Predestined to be miserable?
During my brief sojourn in a parish where I was the worst incumbent in living memory some of the happiest moments were in the company of a Presbyterian colleague, an old hand who had come through the worst of the Troubles, he was possessed of a dry Ulster wit and an ability to find humour in unlikely situations. Sitting at the meeting of the local Protestant clergy one morning, he decided to bait one on the Methodist ministers, a man who was sensitive and for whom life was a very serious matter.
“Tom, do you know, I have no problem in sharing fellowship with Ian, he and I are both Calvinist, our Shorter Catechism and the Thirty-Nine Articles of the Church of Ireland take the same approach;, but you Tom, you’re an Arminian and I would have trouble sharing fellowship with anyone who is a universalist.”
Tom, might have been a gentle soul, but was a good theologian, holding a doctorate from a leading United States university, and leapt to the defence of the tradition to which he belonged. The conversation broke down into laughter when he realized he had fallen for the bait.
To be honest, being Calvinist has sometimes been a position to which to retreat, sometimes a trump card to play in arguments, sometimes a barrier to raise against arguments.
Assuming a church building to be empty, I wandered in one afternoon, only to be ambushed by two ladies who were there to welcome anyone who came to pray. Perhaps I would like to worship with them the next Sunday? They had “contemporary” worship and everyone was welcome. (If they had spoken to me on the previous occasion I had been at the church, they would know I had been there before, there had been banal and repetitive choruses and not a single word of welcome from anyone). Not wishing to give offence, I said I was conservative and Calvinist and that I valued the Prayer Book and that I suspected our traditions were very different.
Calvinism is not such a problem intellectually. Combine Einstein’s idea of space-time as a continuum, of time as being something in which past, present and future are complete in a single instant, with the idea of God as someone who is outside of space and time, and one can have freewill within space-time and predestination outside it.
Calvinism can become challenging culturally, though – it can bring a dourness which throws a wet towel over every happy moment, a grimness, a compulsion to find the cloud around every silver lining. Even a beautiful late summer evening can elicit the comment, “it’s not bad for autumn time.” Sometimes being an Arminian would seem attractive.
Interesting that the predestination theory was developed at a time when the C16th expansion of the population started to hit. And troughs were occurring in the Mini Ice Age graph.
In truth though, while predestination wasn’t enunciated pre-reformation, queue jumping was the norm. If you look at the coronation of QE2 you can readily see that medieval queuing system in action.
Predestination is in the writings of Saint Paul, but those, of course, were conveniently overlooked by a church accustomed to the the power that accompanied its presumed right of dispensing salvation (and damnation) itself
Lots of bits were missed when they shoehorned a church based on the lower end of society into the imperial palace and administration.
I think I’d argue that the letters caused much of the subsequent trouble for I think Paul was explaining for inclusion to either Jews or non Jews using what they knew. A bit like the stories about the Shamrock. Only they had the issue where Christianity was seen as an offshoot of Judaism. And then you had the pesky question of innumerable mystery religions, prime of them to Mitras, hidden and with charters defining them as an Elect.
Odd, isn’t it. But now, a time when we have a vastly greater knowledge of that period, way way waaay more than Augustine or Luther, we have less people giving a hoot.
It always baffles me that for so long metaphysical issues could be the occasion of major conflicts. did the rulers really believe that it was worth fighting a war over, say, the nature of the Eucharist, or was it a convenient ground upon which to fight battles for material gain?