A Question for Calvinists.

I go to a Grace Baptist church and we've just started a two part series on the Ordo Salutis (the Order of Salvation) which is essentially a series on Calvinism. The first of these sessions was on Foreknowledge and Election. Therefore I think this might be a good time to do a couple of posts... or more... on the age old debate about Calvinism. As last night's sermon was on foreknowledge I think I'll start there.

Ignoring what exactly foreknowledge means in some of the hotly disputed passages (context determines the meaning of a word in any given passage), I'll just limit myself to the question:

Can God foreknow something unless He ordains it?

Or, to put it another way: Can people have genuine freedom if God knows what decisions we will make?

Here's a quote from a Calvinistic website:

Simply put, what God foreknows, must, of necessity, be as fixed as that which He has decreed. Therefore, to argue for foreknowledge over against predestination by appealing to the freedom of the will is to argue in a self-contradictory fashion. No event can be foreknown unless, in some sense, it has been predetermined... Foreknowledge demands certainty, and certainty demands foreordination. [Emphasis in Original]

Clearly, he along with others, believes the answer is no. But rather than getting into long philosophical debates I think I'll just raise a question for Calvinists:

Did Adam and Eve have genuine free will at the Fall? Could they have resisted the temptation and not eaten the forbidden fruit?

This is a yes or no question and whatever you answer it has important implications.

If you answer yes, then we have an example of genuine free will and of God knowing what the result of that free will would be. This demonstrates that human freedom can coexist with God's omniscience. It doesn't tell us how it's possible, nor even if we currently have free will, but it does show us that it's possible. God can foreknow a decision without determining it.

If you answer no. Then you claim that God ordained the fall. And to my mind, this makes God the author of sin and evil. And that's not something I'm happy to believe.

The Important Things in Life

How can you know what's important in life?
How can you tell what really matters?

It's easy really.

Remember you're going to die.

Then ask yourself: what would I regret if I died tomorrow?

So what comes to mind?  Money, job, career, holiday, qualifications, car, education, sporting achievements?

For me it's none of these.  What matters are people. It's the friends I've lost contact with, the relationships that have broken down and  the people I haven't told how much they mean to me.  I don't think this is just me. I'd guess most people will say others are the most important things in life.  But why is this?  Is it just because I want to be remembered as a nice bloke or is there some deeper reason? Why are humans so important?

If there is no God, then this life is it. There's nothing else. When I die, what's in my bank account won't matter, but then neither will my relationships.  The best I can hope for is that people remember me as someone who was great – but that won't bother me either, if all I am is worm food.  Moreover, unless I'm someone like Alexander the Great, in a hundred years I'll be forgotten.  It will be as if I'd never existed.  So why is it that my heart tells me that relationships are more important than all else?  Maybe it's because this life isn't all there is, that when I die it's not all over, and that how I relate to people has eternal consequences.

The Bible teaches that people are made in God's image.  That death is not the end.  Therefore relationships matter.  Money, career etc. don't matter – they won't enter eternity - but people do.  And people matter.  God cares about how we treat those who bear His image.  He made us for relationships – with each other, but most importantly with Him.  And this is the relationship we tend to forget most about.  But it's the one that matters the most. It's the one that determines our eternal fate. And if I'm reconciled to my creator then I'll start to put my other relationships right.

So in light of your mortality: how will you live tomorrow?

To AV or not to AV?

That is the question.

And frankly I haven't a clue.

Next Thursday in the U.K. we're having a referendum on whether to change our voting system from First Past the Post (FPTP) to the Alternative Vote (AV) system. So to be a responsible subject I ought to have a think about how to vote. 

The first past the post system is the one we currently have. The person with the most votes wins. It's simple and transparent. But it has its problems: the existence of safe seats and that votes for a minor party seem a waste. The AV system claims to be able to fix this. In the AV system (which we use in student union elections), instead of putting a cross by the candidate you want, you number the candidates you want in order of preference (you don't have to put a number against all of them). The votes are then counted and the person with 50% of the vote wins. If no one has 50% then the candidate who came last is eliminated and their votes are redistributed amongst the other candidates, according to the second preference. This is continued until someone has more than 50% of the vote. So does this fix the problems of FPTP? Does it create any new problems?

