Confronting Five-Point Calvinism (Interpreter: A Journal of Mormon Scripture Book 4)

I am in full agreement with Olson on these matters. Those in debt to Augustine, of course, celebrate what they call free will. They insist that the human will is free to do as one desires, but they also insist all desires are strictly given to human beings and hence are firmly determined by God. So from this perspective one is merely free to do what one was predestined to desire. This is clearly not what the Saints know as moral agency. The Augustinian legacy has thus, it seems, led Calvinists to picture human beings as puppets in the hands of an all-powerful, inscrutable First Thing that created everything, including both space and time, out of nothing and that in a full sense caused everything, including even the moral evils, that humans encounter in this often troubling, fallen world.

Insisting on divine sovereignty in such a very loud voice may end up actually demeaning the divine. This problem seems to me to stem from a fascination with what is now sometimes called classical theism, where what is attributed to God makes it impossible for him to be loving, gentle, and merciful.

But most conservative Protestants, despite the abstract distant figure sketched by classical theism, when they face evils in this disconsolate world, end up pleading with a God who is not passive, but fully passionate and both can and will listen and respond to those who genuinely turn to him for mercy and consolation, as well as hope beyond the miseries of this world and of the grave. All of this, in addition to classical theism and the great ecumenical [Page 91] creeds, lurks behind or flows from the TULIP ideology against which Olson now remonstrates.

I have urged the Saints to consult his books, which include the following, some of which I have previously reviewed favorably:. Grenz 20th Century Theology: The Story of Christian Theology: Hall The Trinity Eerdmans, Though I have not published a review of this book, I have often recommended it to Latter-day Saints who are often faced with critics who seem to spout the Sabellian or modalist heresy, at least when they attack the faith of the Saints.

The Mosaic of Christian Belief: And I am pleased to recommend to Latter-day Saints readers his impressive Against Calvinism , which is a useful book for all those interested in one of the contending versions of historical and contemporary Protestant dogmatic theology. Stewart, Ten Myths about Calvinism: IVP Academic, , Olson has had more to say about this elsewhere.

See his Arminian Theology and related commentary below. Thanks for the concise and pointed review, Lou. It is reassuring to know that other Christians are constructively engaged in the discussion with our five-point friends. I am pleased that this little review has been both noticed and appreciated.

For several reasons I find this kind of conservative Protestant literature both interesting and valuable. We can and should learn from encounters with solid evangelical scholarship. This shows that god has not chosen a select few to be the Elect and the rest damned.

See also 2 Jn. Hi Lou… Calvinism is a terrible doctrine.

I was very involved in it for awhile. But, what I really wanted to ask you about was this comment you made in your article…. This is so true, but I have, recently, thought this could also be true of the God of the Old Testament, who seems very authoritative and commits horrible acts of destruction against various peoples.

I really struggle with that. I did enjoy reading your article. Calvinism turns people into puppets and completely takes away any responsibility for anything man does.

How can God punish people who have no choice but to sin? No choice, unless they are chosen by Him. Takes away all culpability from man and puts it on God. When I indicated that Calvinist stress divine sovereignty ends up demeaning God, I did not have in mind the stories found in the Old Testament that describe such things as divine retribution for sin, some of which are grim from our current perspective. Calvinists, of course, find proof texts in these accounts to support their theology, but TULIP is not derived from historical narratives.

Elements of classical theism as laid down by theologians and churchman and to some extent frozen in the great ecumenical creeds and later confession are the background assumptions of the Calvinist insistence on turning God into a puppet-master in which human beings are predestined to do what they do at the moment of creation out of nothing. Five-Point Calvinism is one of the unfortunate conclusions flowing from and dependent upon classical theism; it is an rigorous effort to generate a coherent account of God understood as a First Thing that explains everything.

It is not, however, taught in the Gospels or the fruit of an actual encounter with a divine friend and merciful companion, since Calvinists have most often closed the door to divine special revelations other than those reported in the New Testament. There is a certain logic to all of this. A First Cause or Prime Mover is not the responsive, forgiving, loving, caring friend of human beings, but an explanation for the way things are and cannot but be—hence predestination and so forth. Those who adopt a TULIP-type theology are, in my experience, certain that they were chosen at the moment of creation.

Those who hold a competing understanding of divine and human things were not so fortunate. This stance seems to me to be an exercise in human pride, despite the very low opinion of human potential and worth built into Calvinism and its ideological roots. I would be more sympathetic with those who insist on TULIP if they would indicate that some who entertain their understanding of divine things were themselves not predestined to salvation, but for no reason whatever, other than the inscrutable will of God, destined to be enemies of God from the moment time and space were created out of nothing.

However, I respect the often deep piety of Calvinists far too much to believe what they say. I suspect that even a most ardent Five-Point Calvinist, when faced with the evils of this world, and in desperation approaches God in prayer, hopes and even expects that God is not as is pictured in Calvinist theology, but is, instead, a passionate, loving sentient moral agent genuinely able to listen and respond to desperate pleadings.

