As I have been wont to say many times in the past: ‘who we think God is determines everything else following.’ In North America, and in my closest experience, John MacArthur, Paul Washer and their respective acolytes, illustrate this quite readily. John MacArthur and Paul Washer, both self-styled 5 Point Calvinists, maintain that God is a singular monad, an actus purus, a pure being who has been appropriated by the Christian God of revelation, as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. The result of thinking and speaking God this way, for MacArthur, Washer, and all else, no matter what interpretive tradition they follow, is to think God in rather cold, brute, impersonal, decretal, pure Creator types of way; just as the philosophical apparatus that stands behind said system of interpretation—so the 5 Points etc.—determines it to be (pun intended). That is to say, if a thinker a priori presumes that the God of Aristotle (and Thomas Aquinas) just is coordinate, categorically and definitionally, with the God Self-revealed and exegeted in Jesus Christ, then that thinker will indeed think of God in impersonal, passionless, unmoved mover types of ways. This will affect every other doctrine downstream from said thinker’s theology proper, because how we think God determines everything else following.
And so, salvation. Salvation for people like MacArthur and Washer, and even higher up on the Reformed food chain, as far as higher (and real) Reformed theology like we find in Federal (Covenantal) theology, is thought of under the species of a God-world relation wherein God arbitrarily relates to the creation, as the Creator, simply because he has almost begrudgingly done so; that is, to create. As if, ‘well I [God] created, so I’d better at least provide a ray of hope for at least some of the people I have populating this earth I created.’ That’s a very crude characterization, but intentionally so; I think it fits the spirit of the type of god produced when thought of under the pressures provided for by an inept philosophical apparatus for thinking what God is. When God is thought of this way, when a person gets ‘saved’ into this contractual type of relationship, this affects, as Calvin emphasized, a knowledge of self; and thus a knowledge of others. That is to say, if the God I have become reconciled to is characterized by impersonal brute passionless features, this will start to condition the way that I relate to myself and others. My tone, my mood will drip with rather aloof feeling, with abstract and even cold thought about the world out there. Indeed, the way I think about life in God in Christ, under these pressures, will in fact be characterized more by a wilderness untamed nature, rather than one under the control of a loving, caring, comPASSIONATE Father God of the Son, Son of the Father, in the sweet filial bond of the Holy Spirit. Salvation will be thought of in mercantile terms, qui pro quo even, wherein this pure being god makes a contract with humanity (covenant of works) such that if they keep their end, as those who are hypothetically elect (hypothetical cause they might have a temporary faith), God has determined to keep his end and bring this select crop of individuals, who God arbitrarily chose, into the bosom of his eternal felicity and beatification. In this frame of salvation there is an elite group of people, indeed thankful to be selected, as no part of their own, into the family of the Pure Being. This thinking necessarily creates a bifurcation between us (the ostensibly elect) and them (the absolutely reprobate). Apartheid and its undercurrent provided for by Dutch Calvinism in South Africa comes to mind at this juncture when racially applied.
Surely, I jest. Surely, I am overstating, and hyperbolizing the state of affairs. Nein. I am only pressing the implications of affirming the god of the decretrum absolutum (absolute decree). It becomes hard to discern these things because of feelings and emotions. Most 5 Point MacArthurites, Washerites et al., and Covenantal Reformed theology people operate with a high piety. It is this piety that muddies the waters, in regard to being able to see clearly with reference to the superstructure that stands behind their respective theology. They have many centuries of literature from people who write with some of the highest and pious language one could imagine in regard to God and salvation. And I think this seeming dissonance, between the background theology and piety, comes because these types of Christians are also voracious Bible readers. So, the God they walk away from in encounter through Holy Scripture, ends up providing them the categories and bases for communicating God with seeming filial and relational adoration and worship. They operate, theologically and spiritually, in a torn way. When they do their background theology they are perfectly fine with thinking God from a pure being, abstract and speculative means for thinking God. But when they attempt to fill this same theology out, sermonically, and in the pulpit ministry, you end up hearing a different thing; as if the philosophical background to their scholastic theology, has been betrayed by the Scriptures they so intently focus upon.
The Word of God is even more powerful than our theological systems. But if that’s the case why not principially start with the Scriptures as a theological methodology? Why not start the way Scripture does; not with prior speculative models for thinking (and proving) God, but with the concrete of God’s voice speaking His first word of creation: ‘In the beginning.’ Why not actually follow the Reformed ‘Scripture Principle’ and stop the practice of bringing a speculatively constructed god to the God of Scripture in Jesus Christ, and then stamping this prefabricated notion of God with the face of Jesus Christ? These are troubling matters with real life consequences. We can see that being played out in church contexts like John MacArthur’s, and many others who follow. I’d say some repentant thinking is in order, at the very least. Kyrie eleison