“A Puritan confronted by failure and ambivalence could find his faith justified by the experience, could feel that the world had answered his expectations.”

Marilynne Robinson writes:

“The Calvinist doctrine of total depravity—’depravity’ means ‘warping or distortion’—was directed against casuistical enumerations of sins, against the attempt to assign them different degrees of seriousness. For Calvinism, we are all absolutely, that is equally, unworthy of, and dependent upon, the free intervention of grace. This is a harsh doctrine, but no harsher than others, since Christian tradition has always assumed that rather few would be saved, and has differed only in describing the form election would take. It might be said in defense of Christianity that it is unusual in a religion to agonise much over these issue of ultimate justice, though in one form or another every religion seems to have an elect.

The Calvinist model at least allows for the mysteriousness of life. For in fact life makes goodness much easier for some people than for others, and it is rich with varieties of cautious or bland or malign goodness, in the Bible referred to generally as self-righteousness, and inveighed against as grievous offenses in their own right. The belief that we are all sinners gives us excellent grounds for forgiveness and self-forgiveness, and is kindlier than any expectation that we might be saints, even while it affirms the standards all of us fail to attain.

A Puritan confronted by failure and ambivalence could find his faith justified by the experience, could feel that the world had answered his expectations. We have replaced this and other religious visions with an unsystematic, uncritical and in fact unconscious perfectionism, which may have taken root among us while Stalinism still seemed full of promise, and to have been refreshed by the palmy days of National Socialism in Germany, by Castro and Mao—the idea that society can and should produce good people, that is, people suited to life in whatever imagined optimum society, who then stabilise the society in its goodness so that it produces more good people, and so on. First the bad ideas must be weeded out and socially useful ones be put in their place. Then the bad people must be identified, especially those that are carriers of bad ideas. Societies have done exactly the same thing from motives they considered religious, of course. But people of advanced views believe they are beyond that kind of error, because they have not paused to worry about the provenance or history of these advanced views. Gross error survives every attempt at perfection, and flourishes. No Calvinist could be surprised. No reader of history could be surprised…

Optimists of any kind are rare among us now. Rather than entertaining visions, we think in terms of stopgaps and improvisations. A great many of us, in the face of recent experiences, have arrived with a jolt at the archaic-sounding conclusion that morality was the glue holding society together, just when we were in the middle of proving that it was a repressive system to be blamed for all our ills.”

(“Puritans and Prigs” in The Death of Adam, pp. 155-159)

Christians who are “postmillennial” (the gospel of Christ will continue to take cultural ground and finally be vindicated in history) are not wearing rose-coloured glasses. Postmill not only understands the strength of the gospel through the Spirit of Christ as the true mortar that builds Christian culture, it is not disheartened by the failures of a Christian culture that attempts further progress without Christ. Because this is also, in fact, vindication of the gospel. In the big picture, just as it is in any Christian’s life, this realistic—messy—process of trial and error is part of humanity’s growth to maturity. The gospel-leaven will eventually fill the whole lump as Christ promised.

A postmillennial Calvinism is a realistic optimism.

“Not by might, nor by power, but by my Spirit,” says the Lord. (Zechariah 4:6)

(See also A Priesthood of All Believers Can Be Messy – 1.)

“For if we sin wilfully after that we have received the knowledge of the truth, there remaineth no more sacrifice for sins” - Hebrews 10:26

NOTE: THIS POST HAS BEEN REMIXED AND INCLUDED IN GOD’S KITCHEN.

Did Christ die for all? If Jesus’ blood was not shed for all, how can it possibly be a sin to “trample it underfoot” as the unbelieving Jews did? (Hebrews 10:29)

Elijah set up a 12 stone altar as a substitute for Israel. The sacrifice ascended to the Lord (goat #1) and the prophets were slain (goat #2). Thus, the Baal worship was atoned for.

But Jezebel trampled this sacrifice underfoot, and continued in sin. In retaliation, she slew the prophets that Obadiah had hidden. Consequently she was trampled underfoot. (2 Kings 9:33).

The New Testament history, including the Revelation, follows this pattern. Jesus set up a new 12 apostle priesthood and Israel slew Him and them. Consequently, Israel was slain, as Jezebel. That is the context of the Hebrews passage, and the meaning of the harlot of Babylon.

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[1] Loraine Boettner, Limited Atonement.
[2] James B. Jordan, The Offertory, RITE REASONS No. 97. Available from www.biblicalhorizons.com. The debates about whether the Ark-cover was for propitiation or expiation miss the point.

P.S. The expressions on the faces of the servants in the image above indicates that the artist thought they were believers, not just obedient servants. Now that is an excommunication. Perhaps they feared an evaluation by the Lord such as in Revelation 2:20: “Nevertheless I have a few things against you, because you allow that woman Jezebel, who calls herself a prophetess, to teach and seduce My servants to commit sexual immorality and eat things sacrificed to idols.”

Doctrines had to be defined within strict limits, even in order that man might enjoy general human liberties. The church had to be careful, if only that the world might be careless.

This is the thrilling romance of Orthodoxy. People have fallen into a foolish habit of speaking of orthodoxy as something heavy, humdrum, and safe. There never was anything so perilous or so exciting as orthodoxy. It was sanity: and to be sane is more dramatic than to be mad. It was the equilibrium of a man behind madly rushing horses seeming to stoop this way and to sway that yet in every attitude having the grace of statuary and the accuracy of arithmetic.

The church in its early days went fierce and fast with any warhorse; yet it is utterly unhistoric to say that she merely went mad along one idea, like a vulgar fanaticism. She swerved to left and right, so exactly as to avoid enormous obstacles. She left on one hand the huge bulk of Arianism, buttressed by all the worldly powers to make Christianity too worldly. The next instant she was swerving to avoid an orientalism, which would havemade it too unworldly.

The orthodox church never took the tame course or accepted the conventions; the orthodox church was never respectable. It would have been easier to have accepted the earthly power of th Arians. It would have been easy, in the Calvinistic seventeenth century, to fall into the bottomless pit of predestination. It is easy to be a madman; it is easy to be a heretic. It is always easy to let the age have its head; the difficult thing is to keep one’s own. It is always easy to be a modernist; as it is easy to be a snob. To have fallen into any of those open traps of error and exaggeration which fashion after fashion and sect after sect set along the historic path of Christendom — that would indeed have been simple. It is always simple to fall; there are an infinity of angles at which one falls, only one at which one stands.

To have fallen into any one of the fads from Gnosticism to Christian Science would indeed have been obvious and tame. But to have avoided them all has been one whirling adventure; and in my vision the heavenly chariot flies thundering through the ages, the dull heresies sprawling and prostrate, the wild truth reeling but erect.

G. K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy , 146-147.