I became a Calvinist quite literally as a result of reading Scripture, cover to cover about four times that first year, as a completely unchurched atheist who read Scripture to contend with God and the myriads of Christians who came before me. I struggled with it a great deal then … It was something I struggled through once again as I came to grapple with the consistency of this as it concerns double-predestination. But the one thing I couldn’t do was claim that this wasn’t something Scripture taught over and over again, and quite clearly so.

I’ll admit the title of this blog post can be immediately perceived as inflammatory—but the truth of the matter is that this really is how I came to be a Calvinist. I remember sitting down over a cigar with a dear family friend (who married my wife and I) and we were discussing predestination and election. He is an Arminian and has been for years, so naturally, we butted heads in our understanding of salvation. At the time, I was a fairly new Christian, perhaps just a year into the faith at this point—but I came to faith unwittingly as a Calvinist.

As we were hashing out our differences he made mention of terms I’d never heard before: Calvinism, the Doctrines of Grace, and that I held to an acronym bearing the name of a flower. I stopped the conversation and asked, “What’s Calvinism?” A bit taken aback, he asked me how I became a Calvinist without even knowing what the term was, and without any intention of being a jerk, I replied rather ignorantly, “I just read my Bible.” Thankfully he knew I was being earnest and didn’t razz me too hard about that remark. We laughed it off, took another draw off of our cigars, and moved on with a different discussion.

While perhaps I can write to this in greater detail at some point in the future, I began to read the Scriptures as an atheist in pursuit of proving the Christian faith to be wrong. I read from cover to cover, Genesis to Revelation, and noticed that many of the preconceptions I held about the Scriptures were not only incorrect, but didn’t stand up to some of the most basic standards of logical consistency. The obvious end to that story is that the Scriptures themselves convinced me of the truthfulness therein, most importantly, in the death, burial, and resurrection of Jesus Christ.

Yet during that journey there were many perplexing passages I came across that messed with my understanding of how the world worked, particularly as it concerns the will of man. I came to read about the Pharaoh, whose heart was hardened by the Lord so that he would not listen to Moses (Ex. 4:21, 7:4, 7:13, 9:12, 10:1, 10:20, 11:10, 14:8). I likewise noticed that during the conquest, it was the Lord who hardened the hearts of Israel’s enemies for the express purpose of their destruction—that they would receive no mercy and be annihilated (Josh. 11:20). I saw that in much the same way, the Lord gave Sihon the king of Heshbon a stubborn and obstinate spirit (Deut. 2:30).

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