I’ve been to hell and back.
And I took my wife and teen daughters with me.
My name is Eric McCarty.
About 15 years ago, I dreamed that one of my daughters was hanging by her hands on a wire hundreds of feet over the ocean.
She screamed out to me, but I couldn’t help her. There was nothing I could do but watch.
She was slipping.
To say that I awoke shaken is like saying the sun is warm. I had a hard time shaking that dream over the next few weeks.
What I had been taught about hell is that it’s like a nightmare you never wake up from. I thought back to the first nightmare I ever had. I was stuck in a pipe in the ground, and nobody could help me.
I tried to imagine what it would be like if I never woke up…
It wasn’t that I was worried about my own salvation. I believed I was going to heaven. But this would be the fate of most people who had ever or would ever be born.
I used to hear friends say, “I don’t know how people get through funerals as atheists. They have no hope.” I had the opposite thought. It would be better to think there was no afterlife than to think that the body in the casket belonged to a spirit who might be enduring unending pain. In some cases it was, from everything we knew about the person, ensured.
But, of course, we didn’t say that at a funeral.
Over the next couple of years, I began to have deeply troubling doubts about Christianity because of that thought.
Why would God set the wheels of creation in motion if never-ending misery for most people was going to be the result?
Why does there have to be so much hurt, both on Earth now, and multiplied by infinity in hell forever? What good can be worth all the bad?
When you look at the full picture, what most Christians believe about reality is mostly bad, not good. Despair, not hope. Misery, not bliss.
Sure, you could try not to think about it. Try not to talk about it. But that doesn’t change the picture we painted.
Usually, I would just brush the thought aside. But it kept popping back up. It’s in there. It’s hard to read the Gospels and not bump up against it. (At least I thought so.) Every time I’d start to get on fire about God, I’d hesitate. If I buy into all the good stuff, there’s this really, really dark thing that I have to believe is true.
So I’d back off.
I could play around with Christianity intellectually. I could make some life choices which kept me in the Christian crowd. But I wasn’t all in.
Through the mid-90s and early 2000s, another thing which caused me trouble was that our culture was sliding down a slippery slope and there wasn’t much we could do about it. It seemed the world was becoming more anti-Christian every minute. There was this low-level anxiety in our churches, which seemed to rise in pitch around election time. And I felt it.
So I had these two problems which seemed to nag me in varying degrees. I had a very pessimistic view of our immediate future and an incredibly pessimistic view of the future of most of mankind in eternity.
It was during one of those election seasons that a pastor from a neighboring church preached a sermon at our church on a Sunday evening. I can’t tell you what the title of the sermon was or what Scripture he used.
I can only tell you that he wasn’t anxious.
He was well-read, well-spoken, and witty.
And he didn’t dodge what was happening in our culture. He spoke as if God was in complete control and we could have peace with that knowledge. The anxiety returned after a bit, but during and immediately after that sermon, I wasn’t worried about our immediate future.
He preached at our church a couple more times in the coming months, and I lapped up each one.
I said to myself, “If we ever stop going to church here, I’m going to his church.”
The Calvinist Journey Begins
A few years later, my brother-in-law and his family, whom we love dearly, moved back to our area after some time in seminary and started attending that pastor’s church. I heard that the pastor was leading a study on C.S. Lewis’s Mere Christianity on Wednesday nights. I desperately wanted to attend. Lewis got me through college as a Christian. I talked my wife into it. It was a big step. We were leaders at our church. Attending another church on Wednesday nights felt wrong. But that’s how bad I wanted it. So we went.
I ate it up.
Before that series of classes wrapped up, I knew there was something different going on there. I had been stagnant in my Christian walk for quite a while. I had issues with hell and I hoped he could help me work through them. At some point, I learned that he believed in predestination.
In the Southern Baptist churches I grew up in, I heard that there were those who believed in predestination.
