Calvinism and Wesleyanism: Predestination vs. Free Will Research Paper

Introduction

Calvinism and Wesleyanism developed a conceptually new vision and understanding of free will and predestination in religion. Calvin responded to the turbulence of his age, to the “terror of the abyss,” by seeking assurance in the order of nature. This Calvin sought order, harmony, and balance as a way of overcoming the chaos he saw all around in the collapse of the old medieval world[1]. He called upon reason and fixed principles as a way of putting up boundaries, of providing intelligibility and certainty, in the face of what appeared to be the limitless disorders and uncertainties of his time.

Main text

Calvin, the philosopher and rationalist, was a conservative seeking a way to control himself and his world. There was another side to Calvin, a radical side, that recognized the powerlessness of human beings to control life, to construct boundaries, and to build perfect systems, that saw mystery in the universe, and that came face to face at some deep inner level with the ambiguities and paradoxes of the human condition. What filled this side of Calvin with anxiety was not the chaos of his time but the feeling of being trapped, of being constrained and boxed in by the rigid systems and enclosing boundaries of the old order[2]. This was Calvin the humanist, more concerned with persuasion and its art–rhetoric–than with the neat systems and orderly arrangements of philosophy. For Calvin the heart and the affections played as important a role as the mind and reason. This dethronement of reason, and with it a hierarchical understanding of the human personality, would help make manual labor for Calvin as noble a calling as scholarly endeavors and would raise troubling questions about all social hierarchies.

The main tenets of Calvin’s ideology are total inability, unconditional election, limited atonement, efficacious grace, the perseverance of the saints[3]. The famous doctrine of predestination and election that has been so closely identified with the Reformed tradition is an attempt to express both the absolute miracle of salvation, that it comes as a free, undeserved gift, and the character of God as the Sovereign One. The belief in such a sovereign God has been a fountainhead of contrasting elements of fundamental importance in the Reformed tradition and in Reformed communities the world over. Theological affirmations, in other words, no less than contextually induced anxieties, helped to shape the antithetical impulses of the tradition[4]. On the one hand, the emphasis on the sovereignty of God has been the source of Reformed piety, the inspiration of the courage, self-sacrifice, and broad humanitarianism that has often marked the Children of Geneva. It has been this piety, and the passionate belief that God is working God’s purposes out in human history, that has inspired in Reformed communities resistance to tyranny, that has sent their members out to do battle with evil, that has made them social reformers and in some places and circumstances revolutionaries[5].

Freed from such preoccupation with personal moods and feelings, they have often given themselves to building a holy community and indeed a world that will reflect the will of God[6]. On the other hand, the passionate belief in God’s sovereignty has all too often encouraged a self-righteous, cold, and narrow sectarianism in Reformed communities–especially when they have forgotten their belief that election is a sign of grace and not of their own righteousness. The sovereignty of God has been used to justify not revolution but a vigorous defense of the status quo, emphasizing that every person has a God-given place in society with corresponding duties and privileges. With such a defense, there has often come an inward turn, a movement away from a concern for action–although action was rarely abandoned[7]. Calvin supposes:

when the will of a natural man is said to be subject to the power of the devil, so as to be directed by it, the meaning is, not that it resists and is compelled to a reluctant submission, as masters compel slaves to an unwilling performance of their commands; but that, being fascinated by the fallacies of Satan

[8]Such contrasting elements and opposing impulses have not been neatly divided or clustered within Reformed communities–a point that must be emphasized–but have lived side by side in a greater or lesser tension. Sometimes one impulse dominates while its antithesis recedes; sometimes the opposite is the case. Always the social context and the place of the Reformed community in that context have been critical factors in shaping which elements of the tradition come to the fore and which elements remain in the background. For the Reformed communities, the heart of sin is worshiping anything other than the sovereign God[9]. Sin is making a god of that which is not God. Any attempt to control God, any endeavor to equate human understanding of God with God, must be rejected as idolatry. These communities have all too often done precisely that, especially when chaos threatens and there is a need for order and boundaries. Then they have substituted their theological statements, their convictions about God or God’s causes, for God. The Reformed tradition as a movement has insisted that the Transcendent One is both hidden and completely free and cannot be manipulated by even the most pious[10].

