There is No Gap

I have spent twenty six years inside the Reformed and sovereign grace world. And in that time I have noticed something most of us never name out loud, and yet it shapes nearly everything we say about salvation. We imagine a gap.

We picture God's predestinating work over here, and reality over there. We picture the decree as something that happened, and time as the room where the consequences are now playing out. We picture the elect as a list that was made before the world began, and life as the long process of that list getting rendered into actual saved persons. We imagine, in short, a chasm between the eternal work of God and the temporal world we are walking through. Sometimes the gap is spatial. God is up there. Creation is down here. Sometimes the gap is temporal. The decree was way back then. Reality is now. Sometimes both at once. But almost always there is a gap.

I want to talk about that gap. Because it is the floor under most Calvinist theology. Once you see it, you cannot unsee it. And once you see what removing it would do, you start to understand why so many of the doctrines we hold the way we hold them are the way they are.

The Spatial Gap and the Temporal Gap

The spatial gap is the easier one to describe. It is the picture of God seated in heaven, decreeing things, and the universe down here receiving the decrees from a distance. It treats heaven as a separate room from creation. It treats God's sovereignty as something that reaches across distance to act. It is not quite deism, but it is a near cousin of deism. The Calvinist who holds this picture believes God is sovereign, but he imagines that sovereignty as a remote control held by a sovereign who is somewhere else.

The temporal gap is the same picture in the dimension of time. It is the idea that God decreed in "eternity past," and now we are in the unfolding under that old decree. The decree was an event in the deep past. Reality is the consequence of that event playing out in the long now. The believer lives in the leftover of an old verdict.

Both gaps are produced by the same underlying ontology. Both gaps treat God as a being like other beings, just much bigger and older, who acts upon a creation that is separate from Him in space and time. Both gaps create a here and a there, with God on one side and us on the other.

This is not classical Christianity. It is Christianity with a Greek deism quietly running underneath. And once you see it, you can spot it in nearly every Calvinist conversation you walk into.

What the Gap Produces Downstream

Once you have a gap, every doctrine becomes gap engineering. The whole of Calvinist soteriology, on this floor, is the work of figuring out how the gap gets crossed and on which side of it I happen to be standing.

Assurance becomes a problem because the believer needs to know which side of the gap he is on. The decree was made over there. I am living over here. How do I know I am one of the elect? The gap creates the question, and the question dominates Calvinist devotional life in a way it does not need to.

Doctrinal articulation becomes the test because correct articulation is how the believer demonstrates that the gap has been bridged for him. If he can state the five points correctly, he must be on the right side of the gap. The gospelist mood comes directly from this. The gap creates the test, and the test creates the tribe, and the tribe creates the gatekeeper.

Faith becomes a temporal trigger because faith is the moment when the bridge across the gap connects. The Spirit reaches across, faith is given, the bridge holds, the believer is now on the elect side. Faith is no longer the means by which the eternal love of God is experienced. Faith is the connection event in a chain. This is why so many sovereign grace preachers, despite their words about monergism, sound functionally Arminian. Their ontology demands a temporal trigger. The gap forces it.

Law-keeping becomes evidence because the visible obedience of the believer is how he and others verify the bridge held. The fruit is examined to confirm the connection. Pastoral life becomes inspection.

Every one of these moves is downstream of the gap. Take the gap away and they all collapse, because they all exist to manage a chasm that does not exist in the first place.

There Is No Gap

The framework I have been writing about most of my adult life takes a different floor. It does not have a gap. It cannot have a gap. The thought of God is the substance of reality, and the reality we walk through is the rendering of His thought. There is no place where His decree ends and the world begins. There is no point in time where the eternal now of His thinking became a past event we are downstream of. The decree is the world being thought. The world is the decree being rendered.

This is not novelty. This is classical Christianity. The Scriptures are emphatic on it.

"For in him we live, and move, and have our being" (Acts 17:28). We are not on the other side of a gap from God. We are in Him. We move and live and have our being inside the very God who is thinking us.

