Introduction
So to help make sense of this portion of my story, I have to set some dates that will serve as doctrinal pegs as I proceed. I became postmillennial somewhere near the end of 1985. Three years later, in 1988, I became a Calvinist (although I refused to call myself that for several years after the fact). Consequently I spent about 5 years as a small-r, small-b, reformed baptist, until I came to the conviction that infant baptism was in fact a biblical practice. That happened in 1993. And—here I am estimating—sometime a few years after that I came into an understanding of what I have called the objectivity of the covenant. 
Throughout these shifts, there were a few important constants. I believed (and still believe) in the absolute authority of the Scriptures. Whatever they teach, that and that alone is what we are obligated to believe. And the second constant was the fact of my evangelicalism, which I understand as an insistence on the absolute necessity of the new birth. A corollary to this evangelicalism has been an ongoing commitment to practical Christian living—doing what you say you believe, confessing your sins, and applying the Word to everything within your reach.
Mugged in Geneva
There were various factors that led to my acceptance of Calvinism. But while we are on the subject, it would be more accurate to say that I never “accepted” Calvinism. Rather Calvinism waylaid me, seizing me by the back of my shirt collar. I was dragged down a back alley, beat up pretty good, and the thugs of Geneva went through my wallet. Took everything. I was not what you would describe as a cooperative convert.
But as I said, there were various factors. One of them was the result of my having become postmillennial a few years before. If the earth will be as full of the knowledge of the Lord as the waters cover the sea . . . I didn’t see how that could happen at the rate we were going. That caused me to reopen my study of historic revivals. This was necessary because some years before this I had read Finney, had been appalled by the general approach, and rejected the whole idea of revival as that kind of whooping it up. If that is revival, who wants it? But now I went back earlier, looking at Edwards, Whitefield, et al. I concluded that, historically speaking, the kind of revival that we needed was a fruit that grew on one kind of tree, and that kind of tree was Reformed gospel preaching. So that was one factor.
A second factor was my (somewhat mysterious) decision to preach through Romans. I remember telling one of our elders that I did not know what I was going to do when I got to “those chapters.” And I honestly didn’t. I wasn’t Calvinistic when I began that series, and when it concluded, I was. I don’t remember the verbatim thought, but somewhere in chapter eight or nine I thought to myself something very much like “what the hell,” and just preached what it said. That is not the kind of reverent thought that you generally want to find in the pulpit, but it was far more reverent than what I had been doing with those texts before. That was the second factor.
The third factor has to do with my relationship to my brother Evan, and the point of this post. He was an elder in our church, and at the time was preaching at a separate congregation here in Moscow. Our upbringing had been conservative and evangelical, but we weren’t really systematic about anything. My father had pronounced convictions against systematizing, teaching us that “systems” were too often a Procrustean bed upon which the text is laid, and then mutilated or stretched to fit. And—it must be said—there are plenty of examples of this around, and in sufficient numbers to make his point. That said, we were generally “Arminian” in our assumptions about God’s sovereignty. I put scare quotes around that because my father would reject Arminianism as just one more system as well.
Evan began to work out the contradictions within Arminianism by going in the direction of open theism. He was doing this on his own, and not as a result of reading theologians like Clark Pinnock who were also heading in that same direction. And, it needs to be said, Evan was and is far more conservative in his doctrinal understanding of other issues than the general crop of openness theists have been. But the upshot of it was that he began to teach that some things in the universe were governed by chance, and that God doesn’t necessarily know the future—since the future is not an entity capable of being known. This followed from an insistence that our free will has to be understood as the power of making a contrary choice. And if God knew from before the foundation of the world that I was going to choose chocolate, then I did not really have the power of contrary choice, and vanilla was out.
This horrified me, but—given my Arminian assumptions—I had no way of responding with any kind of consistency. Given what I had always assumed about free will, Evan’s conclusions were completely understandable, and what he was saying followed. But it still horrified me.