Will it make safe seats less safe?

Maybe for some seats. In constituencies where there is currently one clear winner and the remaining vote is spilt between two similar parties then suddenly the seat will becomes more marginal. But in other cases it won't. Where there is one clear winner at the moment and the remaining vote is spilt between lots of different parties then the seat will remain safe. Currently if you live in such a safe constituency, and you don't like the safe candidate, then it doesn't seem worth voting. But what would happen under AV? Maybe everyone's alternative choices will combine under some compromise candidate to oust the current incumbent. And this will make it worth voting. But I think its unlikely.

What about voting for minor parties?

At the last election I was living in a marginal constituency: between the Liberal Democrats and the Conservatives. Under FPTP a vote for a minor party is perceived as a wasted vote. But I voted for UKIP, why? Wasn't that a waste. The reason UKIP (or any other minor party candidate) is seen as a wasted vote is because everyone assumes that everyone else will vote for the two main parties, so they vote for one of the two main parties, even though they don't really represent them. So even though with FPTP you should be voting positively, you end up voting negatively, to keep someone else out. But I voted UKIP anyway, why? Because I decided to vote positively in the forlorn hope that everyone else might also decide to. I decided there wasn't a big enough policy difference between the two major candidates for it to matter much if the which of them got in. Neither represented me. As it turned out, the Conservative won.

With AV I wouldn't have had to face this dilemma – I could have voted UKIP 1^st, Conservative 2^nd, Whoever 3^rd etc. My vote wouldn't have been wasted. In essence I have one positive vote and then can arrange my preferences to arrive at the least worst candidate. This sounds like a better system. But I'm not so sure. I think the minor parties would pick up far more votes than they do. This seems more representative, and if that means people voting positively it would be a good thing. However what is most likely is that the minor parties will be eliminated and their votes redistributed so they'll be no real change. In fact, I fear, the major parties will be blander than ever in the hope of picking up the second preference votes of the other major parties. In short: you can vote centre left in either red, blue, or yellow and various levels of sanity. This is hardly increasing democracy. By voting UKIP in the last election I was sending a message to the conservative party. By moving their policies to the left they have lost my vote. In some constituencies, assuming most UKIP voters are Tories, the UKIP vote lost the Conservatives the seat. The more my vote costs the the Conservatives the more likely they are to decide to shift back to the right - and then people can have a genuine choice at future elections – which might just shake up voter apathy. But under AV the Conservative parties can safely ignore the concerns of UKIP voters as they know they'll pick up the second preferences. The chance to vote for genuinely different alternatives is essential to a healthy democracy; I think AV will erode the remaining differences between the major parties.

The ability to sling one government out and install another is important part of a democratic state. Some people believe that AV will result in more coaltions with the Lib Dems, winning more seats. But coalitions are unaccountable. Both parties seem to rip up their manifestos and blame the fact they're not keeping their promises on the other party. In addition the third party (the Lib Dems) remain in perpetual power and act a king makers. That doesn't seems very representative.

To sum up. AV sounds like a great idea in principle. You can vote for who you want to represent you without feeling you're wasting your vote. I don't think we can tell what the effects of AV will be. Will voter turnout increase and what effect might that have? Will a minor parties be seen as a credible choice and this change the whole political landscape? But as a whole I can't see it changing the grip of the major parties. And as an unintended consequence, their policies will become less distinctive. Do we want to elect the least offensive candidate to the electorate rather than the one most people want? And should people's second, third or fourth preference vote count as much as a first preference? I'm still not sure how I'll vote. My heart says AV, but my head may overule.

Anyway it doesn't matter how I'll vote. How will you vote? This is an important issue to think and pray about. And if you want to know more about the issues then I suggest you read here and look here for a Christian perspective.

