I had the privilege of sitting down for over an hour with Dr. Dale Wayman, one of the Vice Presidents of the Society of Evangelical Arminians. The following article is a transcript from part of our conversation, I pray that it helps many and glorifies God and His true character.
…And that’s one of the things that I think is so destructive about Calvinism, is it makes our Savior into our abuser, and that’s not the way He is. He is our savior and he’s there to Help us, not to abuse us… Dr. Dale Wayman
Ash: Thank you so much for taking the time to have this conversation. Could you please start out with telling the audience a bit about yourself, perhaps any favorite areas of study or passion topics and anything pertaining to this conversation and topic that you find important to mention.
Dale: I appreciate you letting me talk to you a little bit about this. So I’ve been in the mental health field professionally for 40 plus years and been married for 40 years, so my wife knew what she was getting into, and she’s been such an invaluable resource for me, a good source of strength for me. I started out as a social worker in rural Appalachia and in that area, if a social worker shows up on your front porch, they’re there to take your children. So I would get that everywhere I go, “Oh, are you here to take my kids?” and I didn’t want to be the person where someone immediately thought, “Oh, no, he’s coming!” and so then I became a Drug and Alcohol Counselor and got certified and licensed in that, and that was good, but I wanted to do more. So then I became a Mental Health Counselor and after that I became a Professor and a Clinical Supervisor. I’ve been in the mental health field for a long time and I’ve probably seen everything there is to see.
I’m also a Christian and been a Christian since I was six years old, and I’m currently 62. I’ve been a Christian for 50 plus years, and I was raised in a pastor’s family and raised in a Free Methodist parsonage. And Free Methodists are unlike United Methodists or Global Methodists in the sense that we started out in the middle 1800s or so, and we believe that people should not be enslaved. Therefore it was right around the time of the Civil War, and so we were abolitionists, and also we didn’t believe that people should have to pay for their pew to have a seat in the church, and so that’s where the word “free” comes. But Methodism comes from Wesley, and so we’re of the Wesleyan branch of Christianity, and that’s who I identify most with, is Wesleyanism and Wesley.
I also do evaluations of pastors that come to our district that are wanting to become pastors, people that want to become pastors, and one of the things that we really look for is to make sure that they don’t have a theology that is Calvinist, because we’re not a Calvinist denomination. And so I’ve studied up a lot on this topic.
My dad had been with the pastorate for 60-something years. He’s passed away recently, but he taught me so much about theology. In fact, I have two brothers who are pastors and they have their doctorate in ministry. A concern of mine is pastors who are Calvinist that get God’s character confused and when they go to help people, I think they actually do not honor God as appropriately as they could. Because it seems like in Calvinism, God is your enemy rather than your Salvation. I think that’s really important that people who’ve experienced abuse, spiritual, sexual, or physical, need to understand, that God is on their side. That God is our salvation and we’re only saved through what Jesus Christ did for us.
I think that’s really important that people who’ve experienced abuse, spiritual, sexual, or physical, need to understand, that God is on their side.
I’ve counseled a lot of pastors in the years. I’ve counseled a lot of people who’ve experienced abuse and it seems like it’s one’s perception of God that seems to be the key to getting better, and I have this book, Theology for Better Counseling, and it’s by Virginia Holman, and I really like her work, and she makes an interesting statement here that I think is just amazing. She says this: “Counseling can function as a means of grace, a process through which God can pour His love into human lives.”
