Does Calvinism Undermine Evangelism?
The doctrine of election doesn't undermine the missionary mandate. It's the only thing that makes it sustainable.
The most common objection to the doctrine of election goes something like this: if God has already determined who will and won’t be saved, then why bother evangelize?
If God has already determined that the elect are going to be saved and the reprobate are going to be lost, then the whole enterprise of missions and evangelism seems pointless at best and theatrical at worst.
The question is understandable, but the scripture does not allow this conclusion. In fact, not only is this a false conclusion, but the opposite is true. Calvinism does not undermine evangelism, it is 94 octane, premium fuel for evangelism.
The best place to see this dynamic at work is Romans 9-10. Romans 9 lays out the doctrine of election in straightforward, plain terms. Romans 10 explains the necessity of evangelism to bring about the conversion of the elect. In other words, Calvinism and evangelism fit together like a hand in a glove.
From man’s perspective, salvation is simple: “if you confess with your mouth that Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved” (Rom 10:9). “For ‘everyone who calls on the name of the Lord will be saved’” (v13). Simply put, salvation isn’t “out there” somewhere, high up some mountain where you have to seek it out like a hidden treasure. No, salvation is a simple as believing the message of the gospel, wherever it goes. “The word is near you, in your mouth and in your heart” (v8).
The substance of every conversion story is the same. Someone believed in their heart that Jesus died for their sins and rose from the dead, and they confessed him as Lord. Believe the gospel. That’s it. Faith plus nothing equals everything.
Even though Paul taught in Romans 9 that God alone determines everyone’s ultimate destiny, Romans 10 teaches that God works through human means to bring this about. The logic of the missionary mandate goes like this: if salvation happens simply by someone believing and calling on the name of Christ, then they will need to hear about Christ in order to call on him, and someone will have to preach Christ in order for someone to hear about him.
Thus, preaching is not optional. Preaching is structurally necessary for anyone to be saved. Paul works through this chain in Romans 10:14-15: “How then will they call on him in whom they have not believed? And how are they to believe in him of whom they have never heard? And how are they to hear without someone preaching? And how are they to preach unless they are sent?”
In Paul’s day, news traveled by heralds. A man was literally “sent” into the public square to announce important events. A town waiting to hear news from a distant battle or something would crowd around the herald to hear the news. If he said “I have good news,” everyone would feel immediate relief. He was bringing a “gospel” to them: good news. And people would delight to hear it and bless the man who’s feet carried him to that city to announce it.
That’s what gospel proclamation is. The gospel is the good news that God sent his Son into the world, that he died in our place, that he rose from the grave having conquered sin and death, that victory has been accomplished and the celebration has begun. And further, all anyone needs to do to share in that victory is receive it by faith. It is the best news that has ever been announced. And it will only reach people if someone announces it.
This means, every Christian is a herald. One way or another, we have all been sent. The non-Christians in your life will only become Christians if someone shares the gospel with them. God works through means, and evangelism is the means he has sovereignly appointed for saving the lost.
What Calvinism Does for the Evangelist
This is where the sovereignty of God becomes practically relevant to the task of evangelism rather than an obstacle to it.
If you believe that your friend’s eternal destiny ultimately rests in his or her own decision, and that he or she just needs to be convinced by the right arguments or techniques to make that decision, then you’ll feel as though the outcome depends on whether you can make the gospel compelling enough. You will feel enormous pressure every time you share your faith to say it just right. And if they don’t believe in Christ, you might feel as though it’s your fault for not presenting it compellingly enough.
That pressure does something to people. It makes them overly pragmatic. I’ve seen this many times and I’ve watched how much harm it can do. The evangelist feels unnecessary pressure to save the other person, which is something only God can do. And quite often, they end up watering down the gospel and eliminating Jesus’ call of discipleship that requires us to deny ourselves, take up our cross, and follow him. They’re tempted to downplay the cost of discipleship to make it easier for people to make the right decision, but in so doing, they’ve robbed the gospel of its clarity and power. Basically, pragmatism produces easy-believism kind of evangelism, which leads to false converts.
