by iohannes on Sun Nov 09, 2003 5:24 pm
The trouble is "calvinist" has become a by-word for strict. It isn't Calvinist, it's non-conformist with a calvinistic based theology. Evangelising doesn't go against the idea of pre-destination. Calvin evangelised.
Pre-destination merely says that God knows what path your life will take, whether you will be saved or damned. The means of that saving is justification by faith alone. Put simply, God knows whether you have true faith before you do, and He knows whether you will be damned before you do. He doesn't prevent you from sinning nor does He prevent you from doing good. But doing good without faith won't save you. Since you don't know whether you are damned or not the idea is to seek knowledge of God and belief in Christ because while you may not believe now, you might believe later and that might be the point at which you are saved, but only in your mind, for to God you were saved all along.
It's a really, really complicated piece of theology but it is not, as Philipp Melancthon feared it would be seen as, a licence to do whatever you want in the belief that it doesn't affect what will happen to you after death. It is true it won't affect what will happen, because God already knows you will do this and therefore already knows you are damned. Basically you can't play games with an omnipotent, omniscient God. It's all based around the idea that we will all sin, but that it doesn't matter if we do because we all do it. What matters is whether we believe in God, and believe that Jesus died for our sins. If we believe that we will endeavour not to sin out of love of God. Since love is irrational, we are not doing good out of any selfish desire to be saved but merely out of love. Therefore it is not our good deeds that saves us but our faith. God already knows which of us has faith and which of us doesn't, but because we don't know, we should live our lives as if we had free will because from our point of view we do. Only we really don't.
Clear?
That is all ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.