There are really only three systems which claim to
set forth a way of salvation through Christ. They are:
(1) Universalism, — which holds that Christ
died for all men and that eventually all shall be saved, either in this life
or through a future probation. This view perhaps makes the strongest appeal to
our feelings, but is un-Scriptural, and has never been held by an organized
Christian church.
(2) Arminianism, — which holds that Christ
died equally and indiscriminately for every individual of mankind, for those
who perish no less than for those who are saved: that election is not an
eternal and unconditional act of God; that saving grace is offered to every
man, which grace he may receive or reject just as he pleases; that man may
successfully resist the regenerating power of the Holy Spirit if he chooses to
do so; that saving grace is not necessarily permanent, but that those who are
loved of God, ransomed by Christ, and born again of the Holy Spirit, may (let
God wish and strive ever so much to the contrary) throw away all and perish
eternally.
Arminianism in its radical and more fully
developed forms is essentially a recrudescence of Pelagianism, a type of
self-salvation. In fact, the ancestry of Arminianism can be traced back to
Pelagianism as definitely as can that of Calvinism be traced back to
Augustinianism. It might, perhaps, be more property called "Pelagianism,"
seeing that its principles were brought into existence nearly twelve hundred
years before Arminius was born. Pelagianism denied human depravity, and the
necessity of efficacious grace, and exalted the human will above the divine.
"Its doctrines pleased the natural palate of man, hating, as all men do hate,
the doctrine of universal depravity. To say that man could grow holy and
spotless, that he could secure God's grace, and attain to salvation by an act
of his own free will, was teaching that attracted, as it still does attract,
thousands." (Warburton, Calvinism, p. 11)
Arminianism at its best is a somewhat vague
and indefinite attempt at reconciliation, hovering midway between the sharply
marked systems of Pelagius and Augustine, taking off the edges of each, and
inclining now to the one, now to the other. Dr. A. A. Hodge refers to it as a
"manifold and elastic system of compromise." Its leading idea is that divine
grace and human will jointly accomplish the work of conversion and
sanctification,and that man has the sovereign right of accepting or rejecting.
It affirms that man is weak as a result of the fall, but denies that all
ability has been lost. Man therefore merely needs divine grace to assist his
personal efforts. Or, to put it another way, he is sick, but not dead; he
indeed cannot help himself, but he can engage the help of a physician, and can
either accept or reject the help when it is offered. He thus has power to
co-operate with the grace of God in the matter of salvation. This view exalts
man's freedom at the expense of God's sovereignty. It has some apparent, but
no real, Scripture authority, and is plainly contradicted by other parts of
Scripture.
History shows plainly that the tendency of
Arminianism is to compromise and to drift gradually from an evangelical basis.
Hence it is that to this day there has never been developed a logical and
systematic body of Arminian theology. It has, in the Methodist Church for
instance, a brief and informal creed in some twenty-five articles; but the
contrast between that statement and the carefully wrought-out Westminster
Confession is seen at a glance.
(3) The third system setting forth a way of
salvation through Christ is Calvinism. Calvinism holds that as a result of the
fall into sin all men in themselves are guilty, corrupted, hopelessly lost;
that from this fallen mass God sovereignly elects some to salvation through
Christ, while passing by others; that Christ is sent to redeem His people by a
purely substitutionary atonement; that the Holy Spirit efficaciously applies
this redemption to the elect; and that all of the elect are infallibly brought
to salvation. This view alone is consistent with Scripture and with what we
see in the world about us.
Calvinism holds that the fall left man
totally unable to do anything meriting salvation, that he is wholly dependent
on divine grace for the inception and development of spiritual life. The chief
fault of Arminianism is its insufficient recognition of the part that God
takes in redemption. It loves to admire the dignity and strength of man;
Calvinism loses itself in adoration of the grace and omnipotence of God.
Calvinism casts man first into the depths of humiliation and despair in order
to lift him on the wings of grace to supernatural strength. The one flatters
natural pride; the other is a gospel for penitent sinners. As that which
exalts man in his own sight and tickles his fancies is more welcome to the
natural heart than that which abases him, Arminianism Is likely to prove
itself more popular. Yet Calvinism is nearer to the facts, however harsh and
forbidding those facts may seem. "It is not always the most agreeable medicine
which is the most healing. The experience of the apostle John Is one of
frequent occurrence, that the little book which is sweet as honey in the mouth
is bitter in the belly. Christ crucified was a stumbling-block to one class of
people and foolishness to another, and yet He was, and is, the power of God
and the wisdom of God unto salvation to all who believe." (Mcfetridge,
Calvinism in History, p. 136)
Men constantly deceive themselves by
postulating their own peculiar feelings and opinions as moral axioms. To some
it is self-evidently true that a holy God cannot permit sin; hence they infer
that there is no God. To others it is self-evident that a merciful God cannot
permit a portion of His rational creatures to be forever the victims of sin
and misery, and consequently they deny the doctrine of eternal punishment.
Some assume that the innocent cannot justly be punished for the guilty, and
are led to deny the vicarious and substitutionary suffering and death of
Christ. And to others it is an axiom that the free acts of a free agent cannot
be certain and under the control of God, so they deny the foreordination, or
even the foreknowledge, of such acts.
We are not at liberty, however, to develop a
system of our own liking. "The question which of these systems is true," says
Dr. Charles Hodge, a zealous and uncompromising advocate of Calvinism, "is not
to be decided by ascertaining which is the more agreeable to our feelings or
the more plausible to our understanding, but which is consistent with the
doctrines of the Bible and the facts of experience." "It is the duty of every
theologian to subordinate his theories to the Bible, and teach not what seems
to him to be true or reasonable, but simply what the Bible teaches," And
again, "There would be no end of controversy, and no security for any truth
whatever, if the strong personal convictions of individual minds be allowed to
determine what is, or what is not true, what the Bible may, and what it may
not be allowed to teach." (Systematic Theology, II, pp. 356, 559, 581.)
As in the case of the other doctrines which
are common to the Christian system, there is no place in the Bible where these
distinctive Calvinistic doctrines are set forth in a systematic and complete
form. The Bible is not a work on Systematic Theology, but only the quarry out
of which the stone for such a temple can be obtained. Instead of giving us a
formal statement of a theological system it gives us a mass of raw materials
which must be organized and systematized and worked up into their organic
relations. Nowhere, for instance, do we find a formal statement of the
doctrine of the Trinity, or of the person of Christ, or of the inspiration of
the Scriptures. It gives us an account of the origin and development of the
Hebrew people and of the founding of Christianity, and the doctrinal facts are
given with little regard to their logical relations. These facts need to be
classified and arranged in a logical system and thus transformed into
theology. This fact, that the material in the Bible is not arranged in a
theological system, is in accordance with God's procedure in other realms. He
has not given us a fully developed system of biology, or astronomy, or
politics. We simply find the unorganized facts in nature and in experience and
are left to develop them into a system as best we may. And since the doctrines
are not thus presented in a systematic and formal way it is much easier for
false interpretations to arise.
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