They think they’re saved because they “made a decision” one time, but their life isn’t changed. If the goal is to get people to make a decision, then anything that produces a decision looks like success. I’ve been in ministry long enough to see how frequently emotional manipulation is used as an evangelistic strategy. I’ve seen social pressure, bait-and-switch programming, entertainment-driven worship services designed to lower resistance, and similar strategies justified under the banner of “reaching the lost.” And since it works on a human level by producing “decisions,” we’re reluctant to question it.
People say things like, “look at what God is doing! We’re reaching the lost! Look at how many souls are saved!” But are they actually being converted? In many cases, no, they’re not. They have been emotionally manipulated and spiritually coddled because their ears have been tickled.
These tactics are some of the most destructive trends in modern American Christianity. Churches abandoned genuine worship on the Lord’s Day and turned Sunday morning into an evangelistic crusade, where the entire service calibrated to the sensibilities of unbelievers. Fancy production values, carefully engineered emotional environments, altar calls staged with volunteers standing simultaneously to create a bandwagon effect, all designed to manufacture a decision.
These strategies have been around for a while. Charles Finney pioneered these methods about two hundred years ago, and he is the grandfather of everything wrong with modern revivalism. The result is a massive population of false converts. These are people who think they’re Christians because they responded to an emotional stimulus but whose lives show no evidence of genuine regeneration. Meanwhile, the true sheep in the pews are being deprived of spiritual food from God’s word because their pastors, drunk on church growth gimmicks, are focused on goat farming.
The doctrines of grace are the antidote to this. Not because Calvinists are smarter or more virtuous, but because the doctrine itself clarifies the division of labor between the evangelist and the Holy Spirit.
Our job as evangelists is to faithfully preach the gospel. That’s it. We may use tools of persuasion and apologetics, but that’s not the same as decisioneering and manipulation.
The Holy Spirit’s job is to use human preaching to accomplish the supernatural work of awakening dead hearts. I cannot change anyone’s heart. I don’t have that power. Neither do you. The only one who can take a spiritually dead person and make him alive is God. And that means the pressure is off me to manufacture a result. My responsibility is simply to to be faithful with the message.
This simplification is liberating. It means the power is in the message itself, not in my methods. The gospel is “the power of God for salvation to everyone who believes” (Romans 1:16). Dressing it up or watering it down is the same as being ashamed of it. We can simply preach the unvarnished gospel without softening it to make it more palatable because God’s word will accomplish what God intends it to accomplish. It means I can be patient with hard-hearted people because sometimes it takes a long time for a seed to germinate. And it means I can be confident — genuinely confident — that God can save anyone I share the gospel with, because salvation is entirely his work, not mine.
You don’t have to be a Calvinist to care about missions. But it is simply false to say that Calvinism undermines evangelism. Calvinism places our confidence where it belongs. God alone has the power to save, and he uses our simple and faithful preaching as the means to do so.
Personal Updates and Media Appearances
Loser Theology: Why the Weak Won’t Inherit the Earth
My next book published by Canon Press is on the final stretch of publication. Pictured below is the cover for the Advanced Reader Copies being sent out for endorsements and book reviews. So far, I’ve received endorsements from Willy Rice, Katie Faust, Auron Macintyre, Andy Naselli, Jon Harris, Joe Holland, and Brad Andrews.
To give you an idea, see below for the most recent endorsement I got back from my friend, Josh Daws. I’m told the pre-order site should be made available in the coming weeks. I’ll let you know as soon as that’s up.
Conferences
I spoke at two different conferences this month. One was the Church and Family Life Conference in Black Mountain, NC. The other one was a men’s conference in Iowa called “Rugged Christianity.” Both events were a huge blessing and I was honored to be invited.
Media Appearance
I went on Auron Macintyre’s show a couple of weeks ago to discuss the piece I wrote about Vivek Ramaswamy regarding his effort to sycretize his Hindu beliefs with Christianity to court voters.