While the culture falls apart around them, for some reason there are many leaders in the Southern Baptist Convention who see Calvinism as some sort of great threat today. Despite the fact that all the major fathers of the Baptist faith were Calvinists, these modern-day Chicken Littles run around screaming as though Calvinism (as opposed to, say, the cheap decisional regeneration taught in the vast majority of SBC churches, for example) will somehow be the end of Christianity as we know it.

I recently saw a quote from Paige Patterson, president of one of the SBC's official seminaries, at A Better Country, one of my favorite online haunts. Here's the blurb:

"I believe that God's predestination or election is based on the fact that he does know everything, unlike the openness theologians would try to tell us," Patterson says. "[God] knows before we were ever born who will and who will not respond to the gospel message," he says, "and it is on the basis of his foreknowledge that election takes place -- not on the basis of some arbitrary decision on God's part to create some to damn them."

In other words, God looks down the corridors of time and sees who will choose Him, and then He chooses them. And that's "election." To paraphrase Ben Franklin, "God elects those who elect themselves."

Now I thank God for Paige Patterson. He was one of the major figures in rescuing the Southern Baptist Convention from the cancerous liberalism that took hold in the 70's and 80's. And he's right to oppose the heresy of "open theism." But this quote frustrates me because his view, in effect, still leaves God nearly as impotent as open theism does. Openness says God doesn't know what decisions people will make, while Patterson says that God does know--but that He won't actually do anything about it. The open theist has God sitting passively watching things unfold in the present; Patterson has God sitting passively watching things unfold in the future. Patterson still makes man ultimately sovereign and God nothing more than reactive--he merely changes the timing of God's passivity.

Patterson is sure that something is wrong with open theism, but he's so concerned to avoid Calvinism that he cuts the legs out from under his own argument, in in so doing brings up exactly the same objection that Paul anticipates and refutes in Romans 9. I look forward to the day when my fellow Baptists can simply accept Paul's teaching, rather than feeling the need to dance around it to support their own humanistic conception of autonomous "free will":

...Rebekah's children had one and the same father, our father Isaac. Yet, before the twins were born or had done anything good or bad--in order that God's purpose in election might stand: not by works but by him who calls--she was told, "The older will serve the younger."Just as it is written: "Jacob I loved, but Esau I hated."What then shall we say? Is God unjust? Not at all! For he says to Moses, "I will have mercy on whom I have mercy, and I will have compassion on whom I have compassion." It does not, therefore, depend on man's desire or effort, but on God's mercy. For the Scripture says to Pharaoh: "I raised you up for this very purpose, that I might display my power in you and that my name might be proclaimed in all the earth." Therefore God has mercy on whom he wants to have mercy, and he hardens whom he wants to harden. One of you will say to me: "Then why does God still blame us? For who resists his will?" But who are you, O man, to talk back to God? "Shall what is formed say to him who formed it, 'Why did you make me like this?' "Does not the potter have the right to make out of the same lump of clay some pottery for noble purposes and some for common use?