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.That gift is the freedom to choose.It’s what makes you like God.” I wondered how he would explain the old conundrum of humanfree will versus divine sovereignty, and whether he would resist my comparison of him to Edwards.Though the casual visitor would never know it, Epilogue211Saddleback Church is a congregation of the Southern Baptist Convention, whose Calvinist wing in the late twentieth and early twenty-fi rst centuries has enthusiastically promoted Edwards as a spiritual forefather.Would Warren consider himself an Edwardsean? a Calvinist?Warren’s offi ce had declined my request for an interview, but I continued my fact-fi nding mission the next evening in Class 101, which is required of all prospective members.On this day, 199 people fi lled an air-conditioned tent for a four-and-a-half-hour crash course, complete with free dinner, in the congregation’s history and basic beliefs.Three of the church’s other pastors led the class through a 32-page curriculum covering, among other things, the main points from The Purpose-Driven Life, as well as the church’s fundamental doctrines, including the claim that the Bible is “the truth without any mixture of error.” The curriculum also emphasized the belief in a literal heaven and hell, as well as the characteristically Southern Baptist adjunct to predestination—eternal security.“If you have been genuinely saved,” the handout explained, “you cannot ‘lose’ it.” 5The presentation again came close to addressing predestination when Pastor Gerald Sharon professed his own faith in providence.“Before the foundation of the world, God knew you’d be here today,” he told us.“He even saw the color of the tablecloth for the table you’re sitting at.” Everything, Sharon explained, was integral to God’s plan for creation: “Every plant has a purpose.Every rock has a purpose.” He did not mention the fundamentalist conclusion that Saddleback pastors draw from this—that Darwinian evolution is a slippery slope to atheism.The congregation’s allegiance to creationism was a topic covered in the more comprehensive Foundations curriculum co-authored by Saddleback pastor Tom Holladay and Rick Warren’s wife, Kay.There, even “theistic evolution” was dismissed as an affront to God’s providential control of all things at every moment.6After the class, I watched as 33 people availed themselves of the opportunity to be baptized on the spot in a heated outdoor pool.Part of the class had been devoted to the topic of baptism and why Saddleback insisted on following the biblical precedent of believers’ baptism by immersion.I watched as three of the people from my table at dinner were baptized: a dentist (a former Catholic), his wife (a former Episcopalian), and a onetime lay minister in the largest African-American Pentecostal denomination, the Church of God in Christ, who had found his way back to religion after a long absence.The dentist, a tanned, bearlike man, was particularly forth-coming.“Apparently the sprinkling I had as a Catholic didn’t count,” he told me, referring to his fi rst baptism as an infant.I asked if it bothered him to be baptized again.“Absolutely not,” he replied.He and his wife went on to explain their attraction to Saddleback, including the practical advice 212Predestinationoffered in weekly sermons and the church’s welcoming stance toward Christians of all backgrounds.To this couple, Saddleback seemed to transcend denominational exclusivity.I wondered if they knew they had just joined a congregation of the Southern Baptist Convention, since Saddleback’s affi liation was never mentioned in Class 101, at least not in my hearing.But I suppressed my desire to press questions of denominational identity, which suddenly seemed ponderously retro.I fi nally got some answers to my doctrinal questions when I sat down two days later for an hour with Pastor Tom Holladay in his spacious offi ce over-looking the dry southern California hills.Like his brother-in-law Warren, Holladay had an irrepressible smile and a disarmingly warm personality.I asked him about Saddleback’s Baptist connection.He explained that the congregation did not call itself Baptist because the term was a needless barrier to unchurched persons unfamiliar with theological distinctions.Though I knew that a seeker-friendly avoidance of denominational shibboleths was typical of megachurches, my historian’s skepticism told me that doctrinaldistinctions must lurk below the surface.7 I pressed Holladay on where Saddleback stood in the ongoing confl ict in the Southern Baptist Convention between Calvinists and non-Calvinists:We wouldn’t want to take sides in that.We would rather help both sides see the truth in God’s word and how it applies to God’s purpose for their lives.Where I would take sides is [against] any form of Calvinism that prevents somebody from clearly, dramatically, emphatically sharing their faith with somebody else.When Calvinism gets to that point where I don’t have this urge to share my faith with somebody else, that’s clearly outside the bounds of the Bible.8What about Rick Warren himself? Would he call himself a Calvinist?“No,” Holladay said emphatically.“I can clearly speak for that.Nor would he want to embrace the Arminian label.Labels are labels.That’s the problem.” He added that Saddleback’s pastors were in general agreement that “both Arminianism and Calvinism are true.It’s not that truth is in the middle.They just both have truth in them.”I asked him if the issue of predestination ever came up in Saddleback’s more advanced classes for members.He explained that in teaching the Foundations curriculum, he usually reserved one night for questions and answers.Invariably, someone asks about predestination and how to reconcile it with human initiative.He described his typical response: “God’s foreknowledge and election do not prohibit our choice, nor does our choice inhibit God’s election.Now I know that’s doublespeak.I’ve wrestled with it Epilogue213for years and years.But to me that’s the best way to honor the choice thatGod has given us while we live on this earth.”9On my fl ight home, I pondered Saddleback’s postdenominational paradigm, with its cheerful matter-of-factness about doctrinal matters that were once church dividing.In sunny tracts of southern California suburbia, a vague but pervasive sense of providence (sans the term) had replaced the old party politics wrought by the most important providential riddle— predestination.Saddleback’s members still clung to the idea that, as Increase Mather once put it, “nothing comes to pass in the Earth, but what was fi rst determinedby a wise decree in Heaven.”10 And yet God’s electing decree, which engendered so much confl ict in American religious history, no longer loomed as a question of life-or-death signifi cance.Calvinists such as Mather or Edwards had denounced the conditional predestination of Arminianism as a grace-denying heresy, while John Wesley and other Arminians had decried unconditional predestination as a monstrous affront to a loving God
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