Issues of grace and salvation are among the most common ones in
soc.religion.christian and other religion groups.  I've been
interested in them since my college days, when I became a Calvinist.
This paper is an attempt to clarify for myself some of the issues.

In order to avoid writing an entire systematic theology, I'm going to
focus on one specific issue: who is responsible for our salvation.
Luther and Calvin both believed that they were forced by Scripture to
say that God is completely responsible for it.  They saw the human
role as entirely one of being an impediment -- our sin makes it
impossible for us to take the initiative in the process, or even
(without God's help) to respond to him correctly.  In Calvin the
resulting theology is fairly straightforward: God is completely
responsible for everything.  He determines who he wants to save,
bestows sufficient grace on them, and they respond in faith.  Luther's
view is more complex.  While he still insists on God's overall
responsibility, he is unwilling to say with Calvin that God decides to
damn certain people.

Let's start with what everyone agrees on: Human sin makes it
impossible for us to save ourselves.  God must take the initiative.
He gives us grace.  For those that are saved, it overcomes our
barriers of sin, and we respond.  At that point, the Christian life
begins.  Through a life-long process of repentance and discipleship,
the Holy Spirit leads us to become more Christ-like, overcoming the
power of sin in us.  That sets the context for the questions that I
want to deal with:
  - who is responsible for salvation of the saved?
  - who is responsible for the non-salvation of those who aren't?
  - Protestants are inclined to object to anyone who suggests that
	salvation is a matter of being good enough.  Does that
	objection make sense?

In fact I think any attempt at a simple account of how people are
saved is doomed.  There are many influences.  This includes the
person's upbringing, experiences, character, and the quality of the
Christian witness around them, and of course, the internal witness of
the Holy Spirit.  Few Christians would want to deny the important role
of Christian upbringing, or of Christian preaching and missions.  It
seems clear that God has chosen to give Christians an important role
in saving others.  However it is not an exclusive role: God may still
do his own work in surprising ways.

Unlike Calvin, I do not believe that God has secret lists of people he
does and doesn't care about.  I am convinced that according to the
Bible, God does seriously call everyone.  The other view seems to me
to require Jesus to be speaking most of the time with his fingers
crossed behind his back.  The whole concept of invitations to everyone
that are not meant seriously seems unworthy of God.  In anyone else
this would be called hypocrisy.  This does not mean that I claim to
know all of God's purposes.  He has apparently set things up so that
not everyone ends up being saved.  Since he obviously could arrange it
for everyone to be saved (by brute force if necessary), this means
that he stops short of what is necessary for some people.  I do not
know why he does this (although I speculate that it may have to do
with maintaining the independence of his creatures).  However I don't
believe it is because he simply wants certain people to be damned.

Over the last few years I have become increasingly convinced by the
argument that God intentionally uses his power in such a way as to
create a certain amount of independence for the world, and
specifically for people.  It is obvious that God could save everyone
by use of brute force or its equivalent.  However he chose to do it by
coming into human life and accepting the vulnerability of mortal life.
He has chosen to delegate much of the responsibility for reaching the
world to the Church.  If we are serious about thinking that Christ
reveals God, then I think we have to see this as a model of God's
overall approach of dealing with us.  What we see of God through
Christ is consistent with a God who has limited his own power.

Note that this does not necessarily resolve all of the moral
complaints against God that we have heard from time to time.  I
believe that God is responsible for the overall setup.  He is at least
indirectly responsible for the fact that sin exists.  I don't say that
he is the source of sin, but he made people in such a way that sin
would result.  (This is what I mean by saying that I am a
supralapsarian Arminian.)  I'm not going to engage in the usual
arguments as to why this might be a good or bad thing, as I have no
idea of what constraints, if any, God was working under in his design
of the universe.  Is sin a necessary result of allowing people to have
a genuine existence separate from God?  That's a tempting conclusion,
but I'm simply not in a position to look at things at that level.

There's a certain argument that God is ultimately responsible for
choosing which people are saved simply as a result of foreknowledge.
He set up the rules.  He can forsee the results.  Therefore he is
responsible for them.  At least in some forms, this argument assumes a
sort of mechanical model of the world and specifically of people that
is no longer tenable.  I've always been reluctant to derive too much
theology from physics.  But the statistical basis of much modern
physics at least undermines the idea that God's initial act of
creation directly entailed all of later history.

