A Direct Punch to the Face of Deformed Theology

A direct punch to the bloviated face of Deformed Theology

Someone can read an article and be inspired; others depressed.  Millions can read the same text and find themselves entertained, others, like Mark David Chapman and his Catcher in the Rye, are somehow led to shoot famous musicians outside their home.  The question is never what should or could be valuable reading, the question is more like, “How will individuals interpret what they read and how will this play out in their lives and the world around them.

John Calvin, possessing a great legal mind along with a devout allegiance to the God he read about in the Bible, decided to elevate God to a place where even He is imprisoned by His own holiness.  The result?  The need for Him to save some select souls (for no other reason than He chooses too) while refusing to save the rest.  The natural outflow of this thinking, then, is those He does not elect to save are worthy of going to an afterlife hell where they burn forevermore.  This is what Calvin saw in what he read.  This is what Calvinism teaches around the world.  The result?  People utterly committed to the false notion that show relative indifference to the human experience.

After several decades of trying to really understand what the biblical text says (from Genesis to Revelation) Yeshuan’s have come to see God in a better way, and equally biblical. And it’s better because it extols Him as the uncontested source of agape love.  Let me explain.

When God Almighty chose to make human beings in His own image and to therefore bestow upon human beings their own freewill (which is obviously made manifest in the Garden scene with a forbidden tree) I suggest that God chose to go from being unchangeable to willingly choosing to change.  This does not move Him into a place of failing to know things nor does it push him into a state of being subject to ignorance.  It merely means that the Living God, because He is love and loves this world, chose to adapt Himself and His ways to the freewill choices human beings are designed by Him to make.  We might see the Living God prior to the Creation as the perfect, omniscient, omniscient, omnipresent Being many Christians describe Him to be.  But when He created human beings in His own image and gave us free will, He knew He would be required to adapt to our failures and successes the way any human parent worth their salt adapts to the children that they bring into the world.  When a parent refuses to adapt in any way, shape or form to their own offspring, the uniqueness, skills, traits and personality of the child is crushed under the hand of a despotic guardian who has zero interest in what that child was made to be and do in this world.  When a parent sees that their toddler/child/teen is uninterested in what they want them to be and do and demands that they do/become that person anyway, we are not describing good parenting – we are describing the parenting of a committed five-point Calvinist and the way a committed five-point Calvinist depicts the living God.  No, we say that the scripture, what we read, says otherwise.  Because that scripture shows, repeatedly, that the living God has changed and adopted a number of things in response to the free-will choices of his creations.  Where all of these changes and adaptations by God can be explained away by those who aren’t willing to admit to them, there is one way that God changed that is impervious to challenge and that was when God became incarnate.

Was God ever incarnate before?

No.

Did the incarnate Christ (whom the Calvinists claim was God the Son) learn obedience through the things He suffered?

Yes.

Did this God the Son then ascend into the Holy Place with all of that knowledge?

He did.

Did God, post incarnation then, change?

Yes, He did.

Why?

Out of love for all of His human creations, given free will and made in His image.

And, having saved the world from the results of the freewill choices of our parental founders, we submit that God continues to change, to reach out, to try and relate and to accommodate all of His human creations wherever they are – in darkness, in goodness, in light, in shadow, in selfish pride, or in humble despair.

This is the Great News Yeshuan’s preach, teach and stand upon – that God loves us, will always love us, and that  He has not only had the victory, once and for all, over everything that stood in our way because of the freewill choices of our parents, but now calls constantly to all to see what He has done, and what He continues to do, in the book that should be read as the end of these beginnings and not as the beginning of an end.