Author: Papa Giorgio

Much of Calvinism Found in Augustinianism

Published by Papa Giorgio

UPDATED QUOTE!

An updated excerpt from the book “The Dark Side of Calvinism: The Calvinist Caste System” (PDF) – part of a Calvary Chapel “series” (3 books) on Calvinism [back cover at bottom of quote – click to enlarge]:

THE AUGUSTINIANISM OF CALVINISM

Although the five points of Calvinism are most closely associated with the sixteenth century Protestant Reformer John Calvin (and for good reason), they did not originate with him. Calvinists would, first and foremost, contend that the five points faithfully represent the teaching of the New Testament in general, and of the apostle Paul in particular. Obviously, I do not agree with this contention. I do, however, agree with Calvinists when they point out that Calvin was not the first notable figure in church history to champion the views that led to what is today the Calvinist or Reformed system of theology. Just as the Synod of Dort, which first formally presented these points as the five points of Calvinism, was a Calvinist synod, so John Calvin was an Augustinian.

This is especially true with regard to the later Augustinian view of predestination and its bearing upon the salvation of the elect and the damnation of the reprobate. Norman Geisler makes the point that Augustine held two contradictory views, reflecting a change of thought over time. According to Geisler, it is the views of Augustine in the latter part of his Christian life that had such an influence on Calvin and many other Calvinists down through the centuries. This is especially so with regard to the Reformed view of salvation and damnation.59 Lawrence Vance makes the case that Augustine was at once both the father of Roman Catholicism and of Reformed Theology.60

Because of Augustine’s association with the Roman Catholic Church, there are some uninformed Calvinists who believe that Calvin was not influenced by Augustine and that to make this connection is nothing more than a smear tactic on the part of anti-Calvinists. Calvin’s repeated references to Augustine, however, reveal that he gave a lot of weight to what Augustine taught and was in fact echoing Augustine on the most central tenets of Reformed doctrine. Because some Calvinists object to the assertion that Calvin relied upon Augustine to develop and defend his doctrinal distinctives, I will quote from a wide variety of leading Calvinists to establish this statement. Herman Hanko, as non-Roman Catholic as one can be, says:

In fact, our fathers at Dordrecht knew well that these truths set forth in the Canons could not only be traced back to the Calvin Reformation; they could be traced back to the theology of Saint Augustine who lived almost a millennium before Calvin did his work in Geneva. For it was Augustine who had originally defined these truths. Calvin himself, again and again, pays tribute to the work of Augustine and points out that what he is saying has been said before him by the Bishop of Hippo. The Synod of Dordrecht was conscious of this.61

In agreement, Loraine Boettner says:

It was Calvin who wrought out this system of theological thought with such logical clearness and emphasis that it has ever since borne his name. He did not, of course, originate the system but only set forth what appeared to him to shine forth so clearly from the pages of Holy Scripture. Augustine had taught the essentials of the system a thousand years before Calvin was born, and the whole body of the leaders of the Reformation movement taught the same. But it was given to Calvin with his deep knowledge of Scripture, his keen intellect and systematizing genius, to set forth and defend these truths more clearly and ably than had ever been done before.62

Calvinist theologian, R. Laird Harris, also agrees when he points out that:

Although Calvin gave the Reformed doctrine its most thorough formulation, the theology had long been held. Calvin would have been the first to deny its novelty. … Indeed Calvinism is often called Augustinianism.63

Boettner went so far as to say:

The Reformation was essentially a revival of Augustinianism … ,64

  1. I. Packer echoes this sentiment saying:

The Reformation was an Augustinian Revival.65

Edwin Palmer explains:

The name Calvinism has often been used, not because Calvin was the first or sole teacher, but because after the long silence of the Middle Ages, he was the most eloquent and systematic expositor of these truths.66

For these reasons and some others, Calvin gets the lion’s share of credit for what he did with the teachings of Augustine. According to Boettner:

Inasmuch as it was Calvin who first formulated these principles into a more or less complete system, that system, or creed, if you will, and likewise those principles which are embodied in it, came to bear his name.67

Boettner explains the Reformed view of Calvin’s role in Calvinism as follows:

Calvin’s active and powerful intellect led him to sound the depths of every subject which he touched. In his investigations about God and the plan of redemption he went very far, penetrating into mysteries concerning which the average man seldom if ever dreams. He brought to light a side of Scripture which has as yet been very much in the shade and stressed those deep truths which in the ages preceding the Reformation had comparatively escaped notice in the Church. He brought to light forgotten doctrines of the apostle Paul and fastened them in their full and complete sense upon one great branch of the Christian Church.68

Spurgeon probably speaks for all authentic Calvinists when he says:

That doctrine which is called “Calvinism” did not spring from Calvin; we believe that it sprang from the great founder of all truth. Perhaps Calvin himself derived it mainly from the writings of Augustine. Augustine obtained his views, without doubt, through the Spirit of God, from the diligent study of the writings of Paul, and Paul received them of the Holy Ghost, from Jesus Christ the great founder of the Christian dispensation. We use the term then, not because we impute any extraordinary importance to Calvin having taught these doctrines. We would be just as willing to call them by any other name, if we could find one which would be better understood, and which on the whole would be as consistent with fact.69

William S. Reid, in the Evangelical Dictionary of Theology, says:

John Calvin, often regarded as “the systematizer of the Reformation,” was a second generation Protestant Reformer of the sixteenth century who brought together biblical doctrine systematically, in a way that no other Reformer before him had done … all Reformed and Presbyterian churches look back to him as the founder of their biblical-theological doctrinal position. … Although Calvin was the systematizer of the Reformation theology, since his day those who have accepted his structure of theology have continued to develop many of his ideas. During his own lifetime he himself developed his thought in the successive editions of his Institutes of the Christian Religion. With the writing of various Calvinistic confessions as the Heidelberg Catechism (1563), and the Canons of Dort (1618), and the Westminster Confession and Catechisms (1647-48) additions to and further developments in theological thought have appeared.70

While Reformed Theology—the theology of Calvin and Calvinism itself—is often thought of as the theology of the Reformation, this is imprecise at best. In fact, church historian Bruce Shelly says:

Calvin’s leadership … shaped a third reformation tradition. Today we call it Reformed or Calvinistic Christianity. It includes all Presbyterians, Dutch and German Reformed Churches, and many Baptists and Congregationalists.71

In fairness, I should point out that when Reformed denominations become liberal they lose their Calvinism along with their part in biblical Christianity. Thus, one could qualify the Calvinists among these groups as Evangelical or even Conservative Presbyterians, Congregationalists, etc. I should also point out that while there have always been Calvinist Baptists, variously called Reformed, Particular, or even Sovereign Baptists, etc., Baptists as a whole tend not to buy in to Reformed Theology. Still, in all of the mainstream Baptist denominations, there are those who are mounting a major effort to turn all Baptists (or as many as possible) into Reformed or Calvinist Baptists. Some even believe that a non-Reformed Baptist is not a true Baptist. One only needs to read The Other Side of Calvinism to see how wrong it is to equate Reformed Theology with the theology of mainstream Baptists.

NOTES

59 Norman Geisler, Predestination and Free Will (Downers Grove, 111.: InterVarsity Press, 1986), 68.

60 Vance, The Other Side of Calvinism, 37-68.

61 Hanko, Hoeksema, and VanBaren, The Five Points of Calvinism, 10.

62 Boettner, The Reformed Doctrine of Predestination, 3-4.

63 Charles F. Pfeiffer, Howard F. Vos, and John Rea, eds. The Wyclijfe Bible Encyclopedia A-J. R. Laird Harris, “Calvinism.” (Chicago, 111.: Moody Press, 1975), 293.

64 Boettner, The Reformed Doctrine of Predestination, 367.

65 J. I. Packer, “The Love of God: Universal and Particular.” Schreiner and Ware, eds. The Grace of God, the Bondage of the Will, 420.

66 Palmer, The Five Points of Calvinism, Foreword.

67 Boettner, The Reformed Doctrine of Predestination, 4.

68 Ibid, 5.

69 Spurgeon, The Spurgeon Sermon Collection, Vol. 2, 216.

70 William S. Reid, “Calvinism,” Evangelical Dictionary of Theology, Ed. Walter A. Elwell (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Baker Book House, 1984), 186-188.

71 Bruce L. Shelley, Church History in Plain Language (Dallas, Tex.: Word Publishing, 1995), 257.

(PDF of the above)

(Video Description – below) The provided text, excerpts from “AntiCALVIN The Gnostic Origins of Calvinism” by Ken Johnson, Th.D., establishes a detailed argument tracing the theological origins of Calvinism, particularly the doctrines codified in TULIP (Total Depravity, Unconditional Election, Limited Atonement, Irresistible Grace, and Perseverance of the Saints), back to ancient Gnostic and Manichaean heresies rather than scriptural orthodoxy. The author contends that concepts such as predestination and the denial of free will were first espoused by groups like the Valentinian Gnostics and were later incorporated by thinkers like Augustine of Hippo during debates against Pelagianism. A significant portion of the material contrasts the Calvinist definitions of these core theological points with the Arminian and “biblical” positions, often appealing to the writings and testimonies of the Ancient Church Fathers to support the idea that early Christianity affirmed free will and resisted doctrines leading to double predestination. Ultimately, the work aims to dismantle Calvinist theology by exposing its claimed “Gnostic origins” and demonstrating its contradiction with the beliefs of the immediate successors to the apostles.

MORE HERE.

A simplistic understanding of church history claims:

  • “Augustine introduced a dozen novel Doctrines in the course of his writing one short letter; then, he developed amnesia on his new doctrines for the next fifteen years.”

However, we know from his going back in time and changing [rewriting portions of] his views (for instance in Ad Simplicianum [2.5-22] and Lib. arb.3.47-54) that his reverting back to his neo platonic/Gnostic roots is clearly earmarked at the AD 412 mark.

His changes included not acceptance of,

  1. Total Inability
  2. Double Predestination
  3. No choice in choosing spiritual goodness
  4. God is just despite creating people intended for an eternal torture in hell with no ability to choose the good even when offered it.

Calvin (and to a lesser degree, Luther) plumed these later changes and incorporated them specifically into their reformational undercutting of the early Baptists and the SOLAs.

ADDITION: to be clear, we possess no writings from any prior Christian author who held such pagan views – which were plentiful in Platonism, Stoicism, and Gnosticism before AD 412.

I wish every person interested could at least read chapter 6 of “Calvinism: A Biblical and Theological Critique” WOWZA.

Here are a few pages (& PDF)

Why Did Augustine Revert to Pagan Salvific Determinism in AD 412?

The major influence on Augustine’s AD 412 reversion to his prior deterministic Manichaean interpretations of Scripture was the arrival of Pelagius and Caelestius near his North African home in late AD 411. Augustine previously admitted (AD 405) he did not know why infant baptism was practiced (Quant.80). But the conflict with Caelestius and Pelagius forced him to rethink the church’s infant baptismal tradition and precipitated his reversion to his pagan DUPED.26 Caelestius had argued that infants did not receive baptism for salvation from sin but only for inheritance of the kingdom. Augustine’s polemical response to Caelestius in AD 412 was logical: (1) Infants are baptized by church tradition; (2) water baptism is for forgiveness of sin and reception of the Holy Spirit; (3) some dying infants are rushed by their Christian parents to the bishop for baptism but die before baptism occurs, while other infants born of prostitutes are found abandoned on the streets by a church virgin who rushes them to the baptismal font where the bishop baptizes them; (4) these infants have no “will” and no control over whether or not they are baptized to receive the Holy Spirit to become Christians. Therefore, God must unilaterally and unconditionally predetermine which infants are saved by baptism and which are eternally damned without baptism (unconditional election).27 God’s election must be unconditional since infants have no personal sin, no merit, no good works, no functioning free will (incognizant due to the inability to understand at their age), and therefore, no choice.

In his next work that same year, Augustine concluded if this is true for infants, then unbaptized adults also have no choice or free will (Sp. et litt.54– 56). The Holy Spirit was received in water baptism, transforming the person into a Christian with a free will. Since humans have no free will before baptism, God must unilaterally choose who will be saved and infuse faith into those persons. Augustine taught even when “ministers prepared for giving baptism to the infants, it still is not given, because God does not choose [those infants for salvation]” (persev.31). Infant baptism became the impetus for Augustine’s novel theology when he reinterpreted that church tradition and reached a logical conclusion. By doing this he abandoned over three hundred years of church teaching on free will. According to the famous scholar Jaroslav Pelikan, Augustine departed from traditional Christian theology by incorporating his prior pagan teachings and thereby developed inconsistencies in his new anthropology and theology of grace, especially his “idiosyncratic theory of predestination.”28

Augustine Reverted to His Prior Pagan Philosophies in AD 412

The controversy over infant baptismal regeneration propelled Augustine to revert to his pagan training. Augustine’s reading of the Neoplatonism of Plotinus (Enneads) and Porphyry provided vital concepts he would incorporate from philosophy into his new theology.29 Evil produced an incapacitating fall with a total loss of the image of God in humans (Enn.1.1.12; 1.8.5; 4.3.12). In Neoplatonism, all humans were created as pure spirits (no physical body). Their voluntary choice to become physical resulted in the loss of free will.

By this choice humanity lost the “good will” and became inextricably chained in universal wickedness from an “evil will” (Enn.3.2.10; cf. Stoicism). This required the Spirit to implant the desired love and restore the “good will” by divine infusion (Enn.3.5.4; 1.7.9; 3.2.9.1; 2.3.1.1; 3.3.19–21; 4.8.5.1– 4). Although human souls do not possess genuine free will, (somehow) neither do they act by compulsion (Enn.4.3.13).30 The Neoplatonic “Reason-Principle” (god) purposefully created only a few individuals to whom he would gift a “good will” but created many more evil individuals who would remain devoid of personal choice. These evil persons were created as predestined to damnation. Nevertheless, those created for damnation remain inexcusably culpable and guilty, because the universe is just and good when each person accepts his or her god-imposed role, including those eternally tortured screaming in pain (Enn.3.2.17). Because “The One” (god) can only do good, he is exonerated by doctrinal definition from committing any injustice. These pagan philosophical teachings were the warp and woof of Augustine’s earlier studies, and these buttressed his theological answers to the Pelagian challenge.

Augustine utilized all these Neoplatonic doctrines after AD 411: (1) humanity’s fall resulted in total inability to respond with loss of free will (leaving only an evil will); (2) individuals were created for the purpose of damnation unto God’s glory; (3) individuals were culpable despite the lack of any choice to do good or respond positively; and (4) God was just, despite deliberately creating persons for eternal torture. After AD 412 Augustine regurgitated these pagan doctrines. “This absolutely obvious truth by which we see that so many are not saved because God does not will this, though human beings do” (Ep.217.19). God purposefully created persons to damn them eternally (Nupt. et conc.2.31–32). We possess no writings from any prior Christian author who held such pagan views.

Similarly, in AD 412, Manichaean Divine Unilateral Predetermination of Eternal Destinies (DUPED) invaded Christianity through Augustine. Foreknowledge now resulted from God unilaterally predetermining the elect (in other words, divine foreordination preceded divine foreknowledge). This was a Gnostic requirement. “Present a command to us to see Thee, so that we may be saved. Knowledge of Thee, it is the salvation of us all! Present a command! When Thou dost command, we have been saved” (The Three Steles of Seth, 125). Augustine wrote a similar line: “Give what you command, and command what you will” (Conf.10.40).