I have no question that there are situations where God does know that
what he is doing (or refraining from doing) will result in someone not
being saved.  I don't know how he decides exactly "how much" grace he
will use in dealing with each individual.  But I believe he holds
back, not from a specific desire to damn certain people, but from an
unwillingness to go so far that people are simply his puppets.  Note
that this effectively inserts a qualification in certain statements
about God.  While I believe that he wants to see each person saved,
this desire is qualified by an unwillingness to go beyond a certain
point in convincing them.  I see no problem with such implicit
limitations.  When I say that I want to do something, I assume
everyone understands that while I want it, I will restrict myself to
ethical means to get it to happen.

To return to the subject at hand: In my view, it's very difficult to
give a single answer to the question of whether God or the person
decides whether the person is saved.  To oversimplify things, the
person puts up a barrier, which is of variable height, and various
factors in his experience and surroundings (including Christian
upbringing and witness) combine with God's interior call in a way
which either overcomes the barrier or does not.  Calvin was very
concerned that we must attribute the difference purely to God's will.
He believed that if you make anything other than God's choice a
determining factor, you are leading to works righteousness, because
what it comes down to is who is good enough to be saved.  I think
*any* oversimplification is an error, including his.  On the one side,
if we say that our own character is the sole influence, then we end up
with what Calvin objected to.  On the other side, if we say that God's
decision is the sole influence, then we end up with God having lists.
In fact I believe the only real answer is that it's an interaction of
several things.

Now Calvin would not find my explanation sufficient, even so.  He
would believe that if anything other than God's naked will determines
salvation, we end up with works righteousness.  I have several
responses to this: (1) As far as the person himself is concerned, the
issue is not being good enough.  No one is good enough.  Our sin sets
up a barrier between us and God.  That's true for everyone.  At most
our contributing factor would be having a barrier that is less high.
(2) But things are not so simple as that, because there are influences
other than just us and God.  These include the quality of the
Christian witness around us and other elements of our experience.  (3)
There may well be differences in the way God works with different
people as well.  While I do not believe that he has a specific lists
of favorites and people he is determined to damn, I am also not going
to assert that he measures exactly one Standard Grace Unit for each
person.  Since I don't claim to know God's motivations, I can't be
sure, but it seems unlikely to me that things are quite so simple as a
measured amount of grace to each person.  It may be that in certain
cases he can go further than others without violating his constaints.

If someone insisted that I give a simple explanation, I find that I
would probably fall back on something close to Luther's.  In the case
of people who are saved, I would attribute it to God's grace; in the
case of people who are not, I would attribute it to their sin.  When I
first looked at these issues seriously (in college) I thought Luther's
position was inconsistent.  If God determines who he is going to save
by giving them sufficient grace, then effectively he is damning
everyone else by not giving them sufficient grace.  So why not be
logical like Calvin, and simply say that God elects and reprobates?
Well, since then I've come to believe that God does not act in quite
so heavy-handed a fashion.  As I've said above, in some ultimate sense
you can't absolve him in the case of the person who is not saved -- he
could give sufficient grace if he really wanted to, and he set up the
system in the first place.  But within the context he's chosen to set
up, I think it's most accurate to say that the person's sin was at
fault.  God couldn't overcome it without overstepping his bounds
(which I only with great effort avoid calling the Prime Directive).
In the case of someone who is saved, I would -- with Luther, Calvin,
and Paul -- give the credit to God.  After all, the person was a
barrier, not a help.

As you can see, I have not followed Calvin on these issues.  This is
an unusual situation -- I'm about the closest thing you can find to a
real Calvinist in the Presbyterian Church (USA) these days.  However I
have to say that Calvin's views may not actually be so far from mine
as I have implied.  Like me, Calvin acknowledged that he did not
understand everything that God does.  While his description of
election looks a lot like God making arbitrary lists, I've caricatured
it somewhat.  Calvin did believe that when we were in a position to
understand what God had done we would see that he had actually acted
justly.  There's been a tendency to show his views in a somewhat
onesided and arbitrary light, and to minimize this side of them.
(Calvin was almost certainly not a "5-point Calvinist".)  My
exposition could be seen as an explanation of Calvin's model, that is
willing to go further than Calvin did in speculating on how God
decides to bestow grace.  Calvin was a very careful man.  He had seen
so many bad results of speculation that he was unwilling to go beyond
what he could find in the Bible.  In this case I think it had ill
effects, because he failed to make even a plausibility argument for
how God could act as he said and still be just.  (This is perhaps more
important in the 20th Cent. context than it was in the discussions
Calvin was involved in.)  Also, his exposition was influenced by the
16th Cent. context, in which he felt he had to emphasize God's
election in order to counteract what he saw as works righteousness.