I just received an e-mail from a friend asking me to help him pinpoint the problem w/ a post he found on another blog. Below is the post in question,
The blog writer tees up his quote by saying,
“When I first read this passage in 2000, I realized that I had for years been something close to a hypercalvinist, and I was committing some of the same fallacies as Hoeksema’s Protestant Reformed Church. Klaas Schilder knocked some sense into me and make me start to think covenantally. Steve Schlissel was the man who recommended him to me. This quotation was what did the trick:
“When I declare — and with the pretention of the greatest accuracy in a new binding — that election is the cause and fountain of our total salvation, then I run the danger of making someone, and later the whole church, think that if election is present then the fountain is bubbling, the cause is working, and the process is on its way. “No,” says Twissus [first prolocutor of the Westminster Assembly, and a delegate at Dort], “nothing is going on yet.” He admonished the Arminians, especially Corvinus, three times not to confuse election with the execution of election. Decree and the realization of the decree are two different matters. Election is not the cause. With election, the decree is from eternity. When I merely decide to travel to Amsterdam, then nothing as yet has happened.
The cause of my coming to Amsterdam is that I finally did put on my coat, went to the railway station, and said goodbye to the silhouette of my residence.
When I decide to do something then this decision can still change for at first I did not make a decision at all, or perhaps I would have decided something different, for instance to travel to London. But in God all decisions are unchangeable, a decision or decree therefore does not change anything in Him. Nor in us. That which causes anything in us and which is thus cause and fountain of all salvation, is something which comes in time. The causes all work with and in time…
“Man, stop,” Twissus now says, “you are forgetting that the decree, strictly speaking, is not the fountain or the cause. We do not tell our children and our people, ‘you are elect, for that is what your baptism indicates and you may now conclude that the stream of God’s clear healing water has started to flow.’ No,” says Twissus, “you Arminians forget one thing. The doctrine of election is not a doctrine of causes or fountains. Causes and fountains only occur in history, in what God started in this world. For instance, and that certainly in the first place, the preaching of the Word is a cause and a fountain. That is where the fountain starts to spout water. There the cause is working…
Consequently we do not make people rely upon election, as ground and fountain, but upon the Word.”
Our earnest writer ends with this tag on line,
“I would only add, “and the sacraments” to the end of the last paragraph
Now, I take the time to examine this not only to help my friend who e-mailed me but also in order to get at some of that which drives the Federal Vision error. The following mentions some of the problems w/ the above quote.
1.) The primary problem here is that it confuses ultimate causation with proximate causation. In matters of salvation the ultimate cause is election but that reality doesn’t negate that Word and Sacrament are proximate causes in their own right.
2.) The decision illustration does not work. The beginning point is the decision to do something or not do something. All else results from that decision. If I decide to go to Amsterdam and then change my mind and go to London instead that change still was caused by a change in my decision. Now, the whole notion that we can somehow divorce God’s ultimate causal decree of election that ends with the elect being saved from the God’s decree that the proximate causal means to that end is Word and Sacrament is to divorce heat and light from the Sun. A trip to a Tulip Festival in Amsterdam has both the ultimate cause of making the decision to go and the proximate cause of actually going and continuing to go. Plainly speaking, such divorcing of decree from execution of decree which leads to a prioritizing over the execution of decree over the decree itself, as if the execution could happen w/o the decree, is stupid.
3.) It is not hyper-calvinism to believe passages like Ephesians 1:3-13. It is not hyper-calvinism to believe that what happens in time is pinioned on what God decreed. What is hyper-calvinism is to believe that the decree itself is the accomplishment of the decree. Now I freely admit that there are Calvinist out there who, pragmatically speaking, operate the way our blog writer speaks of but it does us no good to call the belief that time is conditioned by eternity hyper-calvinism.
4.) That which may be being reacted to by Twissus, and later Schilder, and still later by Schlissel and the Federal Visionists is the tendency by some Reformed people to treat predestination and election like Muslims treat Fate. There have been times when the Reformed have been properly referred to as the “frozen chosen.” There have been times in the Reformed Church when being saved meant having your “I’ve been baptized” Union card. But the cure to Reformed people treating predestination and election the same way that Muslims treat fate is not by suggesting that God’s decrees aren’t causal. The way to defeat Reformed views of predestination that end up getting translated as Islamic fate is by emphasizing that God works in history through His covenant people crafting and shaping history just as he has worked outside of history and that God, as He who decrees, is not divorced from God who rules, governs and sustains this world.
5.) If we teach that God’s decrees aren’t the ultimate cause of all that happens we cut the animating nerve between God’s commands and our compliance. For example, it is because of my certainty that God has decreed that all the nations will come to Christ and that the earth will flower again with the success of the Gospel that has me contending for just that. It is my certainty that God has decreed my increasing conformity to Christ that has me seeking to comply with God’s command for that and so finds me attending to the proximate causes for sanctification in Word and Sacrament.
In the end what we have here, once again, is the desire to over-react to a over-reaction. We don’t beat hyper-calvinism by embracing hypo-calvinism. We beat hyper-calvinism by meat and potatoes garden variety calvinism.
Amen!