A critique of Evangelical (Calvinistic) faith

Well, as always, I have been hoping, meaning, planning to write a blog post here, but as always, busyness has prevailed. In fact I was so determined to write a post today – it is now past midnight, I mean yesterday! I can’t even remember what it was going to be on now though! Because I spend so much time on YouTube, and I watch so many relationship videos, ie people complaining about their relationships, I am never short of blog ideas, and always have a few bubbling away in my mind that I could write about.

However, what finally drove me to write this post is something completely different, not related to relationships, but all the same something I have been wanting to write about for a while now. And it is this:
I’m going to have to think of a diplomatic title for this, but basically it is a critique of evangelical (calvinistic) Christianity. IE everything that is wrong with it, demonstrating that it is not a sincere expression of Biblical faith.

Now before I go any further, let me make it clear that I am not from an evangelical tradition -or rather I am, but the way the term is usually used in Western circles, it usually means “Calvinistic”. Yes, technically I am an evangelical Christian, meaning born-again, but I am definitely NOT calvinistic. I was born into and adhere to a Pentecostal/charismatic expression of evangelical faith, and to be clear there are many things wrong with that too, and many ways modern expression of Pentecostal/charismatic faith deviate very sharply from the Bible. Perhaps I need to do a critique on that too.

So why is it the evangelical faith that I have chosen to criticise?  Because in my experience they are so convinced that they are right, that they have an exclusive understanding of faith, there is lots of presumed intellectual as well as racial superiority.  Right now I can’t remember what it was that drove me to the tipping point of thinking “Right, I need to write an article about this!”, but that tipping point occurred a few months ago. But then other things have happened within the last couple of hours which made me think “Right, I have to write that post this very tonight!”

This particular post that I am writing just now has also convinced me that I need to revive my Bible blog, which has been dormant for a few years. So I’ll hopefully get around to that in the next few days.

Because it is now late at night and I am tired, and I still have not completed my todo list for the previous day, I am going to do a quick summary just now of everything that I want to say:

I have written with lots of anger and venom about Evangelical(Calvinistic) Christians on both of my blogs. I have come conclusively to the point of thinking “Right! I need to let go of this anger.” But as part of releasing that anger, I have come to see that their faith is completely different from my faith. It is not the same faith at all. Henceforth, I can be polite towards these people, I can put all this anger and frustration etc in the past. However, I will never again be remotely tempted to interact with these people as Christian “brothers and sisters”. Whatever faith they have, it is completely different from mine. Furthermore, I have seen enough of their faith to know that I want to have nothing to do with it, or them, ever again.

– This point is probably the biggest thing: Evangelical/calvinistic theology is not actually a sincere interpretation of the Bible. At all. From my reflection, it occurred to me that it is actually an attempt to sanitise the Bible and the faith, to file off the sharp edges (or however the idiom goes) to make it fit in with Western Enlightenment thinking.  Or you could say it is an attempt to Christianise the Enlightenment.

As someone with a strong African heritage, and thereby not a native child of the Enlightenment, this has caused great puzzlement whenever I have interacted with evangelical/calvinistic Christians. I believe that the Bible/faith should be understandable from the Bible. So someone should be able to come with absolutely no knowledge of the Bible, and understand it all from reading the Bible, and from the leading of the Holy Spirit. This also means that people from different cultures, ethnicities and time periods should be able to come to the Bible and understand essentially the same thing.  And yet now I have finally grasped this understanding about the Enlightenment, I now understand that huge invisible levers for the evangelical faith are operating from outside the Bible.  And there is simply no way of understanding it if you are not “in the know” about Enlightenment thinking, or you have not absorbed it as thoroughly as they have. And worse yet, perhaps unwittingly, evangelical Christians judge others based on these invisible, extra-biblical levers, and still call it “Bible”.

– Theology versus miracles. This is one of the huge invisible levers that I am talking about. Evangelical/Calvinistic Christians look down on the idea of performing miracles. As I am typing this out, I can’t help laughing, as supernatural power expressed through miraculous events is so central to the Christian faith, or at least it is central to the Bible. Yet in my experience Calvinistic Christians enforce a a very sharp dichotomy between “theology” and miracles, where theology is good, but miracles are weird, or suspect. Guess what?!  This dichotomy does not come from the Bible at all. Where does it come from? It comes rather from the Enlightenment insistence on “Reason” over superstition, where  in the calvinistic interpretation “theology” corresponds to “Reason” and miracles correspond to “superstition”.