“But God doesn’t make robots,” we said. And that sounded like solid reasoning to me at the time. I didn’t know it then, but that view is what is called an Arminian perspective. The name comes from Jacob Arminius, a 16th-century theological adversary of John Calvin.
But, I thought, maybe that predestination idea is the way to deal with the problems I was having.
So we made the difficult decision to leave the church we had been active in for 12 years and attend this pastor’s church. Really, it wasn’t a “we” decision. I made the decision.
Over the next few years, I grew even more enamored with my new pastor and his sermons. I began studying Reformed theology in weekly meetings with him and a few other pastors. The material was deep. Logical concepts are very attractive to me, and there were plenty of them in those books.
I began to understand the ideas. I began to speak the lingo. I began to defend the Calvinist view against Arminian arguments. I read books and watched sermons by John Piper, the leading Calvinist of our day. I liked the rapturous enthusiasm with which he expressed his ideas. They were logical. They were biblical. And it seemed to make him love God more.
But, to be honest, I had trouble getting all the way through Piper’s books and Edwards’s sermons. They helped me deal with the cultural decline issue, but when I got to Piper’s explanations of why God chose to save some, but not all, I still hesitated.
While I could hold the idea intellectually, it still bothered me that the end could be that dark for so many and that God could be happy with it. (His degree of pleasure with the result depended on which Calvinist you listened to.)
A Turning Point
Then came February 4, 2014. Our church was to live-stream a debate between young-earth creationist Ken Ham and naturalist Bill Nye, The Science Guy. I distinctly remember not wanting to go. But my wife thought it would be good for our girls to watch the debate.
So we went.
I didn’t hear anything new during the debate. It didn’t change my perspective of either side. Instead, the effect on me was a catalyst to evaluate my position on Christianity as a whole. I had been attending this Reformed-leaning church for several years. I had, I felt, as good of a grasp on the concepts of Reformed theology as I was ever going to have. So where was I? I knew I wasn’t an Arminian. But was I a Calvinist? Was I prepared to be “all in”?
I was, honestly, scared to ask that question because I knew, deep down, that I wasn’t. The worldview I had come to hold wasn’t one I really WANTED to defend.
And where would that leave me?
I began to re-evaluate my Calvinist positions; this time with my heart on the line, not just my head. I had lengthy discussions with my pastor and a couple of other Calvinist friends. This time, when I heard the answers, I knew how I felt. I hated it. The responses made me sick. While most Calvinists tend to look only at the good side (God’s graciousness to the elect), there is an evil side.
What it boiled down to is this.
God creates billions and billions of souls out of nothingness. He doesn’t just walk up on an existing earth during a leisurely stroll through the universe and be surprised to find people behaving badly. (This is the point most Calvinists try to dodge as they defend their position.)
He CREATES ALL OF THEM in a fallen state. They didn’t decide to enter never-ending existence. HE decided to bring them into eternal consciousness and not provide what they need most.
And why would He do that?
He does it so that He can receive “glory.” He does it so that everyone can see that He is powerful. He can do whatever He wants. And He takes pleasure in everything He does—even if that means displaying His “glory” through the unimaginable, unending misery of His own creation.
He does not care enough about most of them to grant them their most basic need: salvation. He is more concerned with His own “glory” than He is the well-being of those He has called into being out of nothingness who are utterly dependent on Him.
It dawned on me just how evil the whole thing is.
Keep in mind that Calvinists won’t just come out and say these things. But when you put the pieces together, this is where it leads. And when you ask the hard questions using the right words, they won’t deny it.
If a man had done what Calvinists say God does, that man would be condemned as the worst person who ever lived.
Something had changed in me.
Over the next couple of weeks, I sank into a deep depression. I couldn’t sleep.
I started missing work.
My wife and I spent many, many hours in talk and anguish. I had long talks with my pastor and a Calvinist friend.
I couldn’t hide it from my kids. I was completely incapacitated. Nothing felt good or tasted good anymore. Sleep was my only solace, but on the other side of it was waking misery, so even that wasn’t helping. Then I couldn’t sleep at all. I kept having breakdowns, and my wife would have to leave the kids alone to take care of me.
