You Have Been Saved

“A minister without theology is like a doctor without medicine; all he can do is kill you.” This was a favourite saying of my principal at Emmanuel College, Earl Lautenschlager. The saying came back to me recently while reading Mary Henley Rubio’s heartbreaking biography, Lucy Maud Montgomery: The Gift of Wings.

Lucy Maud Montgomery, the beloved author of Anne of Green Gables, was killed in a sense by a minister without theology. And the minister was her very own husband: the Rev. Ewan Macdonald.

It wasn’t as if Ewan’s theology was terrible through and through. It’s just that he took his theology seriously, even at its weakest point, and that weakest point had everything to do with John Calvin’s notorious doctrine of predestination.

“All are not created on equal terms,” Calvin declares in his Institutes of the Christian Religion, “but some are preordained to eternal life, others to eternal damnation; and, accordingly, as each has been created for one or other of these ends, we say that he has been predestinated to life or to death.”

Ewan Macdonald firmly believed that he had been “predestinated” to eternal death. Nothing that his wife (especially his wife!) or anybody else said could persuade him otherwise. He became convinced, as Lucy Maud herself noted in her diary, that he was “eternally lost—that there was no hope for him in the next life. This dread haunted him night and day and he could not banish it.”

Before blaming Calvin too much for supplying this “horrible” decree (Calvin’s own word), we need to remember that all the major 16th – century Reformers believed in predestination. It’s just that they didn’t speak about it as often as Calvin did.

And even Calvin didn’t speak about it too much. He seemed to know that the doctrine of predestination was not a doctrine that one could be especially proud of.

A reaction to this monstrous doctrine eventually took place in the 17th century when a number of Dutch Calvinists, under the leadership of Jacob Arminius, claimed that Christ died for everyone, and that the individual person was free to accept or reject God’s saving grace. A century later John Wesley and the Methodists embraced Arminius’s teachings.

The problem with Arminianism, however, is that it amounts to a subtle or not so subtle form of works righteousness. It’s not Christ now who earns our salvation through his death and resurrection, but we ourselves who earn it through our faith in Christ.

That can’t be right, said Calvin, and Luther and Augustine and Thomas Aquinas all basically agreed.

Today, however, almost all of us recoil at the thought of God wiring masses of people in such a way that they can’t help falling into hell. The problem was existentially solved in the 20th century when secularism hit with such a wallop that most people had trouble believing in the afterlife at all, let alone in an unhinged deity separating the sheep from the goats for no fair – seeming reason.

The 20th century, however, also found a great Calvinist scholar taking the problem seriously, but working through to a better answer. This was Karl Barth who reformed Calvin’s doctrine of predestination by grounding it in Jesus himself and not in some strange, mysterious decision taken behind the back of Christ.

Jesus is now seen as the Elect man in whom the whole of humanity is elected. At the same time, Jesus is also seen as the Rejected man, the one true reprobate in whom the whole of humanity’s rejection is borne and borne away.

We catch echoes of Barth’s Christ – centred correction of Calvin’s doctrine of predestination in a sermon that he once preached to prisoners in a Swiss jail on the text, “By grace have you been saved” (Ephesians 2:5). Barth tells the inmates at one point: “You have been saved! We are not told: you may be saved sometimes, or a little bit. No, you have been saved, totally and for all times. You? Yes, we! Not just any other people, more pious and better than we are, no, we, each one of us.”

The sermon concludes with Karl Barth urging the inmates to believe in their salvation and live in the light of the glorious truth that they have been saved. But whether they believe or not, they should know that by grace they have been saved:

“The bright day has dawned, the sun of God does shine into our dark lives, even though we may close our eyes to its radiance. His voice does call us from heaven even though we may obstruct our ears. The bread of life is offered to us, even though we are inclined to clench our fists instead of opening our hands to take the bread and eat it. The door of our prison is open, even though, strangely enough, we prefer to remain within.”

The great Swiss Reformed theologian was able to proclaim the gospel in this unconditionally gracious way because he understood God’s predestined love in the light of Jesus himself and not in terms of some horrible decree taken behind his back. What we see in the Son is exactly what occurs in the Father, for the Father and the Son are truly one in the unity of God’s gracious Spirit.

In 1942, Karl Barth published the volume of his massive Church Dogmatics in which he presents his christologically – grounded and biblically attested doctrine of predestination. That same year Lucy Maud Montgomery died, the last suicidally – tinged page in her journal reading, “I have lost my mind by spells and I do not dare to think what I may do in those spells. May God forgive me and I hope everyone else will forgive me, even if they cannot understand. My position is too awful to endure and nobody realizes it. What an end to a life in which I tried always to do my best in spite of many mistakes.”

The following year Ewan Macdonald also died, a broken and confused man. They both died for many reasons. But somewhere in there is a theological reason, reminding us that bad theology is like a doctor without medicine; all he can do is kill us.