Calvinism, Arminianism, and Wesleyan Arminianism

[Tim Bonney]

[Rvaughn]

Probably until about 15 years ago or so, I had little idea of a distinction between Classical Arminianism and Wesleyan Arminianism (and I still wouldn't claim to know a lot about it), it was just all Arminianism. Back when I was interacting with Free Will Baptist minister Matthew Pinson (now president of Welch College) on the topic of feet washing, he sent me some articles about Classical Arminianism -- which he held and promoted. I think he thought some FWB's had accepted Wesleyan Arminianism in place of what should have been the usual FWB position. That is sort of outside my wheelhouse. I didn't follow up on it much afterward. However, I do find it interesting, and look forward to what will be written here.

[Sandy]

From experience, I find many similarities in doctrine, worship practices and at least in what comes across in preaching between the Freewill Baptists and the Church of the Nazarene. There's a strong emphasis on holiness in both groups. There are some similarities in Pentecostal groups that stem from Wesleyan origins as well. I would not be able to distinguish between "classical" Arminianism and "Wesleyan" arminianism. They are basically the same on core principles, particularly the teachings on holiness and on falling from grace.

[Tim Bonney]

[Tim Bonney]

[Dave Roberts]

Someone gave me an analogy several years ago borrowed from parliamentary procedure with a more Arminian spin.

"God makes the motion for our salvation. We must second that motion with our lives."

[Tim Bonney]

[Rvaughn]

[linda]

My daddy was a Methodist. We were taught that classic Arminians believed if you lose your salvation you cannot regain it. Wesleyan Arminians held you could regain it. Also classic Arminians do not hold the possibility of entire sanctification, Wesleyans do.

[Tim Bonney]

[Tim Bonney]

[Tim Bonney]

By the way, in the historic Methodist ordination questions asked since 1773 all who are ordained as Elders are asked the following. Note the reference to "Christian perfection." (meaning total sanctification.)

1. Have you faith in Christ?

2. Are you going on to perfection?

3. Do you expect to be made perfect in love in this life?

4. Are you earnestly striving after it?

5. Are you resolved to devote yourself wholly to God and his work?

6. Do you know the General Rules of our Church?

7. Will you keep them?

8. Have you studied the doctrines of The United Methodist Church?

9. After full examination, do you believe that our doctrines are in harmony with the Holy Scriptures?

10. Will you preach and maintain them?

11. Have you studied our form of Church discipline and polity?

12. Do you approve our Church government and polity?

13. Will you support and maintain them?

14. Will you diligently instruct the children in every place?

15. Will you visit from house to house?

16. Will you recommend fasting or abstinence, both by precept and example?

17. Are you determined to employ all your time in the work of God?

18. Are you in debt so as to embarrass you in your work?

19. Will you observe the following directions? a) Be diligent. Never be unemployed. Never be triflingly employed. Never trifle away time; neither spend any more time at any one place than is strictly necessary. b) Be punctual. Do everything exactly at the time. And do not mend our rules, but keep them; not for wrath, but for conscience’ sake.

[Haruo]

[Tim Bonney]

[Tim Bonney]

Another slant on Calvin and Arminius is the whole "once saved always saved" view held by many Baptists and other evangelical Christians.

When I was a Southern Baptist, as best as I could tell, was that you had free choice to choose God or not until you made a choice to become a Christian. Once you became a Christian your actions, free will and choices no longer mattered because no matter what you were "once saved always saved."

I know that isn't official doctrine of any Baptist group. But it is how I saw people treat it. They were Arminians until they were saved and Calvinists thereafter.

[Haruo]

[Tim Bonney]

[Haruo]

[Haruo]

: I meet God in the guise of two bottles of Almadén Mountain Chablis : It's the first of August, and every time August rolls around, I start looking towards September. This coming September first will be the fifteenth anniversary of my last drink.
Let me tell you about those days. On September first, 1984, I was drunk. I'd been drinking all night. I'd been drinking all month. I'd been drinking most every chance I got for most of the previous twelve years or so. What made this day different from all the other days I had been drunk was this: on Monday, September third, it was my intention to kill myself. Well, not exactly kill myself. My plan, which I had been working on all August, was to rob a bank and hope to be killed in the process. I had chosen bank robbery because it had several possible outcomes, and they all looked better than where I was. As I saw it there were three possibilities: either I would be shot and killed during the robbery (and my problem would be solved), or maybe I would be arrested (in which case at least I wouldn't have to worry about room and board for many years to come), or I might actually get away with it and have all this money, and be able to drink myself to death the way I wanted to. (I'd been trying to do it with quarts of Rheinlander beer — boy, that really dates me: when I sobered up they still hadn't invented 40-ouncers, we still had to make do with quarts! — but I swear you'd drown in the stuff before you died from it; Olympia beer advertises "It's the Water!" Rheinlander could advertise "It's water!" — but I digress.) So on Monday I was planning on robbing a bank and hopefully dying. But I didn't really want to die, I just wanted out from where I was, and I couldn't think what else I hadn't tried.
So that Saturday morning, as a last ditch alternative, I went to see a former therapist of mine. Now this guy had kept me sober once for a year and a half, because when I was in therapy with him I, as we say in AA, "turned my will and my life over to the care of" this therapist and his wife. They said, "Don't drink." I didn't drink. So I went to see him that morning, September first, hoping that he would say some magic words and put me on lithium or something and make me okay. But this time he smelled me coming (I guess!) and his first words were, "Leland, how much have you had to drink?" So I told him, just what I'd had that past night, not the whole month or the whole 12 years, and he said, "Leland, you're an early late-stage chronic alcoholic. Don't you think you should go to an AA meeting?"
I was utterly deflated, totally shot down. All my hopes (such as they were) that he could help me vanished. You see, I'd been to AA before and it had not kept me sober. I was convinced I was not able to "stay sober" with or without AA for even one day at that point, unless I was physically unable to get anything to drink, and anyway I thought I was what AA literature calls "constitutionally incapable of being honest with" myself, and thus doomed to die drunk. I had given up on even trying to stay sober; my failures had been so many and so demoralizing. (Incidentally, when I was in therapy, I wasn't diagnosed as alcoholic; the "don't drink" injunction was just house rules; they said, "If you want to be in therapy with us, you must not drink or use any street drugs", and I just did what I was told.)
But I had nothing for an alternative, and I had to kill a couple days before I killed myself, so I followed his advice, and went to AA. I went down to Fremont to the noon meeting that day at the old Fremont Hall, which used to be just a couple blocks from here. I walked in late and drunk, and sat down — and haven't had a drink since.
That first night of my sobriety, I stayed with somebody I met at the hall, and didn't go back to my room in a rundown rooming house in the U District until the second night. But the second night I did go back to my room, and as I approached the building, there on the back porch was a half-gallon bottle of Almadén Mountain Chablis, nearly full, just sitting there waiting for me.

