I’m really glad I’m not one of those people,” I thought to myself. The year was, I think, 1978 and I was 12 years old and in the 6th grade.
So what was it I was glad I wasn’t? Just who were those people?
Calvinists. Yes, the dreaded Calvinists
You see, I was reading my history textbook. You know, the kind of big, thick general history textbooks we used to have. The ones that started out talking about the Sumerians and ended somewhere around WWII.
This particular textbook had managed to find room for a paragraph or two on the Protestant Reformation. Part of me is tempted to blast the textbook writers for devoting one or two lousy paragraphs to the greatest Christian movement since the days of the apostles. But when I think about it, I shouldn’t be too harsh on them. After all, at least they mentioned the Reformation. I’m not sure if textbooks today would do even that. Further, the textbook writers managed to get at least one important detail right: the importance the Calvinists laid on of the doctrine of election.
It was the doctrine of election that offended me. It struck me as insufferable arrogant. To me, it sounded as if the Calvinists thought they were God’s chosen people because they were innately better than everyone else. Of course, that’s not what Calvinists taught then or teach now. But that was my assumption. Calvinists believed then and believe now that no one is worthy of God’s grace. That’s why it’s called grace! If sinners were in some way worthy of God’s grace, then grace would no longer be grace.
But I didn’t understand that then and wouldn’t until many years later.
I was a church kid growing up. Looking back on it, I believed many true things about God, but I didn’t know the Gospel of Justification by Faith (Belief) Alone.
One of the points I was confused on, and it’s a very common point of confusion in American evangelicalism, is the relationship between regeneration and faith.
In my 12-year-old self’s understanding, I thought that I first had to believe before I could be regenerated.
I’ll come back to this thought later, but for now, let’s leave it at that.
Fast forward a few years and I’m in high school. If you had asked me if I was a Christian, I would have told you yes. But I wasn’t for the reason I mentioned about, I did not know about, so could not believe, the doctrine of Justification by Belief Alone.
My middle school and high school years were tough for me. I didn’t fit in real well, was quiet and socially awkward. I didn’t have a lot of friends and generally hated the entire experience. In retrospect, I had some very good reasons to hate the experience as well as some that were not so good.
The one thing I had going for me was my music. I played french horn in the school band and turned out to be pretty good at it. Good enough that I wanted to pursue music professionally.
But things didn’t work out quite the way I had hoped.
I had injured myself due to over practicing prior to my senior year in high school and never really recovered from it. This may sound odd, but musicians are athletes in much the same way as those who play sports. As baseball, football and basketball players can have injuries, even career-ending injuries, so too can musicians. I struggled to try to recover from my injury while in music school but was never able to do so. Eventually, I was kicked out of the music program due to poor performance.
The effect on me was devastating.
Music had been the thing I had loved the most during my bleak high school years. It was the one thing that got me through a very tough time. When I think about it, I would call its God’s grace to me that I had music in that time. Had I not had that outlet, I don’t know if I would have made it through high school at all.
But now, it was all gone. Poof.
Quite literally, I had no idea what to do with myself. It never occurred to me that I would not be a professional musician, and I never took and action to explore other educational and professional options.
To keep from boring you with the details, I fell into a sustained depression thereafter that consumed about 20 years of my life.
I was very bitter at God, who I thought had abandoned me and was out to destroy me. I went a number of years without so much as darkening the door of a church.
But eventually, that changed.
But while I returned to church, I still did not know the Lord. But I was asking questions and reading.
One day, I think it was in 1995, I read a review of Chuck Colson’s book Evangelicals & Catholics Together (ECT). The review was in Bill Buckley’s magazine “National Review.” Buckley was a Roman Catholic and his periodical had a distinctly Roman Catholic bias in its editorial stance. Unsurprisingly, the magazine thought the book was great and recommended it to its readers.
Skeptical, I bought the book and read it.
Why was I skeptical? While I didn’t know much theology in 1995, I knew enough to realize that Protestantism and Roman Catholicism were very different systems. It didn’t seem to me that a rapprochement was possible, but I thought I’d look into the matter for myself.
