Chesterton on Determinism, Calvinism, and Commentary Thereon

"The man who cannot believe his senses, and the man who cannot believe anything else, are both insane, but their insanity is proved not by any error in their argument, but by the manifest mistake of their whole lives. They have both locked themselves up in two boxes, painted inside with the sun and stars; they are both unable to get out, the one into the health and happiness of heaven, the other even into the health and happiness of the earth. Their position is quite reasonable; nay, in a sense it is infinitely reasonable, just as a threepenny bit is infinitely circular. But there is such a thing as a mean infinity, a base and slavish eternity. *It is amusing to notice that many of the moderns, whether sceptics or mystics, have taken as their sign a certain eastern symbol, which is the very symbol of this ultimate nullity. When they wish to represent eternity, they represent it by a serpent with his tail in his mouth. There is a startling sarcasm in the image of that very unsatisfactory meal. The eternity of the material fatalists, the eternity of the eastern pessimists, the eternity of the supercilious theosophists and higher scientists of to-day is, indeed, very well presented by a serpent eating his tail, a degraded animal who destroys even himself.*"

"This chapter is purely practical and is concerned with what actually is the chief mark and element of insanity; we may say in summary that it is reason used without root, reason in the void. The man who begins to think without the proper first principles goes mad; he begins to think at the wrong end. And for the rest of these pages we have to try and discover what is the right end. But we may ask in conclusion, if this be what drives men mad, what is it that keeps them sane? By the end of this book I hope to give a definite, some will think a far too definite, answer. But for the moment it is possible in the same solely practical manner to give a general answer touching what in actual human history keeps men sane. Mysticism keeps men sane. As long as you have mystery you have health; when you destroy mystery you create morbidity. The ordinary man has always been sane because the ordinary man has always been a mystic. He has permitted the twilight. He has always had one foot in earth and the other in fairyland. He has always left himself free to doubt his gods; but (unlike the agnostic of to-day) free also to believe in them. He has always cared more for truth than for consistency. If he saw two truths that seemed to contradict each other, he would take the two truths and the contradiction along with them. His spiritual sight is stereoscopic, like his physical sight: he sees two different pictures at once and yet sees all the better for that. Thus he has always believed that there was such a thing as fate, but such a thing as free will also. Thus he believed that children were indeed the kingdom of heaven, but nevertheless ought to be obedient to the kingdom of earth. He admired youth because it was young and age because it was not. It is exactly this balance of apparent contradictions that has been the whole buoyancy of the healthy man. The whole secret of mysticism is this: that man can understand everything by the help of what he does not understand. The morbid logician seeks to make everything lucid, and succeeds in making everything mysterious. The mystic allows one thing to be mysterious, and everything else becomes lucid. The determinist makes the theory of causation quite clear, and then finds that he cannot say "if you please" to the housemaid. The Christian permits free will to remain a sacred mystery; but because of this his relations with the housemaid become of a sparkling and crystal clearness. He puts the seed of dogma in a central darkness; but it branches forth in all directions with abounding natural health. *As we have taken the circle as the symbol of reason and madness, we may very well take the cross as the symbol at once of mystery and of health. Buddhism is centripetal, but Christianity is centrifugal: it breaks out. For the circle is perfect and infinite in its nature; but it is fixed for ever in its size; it can never be larger or smaller. But the cross, though it has at its heart a collision and a contradiction, can extend its four arms for ever without altering its shape. Because it has a paradox in its centre it can grow without changing. The circle returns upon itself and is bound. The cross opens its arms to the four winds; it is a signpost for free travellers.*"

"When tallying who the greatest heretic in Christian history might be, or at least, the greatest heretical doctrine, there are certainly a few sterling examples. Some might start with Saint Paul himself, oft cited as the originator of Christianity. It was Paul who, with his scholarly Jewish mind and particular spiritual vexations that turned the experience of Christ into a full religion. But I think one needs to better understand Paul's context to know his motivations and to read his works effectively and fruitfully. . . ."

