For my whole life I’ve been broadly a part of an ecclesiastical culture/movement that has been disinclined to commit either to Calvinism or Arminianism. A steady stream of articles, essays, and blog posts have kept this delicate balancing act alive for decades (for a recent and more-than-usually scholarly example, see the ongoing series here—I was going to wait for the conclusion, but I ran out of patience). I don’t believe, however, that this position is ultimately sustainable. And so my thesis in this post is simply this: the principal question in the Calvinism/Arminianism debate is a fundamentally binary one: you have to choose one or the other.
Of course, I am not so naïve as to imagine that variations and nuances of the two basic positions do not exist. I am, after all, editor of a soon-to-be-released book detailing THREE perspectives on the extent of the atonement (and in my introduction I suggest that there are others). So by saying that the principal issue is binary, I am not saying that it is simple. I recognize, for instance, that there are some Arminians who deny prevenient grace and affirm eternal security; likewise there are some Calvinists who deny particular redemption and assert the priority of faith to regeneration. IOW, there are some who are not historically pure Arminians or historically pure Calvinists. But while I concede the existence of variations of Arminianism and Calvinism, this is where my concession stops: there is ultimately no neutral ground here. There are Arminian-types and there are Calvinist-types, and a single, binary question distinguishes them.
The question is this: Do believers play any independent role in their own regeneration? This is the watershed issue and it is absolutely binary.
Note that the issue is not whether or not believers play any role in salvation—both sides agree that believers choose to believe. The question is not even whether or not believers have divine aid in choosing to believe—both sides believe in assisting grace of some sort (if you believe that the believer needs no help at all from God, you have embraced the Pelagian heresy and your very Christian identity is at stake). The issue is whether a believer is in any sense an independent arbiter of his own regeneration.
Arminian-types are ultimately obliged to admit that what ultimately distinguishes a believer from an unbeliever is not divine grace (which for the Arminian is always indiscriminate); rather it is the informed but autonomous choice by grace-assisted persons to either embrace or reject Christ. Calvinist-types on the other hand, necessarily affirm that while human faith is requisite to salvation, the ultimate efficiency of that faith is not human but divine.
“None of the above” is not a valid answer.
