A Letter to Andrew: Calvinism, the Father Who Runs, and How to Argue in Love

Dear Andrew,

Your dad tells me you like to dig into big questions and argue them out. I'm glad. A faith that never asks hard questions usually stays thin. So let me tell you what I understand about Calvinism, what the Bible says, why I think faith in Jesus stands up to hard thinking, and something even more important: how to argue about all of it in a way that honors Jesus.

What Calvinism is

Calvinism is named after John Calvin, a pastor in Geneva about 500 years ago. Calvinists hold some things that are true and beautiful. God is King over everything. We can't earn our way to him. Salvation is a gift from start to finish. And God always makes the first move. Hold on to all of that, because it's right.

The disagreement is mainly over election, the question of whether God decided ahead of time that some people would be saved and others wouldn't. Many Calvinists say yes. I think the Bible pushes hard the other way.

The "all" verses

Scripture quoted from the New Revised Standard Version.

• God "desires everyone to be saved and to come to the knowledge of the truth… Christ Jesus… who gave himself a ransom for all" (1 Timothy 2:4–6).
• God is "not wanting any to perish, but all to come to repentance" (2 Peter 3:9).
• "I have no pleasure in the death of the wicked, but that the wicked turn from their ways and live" (Ezekiel 33:11).
• "For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life. Indeed, God did not send the Son into the world to condemn the world, but in order that the world might be saved through him" (John 3:16–17).
• "He is the atoning sacrifice for our sins, and not for ours only but also for the sins of the whole world" (1 John 2:2).
• "Here is the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world!" (John 1:29).
• "The true light, which enlightens everyone, was coming into the world" (John 1:9).
• "And I, when I am lifted up from the earth, will draw all people to myself" (John 12:32).
• "Come to me, all you that are weary and are carrying heavy burdens, and I will give you rest" (Matthew 11:28).
• "Anyone who comes to me I will never drive away" (John 6:37).
• "We have our hope set on the living God, who is the Savior of all people, especially of those who believe" (1 Timothy 4:10).
• "The grace of God has appeared, bringing salvation to all" (Titus 2:11).
• "One has died for all… And he died for all" (2 Corinthians 5:14–15).
• God "commands all people everywhere to repent" (Acts 17:30). He wouldn't command all to do what he had made impossible for some.
• "Everyone who calls on the name of the Lord shall be saved" (Romans 10:13).
• "Turn to me and be saved, all the ends of the earth!" (Isaiah 45:22).
• "Let everyone who is thirsty come. Let anyone who wishes take the water of life as a gift" (Revelation 22:17).

And there's the one that moves me most. Jesus looked over Jerusalem and cried:

“How often have I desired to gather your children together as a hen gathers her brood under her wings, and you were not willing!”

— Matthew 23:37

You don't weep over people who never had a real choice.

Paul's verses Calvinists use, and whether they hold

Their strongest passage is Romans 9: "I have loved Jacob, but I have hated Esau" (9:13). "So it depends not on human will or exertion, but on God who shows mercy" (9:16). "He has mercy on whomever he chooses, and he hardens the heart of whomever he chooses" (9:18). "Has the potter no right over the clay…?" (9:21). They also use Ephesians 1:4–5, "he chose us in Christ before the foundation of the world… He destined us for adoption as his children," and Romans 8:29, "those whom he foreknew he also predestined."

These are serious verses, and you should never brush them off. But read them closely, and I don't think they prove what Calvinists say.

1. Romans 9 is about nations and God's plan, not who goes to heaven. Paul is grieving over Israel (9:1–5). "Jacob and Esau" quotes Malachi 1:2–3, about two nations, Israel and Edom. Genesis 25:23 says "two nations are in your womb… the elder shall serve the younger," and Esau personally never served Jacob. God has the right to choose whom he uses to carry out his plan.

2. Keep reading. Israel stumbled "because they did not strive for it on the basis of faith" (9:32). Then "everyone who calls on the name of the Lord shall be saved" (10:13). The section ends, "God has imprisoned all in disobedience so that he may be merciful to all" (11:32). The hardened can be grafted back in "if they do not persist in unbelief" (11:23). Hardening isn't a final sentence.

