After being a born-again Christian for five years, one night by God’s providence I was introduced to Reformed theology, what some call Calvinism. In its broad contours it goes back to the great Bishop of Hippo (North Africa), Augustine (354-430), who emphasized man’s inability to save himself and God’s sovereignty in our salvation from sin. If you read through his Confessions, it’s clear who’s in the driver’s seat when it comes to God saving him from pride and paganism. I remember forty years ago like it was yesterday, going home that night after this introduction and opening my Bible to Ephesians. The gentlemen I’d just met and who would become a friend with profound influence on my life, suggested I read it, especially the first two chapters.
Up to that point, unlike Augustine, I saw my salvation and relationship to Christ as something where I was basically in the driver’s seat, and I clearly shouldn’t have been allowed on the road. I couldn’t have explained any of this given I had no understanding of theology, but that night as I read Ephesians, I saw it immediately and wondered how I’d missed it all those years. Now, instead of seeing my Christian faith in black and white, all of sudden it was in color, or having been trying to read about my faith in a foreign language and coming across an English translation; it all made sense now. Instead of me seeking after God and trying to be a good Christian, The Hound of Heaven had been seeking me and transforming my heart from within. Jonathan Edwards said our seeking and finding God doesn’t happen after a search on our part, but that our seeking and finding him starts with him seeking and saving us. This was upside down and inside out from how I perceived things just earlier that same day.
Chosen and predestined in Christ: Spiritual Resurrection from the Dead
I’d probably read these words of Paul several times but somehow missed that God chose us in Christ before the creation of the world—I didn’t choose him; I couldn’t have, I wasn’t born yet! I realized my choosing him was because he first chose me; he initiated, I responded. That’s the way it always is in our relationship to God. As Paul says, God pre-determined, or predestined us, to be adopted as his sons through Christ, to be his heirs, even before we were born. I had nothing to do with any of it because it was all of his unmerited favor. And again, Paul says we were chosen because we were predestined, and that God had this all planned that it might happen “in conformity with the purpose of his will.”
All I could think of as I was reading and meditating on these words, as if for the first time, was the picture my new friend shared with me about how I might understand this process. I used to see salvation as if I were drowning in a pool, bobbing up and down in the water crying out for help. The gospel was the life preserver someone threw to me, I grabbed it and was saved! But now I realized I’d actually been dead, at the bottom of the pool, and God had to supernaturally raise me spiritually from dead, bring me to spiritual life so I could believe, so I could trust in Christ. This radical change in orientation, in perspective, changed everything for me.
Reading Ephesians 1 and 2 more than forty years later brings all that vividly back to life, and I see more than ever how The Hound of Heaven has molded and shaped me, transformed me, sometimes kicking and screaming, but wonderfully, amazingly, incredibly. I now see soteriology, our salvation from sin, not just as the immediate grace given to open our once blind eyes to God’s mercy and Christ’s merits for us, but as the lifelong transformation process we were promised in Christ. We are told that was Christ’s mission when Joseph was given his name, Jesus, by the angel in a dream (Matt. 1):
21 She will give birth to a son, and you are to give him the name Jesus, because he will save his people from their sins.”
I come back to this verse repeatedly because to me it says it all: he will save us, not try, not offer, not make it possible, but actually save us from our sins. This salvation, as the great hymn Rock of Ages says, is the double cure for sin from both its guilt and power. Reading Ephesians again reminded me that salvation is primarily about God and his work for, in, and through us. It’s not about me!
Ephesians 2 makes the contrast even more obvious. Paul brings death into the picture, and not merely as a metaphor, but as a spiritual reality. He tells us we are dead in our “transgressions and sins,” bottom of the pool, not flailing away in the deep end. Because of the way we lived, we were “by nature deserving of wrath.” Because we were unrepentant sinners, God was our judge, jury, and executioner. Then there is a world transforming conjunction, a “but” to reveal our transformation to a new life, all by the power of God. We had literally zero to do with it, and I will quote the full passage:
4 But because of his great love for us, God, who is rich in mercy, 5 made us alive with Christ even when we were dead in transgressions—it is by grace you have been saved. 6 And God raised us up with Christ and seated us with him in the heavenly realms in Christ Jesus, 7 in order that in the coming ages he might show the incomparable riches of his grace, expressed in his kindness to us in Christ Jesus. 8 For it is by grace you have been saved, through faith—and this is not from yourselves, it is the gift of God— 9 not by works, so that no one can boast. 10 For we are God’s handiwork, created in Christ Jesus to do good works, which God prepared in advance for us to do.