They may, with me and most other Christians, have a hope that the Holy One of Israel will take pity on our suffering, and perhaps even mercifully change for the better the way things will eventually turn out. Put another way, even Calvinists, I trust, sometimes long for God to do things their theology renders impossible or even ridiculous.

This is true despite a theology that does not permit a merciful response from the God of their theology. Skip to main content. Log In Sign Up. Joseph Smith in Hermeneutical Crisis. Smith Marvin Hill argued in that the fundamental problem early Mormonism was designed to address was the problem of plural- ism. Pluralism, according to Hill, caused a situation of social disin- tegration and insecurity to which Mormons hoped to bring stab- ility and uniformity.

These religious divisions, in turn, arose largely from diver- gent readings of the Bible. Although Joseph Smith did endeavor to create political and institutional unity, his more fundamental project was to create re- ligious unity.

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Reli- gious divisions were blamed on the interference of creeds and au- thorities with the common sense reading of the Bible. Many be- lieved that, if interpretation could be democratized, Christian unity would be the natural result. Actually, however, in the highly democratic environment of the early nineteenth century, inter- pretations of the Bible only multiplied, and new denominations only proliferated.

The religious foundation of Protestant America turned out to be so much shifting sand, and the viability of the na- tion itself seemed threatened. Put another way, early nineteenth-century Protestant America was a nation in hermeneutical crisis. More frightening still was the challenge posed by rationalism, which threatened to do away with biblical authority altogether.

Joseph Smith ad- dressed such concerns by an appeal to special revelation, by which he authoritatively clarified and interpreted the Bible for a nine- teenth-century audience, with special attention to resolving con- tradictions and to creating continuity in salvation history. The Smiths Confront the Crisis When Joseph Smith was born in Sharon, Vermont, on Decem- ber 23, , it was not to a virgin; there were no portents in the stars to let the world know that a prophet had been born.

But if the fates did not move the heavens for the infant prophet, it may be because they were too busy moving the earth. His maternal grandfather, Solomon Mack, had spent most of his life as an atheist. The religious rift in the family widened when their eldest son, Alvin, died in Joseph Smith in Hermeneutical Crisis 89 main a member of no church all religious people will say I am of the world; and, if I join some one of the different denominations, all the rest will say I am in error. No church will admit that I am right, except the one with which I am associated.

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This makes them witnesses against each other; and how can I decide in such a case as this, seeing they are all unlike the church of Christ, as it existed in former days! In the first half of the nineteenth century, the domi- nant American epistemology was what historians have termed Scottish Common Sense Realism. According to this perspective, the facts of scripture must be inductively observed, collected, and studied according to the same rules that scientists of the time employed in studying the natural world.

It emphasized that the senses provide direct and uncomplicated knowledge of the real world and that virtually anyone is capable of apprehending and understanding the facts of the Bible and nature. One important Common Sense interpreter was the restora- tionist preacher Alexander Campbell. He believed that the plurality of interpretations re- sulted from a lack of objectivity. Instead of relying on common sense and scientific principles, people were reading the Bible through the lenses of creeds, systems, and authorities.

The way to restore Christian unity was to discard all such lenses and to make biblical interpretation a free, democratic, and scientific affair. Joseph Smith in Hermeneutical Crisis 91 philological criticism were out of reach for the vast majority of nineteenth-century Americans, and their spiritual vision was not so sound as to overcome this deficiency.

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The lesson that took the Campbellites decades to learn Joseph Smith learned as a teenager. Amid the chaos of a Palmyra revival, Smith consulted the Bible and concluded, as had his parents be- fore him, that there was no true church on the earth. As visions, prophecies, and other miraculous experiences proliferated, a vigorous national debate erupted between proponents of the revivals and their establish- ment anti-revivalist critics. This war was waged in both Calvinist and Arminian circles with equal vehemence.

He apparently did not consider his vision, which in the earliest accounts sounds like a fairly typical conversion experience of that period, to be unprec- edented or out of keeping with the religious climate of his day. Radical prophets like Ann Lee, theological liberals like the Universalist Caleb Rich, and even illiterate blacks whose names are lost to history all claimed to have received by special rev- elation the true interpretation of the scriptures.

They denounced dreams and visions with the same vehe- mence that the visionaries directed against the creeds. Perhaps without intending to, Joseph Smith had become a combatant in one of the most bitter theological conf licts of his day. The side of this conf lict that the young Prophet had chosen, however, was a clamor of competing voices.



Joseph Smith in Hermeneutical Crisis 93 ble truly meant. Joseph Smith needed to find a way to privilege his own revealed knowledge over that of the other competitors. He initially accomplished this goal by grounding it in concrete ob- jects: None of them ever succeeded in obtaining any treasures, despite many expeditions.

Joseph nevertheless proved exceptionally talented at demonstrating his scrying abili- ties to neighbors by describing distant locations that he had seen in his stone and by finding lost objects. At the trial of Joseph Jr. Similarly, Smith apparently took the biblical Urim and Thum- mim as a precedent for the seer stones that his father and neigh- bors used. If the family really believed that Joseph Jr. Whatever other knowledge Joseph could obtain through his keys, the function upon which he soon fixated was the translation and interpretation of ancient records.

