John Wesley firmly rejected the Calvinistic "doctrine of predestination", saying it presented "GOD as worse than the Devil: More False, more Cruel, more Unjust." (From his sermon Free Grace)
"More False; because the Devil, Liar as he is, hath never said, 'He willeth all Men to be saved.' More Unjust, because the Devil cannot, if he wou'd, be guilty of such Injustice as you ascribe to GOD, when you say, That GOD condemned Millions of Souls to everlasting Fire prepared for the Devil and his Angels for continuing in Sin, which for want of that Grace he will not give them, they cannot avoid; And more Cruel, because that unhappy Spirit [the Devil] seeketh Rest and findeth none; so that his own restless Misery is a kind of Temptation to him to tempt others. But GOD resteth in his high and Holy Place: So that to suppose him of his own mere Motion, of his pure Will and Pleasure, happy as he is, to doom his Creatures, whether they will or no, to endless Misery; is to impute such Cruelty to him, as we cannot impute even to the great Enemy of GOD and Man."
In my opinion, these are all valid philosophical arguments against Calvinistic predestination.
The term "predestined" only occurs in Scripture four times. Twice in Ephesians 1 (in verses 4 and 5) and twice in Romans 8 (in verses 29 and 30).
And here's where it gets funny and sad: Wesley didn't have an alternative to the Calvinist interpretation of those verses. He didn't know what they meant.
But that didn't slow him down!
He said, "Whatever that Scripture proves, it never can prove this (that God is worse than the Devil). Whatever its true Meaning be, this cannot be its true Meaning."
And if the Calvinist asks Wesley, "What is its true Meaning then?"
His reply is thus: "If I say, I know not, you have gain'd Nothing. For there are many Scriptures, the true Sense whereof neither you nor I shall know, till Death is swallowed up in Victory. But this I know, Better it were to say, It had no Sense at all; than to say it had such a Sense as this. It cannot mean, whatever it mean besides, that the GOD of Truth is a Lyar. Let it mean what it will, it cannot mean that the Judge of all the World is unjust. No Scripture can mean, that GOD is not Love, or that his Mercy is not over all his Works. That is, Whatever it prove beside, no Scripture can prove Predestination."
In other words, "I don't know what those verses mean, but I know they can't mean what the Calvinist has in mind. And it would be better to say that these verses are simply nonsensical than to say they show God loves some people and hates others."
Wesley is not going to win a debate with that argument, but you have to admit there is some validity to looking at someone's interpretation of Scripture and saying, "I'm not sure exactly where you went wrong, but my gut says you are in left field."
A lot of heresies could be stopped from spreading with a simple gut-check on the hearer's part.
P.S. A lot of Calvinist preachers - like John Piper and R.C. Sproul - admit to having the same gut revulsion to Calvinism when they were first exposed to it. But they somehow learned to live with it when presented with a stack of prooftexts.
P.P.S. Wesley may not have figured out an alternate interpretation for Ephesians 1 or Romans 8, but many others have. (Wesley was honestly no better at exegesis than the typical Calvinist is.) It took me 20 minutes one winter morning to get a grip on Ephesians 1 when I was barely out of college - just me and my Bible.
No comments:
Post a Comment