All Scripture is God-breathed . . .

This often-quoted Scripture about Scripture in 2 Timothy 3:16 gets a lot of attention today (and it should). Many fine defenses of the classical understanding of these three Greek words (pasa graphē theopneustos) have been published in recent decades. The God-inspired, or God-exhaled, nature of holy Scripture is worth receiving and defending and — as the rest of the verse reads — putting to use. Theorize and argue about it as we might, a second foot lands that makes this a strikingly practical text:

All Scripture is breathed out by God and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness . . .

Take up Scripture, and use it, Paul writes. It is profitable, that is, valuable, beneficial, useful (Greek ōphelimos). We might even say it’s doubly useful — not only for those who are taught, reproved, corrected, and trained, but also for the teacher himself. That’s the purpose Paul gives: “. . . that the man of God (the teacher himself!) may be complete, equipped for every good work” (2 Timothy 3:17). Scripture not only profits the people; it equips the teachers. Christian pastors dare not feign to teach and preach to God’s people apart from using Scripture — with the kind of use (and not abuse) that God intends.

Are the Four in Order?

Now, ancient letter-writing was an expensive and time-consuming endeavor (we shouldn’t assume the kind of speed and carelessness with which we dash off emails today). Skilled craftsmen like Paul would thoughtfully plan and draft and rewrite and edit and proof their epistles before those words hit the Roman roads.

So, when an apostle lists a sequence like the last part of 2 Timothy 3:16 — “for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness” — he means it. He thought of this list, ordered it, drafted it, reviewed it, and finalized it. The Theological Dictionary of the New Testament goes as far as to say that this is “obviously a planned sequence in this list of nouns.”
While guarding against over-reading the order, we can look for reasons why Paul chooses these particular words and arranges them like he does.

Let’s consider, then, this planned sequence for the pastoral use of Scripture in the local church. How might these specific activities clarify our calling and practice as pastor-teachers?

First and Foremost: Teach

It’s no surprise that Paul would begin with “teaching.”

Teaching is the distinctive, central labor of the pastor-elders in the life of the local church. The risen Christ gives his church its pastors and teachers (Ephesians 4:11), leaders who speak the word of God (Hebrews 13:7), overseers who not only exercise authority but do so mainly through teaching the gathered church (1 Timothy 2:12). Good pastor-elders “labor in preaching and teaching” (1 Timothy 5:17). The heart of their calling is not their own wisdom or life hacks or executive savvy, but feeding souls through teaching and preaching God’s word.

So, Paul takes a deep breath after verse 17 and then says, after a long, loaded preamble, “preach the word” (2 Timothy 4:2). And such pastoral preaching in the life of the local church is clearly bound up with teaching:

preach the word . . . reprove, rebuke, and exhort, with complete patience and teaching. For the time is coming when people will not endure sound teaching . . . (2 Timothy 4:2–3)

Let’s not miss the prevenient nature of Christian preaching and teaching: ideally, instruction in sound doctrine begins before the church encounters error. Preaching the word and teaching the Scriptures is steady-state, everyday Christian pastoral ministry. We feed the souls of the sheep on God’s words. His Scriptures are the green pastures and still waters to which good shepherds lead their flock. First comes faithful, heartful preaching and teaching, as daily bread and water; then comes the defense of the flock as various threats arise.

If the sequence of nouns in 2 Timothy 3:16 represents four distinct aspects of the pastoral use of Scripture, then it is hard to imagine another activity appearing first. Teaching is the pastors’ first and foremost call, and its coming first helps us to recognize what we might call a “didactic order” — a logical sequence here that lists teaching first, then rebuke, then correction, then training.

Next: Expose Error to Light

Appropriately, “reproof” comes next. Now the term is negative and responsive, complementing the positive and pro-active endeavor of teaching. However well the pastors teach their people, errors and deceptions inevitably emerge, often related to prevailing errors in the world (or overreactions to those errors) that find sympathy in the church. We Christians also have plenty of indwelling sin to originate our own errors as well. Every church and all Christians are susceptible to both innocent and culpable mistakes, in belief and practice, that need to be exposed to the light.