I read the book and was appalled by what I saw. It seemed to me that the Evangelicals were giving away the store and the Romanists were carrying off all the loot. But if you had pressed me to say why Colson’s book was wrong, I knew I would have had a hard making a coherent argument.
That bothered me.
It bothered me enough that I started to look around for a source to clear up my ignorance and put some teeth into my objections.
Recall that this was in the mid-’90s at the dawn of the internet, so I couldn’t just go and surf the web. But somehow, I don’t even remember how, I found a book by someone named R.C. Sproul called Faith Alone, which Sproul had written specifically as a rebuttal to Evangelicals & Catholics Together. It seemed to be just what I was looking for, so I bought it and started reading.
One point that Sproul made was that Colson and company were fudging on the term “faith.” The Catholic and the Evangelicals both agreed that faith was necessary for salvation, but they left out the important qualifier “alone.” The historic Protestant and Biblical teaching on justification was that sinners were justified by faith in Christ alone, apart from the deeds of the law.
Rome had never denied that faith was necessary for salvation, but they had denied that it was sufficient. So it turned out I was right without really knowing why. The Catholics had given up nothing, while the Evangelicals had, so to speak, slit their own doctrinal throats.
But Sproul didn’t stop there. Later on in the book he made a point that I had never in my life heard before. One that radically altered my view of faith and opened up my understanding of the Bible as it never had been opened before.
So, just what was this amazing point?
Regeneration precedes faith.
You see, I had always thought that faith preceded regeneration. That is to say, I thought that I had to work up faith on my own steam to believe the Gospel and then, having believed, God would regenerate and save me.
This is a very common belief. And it is wrong.
As Paul wrote in Ephesians, “By grace you are saved through faith, and that not of yourselves, it is a gift of God that no one may boast.”
That’s it! I thought to myself. That’s how justification by faith alone works!
You see, if I can claim that my faith is something I bring to the table, I can claim that however small, I get some credit for my salvation. I bring the faith, God does the rest. But that’s not how it works.
Not only is our justification a gift of God, but the faith in Christ by which we are justified is a gift as well. Salvation is a gift of God, first to last. As he says in another place, “My glory I will not give to another.”
It would seem that my assessment of the Calvinists all those years before was quite wrong. Claiming to be the elect of God, far from being a matter of pride, was simply their humble acknowledgment that they were wholly dependent on God’s grace for their standing. The Calvinists didn’t claim their elect status on the basis of their own righteousness or because they somehow merited it or deserved it. They claimed to be elected because that’s how God works: he graciously and sovereignty bestows his grace on undeserving sinners. “I will have mercy on whom I will have mercy,” says the Lord.
All who come to genuine faith in the Lord Jesus Christ do so, not because they are better, smarter, or more righteous than anyone else. It’s God’s sovereign mercy of granting faith to his people that distinguishes believer from unbeliever.
The arrogant position, unknown to me when I was 12, is to claim that in my wisdom and goodness I chose God, when, in truth, I would never choose him apart from his gracious act of regeneration leading to saving faith.
Postscript
A number of years later, I recall listening to R.C. Sproul’s radio program while driving to work. I remember he had a minister’s round table discussion one day, and one of them mentioned that they catechized their children, teaching them that “regeneration precedes faith.”
“Incredible!” I thought to myself. I was thirty years old before I ever knew that.
It’s probably worth mentioning here that as a Clarkian, I don’t follow R.C. Sproul on everything. It would be several more years before, in God’s providence, a friend would introduce me to the work of Gordon Clark and John Robbins.
But God most certainly used R.C. Sproul to teach me some important truths at a time when I was searching, and for that I am thankful. As Jesus said, “knock and it shall be opened to you; seek and you shall find.” Christ was faithful to his promises.
It was by God’s grace that I sought the truth in the first place. And it was by his grace that I found it.
By his grace alone, I was surprised by faith.