Thus, Augustine abandoned the unanimous consensus of the earlier Christian view and reverted to his Gnostic-Manichaean deterministic interpretations of Christian Scripture in AD 412. This can be best visualized by examining the following chart that compares the different interpretations of key Scripture passages by early Christians, Gnostic-Manichaeans, and Augustinian-Calvinists.

*Greek eudokias; the five other texts (Ps 5:13, 68:14, 144:16; Sir 15:15; Luke 2:14) containing eudokia refer to favor, acceptance, or good pleasure; “good willer” is my pejorative term for the pagan concept of a formal faculty that can “will good” (Stoic/ Neoplatonic/ Manichaean). It must be gifted by god/ the One to overcome the “evil will” in spiritually dead persons incapable of a positive response to god/ the One’s offer of salvation. The same passages the Gnostics and Manichaeans had interpreted as deterministic are now used by modern Calvinists to prove total depravity and unconditional election (the essential elements of Divine Unilateral Predetermination of Eternal Destinies, DUPED).

Gnostics and Manichaeans had used these same Christian Scriptures (listed above) for centuries to promote their unilateral determinism. Before Augustine, orthodox Christians had refuted heretical Gnostic and Manichaean DUPED and “interpreted proorizō [election] as depending upon proginoskō (foreknow)—those whom God foreknew would believe he decided upon beforehand to save. Their chief concern was to combat the concept of fatalism and affirm that humans are free to do what is righteous.”31

Augustine’s move toward DUPED was recognized by his peers, so he was accused of reverting to his prior Manichaean theology.32 But as a splendid rhetorician, Augustine defended himself brilliantly by creating a subtle distinction. He modified Gnostic/Manichaean “created human corrupt nature” (producing damnation) into a Christianized “fallen human corrupt nature” in Adam with inherited guilt (producing damnation; Nupt. et conc.2.16). Augustine’s novel nuanced “fallen” nature borrowed a key Gnostic/Manichaean and Neoplatonic doctrine: humans have total inability to respond to God until divinely awakened from spiritual death.

Furthermore, to avoid violating centuries of unanimous Christian teaching, Augustine had to redefine the Christian meaning of free will. He concluded God must micromanage and manipulate the circumstances that guarantee a person would “freely” respond to the invitation of God’s calling to eternal life.33 This should be compared to placing a mouse in a maze, then opening and closing doors so the mouse could “freely” reach the cheese. (In Christian theology that emphasized free will, all doors remained open for the maze traveler to choose his or her own path.) Augustine’s redefined free will was Stoic “non-free free will.” A millennium later, Calvinists would label this divine manipulation of the human free will by the term irresistible grace (God forcing a person to “love” him).

NOTES

26 Wilson, 285. See also Chadwick, Early Christian Thought, 110–11.

27 Augustine, Pecc.mer.1.29–30. In contrast, ca. AD 200, Tertullian had rejected infant baptism, stating one should wait until personal faith was possible (De bapt.18).

28 Jaroslav Pelikan, The Christian Tradition: A History of the Development of Doctrine, vol. 1, The Emergence of the Catholic Tradition (100–600) (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1975), 278–327, quotation at 325.

29 O’Daly, Platonism Pagan and Christian, 719.

30 This equivocation was also practiced by the ardently deterministic Stoics, since a total absence of free will was untenable to many among the ancient populace.

31 Carl Thomas McIntire, “Free Will and Predestination: Christian Concepts,” in The Encyclopedia of Religion, 15 vols., ed. Lindsay Jones, 2nd ed. (Farmington Hills, MI: Macmillan Reference USA, 2005), 5:3206–9.

32 C. Jul. imp.1.52. His ordination as a bishop was blocked and almost prevented due to his prior Manichaeism. See Jason D. BeDuhn, “Augustine Accused: Megalius, Manichaeism, and the Inception of the Confessions,” Journal of Early Christian Studies 17, no. 1 (2009): 85–124; and Henry Chadwick, “Self-Justification in Augustine’s Confessions,” English Historical Review 178 (2003): 1168. As in the chart above, see Augustine’s Manichaean interpretations of Romans 9–11 (Pecc. merit.29–31, Spir. et litt.50, 60, 66; Nupt.2.31–32, C. du ep. Pelag.2.15, Enchir.98, C. Jul. 3.37,4.15, Corrept. 28); Eph 2:8–10 (Spir. et litt.56, C. du ep. Pelag., Enchir.31, Praed.12); John 14:6 and 6:44, 65 (C. du ep. Pelag.1.7, Grat.3–4,10); and Phil 2:13 (Spir. et litt.42, Grat. Chr.1.6, C. Jul.3.37, 4.15, Grat.32, 38).

33 Burns, “From Persuasion to Predestination,” 307.

David L. Allen (Editor), Steve W Lemke (Editor), Calvinism: A Biblical and Theological Critique (Nashville, TN: B & H Academic, 2022), 222-226.

A Recent Sermon Maligning God’s Character/Holiness

Published by Papa Giorgio

Originally posted January 1st, 2026

My visual video response:

Yes, this is from the church I attend. A wonderful place to attend, but definitely Calvinistic. This is a newer pastor, and I must say, even though I vehemently disagree, at least he is preaching honestly. Another pastor months before preached a sermon where he quoted Joshua 24:15 and said:

  • “Make a choice. Choose this day. In fact, you can choose one of the… He’s not saying that he’s happy if you choose the pagan gods, but he says, in fact, pick one of the pagan gods. Do you know that something that God is extremely kind and gracious to us and that he gave us free will? Did you know that? He didn’t force a relationship on us. He gave us free will. Do you remember what he gave Adam and Eve? Free will. You can make a choice. I’m not gonna force it. Hey, you choose, yeah, you, make the choice.”

When I asked an elder if this pastor really believed this statement he made regarding free will from the pulpit, I got an honest answer of “No.”

So I love the almost Provisionist preaching and call to come to God in faith — but this is not what is REALLY believed as these pastors overlay TULIP on to their understanding of Biblical text. I struggle with the good that can come from the “alter call” type preaching of the “Armininian style” while they sleep as a Calvinist. That being said, it is a duplicitous preaching like they make God out to be by overlaying a 16th century philosophy onto God. A Jaundiced view at best. AND, I can truly appreciate the rawness of the logical outcomes being honestly preached from the pulpit. Although even this pastor does not follow his own thinking to their ends without hemming and hawing with a myriad of qualifiers and nuances.

Here is my FACEBOOK comments on this sermon:

So, in the past I have praised good sermons from my church… if I do that, should I at times not critique [as publicly] a bad one? I will be clipping the main idea of it from the video for my site [like I have uploaded some clips from the good ones], but that is in the future tense. I am thankful, however, that this pastor was so forthright, and didn’t hide behind the “preaching as an Arminian, sleep as a Calvinist” idea.

Honest preaching is laudable. This was essentially the sermon:

(a) God decrees and ordains all evil for His glory
(b) God saves us from the evil He decreed and ordained…. for His glory.

In other words, while this pastor didn’t follow his sermon to its logical conclusion, it is essentially God saving us from Himself. So, all the pain and suffering mentioned in stories and text… are all God caused. Remember, this pastor chose AW Pink’s book for the last Monday men’s service series. [It could have been more in the pastorate choosing Pink’s book, as far as I know — because I do not actually know how these books are approved.] Pink is a hyper Calvinist, like this Pastor publicly is.

All I was thinking was,

  • “well, people who don’t get the raw [5-point, Calvinist] truth from other pastors are hearing it now.”

On the flip side of that “positive”, the new people on the “faith fence” — which only makes sense to those of the non-Calvinist soteriological bent — may have wrote off Crossroads as their home. Or worse yet, wrote off God.

Which in this pastor’s view, was also ordained.

The same pastor here eisegetes into Scripture a 16th century doctrine not understood as being the Bible before Calvin popularized it via his doctrinal hero:

  • The reason I added the SNL skit was to note that right when the sermon was starting to state some good position or truth, it was dashed shortly after by the “doctrines of grace.”

UPDATED CONVO

In another example, after a wonderful, Gospel oriented presentation by a senior pastor at the men’s Monday night class, I was perplexed. I thought I was crazy in fact. I was just about to tender my separation letter to the elders, pastors, and peeps at church. So I asked a question in text of the pastor (again, no names):

Ouch. That confirmed and upset me a bit. Did you catch it? This pastor admits that in order to convert people with the Gospel message, he withholds parts of his systematic because it would interfere with his evangelism.

Um… yeah it would.

But again, it is duplicitous in nature, as stated earlier.

How?

There is no Gospel in Calvinism.

See also: “Logical Ends of TULIP (No Rebellious Creatures)“

This illustration [via NotWilliangThatAny] is aiming to reflect a real tension in Calvinist theology, not exaggerate it. It takes the idea of election and shows it visually in terms of proportion. One petal represents the elect, while many “nots” represent those passed over. The focus is on how small the number of the elect might be compared to everyone else.

First, this connects to limited atonement. In this view, Christ’s death is effective only for the elect, not for every individual. Passages like John 10:26, “you do not believe because you are not among my sheep,” and John 17:9, “I am not praying for the world but for those whom you have given me,” are often used to support this. The illustration reflects that by showing a small number who are truly loved in a saving sense, and many who are not.

Second, it ties to unconditional election and reprobation. God chooses some to receive mercy while others are passed over. Romans 9:13 says, “Jacob I loved, but Esau I hated,” and Romans 9:22 speaks of “vessels of wrath prepared for destruction.” The many “nots” in the image visually represent this larger group who are not chosen, emphasizing the imbalance.

Third, it reflects the idea that salvific love is not universal. While Calvinists affirm that God shows a kind of general love or kindness to all (Matthew 5:45), His saving love is reserved for a specific people. The illustration presses on that distinction by asking what it means in practice. If most people are not recipients of that saving love, then the experience of humanity is largely outside of it.

This leads to a key question. If Scripture says God “so loved the world” (John 3:16) and desires “all people to be saved” (1 Timothy 2:4), how should we understand the scope of His love? Does the picture of a few loved and many not align with the overall tone and message of the Bible, or should we rethink how we define God’s saving love?

 

 

TikTok Conspiracies | Trump On Epstein Island

Published by Papa Giorgio

GROK:

No, there is no credible evidence that Donald Trump ever visited Jeffrey Epstein’s private island (Little Saint James). — politifact.com

Flight logs from Epstein’s planes (often called the “Lolita Express”) show Trump flew on them several times in the 1990s—recently released documents confirm around 6–8 flights, more than previously known—but none of those flights went to or from the island. The documented trips were domestic routes, such as Palm Beach to New York/Newark or similar East Coast legs, often with family members. — newsweek.com

Trump flew four times in 1993, as well as once in 1994, 1995 and 1997. The flights were between Palm Beach, Florida, and New York City airports, with one 1994 flight stopping at Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport.

In another June 1994 flight, Trump traveled with a woman named “Marla”—presumably then-wife Marla Maples—and his then-infant daughter, Tiffany, along with a nanny.

Trump’s son Eric is also listed on a flight in August 1995 from Palm Beach to New York, and would have been 11 at the time of the flight.

There is no evidence that Trump visited Epstein’s notorious Little St. James island, where the late financier is alleged to have trafficked and sexually abused young women and girls. Trump has also never been implicated in the offenses committed by Epstein or Maxwell.

(NEWSWEEK)

Key facts from court records, victim statements, and investigations

  • No island visitor logs or flight records list Trump: Extensive Epstein flight logs, island visitor data, and court-released documents (including millions of pages unsealed in 2025–2026) contain no record of Trump traveling to Little Saint James. Fact-checkers and news outlets reviewing the files have repeatedly stated this. — poynter.org
  • Virginia Giuffre (a central Epstein victim and accuser): In a sworn deposition, Giuffre—who was recruited while working at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort—explicitly said she never saw Trump on the island, never observed him and Epstein together in compromising situations, and had no recollection of Trump visiting any of Epstein’s properties in a way tied to the abuse. She later clarified that any earlier flirtation claim was inaccurate. — abcnews.com
  • No corroboration in victim accounts or prosecutions: Major Epstein-related trials, depositions, and FBI files include tips and uncorroborated allegations about Trump (some old and withdrawn lawsuits from the 1990s/2010s alleged misconduct at Epstein’s New York apartment, not the island), but nothing places him on Little Saint James. Prosecutors and investigators have never used such evidence against him.

Trump and Epstein were socially acquainted in New York/Palm Beach circles in the late 1980s–1990s (photos and quotes from that era exist), but Trump publicly distanced himself around 2004–2005 after banning Epstein from Mar-a-Lago over an alleged incident involving a young girl at the club. Trump has said he turned down an invitation to the island and hadn’t spoken to Epstein for roughly 15 years by the time of Epstein’s 2019 arrest. Conspiracy theories and social media claims persist, but they rely on speculation, not logs, testimony, or documents. Major outlets (including those critical of Trump) and fact-checkers have consistently found zero evidence of an island visit. — politifact.com

In short: social ties and plane flights (not to the island) = documented. Actual trip to Epstein’s island = no evidence whatsoever.

Happy First Fruits

Published by Papa Giorgio

Jesus is the center of history… in more ways than one!

Some Historical Reflections

Napoleon said this about Jesus:

  • I know men and I tell you that Jesus Christ is no mere man. Between Him and every other person in the world there is no possible term of comparison. Alexander, Caesar, Charlemagne, and I have founded empires. But on what did we rest the creation of our genius? Upon force. Jesus Christ founded His empire upon love; and at this hour millions of men would die for Him.

H.G. Wells, the famous novelist and historian in his own right agreed:

  • I am an historian, I am not a believer, but I must confess as a historian that this penniless preacher from Nazareth is irrevocably the very center of history. Jesus Christ is easily the most dominant figure in all history.

Albert Einstein adds his intellect:

  • As a child I received instruction both in the Bible and in the Talmud. I am a Jew, but I am enthralled by the luminous figure of the Nazarene….No one can read the Gospels without feeling the actual presence of Jesus. His personality pulsates in every word. No myth is filled with such life.

Church historian Philip Schaff concludes:

  • Jesus of Nazareth, without money and arms, conquered more millions than Alexander the Great, Caesar, Mohammed, and Napoleon; without science and learning, he shed more light on things human and divine than all philosophers and scholars combined; without the eloquence of school, he spoke such words of life as were never spoken before or since, and produced effects which lie beyond the reach of orator or poet; without writing a single line, he set more pens in motion, and furnished themes for more sermons, orations, discussions, learned volumes, works of art, and songs of praise than the whole army of great men of ancient and modern times.

Robert Hume

The nine founders among the eleven living religions in the world had characters which attracted many devoted followers during their own lifetime, and still larger numbers during the centuries of subsequent history. They were humble in certain respects, yet they were also confident of a great religious mission. Two of the nine, Mahavira and Buddha, were men so strong-minded and self-reliant that, according to the records, they displayed no need of any divine help, though they both taught the inexorable cosmic law of Karma. They are not reported as having possessed any consciousness of a supreme personal deity. Yet they have been strangely deified by their followers. Indeed, they themselves have been worshipped, even with multitudinous idols.

