2 of 3
Mouw affirms these misgivings, to the point of stating that it's not fully clear whether Christ died for "all," for "the elect," or whether "all" means "all of the elect" or "elect" means "all." Different passages of Scripture support different interpretations. Mouw doesn't arrive at his inconclusive conclusion casually; he does so only after working his way through Owen Thomas' 300–plus–page book The Atonement Controversy in Welsh Theological Debate, 1707–1841. I think the 99 percent of us who have not read that work should defer to Mouw's summation that this is one of the mysteries that ultimately lies beyond human comprehension.
But before he leaves it at that, Mouw makes a compelling case for the L of TULIP. "Limited atonement" is a negative term; Mouw's positive term for the concept is "mission accomplished." Christ successfully saved everyone for whom he died. If you believe salvation is offered to all but only some accept it, then in some ways you are calling God a failure. God is only able to save those who allow him to do so; he fails, despite his ambitions, to redeem the rest. When you look at it this way, denying the L of TULIP can be just as uncomfortable as accepting it. But saying "mission accomplished" (should we make it "TUMIP"?) instead of "limited atonement" affirms God's sovereignty: everyone he died for goes to heaven. No one he died for goes to hell.
In fact, God's sovereignty, Mouw makes clear, is the main idea of TULIP as a whole. The purpose of TULIP is not to make God seem stingy; it is to affirm God's rule over all of creation, and to place humans in proper relation to him. "Indeed," Mouw writes in conclusion, if Calvinists "are ever faced with a choice between a theological formulation that diminishes God's sovereignty and one that would diminish human freedom, we'll go with sovereignty." We do not wish to "detract in any way from the sovereign rule of God" or "give the impression that God is limited by our human choices."
Still, Mouw says that TULIP is best used late—if at all—in conversations about Calvinism with non–Calvinists. In his chapter called "Jake's Mistake," Mouw returns to George C. Scott's character Jake Van Dorn in Hardcore, and notes how uncaring it was to throw TULIP at Niki, instead of inquiring about her own fears and sorrows and speaking of Christ's love for her. "She did not need a theology lesson," Mouw says. "She needed a God who spoke to her in soft and tender tones." And so, Mouw says, Scott should have started with Heidelberg One: "What is your only comfort in life and in death? That I am not my own, but belong, body and soul, to my faithful savior Jesus Christ." TULIP, Mouw says, should only come in "farther down the line … as a 'looking back' framework."
I imagined what Schrader would think if he saw this book. Leave it to a former Calvin College professor to take a little gag in a movie and launch into a whole book about theology! But I love the way Mouw says, I get the joke, and it's a valid one, but let's put it to good use. In fact, Mouw is the one person I would introduce to Schrader as the polar opposite of George C. Scott's character. Where Scott is hasty, harsh, and uncontemplative about his Calvinism, Mouw is careful, gentle, and deeply thoughtful about how doctrine is an expression of faith instead of the other way around. Mouw is also brutally—but helpfully—honest about the failings of his Dutch Calvinist tradition.
The point of Mouw's book is to say that Calvinism "travels well." TULIP does not—as I feared growing up—require certain academic and ethnic fertilizer in order to bloom. And so I made a point of reading his book in non–Calvinist locations—in a Starbucks in downtown Chicago, and on an Amtrak train. On the train, the man across from me saw the title and asked about it. Turns out he was a Zen Buddhist, and we launched into a cordial conversation about the similarities and differences between Buddhism and Calvinism. It was just a conversation, but it was a far more productive encounter than Jake had in the Las Vegas Airport.
share this page
RSS Feed