I’m one of the vice presidents for the Society of Evangelical Arminians. There’s a president, and then there’s four vice presidents, and we firmly believe that Calvinism needs to decrease. That’s one of our objectives, to decrease the influence of Calvinism and increase the influence of Arminianism. And when you use those two terms, people say, “Oh, they follow Calvin,” and “They follow Arminius,” and that’s not what we mean. I’m not sure what Calvinists always mean with that, but that’s not what we mean, because we don’t agree with everything Jacobus Arminius said. There’s a few things that we disagree with him on, but that kind of language is simply just shorthand. It’s just saying it’s a theological belief, and so when I use that term “Calvinist” or “Arminian” or “Wesleyan,” I’m not saying that these people are to be exonerated as perfect or imperfect people. It’s rather a shorthand for a description of beliefs. So you could kind of say maybe they’re like heroes, maybe, but they’re not Jesus, they’re not the Bible. That’s for sure. They can be wrong. They’re just people, and so when I use that throughout our conversation, don’t think I want to be like Arminius, no, I want to be like Jesus. That’s who I want to be like. But Arminius put together a lot of the thoughts and Wesley put together a lot of the thoughts and beliefs that I have about the Bible and the way God works in our world, and so I just use that kind of as a shorthand.
What’s really important about Wesley is that he believed in Sancta Caritas, which means Holy Love, and he says that’s God’s Holy Love. There’s nothing else in God except pure Holy Love. And if you follow some people who’ve kind of gone on further, they’ve added the sola to it, Sola Sancta Caritas, only Holy Love. And so God has nothing in him but Holy love. Now that doesn’t mean that God winks at sin. It doesn’t mean that at all. It just means that love is the most powerful force in our universe and that’s God who is pure love. And so pure love confronts evil and sometimes has to do hard things to evil, to get evil to stop or slow down. And some people get Wesley wrong, thinking that he excused everything, and that’s what I think probably led to some of the division in the UMC. I’m not a UMC expert, so I don’t know what all happened, but I think that’s part of it. Because our world says, “If you love me, you’ll let me do anything I want to do,” and that’s not what God says. God says if you love Me, you’ll keep My commandments and you’ll also have a heart of love for others, even though you disagree with those who aren’t following me. Sometimes we have to confront things, and so when we’re talking about abuse in the church or something like that, that has to be confronted. You know that is not acceptable. That is not love. Love is not abusive and God is not abusive in the slightest. He knows exactly what He’s doing and He’s perfect, perfectly loves us, each one of us, as if we were the only person that he loves.
Love is not abusive and God is not abusive in the slightest. He knows exactly what He’s doing and He’s perfect, perfectly loves us, each one of us, as if we were the only person that he loves.
Ash: As a well experienced counselor, what do you see as the logical consequences of trying to counsel someone who actively believes or leans towards belief in divine determinism? Not just the theological fallout that can happen from that, but the practical implications. I can tell you from my own experience, and you can speak to this as an experienced counselor, I believed that if divine determinism was true, it was kind of like the ends justified the means type of thinking and consequently I had developed a big distrust towards God. It was hard for me to reconcile God being loving and actually caring for me and then also, at the same time, hearing that He decreed this horrific event to happen to me.
Dale: You know the consequences of that line of thinking is: God becomes your enemy. God, You decreed that from an eternity past, that I was going to be abused by my uncle? That is not God at all.
Calvin wrote in his Institutes, Book 3, chapter 23, paragraph 6, he says that, God foresees events because He had to make them determined. So what he’s saying is that God is really not omniscient, He only knows what He’s determined. And since God has predetermined everything, He knows everything now. Whereas the branch that I’m in Arminianism, we believe God knows everything because He’s God. That’s just part of the job, that’s part of the requirements to be God is that He knows everything. What He knows is our free will actions and He’s known them forever. He knows our free will actions and that is what He is operating on, and He’s not operating on all these decrees that He made in eternity past, because that just doesn’t make sense to me in terms of God’s loving character. The Westminster Confession of Faith gives the same sentiment as Calvin. It says God from all eternity did by the most wise and Holy counsel of His own will, freely and unchangeably ordained, whatever comes to pass. That’s not the God that I know. It doesn’t make sense. And then they go on a little bit further and say, even though we’re telling you this, He’s not the author of sin.
Okay, so why do they have to bring that in? Because that’s where your mind goes. If God decreed everything that comes to pass, that makes God the author of sin, doesn’t it? To me that just doesn’t fit God’s loving character.