So Then . . .
Up to this point, I had been willing to read Calvinist authors, and really liked their stuff, but I would not read them on Calvinism. I would read them on fractional reserve banking, on the arts, on worldview thinking, etc. but I would not read them on soteriology. The crisis that Evan precipitated by adopting his views on chance was something that broke down my resistance. I thought something like, “well, I am sure that Calvinists are probably solid on this chance business.” I wanted God to be in complete control of the world, as I had always assumed He was, but my sticking point was the Calvinist doctrine of “limited atonement.”
In other words, I loved the idea of God being in absolute control, but I also loved the proclamation of Christ offered on the cross for the sins of the whole world. These two cars were now headed for my personal intersection, both going around eighty. Fortunately, the postmillennial ambulance station was not that far away.
So I started to read Calvinists on Calvinism, and my informal Arminianism was slowly and methodically dismantled. At one point, I remember praying to God and telling Him that I was willing for “all this” to be true. That was mighty big of me, but I am still not sure how much the hosts of Heaven appreciated my magnanimity. Sometime shortly after that, I had my moment in the pulpit.
And Problems Followed . . .
This is where the serious difficulties started. Up to this point, Evan’s doctrinal stance was just a stumper for me to prove wrong. I simply couldn’t answer the questions. After that point, I realized that his position was not just unsettling to inconsistent people like me, but was also outside the framework of biblical orthodoxy. And he was an elder in our church, and I was a freshly-minted Calvinist—who, recall, would not use the word Calvinism to describe what was happening to me. I took that stance because I did not learn it from Calvin, I wasn’t a disciple of Calvin, this is all in Romans, etc. But after a few years I discovered that I was not succeeding in making people realize that I was being “strictly biblical,” and I think I was succeeding in making them think I was being disingenuous. “We all know what Calvinists are, and you are frankly one of them.” “Okay, fair enough,” I finally admitted. I decided the tag was inescapable, and it was a quick form of shorthand for the complicated explanation I had been trying to give.
I say all this because when I came into Calvinism, I was dragged through the hedge backwards. It was not done all nice and tidy like. This was a theological problem, a personal problem, an ecclesiastical problem and a familial problem, not to mention a few others probably, and all together at once. I can say that I wanted to do the right thing throughout, but I can also say that intentions are not the same thing as accomplishments. It should also be mentioned that in the years to follow, this controversy sometimes got swept up and tangled together with some of the others that happened—whether involving federal vision, young libertine fatheads in Moscow, or southern slavery. There were also the periodic doubts I had about whether Evan actually thought these things, or whether he was just being provocative in the rough and tumble of debate. He would say far more in private conversation than he would from the pulpit So maybe . . .? With all those complications noted, I am sure there are any number of things I should have handled differently and better. Let me mention one of more important ones.
Reading Hearts
Not only was I now a Calvinist (and still learning the ropes), but also remember that I was also still a baptist. I am not trying to start anything here with my many baptist readers, but one unfortunate proclivity that conservative baptists have is their temptation to read other people’s hearts. In the discussions, debates, and collisions I had with my brother over all this (which extended over years), I do know that I struggled with this in my mind, and I also know that there were times it came out. “How could someone teach something that is this far off and still have the root of the matter in him?” I had not yet learned that there really is a distinction between objective heresy and convicted heretics, and there is not necessarily a one-to-one correspondence between them. So a number of years ago, I sought Evan’s forgiveness for questioning his salvation (which I had done). For any number of reasons, I was not in a position to raise that question at all, and should not have done it. Part of the reason for writing this piece now is that just recently a report came back around to me that I was still maintaining that my brother was “not a Christian,” that I had not dealt with that. No, I have no problem accepting him as a believer, a member of the covenant, but one who has been captured by a serious error.