All of the nine founders of religion, with the exception of Jesus Christ, are reported in their respective sacred scriptures as having passed through a preliminary period of uncertainty, or of searching for religious light. Confucius, late in life, confessed his own sense of shortcomings and his desire for further improvement in knowledge and character. All the founders of the non-Christian religions evinced inconsistencies in their personal character; some of them altered their practical policies under change of circumstances.

Jesus Christ alone is reported as having had a consistent God consciousness, a consistent character himself, and a consistent program for his religion. The most remarkable and valuable aspect of the personality of Jesus Christ is the comprehensiveness and universal availability of his character, as well as its own loftiness, consistency, and sinlessness.

(Robert Hume, The World’s Living Religions [New York, NY: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1959], 285-286.)

The Crown of Thorns

RESURRECTION PRESENTATIONS

The Joy of the Resurrection by Dr. Gary Habermas

Lee Strobel

A SEASONED JOURNALIST CHASES DOWN THE BIGGEST STORY IN HISTORY – Is there credible evidence that Jesus of Nazareth really is the Son of God? Retracing his own spiritual journey from atheism to faith, Lee Strobel, former legal editor of the Chicago Tribune, cross-examines a dozen experts with doctorates who are specialists in the areas of old manuscripts, textual criticism, and biblical studies. Strobel challenges them with questions like; How reliable is the New Testament? Does evidence for Jesus exist outside the Bible? Is there any reason to believe the resurrection was an actual event? Strobel s tough, point-blank questions make this bestselling book read like a captivating, fast-paced novel. But it is not fiction. It is a riveting quest for the truth about history s most compelling figure. What will your verdict be in The Case for Christ?

Lecture by Dr. Craig Hazen | “Evidence For The Resurrection Of Jesus”

Shroud of Turin

“The Face of God”
Michael Knowles and Dr. Jeremiah Johnston

Just as a pat on my back, I have been following this guy since his “infancy” in apologetics in the public (social media now) square. I am so stoked for Doctor J to be on the cutting edge of delivering and studying this stuff. (See my Previous Post on the matter via Doc J.)

Is the Shroud of Turin the real burial cloth of Jesus Christ—or the greatest mystery in Christian history? In this powerful episode of Michael &, Michael Knowles is joined by theologian and historian Dr. Jeremiah Johnston to uncover the mind-blowing discoveries surrounding the Shroud. From scientific analysis and historical evidence to theological significance, they explore what makes the Shroud one of the most studied and debated relics in the world—and what it could mean for believers today.

The Shroud of Turin and the Resurrection of Jesus | SRS #293
Shawn Ryan and Dr. Jeremiah Johnston

Dr. Jeremiah J. Johnston is a world-renowned scholar on the Historical Jesus, specializing in archaeology, ancient history, and the New Testament.

In 2026, Dr. Johnston became the only academic invited to present evidence for Jesus and the Resurrection at the World Economic Forum in Davos—bringing the Gospel into one of the most influential global stages. His evidence-based approach bridges rigorous research and compelling communication, making the case for faith both intellectually credible and spiritually transformative.

He is the author of The Jesus Discoveries: 10 Historic Finds That Bring Us Face-to-Face with Jesus, which highlights top archaeological discoveries corroborating the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus outside the biblical record. Known for his evidence-first, no-nonsense style, Dr. Johnston powerfully confronts myths and cultural skepticism while offering hope and clarity in an age of confusion.

A hands-on scholar, he uses authentic and replica artifacts;  such as the Shroud of Turin, crucifixion nails, the Titulus Crucis, the Pilate Stone, ossuaries, early New Testament papyri, Dead Sea Scroll facsimiles, and Roman coins. to bring history alive in vivid detail. His passion is showing how fresh discoveries, like the Shroud’s fading image, inscriptions mocking early Christians, and coins tied to Gospel events—continue to strengthen the historical case for Jesus Christ.

The Face

The Shroud Evidences – Dr. Johnston

(March 29, 2024) Is there enough evidence to prove that the Shroud of Turin is real? Prestonwood Baptist Church apologetics pastor Jeremiah Johnston used to be a skeptic. But once he did a deep dive into the history of the Shroud, he became a “total defender” of the Shroud’s authenticity. This Easter Week, Pastor Johnston joins the Glenn Beck Program to lay it all out from a scientific perspective. Plus, he explains why you don’t need to be Catholic to believe the Shroud is truly the burial cloth of Jesus Christ.

 

  • (John 20:5-8, CSB) 5Stooping down, he saw the linen cloths lying there, but he did not go in. 6 Then, following him, Simon Peter also came. He entered the tomb and saw the linen cloths lying there. 7 The wrapping that had been on his head was not lying with the linen cloths but was folded up in a separate place by itself. 8 The other disciple, who had reached the tomb first, then also went in, saw, and believed.

The indomitable Leon Morris:

6–7 It is not said how much later Peter arrived. But when he got there he did not hesitate but went straight into the tomb. He saw the cloths that had been around the body. John specifically mentions that the cloth that had been on Jesus’ head was not with the others, but was wrapped up in a place of its own (Berkeley [Berkeley The Holy Bible, The Berkeley Version (Grand Rapids, 1959)] renders “in its particular place,” but this seems to go beyond the meaning of the Greek). In recent years this has often been taken to mean that the grave clothes were just as they had been when placed around the body. That is to say, Jesus’ body rose through the grave-clothes without disturbing them. This is not inconsistent with the language, but we should bear in mind that John does not say this. That the headcloth18 was not with the others scarcely supports the view, for had this been the case it would have been right alongside them, with no more than the length of the neck (if that) between them. Moreover, “folded up” does not look like a description of the way it would have appeared if the head had simply passed through it. However, whatever be the truth of this, John is plainly describing an orderly scene, not one of wild confusion. This means that the body had not been taken by grave robbers. They would never have left the cloths wrapped neatly. They would have taken the body, cloths and all, or would have taken the cloths off and dropped them in a heap.19 [1]

18 σουδάριον is a loanword from the Latin sudarium, a cloth for wiping off sweat (sudor); it denotes a cloth more or less like our handkerchief. Here it apparently signifies a jawband, a cloth that went “round the face and over the head” (Robinson, Priority, p. 292) to hold the jaw in position.

19 Long ago Chrysostom remarked: “For neither, if any persons had removed the body, would they before doing so have stripped it; nor if any had stolen it, would they have taken the trouble to remove the napkin, and roll it up, and lay it in a place by itself; but how? they would have taken the body as it was. On this account John tells us by anticipation that it was buried with much myrrh, which glues linen to the body not less firmly than lead …” (85.4; pp. 320–21). Grave robbing was regarded as a serious offense; Barrett cites an ordinance of Claudius prescribing capital punishment for offenders (The New Testament Background: Selected Documents [London, 1957], p. 15).

[1] Leon Morris, The Gospel according to John, The New International Commentary on the New Testament (Grand Rapids, MI: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 1995), 735.

The Shroud Evidences – Mr. Schwortz

(July 30, 2023) Is the debate over the Shroud of Turin over? Many Christians believe it was the burial cloth of Jesus and even non-Christian scientists struggle to explain how the image of a man was imposed onto it. But some scientists have claimed that carbon dating has proven it is much younger than previously thought. However, Shroud of Turin Research Project Official Photographer Barrie Schwortz joins Glenn to explain why he’s refuting that claim. According to Schwortz, who was once a “total skeptic” of the Shroud, the carbon dating was improperly done. Instead, he believes the most plausible explanation is simple: “This is the burial shroud of the historic Jesus of Nazareth.”

The NEW YORK POST updates the issue a bit with [of course] an A.I. rendering:

New X-ray analysis seems to prove that the Shroud of Turin was indeed from Jesus Christ’s time – allowing artificial intelligence to recreate stunning images of what many believe could be Christ himself.

Christians have long believed that the treasured relic was the burial cloth of Jesus, showing an imprint of their Messiah’s face.

While dating analysis from the 1980s suggested it was actually a painted forgery from the 1300s, new X-ray dating evaluation suggests it was from 2,000 years ago, putting it in Christ’s time, according to a study published in the Heritage journal.

That knowledge has since allowed cutting-edge artificial intelligence (AI) technology to creating vivid, eerily lifelike renderings of the facial impression that believers are convinced was left on the cloth at the moment of Christ’s resurrection.

One image drawn from the facial imprint by AI site Midjourney was eerily similar to many classical art historical depictions of Jesus, including the shoulder-length hair and beard. 

The AI image also shows the man with wounds on his bare chest, suggesting that he had just been tortured and killed, noted the Daily Express, which generated the image.

[….]

Dr. Liberato de Caro, the leader of the Heritage analysis, claimed that the wide-angle X-ray analysis proved that the Shroud of Turin matched a similar fabric sample from Masada, Israel dating between 55 to 74 CE.

“The experimental results are compatible with the hypothesis that the Turin Shroud is a 2000-year-old relic,” the study said, claiming that the previous definitive analysis was flawed due to contamination.

There were also tiny particles of pollen from the Middle East lodged in the linen fibers of the shroud, which seemingly ruled out the idea that the fabric came from Europe, Dr. de Caro added. …

Of course, there are other A.I. renderings of the image, and they vary in appearance. So know that man-made parameters for the programs change the end result — in other words, the images may be close, but no cigar.

My dad had this same painting hanging in his hallway. The eyes are painted shut, but it also loos like he is staring at you:

Spooky Jesus

… Uhm … I would much rather have the A.I. renderings than this.

Note that Doc Habermas talks about the “teeth image” that makes the accurate image of God

The Shroud Evidences – Dr. Habermas

Dr. Gary Habermas shares the special qualities of the Shroud of Turin and problems with the most recent Carbon 14 dating.

The Resurrection Evidences – Dr. Craig

Answering Skeptics

Matthew 27:52-53

While this is cute, it is how skeptics view this passage… as myth. I DO NOT.

The tombs were also opened and many bodies of the saints who had fallen asleep were raised. And they came out of the tombs after His resurrection, entered the holy city, and appeared to many. (Matthew 27:52-53, HCSB)

On this Easter and a verse at church about the first-fruits and then ending with the new heaven and new earth… I remembered a book I read from many, many years ago. So I dug it out and excerpted the portion I was thinking of. Enjoy and happy “First-fruits”!

  • Grant R. Jeffrey, Heaven: The Last Frontier (Toronto, Ontario: Frontier Research Publications, 1990), 25-28.

The Firstfruits of Resurrection

The Bible uses the word “firstfruits” to describe this First Resurrection which leads to eternal life in Heaven. In Israel the Feast of Firstfruits happened in the spring of the year to celebrate the first fruits of the harvest. As the Jews brought these tokens of the bounty of the coming harvest to the Temple they were acknowledging that God was the provider of the harvest. This word “firstfruits” became a proper symbol of this first group of resurrected saints, a token of the great harvest when Jesus, the Lord of the Harvest, will come to gather the saints to meet Him in the air.

The writer of the book of Hebrews, after recounting the many acts of faith of Old Testament saints, told his readers about their life in Heaven. He declares “we are surrounded by so great a cloud of witnesses” (Hebrews 12:1). They still live! They have been transformed and are now in Paradise, watching our walk of faith. Many of those Old Testament saints participated in this first stage of the First Resurrection, when Jesus rose from the grave.

Matthew 27:52-53 describes the amazing and exciting events that happened after Jesus rose from the dead, during the Feast of the Firstfruits: “And the graves were opened; and many bodies of the saints who had fallen asleep were raised; and coming out of the graves after His Resurrection, they went into the holy city and appeared to many.”

The various writers who observed this miraculous resurrection recounted it in their histories of the day. Jesus Christ had risen from the dead and won victory over death, not only for Himself as the Son of God, but also for those saints who had died centuries before and for all who would believe in Him as their Lord and Savior for centuries to follow.

Writings by Christians of that time have been collected in the Ante-Nicene Library. They describe that more than twelve thousand of these Old Testament saints walked through Galilee for forty days, appeared in Jerusalem before many, and later ascended into Heaven when Jesus Christ ascended to His Father.

This undeniable fact of Christ’s Resurrection and the resurrection of Old Testament saints who identified themselves to many Jews created a ground swell of belief in the claims of Christ that He was the Messiah and the true Son of God. The Lord proved forever that His power of resurrection and eternal life was available to all who would receive His offer of salvation. God will not force you to accept eternal life, nor will He force you to live in Heaven if you choose not to claim this “indescribable gift” (2 Corinthians 9:15) as Lord and Savior.

These saints who rose from the dead when Christ arose were the “firstfruits” of the first resurrection to eternal life in Heaven. It is no coincidence that this seventeenth day of Nisan in A.D. 32 was the Feast of the Firstfruits. Other notable events connected with resurrection also happened on this anniversary.

On this day the ark of Noah rested on Mount Ararat and the human race was resurrected following the flood. Almost a thousand years later, on this anniversary, Moses led the people of Israel through the Red Sea to be resurrected as a nation from the bondage of Egypt. Forty years later, Israel crossed the Jordan on the seventeenth day of Nisan, and the people enjoyed the firstfruits of the Promised Land. In the sovereignty of God, He caused Jesus Christ to rise from the dead and to bring these saints with Him into new life on this same day, during the Feast of Firstfruits.

These resurrected saints had bodies that were real. Several documents from this era claim that among those raised by Jesus were the Temple priest, Simeon, who had once waited in the Temple to see the baby Jesus, and his two sons who lived in Arimathaea. The records state their resurrection was specifically investigated since they were well-known to the Sanhedrin because of their Temple service as priests. After so many centuries, it is impossible to ascertain the documentary accuracy of these ancient texts, but it is interesting to note that they confirm the details of the event which Matthew recorded in his Gospel.

These records in the Ante-Nicene Library claim that during the investigation each of the sons of Simeon was separately and simultaneously interrogated. They both told the same story, namely that Christ had appeared to them in Hades, preached to all, and that those who had earlier responded to God were miraculously given new bodies and resurrected when Christ rose from the grave.

Matthew’s record of this event is tantalising in both what it reveals and what it conceals. He states that these Old Testament saints “went into the holy city and appeared to many.” Remember that all the events involved with the death and resurrection of Jesus happened in Jerusalem during the busiest season of the year, the Feast of Passover. Every Israelite male who was capable made an effort to come to Jerusalem for the Passover festival. Deuteronomy 16:2 records this as a command of God. Each home in the holy city had upper rooms which were supplied without cost to fellow Israelites who came on these pilgrimages. Therefore, during this Feast of Passover, the population of Jerusalem had swollen to five times the normal number. Flavius Josephus, the Jewish historian, says in his Jewish Wars that, according to Roman records, the number of sheep sacrificed during the Passover was 256,500. Since one sheep would serve as a sacrifice for five people, the conclusion is that during the time of Christ up to 1,250,000 people would come to the city during Passover instead of the usual 250,000 city dwellers.

Both the New Testament and letters of first-century Christians record that these resurrected saints identified themselves to the people as historical, biblical characters. With 1,000,000 visitors already in the city, obviously these resurrected saints must have appeared different in some way from other men, or they would simply have been lost in the crowd. Possibly their faces were transfigured with God’s reflected glory as the faces of Moses and Elijah were on the Mount of Transfiguration.

