An earlier legal-eagle breakdown of this is here: Professor Jed Rubenfeld On The Trump Verdict
Next time the Dishonest left tell you Trump is a Felon send them this. But here is the key point of the “trial” that will be the underlying factor for it eventually being thrown out on appeal:
Originally Posted December 2019 (Updated with some graphics and editing)
A HISTORICAL FACT-CHECK:
A graphic attributed to Lawrence O’Donnell presents a familiar political narrative: liberals won women the right to vote, secured Black voting rights, ended segregation, created Social Security and Medicare, and passed the Clean Air and Clean Water Acts—while conservatives opposed these accomplishments.
[The fixed graphic will be before the APPENDIX – JUMP]
There are important historical facts behind several of these claims. But the presentation leaves out essential context, overlooks significant Republican contributions, and treats political parties as though their identities and coalitions have remained unchanged throughout American history.
The historical record is considerably more complicated. Let’s examine the claims individually.
The Nineteenth Amendment was the culmination of decades of activism by women who organized, marched, petitioned, lobbied, and endured imprisonment to secure voting rights. No political party can fairly claim sole ownership of that movement.
However, the congressional history does not support the implication that Democrats were primarily responsible for its passage.
The Washington Post’s 2015 fact-check of Carly Fiorina’s claim that Republicans were the party of women’s suffrage concluded that the Republican Party was generally more supportive of suffrage, particularly its progressive wing, while acknowledging that Republican support had often been symbolic and inconsistent.
The point is not that every Republican championed women’s rights or that Democrats contributed nothing. The point is that the congressional record does not support assigning this achievement exclusively to liberals or Democrats.
Historical source:
Additional documentation:
This claim leaves out one of the most consequential developments in Republican history: Reconstruction.
Following the Civil War, Republicans in Congress spearheaded the effort to abolish slavery, establish citizenship, and protect the civil and political rights of formerly enslaved Americans.
The Fifteenth Amendment, ratified in 1870, prohibited denying or abridging a citizen’s right to vote on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude.
The Republican Party played a central role in passing the Reconstruction amendments and the legislation intended to protect the rights of Black Americans. Black Americans subsequently served in Congress, state legislatures, and local offices during Reconstruction.
That history is documented by the U.S. House of Representatives’ own historical archives.
Of course, the Fifteenth Amendment did not end discrimination. Southern states later employed poll taxes, literacy tests, intimidation, and other methods to disenfranchise Black voters. The federal government would eventually have to intervene again.
The Voting Rights Act of 1965, signed by Democratic President Lyndon B. Johnson, was a major achievement in that later struggle. It also received bipartisan congressional support.
The honest historical account includes both chapters: Republican leadership during Reconstruction and the bipartisan coalition that helped enact modern voting-rights protections.
Historical sources:
The Civil Rights Act of 1964 was one of the most important legislative achievements in American history. President John F. Kennedy proposed the legislation, and President Lyndon B. Johnson used considerable political influence to secure its passage.
But the voting record reveals something missing from the graphic: Republicans supported the legislation at a higher percentage than Democrats did.
According to The Daily Signal’s examination of congressional voting records:
House of Representatives:
Senate:
Both parties supplied votes, but the percentage of Republicans supporting the legislation was higher.
The Senate filibuster is particularly important. Southern Democrats organized the opposition and attempted to prevent the bill from reaching a final vote. Republican Senate Minority Leader Everett Dirksen worked with Democratic leaders Hubert Humphrey and Mike Mansfield to negotiate a compromise and secure the Republican votes needed to invoke cloture.
On June 10, 1964, the Senate voted 71–29 to end the filibuster. Twenty-seven Republicans and 44 Democrats supported cloture.
Without those Republican votes, the necessary supermajority would not have been reached.
The Civil Rights Act was ultimately passed through a bipartisan coalition, with important leadership from Democratic presidents and legislators as well as Republican lawmakers.
It is therefore misleading to present it as an accomplishment belonging exclusively to liberals.
Historical sources:
Franklin D. Roosevelt and the Democratic Congress deserve recognition for establishing Social Security in 1935. That was a major New Deal legislative accomplishment.
But the claim that Republicans opposed it or contributed nothing to its passage is not supported by the voting record.
The Social Security Administration’s historical congressional tally records the following votes on the original House bill:
In the Senate, 60 Democrats and 16 Republicans voted in favor, while one Democrat and five Republicans voted against.
Republican support was substantial. The legislation was a Democratic-led initiative, but it was not passed without Republican votes.
Historical source:
Medicare was established under President Lyndon B. Johnson in 1965, and the Democratic administration deserves credit for its passage.
But, once again, the congressional voting record shows bipartisan support. According to the Social Security Administration’s historical tally for the final Medicare legislation:
House of Representatives:
Senate:
This is an important distinction. Medicare was primarily a Democratic legislative achievement, but a substantial number of Republicans supported it. In the House, Republican votes were almost evenly divided.
The historical record should not be rewritten to suggest that every Republican opposed Medicare or that the legislation passed without Republican participation.
