As I said on Twitter, I do my best thinking in the shower. But I usually take baths. Anyway, today I was in the shower and I was mulling over the one verse in the Bible that always gives me trouble when it comes to Calvinism. If you wanna read more, jump on in. If not, well, who can blame you?
I am not a Calvinist. Old, new, Tulip or TTulip or whatever the latest catchphrasey twist is. In my way of thinking Calvinism is what happens when you let a Frenchman get ahold of theosophy. While it has its delicious mix of flavours and a memorable aroma it is also a snooty, pretentious, overdecorated mess.
My issue with Calvinism can be boiled down to one point. It is a theosophy of arrogance. It presumes that there are those who are always meant for God and Heaven (The Elect) and those who are basically garbage strewn through the path of life. (The UnElect, The UnWashed, whatever they call them now.) The more gently-minded practitioners of this way maintain that we should be nice to everyone because we don’t know who is and who isn’t elect. The more cut-throat Calvinists just take a firm Us Vs. Them stance that rankles.
A lot of this happens because of the verse in the Bible that reads
For those God foreknew he also predestined to be conformed to the likeness of his Son, that he might be the firstborn among many brothers
I admit that verse causes me a bit of wondering. Because it just doesn’t fit with the rest of the picture of God in the Christian Testament if you put the Calvinist spin on it. Everywhere else we see the great good news of sacrifice bringing salvation to all men. And this verse seems to say “You there! Not so fast, buddy.”
On a partially related note I’ve been doing some reading on quantum physics theories of time travel. And so as I stood there sudsing up my hair with Aussie I thought of the Minkowski Cube. The shortest description I can give here is that the theory is that when a person’s entire life is viewed from a non-linear internal position–outside of time in what is the Fourth Dimension— it forms a cube where you can see the timeless element move through the three restrictive dimensions of linear time.
As a Christian and a philosophy student it is my studied belief that when the Bible talks about God making humans in God’s image that refers not to our three-dimensional earth-bound bodies at all. Rather it refers to our soul, which in what is best described ‘Quantum Christianity*’, is the vehicle our consciousness uses to move through that fourth dimension. With those presuppositions I would propose the following syllogism to refute the Calvinist doctrine of Election.
1. God created every human in God’s image. That image is the eternal soul.
2. The eternal soul exists in the fourth dimension and is not constrained to time, although the body it resides in during ‘life’ is.
3. Since God exists in the fourth dimension (and dimensions beyond), then God sees people as they exist in the fourth dimension. It is this vision we call “foreknowledge” because God knows the sum total of a person’s cubed existence in the realms outside of time.
4. All humans have souls and exist in the fourth dimension.
5. God foreknew everyone. So everyone is, in that sense, Elect.
Now of course that means that I’m doing all kinds of other thinking about what this means in terms of time travel, which is impossible in a physical body because the physical body is what anchors the fourth dimension unit to the linear three dimensions.
Why am I worrying about this instead of playing Farmville? I have no idea. Probably that novel deadline looming.
Just Another Pretty Farce 
I have nothing to add, but I have been fascinated by Calvin (and, actually, Augustine before him) since college. Not a Calvinist either–I can’t reconcile it with anything I truly know, though at times the things I feel help me understand those who do subscribe to it.
Two things that, as I said, add nothing, but I find myself typing anyway:
1. A joke from my college advisor:
Q: What did the Calvinist say when he tripped and fell on the sidewalk?
A: “Whew, I’m glad that’s over with!”
2. Thank you for the link to the FlashForward exerpt. I didn’t know about the Minkowski Cube. This all reminds me of passages from C.S. Lewis’s “The Great Divorce,” which I had to take down and look at after reading your post here. For instance:
“Time is the very lens through which ye see–small and clear, as men see through the wrong end of a telescope–something that would otherwise be too big for ye to see at all. That thing is Freedom: the gift whereby ye most resemble your Maker and are yourselves parts of eternal reality. But ye can see it only through the lens of Time, in a little clear picture, through inverted telescope. It is a picture of moments following one another and yourself in each moment making some choice that might have been otherwise. Neither the temporal succession nor the phantom of what ye might have chosen and didn’t is itself Freedom. They are a lens. The picture is a symbol […] For every attempt to see the shape of eternity except through the lens of Time destroys your knowledge of Freedom.” (122)
And lots of relevant stuff before and after.
P.S. I truly hope it’s at least somewhat clear why I typed all that out on your blog.
Katherine, I realize that my advocacy of Calvinism puts me in a relative minority of American Christians. I also recognize that some of those professing Calvinist beliefs are guilty of the kinds of arrogance that you describe.
Having said that, I must add that I know many who hold to the doctrines of grace who are among the most kind and unpresuming people I know. It should also be noted that Calvinism has strong biblical foundations that go far beyond Rom. 8:28.
Like Spurgeon, I consider “Calvinism” to be a nickname given to the Gospel. While I do not expect most to agree, I always encourage more serious consideration of what we really have to say. Most who oppose Calvinism are actually opposing straw men that I find just as disagreeable as they do.
Premise #3 is false. God (more precisely, the Divine Essence) exists in no dimensions and is unlike anything created. However, you could probably re-work this into a doctrine of Theosis: you seem to be moving along the proper lines.