Pared with teaching, this reproof, says Gordon Fee, is “the other side of the task; [the pastor] must use Scripture to expose the errors of the false teachers and their teachings” (1 & 2 Timothy, Titus, 13). Exposing error to light, through words, is the heart of this second activity (John 3:20; Ephesians 5:11, 13). Good preaching and teaching exposes errors, yet without letting error set the agenda. Teaching is the tip of the spear — and the advancing spear divides truth from lies (and half-truths), and sheds fresh light on unlit nooks and crannies, enlightening darkened minds and convicting compromised hearts.

Pastoral exposition, then, not only exposes our people to the light by faithfully teaching Scripture; it also exposes remaining pockets of darkness in us and in our habits of life. And such exposure of error need not be combative or heavy-handed. Rather, like pastoral admonition (an even stronger term in the New Testament), reproof is familial. The apostle Paul says he wrote to the Corinthians not to shame them, but as a father to beloved children (1 Corinthians 4:14).

If even admonition is to be brotherly (2 Thessalonians 3:15), rather than adversarial (and works hand in hand with teaching, Colossians 1:28; 3:16), then wise shepherds, as fathers and brothers to the flock, will expose errors with the same hope, patience, and Christian grace they exercise in their teaching. The call to reprove is no license to sin, abandon self-control, or to draw attention to the teacher’s own smarts as the one who knows better.

Good pastors lovingly expose error — however gently or severely the situation requires (Titus 1:13; 2:14) — because we have a clear, objective, fixed standard of truth, outside ourselves. In a world of endless shades of gray, how could we presume to claim to say what’s in error and what’s not? Because we have and teach the Scriptures. Not our own abilities, but God’s written word. As Robert Yarbrough comments, “On what basis does any pastor stand in undertaking such a daunting responsibility? It is the Scriptures that furnish guidance and divine authority for servants of that word to perform this necessary function” (The Letters to Timothy and Titus, 687).

Then: Envision the Path Forward

So, back to the sequence. Let’s say God’s word is being taught, and along the way error is exposed — now what? Then follows “correction.”

Correction (Greek epanorthōsis) moves from ideas to actions, from exposing false teaching to envisioning godly living and tactical hope. Correction charts a course for healing, for restoration, for reformation, shining light on the path that is an escape from the dark. According to Yarbrough, “Pastors do not merely rebuke: they restore and point in corrective directions.” Correction, says Philip Towner, is “the activity that follows” rebuke.

Hebrews 12:13 captures it, using the same root word (orth-, meaning straight): “make straight paths for your feet, so that what is lame may not be put out of joint but rather be healed.” Correction re-sets the broken bone, that it might properly heal. It’s a companion to reproof that “emphasizes the behavioral, ethical side” (Fee). While reproof brings error to light, correction directs sinners toward recovery. When errors come to light — when you realize, Oh no, I’ve been wrong! — correction is the next step.

Tactical as it is, such correction is no less than the full application of God’s grace in Christ — both outside of us in Christ and his work, and in us through his indwelling Spirit. God’s word both announces his forgiveness of our exposed sins, and summons us to practical holiness, empowered by the Spirit. Christian teaching of God’s full word prompts sinners to cast themselves on mercy, and learn to stand and walk in grace as well.

Finally: Train Them to Live Well

Last of the four, and a fitting conclusion to the didactic sequence, is training — a freighted concept in the ancient world and New Testament (Greek paideia). Not merely verbal, but tactical, this “corresponds to correcting, as its positive side” (Fee). Training involves conditioning the inner person through “inculcating the acts and habits that will reflect God’s own character (his ‘righteousness’) in relationship with his people” (Yarbrough, 688).

