Riverwood Presbyterian Church

Security Blanket

by Jimmy Hopper

I have been thinking about predestination for several days now. I think it started in the Book Group discussion about Chesterton’s Orthodoxy. In a chapter about the paradoxes of Christianity, Chesterton makes this comment:

It would have been easy, in the Calvinistic seventeenth century, to fall into the bottomless pit of predestination. It is easy to be a madman; it is easy to be a heretic. It is always easy to let the age have its head: the difficulty thing is to keep one’s own.

We discussed this quote at some length and one of the group marveled at Chesterton dissecting the other paradoxes of Christianity but simply making this statement about the paradox of God’s will and man’s will without any other discussion. Chesterton came to Christianity by considering the world’s arguments and, because the world seemed to protest too much, seriously looked at what they were protesting against. Throught this, he was able to accept the arguments for orthodoxy as answering the questions of the world and philosophy. Given the answers provided by predestination (the omnipotence of God, etc.) and the Biblical demands for it; how could he make this statement of heresy without looking into it in the same way that he had so rigorously looked into the other arguments?

The Book Group decided that possibly it had to do with his self satisfaction at intellectually “discovering” the answers he had put forth. Given an orthodox option to not give God the credit for bringing him to salvation (note that this is different from God providing salvation,) he opted for intellectual credit. Someone in the Book Group brought up the fact that other, equally intelligent men had looked at the same questions and came to a final state of unbelief. The only real answer, and the Biblical answer, is predestination.

All of this was revisited in the excellent Sunday night segment of the What We Believe series. If God is God, ALL of salvation is His. And this is fine with me. My salvation is a responsibility that I’m glad God has taken on. Predestination is, in a very real sense, my security blanket. The historian, Paul Johnson, spoke to this issue in his book, A History of Christianity. Johnson said, in much the same way as Chesterton:

The terrifying doctrine of election, or damnation, was made palatable by the fact that election was proved by communion with Christ – that is, in practice, by membership of a Calvinist congregation: “Whoever finds himself in Jesus Christ and is a member of his body by faith, he is assured of his salvation.” So long as a man avoided excommunication, he was secure. Here is both the strength and weakness of Calvinism: if you do not accept the horrific argument of double predestination, it is abhorrent; if you do accept it, it is almost irresistible.

It is irrestible to me. I can take that to bed with me at night and sleep unconcerned. It is true security because it is of God and God alone.