texts, let alone apocalyptic texts from the very Word of God.
Third, what we are told about the end of the world is spoken about in the Bible in at least two different ways. That is, the Bible speaks about the end times as both something yet to come, and that something that has already arrived. It describes both the destruction of the Temple and Jerusalem, both of which happened in 70 AD. The Bible is not always clear which “last days” it is talking about. It is easy to get them confused.
All that said, however, I left behind my panmillennialism when I realized that however difficult it may be to understand what God has revealed, He did reveal what He revealed. It is never healthy to take even a small portion of the Word of God, get confused, and then decide not to bother about it. When He speaks we are called to listen. When we are confused we are called to work through that confusion.
When we do so, however, we should not be surprised that others in working through the confusion have come to different conclusions than our own. My favorite theologian has wrestled and come to one conclusion, only to wrestle some more and come to another, only to wrestle some more and come to a third. Which should encourage us to seek peace among the brethren, and to rest in the assurance that it will indeed all pan out. Whatever eschatology we embrace, we all agree that Jesus wins in the end. Because Jesus always wins.
It was a strange time for me. I was attending a high school that was so nominal in its commitment to the Christian faith that the high school English teacher was an atheist. Still, his was among my favorite classes, both because of what we read and because of the things we talked about. While attending this school during the week, I also attended a decidedly Christian Sunday school. The late Dr. John H. Gerstner, my father’s mentor, was my Sunday school teacher. During the week, and during the weekend, for a delightful several months, we were studying the work of the Puritans. Dr. Gerstner’s class was called “The Puritans: The Church at Its Best.” Dr. Kupersmith’s tenth-grade English class was called just that, but we read snippets from several Puritan authors as a part of our survey of American literature. We read a bit of Cotton Mather’s masterwork, Magnalia Christi Americana, and we read Jonathan Edwards’ sermon “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God.”
Although I was a convinced Calvinist at the time, I must confess that it seemed a little strange that we were reading Puritans in English class. It was a sort of a good news, bad news thing. We were reading the works of men who poured their lives into striving for change, to save souls, and to shape a culture. And we were reading them like curious old, cultural artifacts, as if the proclamation of the Word of God could be turned into sociological dinosaur bones. It was true enough, though it was supposed to shock us, that people who thought this way once shaped the nation. It was true enough that it was true enough that strangest of all, one Sunday morning my atheist English teacher showed up to hear my hero and Sunday school teacher expound on the Puritans and how their thought shaped their culture. I prayed during the whole class that God would show Him the light. Indeed He did. But this man still preferred the darkness.
I think that Sunday morning at the feet of Dr. Gerstner at the least did this for my teacher, it helped him understand me a bit better. When the English class read through Edward’s sermon, “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God,” most of the students were repulsed. Well, to be more accurate, everyone in the room but me was repulsed. They couldn’t imagine that anyone could sit still to hear a sermon in which God was portrayed so harshly. If you are unfamiliar with the sermon, the imagery that shapes it is simple enough. Edwards encourages those in his audience to understand their situation, that they are like a spider, dangling on a single strand of web, precariously hanging above a raging fire. God holds the upper end of that strand, such that all that separates you and that burning cauldron is that gossamer thread. We didn’t, as a class, talk about God per se, but Edwards’ perception of him. They knew for sure that God wasn’t at all like that. They were just shocked that anyone could think he was. But of course, they figured, this was a long time ago, practically all the way back to the dark ages.
After all the bellowing from my classmates finished, I gingerly raised my hand. “I’m sorry,” I said, “but I think you all have completely missed the point of this sermon. Edwards wasn’t trying to paint God as an ogre. He wasn’t trying to impress upon his flock the harsh judgment of God. No, this is a sermon about the grace of God.” There was a brief and stunned silence as the class took in my hypothesis. When they understood what I said, they saw Edwards in a new light. He wasn’t the world’s worst Calvinist — I was. They bellowed like so many spiders dangling over a fire. Grace?! Grace?! How in the world could I argue that this was about grace?
I went on to explain, though I doubt I persuaded anyone, that the grace was simple enough to see. It was found in that gossamer thread, and in the hand that held it. Edwards isn’t telling his audience how mean God is to hold them over the fire, but how gracious He is that He hadn’t yet dropped them in the fire.
The difference, then, between Puritan culture and our culture isn’t found, in one sense, in differing conceptions of God. Rather, it is found in different understandings of man. The culture’s wholesale rejection of the theology that served as its foundation isn’t of the predestinating God, but of the total depravity of man. The world, and that which is of the world in the church, hates the Reformed faith because of what it rightly tells us we deserve. We affirm we have earned the wrath of God, while they affirm God has earned our wrath. Which is why our attempts at soft-selling the living God have failed so miserably. As we, in trying to call the lost to Christ cover over the wrath of God, we in turn cover over the one thing they need to grasp. Everyone’s already alright with God, because we aren’t spiders, but the pinnacle of creation. Indeed, we are so committed to our own goodness that we leave God dangling over the fire, finding Him guilty for not making all our dreams come true.
Perhaps by God’s grace, one day students will be shocked at how we in this century misunderstood the nature of God and the nature of man.
Hopefully we’ll be back on next week.
Of course they are. Paul tells us in Galatians, an epistle written specifically to deal with questions related to the above, “Therefore know that only those who are of faith are sons of Abraham” (3:7). If you have faith and only if you have faith you are the sons of Abraham, Jew or Gentile. That’s one family, one patriarch. The truth is, however, that not even the most diehard of classical dispensationalists has ever denied this. They, after all, not only read their Bibles but revere them. They may hold to a paradigm and an eschatology that I think are in error, but they’re neither idiots nor devils.
Think of it this way. I could have asked this question, “Are Gentile believers a replacement for God’s people, the Jews?” The answer would have been, “Of course not.” The truth is that not even the most diehard classical covenant theologian would ever affirm this. They, after all, not only read their Bibles but revere them. We may hold to a paradigm and an eschatology that dispensationalists think are in error, but we’re neither idiots nor devils.
All of which should tell us that each view is rather a bit more nuanced that it is often painted to be by the loyal opposition. Dispensationalists agree that all those who will spend eternity in the new heavens and the new earth will be there because of the work of Christ applied to them through faith in that work alone. Covenant theologians agree that the Jerusalem Council left room for Jewish believers to be circumcised and Gentile believers not to be. In short, there is a connection that is real, organic and biblical. And there is a distinction that is real, organic and biblical. Perhaps we ought to learn to be a bit more gracious to our brothers and sisters on the other side of this issue.
Just today I heard for the first time that John Wesley, when asked if he thought he would see George Whitefield, with whom he had worked closely for many years but with whom he’d had a falling out over predestination, said, “I don’t think so. He’ll be far too close to the throne of heaven for me to see him.” Truth be told, I’d heard the exact same story. I’ve told the exact same story with this key difference, it was Whitefield who was asked the question and answered the same. It was the honorable Dustin Benge who told the story that revealed my story was inside out.
I was disappointed to learn that I’d had it wrong. Not because I don’t like being wrong. I don’t, but that isn’t the issue. I was disappointed because I wanted the guy on my side of the predestination scuffle, George Whitefield, to be the gracious one in the story. Which reveals my own weakness in showing grace to my brothers and sisters with whom I disagree on secondary matters. Let Wesley be the hero because either way, Jesus is the hero.
We need to stop bemoaning the impact of the internet on our discourse and start repenting and changing. We need to be good Augustinians in affirming not just “In essentials unity, in non-essentials liberty” but in practicing “In all things, charity.”
