Calvinism creates Baptist dissension

Scott Batson is the first to admit he's no theologian. Still, the 39-year-old employee of a drapery manufacturer is a devout, lifelong Southern Baptist who served as chairman of the deacons at Lee Road Baptist Church in Taylors.

But it wasn't until his church called the Rev. Paul Dean that Batson felt he learned what his Bible was saying about God's plan for salvation, how he chose people for salvation or damnation "before the foundation of the world" (Ephesians 1:4, KJV).

"It went against everything I'd been taught growing up in Southern Baptist churches," Batson said. "It didn't teach that I'd made a choice. It taught the opposite, that God had made a choice. That's frightening when you first see it." Batson's fright soon gave way to a more fervent belief in God's sovereignty in choosing an elect group to save. But the majority at Lee Road didn't agree. After much dissension, Batson, pastor Dean, associate pastor Johnny Touchet and approximately 130 others left eight months ago to form a new Taylors church, Covenant Baptist.

At issue: Calvinism, a 16th-century doctrine emphasizing God's sovereignty and its corresponding doctrines of grace. Most Baptists, whose denomination has deep Calvinistic roots, go along with at least three of the five points of Calvinism: man is totally depraved, the Holy Spirit can provide irresistible grace, and God's people will persevere to the end (once saved, always saved).

Where some balk are the two points that say God, not man, chooses who will be saved, and that Jesus died only for those chosen ones. For them, that flies in the face of that most beloved of all Bible verses, John 3:16: "For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life."

For reasons that are not entirely clear, the doctrinal controversy has flamed into a hot, sensitive topic in the Upstate. A few happenings from the past year:

In July, 115 people left Mount Pisgah Baptist Church in Easley to form Mount Moriah Baptist, which calls itself theologically Reformed instead of Calvinist. Before the split, said Dr. Doug Limbaugh, one of those who left, Mount Pisgah had a string of four pastors with Reformed leanings. One of them was Paul Dean.

At Gowensville Baptist Church, just northeast of Blue Ridge, pastor David Hayes resigned in March. The issue of Calvinism "was probably one of the main things," said deacon chairman Bill Branyon. "He was leaning that way, and the majority of us were not." Hayes could not be reached for comment.

The state's regional Baptist associations invited a Columbia pastor, Dr. Dick Lincoln, to speak about Calvinism at a statewide conference a few weeks ago. He handed out a sheet that included a list of "Scriptural Reasons I Am Not a Calvinist."

"It is something different churches are dealing with, and the questions are coming up," said Dr. Ron Davis, director of missions at the Greenville Baptist Association. "Even when there's no split, there are those who are talking about it and wanting information."

After that statewide meeting, the Rev. Steve Rutledge, Davis' counterpart at the North Greenville Baptist Association, addressed the same topic with his member churches. He refused to discuss what he said, explaining that it was a delicate internal matter.

The Baptist Courier, the magazine of the South Carolina Baptist Convention, has run so many letters to the editor on the controversy that editor Don Kirkland finally asked a professor at Erskine Theological Seminary to write a series of articles explaining just what Calvinism is.

North Greenville College President Jimmy Epting has had so many inquiries about whether his Southern Baptist college is pushing Calvinism that he wrote a "To Whom It May Concern" letter in April. While the important Reformation doctrine is taught in its historical and theological context, Epting wrote, "The Christian Studies faculty has no agenda to force any system of beliefs on any student."

Calvinism has been debated across the Southern Baptist Convention over the past 20 years in connection with biblical inerrancy. Epting has been hearing about it for his entire 10 years at North Greenville. But no one knows why the aftershocks are appearing just now in the greater Greenville area.

"The only place I've heard it coming from is the Upstate," said Dr. Rick Fisher, pastor of Lexington Baptist Church and chairman of the SCBC's executive board. "But somebody's got to really make it an issue before it's going to jump up in front of the people."

Frenchman John Calvin (1509-1564) is considered by many scholars to be the greatest thinker of the Protestant Reformation. His "Institutes of Christian Religion" sought to defend Protestant believers against the slanders being made against them as they pulled away from the medieval Roman Catholic Church.