Those saints who rose with Christ did not die again, according to the writings of the first century. They were raptured to Heaven when Christ was raptured. These saints are now enjoying a “better that is, a heavenly country…for He has prepared a city for them” (Hebrews 11:16). These raptured believers are the firstfruits of the first resurrection, which is “the resurrection of life” (John 5:29).

Paul described this resurrection in his first epistle to the church at Thessalonica: “If we believe that Jesus died and rose again, even so God will bring with Him those who sleep in Jesus” and if we are still alive on earth, “we who are alive and remain shall be caught up together with them in the clouds to meet the Lord in the air. And thus we shall always be with the Lord” (4:14,17) in eternal life in the New Jerusalem forever. The rapture of the saints will be discussed in greater detail in the next chapter. Those who miss the first resurrection will also rise again, but they will partake of the dreaded second resurrection, which is a spiritual, eternal death in the Lake of Fire (Revelation 20:15).

Some Early Church Father’s Take:

This gem comes from BIBLICAL HERMENEUTICS – Ask A Question section

It is defended regularly by Early church fathers such as:

Ignatius to the Trallians (c. AD 70-115)

  • “For Says the Scripture, ‘May bodies of the saints that slept arose,’ their graves being opened. He descended, indeed, into Hades alone, but He arose accompanied by a multitude” (chap. Ix, The Ante-Nicene Fathers, vol. I, p. 70).

Ignatius to the Magnesians (c. AD 70-115)

  • “…[T]herefore endure, that we may be found the disciples of Jesus Christ, our only Master—how shall we be able to live apart from Him, whose disciples the prophets themselves in the Spirit did wait for Him as their Teacher? And therefore He who they rightly waited for, being come, raised them from the dead” [Chap. IX] (Alexander Roberts and James Donaldson, eds. The Ante-Nicene Fathers, vol. I (1885). Reprinted by Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, p. 62. Emphasis added in all these citations).

Irenaeus (c. AD 120-200)

  • “…He [Christ] suffered who can lead those souls aloft that followed His ascension. This event was also an indication of the fact that when the holy hour of Christ descended [to Hades], many souls ascended and were seen in their bodies” (Fragments from the Lost Writings of Irenaeus XXVIII, Ante-Nicene Fathers, vol. I, Alexander Roberts, ibid., 572-573).

Clement of Alexandria (c. AD 155-200)

  • “‘But those who had fallen asleep descended dead, but ascended alive.’ Further, the Gospel says, ‘that many bodies of those that slept arose,’—plainly as having been translated to a better state” (Alexander Roberts, ed. Stromata, Ante-Nicene Fathers, vol. II, chap. VI, 491).

This does not include the *multiple times the phrase was quoted by later church Fathers (Tertullian, Hippolytus, Origen, Cyril, etc). If one suggests that it was added to the text, they must first grapple with its extended use in these and other very early documents and decide how an error was placed within the text so early in transmission.

The below is most likely where the above responder got his quotes from:

*TO WIT…

This comes by way of an excellent dealing with the topic/Scripture, DEFENDING INERRANCY — via Dr. Norman Geisler titled:

(Emphasis in the original) BTW, this section is titled: “A Survey Of The Great Teachers Of The Church On The Passage,” as, “early Church Fathers” are not the only persons listed below.

Tertullian (AD 160-222)

  • The Father of Latin Christianity wrote:  “’And the sun grew dark at mid-day;’ (and when did it ‘shudder exceedingly’ except at the passion of Christ, when the earth trembled to her centre, and the veil of the temple was rent, and the tombs burst asunder?) ‘because these two evils hath My People done’” (Alexander Roberts, ed. An Answer to the Jews, Chap XIII, Ante-Nicene Fathers, vol. 3, 170).

Hippolytus (AD 170-235)

  • “And again he exclaims, ‘The dead shall start forth from the graves,’ that is, from the earthly bodies, being born again spiritual, not carnal.  For this he says, is the Resurrection that takes place through the gate of heaven, through which, he says, all those that do not enter remain dead” (Alexander Roberts, Ante-Nicene Fathers, vol. 5,  The Refutation of All Heresy, BooK V, chap. 3, p. 54).  The editor of the Ante-Nicene Fathers footnotes this as a reference to the resurrection of the saints in Matthew 27:52, 53 (in Note  6,  p. 54.), as indeed it is.

Origen (AD 185-254)

  • Despite the fact that Origen was known for his Neoplatonic spritualizing of some biblical texts, Origen declared that Matthew 27 spoke of a literal historical resurrection of these saints.  He wrote:  “Now to this question, although we are able to show the striking and miraculous character of the events which befell Him, yet from what other source can we furnish an answer than the Gospel narratives, which state that ‘there was an earth quake, and that the rock were split asunder, and the tombs were opened, and the veil of the temple was rent in twain from top to bottom, an the darkness prevailed in the day-time, the sun failing to give light’” (Against Celsus, Book II, XXXIII. Alexander Roberts, ed.  Ante-Nicene Fathers, vol. 4, 444-445).
  • “But if this Celsus, who, in order to find matter of accusation against Jesus and the Christians, extracts from the Gospel even passages which are incorrectly interpreted, but passes over in silence the evidences of the divinity of Jesus, would listen to divine portents, let him read the Gospel, and see that even the centurion, and they who with him kept watch over Jesus, on seeing the earthquake, and the events that occurred [viz., the resurrection of the saints], were greatly afraid, saying, ‘This man was the Son of God’” (Ibid., XXVI, p. 446).

Cyril of Jerusalem (c. AD 315-c. 386)

  • Early Fathers in the East also verified the historicity of the Matthew text.  Cyril of Jerusalem wrote: “But it is impossible, some one will say, that the dead should rise; and yet Eliseus [Elisha] twice raised the dead,–when he was live and also when dead…and is Christ not risen? … But in this case both the Dead of whom we speak Himself arose, and many dead were raised without having even touched Him.  For many bodies of the Saints which slept arose, and they came out of the graves after His Resurrection, and went into the Holy City, (evidently this city in which we now are,) and appeared to many” (Catechetical Lectures XIV, 16,  Nicene Fathers, Second Series, vol. 7, p. 98).
  • Further, “I believe that Christ was also raised from the dead, both from the Divine Scriptures, and from the operative power even at this day of Him who arose,–who descended into hell alone, but ascended thence with a great company for He went down to death, and many bodies of the saints which slept arose through Him” (ibid., XIV, 18, vol. 7, p. 99).

Gregory of Nazianzus (c. AD 330-c. 389)

  • “He [Christ] lays down His life, but He has the power to take it again; and the veil rent, for the mysterious doors of Heaven are opened;5 the rocks are cleft, the dead arise.  He dies but he gives life, and by His death destroys death.  He is buried, but He rises again. He goes down to Hell, but He brings up the souls; He ascends to Heaven, and shall come again to judge the quick and the dead, and to put to the test such words are yours” (Schaff, ibid., vol. VII, Sect XX, p. 309).

Jerome (AD 342-420)

  • Speaking of the Matthew 27 text, he wrote: “It is not doubtful to any what these great signs signify according to the letter, namely, that heaven and earth and all things should bear witness to their crucified Lord” (cited in Aquinas, Commentary on the Four Gospels, vol. I, part III: St. Matthew (Oxford: John Henry Parker, 1841), 964.
  • “As Lazarus rose from the dead, so also did many bodies of the Saints rise again to shew forth the Lord’s resurrection; yet notwithstanding that the graves were opened, they did not rise again before the Lord rose, that He might be the first-born of the resurrection from the dead” (cited by Aquinas, ibid., 963).

Hilary of Poitiers (c. AD 315-c.357)

  • “The graves were opened, for the bands of death were loosed.  And many bodies  of the saints which slept arose, for illuminating the darkness of death, and shedding light upon the gloom of Hades, He robbed the spirits of death” (cited by Aquinas, ibid., 963).

Chrysostom (AD 347-407)

  • “When He [Christ] remained on the cross they had said tauntingly, He saved others, himself he cannot save. But what He should not do for Himself, that He did and more than that for the bodies of the saints.  For if it was a great thing to raise Lazarus after four days, much more was it that they who had long slept should not shew themselves above; this is indeed a proof of the resurrection to come.  But that it might not be thought that that which was done was an appearance merely, the Evangelist adds, and come out of the graves after his resurrection, and went into the holy city, and appeared unto many” (cited by Aquinas, ibid., 963-964).

St. Augustine (AD 354-430)

  • The greatest scholar at the beginning of the Middle Ages, St. Augustine, wrote: “As if Moses’ body could not have been hid somewhere…and be raised up therefrom by divine power at the time when Elias and he were seen with Christ: Just as at the time of Christ’s passion many bodies of the saints arose, and after his resurrection appeared, according to the Scriptures, to many in the holy city” (Augustine, On the Gospel of St. John, Tractate cxxiv, 3, Philip Schaff, Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, vol. VII, 448).
  • “Matthew proceeds thus: ‘And the earth did quake, and the rocks rent; and the graves were opened; and many bodies of the saints which slept arise, and come out of the graves after the resurrection, and went into the holy city, and appeared unto many.’ There is no reason to fear that these facts, which have been related only by Matthew, may appear to be inconsistent with the narrative present by any one of the rest [of the Gospel writers)…. For as the said Matthew not only tells how the centurion ‘saw the earthquake,’ but also appends the words [in v. 54], ‘and those things that were done’….  Although Matthew has not added any such statement, it would still have been perfectly legitimate to suppose, that as many astonishing things did place at that time…, the historians were at liberty to select for narration any particular incident which they were severally disposed to instance as the subject of the wonder.  And it would not be fair to impeach them with inconsistency, simply because one of them may have specified one occurrence as the immediate cause of the centurion’s amazement, while another introduces a different incident” (St. Augustine, The Harmony of the Gospels, Book III, chap. xxi in Schaff, ibid., vol. VI, p. 206, emphasis added).

St. Remigius (c. 438-c. 533) “Apostle of the Franks”

  • “But someone will ask, what became of those who rose again when the Lord rose.  We must believe that they rose again to be witnesses of the Lord’s resurrection.  Some have said that they died again, and were turned to dust, as Lazarus and the rest whom the Lord raised.  But we must by no means give credit to these men’s sayings, since if they were to die again, it would be greater torment to them, than if they had not risen again.  We ought therefore to believe without hesitation that they who rose from the dead at the Lord’s resurrection, ascended also into heaven together with Him” (cited in Aquinas, ibid., 964).

Thomas Aquinas (1224-1274)

  • As Augustine was the greatest Christian thinker at the beginning of the Middle Ages, Aquinas was the greatest teacher at the end.  And too he held to the historicity of the resurrection of the saints in Matthew 27, as is evident from his citations from the Fathers (with approval) in his great commentary on the Gospels (The Golden Chain), as all the above Aquinas references indicate, including Jerome, Hilary of Poitiers, Chrysostom, and Remigius (see Aquinas, ibid., 963-964).

John Calvin (1509-1564)

The chain of great Christian teachers holding to the historicity of this text continued into the Reformation and beyond.  John Calvin wrote:

  • Matt. 27.52.  And the tombs were opened. This was a particular portent in which God testified that His Son had entered death’s prison, not to stay there shut up, but to lead all free who were there held captive….  That is the reason why He, who was soon to be shut in a tomb opened the tombs elsewhere.  Yet we may doubt whether this opening of the tombs happened before the resurrection, for the resurrection of the saints which is shortly after added followed in my opinion the resurrection of Christ.  It is absurd for some interpreters to image that they spent three days alive and breathing, hidden in tombs.  It seems likely to me that at Christ’s death the tombs at once opened; at His resurrection some of the godly men received breath and came out and were seen in the city.  Christ is called the Firstborn from the dead (1 Cor. 15:20; Col. 1:18)…. This reasoning agrees very well, seeing that the breaking of the tombs was the presage of new life, and the fruit itself, the effect, appeared three days later, as Christ rising again led other companions from the graves with Himself.  And in this sign it was shown that neither His dying nor His resurrection were private to himself, but breathe the odour of life into all the faithful (Calvin’s New Testament Commentaries, trans. A. W. Morrison. Eds. David and Thomas Torrance.  Wm. B. Eerdmans, 1972, vol. 3, pp. 211-212).

CONCLUDING COMMENTS

Of course, there are some aspects of this Matthew 27 text of the saints on which the Fathers were uncertain.  For example, there is the question as to whether the saints were resurrected before or after Jesus was and whether it was a resuscitation to a mortal body or a permanent resurrection to an immortal body.  However, there is no reason for serious doubt that all the Fathers surveyed accepted the historicity of this account.  Their testimony is very convincing for many reasons:

First, the earliest confirmation as to the historical nature of the resurrection of the saints in the Matthew 27 passage goes all the way back to Ignatius, a contemporary of the apostle John (who died. c. AD 90).  One could not ask for an earlier verification that the resurrection of these saints than that of Ignatius (AD 70-115).  He wrote: “He who they rightly waited for, being come, raised them from the dead”[Chap. IX]. And in the Epistle to the Trallians he added, “For Says the Scripture, ‘May bodies of the saints that slept arose,’ their graves being opened.  He descended, indeed, into Hades alone, but He arose accompanied by a multitude” (chap.IX, The Ante-Nicene Fathers, vol. I, p. 70). The author who is a contemporary of the last apostle (John) is speaking unmistakably of the saints in Matthew 27 who were literally resurrected after Jesus was.

Second, the next testimony to the historicity of this passage is Irenaeus who knew Polycarp, a disciple of the apostle John.  Other than the apostolic Fathers, Irenaeus is a good as any witness to the earliest post-apostolic understanding of the Matthew 27 text.  And he made it clear that “many” persons “ascended and were seen in their bodies”(Fragments from the Lost Writings of Irenaeus XXVIII. Ante-Nicene Fathers, vol. I, ibid., 572-573).

Third, there is a virtually unbroken chain of great Fathers of the church after Irenaeus (2nd cent.) who took this passage as historical (see above).  Much of the alleged “confusion” and “conflict” about the text is cleared up when one understands that, while the tombs were opened at the time of the death of Christ, nonetheless, the resurrection of these saints did not occur until “after his resurrection” (Mt. 27:53, emphasis added) 7  since Jesus is the “firstfruits” (1 Cor. 15:23) of the resurrection.

Fourth, the great church Father St. Augustine stressed the historicity of the Matthew 27 text about the resurrection of the saints, speaking of them as “facts” and “things that were done” as recorded by the Gospel “historians” (St. Augustine, The Harmony of the Gospels, Book III, chap. xxi in Schaff, ibid., vol. VI, p. 206, emphasis added).

Fifth, many of the Fathers used this passage in an apologetic sense as evidence of the resurrection of Christ.  This reveals their conviction that it was a historical event resulting from the historical event of the resurrection of Christ.  Irenaeus was explicit on this point, declaring, “Matthew also, who had a still greater desire [to establish this point], took particular pains to afford them convincing proof that Christ is the seed of David…” (Irenaeus, ibid., 573).

Some, like Chrysostom, took it as evidence for the resurrection to come.  “For if it was a great thing to raise Lazarus after four days, much more was it that they who had long slept should not shew themselves above; this is indeed a proof of the resurrection to come” (cited by Aquinas, ibid., 963-964).

Origen understood it as “evidences of the divinity of Jesus” (Origen, ibid., Book II, chap. XXXVI. Ante-Nicene Fathers, 446).  None of these Fathers would have given it such apologetic weight had they not been convinced of the historicity of the resurrection of these saints after Jesus’ resurrection in Matthew 27.