Nevertheless, at the same time, I did not want the window of doctrinal acceptability to shift, and I still do not. I do not believe that openness theism is an acceptable position for evangelicals to take. I do not believe it to be a matter of secondary importance. It is not adiaphora. As a result, because he is a public teacher and continues to hold to this heterodox view, I do not believe that Evan is qualified to teach in any orthodox church unless and until he repudiates all this, and returns to a more orthodox position on the nature and attributes of God. Qualifications for fellowship and qualifications for leadership are not the same thing.
Boiled All Down
I said above that there were things that I “should have handled differently and better.” This is quite true, but I was not talking about sin at the center. There have been things to put right, as they have been, and sins to confess, as they have been, but those were not the cause of the conflict. Let me explain what I mean.
Here is the heart of the issue as I see it. The doctrinal differences between classical theists and open theists are either a big deal or they are not. And by “big deal,” I mean that they are important enough to initiate conflict over. When evangelical Baptists and evangelical Presbyterians are able to exchange pulpits despite their differences, I believe this is something that delights the Spirit of God. It is entirely a good thing.
When a minister of the Reformed church and a charismatic church can have wonderful fellowship together, I believe that this also is honoring to God. In fact, I have had direct experience with that one. During one of the uproars we had here in Moscow (over slavery), when I was being publicly pilloried for being racist, I had the unsettling experience of having men who had known me for years, and who knew I was not racist, nevertheless put a bit of daylight between themselves and me. On the human level this was understandable because the air was full of incoming dead cats. But right around the same time, I had a charismatic minister in the area that I did not know that well contact me, and he invited me to a ministers’ lunch over in Pullman. So I went, and it turned out to be a group of charismatic ministers. They welcomed me warmly, and somewhere in there I made a joke about the slavery controversy. “Oh, this is not about slavery,” they said. “This is all about Jesus.” And they prayed for me. That kind of thing is nothing but a sheer blessing. God approves of that kind of thing.
Now the differences between classical theists and open theists are either differences of this sort, or they are not differences of this sort. These differences either have implications for the gospel, or they do not. They are worth having a conflict over, or they are not worth having a conflict over. They are worth disrupting the peace and stability of a wonderful family, or they are not. It has to be one way or the other.
This is the central issue, and at the end of the day it is really the only issue that matters. If the differences between classical theism and openness theism are differences that God categorizes the same way He categorizes disputes over church polity, or water baptism, or eschatology, then I have wronged my brother and his family grievously. I have caused a great deal of grief for them, and I have done it unnecessarily. But if God does not place this dispute in the same category, then it goes the other way. My brother has wronged me (along with his family) and a number of others grievously.
But we cannot determine this by looking at the hurts, or comparing the wounds. Our feelings are not the arbiter of anything. The thing has to be settled by Scripture. To the law and to the testimony.
Conclusion
A couple more comments. Now that we are past the tempest of the actual debates, our relations are amicable. Obviously, because of all the historic strains, and because of the standing disagreement, there cannot be deep and easy fellowship, but we get on well enough. I do not want anything I have written here to disrupt that, and trust that it will not. At family get-togethers, we do not glare at each other across the room, and I have no intention of starting.
And under the kindness of God, I can thank Evan for one thing. Because he followed the logic of what we both believed to be a biblical premise, following it out to the end by good and necessary consequence, he rattled me enough so that I was willing to shake off my dogmatic prejudices, which were considerable. So if there is one human instrument primarily responsible for my Calvinism, that person would be Evan.
This is not a parting shot. I am not just saying it to be annoying, or to score some kind of a cheap point—I really am grateful. In a very real way, this whole mess has been a prime illustration of the truth that has been under debate. These strains and collisions I have had with my brother have been one of the great griefs of my life, and at the same time, the entire situation has been God’s means of delivering to me one of the greatest blessings of my life. Nothing about the fact of this blessing takes away the hardness of the hardship, but it most certainly takes away the temptation to think of it as pointless. Nothing is pointless, and God will eventually resolve all dissonance into a perfect chord.