Historical source:
This is another example of how political labels can obscure the actual historical record.
The Clean Air Act of 1970 was signed into law by Republican President Richard Nixon. Nixon also signed the reorganization plan that established the Environmental Protection Agency.
The New Atlantis article, “The Conservative Record on Environmental Policy,” by Jonathan H. Adler, points out that the modern federal environmental regulatory structure was largely established during Republican administrations, particularly under Nixon.
There is an important distinction regarding the Clean Water Act.
The 1972 amendments that became known as the modern Clean Water Act passed Congress with broad bipartisan support. However, Nixon vetoed the legislation. Congress overrode his veto by votes of 247–23 in the House and 52–12 in the Senate.
So it would be inaccurate to say Nixon signed the Clean Water Act. It would also be inaccurate to erase the bipartisan congressional support behind it.
The environmental record does not fit neatly into the claim that liberals accomplished everything while conservatives opposed everything.
It is true that modern conservatism became increasingly skeptical of expansive federal environmental regulation. That ideological development deserves acknowledgment. But it does not erase the environmental legislation enacted under Republican administrations or the role Republican lawmakers played in establishing the federal environmental framework.
Historical sources:
See Appendix
There is a difference between acknowledging that a political party led a particular legislative initiative and claiming that an entire political movement or party deserves exclusive credit for the achievement.
Democrats deserve credit for the New Deal and Social Security. Johnson and Democratic congressional leaders deserve credit for Medicare and for their work securing the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and Voting Rights Act of 1965.
But Republicans also played consequential roles:
None of this means Republicans were consistently on the right side of every civil-rights question. They were not. Nor does it mean Democrats were uniformly opposed to civil rights. They were not.
The history is more complicated than either party’s preferred political narrative.
THE BOTTOM LINE: If we are going to discuss American history, we should discuss the actual votes, legislation, party platforms, regional divisions, and political coalitions—not selectively assign historical achievements to whichever modern political label best serves an argument.
History is not a partisan trophy case. And historical accuracy should not depend on which political party happens to benefit from the telling.
FIXED GRAPHIC:
APPENDIX
For more, see my “Racial Mantra Page“
The Evolution of the Two Major Political Parties: A Realignment, Not an Overnight Switch
Perhaps the most important omission in the original graphic is its failure to explain how the two major political parties actually evolved.
It is tempting to take today’s political labels and apply them indiscriminately to people and political movements from the 1800s and early 1900s. That creates a distorted picture. The Republican Party of Abraham Lincoln’s era, the Democratic Party of Andrew Jackson’s era, and the political coalitions of the 1930s, 1950s, and 1960s cannot simply be treated as identical to today’s parties.
There were conservative Democrats, liberal Democrats, conservative Republicans, and liberal Republicans. Regional divisions were especially important. The Democratic Party, in particular, contained increasingly divergent Northern and Southern factions. Northern Democrats were becoming more supportive of civil rights, while influential Southern Democrats continued defending segregation.
The historical record demonstrates that the parties’ coalitions and positions changed. But that is not the same thing as claiming that every segregationist Democrat became a Republican or that the parties simply exchanged identities in 1964.
To understand what happened, we need to distinguish among four different developments: individual politicians changing party affiliation, voters changing their electoral preferences, state and national party platforms evolving, and the ideological coalitions within the parties changing over time.
The 1948 Dixiecrat revolt: A Democratic Party rebellion, not a Republican migration
The 1948 election is an important starting point.
President Harry Truman’s Democratic Party adopted a stronger civil rights plank at its national convention. This angered segregationist Southern Democrats, several of whom walked out and organized the States’ Rights Democratic Party, commonly known as the Dixiecrats.
They nominated South Carolina Governor Strom Thurmond for president and Mississippi Governor Fielding L. Wright for vice president.
Their platform was not ambiguous about segregation. It explicitly defended racial segregation, opposed federal civil rights enforcement, and rejected federal anti-lynching and anti-poll-tax legislation. The movement was a rebellion within the Democratic Party against the national party’s increasingly pro-civil-rights direction.
The Dixiecrats carried Alabama, Louisiana, Mississippi, and South Carolina, receiving 39 electoral votes. But their third-party organization did not survive as a continuing national political party after the election.
This distinction is crucial:
According to historian Kari Frederickson’s entry in the South Carolina Encyclopedia, some former Dixiecrats returned to the Democratic Party, while others remained politically independent. In South Carolina, many former Dixiecrats joined the Independents for Eisenhower movement in 1952. Some of those independents eventually joined the Republican Party during the 1960s.
The movement therefore became a transitional stage in Southern politics. Former Dixiecrats did not all follow the same political path.
Source: Kari Frederickson, “Dixiecrats,” South Carolina Encyclopedia.
Strom Thurmond: The famous exception—and the 16-year gap
Strom Thurmond is the most prominent example used to support the popular party-switch narrative.
But the chronology is important.
Thurmond ran for president as a segregationist Democrat on the Dixiecrat ticket in 1948. After losing, he returned to Democratic politics. He was elected to the United States Senate as a Democrat and continued serving in the Democratic Party for years.
