In the early 1980s I encountered a Christian who left the Dutch Reformed Church because it was insufficiently Calvinist. He and a few others formed a new church where they would be free to adhere more exactly to the Calvinist principles of which they were so fond. This sticks in my mind mainly because he was the first person I had encountered that believed some babies are predestined to hell and if they die as babies, that’s where they’ll end up – for God’s greater glory. He took his Calvinism seriously. I was taken by surprise at the enormity of the consequences this belief and I don’t think I gave a very coherent response to what seemed to me to be an abominable idea. I knew Calvin and I would have problems.

Subsequently I read some of Clark Pinnock’s books including essays of his where made the case for Arminianism and others for Calvinism; I found Clark’s to be the more convincing case although I was not swayed entirely to his point of view. I later became acquainted with Clark because he occasionally attended my church and I remember questioning him on a point he made that seemed extreme; he gave me a worried look and said “do you think I’ve gone too far?” I wanted to say “how the hell should I know, you’re the theologian” – but didn’t. I think it was something to do with the final destruction – rather than torment – of the lost.

Leaving aside damned babies, David Bentley Hart succinctly sums up the problem:

I quite explicitly admit in my writing that I think the traditional Calvinist understanding of divine sovereignty to be deeply defective, and destructively so. One cannot, as with Luther, trace out a direct genealogy from late medieval voluntarism to the Calvinist understanding of divine freedom; nevertheless, the way in which Calvin himself describes divine sovereignty is profoundly modern: it frequently seems to require an element of pure arbitrariness, of pure spontaneity, and this alone separates it from more traditional (and I would say more coherent) understandings of freedom, whether divine or human.

This idea of a God who can be called omnipotent only if his will is the direct efficient cause of every aspect of created reality immediately makes all the inept cavils of the village atheist seem profound: one still should not ask if God could create a stone he could not lift, perhaps, but one might legitimately ask if a God of infinite voluntaristic sovereignty and power could create a creature free to resist the divine will. The question is no cruder than the conception of God it is meant to mock, and the paradox thus produced merely reflects the deficiencies of that conception.

Frankly, any understanding of divine sovereignty so unsubtle that it requires the theologian to assert (as Calvin did) that God foreordained the fall of humanity so that his glory might be revealed in the predestined damnation of the derelict is obviously problematic, and probably far more blasphemous than anything represented by the heresies that the ancient ecumenical councils confronted.

A 1600 year old Bible, including the oldest known version of the New Testament is now online:

Codex Sinaiticus is one of the most important books in the world. Handwritten well over 1600 years ago, the manuscript contains the Christian Bible in Greek, including the oldest complete copy of the New Testament. Its heavily corrected text is of outstanding importance for the history of the Bible and the manuscript – the oldest substantial book to survive Antiquity – is of supreme importance for the history of the book.

The site is slow; let’s hope it is because of unanticipated popularity.

Before I was a Christian I remember thinking that one of the things that I would find convincing about the effects of faith would be a person whose happiness – or more correctly, joy – did not depend at all on outer circumstances. In 1978 I saw an interview with Richard Wurmbrand in which he recounted his days of being imprisoned and tortured for his faith. The particular thing that stuck in my mind was his account of how at night he felt if he did not give expression to his inner joy he would burst; he danced with manacled feet in his tiny cell.

I subsequently saw him in person a number of times and was equally moved by his talks. His books, in particular Tortured for Christ, are well worth reading.

We comfortable Christians in the West are prone to forgetting that we have Christian brothers and sisters who are still prepared to give everything for what they believe. We should remember them. pray for and support them.

Remember those who are in prison, as though in prison with them, and those who are mistreated, since you also are in the body. Heb 13:3

Once a month I provide the musical part of the worship for a chapel service that St. Hilda’s conducts at a youth detention centre. It is what minstrels and other vendors of entertainment would call a difficult room. Since there isn’t too much fun to be had in prison, even attending a chapel service appears tempting, so the numbers we attract are not necessarily the result of religious fervour; happily, after many years of playing in front of Anglicans I have an extremely thick skin.

The idea that hell or the devil does not exist is a conceit that afflicts many modern Christians, particularly in mainline Western churches; those who have fallen for this should periodically visit a prison. First of all, it’s hot enough to convince the frail of temperament that the flames of hell are licking at the foundations; secondly, there is an air of oppression that even a spiritually obtuse person such as myself can feel. Someone who is close to me won’t go there because she hears the constant screaming of demons.

Lastly, you can see the effects of evil on the inmates. Today an innocent looking child with bandages on his arms came up after the service and asked us to pray for him. He cuts himself – a lot. He believes the lie that he is worthless; he doesn’t believe that God loves him; the idea that he is precious and made in God’s image is a completely foreign concept. These are all delusions from hell.

He participated in a Eucharist and we did pray for him – you can too, even though you don’t know his name.