And this is one of the things where if you’re me, you will talk happily about miracles, and they (evangelical Christians) will just look at you weirdly, as if you should just know.  Yeah, because the Bible talks about miracles, all the time!  Here’s the thing, if you don’t want to believe in what the Bible actually says, then that is your prerogative.  However, please do not bring this pseudo-intellectual nonsense and claim “this is what the Bible says!”  because it is not. Whether you like it or not the Bible is a supernatural book, in both the Old Testament AND the New Testament. Furthermore the Bible makes supernatural promises of life right down here on earth, in this lifetime. To claim anything else, to try to twist the Bible into saying anything else is gaslighting on an immense scale.

[A digression: this is also why there is such easy and fluent crossover between atheism and evangelical Christianity, in that someone will decide that they are no longer an evangelical Christian and they will automatically become an atheist – because they, Calvinism and atheism are already essentially the same thing, they are founded on the same tenets of “reason” over superstition. Today’s Western atheism is the non-religious expression of Enlightenment thinking. ]

There are so many other things that I could add just now, but as I say I am tired.
-Calv. Christians don’t believe in hearing from God, don’t receive any guidance from God – and it shows! Insist on interpreting the Bible as if the world is still the same as it was when the Bible was written – this is where the guidance of the Holy Spirit would be useful
– A completely powerless faith, not just in terms of miracles. Makes no impact whatsoever, has no expectation of making impact in society, does not even make any significant impact in the lives of its adherents.  This is why it is not a threat to global power systems, unlike the First Century church, and is therefore largely tolerated, unlike the First Century church
-Rooted in White supremacy (owing to its roots in the racist Enlightenment) and still unsubtly expresses that.
– Claims to strongly uphold the word of God “We are evangelicals because we believe the Bible!” In truth, it flagrantly ignores much of the Bible.  For instance, when I was in university, the Christian Union made a very big thing that we were “not allowed” to speak in tongues. Apparently no-one there had ever come across 1 Corinthians 14v39 “And do not forbid to speak in tongues”. Rather they twisted a verse about eating meat and making your brother stumble to insist that people should not speak in tongues.  Which is utterly laughable considering that there is actually a verse which categorically, unequivocally says “Do not forbid to speak in tongues”.

-This should be the premier point: Calvinistic Christians make such a song and dance about  Jesus. Everything is all about “taking it back to the cross, laying it at the foot of the cross!” However, after deep consideration, the following, shocking thing occurred to me: Calvinistic Christians do not have any time whatsoever for the person of Jesus or what Jesus said.  They only care about Jesus as a theological motif. [He is] “The image of the invisible God, ineffably sublime!” Hence they ignore all the things that Jesus actually said. This is why it is commonly said online by both Christians and non-Christians alike that if Jesus was actually walking the earth today, Christians would accuse Him of being “woke”. Because their faith makes no space whatsoever for the things that Jesus actually said. They don’t even recognise His words or teachings as being in any way central to their faith.

– [The last point I will make just now, but very pertinent to me] Because their faith was apparently all about having a “correct” (read woefully incorrect) understanding of theology, and possibly because they apparently did not believe in reading the Bible to understand God, and because they had no time for Christ, they obviously had no time for Christlike character either, so their character was often appalling. They were so full of insincerity, barely disguised racial superiority, lies, gossip. These are the things which have strongly provoked me to anger, and these are the things I have been ranting about ever since. I’ve previously said about them that I’ve never met such awful people in my life. And you know what, I belatedly realised only a few weeks ago that Christian Union was an attempt to convert people like me to their faith.  Yeah, thanks but no thanks!  Who would leave a faith like mine, where God regards me as a full human being, and my faith has a powerful tangible daily effect in my life, to go over to your non-impactful, Christless Christianity to be trampled endlessly by your presumption of racial superiority (amongst so many other things)?!

Actually, I’ve just remembered something else which I have to write down just now: Christian Union certainly hosted prayer meetings. However, I have since come to realise that Calvinistic Christians don’t truly believe in prayer. Because they believe that “God is Sovereign”, so whatever He wants to happen will eventually happen anyway, whether we pray or not, so what is the point of praying?!  Once again, this completely contradicts the Bible, but as might be obvious by now, calvinistic Christians apparently think that they know more than God.