Sheep and Goats: The Case Against Sola Fide
Calvinism, a watered-down version of which I was raised in, cuts the church out of the grace business altogether: we are all hopeless sinners, deserving damnation, and no good deeds can change that. We are saved by conversion, an irresistible fact that unites us with the only good human who ever existed, Jesus. After conversion, we are still depraved, but the alien goodness of Christ in us carries us irresistibly toward eternal bliss. Calvin discounts all personal moral effort, so the only difference between a saint and a sinner is God's decision to create some of as sheep and others as goats.
There's no free will involved. Guilt and redemption are not the result of moral action. This leads to a slogan, popular among evangelicals when I was growing up: once saved, always saved. Since we are still depraved, we will sin after conversion, but Calvinism eliminates the need to rush to confession. If we really know Jesus, he will make it all good in the end.
This leads to paradoxes having to do with the doctrine of predestination, which is almost self-contradictory as time travel. Why choose to preach a doctrine or make converts if your choices can't change anything? If, in the moment of conversion, being born again, you are irresistibly Heaven-bound, why bother to follow any of Jesus' commandments? Why not do whatever feels good? It won't make any difference. There have been cults that took this line, but mainstream Christianity clings to the idea that a religious conversion should make you a better person, so how does Calvin get around this? He stipulates that goodness is a consequence of conversion. It comes after the fact, not before. If Jesus, the one good person in the universe, is in your heart, then he will inevitably cause better behavior. Still, the sense that you are a good person is an illusion. None of the merit is actually yours. It is Christ's. Goodness is a side-effect.
On the one hand, this doctrine promises predestined salvation--a steady state of grace rather than the on-again-off-again grace of Catholic confession. But a chasm of uncertainty lurks under all of this. Since I can't know what is predestined before it actually happens, how can I know for sure that I am a sheep, not a goat in sheep's clothing? By signs, I'm told: first, by the depth of my conversion experience and, second, by my persisting in a more-or-less moral life that shows Christ's presence in me. But how deep? Maybe I was fooling myself. How moral does my life have to be to symptomize grace? And, more sinister, how can I be sure that, some day before I die, I won't careen off the moral rails and reveal an inner goathood to myself and all the sheep around me.
So there's a backhanded sense in the fact that sects denying any causal connection between moral behavior and salvation are, in general, the most puritanical--seeing card-playing, gambling, and mixed dancing as signs of the devil in Cromwell's England and in 1950's Alabama. A Baptist martini, the joke goes, is one in a coffee cup. A Catholic can overindulge, confess, and move on, but a Calvinist walks a tightrope, given one rebirth and damned forever if it was bogus. Hence, the notorious hypocrisy, the desperation to seem Godly.
As a teenager, even before my faith flew the coop, I couldn't make any sense of the once-saved-alway-saved controversy. I saw a distinction without a difference. If we don't presume to mind-read God, which is beyond foolish, then all we have is the facts of a case. Let's imagine that at age twenty-five after a dissipated youth, I dedicate my life to Christ with all due drama (at First Baptist it was a quiet business, but you may stipulate shouting and waving of arms). I'm baptized, quit partying, read my Bible, tithe, and attend church every Sunday. All signs proclaim that I'm born again. Then, fourteen years later, something happens--irregular church attendance at first, then none at all, and scandalous rumors. Maybe it's just routine sin salted with cussing or maybe a meth lab, grand theft auto, and child porn. In any case, old friends are sure that, whatever my earlier show of conversion, the Lord is not in me, and, if they're good Calvinists, that means I never was born again. But then, what if, decades later, released from prison, I show up broken and repentant, rededicating my life to Christ? It happens. What if this time I begin to preach and die with prayer on my lips? Or what if, before this can happen (but it might have), I die in a shootout with police? Or merely cursing God? Was I born again when I was twenty-five?
To me, the commonsense reading of these events (that is Catholic, Anglican, or Methodist) is that I did, in fact, convert but then backslid very badly. Otherwise, the years of un-coerced, faithful practice make no sense. Maybe I later lost my faith after a painful tragedy, but I had it and lost it. Then, years later, I found it again (if I lived that long). This is a common pattern, like flunking out of college and then reenrolling and graduating. The Calvinist view is like claiming a 100% graduation rate by refusing to count as a student anybody who doesn't graduate. If conversion is defined as dying saved, of course, all conversations are permanent, but this plays fast and loose with language like Humpty Dumpty in Through the Looking Glass, who says that, when he uses a word, "it it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less."