He was equally determined to correct problems of transmission and interpretation 1 Ne. Joseph Smith in Hermeneutical Crisis 95 Smith continued to claim the keys to authoritatively interpret the Bible until the end of his life. Significantly, however, the claim underwent a subtle transformation over time. The motivation for this change from tangible to intangible keys seems partly that, as his audience broadened beyond the folk religious circles of his youth, his involvement in magic became a public relations liabil- ity.

Partly, however, it is because he no longer needed concrete ob- jects to ground his hermeneutical privilege. His vigorous per- sonal charisma as a prophet had eclipsed the props of seership. Closing the Distance The plurality of biblical readings that had so bewildered the young Joseph Smith largely resulted from the psychic distance be- tween the readers and authors of the biblical text. Most nine- teenth-century interpreters took for granted that the goal of read- ing a text is to understand the meaning its author intended. The greater the cultural and linguistic distance between readers and authors, the more difficult interpretation becomes.

For nineteenth-century inter- preters of the Bible, the distance was vast. Schleiermacher, like Campbell, was aware of this problem and hoped to close the psychic distance between readers and authors by means of careful historical and philological work. He argued that only by painstakingly reading and rereading the biblical texts can interpreters hope to gradually and imperfectly bring their pre-understandings into agreement with those of the authors. Joseph Smith, too, had found in divination a remedy for his distance from the biblical authors.

He acquired and employed historical-critical and linguistic tools in his biblical interpretation, such as the writings of Josephus and a knowledge of ancient Hebrew. He produced three different versions of the Genesis creation narra- tive, for example, each departing from its predecessor in subtle but very significant ways. To a large degree the Book of Mormon can be read as a witness and support for the Bible. It has a strongly biblical f lavor; it is couched, in fact, in the Jacobean idiom of the King James Bible. The pro- phetic passages, especially, are recontextualized and reinterpreted in light of latter-day events.

We have none; for. Joseph framed his concerns about the difficulty of biblical in- terpretation in terms of translation. Thus the Book of Mormon at once challenged and rescued the notion that Common Sense can en- able anyone to easily understand the Bible. The Bible was diffi- cult to understand in its present form, but the Book of Mormon would translate its message into plain, nineteenth-century lan- guage.

Later in his career, Smith actually produced his own inspired translation of the Bible in cooperation with Sidney Rigdon.

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Smith was not the first to make this accusation. Paine also as- serted that the Bible was created by a majority vote and that it was only on this authority that several books were rejected. Joseph Smith in Hermeneutical Crisis 99 quoted in the Book of Mormon from Isaiah follow the King James Version word for word, but in the other half are hundreds of appar- ently deliberate revisions. Some, for example, are concerned to fill theological or narrative gaps.

For example, Joseph addressed the discrepancies between Genesis 1 and 2, by making Genesis 1 a spiritual pre-creation event, while Genesis 2 referred to the physical creation. Michael Marquardt has identified New Testament quotations in the portion of the Book of Mormon that was supposedly written in the pre-Christian era. Philip Barlow has suggested that this phenomenon was an expression of the Enlightenment assumption that truth is unchanging. He held to a very f lexible ethic,83 intro- duced new scriptures and doctrines, and eventually taught a doc- trine of eternal progression.

He also held, like many Protestants of his day, that history could be understood as a series of pro- gressive dispensations. Though there have been many dispensations, the same core truths have been taught in all of them, and the same symbols and events have recurred over and over again. This union of stasis and progress was also a union of ancient and modern. Mormon restorationism, with its radical reenact- ment of biblical narratives and its appropriation of biblical polity, sought the identification of readers and authors to a degree that Protestant interpreters like Campbell and Schleiermacher never conceived.

Joseph radically thrust together the worlds of the bibli- cal patriarchs and his own nineteenth-century American follow- ers. It was perhaps the most thoroughgoing and successful of his several strategies to close the psychic distance and to facilitate interpretation for his followers. Conclusion Joseph Smith witnessed in his culture and family the divisive effects of a crisis of authority that sprang from the inadequacy of Common Sense hermeneutical assumptions. Rather than try to alter these deeply rooted cultural assumptions, he used his own complement of prophetic tools to reshape biblical history and to craft it into the kind of consistent, coherent, and easily under- standable narrative that the Common Sense philosophy pre- dicted.

By these means he hoped to restore unity in the face of theological and social disintegration. Joseph Smith in Hermeneutical Crisis debatable. At the very least, however, he did succeed in making biblical interpretation seem simple and straightforward to his fol- lowers. Thus, despite his initial skepticism about the adequacy of Common Sense, he rescued it in the end.

Hill, Quest for Refuge: Signature Books, , xi. Grant Underwood has leveled a similar criticism against those who see Mormon millenarianism as a reaction to economic and political deprivation. Underwood sees Mormonism as a protest against a funda- mentally spiritual kind of deprivation: University of Illinois Press, , The Life of Joseph Smith, 2d ed.

Knopf, , Yale University Press, , 3—1, — Dan Vogel, Joseph Smith: