Letters from Arminia

Once upon a time, there was me. Me, being a good little Reformed boy knew the Heidelberg Catechism like the back of my hand. For fun, I used to page through the tune name index of the gray hymnal and looking for congruences between the Canons of Dort and the Westminster Shorter Catechism. Now I find myself in a place where none of that really matters, where we daily walk the line between the Church falling apart and staying together, and where I learn lessons everyday about how the majority of Christendom operates. This is Arminia.

Not very many towns in America are absent of some sort of Presbyterian Church. The ones that are usually have some sort of UCC or Reformed presence somewhere in their midst. Rarely, especially in Michigan, do you find a town where there is not a Reformed soul to be found. A town where the Lutherans are almost ready to close the last of their 3 churches, the baptists welcome people to town with condemning phrases from the KJV, and the Christian minority is almost entirely Catholic, Congregationalist or Wesleyan. Welcome to Greenville.

I wouldn't be surprised if I was the first Calvin Seminary student/graduate every to work in this town, of if I was the first commuter to the Calvin campus in the city's long history. Reformed thought is irrelevant here, it would seem.

Ironically, however, I would like to dissuade people from believing that Arminians are inevitably bent on their own personal choice to the exclusion of all else, that they baptize every congregant every Sunday, and that a Reformed person can get chewed up and spit out within a few Wesleyan sermons. I believe that this is untrue just as much as I believe its untrue that election is a core belief in many of our Reformed communities in this country. The Church is a melting pot, just like the US, and that might just be okay.

People often ask me how I can exist at an Arminian church. How can you reconcile your beliefs with theirs? How can you sit through a worship service, a sermon, an altar call? How do you deal with perfectionism and the like?

Many people describe my senior pastor and I as people who have "agreed to disagree" on some theological topics, and since we get along well, you might think that. However, I think the greater truth is that we both acknowledge what I wrote about in my previous blog. Calvinism and Arminianism, while both eloquent and well defended against one another, are simply a peephole into the grandness and wondrousness that is the actual theology of God, or that which God knows about himself. How we speak about God, our theology, is but a speck of dust compared to God's theology, or how he speaks about himself. If any theologian would deny that to me, I think I might have to pop him in the face.

My senior pastor, Dave, is not an hard-core Arminian. He does not believe that people can achieve perfection this side of glory, as Wesley hinted at in his later years. He's offended by determinism and fatalism, the flaws that he sees in Reformed thought, especially hyper-Calvinism. But then again, so am I. I shudder at the thought that we're just stagnated linemen on some cosmic foosball table, and I don't think its Biblical either. I like theologians, like Aquinas, who give me a way out here. They identify God as the primary actor, but do not push the ideas of election/predestination/etc. While I might confess those if you held a sword to my neck, its not necessary for my daily ministry that I push those on my laity. In fact, I think Dave and I would both say quite openly that while we're comfortable in our own theological recliners, neither of us would be surprised if, at the end of time, Jesus lays out a far different theology than anything Calvin, Wesley, Aquinas, Augustine, Luther, Chrysostom, or anyone else has laid out. Why? They're not God.

While we've come a long way from the way Calvin treated Servetus and how the Reformers treated the Anabaptists, its sad that we really still just don't get it. In communities around the world, ecumenism is broken down by theological cockiness. There are a lot of pastors and churches that just plain weird me out. Some of them are Arminian, some of them are Reformed, and some of them are so "out there" that I can't identify them. Recognize the affinity that you have with people across denominational lines because they, like you, hold up the primacy of Scripture, which is so trampled in today's world and because learn from the things they do better than you. Our church's worship library is now a fully-integrated Reformed/Wesleyan resource, and I hope the same would be true if I find myself in a Reformed congregation someday.

Few Reformed people get the opportunity that I get to see the inner workings of a solid, comparable, Arminian denomination from as up close and personal as you can get. I continue to urge as many people from both sides of the table to sit down and talk....sit down and cooperate. Often times, you will have far more in common than you think. And remember, no matter how big your allegiance to Calvin, Luther, Aquinas, or Wesley is, your greater allegiance is to the Lamb of God, who is not a follower of any of those four. Let God's theology of Himself and His Church increase as your theology of God and His Church decreases. And let all churches, Calvinistic and Arminian alike, ascent "soli deo gloria."