As Jesus spoke about his disciples being trained during their time with him (Matthew 13:52; Luke 6:40), so we mean to disciple our people toward Christian maturity. And maturity, in any sphere of human life, does not come automatically, but through intentional conditioning (Hebrews 5:14). Discipling actually does something; it changes the disciple, it reshapes the soul and its patterns of thought and delights — and greatly so over time. And such training is typically not easy but requires persisting in moments of discomfort, even pain, to endure on the path toward the reward set before us (Hebrews 12:11).

Training doubtless includes what we might more narrowly call discipline (Hebrews 12:3–11), even as we note well the difference between discipline as a means and punishment as an end (1 Corinthians 11:32). The whole process of pastoral training is comprehensive and constructive, not just responsive. It’s holistic, not just intellectual.

This training in righteousness — in righteous living, Christian behavior — begins in our teaching, but doesn’t end with our words. To train our people, we pastors must be among them, and have our people among us (1 Peter 5:1–2). Together as pastoral teams, we teach the church how to live from Scripture and then model Christian conduct in everyday life (1 Peter 5:3; Titus 2:7).

In the midst of caring for the whole flock — through teaching, counseling, and example — we also “entrust [the central truths] to faithful men, who will be able to teach others also” (2 Timothy 2:2). That is, we disciple and seek to invest in future leaders, vocational and nonvocational, who we hope will join us in the work and do the same. We labor to raise up men who will use God’s word well to teach, reprove, correct, and train in righteousness even long after we’re gone.

She allured men to many places,She who is fatally coy.Men, who knew not her embraces,Called her by the name of Joy.

I can’t recall the first moment I experienced the tease, the turmoil, the torment of Joy.

When most speak of joy — when for many years I mentioned her — they mean a smiling joy, an uplifting joy, a joy for sunny days, a pleasant satisfaction. Comforts, fulfillments, good health, gratitude fills her banquet. She bequeaths a desire to be where you already are, a wish for what you already have.

But these were mere honeybees; the hive held a Queen.

The empress Joy emerged with a supremacy that murdered her rivals. She made common stones of former jewels; ruined my appetite for other meals. When she came nearest, the world beside leaked emptiest. Beauty was her weapon; splendor, her sorcery; allure, her deadly art. She was as a goddess, divine, bewitching.

She did not bestow a quiet contentment; she provoked a desperation, carnivorous and untamed. She knifed an ache for somewhere I wasn’t — a fierce and restless angst (a madness, it at times seemed) for a blessedness I did not possess, a blessedness I did not even know truly existed. What before I never needed, I could no longer live without. My Helen of Troy, hers was the face to launch ten thousand ships.

Shadows in the Water

She had but to smile in my direction and I set sail. She became my White Whale — or rather I her Ahab.

I remember her shadow showing beneath the waters during late evenings salsa dancing at Latin restaurants. While we inhabited the music, dramatizing masculinity and femininity in rhythm, a flicker transcended the fluidity of the dance — a moment — a glimpse.

I sensed her nearness on the football field, the place men feign war. At the helm of combat, time-warped and slowed. A friendly uniform flashed down the sideline. The ball catapulted — spiraling forth with mathematic eloquence, returning from its flight as a falcon diving at its prey. The crowd exhaled a roar — she, for a moment, smiled.

I heard her ancient voice through doorways into other worlds. In stories bigger than men, valor glistened from other lands, evil threatened, a mission dawned worth dying for. Beyond the make-believe worlds of magic and orcs and elves, beyond the battles and the wars and the triumph and restoration — she summoned. But to where?

At other moments, she would peer at me from the other side of a sunset, hike with me through kingdoms of green, smite me with her strings during beautiful symphonies, chuckle with delight through a child’s laughter, or converse intimately while on an evening’s date — but these were never her. “Beauty has smiled, but not to welcome us; her face was turned in our direction, but not to see us. We have not been accepted, welcomed, or taken into the dance” (The Weight of Glory, 41). She but left her perfume upon the doorknob.