3. The potter comes from Jeremiah 18, where God says that if a nation turns from evil, he will change what he planned for it. The potter reshapes clay that responds.

4. Ephesians 1 says chosen "in Christ." Christ is the Chosen One, and those in him share his chosenness. We are destined "to be holy and blameless" and to be adopted. The predestination is about what we become, not a list of who's in and who's out.

5. Romans 8:29 begins with "foreknew" and continues, "to be conformed to the image of his Son." Its aim is comfort and transformation: nothing "will be able to separate us from the love of God" (8:39).

Is the Calvinist reading valid? It's serious and not foolish. But I believe it takes a passage about God's freedom to save in surprising ways and turns it into a statement that he limits whom he saves. Romans 9–11 ends in mercy for all, not mercy for a few.

The picture to keep

Think of the prodigal son (Luke 15). The father lets the son leave. But "while he was still far off, his father saw him and was filled with compassion; he ran and put his arms around him and kissed him" (15:20). In that culture an old man didn't run. This one did.

Then remember the older brother. He never left home, but he stands outside the party sulking, and "his father came out and began to plead with him" (15:28). Jesus ends the story without telling us whether he went in. The door was open from the father's side. That's how I understand even hell: God doesn't lock people out. People can keep refusing to come in. Whichever son you are on a given day, the Father is already coming out to meet you.

Be fair to the other side

Calvinists have answers to the "all" verses. Some say "all" means "all kinds of people." Others say God has two wills, what he desires and what he decrees. You may find those weak, and I mostly do. But many who give them are godly scholars who love Jesus. If you can explain their view so well that a Calvinist says, "Yes, that's exactly what I believe," you've earned the right to disagree.

And many Calvinists are better apprentices of Jesus than many people who agree with you and me. The test isn't which five points a person signs. It's whether they're becoming kind, humble, and joyful in God's kingdom.

A warning from history

In 1553, a Spanish doctor named Michael Servetus, who denied the Trinity, was burned alive in Geneva, and Calvin was directly involved. Servetus had written Calvin private letters, and that year a friend of Calvin's handed them to the Catholic Inquisition in France as evidence against him. When Servetus later appeared at church in Geneva, Calvin had him arrested, and Calvin's own secretary filed the charges. The city council sentenced him. Calvin asked that he be beheaded, a quicker death, but the council burned him. Nearly everyone back then, Catholic and Protestant, thought executing heretics was right. It wasn't.

“To kill a man is not to defend a doctrine; it is to kill a man.”

— Sebastian Castellio, 1554

The deeper sickness was believing truth must be protected by force instead of love. Jesus told Peter to put his sword away. You can't force anyone into the kingdom, because it's entered only by a willing heart. You'll see smaller versions today: leaders who grew harsh and controlling, like the painful story of Mark Driscoll and Mars Hill. You'll see doctrine worn as a badge of being the "smart, serious" Christian. And you'll see right answers mistaken for becoming like Jesus. You can win every argument and still be a person nobody wants to be around.

How to argue in love

1. Aim to win the person, not the point. "Always be ready to make your defense to anyone who demands from you an accounting for the hope that is in you; yet do it with gentleness and reverence" (1 Peter 3:15).

2. Listen first. "Let everyone be quick to listen, slow to speak, slow to anger" (James 1:19). Ask, "What makes that convincing to you?" Questions open doors that arguments slam shut.

3. Speak "the truth in love" (Ephesians 4:15). Truth without love is a club. Love without truth is mush.

4. No mockery, no scoring. "The Lord's servant must not be quarrelsome but kindly to everyone, an apt teacher, patient, correcting opponents with gentleness" (2 Timothy 2:24–25).