Paul could not be clearer that a resurrection from the dead is the spiritual reality of salvation. And not an escape by the hair of our chinny chin chin, but raised up to a royal position in Christ to the very right hand of God! And if Paul could not be any more explicit, he says, “and this is not from yourself.” I’ve heard people say since it’s a gift then we have the choice to accept or reject it, but nobody rejects the gift of a king. If it were because of our choice, then we would have something in which to boast. Look how smart I am; I made this choice and you didn’t. Regardless of what anyone’s theology is, everyone knows our salvation is the providential sovereign work of Almighty God. Nevertheless, Christians thinking they are making it “fair,” insist we must have the ability to accept or reject the offer. Dead people do not have that choice.
The History of a Man Centered Faith: How We Got Here
When I was a young Christian I would never have said my faith was “man centered,” but that was the implication of the theology I didn’t even know I had. I believed I was drowning in my sin, not dead in it, when God saved me. Once I became a Christian I believed that accountability implies ability, that if God commands something we have the innate ability to do it. Ever since Augustine, and even before, no Christian believed, nor did the Catholic Church teach, that we had the innate ability to obey God’s law. Despite much Protestant invective against Catholicism over the centuries, the Catholic church has never taught we can be saved by our obedience to the law. Grace is thought of differently in Catholic theology, but it is still grace.
No, the blame for a man centered faith rests at the feet the Protestants. After Luther and Calvin set the Reformation on a thoroughly Augustinian trajectory, the Arminians in the 17th century started to push back against that. They still defended the grace of God in salvation, but they had opened to door to Christians seeing salvation as primarily about our faith, our choices, our decisions, about us. Those things are of course involved, but they are only in response to the mighty resurrection power Paul talks about in chapter 1:
18 I pray that the eyes of your heart may be enlightened in order that you may know the hope to which he has called you, the riches of his glorious inheritance in the saints, 19 and his incomparably great power for us who believe. That power is the same as the mighty strength 20 he exerted when he raised Christ from the dead and seated him at his right hand in the heavenly realms.
When Jesus raised Lazarus from the dead it was a one-way deal, as is our salvation. That deal not only saves us from God’s wrath and the guilt of sin, but also from its power in our lives, what we know as sanctification. If we are one of God’s chosen ones he came to save from our sins, that’s going to happen whether we like it or not. And since God’s law is now written on our hearts, we will like it very much.
By the time of the First Great Awakening in the mid-18th century the cracks in the providential sovereign salvation damn began to form. It would become much more apparent in the Second Great Awakening a hundred years later, but our choosing and less God’s saving power began to be emphasized. Slowly but surely the focus shifted and now it was up to us. John Wesley was the theological turning point. He despised Calvinism and decided to lose his friendship with Whitfield over it. He believed that perfect holiness was attainable for the Christian, and that meant the Christian would not commit any known sin. You can’t get much more man centered than that. Holiness in the Christian life basically came down to our will, which is a fragile piece of machinery upon which to base the Christian life.
As the 19th century developed, Wesley’s influence could be seen far outside of the fields of Methodism, the movement and denomination he essentially founded. The various strains of Evangelical Christianity that participated in the Second Great Awakening fully embraced the Wesleyan understanding of Christianity. What came to be called Revivalism embraced a salvation that turned on a person’s decision. Each human being in this understanding has “free will,” so we are able to accept or reject the offer. Out of this Awakening several strains of Wesleyan perfectionism developed known as Holiness Movements like The Higher Christian life and Victorious Christian Living. The great 19th century evangelist D.L. Moody put it perfectly: “Whatever the sin is, make up your mind that you will gain victory over it.”
That didn’t seem to work real well for me because I was in two minds about sin, and in many ways I still am. If defeating sin is about “making up my mind,” I may as well check out before I begin. That was basically the first five years of my Christian life, and it was a constant battle against guilt and shame. Even in the late 70s and into the 80s, perfectionism was still in the Evangelical air I was breathing, and I was not pulling it off to say the least. I’m currently reading Augustine’s Confessions, and this was the battle he experienced more before he became a Christian. Whenever it happens, it’s a battle for all Christians. Paul shares the same struggle in Romans 7 and asks, “Who will rescue me from this body of death?” His answer?
25 Thanks be to God, who delivers me through Jesus Christ our Lord!
But thanks be to God because he planned a salvation in Christ for his people that wasn’t up to us or our wills or abilities, but up to his resurrection power, and the Holy Spirit whom he would send to live in his people, as John says, to “tabernacle among them.” Our enduring faith is nothing less than God dwelling with us, in us, his people, now and forever.
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