For the Reformed communities, the transcendent, sovereign God, the hidden One, is revealed in Jesus Christ. And what is revealed in Christ is not only God’s majesty and sovereignty but a majesty and sovereignty that expresses itself in mercy and forgiveness, gracious humility and compassion. Only the sovereign, elective grace of God, they believe, can free the human soul from its bondage and bring it to rest and peace in its Creator. Grace for those in the Reformed tradition is understood as a pure gift: it comes from above as a surprise, like rain to a dry and weary land, and is not the result of any human activity[11]. The heart could and should be prepared through prayer, Bible study, worship, and a holy life for the coming of the Spirit, but the Spirit blows where it wills, and its coming is always a gracious gift from a sovereign God. Such grace is powerful and irresistible, pursuing and overwhelming the soul, cleansing it of its secret faults, and turning the heart to God[12].

For Calvin and his early followers, the emphasis on the sovereignty and providence of God was a source of comfort and strength. But for later generations, it became increasingly a source of anxiety, encouraging the Scholastic side of the tradition. How could you know if you were among the elector if you had experienced God’s grace? It was a question of “assurance,” and beginning in the seventeenth century, it became a deeply troubling question to many Reformed communities[13]. While those included among the elect are always hidden in the mystery of God’s grace, two signs, it began to be said, are present when a person experiences God’s grace. First, a person can testify to an inward experience of being touched by the Spirit of God. Persons who have experienced God’s grace know in their hearts that they have been seized by the Spirit and overwhelmed by the infinite[14]. Second, they demonstrate by a morally upright life that God has granted them grace and touched their lives. If your heart has been changed, if you have had an experience of regeneration, then you will walk in the way of the Lord[15].

In 1790 enlightenment was still most conspicuously the property of the old English Presbyterians, and led them into a conflict which was both the last of the old denominational order, and the prelude to those of the new. John Wesley insisted on keeping the system open. Moreover the teachers ran the Ridgeway Gates School according to their own rules, with little respect to the jurisdiction of Conference. The famous free-for-alls which arose from this self-conscious return to the past have disguised the degree to which the evangelicals shared in the assumptions of the enlightenment, and constituted the second channel of its influence. The one thing absolutely incredible to eighteenth-century evangelicals was the metaphysical approach to theology so characteristic of reformed theologians in the seventeenth century[16]. With astonishing speed they came round to the view that the contest between the Arminians and the Calvinists was not merely unfortunate in its effects, but utterly mistaken in principle[17].

It was system, metaphysics, which seemed to account for the unhappy embarrassments of the past, especially in regard to reprobation, and, high and low, ‘system’ became the theological swearword of the hour. Long before Newman discovered that the Bible was not a textbook of school theology[18], Simeon was pronouncing that ‘God has not revealed his truth in a system: the Bible has no system as such. Early in the nineteenth century, the dissenting ministers of Manchester ‘unanimously agreed that the best method for the spread of the Gospel was to preach in a way that the people could not discern whether they preached free will or free grace’. For when empiricism was the order of the day, there seemed little to choose between the two sides[19]. Early in the nineteenth century, the dissenting ministers of Manchester ‘unanimously agreed that the best method for the spread of the Gospel was to preach in a way that the people could not discern whether they preached free will or free grace’. For when empiricism was the order of the day, there seemed little to choose between the two sides. of the preachers, and the relations of the whole body with the Church[20]. Wesley believed in “correlated view of predestination and irresistible grace,” and he depicted the meritorious cause as one that “allowed for prevenience, free will, and universal redemption”[21]