Central to Calvin's thinking, said Dr. Loyd Melton, the Erskine professor writing an explanatory series for The Baptist Courier, "is the sovereignty of God. God is always God, and human destiny, especially salvation, is first and last in his hands and under his control."

From that fierce belief that God knows and controls everything came the doctrines of predestination and election. Calvin pointed to Paul's writings in Romans 9-10 and in Ephesians, and to verses like this one in Acts 13:48:"And when the Gentiles heard this, they were glad, and glorified the word of the Lord: and as many as were ordained to eternal life believed."

Calvin's purpose, said Melton, was to reassure believers that their salvation was firm because of God's grace and was not dependent on their works.

In succeeding decades, Dutch theologian Jacob Arminius (1560-1609) argued that Calvin's doctrine of election took away human responsibility. Humans can resist grace, he said. And while only believers would benefit from Jesus' death on the cross, he died for everyone.

The Synod of Dort reacted against Arminius by formulating the five points of Calvinism in 1618 -- 54 years after Calvin's death.

Through the centuries, the debate between Calvinism and Arminianism has never really ceased. The foremost preachers of the 18th century's Great Awakening, George Whitefield and John Wesley, came down on opposite sides.

In more recent history, the controversy has rolled through the Southern Baptist Convention as pastors wrestled with the implications of inerrancy. For every Acts 13:48 that Calvinists point to, Arminians answer with a Romans 10:13: "For whosoever shall call upon the name of the Lord shall be saved."

In 1997, Dr. William Estep, a distinguished Southern Baptist historian, wrote an article in the Texas Baptist Standard decrying "this new found fascination" with Calvinism. He appealed to 20th-century concepts of individual liberty and fairness when he wrote, "To say God created some people for damnation and others for salvation is to deny that all have been created in the image of God."

Dr. Al Mohler, president of Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Kentucky, responded. "Many Southern Baptists find predestination and other doctrines difficult to understand and even offensive to our pride," he wrote. "But we cannot read the New Testament without coming again and again to these doctrines."

Undoubtedly, it's a question that has intrigued theologians and historians for four centuries: Is the responsibility for salvation God's or man's? But a newer question might be, Why is it splitting churches in Upstate South Carolina? Why now?

"Where churches are experiencing division over it," said Fisher, of Lexington, "it's being pushed as an issue or as an agenda."

The new pastors at Lee Road and Mount Pisgah declined to comment, saying their congregations are healing in the wake of the splits. But the Rev. Terry Tuley, Lee Road's new pastor, sounded agreement with Fisher when he wrote in a September letter to the Courier that "there seems to be a growing number of pastors who have made their differences a test of fellowship.

"These pastors have become so radical in their quest for five-point Calvinism that they have begun to exclude all those who would differ with them and label them as heretics. These 'hyper-Calvinists' feel as though they have become God's standard-bearers of truth."

The Rev. Paul Dean, the 36-year-old pastor whose Covenant Baptist broke away from Lee Road and who pastored a few months at Mount Pisgah before its split, also declined to talk about those churches specifically. But he denied making Calvinist doctrine an issue, saying he rarely even preaches on election or predestination.

However, he said, he gets called a hyper-Calvinist "all the time" when allhe's trying to do is get past the misunderstandings and emotionalism to the Scriptures.

Calvinism, he said, "is not any aberrant theology that's crept into our churches. Calvinism is essentially the Gospel that's taught in the Scripture."

What seems to bother Southern Baptists most, he said, is that the concept of an elect clashes with their modern view of fairness.

"Everyone, according to the Bible, deserves death and hell," Dean said."What God has done has not been unfair. What God has done has been gracious. God decided to save some out of all humanity who deserve death and hell."

Meanwhile, at Mount Moriah, layman Doug Limbaugh said his new church broke away from Mount Pisgah not in anger but because "God was leading us in a different direction to form a different church."

When first confronted by the doctrine of election seven years ago, Limbaugh responded, "I just don't believe a loving God that I know and worship would create people who he knew were destined to hell."