Ash: A common question that survivors of sexual abuse struggle with is this, “If God is real and good, why did this happen? Why didn’t He stop this evil as it was happening?” Our view of God is so important because if someone truly believes that God has caused their abuse for His glory, that is truly so painful to think about and it’s so contrary to what we read in the Bible. What do you think about those tough questions?
Dale: If you’re crying out to God, “Please God, help me with this! Stop this abuse.” And God’s response is “Well, you know I decree this from a long time ago.” That just doesn’t make sense. So you go to your Rescuer, and your Rescuer turns out to be your abuser. That doesn’t make any sense. That doesn’t sound like a loving God to me. And so the God who I go to, who rescues me from evil, is the God who did not create evil, but in fact God was with me when that evil occurred to me. I think that’s an important fact to know, that God was with us when we were being abused, and God was also being abused. He knows exactly how an abused person feels, because He was there with you when it happened. When someone asks, “Why didn’t God restrain this evil? Why didn’t God stop it from happening?” I don’t know the answer to that. I do know, and I’m confident in this, that God did not allow everything to happen that was in that abuser’s mind. I do believe God restrains certain actions of evil people because that’s the way God operates. And so when we get to heaven and we talk to God about this, say God, why did you allow this abuse to happen? I think this is not in the Bible. This is just a conjecture on my part. You know we’re going to have an eternity to be with God, and so we’ll have plenty of time to ask him all kinds of questions, and so I think God’s going to say “This did happen to you, but let Me show you what could have happened to you if I wasn’t there.” And so to me that’s very comforting as a counselor, it’s very comforting to me as if I was a person who was abused.
Ash: You brought up so many good points. This reminds me of Dr. Leighton Flowers from Soteriology 101 saying that God doesn’t need to play both sides of the chess board to win. Calvinists believe God has to play both sides to win, and we don’t believe that. We believe God’s skill is so much better and He knows what moves we’re going to make an infinite number of steps ahead. And then to address what you said about the comfort that we can give people about what we don’t know that was restrained, I have to agree wholeheartedly. Sometimes, when we’ve been wronged, we tend to demand or want to see justice immediately and we can become short-sighted. We may think “This person got away with it!”, but the truth is we’re not on the other side of eternity yet. The judgment hasn’t happened yet. The ultimate comfort is knowing that God is perfectly just and merciful and no sin will slip by Him.
Dale: It’s interesting you brought up the point about people wanting to see an immediate punishment. I was working on a case just this last weekend, where a man drove into another car, killed the two people, and then the man who drove into the car died too. And the family said, “Where’s the justice in that? I want to be able to see him hurt and in pain for the pain that he caused us!” In this case the counselor was saying that justice isn’t over yet.
We don’t know what God’s going to do in eternity for this man. We hope, and this is hard for some people to hear, we hope that he gave his life to Christ before he passed away and that he is in eternity and he is in salvation.
And I think that for people who’ve been abused, this is so hard to swallow, but that’s where God wants us to be. Are we praying for our abuser to come to Christ, repent of their actions and live a godly life? Or, if they’re dead, hoping and praying that they did come to Faith before they passed away? I think about the things that I’ve done, and I’m glad God will not punish me for those things. I’m glad He accepted my request for forgiveness. That’s why it’s called grace, it’s getting what you don’t deserve.
Ash: This is something I run into with the women that I mentor, they conflate forgiveness with trust and exposure. They think, if I forgive this person in my heart, now I have to be their best friend, now I have to let my kids be around them, now I have to act like nothing happens. I try to show them that’s not what forgiveness means. I can forgive someone and still have a boundary for my safety and the safety of others.
Moving right along to the next question, what is a specific instance in Scripture we can use during counseling sessions to help someone struggling with picturing the concept that God can redeem bad situations that He Himself did not cause?