5. Know when to stop. Sometimes the best ending is "I really respect you, and I see it differently."

6. Pray for the person you argue with. It's very hard to stay proud toward someone you're praying for.

7. Check your heart afterward. Don't only ask, "Was I right?" Ask, "Did I look like Jesus?"

Faith that stands up to hard thinking

You've probably been told a lot of nice stories your whole life, and you're right to ask, "But is it actually true?" Let me tell you something about myself. For nearly fifty years I taught philosophy, not Bible, at the University of Southern California, a secular university. I directed its School of Philosophy, and my specialty was the theory of knowledge: how we know anything at all. I wasn't a Christian in spite of hard thinking. Hard thinking is one of the reasons I stayed one. Here are a few arguments I'd want you to wrestle with.

1. Knowledge, not just belief

Many people think faith means believing without evidence. I don't. I defined knowledge as "being able to deal with things as they are on an appropriate basis of thought and experience." By that standard, knowledge of God is like knowledge of anything else: you test it by living with it and seeing whether reality answers back. Jesus himself invited that test: "Anyone who resolves to do the will of God will know whether the teaching is from God" (John 7:17). Faith isn't a leap in the dark. It's an experiment, one you can actually run with your life.

2. Something has to exist on its own

Look at anything, a tree, a star, yourself. Every event in the physical world depends on something other than itself. But a chain of dependent things can't explain itself, no matter how long it is. I put it this way: "If you have an infinitely long chain of dominoes and you tip the one near the back… You will never get to the final domino." Something must start the chain, "a first cause that, in relation to nature, is supernatural and self-subsistent." By that I mean "something that doesn't depend on anything else for its existence: a mind, a will, which has its existence entirely within itself." And because the world is full of order, and order comes from minds, "we must believe that the first cause of physical reality would also be a mind, and a sufficiently great mind at that." (The Allure of Gentleness, ch. 4, "Faith and Reason.")

3. You are more than your brain

Think of the fact that 2 + 2 = 4. As I wrote in a paper on logic, the laws of logic "would remain true if no minds existed." Look at a brain as closely as you like, every cell and signal, and you won't find "2 + 2 = 4" in it, or your love for your family. Thoughts are about things; they mean something. "No physical thing has it." Brains "simply do not have the 'semantic' properties that consciousness manifestly has," so "the person is not identical with the brain." (The Divine Conspiracy, ch. 3; Renewing the Christian Mind, chs. 14 and 32.) That is why I could write:

“God… does not have a brain. And he never misses it… Body and brain come from him, not the other way around. And in him our own personal being will be as secure without body and brain as it now is with body and brain.”

— The Divine Conspiracy

So death is not the end of you. "Jesus shows his apprentices how to live in the light of the fact that they will never stop living" (The Divine Conspiracy, ch. 3). "When we pass through what we call death, we do not lose the world. Indeed, we see it for the first time as it really is" (The Divine Conspiracy, ch. 10). And none of this is blind faith: "Knowledge and faith are intended to go together" (The Allure of Gentleness, ch. 4).

4. Test the claims by results

Science trusts what can be tested and repeated. The way of Jesus can be tested too. People across every century and culture who have actually apprenticed themselves to him, praying, forgiving, telling the truth, loving their enemies, have found that reality supports that way of living. That isn't proof in a test tube, but it's the kind of evidence we trust in every other part of life.

Why a small error about God matters so much

Everything you do comes out of what you actually believe is real, especially about God. Not what you say you believe, but the picture you really carry inside. A rocket launched one degree off course barely misses at first, but a thousand miles later it has missed the moon entirely. Logic works the same way: if your first premise is wrong, every careful step afterward moves you further from the truth. Good reasoning can't rescue a bad starting point.

So if your picture of God is even slightly off, if he seems a bit stingy, a bit arbitrary, or mostly about control, it won't stay in your head. It will shape how you pray, whether you come to God like a child to a good father or like a nervous employee to a boss. It will shape how you treat people: if God might have written some people off, it gets easier for you to write people off too. And it will shape how you face fear, failure, and money, because you can only rest in a God you're sure is good. We become like what we worship: "Those who make them are like them; so are all who trust in them" (Psalm 115:8).