I felt trapped.
I couldn’t be a Calvinist or an atheist. Both of those holes were too dark. I thought about trying to fake it through the rest of my life. But I couldn’t make myself do that.
I had opened Pandora’s box, and there was no going back.
The weight of it all was breaking me down mentally.
I had anxiety attacks where my heart would race and my entire body would flush with recurring waves of heat and sweat. I would just lay in my bed and try to endure it. The attacks were prompted by my thoughts at first, but then they just started happening no matter what was going on in my head.
Every sound was exaggerated. Pounding. Burning. Anguish.
I was dizzy.
I couldn’t focus.
I went to the walk-in clinic to try to get something to help me sleep and alleviate the crippling anxiety and depression. The morning news was on the TV in the waiting room. It was, of course, bad news. And it was screaming in my head. I asked the receptionist to turn it down. She looked at me puzzled and slightly irritated, then turned it down some. But it was still too loud.
Every syllable pounded and echoed in my head. The sounds themselves and the thoughts they generated burned.
My blood pressure was crazy high, like 160/120 or something. I talked to the physician’s assistant, and he prescribed something for me. As I was walking out the door he called me back in. I was visibly struggling, and he wouldn’t let me go without doing an EKG. It showed a slight abnormality, so he wanted me to have a CT scan to make sure my ticker was OK. We set that up for a few days later. (It turns out that I have an enlarged aorta which is related to high blood pressure.)
I almost called my wife to come get me. I didn’t think I could concentrate enough to make it across town. But I calmed down enough to drive. When I got home, I had another breakdown.
Laying on the bathroom floor, I knew I couldn’t keep going. I didn’t want to live anymore, and my body wasn’t going to let me anyway. I was wrecking it and everything around me.
I was in hell, and I was dragging my family down with me.
Staring at those bathroom floor tiles with my wife sobbing over me—again—I made a decision. It was the only way out. What I became at that moment was, as I look back on it, not an Arminian or a Calvinist, but something different.
The Change
I became a different kind of Christian. I had heard that CS Lewis was a big fan of George MacDonald. In fact, he called MacDonald his “master.” And MacDonald believed that hell wouldn’t last forever; it had a redemptive purpose.
So, I said to myself, I’m going to be a George MacDonald kind of Christian. It’s the only way out.
At first, it felt like I had stepped into the land of the heretics. But I was wrong.
What I learned over the next few weeks and months as I dug deep into MacDonald’s writing (and a lot of others like him) was that Christianity is broader than I thought. I learned of church fathers like Origen and Gregory of Nyssa who believed that the end is good. I learned of the political and social pressures which shaped theology and translations and interpretations. I learned what caused Martin Luther to go through an experience not unlike my own and what colored his world. I began to hear of the deadly mental health fruit which Calvinism and Arminianism have sometimes produced in others as it had in me.
I learned that there is a beautifully Christian, orthodox, biblical view which is not Arminian OR Calvinist and which has subsequently set my heart on fire for Jesus.
I fought my way back to health. To learn more about where I landed, check out Is Arminianism the Only Other Choice?
But I want to circle back now and speak to those who may be heading down the same path I took. When I started exploring Calvinism, there were things which were often only whispered in Reformed circles; things which most Calvinists won’t readily say, but when pressed, will admit.
I want to walk you through some of those questions and concepts so that you can make an informed decision about Calvinism before you head down (or further down) that road. I want to tell you what Calvinists usually won’t tell you.
I’ve already told you a bit about the dark side of Calvinism. But how do Calvinists get there? I’ll show you some of the presuppositions which form a framework that turns God into a monster.
Of course, use your mind as you think through these subjects. Is it true? Is it biblical? Does the logic hold together?
But don’t forget the questions your heart is asking. Is it good? Can I love, truly love, this God?
READ NEXT: Why Do Christians Embrace Predestination?