Recently I was reading two books that had parts addressing the same topic: How to reconcile "limited atonement" -- the L in Calvinism's doctrinal acronym TULIP -- with evangelistic efforts.
The first book is Grace Through Every Generation: The Continuing Story of the Christian Reformed Church by the Rev. Scott Hoezee. This is a new release from Faith Alive Christian Resources, a part of CRC Publications, issued as part of the denomination's 2007 sesquicentennial.
In the book, Hoezee focuses on the changes the denomination has undergone in the last 50 years -- changes that to some seem radical and sudden -- while stressing that the denomination's core values have not really changed at all, and that each decision was actually made quite slowly and deliberately and with much intellectual rigor.
But to get to the point, one of the stories Hoezee relates is that of Harold Dekker, who was a professor at Calvin Theological Seminary in the early 1960s when he wrote a little article challenging the CRC to re-examine limited atonement.
As Hoezee explains, the CRC holds to the tenets of the Canons of Dort, which "explicitly rejected the idea that Jesus’ death made available a salvation that anyone could tap into if they chose to believe in Jesus. Salvation was not available for just anybody and had nothing to do with human choice."
According to Hoezee, Dekker wondered whether "perhaps the reason the CRC did not gain more converts was because it was not trying hard enough, and perhaps the reaon it was not trying harder was because the CRC had such a shrunken, restricted view of God’s love that Christian Reformed missionaries were not always sure what they could offer the average non-Christian in the first place. Dekker noted that mission workers from other denominations were able to come up to even a total stranger and say, 'Christ died for you,' thereby extending a genuine invitation for this person to believe in the Jesus who had sacrificed himself for this person. Dekker argued that the CRC’s limited view of God’s love (restricted to those already elected to be saved) meant that Reformed folks could not really say 'Christ died for you' because they could never be sure this was true."
Dekker was not swinging toward Arminianism, though. Salvation was by grace alone, he said, and "it was always the hidden, prior working of God’s Holy Spirit that moved people to receive the faith by which conversion took place."
But, Hoezee writes, "Dekker wanted to find a way to expand the denomination’s view of God’s love such that one could believe God really does love all people….to approach any and all with genuine fervor, to be able to say 'Christ died for you' without having to hedge that promise by off-putting and unwieldy theological provisos and caveats."
(An aside: Hoezee hits the nail on the head here when it comes to how we CRC folk have to filter everything through the intellect, even the irrational wonders of God, thereby causing many who grow up in the denomination, at least in decades past, to have quite a withered relationship with God, because, you know, that sort of thing sometimes means having to acknowledge that you have a heart, too. Yet the denomination's "intellectual rigor" is not something I'd ever want to give up, either.)
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.
|