P.S. I just found this video clip which demonstrates a serious flaw in the AV system.  By voting for who you want, you can cause someone you don't want to be elected, who wouldn't have been elected if you hadn't voted!

A Prosperity Gospel?

I just finished watching the series Civilization: Is the West History presented by Niall Ferguson. Which you can still currently watch in the U.K. on 4oD. In this fascinating series, Ferguson outlines six feature of western civilization that made the west great which he names killer apps: competition, science, property rights, medicine, consumerism, and the work ethic. Some of the things he covers were disturbing, such as how Africans were treated at the start of the 20^th century, and some were quirky – how jeans brought down the Berlin wall. But what stuck me the most was in the last episode, apart from the inexplicable (that is if you deny the triune God) growth of Christianity in China, was that as an atheist Ferguson was bemoaning the decline of the protestant work ethic and the moral vacuum at the heart of our society. This has got me thinking: does the gospel lead to prosperity?

No! Not in the sense of the money preachers: that with enough faith you'll be rolling in the money. But in a more general sense. The sense that we should work hard as for the Lord, that we shouldn't hanker after material wealth, that the physical world isn't intrinsically bad and inferior to the spiritual, and the wisdom contained in proverbs encouraging saving and hard work. These just relate to the work ethic, but what about individual rights and science? Contrary to the view of Furguson, who sees religion as holding back scoiety, wasn't the birth of science in the west the result of the Christian worldview?  And this quote about rights seems to have some rather Christian assumptions 

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.  U.S. Declaration of Independence.

I don't think that the gospel is responsible for all of Ferguson's killer apps. For example, I don't see how competition, especially when it results in war is a fruit of the gospel. But enough of Ferguson's killer apps can be related to the Bible's worldview to ask the question:

Did the Gospel make the West great?

Not that making society prosperous is the Gospel's main purpose. Rather it's purpose is to reconcile us to God through Christ. But did it made the West great as a byproduct of this. That by people being brought into relationship with their creator society's values are made more in tune those of our maker and as a result we prosper.

Book Review: End of the Spear

The story of “Operation Auca” has gripped me all my life. The image of the small yellow plane, on the sandbar of Curaray River deep in the Ecuadorian jungle, and the speared bodies of Jim Elliot, Nate Saint, Pete Fleming, Ed McCully and Roger Youderian, has haunted my imagination and challenged my values. What will I give to serve the Lord?

However, I have often wondered: what did their deaths achieve?

They dedicated their lives to making contact and getting the gospel to the Aucas (Waodani); one of the most violent societies to ever exist, with a 60% homocide rate. Yet they were speared to death having only just made contact. Why would God allow such a thing? Why would God let these men fail and die in such a noble endeavour?

End of the Spear picks up the story 40 years later, when Steve Saint (son of Nate) returns to the Waodani to bury his aunt, Rachel, who had lived and shared the gospel with the Waodani for half her life. The book is an exciting account of how God leads Steve to take his family and live with the Waodani for a year, to help them interact with the outside world, and the events that follow. Throughout the book, we get glimpses of what happened on that sandbar through the eyes of the Waodani, and how God has changed their lives. How a people in deep darkness, have seen a great light. And how God has used the deaths of those five men.

So what were the highlights for me?

1. That 20% of the tribe are now Christians.
2. The spearing have, by and large, ended.
3. God's providence and guidance. Steve didn't have some vision or hear a voice telling him to move to the jungle, but God's guidance was unmistakably clear.
4. But the most impressive thing of all, the thing that will stay with me, was the amazing love put on display. Steve's deep love for the people who killed his father and their love for him is remarkable. It's divine. That Steve loves the man who killed his father, as a father, is the greatest of miracles. There is no natural explanation. This can only be the work of the Holy Spirit.

This is God's great apologetic. To take two people who should hate each other and cause them to love each other deeply can only be through Christ. He is our peace.

“A new command I give you: Love one another. As I have loved you, so you must love one another. By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you love one another.” John 13:34-35