Yet, for a moment, as fragile as a whisper, everything seemed right; a ray pierced into the clouded world. But the blaze soon extinguished; the snowflake melted; the credits rolled; the song fell with the heavy thud of silence. These Moseses brought me only to the borderland; quitted me on the wrong side of the Jordan. She invited me up to glance at the land flowing with milk and honey — but not to taste.

As quickly as the thought surfaced — Now this, at last, is what life is all about — she vanished. Her sun set violently. She teased and tore through my sky only to pass the scepter again to the lesser lights, leaving behind a dark and colder night.

Seasick

She led me there and back again,Old age and blisters all I found.The Siren of the souls of men,Forsook me to the ocean’s ground.

Years fled away in this fashion. She would neither give herself to me nor let me die politely with earthly pleasures. Upon these waters I learned the throb, the pain, the menacing loveliness of this Joy unheld, uncaught. I spent years searching at sea, and yet she drew no closer than Tomorrow. Her silhouette draped over creation, estranging me to my own world. Was this angel from heaven or from hell?

“Vanity,” a voice sighed from a farther and sadder sea. He too searched this world for her. “I said in my heart, ‘Come now, I will test you with pleasure; enjoy yourself’” (Ecclesiastes 2:1). He built massive houses, planted gardens. He piled gold atop silver. Peerless was his crown; matchless, his wisdom. The choicest singers followed him with song. He drank nightly from a vineyard of women (Ecclesiastes 2:1–9).

“Whatever my eyes desired I did not keep from them. I kept my heart from no pleasure,” came his testimony (Ecclesiastes 2:10). But behold, vanity! All is vanity. She did not exist under the sun, he said, tossing aside the best earth had to offer. If he could not capture her, what chance had I? Should I turn back?

“Joy itself did not reveal God to me, but she kept me groping after more than this earth.”

She defied my nets, but I couldn’t escape hers. How could I give you up, O my Ephraim? Her seal was upon my heart, her name upon my hopes. My desire for her burned as fire — a fire these many waters could not quench. Although harpoons floated, broken in the sea, she still beamed just beyond with the brightness of first introductions. In truth, I would die reaching out for her; fall slain in her shadow. Fleeting dances with her upon the open water were better than all the inlands of worldly pleasures.

Man After My Own Heart

I perplexed myself. Why strain to sail beyond the sea? Why hunt a brook whose water left me thirstier?

Because “though the sense of want is acute and even painful, yet the mere wanting is felt to be somehow a delight,” voiced another in the waters. “This desire, even when there is no hope of possible satisfaction, continues to be prized, and even to be preferred to anything else in the world, by those who have once felt it. This hunger is better than any other fullness; this poverty better than all other wealth” (The Pilgrim’s Regress, 234).

A hunger better than any other fullness; a poverty better than all other wealth. Nowhere have I found Joy better captured than in C.S. Lewis.

Joy sweetly dragooned Lewis onto the seas through a childhood memory.

Before I knew what I desired, the desire itself was gone, the whole glimpse withdrawn, the world turned commonplace again, or only stirred by a longing for the longing that had just ceased. It had taken only a moment of time; and in a certain sense everything else that had ever happened to me was insignificant in comparison. (Surprised by Joy, 17)

Decades later, this Romantic voyager would recount, “In a sense, the central story of my life is about nothing else” (19).

What was Joy to Lewis?

Joy (in my sense) has indeed one characteristic, and one only, in common with [Happiness and Pleasure]; the fact that anyone who has experienced it will want it again. Apart from that, and considered only in its quality, it might almost equally well be called a particular kind of unhappiness or grief. But then it is a kind we want. I doubt whether anyone who has tasted it would ever, if both were in his power, exchange it for all the pleasures in the world. (19)

A grief better than other delights, a golden unhappiness. Lewis would travel further still to translate the Longing’s secret: you were made for another world.