That's why Jesus is the test. "Whoever has seen me has seen the Father" (John 14:9). If your God is less kind, less patient, or less willing to run down the road than Jesus, your picture is wrong, not Jesus.

What I believe about salvation, and where the church has missed it

Most people think the Bible is basically a manual for getting into heaven after you die. Believe the right facts, pray a prayer, get forgiven, and you're set, like a ticket you get stamped and then put in a drawer until you die.

I think that's a tragic shrinking of what Jesus taught. As I wrote in The Divine Conspiracy:

“We are flooded with what I have called 'gospels of sin management,' in one form or another, while Jesus' invitation to eternal life now… remains for the most part ignored and unspoken.”

— The Divine Conspiracy, ch. 2

I also wrote that "Life, our actual existence, is not included in what is now presented as the heart of the Christian message." Such a gospel lets people be "saved" without ever becoming different people. Then we wonder why so many Christians look so little like Jesus.

Jesus's message was much bigger: "Repent, for the kingdom of heaven has come near" (Matthew 4:17). God's kingdom, where what God wants actually happens, is right here and open to anyone who trusts him. "The kingdom of God is among you" (Luke 17:21). And he defined eternal life: "This is eternal life, that they may know you, the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom you have sent" (John 17:3).

“The eternal life that begins with confidence in Jesus is a life in his present kingdom, now on earth and available to all. So the message of and about him is specifically a gospel for our life now, not just for dying.”

— The Divine Conspiracy, Introduction

So salvation isn't mainly about you getting into heaven. It's about heaven getting into you. Jesus didn't say "make converts." He said, "Go therefore and make disciples… teaching them to obey everything that I have commanded you" (Matthew 28:19–20). A disciple is an apprentice, someone who stays with Jesus to learn how to live his actual life, school, friendships, arguments, temptations, the way Jesus would live it if he were him. The Bible isn't a rulebook for getting past a gate. It's how we come to know the One we're learning from.

And grace makes it possible.

“Grace is not opposed to effort, it is opposed to earning. Earning is an attitude. Effort is an action.”

— The Great Omission

You'll put real effort into following Jesus, but none of it earns God's love. It's how you receive the life he's already giving.

Here's my argument, stated plainly. If salvation were only about where you go after death, how you live now would barely matter, and we'd expect a church full of forgiven people who never change. Sadly, that's often what we see. But if salvation is a new kind of life with God beginning now, then becoming like Jesus isn't an extra for super-Christians. It's what being saved actually is. I believe the second is what Jesus taught, and it's far better news.

Heaven starts now, and it never ends

Here's what I most want you to grasp, Andrew, because it changes everything.

“Eternity is not something waiting to happen, something that will commence later. It is now here.”

— The Divine Conspiracy, ch. 8

You don't have to wait until you die to meet God, to see him answer prayer, to feel his peace in a hard moment, to be changed from the inside, or to watch him work through you for someone else. All of that is available today, at your school and your kitchen table.

And what lies ahead is far better than most people imagine. Heaven isn't sitting on clouds playing harps.

“We will not sit around looking at one another or at God for eternity but will join the eternal Logos, 'reign with him,' in the endlessly ongoing creative work of God. It is for this that we were each individually intended, as both kings and priests.”

— The Divine Conspiracy, ch. 10

Our destiny is "a tremendously creative team effort, with unimaginably splendid leadership, on an inconceivably vast plane of activity." Scripture says those redeemed by Christ "will reign on earth" (Revelation 5:10). As I wrote elsewhere, "Reigning creatively with God in his universe is the eternal destiny for which we were meant."

Think about what that means for you right now. Everything you learn, every bit of character you grow, every skill you build, every time you choose love over winning, is practice for a life of creating and ruling alongside God forever. Nothing done with him is wasted. Your life isn't a waiting room for heaven. It's the beginning of it. So you don't have to wait to live. You can start today, with the One who made galaxies, loves you completely, and is already running down the road toward you.

So keep studying, keep asking, and keep arguing. Just do it as someone who has met the Father on the road, and invite others to come and meet him too.

With love, and with great hope for you,

Dallas