It's all Christ, Christ, Christ

I guess we should talk about Calvinism. A friend sent me this blurb from John MacArthur, and asked my take on it. John Mac said, “Having chosen them in eternity past, He graciously and irresistibly calls them to Himself.” My first reply to that friend was... this wreaks of neoplatonism.

I was talking with my mom about this the other day. Here’s a question that will make your head split: Who invented time? Most people are like, “God created time.” And, “God works inside and outside of time.” That’s the John MacArthur sort of view. God superseded himself some way by penetrating our bubble of time, to work within our reality and all around us, before hopping back out and being God again.

Too bad the bible doesn’t teach anything that even remotely resembles that patently Greek, patently neoplatonic view. Remember that the bible was written by a bunch of Hebrew boys.

So who invented time? We invented time. We all did it; not sure if you realized this, but, you have your own time. My dad is definitely on his own time. And hell, I’m on island time right now. No, there’s no one time; we have the Gregorian calendar, but the Mayans had a different calendar, and the Chinese have a different calendar. And so do the Hebrews, the men who wrote the bible.

Further evidence that there’s no one, single, universal, objective ‘time’ would be that we all have to “synchronize our watches” whenever we set out to complete any mission or task that requires collaboration. I used to live on the edge of a different time-zone. Friends in one side of the imaginary border were an hour ahead of us. We’d go shopping in the afternoon. Someone would say, “Meet back here at the food court at 4 P.M.” Ok, is that 4 P.M. your time or mine? We have different times for different locations. And doggonit if my friends in Japan and Australia aren’t like a full day ahead of us, or something (I always have to google it before firing off a text).

When we say things like, ‘in eternity past,’ in reference to God, or we refer to God working ‘within time,’ does that mean that God willingly submits himself to our conception of time? No, God submits to nothing and swears by no one higher than himself. If we say he submits to time, and we assume that time is objective rather than subjective, then I’m going to worship time as God, not God, because time is the thing that God submits to. It’s a higher authority than God. That’s wrong, right?

Yet, we do have people who worship the clock as their god. They’re never late; always five minutes early. Hurry, hurry, hurry. What’s holding us up? Come on. Dude, get out of the passing lane! Oh my God, I overslept.

But even our own conception of time is internally subjective. When I’m at work, doing something boring--like reading a long contract--it seems like time just crawls by. The clock is oppressive. But when I clock out and go on my lunch break, as I’m doing writing this blog post now, I can blink and an hour has passed by and it’s time to clock back in. I just looked up at the clock again. I only have fourteen minutes on lunch, and I just started this blog post.

Neoplatonism says that there is a perfect world of the forms--God’s world--that runs on a perfect, transcendent clock: a an objective, capital-T Time to which even God must submit. That’s John MacArthur’s assumption when he says stuff like, “having chosen them in eternity past.” Give me a break! God isn’t outside of time, because God isn’t outside of anything; Christ is in all, and is all-in-all, and is all!

So that naturally brings up the question: What about the incarnation? Wasn’t Jesus willingly submitting himself to time? Even our time?

All talk of incarnation, immanence, implies transcendence. Here we are, back at neo-platonism. There is no one, transcendent reality, which God left in order to incarnate in our lower, immanent reality. It is all one. Christ is continuously incarnating in every moment, as the Word by whom and through whom all things came into being. Not one thing has come into being apart from him. He’s in it all, everywhere and always. Yes, at one point, he was a Galilean man, a stonemason in the first century. But even John MacArthur would acknowledge ‘christophanies’ throughout the Old Testament, where he appeared as the priest Melchizedek, for example. If you know how to look for him, you will find him in everything.

My friend rebutted this view. He said, “But God is outside of the material.” I think God is immaterial, but not outside of material. If something has no God-stuff in it, then we should destroy that thing. The reason we treat our neighbors with compassion is because they are Christ.

Hear the word of the Lord:

“When the Son of Man comes in his glory, and all the angels with him, then he will sit on his glorious throne. All the nations will be gathered before him, and he will separate them one from another, just as a shepherd separates the sheep from the goats. He will put the sheep on his right and the goats on the left. Then the King will say to those on his right, ‘Come, you who are blessed by my Father; inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world.

“‘For I was hungry and you gave me something to eat; I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink; I was a stranger and you took me in; I was naked and you clothed me; I was sick and you took care of me; I was in prison and you visited me.’

“Then the righteous will answer him, ‘Lord, when did we see you hungry and feed you, or thirsty and give you something to drink? When did we see you a stranger and take you in, or without clothes and clothe you? When did we see you sick, or in prison, and visit you?’

“And the King will answer them, ‘Truly I tell you, whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did for me.’

“Then he will also say to those on the left, ‘Depart from me, you who are cursed, into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels! For I was hungry and you gave me nothing to eat; I was thirsty and you gave me nothing to drink; I was a stranger and you didn’t take me in; I was naked and you didn’t clothe me, sick and in prison and you didn’t take care of me.’

“Then they too will answer, ‘Lord, when did we see you hungry, or thirsty, or a stranger, or without clothes, or sick, or in prison, and not help you?’

“Then he will answer them, ‘Truly I tell you, whatever you did not do for one of the least of these, you did not do for me.’

“And they will go away into eternal punishment, but the righteous into eternal life.”

Matthew 25:31-46 CSB