Sixth, even the Church Father Origen, who was the most prone to allegorizing away literal events in the Bible, took this text to refer to a literal historical resurrection of saints.  He wrote of the events in Matthew 27 that they are “the evidences of the divinity of Jesus” (Origen, ibid., Book II, chap. XXXVI. Ante-Nicene Fathers, 446).

Seventh, some of the great teachers of the Church were careful to mention that the saints rose as a result of Jesus’ resurrection which is a further verification of the historical nature of the resurrection of the saints in Mathew 27.  Jerome wrote: “As Lazarus rose from the dead, so also did many bodies of the Saints rise again to shew forth the Lord’s resurrection; yet notwithstanding that the graves were opened, they did not rise again before the Lord rose, that He might be the first-born of the resurrection from the dead” (cited by Aquinas, ibid., 963).  John Calvin added, “Yet we may doubt whether this opening of the tombs happened before the resurrection, for the resurrection of the saints which is shortly after added followed in my opinion the resurrection of Christ.  It is absurd for some interpreters to image that they spent three days alive and breathing, hidden in tombs.”  For “It seems likely to me that at Christ’s death the tombs at once opened; at His resurrection some of the godly men received breath and came out and were seen in the city.  Christ is called the Firstborn from the dead (1 Cor. 15:20; Col. 1:18” (Calvin’s New Testament Commentaries, vol. 3, pp. 211-212).

Eighth, St. Augustine provides an answer to the false premise of contemporary critics that there must be another reference to a New Testament event like this in order to confirm that it is historical.  He wrote, “It would not be fair to impeach them with inconsistency, simply because one of them may have specified one occurrence as the immediate cause of the centurion’s amazement, while another introduces a different incident” (St. Augustine, ibid., emphasis added).

So, contrary to the claims of many current New Testament critics, the Matthew 27 account of the resurrection of the saints is a clear and unambiguous affirmation of the historicity of the resurrection of the saints. This is supported by a virtually unbroken line of the great commentators of the Early Church and through the Middle Ages and into the Reformation period (John Calvin).  Not a single example was found of any Father surveyed who believed this was a legend.  Such a belief is due to the acceptance of modern critical methodology, not to either a historical-grammatical exposition of the text or to the supporting testimony of the main orthodox teachers of the Church up to and through the Reformation Period.

Ninth, the impetus for rejecting the story of the resurrection of the saints in Matthew 27 is not based on good exegesis of the text or on the early support of the Fathers but is based on fallacious premises:

(1) First of all, there is an anti-supernatural bias beginning in the 17th century and lying beneath much of contemporary scholarship.  But there is no philosophical basis for the rejection of miracles (see our Miracles and the Modern Mind, Grand Rapids: Baker, 1992), and there is no exegetical basis for rejecting it in this text.  Indeed on the same ground one could reject the resurrection of Christ since it supernatural and is found in the same text.

(2) Further, there is also the fallacious premise of double reference which affirms that if an event is not mentioned at least twice in the Gospels, then its historicity is questioned.  But on this grounds many other events must be rejected as well, such as, the story of Nicodemus (Jn. 3), the Samaritan woman at the well (Jn. 4), the story of Zaccchaeus (Lk. 19), the resurrection of Lazarus (Jn. 11), and even the birth of Christ in the stable and the angel chorus (Lk. 2), as well as many other events in the Gospels.  How many times does an event have to be mentioned in a first century piece of literature based on reliable witnesses in order to be true?

(3) There is another argument that seems to infect much of contemporary New Testament scholarship on this matter.  It is theorized that an event like this, if literal, would have involved enough people and graves to have drawn significant evidence of it in a small place like Jerusalem.  Raymond Brown alludes to this, noting that “…many interpreters balk at the thought of many known risen dead being seen in Jerusalem—such a large scale phenomenon should have left some traces in Jewish and/or secular history!”  8 However, at best this is simply the fallacious Argument from Silence.  What is more, “many” can mean only a small group, not hundreds of thousands. Further, the story drew enough attention to make it into one of the canonical Gospels, right along side of the resurrection of Christ and with other miraculous events.  In brief, it is in a historical book; it is said to result from the resurrection of Christ; it was cited apologetically by the early Fathers as evidence of the resurrection of Christ and proof of the resurrection to come.  No other evidence is needed for its authenticity.

(MUCH MORE TO READ!)

Some more various views from commentaries can be found here:

Gavin Newsom’s Empire of Fraud | Larry Elder/City Journal

Published by Papa Giorgio

Tonight, on The Larry Elder Show, California fraud makes Minnesota’s look like couch-cushion money. Larry reads from an article to just scratch the surface of Cali Fraud!

Here is a portion of the CITY JOURNAL Larry was reading from:

…. Welcome to Gavin Newsom’s empire of fraud.

Fourteen months after Newsom began his first term as governor of California, the Covid-19 pandemic swept the world. Roughly 2.7 million Californians eventually lost their jobs. The state’s economy went into freefall as its leaders imposed some of the country’s most restrictive public-health measures. In response to the crisis, Newsom sought to dump pallets of cash across the state—as quickly as possible.

One way to inject money was through California’s massive unemployment insurance program (UI). Unemployment insurance is administered by the state’s Employment Development Department (EDD), which can process billions of dollars in payments monthly. Before the state turned on the cash machine, however, experts had warned that the system was ripe for fraud.

Haywood Talcove, one of America’s leading fraud specialists and CEO of LexisNexis Risk Solutions for Government, was one such expert. “I was begging [federal officials] not to let the money go out like that, because it was going to be the biggest fraud in the history of our country,” he said. “Obviously, I wasn’t successful.”

For many reasons, California was particularly susceptible to the large-scale fraud schemes Haywood Talcove saw on the horizon. Not only did the state have some of the most generous welfare programs in the country; its bureaucrats had also failed to implement some basic fraud controls during Newsom’s tenure.

“They literally suspended all of the rules for the [unemployment insurance] program,” Talcove said. “[That made] it possible for anyone to get that benefit even if they weren’t entitled to it. It was very intentional. They knew what they were doing. But it caught up to them because it just got so out of control.”

The scams began almost immediately, with criminals from around the world reportedly siphoning cash from the program. In one case, a Romanian-led fraud ring orchestrated a $5 million unemployment-insurance scheme. Members allegedly “recruited potential [EDD-benefit] applicants through Facebook” and met them at “parks throughout Southern California to complete the application process,” according to the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of California. “Applicants paid . . . a partial fee up front for assisting with fraudulent applications and another fee after applicants received EDD payments,” the office said. Many of the fraudsters wired the stolen funds to Romania.

Around September 2020, Fontrell Antonio Baines, a rapper from Memphis known as Nuke Bizzle, released a music video on YouTube entitled “EDD.” In the song, Baines bragged about ripping off California’s UI program. “Go to the bank with a stack of these,” Baines rapped, holding up EDD envelopes. Another rapper can be heard saying: “You gotta sell cocaine, I just file a claim.” All told, Baines obtained more than $700,000 in stolen funds using preloaded EDD debit cards. He pleaded guilty to federal charges.

Nor were these isolated incidents. A member of the SFV Peckerwoods, a California-based neo-Nazi gang, allegedly ran an unemployment scam during the pandemic. So did Michael Thompson, a one-time leader of the Aryan Brotherhood, who was eventually convicted. California’s prison population apparently got in on the action, too: the EDD allegedly paid out hundreds of millions of dollars in fraudulent claims in prisoners’ names, including those of at least 133 inmates on death row.

Remarkably, EDD not only failed regularly to cross-reference its unemployment payouts with a list of state prisoners, but it also had just two bureaucrats assigned manually to inspect reports of suspected fraud. State officials eventually admitted to having paid out approximately $20 billion in fraudulent claims during the pandemic, and to making an estimated $55 billion in improper payments. Talcove claims those figures don’t even tell the full story. “The state lost $32.6 billion dollars of taxpayer money to fraudulent applications,” he said. “In California, at one point, you had more people applying for unemployment insurance benefits than you had people over the age of 18.”

While Newsom has conceded that “bad actors” took advantage of the UI program, he has also defended his government’s record, saying they took swift action as soon as the alleged prison scheme surfaced. The EDD, for its part, has a webpage documenting its anti-fraud efforts. But any suggestion that California has fraud under wraps is contradicted by findings from its non-partisan state auditor.

Last December, the auditor reported that EDD’s UI program—which remains on the auditor’s “High Risk” list—had a fraud rate of 7.6 percent in 2023 and 7.9 percent in 2024. Applied to the state’s UI spending, those figures suggest more than $1 billion in stolen taxpayer funds since the pandemic. “EDD continues to have high rates of improper UI payments, including fraudulent payments,” the auditor wrote. “These inadequacies have resulted in a substantial risk of serious detriment to the State and its residents.”

While many states dealt with UI scams during the pandemic, California stands in a class of its own. At best, the EDD’s performance amounted to mass government incompetence; at worst, it reflects total indifference to fraud.

“This happens in every single state,” Talcove concluded, “but it happens a lot more in California.”…..

 

The God Given Right Enforced On DOW Property

Published by Papa Giorgio

About Damn Time!

  • “The War Department’s uniformed service members are trained at the highest and unwavering standards,” Hegseth said. “These warfighters — entrusted with the safety of our nation — are no less entitled to exercise their God-given right to keep and bear arms than any other American. Our warfighters defend the right of others to carry. They should be able to carry themselves.”

Military policy on carrying personal firearms just got flipped by Secretary of War Pete Hegseth, who signed a memo directing military base commanders to allow personnel—“namely, uniformed service members”—to carry privately owned firearms “while in their nonofficial duty capacity on DOW property within the United States.”

Hegseth signed the memo while announcing the new policy on a video posted on “X” on Thursday. In his announcement, which ran just over 2 minutes, 30 seconds, Hegseth noted, “Before today, it was virtually impossible—most people probably don’t know this—for War Department personnel to get permission to carry and store their own personal weapons aligned with the state laws where we operate our installations. Effectively, our bases across the country were gun-free zones, unless you’re training, or unless you’re a military policeman, you couldn’t carry. You couldn’t bring your own firearm for your own personal protection onto post. Well, that’s no longer.”

In a statement obtained by Ammoland News from Kostas Moros, director of Legal Research and Education for the Second Amendment Foundation, he said, “SAF fully supports Secretary Hegseth’s decision to enable our service members to be able to carry personal firearms on military bases, with any denials requiring a written explanation. SAF believes any ‘gun-free zones’ are constitutionally questionable, and also create soft targets that are enticing to criminals and others bent on violence. The fact that military bases, of all places, have been under such restrictions has long been perplexing to us. Serving your country should not require the wholesale abandonment of the Second Amendment right of armed self-defense. It’s excellent to hear that this dangerous policy is finally changing.”

In announcing this change of policy, Hegseth alluded to past tragedies on military bases, including a December 2019 attack at Naval Air Station Pensacola, Florida which left three men dead and eight other people wounded, and another incident at Fort Stewart-Hunter Army Airfield, Georgia in August 2025. That incident left five soldiers wounded, and was committed by Sgt. Quornelius Radford, using his own firearm. On March 31, he pleaded guilty to several charges, according to WTOC News. He will face further charges of attempted premeditated murder and unpremeditated murder on June 15.

Going back further in history, two separate shootings occurred at Fort Hood, Texas, one in 2009 during which 13 people were killed, and the other in 2014, which left four dead. The 2009 shooting was committed by then-Major Nidal Hasan, using his own firearm, as noted by the New York Times. Hasan was convicted and sentenced to death. Following a series of appeals, which stretched over several years, the U.S. Supreme Court denied Hasan’s final petition for a writ of certiorari. Last September, Hegseth said he would seek formal approval from President Donald Trump for the execution to be carried out, according to Wikipedia. ….

(AMMOLAND)

An Augustinian Mistranslation of Romans 5:12

Published by Papa Giorgio

This topic is god to combine with Psalm 51, HERE

  • The person who sins is the one who will die. A son won’t suffer punishment for the father’s iniquity, and a father won’t suffer punishment for the son’s iniquity. The righteousness of the righteous person will be on him, and the wickedness of the wicked person will be on him. (Ezekiel 18:20)

I will first post a section from pages 30-31, 35 of Calvinism: A Biblical and Theological Critique

Romans 5:12

Augustine found support for inherited guilt in a misinterpretation of the Latin version of Rom 5:12. At the end of the verse, Paul wrote that all die eph hō pantes hemartōn (“because all sinned”). Reading from a Latin text, however, Augustine saw the phrase in quo omnes peccaverunt and wrongly interpreted it to mean “in whom all sinned.” The resulting interpretation was that all humanity dies because all humanity sinned in Adam. The Greek phrase eph hō, however, which corresponds to the Latin in quo, means “because.” As support for this interpretation, we may simply consult major English Bible translations.51 Against Augustine’s interpretation, Rom 5:12 states all die because all sin. Though Rom 5:12 provides the primary biblical support for an Augustinian view of original sin, the verse became significant for his view only when he began to debate Pelagians on original sin.52 For Pelagius, Adam’s sin brought death into the world, but each person is held responsible for their own sin. Adam’s sin was the first and primary example of sinful behavior, but his descendants are indicted as guilty for the same reason as Adam—because of their own acts of rebellion against God.53 The early

church interpreted Romans as well as Adam’s relationship to humanity in similar ways. For Augustine, however, the Adam-Christ parallel represented two processes of being born: sinful people are born naturally by the natural man (Adam), but children of God are born spiritually by grace through Christ.54 This Adam-Christ parallel is seen when Augustine paired the verse with 1 Cor 15:22, which he quoted, “For as in Adam all die, so also in Christ shall all be made alive.”55 For Augustine, Adam passed sin to his descendants by procreation, resulting in all people being destined for eternal damnation, including unbaptized infants.56

Though some interpret Rom 5:12 like Augustine, other Christian scholars reject inherited guilt. James D. G. Dunn wrote on Paul’s view of Adam and sin from Rom 5:12–21: “Guilt only enters into the reckoning with the individual’s own transgression. Human beings are not held responsible for the state into which they are born. That is the starting point of their personal responsibility, a starting point for which they are not liable.”57 Donald G. Bloesch explained, “The text in Romans to which Augustine often appealed (5:12) does not tell us how Adamic sin is related to general human sin and therefore cannot be used to argue for inherited sin or guilt; it simply informs us that death pervaded the whole human race ‘inasmuch as all have sinned’ (REB).”58 Joseph Fitzmyer cautioned readers of Rom 5:12 to distinguish between Paul’s writings and the later teachings of the church. This Catholic scholar explains that the doctrine of original sin (the view that all people inherit both a sinful nature and guilt) is a later teaching of the church rather than the explicit teaching of Paul. The doctrine of original sin was developed from later Augustinian writings and solidified through the Sixteenth Council of Carthage, the Second Council of Orange, and the Tridentine Council.59

[….]