If I find in myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world. (Mere Christianity, 136–37)

Men hunger because food exists; they desire women because sex exists; they crave Joy and a beauty bigger than this world because another world exists.

Water at the Well’s End

God used Joy in my own story to prepare me for Jesus. Her honeyed voice cried in the wilderness, “Among you stands one you do not know, even he who comes after me, the strap of whose sandal I am not worthy to untie” (John 1:26–27). The Father used this inconsolable longing to “make known to me the path of life,” to accept with David that “in your presence there is fullness of joy; at your right hand are pleasures forevermore” (Psalm 16:11). I was made for another world, another Deity.

Joy itself did not reveal God to me, but she kept me groping after more than this earth. Joy did not forgive my sins, but she kept me from being gratified with or “given over to” my sin. She did not have the words of eternal life, but she helped them resonate when I did hear them.

Heaven’s hive buzzed when Joy’s Master finally came to earth. And he visited me. He approached my shallow wells of small pursuits and said, “Everyone who drinks of this water will be thirsty again, but whoever drinks of the water that I will give him will never be thirsty again. The water that I will give him will become in him a spring of water welling up to eternal life” (John 4:13–14).

He stood up at the feast of my greatest enjoyments and cried, “If anyone thirsts, let him come to me and drink. Whoever believes in me, as the Scripture has said, ‘Out of his heart will flow rivers of living water’” (John 7:37–38).

He spoke over every lust and darling sin, “The thief comes only to steal and kill and destroy. I came that [you] may have life and have it abundantly” (John 10:10). “Bring your hunger,” he said. “Bring your strongest and most violent appetite for the good, the true, the beautiful, the everlasting, the ever-increasing — I can meet it. You search for Joy because you think that in her you may have eternal happiness, but it is she that bears witness about me. Come to me and have Life.”

His Joy — a waterfall pouring down from forever, shattering the tiny hearts of his worshipers — is what I needed. “These things I have spoken to you, that my joy may be in you, and that your joy may be full” (John 15:11). As a ruined and rebellious son of Adam, I bartered away the knowledge of what I truly desired my whole life. By the Spirit’s recreating power, the long-standing hunger knelt to feast on the Bread of Life.

Old and Stubborn Ache

But if I may end with a word to fellow sailors: the old sore will still irritate — even after knowing Jesus. Lewis would write, “The old stab, the old bittersweet, has come to me as often and as sharply since my conversion as at any time of my life” (Surprised by Joy, 291).

Does this mean we have not found what we are looking for? A moment’s reflection bids us to ask the opposite: Why shouldn’t Joy still pierce with her sugared melancholy? Are we finally home? Are we safe upon the right side of the Jordan? Is the dwelling place of our God now with man? Is Christ before us, shining the sun into retirement?

“Time holds its breath; we hold our breath; Joy holds her breath — for him.”

No, not yet. The old ache — now unmasked — still aggresses my journeying heart, as it did Lewis’s. We still “groan inwardly as we wait eagerly for adoption as sons” (Romans 8:23). Joy still serves salvation. We read that it was the Lord’s mercy that moved angels to seize lingering Lot and his daughters, and bring them out of Sodom to safety (Genesis 19:16). Joy has angelic hands, so guiding us from this Gomorrah all the way to glory.

But for all of that, the importance of Joy, for those who have found Christ, changes. He must increase; she must decrease. The thirst is no more a goddess. She meekly (yet still sometimes roughly) reminds us to go to Christ, drink of Christ, wait expectantly for Christ. On his diminishing interest in Joy, Lewis wrote, “It was valuable only as a pointer to something other and outer. While that other was in doubt, the pointer naturally loomed larger in my thoughts. When we are lost in the woods the sight of a signpost is a great matter” (291).

