Saint SourPuss Lecture #2: Doomed from the Womb...?

Ah....the blessed rest of Monday morning when all the sermonic cannons have been fired with all their reverberating consequences both eternal and temporal. Ye old generals sit back, half resting after the bombardment, but still one hand on their rapier. They watch as the ministerial smoke clears and observe who is slain on the pastoral battlefield and who is charging up the great hill of opinion to run them through with their finely sharpened issues. Oh...it's so glorious.

I am currently wrestling through the theological briar patches of Romans 9-11 and boy can they get prickly. But for me personally, the study has not led to a melancholy decent into the typical hyper-Calvinistic tar pit of election, predestination issues or better put... the morbid mutations of of hyper-supralapsarianism.

I think the unfortunate proectory ends up being a narrowing discussion of who is in and who is out. Insted of, what I discover in the text; being the good news that God's choice is to include more than "natural" Israel by calling the gentiles into the "people of promise". The whole flow of the chapters before are opening us up more and more to the amazing grace of God. We are seeing the horizon clear and the light of His work is revealing a spiritual inheritance that is wider, deeper and more eternal than we have ever known. But instead of this chapter opening up our spiritual vision to a God who is at work in ways that are far more redemptive...we get ramroded into a debate about a God who supposedly is dooming people from the womb. So "Saint Sourpuss" of the hyper-calvinism pulpit, ends up pronouncing a fatalistic gospel that keeps people in their coffins; instead of a faithful and rightly divided gospel that opens the spiritually dead person's grave.

This distinction is discussed in the conversation linked to below, where the hyper-calvinist says: "The message of the Gospel is that God saves those who are His own and damns those who are not." Thus the good news about Christ's death and resurrection is supplanted by a message about election and reprobation—usually with an inordinate stress on reprobation."
You can read more here:
A Primer on Hyper-Calvinism
http://www.spurgeon.org/~phil/articles/hypercal.htm

Of course there are many a "Saint Sourpuss" on the other side of the theological table as well. They brush aside any discussion about the subject with pithy statements that are more bumper sticker responses than serious studied conclusions. They get emotionally charged on the subject and have more heat than light concerning the matter. They are sure of their positions, not based on biblical work, but religious up-brining. They fire off emotional responses based on experience instead of an honest comprehensive examination of the issues from both sides. I would hope that anyone who wants to "debate" an issue would do the work of first "understanding" the issue. Doesn't that make sense?

Being a theological thinker as a Christian doesn't mean you get to forget to be biblical in how you present your case and how you deal with the person you are engaging. Remember Paul's guiding words in 2 Timothy 2:23-25 "But refuse foolish and ignorant speculations, knowing that they produce quarrels. The Lord's bond-servant must not be quarrelsome, but be kind to all, able to teach, patient when wronged, with gentleness correcting those who are in opposition."

So let's not be a Saint Sourpuss but honestly engage the texts and prayerfully and graciously move towards a greater understanding of the gospel of God...God willing.