Stanley Grenz (1950–2005) wrote, “Romans 5:12–21, like Ephesians 2:3, does not clearly and unequivocally declare that all persons inherit guilt directly because of Adam’s sin. The biblical case for original guilt is not strong.” Grenz concluded, “Our human nature has been corrupted.”81 He described the development of moral responsibility. “Somewhere in childhood we move from a stage in which our actions are not deemed morally accountable to the responsibility of acting as moral agents. In short, we cross a point which some refer to as the ‘age of accountability.’”82

51 The CSB, ESV, LEB, NASB, NET, NIV, NKJV render the phrase in question as “because all sinned.” Other translations use different words to communicate the same idea. For example, the KJV used the phrase “for that all have sinned.” Even the NABRE (New American Bible, Revised Edition), the translation used on the website of the US Conference of Catholic Bishops, translated the phrase with a variation of “all sinned.”

52 Augustine quoted Rom 5:12 only three times before his debates with the Pelagians, and none of those occurrences of the verse concerned the transmission of sin. Beatrice, Transmission of Sin, 102.

53 See Pelagius’s views in Pelagius’ Commentary on St Paul’s Epistle to the Romans, trans. Theodore de Bruyn, Oxford Early Christian Studies (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), 92–93 (5:12); 94 (5:15); 99 (6:19); 104 (7:17).

54 Augustine, On the Merits and Remission of Sins, and On the Baptism of Infants 1.19, in NPNF1, 5:22.

55 Augustine, Tractates on the Gospel of John 3.12, in NPNF1, 7:22.

56 Augustine, On the Merits and Remission of Sins, and On the Baptism of Infants 1.21, in NPNF1, 5:23: “Such infants as quit the body without being baptized will be involved in the mildest condemnation of all.”

57 James D. G. Dunn, The Theology of Paul the Apostle (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1998), 97.

58 Donald G. Bloesch, Jesus Christ: Savior & Lord (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity, 1997), 43–44.

59 Joseph Fitzmyer, Romans: A New Translation with Introduction and Commentary, Anchor Bible 33, ed. William F. Albright and David Noel Freedman (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1993), 408–9.

[….]

81 Stanley J. Grenz, Theology for the Community of God (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2000), 205.

82 Grenz, 209.

This clip is taken from the Naked Bible Podcast. It was part of an answer to a question about abortion and what happens to babies who are aborted.

Dr. Leighton Flowers walks through the doctrine often referred to as “original sin” and looks at where the scripture seems to fly in the face of the concept that mankind is held morally accountable for that which is beyond their control.

And 2-pages from the book Anyone Can Be Saved (as well as 3-pages from Adam Harwood’s book, Christian Theology. Both say similar things)

Romans 5:12

ROMANS 5:12

Joseph Fitzmyer cautions readers of Rom 5 to distinguish between Paul’s writings and the later teachings of the church. The Catholic scholar explains that the doctrine of original sin (the view that all people inherit both a sinful nature and guilt) is a later teaching of the church rather than an explicit teaching of Paul. The doctrine of original sin was developed from later Augustinian writings and solidified through the Sixteenth Council of Carthage, the Second Council of Orange, and the Tridentine Council.

Romans 5:12 begins with the word “Therefore.” What was Paul’s previous argument? In Rom 5:1–2, Paul explains that we have been justified by faith and have peace with God through Christ. Also, through Christ we have access by faith to this grace. In vv. 3–5, those who have been given the Holy Spirit can hope in their suffering because of what God produces in them. Christ died for “the weak,” “ungodly,” people who were “still sinners” (vv. 6–8). Verse 9 begins in a way that is similar to v. 1 (“Since, therefore, we have been justified. . .”). Verse 1 mentions being justified by faith; verse 9 mentions being justified by his blood. Verses 9–11 provide assurance that we will be saved from God’s wrath by the life provided by Jesus.

In verse 12, Paul states that “just as sin came into the world through one man, and death through sin, and so death spread to all men” (v. 12). Sin entered the world through one man, Adam. Death entered the world through sin. Death spread to all men. Why? The answer is found in verse 12, “because all sinned.” The text states neither “in whom all sinned” nor “because all sinned in Adam.” Death spread because people sinned. Even worse, “death reigned from Adam to Moses” (v. 14). But Christ is anticipated, and Adam is described as “a type of the one to come” (v. 14).

The remark that “one trespass led to condemnation” (v. 18) is clarified in v. 19, “For as by the one man’s disobedience the many were made sinners” (ESV). Do these verses teach that all people inherit the guilt and condemnation of Adam? If this is pressed as the meaning intended by Paul, then the parallel to all people inheriting guilt and condemnation is all people inheriting justification and life (v. 19). In order to affirm universal sinfulness but deny universal salvation, Millard Erickson posits a “conditional imputation” of Adam’s guilt. People must ratify the work of Adam by personally and knowingly sinning just as they must ratify the work of Christ by personally and knowingly repenting of sin and confessing Christ as Savior and Lord.

What does the text of Rom 5:12–21 not say? The text makes no mention of a covenant between God and Adam and it makes no mention of imputation of Adam’s guilt. Can those concepts be found in various volumes of systematic theology? Yes. Can those concepts be found in this passage? No. In his monumental work The Theology of Paul the Apostle, James D. G. Dunn articulates his rejection of inherited guilt as follows: “Nevertheless, guilt only enters into the reckoning with the individual’s own transgression. Human beings are not held responsible for the state into which they are born. That is the starting point of their personal responsibility, a starting point for which they are not liable.”

Perhaps other biblical texts support the doctrine of inherited guilt. Perhaps not. Either way, they are not discernible in Rom 5:12–21. Instead, we see that death spread to all of humanity because of the sin of one man, Adam. Thankfully, God answered the spread of death and condemnation through Adam with the hope of justification and life through Christ.

[I did not include foot notes in the excerpt above. I did – however – below]

ROMANS 5:12

Augustine found support for inherited guilt in a misinterpretation of the Latin version of Romans 5:12. At the end of the verse, Paul writes that all die eph hō pantes hemartōn (“because all sinned”). Reading from a Latin text, however, Augustine saw the phrase in quo omnes peccaverunt and wrongly interpreted it to mean “in whom all sinned.” The resulting interpretation was that all humanity dies because all humanity sinned in Adam. The Greek phrase eph hō , however, which corresponds to the Latin in quo , means “because.” As support for this interpretation, simply consult major English Bible translations. 34 Against Augustine’s interpretation, Romans 5:12 states all die because all sin. 35

Though Romans 5:12 provides the primary biblical support for an Augustinian view of original sin, the verse became significant for his view only when he began debating Pelagian views of original sin. 36 For Pelagius, Adam’s sin brought death into the world, but each person is held responsible for their own sin. Adam’s sin was the first and primary example of sinful behavior, but his descendants are indicted as guilty for the same reason as Adam—because of their own acts of rebellion against God. 37 The early church interpreted Romans as well as Adam’s relationship with humanity in similar ways. For Augustine, however, the Adam-Christ parallel represented two processes of being born: sinful people are born naturally by the natural man (Adam), but children of God are born spiritually by grace through Christ. 38 This Adam-Christ parallel is seen when Augustine paired the verse with 1 Corinthians 15:22, which he quotes, “For as in Adam all die, so also in Christ shall all be made alive.” 39 For Augustine, Adam passed sin to his descendants by procreation, resulting in all people being destined for eternal damnation, including unbaptized infants. 40

Though some interpret Romans 5:12 like Augustine, other Christian scholars reject inherited guilt. James D. G. Dunn writes on Paul’s view of Adam and sin from Romans 5:12–21, “Guilt only enters into the reckoning with the individual’s own transgression. Human beings are not held responsible for the state into which they are born. That is the starting point of their personal responsibility, a starting point for which they are not liable.” 41 Donald G. Bloesch explains, “The text in Romans to which Augustine often appealed (5:12) does not tell us how Adamic sin is related to general human sin and therefore cannot be used to argue for inherited sin or guilt; it simply informs us that death pervaded the whole human race ‘inasmuch as all have sinned.’ (REB).” 42 Joseph Fitzmyer cautions readers of Romans 5:12 to distinguish between Paul’s writings and the later teachings of the church. The Catholic scholar explains that the doctrine of original sin (the view that all people inherit both a sinful nature and guilt) is a later teaching of the church rather than the explicit teaching of Paul. The doctrine of original sin was developed from later Augustinian writings and solidified through the Sixteenth Council of Carthage, the Second Council of Orange, and the Tridentine Council. 43

CONCLUSION ON AUGUSTINE’S VIEWS OF ORIGINAL SIN AS INHERITED GUILT

Augustine’s view of inherited guilt was based on distorted views of humanity, sexual union, Christian marriage, and his poor interpretations of key biblical texts. Augustine misinterpreted Job 14:4; Psalm 51:5; Ephesians 2:3; Hebrews 7:4–10; and Romans 5:12. The best-known example is that Augustine quotes Romans 5:12 to affirm that all sinned in Adam, which is not what the apostle Paul wrote. Augustine viewed infant baptism as the solution for the problems among infants of inherited guilt and demonic possession. The early church affirmed human sinfulness, but Augustine’s interpretations of Scripture and views of inherited guilt were innovations that were rejected by many of his contemporaries as well as subsequent generations of Christians.

34 The CSB, ESV , LEB , NASB , NET, NIV , NKJV render the phrase in question as “because all sinned.” Other translations use different words to communicate the same idea. For example, the KJV uses the phrase “for that all have sinned.” Even the NABRE, the translation used on the website of the US Conference of Catholic Bishops, translates the phrase as “inasmuch as all sinned.”

35 Another possible interpretation of Rom 5:12 is that humans die and, as a result of their nature inherited from Adam, all sin. According to that view, eph hō serves as a consecutive conjunction meaning “with the result that.” In this case, the sin of Adam is the primary cause of our sinful condition; the result of that sin is the history of sinning on the part of all who enter the human race and sin of their own accord. For a summary and evaluation of major interpretations, see Robert H. Mounce, Romans, NAC 27 (Nashville: Broadman & Holman, 1995), 142 . He suggests this alternate interpretation does justice to the language involved and conforms to the apostle’s theological outlook as he builds his case in the book of Romans.

36 Augustine quoted Rom 5:12 only three times before his debates with the Pelagians, and none of those occurrences of the verse concern the transmission of sin (Beatrice, Transmission of Sin, 102).

37 See Pelagius’s views in Pelagius’s Commentary on St Paul’s Epistle to the Romans, trans. Theodore de Bruyn (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), 5:12; 5:15; 6:19; 7:17.

38 Augustine, On the Merits 1.19.

39 Augustine, Tractates on the Gospel of John 3.12 (NPNF 1 7:22). See other quotations of 1 Cor 15:22 in Letter 140.8–9; 166.7; 169.4.

40 Augustine, On the Merits 1.21 (NPNF 1 5:23), “Such infants as quit the body without being baptized will be involved in the mildest condemnation of all.”

41 James D. G. Dunn, The Theology of Paul the Apostle (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1998), 97.

42 Donald G. Bloesch, Jesus Christ: Savior and Lord (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity, 1997), 43–44.

43 Joseph Fitzmyer, Romans: A New Translation with Introduction and Commentary, AB 33 (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1993), 408–9.

Adam Harwood, Christian Theology: Biblical, Historical, and Systematic (Bellingham, WA: Lexham Academic, 2022), 364-366

Children and Depravity – Two Shorts

(Left video) 5-minutes plus; (Right video) 15-minutes plus

(See more about who introduced such “determinism into the church in a previous post, HERE)

Augustine’s Influence

Did Augustine actually invent the modern idea of original sin—and was it influenced by Gnosticism and Manichaeism rather than Scripture? In this eye-opening conversation, we unpack how Augustine’s shift from a traditional view of free will to a deterministic theology changed the course of Christian thought for centuries.

You’ll discover how Augustine’s 10 years as a Manichaean may have shaped his later teachings on infant baptism, predestination, and the imputed guilt of Adam—concepts that eventually inspired Calvinist doctrine and debates that still divide the Church today.

Join us as we trace the timeline of Augustine’s writings, his secret revisions, and the pivotal debates with Pelagius that gave birth to one of the most controversial doctrines in church history. Whether you’re a theology student, pastor, or just curious about Christian origins, this episode will challenge what you thought you knew about sin, salvation, and sovereignty.

However, I think this next video is the winner. However, it is long, but it shows the hypocrisy of some Calvinists in rejecting the “T” in TULIP to say babies go to heaven:

Dr. Leighton Flowers plays a clip from Jeremiah Notier, aka The Apologetic Dog, in which he accuses Dr. Flowers of being a “Pelagian” because I do not affirm the concept that all babies are born guilty and deserving of Hell.

BONUS PDF

Chapter 4 of Adam Harwood’s book, The Spiritual Condition of Infants: A Biblical-Historical Survey and Systematic Proposal (Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock, 2011), chpt title: “What Do Infants Receive from Adam? (Romans 5:12–21)” (PDF)

Calvinism’s Reading Rainbow | John 3:36

Published by Papa Giorgio

John 3:36 (CSB):

  • The one who believes in the Son has eternal life, but the one who rejects the Son will not see life; instead, the wrath of God remains on him.”

How could this be rewritten using the Calvinist TULIP philosophy overlaid to it (3-versions):

  • The one whom God, in His sovereign and unconditional election, has irresistibly drawn out of total depravity by His effectual grace—causing him to believe in the Son—has eternal life; but the one whom God has justly passed over, for whom Christ’s atonement was never intended, and who therefore remains dead in sins and rejects the Son, will not see life; instead, the wrath of God abides on him forever, for he was never chosen to persevere.
  • “The one whom God has sovereignly chosen and irresistibly drawn to believe in the Son has eternal life. But the one God has not chosen rejects the Son and remains under God’s wrath, for he was never given new life.”
  • “Those elected by God and irresistibly caused to believe in the Son receive eternal life. Those passed over by God reject the Son and stay under His abiding wrath.”

Looping in R.C. Spoul’s and John MacArthur’s “programmed to believe lies” and can “never choose good”

  • “The one whom God has sovereignly elected and irresistibly caused to believe in the Son has eternal life [primary cause]. But the one God has passed over—decreeing his total depravity, programming him to love sin and believe lies so that he can never choose good [secondary cause]—rejects the Son and remains under God’s abiding wrath.”

A Tired Mantra of the 2020 Election and the Courts

Published by Papa Giorgio

KEY:  (Media and Democrats) 61 cases were brought and defeated. (Truth) 93 cases were brought. 32 were heard on merit; 24 of those 32 decisions favored the GOP. 75%

TRANSCRIPT:

STEPHEN CROWDER: Here’s another claim that you’ll hear, and we’ll do an entire segment on this, because a lot of people still believe this, just like a lot of people still believe that Donald Trump praised neo-Nazis as very fine people. And by that, I mean stupid people. The claim that is made is that even the courts themselves, what do you think you know more than the court? The courts in 2020, made it very clear. They stated that the election was absolutely fair.

ABC NEWS: More than two dozen cases have been brought and no finding of fraud from any judge, state or federal, Republican or Democratic. Case after case tossed out and the judges strikingly dismissive of the claims.

STEPHEN CROWDER: Truth…..

That’s wrong.

So only 32 of the 93 election cases were ever even heard – on merit. Okay? So let’s just take those, meaning those were actually heard. 24 of those 32 decisions actually favored the GOP, favored people challenging the results in one capacity or another. Here’s the problem.

After the election, there’s nothing you can do about it.

So, let’s just aim to do better next time.

Then you have a state like Virginia aims to do better.