Dale: James White said something along the lines of, God had to have determined this, otherwise the evil is meaningless and purposeless. But how is evil purposeful? Evil is never purposeful, because God doesn’t do evil, there’s no darkness in Him at all. He is pure love and pure light.
I think Calvinists get the story wrong when they’re talking about Joseph. Because when Joseph confronts his brothers towards the end of the story, he says
“What you meant for evil, God meant for good.” And the Calvinists say “Well, that means that God made it happen!” Because they believe that God had to foreordain it, to foresee it, He had to ordain it to make it happen. But just because it happens the way it did doesn’t mean that was God’s will. Just because Joseph was put into a well, sold into slavery and spent time in prison, and finally rose to second in command in Egypt, just because it happened that way doesn’t mean that God willed it that way. In other words, God didn’t make that happen that way, but He used that to bring Joseph into power. And God’s plan could have been totally different if Joseph’s brothers were obedient to God, and it still would have resulted in God getting glory.
Ash: And even in the story of Jospeh, we see what we were talking about earlier, that God restrains evil. We saw that with the brothers, they wanted to kill him but God restrained that.
Let’s go to the next question. Sometimes those dealing with the aftermath of abuse are told not to think about their past. Some Christians will use Philippians 3: 13-14, Forgetting those things which are behind and reaching forth unto those things which are before, as a proof text in favor of promoting not dealing with suffering or abuse that has happened. From personal experience, this is a common sentiment in the Biblical Counseling realm, and I think it’s very unhelpful for people when it comes to this whole conversation. So what do you think about that can of worms right there in that verse?
Dale: People are discounting the pain that you’ve been through, and that’s not appropriate. You need to deal with that pain, deal with that experience and let God draw you closer to Him. And forgiving doesn’t necessarily mean forgetting, and forgetting doesn’t necessarily mean forgiving. Those aren’t necessarily the same. But also, the context of this here in Philippians 3:13 is not about abuse, it’s about our sinful past. I need to try to forget all the bad things that I’ve done and look at what Christ has done for me and focus on that, because the devil wants to always remind us of all the bad things we’ve done. The devil’s trying to remind us of that and God says, Hey, I’ve forgotten that...
You need to deal with that pain, deal with that experience and let God draw you closer to Him. And forgiving doesn’t necessarily mean forgetting, and forgetting doesn’t necessarily mean forgiving. Those aren’t necessarily the same.
…I’ve forgiven you for that. Why do you keep letting yourself be beat up by something you’ve done in the past? You need to move forward and remember what I’ve done for you.
Now, that’s a painful thought, because that’s where abusers need to be too. And we don’t want to imagine that an abuser can say “Oh well, that’s in the past, I’m not going to dwell on that anymore.” You know that’s really hard to swallow if you’ve been abused, because have they really changed? Or are they just saying that because they don’t want to face the past? Only God knows. And that’s where the Holy Spirit comes in. The Holy Spirit can change anybody, the most vile and evil person. He can speak to that person, and that person can decide if they want to continue in evil, or do they want to move forward and live for God? It’s so, like you said, “a can of worms.” But the context, though, of that verse in Philippians does not support telling victims of abuse to just “get over it”.
Ash: Yes, this the where the rubber meets the road for our Faith: forgiveness. This reminds me of when in the Bible the Christians were really wary of Paul at first. They said “That guy?? Are you sure? Are you really sure of that??” I’m sure there were people who couldn’t accept that because of Paul’s past.
Dale: Regarding forgiveness, it’s not a human expectation, it’s a Godly expectation. We can’t do it in our own power. We have to only do it through God. That’s the only way we can forgive the people who hurt us. We can’t do it on our own, and so I don’t know how people work through it who aren’t Christians. It has to be really difficult. Because it’s so difficult for Christians, it has to be even more difficult for non-Christians. Especially those, for example, who were abused by a pastor. Someone being abused in the name of God, by a person who’s supposed to be representing God. How much more sinful can a behavior be than to represent God and abuse somebody? And so you’ve turned people against God because of your abuse. And so people need to see oh, that pastor was not really God, that pastor was not acting godly.
