We have seen that, according to Calvin, "it is very wicked merely to investigate the causes of God's will" and hence very wicked to reflect upon the nature of God. In this way, Calvin tried to protect one of his own doctrines, the doctrine of reprobation, from careful scrutiny. He in effect granted that the message of the Bible, as he understood it, is in a fundamental conflict with human reason ("our own understand- ing"); but he rejected even the clearest deliverances of human reason on the supposed ground that they conflict with the message of the Bible. He thus elevated not the Bible in all of its richness, complexity, and diversity, but his own interpretation of it, above even the clearest deliverances of human reason.

Now I think it appropriate, at this point, to raise some rather basic questions. For suppose that Calvin's interpretation of the texts upon which he rests his doctrine of reprobation were exegetically correct. Would that not merely prove, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that these texts are something less than an infallible revelation from God? I fully appreciate how scandalous some contemporary Calvinists are apt to find such a suggestion. But why should anyone accept the authority of the Bible, or of some text within it, regardless of what the text teaches? Why should I accept the authority of Jesus or Paul, for example, regardless of what they say? If I exhibit such slavish devotion as that, then I ultimately demean the very authority I am seeking to honor; I say in effect that I would believe the Bible even if it were filled with bald faced lies. Many who accept the Bible as a religious authority do so because, as they see it, they have found within it something worthy of human belief; something that inspires the soul and elevates the mind; something that, though it may shatter their preconceptions on occasion, always does so in the lofty way Jesus does when he teaches that we must love our enemies as well as our friends (see Matthew 5:44). If Christians are entitled to regard a text as authoritative for such reasons as these, do they not also have a responsibility to question a text whose teaching seems morally repugnant or unworthy of human belief? Such questioning need not, of course, imply an outright rejection of the text in question. But it will rest upon an implicit disjuction: Either we have misunderstood the text in question, or its teaching is not an infallible revelation from God.

Lest some Christians should consider such questioning impious, I would also point out that certain texts in the New Testament itself seem to endorse this very kind of questioning. In I John 4:1 we read: "Beloved, do not believe every spirit, but test the spirits to see whether they are of God; for many false prophets have gone out into the world." The injunction here seems to apply far beyond the immediate context in which it appears; it seems to apply to every spirit, every supposed prophet, every sacred text, and even to the letter of I John itself. Must we not test all of these things, with whatever reason is available to us, to see whether they really are from God? False prophets and demonic spirits will always, I want to suggest, reveal their true character in the end; they will do so, as many recent cult leaders have illustrated, by asking that we set aside our own better judgment and submit to an untested authority of some kind. The one thing they will not (and cannot) allow is independent judgment. They will therefore rail against "autonomous human reason" and appeal to mystery and to the limits of our own understanding in an effort to prevent us from assessing some matter which, even given our limited understanding, we are quite competent to assess.

Calvin's defense of his doctrine of reprobation illustrates the point nicely. His statement of the doctrine is clear; the implications of the doctrine for the divine nature are clear; and, as we saw in the previous section, his account of divine justice is complete and gives him the result he wants. Everything he says about the matter falls well within the limits of our human understanding; it is something we can reason about and are quite competent to assess. His appeal to mystery and to the limits of human understanding, therefore, is little more than a subterfuge, an effort to get us to set aside our own better judgment.

Consider also how different Calvin's appeal to mystery is from that which we find in the Bible itself. Whereas Calvin appeals to mystery in an effort to prepare us for a doctrine almost too fearful and too terrible to contemplate, the Bible never appeals to mystery, so far as I have been able to find, except in a redemptive context so wondrous and so glorious that it literally boggles the mind. As an illustration, consider two texts: Romans 11:33, where Paul exclaims: "O the depth of the riches and wisdom and knowledge of God! How unsearchable are his judgments and how inscrutable his ways!" and Isaiah 55:8-9, where we read: "For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways, says the Lord. For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts." Though Calvin cites Romans 11:33 (several times) in an effort to sidestep obvious objections to his doctrine of reprobation, he never once in the Institutes considers either this text or Isaiah 55:8-9 in its own context. So let us consider the context.

Do either of these texts, when taken in their own context, imply that we cannot profitably meditate on God's ways, or understand their point, or appreciate the rationale behind them? Quite the contrary. The context of the Isaiah passage clarifies exactly how God's ways are higher than ours: In verses 6 and 7 we read that, if the wicked will but return to God, he will have mercy upon them and "abundantly pardon" them. That is the precise sense in which, according to the text, God's ways are higher than ours: Such mercy and forgiveness as he displays are utterly foreign to our natural patterns of thought and to our ordinary ways of doing things. So the point is not merely that God's thoughts and ways are an impenetrable mystery, though they are indeed mysterious in just the lofty way we would expect. The point is that God is more merciful and forgiving than we are. It is an altogether balanced view. From one perspective, God's mercy and forgiveness may seem incomprehensibly wonderful; but from another, they will seem altogether befitting a being who is worthy of praise, thanksgiving, and worship. And that is exactly the point that Paul makes as well. What triggers Paul's ecstatic praise is the thought that, appearances to the contrary notwithstanding, God's mercy literally extends to all (see 11:32). We may not understand how this could be, how even God's severity towards the disobedient could be an expression of mercy towards them, but that is precisely the mystery, I would argue, that Paul unfolds for us in the eleventh chapter of Romans. It is a mystery that lifts our hearts and again seems altogether befitting a being worthy of our praise and adoration.

That Calvin should wrench Romans 11:33 from its own context--one of hope--and force it into a very different context--one of fear--tells us something important about his method of exegesis. But that, as I said above, is not my present concern. The question I have asked is this: Do we not have every right, perhaps even a solemn obligation, to follow our own reasoning and better judgment--that is, the best judgment we are capable of--as we test the spirits and the claims of various prophets? Do we not have a solemn obligation to reject any doctrine that appears, the more carefully we examine it, morally repugnant to us? If we should happen to make a mistake and reject a true doctrine thereby, God can always reveal to us a perspective from which the doctrine will no longer appear morally repugnant. But if we try to accept a doctrine even though it deeply offends our moral sense, we then run the risk of jading our conscience and closing our hearts to the Spirit of God. And if we do that--if we close our hearts to the Spirit of God within--we are not likely, I should think, to find our cure in some external source, whether it be the Bible or any other set of religious documents.

It all boils down, I believe, to what kind of God we believe in. If we truly believe in the infinite love and wisdom of our Creator, even as our peasant woman above did, then we will be as invulnerable to the deceptions of the false prophets as she was. We will no longer fear, for example, that our Creator might permit an honest mistake in theology to jeopardize our future. We will simply proceed in the confidence that he knows us from the inside out far better than we know ourselves; that he will appreciate the ambiguities, the confusions, and the perplexities we face far better than we do; and that he will under- stand the historical and cultural factors that shape our beliefs far better than any historian does. Such a Creator--loving, intimate, and wise--would know how to work with us in infinitely complex ways, how to shatter our illusions and transform our thinking when necessary, and how best to reveal himself to us in the end.