But as he kept reading and talking to his pastor, he came to believe, "Who are we to question God in anything he decides to do?"

"I've been reading The Baptist Courier, and I know some ministers have written that some people in the Upstate want to add a book called Calvinism to the Bible," said Limbaugh, who's on the pastor search committee for Mount Moriah. "That's certainly not anybody's intent in our church. At the same time, when the Bible deals with issues of predestination, election, God's grace and God's sovereignty, we think that ministers need to preach on that."

The biggest fear among those who oppose Calvinism is that its teaching on an elect will inhibit evangelism and missions -- one of the great strengths of Southern Baptists. If God has already decided who's in and who's out, what's the point?

But Dean and Limbaugh are emphatic that Jesus commanded believers to spread the Gospel. That is the means by which the elect will hear and be saved, and that is why both their new churches are already active in missions.

Dr. Walter Johnson, a Christian studies professor at North Greenville College who was also an interim pastor at Mount Pisgah before the split, said, "What solves the problem completely is to say, 'God may have a chosen, but the means by which that chosen is reached is through proclamation of the Gospel and through prayer and evangelism.' So there's no conflict between those at all."

When the believer dies, the first thing he will see is the gates of heaven with the words "Whosoever will" emblazoned across the front. As he passes through, he turns and sees on the gate's back side "Chosen before the foundation of the world."

For neutral pastors around the state, it's not an either/or proposition but both -- even as they acknowledge there's some contradiction in that.

"Yes, God is sovereign, but yes, I have the responsibility to choose," said Melton, who is the only Southern Baptist on Erskine's faculty. "It leaves you confessing two truths that from any logical point of view are mutually exclusive. But logic is a human invention. The mistake of fundamentalism, in my judgment, is assuming that all truths can be reduced to logic."

"The Bible teaches both viewpoints, and they're diametrically opposed,"agreed the Rev. Tony Beam, pastor of Pleasant Grove Baptist Church in Fountain Inn. "We're talking about the mind of God. If we ever get to the point where we can figure out the mind of God and explain God completely on every subject, then he ceases to be God."

Many pastors express puzzlement -- and sadness -- that the issue has flared to the point of church splits and pastor resignations. It's a no-win situation, declared Dr. Mike Hamlet, pastor at First Baptist Church of North Spartanburg, because both free will and predestination are taught in the Bible.

"We're not going to solve this dilemma," he said. "There are those who think they can pick a side on this and say, 'We're going to win this one way or the other.' That's where churches make a tremendous mistake, because the church has been dealing with this for centuries."

Someone made a bad mistake in the above article when they said, “From that fierce belief that God knows and controls everything came the doctrines of predestination and election.”

The doctrine of predestination DID NOT come from the fierce belief that “God knows”.... In fact, that’s where all the trouble lies, as Calvinism denies that God chooses a man or not because God “knows” he will be a believer or not. Don’t you remember, Calvinism teaches that God chose a man, or not, NOT ACCORDING TO FOREKNOWLEDGE of anything in that man.

As we know, the mystery of God is “Christ in you”, the hope of salvation. Calvinism denies that God chose any man for salvation “because” of his foreknowledge of Christ in him.

Calvinism teaches that God is unfair, not judging anyone before the foundation of the world ‘before’ he decreed their eternal fate. That’s the WHOLE trouble with Calvinism, the idea that no man was judged by God before their fate was sealed....and the reason Calvin’s unbelievers reject him and choose to believe in the Judge of all mankind, Jesus instead.

See Isaiah 59:14,15...why God was displeased...He saw no judgment.

Jesus says...”...as I hear, I judge: and my judgment is just....” Jesus keeps the Law perfectly...”Doth our law judge any man, “before” it hear him, and “know” what he doeth?” John 7:51 Calvinism makes Jesus (the Sovereign God) the Lawless One (unrighteous).

“Woe unto them that decree “unrighteous” decrees....” Isa 10:1

If you believe in Calvin’s version of predestination, can you tell me what “WAS” God’s Standard of Judgment for salvation or condemnation? Calvinism can’t.

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