In its normal sense, to convert is to declare faith and act faithfully, all of which my alter-ego did at age twenty-five. Calvinism evades this ordinary sense, hinging the definition on an unknowable outcome perhaps decades later. Even allowing this trick, debating once-saved-always-saved seems like debating whether turquoise is green or blue. Both Calvin and John Wesley account for the known facts of my alter-ego's life (and for multitudes like him seeming to slide in and out of Christian practice), so why not prefer the obvious one?
Calvin's arcane doctrine is required by a theological system derived from Luther's and Augustine's interpretation of Paul: a system affirming salvation by faith alone. Sola fide stipulates that we can be saved (typically interpreted as a guarantee of eternal bliss after death) by believing that Jesus can save us (typically by faith in the power of his death and resurrection). But this goes against much of Jesus' teaching in the gospels--unless, of course, you define all apparent moral choice as actually predestined, in which case we all are amoral wind-up toys. And Jesus' offering "living water" (John 4:10) and forgiving sins (repeatedly) during his ministry, well before his death, demonstrate that, as an event on a timeline of history anyway, his crucifixion cannot be the necessary causes of salvation (a distinction that Paul, preaching years after the facts, is able to ignore). Calvary may be a real-world parable of salvation, but instances of salvation precede it.
Jesus clearly teaches that participation in the Kingdom of Heaven or "following" him (which is generally interpreted as salvation) does indeed depend on choices involving both outward actions and inward states of mind. Otherwise, why would he preach so much morality? He remains unclear about what this kingdom will actually look like except for promising that it will come "on earth," a lapse that Paul, John of Patmos, and the church fathers scramble to make up for. I don't buy much of their explanations. Like beauty and pornography, I can't define the Kingdom of God but might know it if I see it, and it's probably not a Golden Ticket for my little ego to suck on Everlasting Gobstoppers in God's chocolate factory (or sacred-harp singing by a river in white robes either). I do associate it with being a metaphorical sheep, not a goat.
This refers to an allegory of Judgement Day in Matthew 25, a story so antithetical to Paul's later emphasis on faith alone that it probably derives from earlier teachings of Jesus. It is a stark courtroom drama that combines the two parts of the Great Commandment: loving neighbor is the same as loving God. God is your neighbor. The occasion is the "son of man" coming "in all his glory," a reference to the apocalyptic vision in Daniel where "one like a son of man" descends with a cloud (the mirror image of Jesus ascension in Acts 16:9), and is given dominion over all the world (Daniel 7:12-14). Hebrew son of man, without a definite article, means "human" (the Daniel figure is merely like a person), but Jesus repeatedly calls himself the son of man in the gospels, "the human being." So the figure in Matthew, the eternal king of the world, implies Jesus as God or God's heir.
In any case, he divides "all the nations" into good and bad, saved and unsaved, sheep and goats. The sheep, who will inherit eternal life, are those who fed the son of man when he was hungry, gave him drink when he was thirsty, welcomed him when he was a stranger, clothed him when he was naked, cared for him when he was sick, and visited him in prison. The goats, who didn't do these things, are condemned to "eternal fire." Both groups ask, when did we see you? The Son of Man's answer--a shocking one if it weren't dulled by familiarity--is that he himself was hungry, thirsty, a stranger, naked, sick, and in prison. Our suffering neighbors aren't just like God; the two are identical. "When you did it to the least these, you did it to me." Jesus' sole criteria for salvation in this passage is not faith in any person or doctrine (whom "all the nations" would not recognize), but the practice of unselfish love (Matthew 25:31-46). It's hard to read this as about faith in the Son of Man because even the sheep profess not to have known him.
As disruptive as this message is to dogmatic theology, it isn't unique to Matthew, but is repeated in Luke, where Jesus agrees that the way to "inherit eternal life" is to love God and "your neighbor as yourself," which cannot fail to lead to acts of mercy for which the sheep are praised. "Do this," Jesus says, "and you will live" (Luke 10:25-28). Similarly, the Epistle of James, traditionally attributed to a brother of Jesus, rebuts the doctrine of sola fide: "What good is it, my brothers, if someone says he has faith but does not have works? Can that faith save him? If a brother or sister is poorly clothed and lacking in daily food, and one of you says to them, 'Go in peace, be warmed and filled,' without giving them the things needed for the body, what good is that? So also faith by itself, if it does not have works, is dead" (James 2:14-17).
Comments
Post a Comment