Kyle Berg

One of the beautiful things about RMSP is that they pump your brain so full of photography for 11 weeks, that, if you apply yourself, you can’t help but learn and grow. It’s all you think about. And when you’re not thinking about taking pictures, you’re thinking about what gear to buy. And when you’re not thinking about that, you’re thinking about sleep. So while my mind had been rather fertile with philosophical questions prior to arriving here, lately I can’t say it’s been producing a lot of deep thoughts. Maybe it has, but I’ve been too focused to notice. Anyway, even though I was really tired and thinking about going to bed around 9 p.m., I stayed up and went through some pictures and uploaded them to our trial website. A few hours of that woke me up and now, at 1:52 a.m., I can’t sleep. So why not contemplate a centuries old Christian dilemma such as predestination? It had been in my mind before starting RMSP and who knows when I’ll have time to think about it again? As with many of my deep questions, I don’t have a final answer, but I will try to take something away from the exercise of thinking through it.

I grew up in a non-denominational, pentecostal church background where free will and personal responsibility were emphasized. We held to an Arminian theology where we could either accept or resist God’s grace and gift of salvation. Also, we believed that inherent in a resistible grace was the possibility of losing one’s salvation. I always had a difficult time understanding the opposing Calvinist mindset that held that God elected only some to be saved and that his grace was irresistible. I thought this view was unjust, exclusionary, and a bit arrogant. Now however, I cannot help but think about the matter more deeply as I’ve been listening to the podcasts of both Matt Chandler and Mark Driscoll, two staunch Calvinist preachers. They preach sin, salvation, and the Gospel with a fervor and conviction that belies much of what I thought a Calvinist would say, do, or believe. I am thoroughly impressed with their complete dependence on God for the transformations taking place in their congregations. While I still hold to an Arminian view, I also see how much control we evangelicals maintain over our faith as we try to explain God and shape him into our mindset. We place a lot of emphasis on our control over our destiny. God is bigger and more inexplicable than we can imagine and we often ignore that.

So without going into the two doctrines further, for that’s not my preoccupation, here are some thoughts. These are not necessarily beliefs, but provocative questions that cause me to think about how I view God.

If God does only elect a few, so what? Really, so what? What are we going to do about it? Just because we think it’s unfair, does that mean he stops being God? Does that enable us to change the rules of eternal judgment? Of course not. The fact that he sent his Son to save some is more than he ever had to do. He rightfully could have damned us all. Who are we, sinful people, to point fingers at him and tell him how unfair he is when he can do whatever he wants and yet still chose to give us salvation? It’s a miracle anyone is saved given our depravity.

What if God sent tornadoes, floods, hurricanes, and famine on the earth? Does that make him less God? Does that allow us to not believe in him because we think he’s mean?

What if God targeted people for disease? Would that make him less powerful or less worthy of worship?

I believe we are inundated in a culture that has to “feel good” about God and we don’t even realize it. It has affected how we proclaim Jesus and salvation. We force ourselves to explain and defend an infinite, omnipotent being in an effort to appeal to the culture. We accept the premise that we must defend the “fairness” of God when God is who he is, like it or not, period. No discussion. God is God and can do whatever he wants. As Job 13:15 says, “Though he slay me, yet will I hope in him.” Or as one of my professors put it, “The point of Job is not that Job got his stuff back, but rather that God is God and he can squash you like a bug.” We cannot let people fall prey to the thinking that says “If I don’t like it, think it’s fair, or believe it, it doesn’t exist.” Our beliefs or lack thereof do not change the fact that God created the Universe, upholds everything, and has control of our lives. The only way around this is to deny God and turn to another religion or atheism. There is no “I accept God, but…”

Maybe I should get more wrapped up and into these theological discussions, but I don’t. To me they are peripheral matters upon which we can agree to disagree and still be okay. My main concern is that I believe God is God no matter what he does and no matter what I think of him. We need to return to preaching that the Bible is about God and is not an “answer manual” to life. Rather, God is the star of the show and the Bible teaches us how to conform to him, and thus to reality.