Beetle Bailey & Zero Debate Predestination vs. Free Will

(Warning to Readers--This is a long post so take your time and enjoy!)

In today's Beetle Bailey comic strip Beetle takes on an extreme Calvinist view of predestination while Zero responds with a Wesleyan/Arminian argument for Free Will. (click the strip to enlarge it)



As a Reformed Calvinist myself (a redundant phrase if I ever heard one!) I would ordinarily take Beetle's side in this debate. But Zero has a very good point, too.

In point of fact, the two seeming opposites, Predestination and Free Will, are not so much opposites as they are two sides of the same coin. Let me explain.

Calvin lived at a time when, at least in the Roman Catholic Church, a person's salvation depended on their relationship with the Church, with their priest, with their penance, their payment of indulgences and so much more that it was virtually impossible for a person to know whether they were saved or not! Even if they felt they were, that could change in a moment if the Church decided differently.

Both Luther and, later, Calvin both challenged this doctrinal melange as being not only a misreading of scripture but a misreading of the very nature of God.

Calvin, especially, emphasized the supreme and complete sovereignty of God. Nothing happens in all of creation unless God either wills it to happen (as in the creation event itself) or allows it to happen (as in weather conditions and human sin). Salvation itself comes as a decree from God. Those who have been saved, personally recognize that salvation through faith. In retrospect, the faithful, like St. Paul in the first chapter of Galatians, come to understand that they were called to faith before they had been born! They had been chosen by God; elected, if you will, to live and reign with him forever....a status earned on their behalf by Jesus, the Son of God, by means of his life, suffering, crucifixion, resurrection and ascension.

According to Calvin, a Christian believer who has truly claimed God's gift of salvation in Christ through faith should have absolutely no doubt concerning whether they have really been saved or not. Faith is an assurance, the Bible tells us. It is evidence that is sufficient to convict us that we belong to God forever.

This idea was central to Calvin's theology since it broke the Roman Catholic Church's "monopoly" on salvation and returned the source of that gift back to God from whence it had come in the first place! The "Church" once again became the gathered assembly, or "congregation" of God's chosen people. It ceased to be a hierarchical bureaucracy wielding Divine authority, not only holding the keys of heaven and hell but setting the rules by which a person would wind up in one of the other.

The Calvinists (who came along after Calvin himself) carried his ideas even further than he would have felt comfortable doing. Beetle Bailey takes this hardline position when he states that if a miserable future is "in the cards" then there is nothing anyone can do to change it. This attitude has as much to do with "fatalism" as it does with "predestination."

Calvin believed that this concept of predestination was true as regards to a person's salvation, of course, but not necessarily with every other aspect of a person's life. Predestination is like a river, flowing inexorably to the sea. Nothing will keep it from getting where it is going to go. Sooner or later, one way or the other, that water will reach the sea no matter what anyone might try to do to prevent it from happening.

Within that river, however, fish move about freely, swimming upstream and down, eating and sleeping at their leisure. Their freedom has limits, of course, determined by the banks of the stream and largely directed by the strength and direction of the current. For Calvin, human freedom is exercised as we engage in a spiritual journey, seeking to satisfy a hunger that the world cannot fill. For the elect, when, on this journey they encounter the true Word of God rightly proclaimed, they experience an awakening of faith that leads them to realize that God has already extended his forgiveness and saving love to them as a free and unrevokable gift.

Zero's position, on the other hand, affirms that, by the good exercise of our freedom, our pilgimage through life will lead us on the paths made straight for us by God.

This is hardly an un-Calvinist position, of course. John Bunyan, who was a tried and true Calvinist, wrote his "best-selling" book, "Pilgrim's Progress," as a graphic metaphor for that very free, but God-led life of the Elect.

For John Wesley, the situation he faced in England was completely different from what Calvin had faced in Geneva, Switzerland. 200 years earlier.

Wesley was confronted by a fossilized cultural Calvinism that had let the English upper classes to believe that their wealth, status and success were evidence not only of God's favor but of their status as the Elect as well. The poor and dispossessed were, of course, clearly those who had been (as the Westminster Confession of Faith Chapter III.3 puts it) "foreordained to everlasting death."

Wesley knew in his heart that this "doctrine" had nothing to do with the Good News of the Gospel. In his day, however, no preacher worth his salt would ever even think of preaching the Gospel to the reprobate. This would be like "casting pearls before swine," something very close to blasphemy!

Wesley, as it turned out, would have nothing to do with this kind of thinking. Instead of being tempted to hold on to the social trappings of ecclesiastical privilege, he resigned his pastoral position and, soon after, found himself preaching salvation to miners in Cornwall.

These hard-working, impoverished folks had known all their lives that the Gospel of Jesus Christ did not belong to them. They had little hope in this world and none in the next! They lived their lives according to that hopelessness, with sexual immorality, brawling, alcholism and the abandonment of families by their fathers considered to be normal and inevitable, not only by the upper classes who scorned these folks as foul and unclean, but by themselves as well.

Wesley entered that dismal scene and started a revolution of spiritual change. The Gospel was for them, he declared. It is a free gift from God BUT they must make up their own minds whether to claim it for themselves or not. Whether they entered salvation or not was up to them.

Never before had they been so empowered to make such a dramatic change in their lives. Hundreds...and then thousands....came to faith in Jesus Christ and began living out that faith in their homes and communities. The revival spread like a prairie fire. Pubs closed, Sunday became the most important day of the week, families were reconciled and, through the formation of small groups and a systematic "method" (hence the term "Methodist") of prayer and reading of the Bible, these miners not only experienced what Wesley called "justification" but made dramatic progress along the path to "sanctification" (which is another way of saying, "being conformed to the image of Christ," etc.).

Did Wesley's approach to the Gospel contradict what Calvin had preached? Of course not! Before a believers come to faith, they sincerely see themselves as holding their eternal destiny in their own hands. It does them no good to tell them that their eternal fate has already been decided by God one way or the other! If so, then why bother to make any choice at all! What difference would it make!

No, in Calvin's day, it was assumed that everyone was not only a Christian (in some way, shape or form) but had been born and baptized as a Christian. The question for them was not a matter of whether they were a believer or not, but whether they were saved or not, and by what authority.

For Wesley, there were large numbers of people who had, for generations, been born, raised, lived and died completely outside the Christian faith. For them the question was whether or not the Gospel included them at all...and, if it did, how they might claim it for themselves!

It is only AFTER one comes to faith in God's saving love through Jesus Christ that a Christian believer begins to recognize that they really had much less to say about their "choosing God" than they had once thought. In retrospect (and ONLY in retrospect) it becomes clear that the Holy Spirit has been working in their lives for a very long time, leading them and preparing them for that moment when they were, at the "right time," ready to experience the "strange warming of their heart" with faith.

This why so many say, correctly, that Arminian-inclined churches are best at bringing people into the Christian faith (because they emphasis the exercise of free will in making a "decision for Christ.")

On the other hand, it is also said that those churches who are Calvinist-inclined are best at nurturing the faithful to a deeper and richer experience of the spiritual life and an understanding of the more "mature" mysteries hidden in God's Word.

Just like Beetle and Zero, Wesleyans and Calvinists can be good friends. We need one another, in fact. In the end we are as inseparable as the "heads" and "tails" of a coin.

If that seems like a mystery in and of itself, why should that surprise you? We are, after all, talking about the things of God!

As Deuteronomy 29:29 puts it, "The secret things belong to God. But the things that are revealed belong to us and to our children forever."