Now, you must understand, at this point in my life I didn't believe in God. I didn't believe there was a God, and if there was one I thought he was probably more like the devil, and definitely out to get me! And the last meeting I'd been to that night, the topic had been "Do What's In Front Of You". They meant, of course, "Do the next indicated thing. Take the next obvious, needed step." But faced with that bottle of wine, I thought they meant I was supposed to drink that wine. Any other day in my adult life to that point I would have rejoiced to find such a bottle. But now I thought that God — the God I didn't believe in — had put the wine there for me to drink, and I rebelled. I said, "No way, God. I don't think that's funny. I am not going to drink it."
And I went in and went to bed, but I couldn't sleep, partly because I was detoxing, and partly because I couldn't stop thinking about that half-gallon of wine that was waiting for me on the porch.
Finally about 5 am I gave up and decided to go to a meeting. So I walked all the way down Eastlake and up to Capitol Hill to the Big Hall, an AA hall that used to be up there. [Probably a distance of at least five miles.] And all the way I was praying, going "Not my will but Thy will be done" in time to my footsteps: "Not, my, will, but, Thy, will, be, done. Not, my, will, but, Thy, will, be, done. Not, my, will, but, Thy, will, be, done." Over and over. I probably prayed more that morning than in all the years since, prayed a vain repetitious prayer to a God I didn't believe existed and who I thought had just tried to get me drunk! (I was, as we say in AA, "toxic".) And the whole way I stared at the sidewalk ahead of me, hoping to find money. On the way to the Big Hall I passed by two restaurants that had early morning AA meetings, but both were closed for Labor Day. Finally I reached the Big Hall, and they let me work in their rummage sale to earn bus fare to get back to Fremont for the noon meeting.
And when I got to Fremont that noon, I told somebody there about the bottle of wine, and they got really upset with me. They said, "You shouldn't have just left it there. You should have picked that bottle up and smashed it on the cement; you should've destroyed it!" And I felt crushed. I was devastated. Now I knew what God had really wanted me to do, and I hadn't done it! (Still not believing in God!)
When I got home late that night, of course the bottle was gone.
But two weeks later, actually it was on Friday the 14th, the 13th full day of my sobriety, as I was walking through the U District, there on the hood of a parked car, about two blocks from my rooming house, in the middle of the afternoon, was another half-gallon bottle of Almadén Mountain Chablis, almost full! It could have been the identical bottle, except there's no way an unattended half gallon of wine will keep two weeks, and move two blocks, in the U District!
Anyhow, I picked up that second bottle and I threw it across 45th Street, and it splattered all over the UW campus. And I felt so good! I had been given a second chance to do God's will, and I had done it.
And when I saw that second bottle, I knew (and have never been able to believe otherwise since, even when I tried), I knew, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that there was a God and that God was, as Pastor Larry preached on this morning, "for me". That God wanted me to be sober, and wanted me to know he existed, and that God knew me inside out, to be able to pull a stunt like those wine bottles to get my attention. That God had been behind the entire concatenation of events that brought me to AA, where, I suddenly realized, I had been sober for two weeks, which I knew to be both physically and morally impossible. God had stepped in and removed my desire to drink and replaced it with a desire to go to AA meetings.
And along with this realization came the sudden awareness that September 3rd, the day I had been planning on robbing the bank (which plan had totally slipped my mind at the time), had been Labor Day — a federal and bank holiday — if I had tried to rob a bank that day I would have found the bank locked, and I would have had to fall back on my backup plan, which was to jump off the Aurora Bridge. It seemed so final, that was why it was my backup plan! But since coming to AA, I've met four people who jumped off the Aurora Bridge and lived! That possibility never crossed my mind. It wouldn't have even occurred to me to be sure to jump onto the concrete — and even if I had, a convertible might have driven by just then and caught me with its roof...
God had done what it took to save me.

[linda]

Haruo you just opened the can of worms that could make my daddy and grandma say "and now they are off and running" .

Methodists in our neck of the woods held to the "longer way" meaning it takes a while to experience initial salvation, entire sanctification, and finally after death glorification happens.

But some in the old (not so much today) Church of the Nazarene and Wesleyan church folks held to the "shorter way" where salvation comes instantly, and entire sanctification is a second crisis experience (happens all at once) and then of course you are to continue to grow in grace.

Used to a huge debate in some Wesleyan circles--shorter way or longer way. Your example of how you quit drinking would be a "shorter way" type experience.

[Tim Bonney]