"If I were obligated to pick one, which I guess in truth is presumptuous of me, then I would have to pick John Calvin. The influence of his life - from French lawyer to Reformation theologian to facist Genevan politician - may not have been so great. But the reverberations from his theology echo through history to our present state where Christianity may be entirely subsumed by his spiritual heirs (or "errs", as the case may be)."

"Perhaps the most frustrating thing about Calvin is that he almost got it right. He understood, correctly, that because of sin and human finitude, we cannot be active agents in our own salvation. The only active agent is God Himself, calling us through grace to be united to Him. God chooses to save us, we do not save ourselves by works or choices."

"Unfortunately, Calvin treats the subject the only way, I suppose, a lawyer could treat the subject. Martin Luther, who had the roughly same idea about salvation, was an Augustinian monk and therefore, rather than being true Reformation thinker, was much closer to Mediaeval ideas about God and spirituality. The Mediaeval period was one motivated very much by internal spiritual experience: the personal experiene of the Divine that lead one to internal transformation. In touch personally and intimately with God, the supreme Love of God becomes very clear. Indeed, Love becomes understood not merely as an attribute of God, but as a synonym for God."

"Calvin is very much a Reformation thinker, however. When the Black Death ended the Mediaeval era, the intimacy of God seemed very far off. As a reaction, society founded the Modern era, based on the principle of externality... Internal experience did not save people from the plague, so they instead sought to understand all the forces outside themselves, pursuing external knowledge. The promise of the Renaissance, the Scientific Revolution and the Enlightenment was that through external knowledge, we could gain control over the forces affecting us. Indeed, the last 600 years of civilization have been naught but an immature knee-jerk reaction to the Black Death."

"The Reformation was not so certain that we could obtain control. It did, however, maintain the emphasis on external knowledge. God was just as far off for the Reformers as He was for the Scientific Revolutionaries. Luther's great objection was to any form of righteousness, such as the sale of indulgences, that did not lead to internal change and intimacy with God. Calvin responded that your internal state is irrelevant. His objection was to what he perceived to be a misinterpreted set of rules."

"Let a lawyer interpret Scripture and this is what you get. Rather than view Scripture as testimony to the faith of those that had gone on before us, the love affair of these writers with the Word, Calvin viewed Scripture as a legal document in need of proper interpretation. This legalistic approach further infects his theology: just as the Bible is a legal codebook, God is a transcendent Judge, with Whom and regarding Whom Love has no meaning."

"Calvin's great heresy, then, is divesting God of Love. In the entirety of his Institutes of the Christian Religion, the word "love" only appears twice, and both times it is in reference to the love we owe God. Without Love, Calvin reduces God to brute power concepts and legalistic approaches."

"God as the active agent in salvation ceases to be the transendent Being of passionate love for humanity, abiding patiently with each person until they eventually find their solace in Him... Instead, He is replaced by a version of Himself that chooses who is saved and who is damned without rhyme or reason except to exert His own power. Everything is oriented towards God's glory, His every action to assert His glory, our every religious devotion to praise that glory. He is an egotistical God, absolutely corrupted by His own absolute power."

"Unfortunately, the reaction of Christianity to Calvin was disasterously wrong-headed. What ended up happening with the Evangelical movement was the dismissal of those parts that Calvin actually got right and the retention of that which he got wrong. The Evangelicals insisted, as they do to this day, that humans are the only active agents in salvation. God has nothing to do with it, but instead, one is saved by "making a decision for Christ". They sought in this Decision Theology a gracious escape from Calvin's loveless God of arbitrary damnation."

"But because these reactionaries were also products of the Modern era, they kept the emphasis on external knowledge. They still insist upon reading Scripture as a legal codebook in need of proper interpretation and therefore continue to view God as an essentially loveless Judge. God's Love, once exaulted by mystics and theologians as God's primary and defining characteristic, has been reduced to subservience to God's Justice. Theirs is a God who imposes punishment upon people for breaking His rules, and Love once again has been subordinated and effectively eliminated as a characteristic of God's at all."

"In many Evangelical minds, God's Love is expressed by His desire to committ violence against us. Yet it is also expressed by God providing the legal loophole by which we can avoid His violence: Jesus Christ. Luther might object that Decision Theology does not cause inward change nor breed internal experience, but is rather a way of externally controlling and compelling God to save us through a legal clause."

