The Worthlessness of Worldviews

I ended my last post with:

“We can present God with what we value—and we can conceptualize the hope that we lay up for ourselves things of value—because to possess a value ascribed to something is possible without contending about its ultimate value to God.  To possess a worldview, in contrast, is to tell God what he values.”

I think of this especially in light of having read recently one of those innumerable insipid essays attempting to justify the Calvinist fixation on “unconditional election.”  It might almost go without saying that the essay I am recalling hauls out a reference to Adam and Eve trying to be God.  I must always try to show that the justification—even the positive mention—of “unconditional election” is a horror—and the horror is not either in the applicability or inapplicability of “unconditional election” in itself.  God, for all we know, operates on the basis or “unconditional election.”  Or the way that God acts might blow away any conceptualization that we might ever grasp.  That, however, does not stop the commentators from grasping—and all that they ever succeed in grasping is a handful of impiety.  

All that the Calvinist commentators succeed in grasping is a portion of that impiety that, in effect, tries to be God.  Adam and Eve—the prototypical novices—are novices by comparison.  It is no honor to God to fiercely defend our conceptions of him, or of his modes of action.  Paul (yes, of course, the above-mentioned essay cites Romans, as they will) is the prototype in this regard.  It is a horror to read Paul and his musings about the potter and the clay.  (Such musings cannot pass without Paul hedging his bets: “What if God . . . ?”)

So, Paul says “the potter” can make two types of vessel, meaning the elect and the damned.  Can we, in our turn, imagine the same thing out of the mouth of Jesus, the mouth that uttered Matthew 7:11?  “If ye then, being evil, know how to give good gifts unto your children, how much more shall your Father which is in heaven give good things to them that ask him?”

Paul, for his part, cannot in Romans even hold to that simplistic teaching that is called the “Pauline” doctrine of unconditional election.  In Romans 2:5-11 Paul refers to “the righteous judgment of God,”

“Who will render to every man according to his deeds: To them who by patient continuance in well doing seek for glory and honour and immortality, eternal life: But unto them that are contentious, and do not obey the truth, but obey unrighteousness, indignation and wrath, Tribulation and anguish, upon every soul of man that doeth evil, of the Jew first, and also of the Gentile; But glory, honour, and peace, to every man that worketh good, to the Jew first, and also to the Gentile: For there is no respect of persons with God.”

What more blatant example of “respect of persons” could there be, than the unpredictable and incomprehensible “unconditional election”?  Paul is speaking in Romans as an apologist; Jesus, of course, always spoke as a teacher—a teacher who spoke with authority.  To think of Paul as the peer of Jesus in the laying down of Scripture is a horror, yet that unwarranted deference to Paul is the price of trying to make a comprehensive worldview out of the tantalizing, maddening value-field with which Jesus confronts us.

As I started with above, “to possess a value ascribed to something is possible without contending about its ultimate value to God.  To possess a worldview, in contrast, is to tell God what he values.”