Regarding forgiveness, it’s not a human expectation, it’s a Godly expectation. We can’t do it in our own power. We have to only do it through God. That’s the only way we can forgive the people who hurt us.
What’s interesting is the story of David and Bathsheba. David obviously sexually abused her. He used his authority to get her to be with him. I mean, if she said no, he could have had her killed, and so how did she reconcile that over time? She had to be a tremendous woman to be able to experience that and continue to raise Godly children. And we don’t see in the Bible that she went off the rails.
And then there is Esther as well, she was sexually abused as well. She was forced to be with the King. And yet God gave her the boldness and strength to approach this King to save her people. Even though she was being abused, God still used her mightily. Esther will be remembered in history forever because of her boldness. Bathsheba and Esther, I have so much respect for both of those women. I want to talk to them in heaven and ask, what did you go through to forgive?
Ash: This conversation has been so edifying, and I want to wrap it up with a some of your final thoughts on Divine Determinism and God’s Holy character.
Dale: God doesn’t cause evil. I mean, it’s just that simple. One of the things I think that’s wrong with Calvinism or determinism in particular, is it’s an ends justifies the means theology. So here’s the goal, and however you get there, it’s okay, long as you’ve got the goal in mind and you make it there… and that’s just wrong. And people understand that in our world. They understand you can’t step on and use people to get what you want. So why do they attribute that to God? It just makes no sense. If we had a human who did that, we wouldn’t accept that. Emotionally, logically, psychologically, spiritually, none of that makes any sense. And so then they have the sui generis argument, which is that “God’s unique, so He can do unique things that humans cannot do. Therefore, He can do all these things and not be held accountable, because nobody can hold God accountable.”
That’s true. He can do whatever He wants, but it’s not in His nature to do evil. He’s told us that over and over and over, that He does not delight in evil.
And so why do we try to attribute that to Him? We need to stop blaming God for things that He has not done and blame the right person. It’s the evil that’s going on, and that evil is going to be taken care of. The devil is going to be gone when we get to eternity. It’s not going to be there anymore, and so I’m looking forward to that very much so.
We need to stop blaming God for things that He has not done and blame the right person. It’s the evil that’s going on, and that evil is going to be taken care of. The devil is going to be gone when we get to eternity. It’s not going to be there anymore, and so I’m looking forward to that very much so.
Ash: Amen. This conversation is so important to me on many levels. Personally, Calvinism had me down a path were I almost shipwrecked my faith. I stopped praying, to be honest with you, because I thought what’s the point? Every thing will happen in God’s will anyways, I got very nihilistic. The end place where Divine Determinism leads was a very dark place for me. I nearly left the faith because of it, because I thought, is this really who God is? I had absolutely zero deep connection with God at that time.
Dale: I’m so glad that you didn’t leave the Faith. I’m glad that you stayed true to what the real God was, not the God who causes evil, because God does not do evil. And that’s one of the things that I think is so destructive about Calvinism, it makes our Savior into our abuser, and that’s not the way He is. He is our savior and he’s there to Help us, not to abuse us.
Ash: Wow, so profoundly said. Thank you so much for taking the time for this conversation!
And that’s one of the things that I think is so destructive about Calvinism, is it makes our Savior into our abuser, and that’s not the way He is. He is our savior and he’s there to Help us, not to abuse us.
You can find Dr. Wayman’s website here.
[This article was taken from taken from Ashleigh Nicole’s website Steadfast Hearts and Minds, and has been edited slightly. Some related posts are listed below.]
— Dr. Wayman’s discussion with fellow SEA member Dan Chapa about the types of issues discussed above: “Video: Calvinism Breaks Down in the Counseling Office”
— Brian Abasciano, “Answering the Problem of Evil from an Arminian Perspective”