"As I suggested at the outset, Calvinism in-and-of itself is not as influential as Calvin's Modernist approach to the faith. This approach, carried on in Evangelicalism, now threatens to subsume all of Christianity. Through media communiations, the message of Evangelicalism has managed to spread, convincing millions of people that theirs is the only true and valid form of Christianity. Even those who do not believe in Christianity have accepted that Evangelicalism is the "true" Christianity and often have disdain for those Christians who do not conform to Evangelical standards. This is what I mean when I say that Calvinism is the greatest heresy the Church has ever faced."

"How would I respond to the Calvinist, though? Not easily, since Calvinism by nature reduces the framework of discussion and has justified itself in tidy dogmatic packages. Calvinism only allows theological discourse in terms of dissecting a legal code, analyzing Scripture chapter-and-verse to determine the correct dogmas. Suggest that God is Love, and a Calvinist would ask 'what Bible verse says that?'"

"If one were to bring up any number of the verses that describe God's Love for humanity, then these would be neatly disposed of in favour of a theology built on other passages of judgement and wrath and power. Calvinism is a very, very tight doctrine... Coiled up as tight as a snake eating its own tail."

"Catholic journalist, columnist and humourist G.K. Chesterton once went about describing lunacy as a circle that is just not wide enough. There may be no way, logically, to prove to an asylum inmate that they are not the rightful heir to the throne of England. The horror of lunacy, he insisted, was not that the subject has lost all their Reason, but that they have lost everything but their Reason... They have tidied everything up in a perfect logical circle, impenetrable to attempts to puncture with Reason."

"Chesterton's solution? 'Nevertheless he is wrong. But if we attempt to trace his error in exact terms, we shall not find it quite so easy as we had supposed. Perhaps the nearest we can get to expressing it is to say this: that his mind moves in a perfect but narrow circle. A small circle is quite as infinite as a large circle; but, though it is quite as infinite, it is not so large. In the same way the insane explanation is quite as complete as the sane one, but it is not so large. A bullet is quite as round as the world, but it is not the world. There is such a thing as a narrow universality; there is such a thing as a small and cramped eternity; you may see it in many modern religions. Now, speaking quite externally and empirically, we may say that the strongest and most unmistakable MARK of madness is this combination between a logical completeness and a spiritual contraction. The lunatic's theory explains a large number of things, but it does not explain them in a large way. I mean that if you or I were dealing with a mind that was growing morbid, we should be chiefly concerned not so much to give it arguments as to give it air, to convince it that there was something cleaner and cooler outside the suffocation of a single argument.'"

"In the same manner, one might respond to the Calvinist that their theology make a quite tidy circle, but it is a very small circle. Chesterton even speaks specifically of Calvin when making his case of logic being the mother of lunacy: 'Perhaps the strongest case of all is this: that only one great English poet went mad, Cowper. And he was definitely driven mad by logic, by the ugly and alien logic of predestination. Poetry was not the disease, but the medicine; poetry partly kept him in health. He could sometimes forget the red and thirsty hell to which his hideous necessitarianism dragged him among the wide waters and the white flat lilies of the Ouse. He was damned by John Calvin; he was almost saved by John Gilpin.'"

"There is a circle quite larger than the circle of Calvinism. It is the circle that understands the infinity of God's Love. It is the circle that reads Scripture and, without needing or necessarily being able to point to a single proof text, recognizes that the message of the Gospel is Love. It is the circle that allows Scripture to move us to an inward change and internal experience of God rather than forcing it to feed back on itself as its own object."

"It is a circle that is able to repsond to perhaps the grestest objection of the heresy - the lunacy - of Calvinism: When asked about the Love of God, His supreme and sacrificial Love for humanity that caused Him to send His Son to die so that we may be united to Him, His Love which created us for Love and His Love which sustains us for that cause, many Calvinists state that it is presumptuous and arrogant of us to think that we are so important. Why should we be so significant that God should Love us so much? The response is simply that we do not know why God should care so much about us in our utter insignificance, but He does, and that is grace."