"Upholding all things by the word of his power" (Hebrews 1:3). Every moment of every existing thing is currently held in being by the present-tense word of God. Not by an old decree that started everything rolling. By His current word, in this present moment, holding all things up.

"And he is before all things, and by him all things consist" (Colossians 1:17). All things hold together in Him. Not next to Him. Not under Him. In Him.

"Of him, and through him, and to him, are all things" (Romans 11:36). The whole of reality is from Him, through Him, and to Him. There is no leg of that journey where the world is separated from its Author. The world is currently of Him, currently through Him, currently being driven to Him. There is no exit point on that road, no rest stop where the world has stepped outside the Author and is on its own.

Where is the gap? There is no gap. The God who decreed and the world that is unfolding are not separated by space or by time. The world is His thought, currently being thought, currently being rendered, currently being upheld. The believer is not standing across a chasm from his Author waiting for an old decree to reach him. The believer is currently being thought by the One whose name is I AM. He is not in the leftover of an old verdict. He is in the present-tense thinking of God.

What Closing the Gap Does to the Doctrines

Once you remove the gap, every gap-engineered doctrine has to be reread.

Assurance is no longer about figuring out which side of the gap you are on. It is about resting in the present-tense love of an Author who is currently thinking you, currently authoring you, currently upholding you in being. Assurance is no longer detective work. It is recognition.

Doctrinal articulation is no longer the bridge across the gap. It is the description of the no-gap reality you are already standing in. Articulation is helpful. Articulation is right. Articulation is not the trigger. The Author has already authored you in His eternal thought, and your articulation is the rendering of that authorship into your conscious experience.

Faith is no longer the connection event that crosses a chasm. Faith is the moment you wake up to the no-gap reality that was always the case. The eternal accounting was already in place. The cross was its temporal enactment. Faith is the believer's experience of the eternal substance becoming subjectively known. The believer does not bridge anything by faith. The Author has already thought him into the rendering, and faith is the rendering becoming aware of itself.

Law-keeping is no longer evidence that the gap held. It is the visible shape of an eternally-thought new creature being rendered into temporal flesh. Obedience is the Spirit's continued work of bringing the rendering into conformity with the eternal substance, not a signal flag that bridges the gap from your side.

Every doctrine softens and clarifies once the gap is named and removed. The doctrines do not change in substance. They change in relational temperature. The believer no longer stands across a chasm hoping the bridge holds. The believer stands inside a thought that has always been thought, and is currently being thought, and will be thought forever, by the Author whose love came before performance and outlasts every failure.

Why This Matters

I am not the first man to argue this floor. Augustine argued it. Aquinas argued it. Calvin argued it in his better moments. Owen argued it. Edwards argued it explicitly. Gill argued it most clearly of any of them. The classical Christian tradition has always said God is timelessly present to His creation, holding it in being moment by moment, with no gap at all. The deistic gap that has crept into popular Calvinism is not the historic position. It is the residue of a Greek floor we did not notice we were standing on.

So when I read the writings of brothers who oppose justification from eternity, or who treat predestination as a long-ago event, or who define election as a list-making and history as the list-being-rendered, I see men who are imagining a gap. They do not know they are imagining it. They cannot see the floor they are standing on. They are not arguing against my position so much as defending the gap their ontology requires. The gap is invisible to them because gaps usually are invisible to the people inside them.

I do not write this to win a fight. I write it because the gap is one of the saddest assumptions in modern Calvinism, and removing it would relieve so much of the pastoral pressure the gospelist tribe has placed on its people. The believer who imagines a gap lives perpetually anxious about which side of the chasm he is on. The believer who has been shown there is no gap rests in the present-tense thought of God. That is the whole difference between a religion of inspection and a religion of communion.

There is no gap. There never was a gap. The Author is currently thinking you. The decree is the now. The world is the rendering. "Of him, and through him, and to him, are all things: to whom be glory for ever. Amen" (Romans 11:36).

To Him Be the Glory Forever and Ever!!!

Grace and Peace,
Brandan