John Wesley was an ardent supporter of Arminianism. This I did not know until recently. However, it does explain quite a few things of my past. I grew up Methodist, meaning that I was raised in a Methodist household by parents who attended the church of that denomination. After I was saved, I rarely attended the church I grew up in. I usually attended my girlfriend’s church, which was PC-US.
However, realizing the defense of Arminianism is something of a shock. I have always gone where I felt the Spirit was leading me — into truth and into the presence of God. Methodism seemed like so much of a fossil to me, mostly because it had no real clear story — no defense, no clear hope; it was a building without a purpose, a church without the Spirit, ritual without reason. Why I felt that way makes sense now.
What hope did it ever have if it viewed man as able to make fundamentally good choices on his own? What need did man have of the Indwelling? Perhaps I could retain my salvation if only I tried hard enough; and if I did not try hard enough, well then, I could be damned. Heaven or Hell was completely up to me and hard work. That is what the Church of Christ folks tried to push on me in college. I did not know it at the time but both of these things were exercises in Arminianism.
I did not know all the truth at first; I had to grow. But as I grew I became more and more aware of my own shortcomings, my own limitations; I became aware that I was fundamentally constrained. I would never fight against Napolean at Waterloo. I would never be a fighter pilot in WWII. I would never be 7′ tall or female. There were so many things in life that I had no ability to choose. I never did have complete freedom. In fact, the nature of my own birth meant that certain things would never even occur to me, so I was constrained by my own mental wetware. When I discovered that God created time, that was really the final straw. It wasn’t long after that that I came to see that man does not have free will, ultimately. God is sovereign. We have a will as free as we understand it, but it could never be truly, absolutely, perfectly free because of the very fact we were born under time and inherited a whole host of particulars. My whole life I have been on a journey into the heart of God, and that brought me closer and closer to Reformed theology until the evidence was incontrovertible.
By God’s grace, I was able to avoid the infamous “cage stage”. To me, it was a peace and a quiet understanding that because I never had a completely free will, that I was not completely responsible. I was designed; I was made, and because of that God in his mercy, could and would be merciful to me, a created being. No, I was not God; I was under time; I was created; that to me, in understanding where I was in the whole order, was fundamentally reassuring. I had always thought that once a man was saved, he was always saved, and so that part had already been resolved. Now the rest was as well.
It is interesting that the issues that others seem to grapple with that flow from this never really bothered me and now bother me even less. To wit, “If God is sovereign, why does man have to do anything?” and “If believers are predestined, then what role does evangelism play?” and “If God is sovereign, then how can He hold man responsible for sinning?” There’s a lot of peace in understanding that Scripture upholds both the omnipotence of God and the responsibility of man; it’s not either/or.
Part of knowing who you are is knowing and rightly understanding your past, and now I have one more clue about it.
The Quiet Towers 