Bye.

Good Night.

Connectthedots: For the record, i'm a light drinker, and have not inbibed this evening. The point of my last to you was that i had no desire to ridicule you, nor to pick a fight with you this evening. Again for the record, i'd consider your ADD to be an infirmity, no more or less than any other problem that requires medication. i'm very surprised that you took exception to my use of the term in light of Isaiah 53:4-5.

Please do not include me on your PING LISTS, whether you call them impromptu lists or saved lists. It is customary on these threads to respect another freeper's desire not to be on your lists.

Please do not ping me as part of ANY list. This leaves you free to ping me separately which is within established guidelines.

Now, in the light of the fact that you-yourself have posted private email information to the forum, the only rationale I can possibly see behind your complaint to the mod regarding the same actions of thePilgrim is that your intent is to get thePilgrim removed from the forum.

Four things

1.) dont expend so much effort in your posts - I dont read them

2.) Why is it you only write to me when stirring up trouble?

3.)I paraphrased that email and specifically it was NOT and I repeat NOT a Freepmail - my understanding is the rules apply to freepmails.

4.)God has forgiven my transgressions, intentional and otherwise - why is it you dont ? every mis-statement - every slight is catalgued and held in a secret place to be thrown in our faces when contention arises

Youre a contentious, divisive person Jean - please refrain from posting me and I will do the same

Now to the point - I was accused of something by someone who could not provide a link - Now Im accused of having concerted an effort to get calvinists banned - This is silly - The only thing I have done is hit the button when they get out of line - nothing more - nothing less

Why is it you have trouble living by the rules of this privately operated board ?

I generally do not participate in such discussions and I'm the one who started this. My apologies.

FWIW - thats not entirely accurate - you clearly challenged marlowe

In your defense Harley - you are for the most part a pleasant freeper - and I think we are both mis-reading each's intentions -

Can we agree to drop this issue and forgive each others transgressions?

"Please do not include me on your PING LISTS, whether you call them impromptu lists or saved lists. It is customary on these threads to respect another freeper's desire not to be on your lists.

Show me the rule, x. That it is "customary" is irrelevant. Show me where I violate FR rules by pinging you with others when I am posting to directly to you are talking about you.

Now, if you wish that I not ping you at all, then you must abide by the forum rules and refrain from discussing Calvinism.

If you follow that option, I'd gladly refrain from pinging you ever again.

"Please do not ping me as part of ANY list. This leaves you free to ping me separately which is within established guidelines."

x, the only time I ping you is when I am talking to you, or when I am talking about you. It is in accord with FR stated rules that I include you in the ping. There is no call and no need for a separate ping.

If I make a post that mentions you ~AND~ I don't post to you, I am technically in violation of FR posting rules. It appears that you are trying to make a situation where I am damned if I do and damned if I don't.

You are being petty and irrational.

Jean

"yep...precisely"

Since this was a post about me, I suppose that I could throw a hissy-fit and notify the RM that you didn't ping me.

But that is not my style.

;)

Jean

CTD, note that the so-called "proof" is from a post in 2002...and (I think) before the religion forum even existed. It's entirely possible that I've said nice things about others, too....CaRepubgal definitely.

My words also were prior to the advent of the vicious character attack campaigns of the trolls. In other words, circumstances led to changed opinions.

In 2002, I also thought that it might take years before Iraq was toppled. Subsequent events....yada, yada...

"1.) dont expend so much effort in your posts - I dont read them"

"3.)I paraphrased that email and specifically it was NOT and I repeat NOT a Freepmail - my understanding is the rules apply to freepmails. "

If you would have actually read my post to you, you would have noted that I actually predicted you would take that defense:

Oh, you are quite correct keeping in mind that while it is against the rules to post private information from Frmail to the forum, it is not against stated FR rules to post private information from non-Frmail-email on a FR forum.
-from my Post #412

While you are correct, it is a rather lame defense.

But it was rather predictable.

"Why is it you have trouble living by the rules of this privately operated board ?"

Perhaps you could show me where I am in violation of the rules?

Thanks,

Jean

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