No, DOJ is going to sue you, can’t do that.

Are you starting to get the picture? Are you starting to get the picture?

You literally have an election where there absolutely was foul, not just talking about media and big tech, challenged in court. 24 of those 32 said, yeah, there’s something here, but there’s nothing you can do. So, let’s just, the best thing to do is let’s not look backwards. Let’s look forward. Let’s fix it for next time. States step in and try and fix it. and the Federal Government in one capacity or another says, no, can’t do that. Let me ask you this. What recourse is there?

GERALD MORGAN JR: And the media is in lockstep on these cases. I didn’t know that we had won 75% of the cases that were brought and actually hurt on the merits. What you hear the media parrot is the 61 number.

STEPHEN CROWDER: Right

GERALD MORGAN JR: 61 cases were brought and defeated. That’s what they parrot on every single show that has addressed this that I’ve ever heard. 61 cases, 61 cases. Somebody needs to be telling them 24 out of 32 decided on the merit. We won. Right. That’s what people need to hear because I heard it and I actually got a little down. I’m like, oh crap, well, they brought 61 cases. I know a lot weren’t even heard on the merits, but we didn’t win one. We didn’t get anything out of this. Texas banded with other states, attorneys general to try to sue Pennsylvania. And we got nothing from the Supreme Court because they basically disenfranchised Texas voters in other states by changing their constitution illegally to vote? Like 24 of 32, you won 75% of the time when the cases were heard on the merits. Take that and make sure everybody hears it.

STEPHEN CROWDER: Yep

Before TDS There Was BDS

Published by Papa Giorgio

This post was originally posted here Feb 2011 with the title: “What You Are not Seeing On Mainstream News Shows-Some Carry Signs Likening Republicans to Hitler and Nazis.” I found the videos again, and re-uploaded the graphics. I added an article as well.

NEWS BUSTERS HAT-TIP:

BREITBART HAT-TIP:

Democrats rhetoric has changed zero-percent since President Ford (full archived article). Democrats have called Republicans racist and Nazis for 62 years. I saw some signs at the SCV No Kings protest showing Trump to be the same. Just like Bush. Just like Romney…. on and on. TO WIT:

….. Let’s start with former Sen. Barry Goldwater (R-AZ) and his acceptance speech at the Republican National Convention in 1964. Over 50 years before Trump decided to run for president, celebrities, journalists, politicians, and other politicos warned that the GOP presidential nominee was an extreme fascist who would cause considerable harm to the country. Goldwater, who served as a pilot during World War II, was likened to Nazis and fascists for promoting conservatism during his presidential campaign.

For example, the then-Democratic governor of California, Edmund Gerland “Pat” Brown, remarked about Goldwater’s acceptance speech, claiming it “had the stench of fascism. All we needed to hear was Heil Hitler.” It should be noted that Goldwater served as a pilot in the military during WWII. Brown didn’t have any military service at all.

Other comments about Goldwater included a scathing rebuke from civil rights leader Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

“We see dangerous signs of Hitlerism in the Goldwater campaign,” King said.

Baseball legend Jackie Robinson, who broke Major League Baseball’s color barrier, said of Goldwater’s speech, “I would say that I now believe I know how it felt to be a Jew in Hitler’s Germany.”

The then-mayor of San Francisco, the city where the 1964 Republican National Convention was held, said the GOP “had Mein Kampf as their political bible.”

The despicable comments continued the following election in 1968. Then-Vice President Hubert Humphrey, and Democratic nominee for president, remarked about the election, “If the British had not fought in 1940, Hitler would have been in London, and if Democrats do not fight in 1968, Nixon will be in the White House.”

Former President Richard Nixon won the election, but the Hitler, Nazi, and fascist comparisons never stopped. For example, in 1970, a political poster featured an image of Adolf Hitler, wearing a Nazi armband, holding a mask of Nixon.

Meanwhile, a news article from October 1972, available for viewing on the CIA’s website, referred to “Nixon’s Nazis” as part of commentary criticizing Nixon. Then there is a photograph from October 1973 of someone wearing a Nixon mask with a crown, giving the Nazi salute.

Gerald Ford followed Nixon as president and as a Republican who was called a fascist. In 1974, a member of the American Civil Liberties Union criticized Ford for his lack of punitive action against Nixon.

“If [President] Ford’s principle had been the rule in Nuremberg,” he said, “the Nazi leaders would have been let off, and only the people, who carried out their schemes, would have been tried,” the ACLU said at the time.

Additionally, in the Gerald Ford Library Museum, a document describes an interaction with a woman in 1975 in which Ford was harassed and repeatedly called a “fascist” and a “fascist pig.”

Surely, over a decade of accusations and allegations of fascism never coming to fruition would stop Democrats from calling Republicans Nazis, fascists, or comparing them to Hitler, right?

Wrong.

Former President Ronald Reagan was the next target in the Democrats’ line of unsubstantiated accusations of fascism.

Rep. William Clay (D-MO) stated that Reagan wanted to “replace the Bill of Rights with fascist precepts lifted verbatim from Mein Kampf.”

The Los Angeles Times cartoonist Paul Conrad drew a panel depicting Reagan plotting a fascist putsch in a darkened Munich beer hall. Harry Stein (later a conservative convert) wrote in Esquire that the voters who supported Reagan were comparable to the “good Germans” in “Hitler’s Germany.”

American Enterprise Institute scholar Steven Hayward highlighted another incident in which the intelligentsia and academia also contributed to the Reagan fascist comparisons when John Roth, a Holocaust scholar from the Claremont Colleges, commented about Reagan’s election:

“I could not help remembering how 40 years ago economic turmoil had conspired with Nazi nationalism and militarism — all intensified by Germany’s defeat in World War I​—to send the world reeling into catastrophe. … It is not entirely mistaken to contemplate our postelection state with fear and trembling.”

Former President George W. Bush might have been the Republican politician who faced the harshest and most vile criticism before Trump. Bush was regularly called every dirty name in the book, from racist to Nazi to fascist to war criminal. There are many examples of linking Bush to Hitler, Nazis, and fascists.

In 2012, Sen. Mitt Romney (R-UT), the same Romney so many Democrats love today, was also linked to Nazis and fascism. One delegate from Kansas (at the time) said Romney was a habitual liar and likened him to Hitler “while criticizing the accuracy of Romney’s campaign talking points.”

A chairman of the California Democratic Party compared then-vice presidential candidate (and eventual former Speaker of the House) Paul Ryan, again, the same Ryan loved by many Democrats today, to Nazi filmmaker and propagandist Joseph Goebbels.

Does any of this sound familiar? It should. It is the same line of attacks Democrats have used against Trump. …..

The below is just a reminder of some of the anti-war marches, the May Day marches, and the anti-Bush, anti-American, anti-Semitic, anti-capitalist liberals/Democrats of years past (most of these pics come from Zombie Time):

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Merica and Israel Are Still Winning in Iran (Mar 20, 2026)

Published by Papa Giorgio

(Mar 20, 2026) Tonight, Larry speaks on the Iran war hitting twenty-one days and discusses who’s winning… Larry’s full audio:

John Spencer

CS Lewis: Our White Being God’s Black

Published by Papa Giorgio

I wanted to separate out two CS Lewis chapters I quote from in my first (May 2025) dealing with the topic at hand. I wanted to let Lewis’ insights burn in the mind of the believer. I will add stuff after the Lewis excerpts, one being a quote from a book recommended from the “lectern” by a pastor at a church I am in the process of leaving… and I wonder what Lewis would have thought if he had read this — more than he already intimates below. [But read the Lewis excerpts before even reading the quote, Lewis stands on his own. I will add the short quote AFTER the focus of one of the 20th century’s apologetic giants thoughts.] I include the full audio chapter at the end of each partial “print” excerpt.

CS LEWIS had a huge influence on my apologetic life. The quotes are from his The Problem of Pain, chapters 3 and 4:

“Divine Goodness”

Any consideration of the goodness of God at once threat­ens us with the following dilemma.

On the one hand, if God is wiser than we His judge­ment must differ from ours on many things, and not least on good and evil. What seems to us good may therefore not be good in His eyes, and what seems to us evil may not be evil.

On the other hand, if God’s moral judgement differs from ours so that our ‘black’ may be His ‘white’, we can mean nothing by calling Him good; for to say ‘God is good’, while asserting that His goodness is wholly other than ours, is really only to say ‘God is we know not what’. And an utterly unknown quality in God cannot give us moral grounds for loving or obeying Him. If He is not (in our sense) ‘good’ we shall obey, if at all, only through fear—and should be equally ready to obey an omnipotent Fiend. The doctrine of Total Depravity— when the consequence is drawn that, since we are totally depraved, our idea of good is worth simply nothing— may thus turn Christianity into a form of devil-worship.

The escape from this dilemma depends on observing what happens, in human relations, when the man of infe­rior moral standards enters the society of those who are better and wiser than he and gradually learns to accept their standards—a process which, as it happens, I can describe fairly accurately, since I have undergone it. When I came first to the University I was as nearly with­out a moral conscience as a boy could be. Some faint dis­taste for cruelty and for meanness about money was my utmost reach—of chastity, truthfulness, and self-sacrifice I thought as a baboon thinks of classical music. By the mercy of God I fell among a set of young men (none of them, by the way, Christians) who were sufficiently close to me in intellect and imagination to secure immediate intimacy, but who knew, and tried to obey, the moral law. Thus their judgement of good and evil was very different from mine. Now what happens in such a case is not in the least like being asked to treat as ‘white’ what was hitherto called black. The new moral judgements never enter the mind as mere reversals (though they do reverse them) of previous judgements but ‘as lords that are certainly expected’. You can have no doubt in which direction you are moving: they are more like good than the little shreds of good you already had, but are, in a sense, continuous with them. But the great test is that the recognition of the new standards is accompanied with the sense of shame and guilt: one is conscious of having blundered into soci­ety that one is unfit for. It is in the light of such experi­ences that we must consider the goodness of God. Beyond all doubt, His idea of ‘goodness’ differs from ours; but you need have no fear that, as you approach it, you will be asked simply to reverse your moral standards. When the relevant difference between the Divine ethics and your own appears to you, you will not, in fact, be in any doubt that the change demanded of you is in the direction you already call ‘better’. The Divine ‘goodness’ differs from ours, but it is not sheerly different: it differs from ours not as white from black but as a perfect circle from a child’s first attempt to draw a wheel. But when the child has learned to draw, it will know that the circle it then makes is what it was trying to make from the very beginning.

This doctrine is presupposed in Scripture. Christ calls men to repent—a call which would be meaningless if God’s standards were sheerly different from that which they already knew and failed to practise. He appeals to our existing moral judgement—‘Why even of yourselves judge ye not what is right?’ (Luke 12:57) God in the Old Testament expostulates with men on the basis of their own concep­tions of gratitude, fidelity, and fair play: and puts Himself, as it were, at the bar before His own creatures—‘What iniquity have your fathers found in me, that they are gone far from me?’ (Jeremiah 2:5.) …

CS Lewis | The Problem of Pain (Chapter 3)

“Human Wickedness”

…A recovery of the old sense of sin is essential to Christianity. Christ takes it for granted that men are bad. Until we really feel this assumption of His to be true, though we are part of the world He came to save, we are not part of the audience to whom His words are addressed. We lack the first condition for understanding what He is talking about. And when men attempt to be Christians without this preliminary consciousness of sin, the result is almost bound to be a certain resentment against God as to one always inexplicably angry. Most of us have at times felt a secret sympathy with the dying farmer who replied to the Vicar’s dissertation on repentance by asking ‘What harm have I ever done Him?’ There is the real rub. The worst we have done to God is to leave Him alone—why can’t He return the compliment? Why not live and let live? What call has He, of all beings, to be ‘angry’? It’s easy for Him to be good!

Now at the moment when a man feels real guilt— moments too rare in our lives—all these blasphemies vanish away. Much, we may feel, can be excused to human infirmities: but not this—this incredibly mean and ugly action which none of our friends would have done, which even such a thorough-going little rotter as X would have been ashamed of, which we would not for the world allow to be published. At such a moment we really do know that our character, as revealed in this action, is, and ought to be, hateful to all good men, and, if there are powers above man, to them. A God who did not regard this with unappeasable distaste would not be a good being. We cannot even wish for such a God—it is like wishing that every nose in the universe were abol­ished, that smell of hay or roses or the sea should never again delight any creature, because our own breath hap­pens to stink.

When we merely say that we are bad, the ‘wrath’ of God seems a barbarous doctrine; as soon as we perceive our badness, it appears inevitable, a mere corollary from God’s goodness. To keep ever before us the insight derived from such a moment as I have been describing, to learn to detect the same real inexcusable corruption under more and more of its complex disguises, is therefore indis­pensable to a real understanding of the Christian faith. This is not, of course, a new doctrine. I am attempting nothing very splendid in this chapter. I am merely trying to get my reader (and, still more, myself) over a pons asi-norum—to take the first step out of fools’ paradise and utter illusion. But the illusion has grown, in modern times, so strong, that I must add a few considerations tending to make the reality less incredible.

  1. We are deceived by looking on the outside of things. We suppose ourselves to be roughly not much worse than Y, whom all acknowledge for a decent sort of person, and certainly (though we should not claim it out loud) better than the abominable X. Even on the superficial level we are probably deceived about this. Don’t be too sure that your friends think you as good as Y. The very fact that you selected him for the comparison is suspicious: he is prob­ably head and shoulders above you and your circle. But let us suppose that Y and yourself both appear ‘not bad’. How far Y’s appearance is deceptive, is between Y and God. His may not be deceptive: you know that yours is.

Does this seem to you a mere trick, because I could say the same to Y and so to every man in turn? But that is just the point. Every man, not very holy or very arrogant, has to ‘live up to’ the outward appearance of other men: he knows there is that within him which falls far below even his most careless public behaviour, even his loosest talk. In an instant of time—while your friend hesitates for a word—what things pass through your mind? We have never told the whole truth. We may confess ugly facts— the meanest cowardice or the shabbiest and most prosaic impurity—but the tone is false. The very act of confess-ing—an infinitesimally hypocritical glance—a dash of humour—all this contrives to dissociate the facts from your very self. No one could guess how familiar and, in a sense, congenial to your soul these things were, how much of a piece with all the rest: down there, in the dreaming inner warmth, they struck no such discordant note, were not nearly so odd and detachable from the rest of you, as they seem when they are turned into words. We imply, and often believe, that habitual vices are excep­tional single acts, and make the opposite mistake about our virtues—like the bad tennis player who calls his nor­mal form his ‘bad days’ and mistakes his rare successes for his normal. I do not think it is our fault that we cannot tell the real truth about ourselves; the persistent, life-long, inner murmur of spite, jealousy, prurience, greed and self-complacence, simply will not go into words. But the  important thing is that we should not mistake our inevitably limited utterances for a full account of the worst that is inside.

