I am a Calvinist. I believe in the 5 points. But Calvinism is a description of salvation. Its not really a doctrine that is supposed to be taught in a class room environment. When we try to teach Calvinism in just the order of the 5 points its very easy for us to reduce it to a few principles to make it easy to apply. Theres a difference between describing something in which you can see the writer going through these points in a kind of process or describing it after it has been applied so that your addressing more than the understanding of these main points.Your actually putting Calvinism in the context of the human struggle.
This problem of application comes as a result of spending more time reading the theologians then reading and meditating on the Bible. This is why Im trying to bring the curse back into the Calvinistic argument. You will find this throughout my writing. Without the teaching of the curse there is no fast rule to keep a person from thinking in a pragmatic way. When we allow pragmatism into our thinking we make Calvinism another teaching about principles that we should follow.
We believe that when we are saved we cannot do a thing without Christ. We believe that we are totally corrupted both body and soul. But these teachings are in the context of what God has done as the agent of delivering us so that we enjoy eternal life. I think this is a miss understanding of what is true love , who is to be loved and what is true hate and how we are to deal with hate.
I find that its really easy as a Calvinist to confuse the doctrine of total depravity as teaching that we are to hate ourselves. I believe that we are to have a proper hatred for ourselves. But I do not believe that self hatred is a step toward repentance. We are always repeating that there is nothing good that dwells in us and is put as an argument to exalt and lift God up. But my question is if our old will has been destroyed and God has given us a new will then are not we adding to His work by bringing the old struggle with our will back to a renewed struggle so that we can conger up more love for Christ? This is where we need to put the curse back into the teaching. The point is instead of reasoning that there is value arguing that total depravity gives value in Christ work, why not look at total depravity as a past action that Christ dealt with on the cross so that our struggle with our sinful self died with Christ as well. You see you cant focus on the end of Christ destructive work that was necessary to free us from the struggle unless you put it in the context of the curse.
In this sense the new person is motivated by a proper love for oneself. The old struggle with fear, shame, sorrow had to die. There is no other way to deal with these hateful dispositions. If Christ work on the cross was as valuable as we want to argue that it is then isnt it proven by Christ ending the curses hold on us instead of us trying to prove that God is exalted by bringing up the past and making it a new struggle?
I think this is what Christ meant when He said that we love others because we love ourselves. The motivation for loving others is that we are motivated to overcome all opposition. How can we love others if we have not experienced love ourselves? This is the number 1 motivation in marriage. If I love myself I will love my wife. If I hate myself I will hate my wife. And vise versa.....This is what the bible is teaching that if I love something more than my marriage then I hate my partner and thus I hate myself. To love oneself properly is to be motivated to love another.
What is self love? Its to have desires for self that are fulfilled. Its to experience the success that comes as a result of our desires! The Psalms teach that the true understanding of self is a communication to God as if the person is the only one that God created. This means that if someone else heard our private communication to God they would feel threatened. If God is as big as we all want then He is the only one who can fulfill every mans desires individually as if that man was the only person on the earth. We are always repeating this that the purpose of learning the scripture is to know God and to know ourselves. But how can we know ourselves if we are not concerned enough to talk to God so that we can focus on ourselves so that we can be successful as God meets our needs? If we do not know what we need and we do not ask then its no different than being lazy in knowing God. This is why everything that opposes us must die in Christ as the basis of being free to know ourselves and God.
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