Renunciation #1: Unconditional Election

As I thought where to begin to share the differences between my new faith and my old faith, I had an idea. During my chrismation ceremony, I had to publicly and formally renounce certain beliefs. The specific set of beliefs needing to be renounced depended upon  my background. My specific renunciations were tailored to distancing myself from Reformed beliefs since that was where my previous identity lay. My idea is to write a blog post for each thing that I had to renounce in order to illustrate differences that the Orthodox Church considers significant enough to require formal renunciation. The first renunciation was as follows:

Do you renounce the false doctrine that the predestination of man to their salvation, or their rejection, is not in accordance with the Divine foreknowledge of their faith and good works, or of their unbelief and ungodliness, but according to some irresistible destiny?

I want to start with this renunciation for a number of reasons: First, this is the easiest one for Evangelicals to understand since they themselves have this discussion: Some say that predestination is based on foreknowledge, others that predestination is not based on foreknowledge, and others that it does not matter so why discuss it. The only odd thing would be that I needed to formally renounce my previous belief. But this is where the difference comes in. For Evangelicals, your views on predestination are peripheral. You can believe whatever you want on this as long as your model of the atonement is penal substitution. But for Orthodoxy, this is not peripheral: It is core. You cannot receive any sacraments in the Orthodox Church if you believe that predestination is based on some irresistible destiny.

The second reason I start with this renunciation is that my whole identity was wrapped up in what I had to renounce. All of the other things I renounced I had already questioned before I began approaching Orthodoxy. But this I did not question until I actually read the text of what I would have to renounce, and it gave me pause. I had been very happy as a Five Point Calvinist. I liked the water-tight system. It was very logical and self-consistent. The problem is that a self-consistent system can be wrong if it is based on incorrect premises, and the system was not based on Apostolic tradition. Instead, it was based on a novel tradition that St. Augustine started in the 4th century.

The Orthodox Church strictly adheres to the standard of Orthodoxy that St. Vincent of Lérins (died around 434 AD) formulated: "Magnopere curandum est ut id teneatur quod ubique, quod semper, quod ab omnibus creditum est." Basically, this means that Orthodoxy is that which has been believed by the Church "everywhere, always, and by everyone." The consensus view of the Fathers before Augustine was that predestination was based on foreknowledge, so a deviation from that is a deviation from the Apostolic Tradition and thus from Orthodoxy, so I had to renounce this belief.

Since the remaining 4 points of Calvinism makes no sense without Unconditional Election, I had to drop the whole system. This caused cognitive dissonance. And it went deeper than the fact that I would have to admit to my sister Melodie and my friend Maria that they had been right. I had been passionately Calvinistic because I deeply understood my brokenness and knew that I could not help myself. I had a strong felt need for a God whose "grace was more powerful than my brokenness". I needed a God who demonstrated his love by efficaciously saving me, not potentially saving me because if it was only potential, I knew that my brokenness would activate the exception clause.

In retrospect, I have to acknowledge that Melodie sang the words of this hymn as sincerely as I did:

O to grace how great a debtor

Daily I'm constrained to be;

Let that grace now, like a fetter,

Bind my wand'ring heart to thee.

Prone to wander, Lord, I feel it,

Prone to leave the God I love;

Here's my heart, O take and seal it,

Seal it for thy courts above.

I just did not have a box at the time to understand how she could consistently sing that song since the author's original intent was to invoke God's irresistible grace, and that was certainly my intent when I sang it but she did not believe in irresistible grace. Even more annoying was the fact that Wesley, who actively lobbied against all 5 Point of Calvinism, was my favorite hymn writer. How could he write songs expressing the cry of my heart when with his other pen he attacked the very five pillars of my belief system? Well, I did not have to dig very deep to discover that Wesley drank deeply at the wells of Eastern Orthodoxy. He obviously did not convert, but he fed himself on the wholesome food.

Anyways, this was enough to enable me to let my guard down, and when I did, I discovered that I actually had repressed negative feelings about Calvinism. Calvinism is only good news is you are one of the elect. And so when you go to encourage yourself with it, you have to have make one really crucial assumption: namely, that you are one of the elect. And you know what, that is an unprovable assumption. You can look for "evidence", but in retrospect, it was pretty circular reasoning: if you are able to believe that the promises apply to you, then that is evidence that you are elect since God only gives the ability to believe his promises to the elect, and so since you know that you are one of the elect now, you can know that the promises apply to you.

In the end when I separated my identity from Calvinism, I realized that I could live without the misplaced assurance that it had given me. And when I let go of it, all of sudden all of those "hard passages" were no longer hard. You no longer had to contort Greek to explain how God so loved the world but reprobated most of it. Or how the warnings in Hebrews made any sense at all if perseverance was guaranteed.

I do not mean to imply that everything I learned from a Calvinist was wrong. A lot of the things that my Calvinist counselor Dan Bush said to me about God's love were true. The problem is that I could not really receive them because we were working in a Calvinistic context, and every time he said something true about God's love, this inward voice would extinguish the benefit: "Well, but is only true if you are one of the elect......"

Well, the above is a sketch of how I came to be accept this distinctive and essential doctrine of the Orthodox Church.