The end of Joy, for those who have come (by grace) to translate the purpose of Joy, is the homesickness for Christ “who is [our] life” to return (Colossians 3:4). One thing have we asked of him; one thing do we seek after: to gaze upon the beauty of the Lord and to inquire in his presence forever (Psalm 27:4). Creation groans; Christians groan. Time holds its breath; we hold our breath; Joy holds her breath — for him.

Thomas Jefferson is one of the most studied figures in American history, and his biographers have characterized his religion in almost every conceivable way. Some have claimed he was a Christian, while others have labeled him a rationalist, a materialist, or a Deist. Some polemical writers on the left and right have even tried to portray him as an atheist or as an evangelical believer. (He was neither.) But perhaps one of the most accurate ways to describe Jefferson’s religious beliefs is that he was an anti-Calvinist. As Jefferson put it in a letter to Philadelphia pastor Ezra Stiles Ely in 1819, “You are a Calvinist. I am not. I am of a sect by myself, as far as I know.”1

How did Jefferson’s staunch anti-Calvinist views develop? He grew up in a fairly conventional Church of England environment in colonial Virginia. Historically, the Anglican Church definitely had its Calvinist stalwarts, including the revivalist George Whitefield of Great Awakening fame. By the time Jefferson studied at the College of William and Mary, however, he seems to have doubted or denied many basic Christian doctrines, such as the resurrection and divinity of Christ.

Still, Jefferson had a number of companions and political allies in Virginia who were evangelicals or Reformed Christians. He was a lifelong friend of Pastor Charles Clay, for example, and he donated to Clay’s “Calvinistical Reformed” church in Charlottesville during the Revolutionary War. (Jefferson regularly gave money to a range of churches, despite the growing disarray in his personal finances.) Jefferson was also an admirer of certain Calvinist political writers, including the English republican theorist Algernon Sidney, whom Jefferson used as a resource in the Declaration of Independence. In his treatise Discourses Concerning Government, Sidney had written that “nothing can be more evident, than that if many [men] had been created, they had been all equal.”2

“Perhaps one of the most accurate ways to describe Jefferson’s religious beliefs is that he was an anti-Calvinist.”

Thus, Jefferson was not predestined to become an anti-Calvinist (pun intended). So where did his revulsion against Calvinism come from? One factor was political, and the other was theological.

Calvinist Enemies

Politically, Jefferson found that many of his most hostile political adversaries were Calvinists, or at least they came out of a Calvinist milieu, usually in the northern states. Again, plenty of professing Christians supported Jefferson, but those Christians tended to be southerners. The northern Christians who backed Jefferson tended to be from outsider groups such as the Baptists, who still faced the threat of persecution in Congregationalist-dominated states such as Massachusetts and Connecticut. Evangelical Jeffersonians tended to focus more on the cause of religious liberty than on the preferred religious beliefs of a presidential candidate.

Reformed and Calvinist leaders in the North, conversely, prioritized the need for Americans to honor traditional Christian belief and culture. This disposition fed into support for the Federalist Party. For example, the Calvinist minister, Yale College president, and arch-Federalist Timothy Dwight (grandson of Jonathan Edwards) stated in 1800 that if the infidel Jefferson became president, it would “ruin the Republic.”

Jefferson thought that religious beliefs were irrelevant to one’s qualifications for public service. Federalists argued that electing someone of Jefferson’s well-known skepticism about Christian doctrine was inviting the wrath of God on the nation. As one Federalist ad in the 1800 presidential campaign put it, the choice before American voters was between “GOD — AND A RELIGIOUS PRESIDENT [John Adams]” or “JEFFERSON — AND NO GOD.” (Yes, Americans used all caps before Twitter.) Jefferson seethed about the way his Federalist Christian enemies made his heterodox views an issue into the 1800 presidential election. He came to see such tactics as typical of Calvinists in politics.3

