But if you’re afraid to fail, you’re afraid to take risks, which begins to explain the final and most ****ing disadvantage of an elite education: that it is profoundly anti-intellectual. This will seem counterintuitive. Aren’t kids at elite schools the smartest ones around, at least in the narrow academic sense? Don’t they work harder than anyone else—indeed, harder than any previous generation? They are. They do. But being an intellectual is not the same as being smart. Being an intellectual means more than doing your homework.

If so few kids come to college understanding this, it is no wonder. They are products of a system that rarely asked them to think about something bigger than the next assignment. The system forgot to teach them, along the way to the prestige admissions and the lucrative jobs, that the most important achievements can’t be measured by a letter or a number or a name. It forgot that the true purpose of education is to make minds, not careers.

In 1964 Synod (the denomination's annual governance meeting, at which half of delegates are pastors and the other half laymen) responded to a “firestorm of protest” by forming a study committee to create “a biblical and confessional study that would relate the notion of ‘limited atonement’ to the teachings currently being promulgated by Professor Dekker.”

Two years later, a 70-page report “bore witness to the historical fact that many of the Reformed tradition’s central teaching traffic deep in the mysteries of God’s providence and decrees.” 

The study “emphasized the mysteries of God’s will” and “affirmed the traditional teaching of limited atonement while at the same time recognizing that our finite minds may simply be unable to understand the apparent paradoxes involved in saying that Christ’s sacrifice is sufficient for all, even though, in the end, it is not effective for all people.” 

Also suggested saying “Christ died for sinners” instead of “Christ died for you,” which “gave the missionary the chance to do an internal shrug of the shoulders regarding the question of whether or not this particular sinner was among the elect…” (Aside: I love the visual here.)

That wasn't good enough, apparently. The committee was sent back to work to  expand and restate its conclusions.
 

The second report had 94 pages that included more biblical references and comments from theologians. The committee could not make a final declaration about the matter, offering two recommendations. As a result, Synod made the unprecedented move to pause for two months and reconvene for more discussion.

The final result, which, along with all the sturm und drang, I never even knew about until reading this book, was this: “That Synod admonish Professor Dekker for the ambigouous and abstract way in shich he has expressed himself in his writing on the love of God and the atonement.” (Acts of Synod 1967, p736)  Oh yes, and the report? Was sent to all the churches in the denomination to be used as a "study resource."

So what do you Reformed folk from other denominations think? Does belief in limited atonement hamper evangelistic efforts? Or can we just say that God will show us who's ready to hear his message of grace? Is evangelism redundant if God has already selected people? I'm not interested in hearing justifications for whether or not  to believe in election. I'm just interested in hearing how you can have both/and.

In my next post on this subject, which I have to do but quick, because I think the book is due back at the library tomorrow, I will describe what Richard Mouw has to say about the subject in his little book Calvinism in the Las Vegas Airport: Making Connections in Today's World. You can get a sense of the polarity surrounding this subject if you read the comments about this book at Amazon.