Inside Joke

This week, I've been reading Richard Mouw's book Calvinism in the Las Vegas Airport. It's a fine book written in an engaging style that avoids overly technical and cliche explanations of Calvinism's "Five Points" (AKA: "TULIP") and their broader implications.

There are, of course, many mysterious elements in this "system" of belief." One of these mysteries is raised by the "P" in "Tulip"--"Preservation/Perseverance of the Saints". This doctrine states that, by God's grace, those who are "in " the Kingdom will always be "in. There is nothing they (or any other force/factor) can do to cause God to let them go. It's a fine doctrine of great comfort, as far as I'm concerned, but the natural question that it raises is how people who appear to have had genuine faith can appear to lose that faith. Hence Mouw's little joke (and apologies if this is only amusing to seminary/pastor types):

Four theologians are standing alongside a train stopped between stations. They are looking at a dead body beside the tracks, arguing about what happened to the person. The Lutheran said he jumped from the train and was killed by the fall. The Catholic said he must have been pushed. The Methodist insisted he fell accidentally. But the Calvinist said that if he was really off the train, then he had never been on it in the first place!

ba-da-bump.