Jefferson’s Bible

Theologically, Jefferson would also undergo a major shift in the years from 1800 to 1803. He was stung by Federalist charges that he was an atheist. Also, in 1802 newspapers began printing allegations that Jefferson had a sexual relationship with his slave Sally Hemings, allegations that Jefferson experts now generally regard as true. Jefferson would never confront those charges in public, but he was clearly becoming anxious to find a way to present himself to the voters and his family as a Christian, at least of a rationalist sort. This anxiety seems to have precipitated Jefferson’s decision to accept Unitarianism and its ethics-focused version of Christianity.4

Despite his skeptical bent, Jefferson had a lifelong interest (sometimes bordering on an obsession) in the Bible and in the person of Jesus. In 1803 Jefferson read Socrates and Jesus Compared, a tract by the Unitarian minister and scientist Joseph Priestley. It represented a major philosophical pivot for the president. Priestley convinced Jefferson that Jesus’s moral teachings were not just significant, but the greatest the world had ever known. Jesus’s ethic of agape, or sacrificial neighborly love, placed him above the ancient Greek philosophers, whose teachings focused on a person’s interior life more than love for one’s neighbor. Jefferson felt that the Unitarian philosophy gave him a way to affirm Christian ethics, while setting aside doctrinal complexities such as the Trinity, tenets that Jefferson believed Christians had imposed on Jesus after his death.

“Jefferson literally cut out most of the supernatural content from the Gospels, including the resurrection of Christ.”

His Unitarian settlement also prompted Jefferson to compose the first version of the so-called Jefferson Bible. The Jefferson Bible (the second version of it, composed in the late 1810s, is the only version of the text that has survived) was Jefferson’s idiosyncratic compilation of the Gospels. It mostly featured Jesus’s moral teachings and parables. Jefferson literally cut out most of the supernatural content from the Gospels, including the resurrection of Christ.

Anti-Calvinist

Drawing upon his Unitarian convictions, by the time of his retirement in the 1810s, Jefferson increasingly cast his religious beliefs as anti-Calvinist. A number of the Congregationalist churches of New England (the old denomination of the Puritans) were turning Unitarian, and Harvard also appointed a Unitarian professor of divinity in 1805. All this elicited a ferocious print debate between the Unitarians and the traditional Calvinists, a debate Jefferson followed. Jefferson became increasingly adamant that Calvin and his followers had done terrible damage to the simple message of ancient Christian teachings.

Jefferson told New Hampshire congressman Salma Hale in 1818,

Calvinism has introduced into the Christian religion more new absurdities than its leader [Jesus] had purged it of old ones. Our saviour did not come into the world to save metaphysicians only. . . . It is only by banishing [the] subtleties, which they have nick-named Christianity, and getting back to the plain and unsophisticated precepts of Christ, that we become real Christians.

Here Jefferson suggested that Calvinists were not “real” Christians. He also averred that the traditional Protestant view of salvation was wrongheaded. Jefferson’s view was “the reverse of Calvin’s” — namely, “that we are to be saved by our good works which are within our power, and not by our faith which is not within our power.” Jefferson rarely spoke about the need for salvation, but he thought that if salvation was needed, it would be earned by good works.5

Cut-and-Paste Christianity

Even as the Second Great Awakening was turning American religion more evangelical than ever during his retirement, Jefferson was optimistic about the eventual triumph of Unitarian faith. “I trust that there is not a young man now living in the US who will not die a Unitarian,” he wrote in 1822. This was laughably inaccurate. (We might argue, however, that pop versions of Unitarianism, and casual belief in salvation by works, command great appeal in America through the present day.)

His prediction also spoke to Jefferson’s naivete about the power of reason — defined by Enlightened men such as himself — to be the final arbiter of truth in politics and religion. Calvin, had he been alive to respond, would no doubt have cautioned Jefferson that while unaided reason has some value as part of God’s common grace, it is of secondary importance when understanding divine truth and the way of salvation. For such matters, we need an authoritative word from God, not a word that we cut and paste to suit our concept of what is reasonable.6