Wesley’s desire to remain within the fold of the Church was perfectly well known, but in the last dozen years of his life he often celebrated the Lord’s Supper in large provincial chapels, and he gave preachers authority to celebrate in America and Scotland, i.e. outside the jurisdiction of the Church of England. As long as it was simply a question of the Methodists enjoying the fellowship of the ordinance together, the line might be held by modestly irregular devices of this kind. But mutual hostility between the Church and the Methodists would make it difficult to resist the demand of certain preachers for full ministerial status[22]. John Wesley supposes that it is the certain way to obtain more grace. To use all the faith you have will bring an increase of faith.”[23]

The case of Methodism suggests a different view and reveals not only an important example of the English response to the Irish situation, but a means by which Protestant opinions were disseminated from the center outwards. No English evangelical body was more closely involved with the Irish than the Methodists. Irish Methodism was vigorous and expanding, and if it was now even harder to get. After the war, as English Methodism was torn apart by social conflict, the Irish came to blows on the sacrament question. As in England in the 1790s, the majority determined to receive the sacrament from their own preachers, while in 1818 the minority separated and set up as Primitive Methodists, ‘primitive’ in this case implying that they continued to receive the sacraments within the Establishment[24].

Summary

In sum, Calvin and Wesley brought new ideas and visions to traditional interpretations of the Church and predestination. Reformed communities became moralistic and famous for their legalism and self-righteousness. Their ethic was not a gloomy, otherworldly ethic as it has sometimes been portrayed. Reformed communities have been convinced that the world God created is good, if fallen, and that history is moving, in spite of all the sins, trials, and tribulations of humanity, toward God’s coming Kingdom.

Bibliography

Basinger, D., Basinger. R. Predestination and Free Will. InterVarsity Press, 1985.

Berkouwer, G.C. Divine Election. Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1960.

Boettner, L. The Reformed Doctrine of Predestination. P & R Publishing, 1990.

Calvin, J. Institutes of the Christian Religion. Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Company; 1536, 1995.

Collins, K. J. The Theology of John Wesley: Holy Love and the Shape of Grace. Abingdon Press, 2007.

Hunter, A.M. The Teaching of Calvin Modern Interpretation. Glasgow: Maclehose, Jackson, and Company, 1920.

Foonotes

1. Hunter, A.M. The Teaching of Calvin Modern Interpretation. (Glasgow: Maclehose, Jackson, and Company, 1920): 72.
2. Boettner, L. The Reformed Doctrine of Predestination. (P & R Publishing, 1990): 33.
3. Boettner, L. The Reformed Doctrine of Predestination. (P & R Publishing, 1990), 59-60.
4. bid., 30.
5. Ibid., 33.
6. Ibid., 34.
7. Berkouwer, G.C. Divine Election. Wm. B. Eerdmans (Publishing Company, 1960), 102..
8. Calvin, J. Institutes of the Christian Religion. Wm. B. (Eerdmans Publishing Company; 1536, 1995), 32..
9. Basinger, D., Basinger. R. Predestination and Free Will. (InterVarsity Press, 1985), 29-30.
10. Ibid., 31.
11. Berkouwer, G.C. Divine Election. Wm. B. (Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1960), 37..
12. Boettner, L. The Reformed Doctrine of Predestination. (P & R Publishing, 1990), 22.
13. Ibid., 37.
14. Ibid., 29.
15. Basinger, D., Basinger. R. Predestination and Free Will. (InterVarsity Press, 1985), 29.
16. Collins, K. J. The Theology of John Wesley: Holy Love and the Shape of Grace. (Abingdon Press, 2007), 43.
17. Ibid., 44.
18. Ibid., 45.
19. Collins, K. J. The Theology of John Wesley: Holy Love and the Shape of Grace. (Abingdon Press, 2007),110.
20. Ibid., 198.
21. Ibid., 107.
22. Ibid., 134.
23. Ibid., 290.
24. Collins, K. J. The Theology of John Wesley: Holy Love and the Shape of Grace. (Abingdon Press, 2007),110.