  1. A reaction—in itself wholesome—is now going on against purely private or domestic conceptions of moral­ity, a reawakening of the social We feel our­selves to be involved in an iniquitous social system and to share a corporate guilt. This is very true: but the enemy can exploit even truths to our deception. Beware lest you are making use of the idea of corporate guilt to distract your attention from those humdrum, old-fashioned guilts of your own which have nothing to do with ‘the system’ and which can be dealt with without waiting for the mil­lennium. For corporate guilt perhaps cannot be, and cer­tainly is not, felt with the same force as personal guilt. For most of us, as we now are, this conception is a mere excuse for evading the real issue. When we have really learned to know our individual corruption, then indeed we can go on to think of the corporate guilt and can hardly think of it too much. But we must learn to walk before we run.
  2. We have a strange illusion that mere time cancels sin. I have heard others, and I have heard myself, recounting cruelties and falsehoods committed in boyhood as if they were no concern of the present speaker’s, and even with laughter. But mere time does nothing either to the fact or to the guilt of a sin. The guilt is washed out not by time but by repentance and the blood of Christ: if we have repented these early sins we should remember the price of our forgiveness and be humble. As for the fact of a sin, is it probable that anything cancels it? All times are eternally present to God. Is it not at least possible that along some one line of His multi-dimensional eternity He sees you forever in the nursery pulling the wings off a fly, forever toadying, lying, and lusting as a schoolboy, forever in that moment of cowardice or insolence as a subaltern? It may be that salvation consists not in the cancelling of these eternal moments but in the perfected humanity that bears the shame forever, rejoicing in the occasion which it fur­nished to God’s compassion and glad that it should be common knowledge to the universe. Perhaps in that eter­nal moment St Peter—he will forgive me if I am wrong— forever denies his Master. If so, it would indeed be true that the joys of Heaven are for most of us, in our present condition, ‘an acquired taste’—and certain ways of life may render the taste impossible of acquisition. Perhaps the lost are those who dare not go to such a public Of course I do not know that this is true; but I think the possibility is worth keeping in mind.
  3. We must guard against the feeling that there is ‘safety in numbers’. It is natural to feel that if all men are as bad as the Christians say, then badness must be very excus­able. If all the boys plough in the examination, surely the papers must have been too hard? And so the masters at that school feel till they learn that there are other schools where ninety per cent of the boys passed on the same papers. Then they begin to suspect that the fault did not lie with the examiners. Again, many of us have had the experience of living in some local pocket of human soci-ety—some particular school, college, regiment or profes­sion where the tone was bad. And inside that pocket certain actions were regarded as merely normal (‘Every­one does it’) and certain others as impracticably virtuous and Quixotic. But when we emerged from that bad soci­ety we made the horrible discovery that in the outer world our ‘normal’ was the kind of thing that no decent person ever dreamed of doing, and our ‘Quixotic’ was taken for granted as the minimum standard of decency. What had seemed to us morbid and fantastic scruples so long as we were in the ‘pocket’ now turned out to be the only moments of sanity we there enjoyed. It is wise to face the possibility that the whole human race (being a small thing in the universe) is, in fact, just such a local pocket of evil—an isolated bad school or regiment inside which minimum decency passes for heroic virtue and utter corruption for pardonable imperfection. But is there any evidence—except Christian doctrine itself—that this is so? I am afraid there is. In the first place, there are those odd people among us who do not accept the local stan­dard, who demonstrate the alarming truth that a quite dif­ferent behaviour is, in fact, possible. Worse still, there is the fact that these people, even when separated widely in space and time, have a suspicious knack of agreeing with one another in the main—almost as if they were in touch with some larger public opinion outside the pocket. What is common to Zarathustra, Jeremiah, Socrates, Gautama, Christ1 and Marcus Aurelius, is something pretty sub­stantial. Thirdly, we find in ourselves even now a theoret­ical approval of this behaviour which no one practises. Even inside the pocket we do not say that justice, mercy, fortitude, and temperance are of no value, but only that the local custom is as just, brave, temperate and merciful as can reasonably be expected. It begins to look as if the neglected school rules even inside this bad school were connected with some larger world—and that when the term ends we might find ourselves facing the public opin­ion of that larger world. But the worst of all is this: we cannot help seeing that only the degree of virtue which we now regard as impracticable can possibly save our race from disaster even on this planet. The standard which seems to have come into the ‘pocket’ from outside, turns out to be terribly relevant to conditions inside the pocket—so relevant that a consistent practice of virtue by the human race even for ten years would fill the earth from pole to pole with peace, plenty, health, merriment, and heartsease, and that nothing else will. It may be the custom, down here, to treat the regimental rules as a dead letter or a counsel of perfection: but even now, everyone who stops to think can see that when we meet the enemy this neglect is going to cost every man of us his life. It is then that we shall envy the ‘morbid’ person, the ‘pedant’ or ‘enthusiast’ who really has taught his company to shoot and dig in and spare their water bottles.

[….]

This chapter will have been misunderstood if anyone describes it as a reinstatement of the doctrine of Total Depravity. I disbelieve that doctrine, partly on the logical ground that if our depravity were total we should not know ourselves to be depraved, and partly because experience shows us much goodness in human nature. Nor am I recommending universal gloom. The emotion of shame has been valued not as an emotion but because of the insight to which it leads. I think that insight should be permanent in each man’s mind: but whether the painful emotions that attend it should also be encouraged, is a technical problem of spiritual direction on which, as a layman, I have little call to speak. My own idea, for what it is worth, is that all sadness which is not either arising from the repentance of a concrete sin and hastening towards concrete amendment or restitution, or else arising from pity and hastening to active assistance, is simply bad; and I think we all sin by needlessly disobeying the apostolic injunction to ‘rejoice’ as much as by anything else. Humility, after the first shock, is a cheerful virtue: it is the high-minded unbeliever, desperately trying in the teeth of repeated disillusions to retain his ‘faith in human nature’, who is really sad. I have been aiming at an intellectual, not an emotional, effect: I have been trying to make the reader believe that we actually are, at present, creatures whose character must be, in some respects, a horror to God, as it is, when we really see it, a horror to ourselves. This I believe to be a fact: and I notice that the holier a man is, the more fully he is aware of that fact. Perhaps you have imagined that this humility in the saints is a pious illusion at which God smiles. That is a most dangerous error. It is theoretically dangerous, because it makes you identify a virtue (i.e., a perfection) with an illusion (i.e., an imperfection), which must be nonsense. It is practically dangerous because it encourages a man to mistake his first insights into his own corruption for the first beginnings of a halo round his own silly head. No, depend upon it; when the saints say that they—even they—are vile, they are recording truth with scientific accuracy.

CS Lewis | The Problem of Pain (Chapter 4)

THE STONE IN THE SHOE:

This was a book recommended in a men’s group, and this comes from my copy… it is repeated below as well in the excerpt from SOTERIOLOGY 101:

Ephesians 1:11 goes even further by declaring that God in Christ

“works all things according to the counsel of his will.” Here the Greek word for “works” is energeø, which indicates that God not merely carries all of the universe’s objects and events to their appointed ends but that he actually brings about all things in accordance with his will. In other words, it isn’t just that God manages to turn the evil aspects of our world to good for those who love him; it is rather that he himself brings about these evil aspects for his glory (see Ex. 9:13-16; John 9:3) and his people’s good (see Heb. 12:3-11; James 1:2-4). This includes—as incredible and as unacceptable as it may currently seem—God’s having even brought about the Nazis’ brutality at Birkenau and Auschwitz as well as the terrible killings of Dennis Rader and even the sexual abuse of a young child: “The LORD has made everything for its own purpose, even the wicked for the day of evil” (Prov. 16:4, NASB ).14 “When times are good, be happy; but when times are bad, consider: God has made the one as well as the other” (Eccl. 7:14, NIV).

Mark Talbot, in John Piper and Justin Taylor, eds., Suffering and the Sovereignty of God (Wheaton, IL: Crossway Books, 2006), 42.

This entire article is well worth the read… and I understand Calvinists do not even allow free will even in secondary cause (see short video embedded in my introduction to a letter which includes John Hendryx and John MacArthur)

Here is the short excerpt from the longer article, keep in mind “that our ‘black’ may be His ‘white’,”

I recently came upon this question in my twitter feed.  In case it isn’t obvious, my answer to this shocking question is unapologetically, “HELL NO!”  And I mean that quite literally. Hell, the place were creatures go who “BRING ABOUT” such atrocities, screams what should be the obvious answer: NO! Our perfectly HOLY God does not bring about the sins for which people suffer for in Hell!

However, as obvious as the answer to this question may seem, John Piper, and other notable Calvinistic scholars, teach a highly controversial perspective:

“God . . . brings about all things in accordance with his will. In other words, it isn’t just that God manages to turn the evil aspects of our world to good for those who love him; it is rather that he himself brings about these evil aspects for his glory (see Ex. 9:13-16; John 9:3) and his people’s good (see Heb. 12:3-11; James 1:2-4). This includes—as incredible and as unacceptable as it may currently seem—God’s having even brought about the Nazis’ brutality at Birkenau and Auschwitz as well as the terrible killings of Dennis Rader and even the sexual abuse of a young child…” 

(Video Link) — Mark R. Talbot, “’All the Good That Is Ours in Christ’: Seeing God’s Gracious Hand in the Hurts Others Do to Us,” in John Piper and Justin Taylor (eds.), Suffering and the Sovereignty of God (Wheaton: Crossway, 2006), 31-77 (quote from p. 42).

So, look at the two different beliefs side by side:

  • Traditionalism affirms that God works to redeem man’s morally evil choices and bring about good from the heinous consequences of those autonomous choices. God is seen as most glorious because of His redemptive grace in overcoming evil.
  • Calvinism, according to Piper, affirms that God “isn’t just managing to turn the evil aspects of our world to good; it is rather that He Himself brings about these evil aspects for His glory.” God, according to this perspective, is seen as most glorious for His power and control of the evil itself.

So, is God bringing about the very moral evil that He works to redeem? 

[….]

I’ll allow John MacArthur, another notable Calvinistic pastor, bring some much needed balance to this approach:

If God is sovereign, is He responsible for evil?

No. Scripture says that when God finished His creation, He saw everything and declared it “very good” (Genesis 1:31). Many Scriptures affirm that God is not the author of evil: “God cannot be tempted by evil, and He Himself does not tempt anyone” (James 1:13). “God is light, and in Him there is no darkness at all” (1 John 1:5). “God is not the author of confusion” (1 Corinthians 14:33)—and if that is true, He cannot in any way be the author of evil.

Occasionally someone will quote Isaiah 45:7 (KJV) and claim it proves God made evil as a part of His creation: “I form the light, and create darkness: I make peace, and create evil: I the Lord do all these things.”

But the New American Standard Bible gives the sense of Isaiah 45:6-7 more clearly: “There is no one besides Me. I am the Lord, and there is no other, the One forming light and creating darkness, causing well-being and creating calamity; I am the Lord who does all these.” In other words, God devises calamity as a judgment for the wicked. But in no sense is He the author of evil. …

[See my post in responding to an atheist on Isaiah 45]

Romans 5:12 says that death entered the world because of sin. Death, pain, disease, stress, exhaustion, calamity, and all the bad things that happen came as a result of the entrance of sin into the universe (see Genesis 3:14-24). All those evil effects of sin continue to work in the world and will be with us as long as sin is.

First Corinthians 10:13 promises us that God will not permit a greater trial than we can bear. And James 1:13 tells us that God will not tempt us with evil.

God is certainly sovereign over evil. There’s a sense in which it is proper even to say that evil is part of His eternal decree. He planned for it. It did not take Him by surprise. It is not an interruption of His eternal plan. He declared the end from the beginning, and He is still working all things for His good pleasure (Isaiah 46:9-10).

But God’s role with regard to evil is never as its author. He simply permits evil agents to work, then overrules evil for His own wise and holy ends. Ultimately He is able to make all things-including all the fruits of all the evil of all time-work together for a greater good (Romans 8:28). – John MacArthur

Please re-read that last paragraph that I emboldened. He says, “He simply permits evil agents to work, then overrules evil for His own wise and holy ends,” while Piper’s article says the opposite, “God isn’t just managing to turn the evil aspects of our world to good; it is rather that He Himself brings about these evil aspects for His glory.”  So, which is it? Is God bringing about evil or simply permitting it?

In another must read article, and why I consider myself a Baptist, but not in the Al Mohler sense, is this one which — again — should be read in full. Here is the short clip via BAPTIST NEWS:

… “This is excruciatingly troubling to me,” the user commented.

So to the Calvinists
Pamela Butler
10 years old
Rollerblading
Kidnapped by Keith Nelson
Taken to a wooded area
Tortured for hours including electrocution
Raped
Strangled to death
Please tell me how this is NOT a tragedy.

Then along came R.C. Sproul Jr. in an attempt to do just that.

Without offering a single word of empathy or lament, Sproul Jr. started in: “The closest the world has ever come to a tragedy is when a man, who had never sinned, was tortured to death. Do you believe God ordained that event?”

When the X poster asked how the Crucifixion of Jesus “remotely compares to the event I described,” Sproul Jr. added: “No, it does not remotely compare. Because in one instance a little girl received the judgment from God she had earned. In the other a perfect man received the judgment I earn. So you are OK with saying God ordained the torment of Jesus but not a sinner?”

From there, Sproul Jr. boasted of being “an orthodox theologian who affirms the doctrine of original sin,” attacked the original poster for using “an emotional appeal that denies what the Bible clearly teaches about our sin,” and demanded that the person “submit to what the Bible plainly teaches.”

He concluded, “If the girl is not a believer, she received justice from God.”

While Sproul Jr.’s words are horrifyingly shocking to anyone who has even a hint of human decency about them, they are indeed the logical outflow of the power- and violence-obsessed gospel prevalent among conservative evangelical Calvinists today. There’s a link between the pop-Calvinist’s obsession with power over women and their indifference to violence against women. And when we begin to probe, we’ll discover the connection in their gospel.

[….]

‘Meaningful rape’

Lest we think this intellectualized indifference toward the rape and murder of 10-year-old girls is a unique manifestation of the internal rot of the Sprouls, it’s actually one of the skeletons in the closet of the conservative evangelical Calvinist world that has come to dominate much of the conservative Reformed Baptist and Pentecostal worlds today.

In a debate on The Bible Answer Man, the Calvinist apologist James White was asked, “When a child is raped, is God responsible? And did he decree that rape?”

White answered, “If he didn’t, then that rape is an element of meaningless evil that has no purpose.” And when pressed further, he doubled down, asserting, “Yes. Because if not, then it’s meaningless and purposeless.”

While talking with a woman about people who have been gang raped, Jeff Durbin said, “God actually has a morally sufficient reason for all the evil he plans. … He actually decrees all things.”

In Suffering and the Sovereignty of God, which was edited by John Piper, Mark Talbot argued: “It isn’t just that God manages to turn the evil aspects of our world to good for those that love him; it is rather that he himself brings about these evil aspects. … This includes God’s having even brought about the Nazi’s brutality at Birkenau and Auschwitz as well as the terrible killings of Dennis Nadar and even the sexual abuse of a young child.”

Vincent Cheung wrote: “Scripture teaches that God’s will determines everything. Nothing exists or happens without God, not merely permitting, but actively willing it to exist or happen.”

John Piper tried to make sense of it by saying: “God disapproves of some of what he ordains to happen. That is, he forbids some of the things he brings about.”

In other words, Sproul Jr.’s indifference toward rape and murder isn’t simply the rantings of a drunk driver who goes on websites designed to facilitate adultery. It’s part of what mainstream conservative evangelical Calvinist leaders across the board celebrate today as good news.

I have a collection of quotes related to this here.