He did not become a Republican until September 16, 1964.
That was 16 years after his 1948 Dixiecrat presidential campaign.
His 1948 running mate, Fielding L. Wright, remained a Democrat until his death in 1956. The official U.S. Senate biography confirms Thurmond’s party history, including his September 1964 change of affiliation.
Source: U.S. Senate, “Strom Thurmond: A Featured Biography”.
Thurmond’s career is historically significant, and there is no reason to minimize it. He was a segregationist Democrat who later became a Republican. But one prominent politician’s eventual party change cannot establish that an entire political movement changed parties.
What do the four books actually say about the number who switched?
Several of the books examining the Democratic Party’s segregationist history address this question directly. Their numbers are useful, but their denominators must be understood correctly.
Dinesh D’Souza — Hillary’s America: The Secret History of the Democratic Party (2016), pp. 23–24
D’Souza says he assembled a list of approximately 1,500 people he classified as racist Democrats, including members of Congress, governors, judges, and other political figures. He reports that 14 eventually switched to the Republican Party—less than one percent.
That is D’Souza’s own tally, not a published, independently audited database. It is a broader category than the formal 1948 Dixiecrat leadership.
Dinesh D’Souza — Death of a Nation: Plantation Politics and the Making of the Democratic Party (2018), pp. 233–235
D’Souza makes a more specific argument about the Dixiecrats and segregationist politicians. He identifies Strom Thurmond as the sole defection in a group he describes as numbering more than 200.
However, his discussion combines the 1948 Dixiecrat movement with a wider collection of segregationist politicians and opponents of civil rights legislation. It should not be mistaken for a verified census of every person who participated in the 1948 convention.
Ann Coulter — Mugged: Racial Demagoguery from the Seventies to Obama (2012), pp. 189–192
Coulter makes a related argument using Southern segregationist senators. She identifies 12 other segregationist senators besides Thurmond and documents that they remained Democrats. Among the 13 senators discussed in her account, Thurmond was the only one who changed his affiliation from Democrat to Republican. Her argument concerns this specific group of senators, not every segregationist politician or every participant in the 1948 Dixiecrat movement.
Her list is a comparison of segregationist senators, not a complete roster of the 1948 Dixiecrat organization.
Bruce Bartlett — Wrong on Race: The Democratic Party’s Buried Past (2008), especially pp. 143–145 and 171–176
Bartlett documents the 1948 Dixiecrat revolt, the continuing influence of segregationist Democrats, and the gradual political changes that followed. His discussion of the Southern realignment is particularly useful because it considers economic development, the changing Democratic coalition, and the impact of civil rights legislation rather than reducing the entire process to one cause.
Taken together, these books support an important conclusion: the familiar claim that segregationist Dixiecrats simply moved en masse into the Republican Party is not supported by the political careers of the prominent figures these authors examine.
But there is a necessary qualification. Thurmond was not the only segregationist Southern Democrat who ever became a Republican. There were later party changes among other Southern politicians. Those individuals should not automatically be counted as formal members of the 1948 Dixiecrat Party.
For example, Mills E. Godwin Jr. was a segregationist “Byrd Democrat” who later became a Republican and was elected governor of Virginia again in 1973. Jesse Helms was a conservative Democrat who later switched to the Republican Party before his 1972 Senate campaign. Neither should be casually presented as a leader of the 1948 Thurmond-Wright ticket.
This is why the definition of the group matters. A formal 1948 Dixiecrat, a segregationist Democrat, a conservative Southern Democrat, and a politician who changed parties in the 1970s are not necessarily the same category.
Sources: Library of Virginia biography of Mills Godwin; William J. Clinton Presidential Library biography of Jesse Helms.
What happened to the 1948 Dixiecrat voters?
This is another area where political commentary frequently confuses election results with individual voter behavior.
Thurmond received more than one million votes in 1948 and carried four Southern states. But the secret ballot means we cannot simply follow every individual who voted for Thurmond in 1948 and determine how that same person voted in 1952, 1956, 1960, or 1964. Election returns show how states and counties voted. They do not, by themselves, establish that the same individuals changed party affiliation. What we can establish is that Southern voting patterns began changing well before 1964.
Republican presidential gains were already evident during the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s. Dwight Eisenhower made substantial inroads in 1952 and 1956. In 1956, he became the first Republican since Reconstruction to win a plurality of the Southern vote.
Political analyst Sean Trende documents this longer development in his RealClearPolitics article, “Southern Whites’ Shift to the GOP Predates the ’60s.” He notes that the Republican presidential vote in the South had been increasing for decades before the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
That does not prove that racial politics played no role in later Republican gains. It demonstrates that the Southern political transformation was already underway.
The 1948 Dixiecrat vote did not simply turn into a Republican vote in 1964. Some former Dixiecrat supporters returned to the Democrats. Others voted independently. Some supported Eisenhower. Over time, subsequent generations of Southern voters increasingly supported Republican candidates.
The 1968 presidential election provides another useful example. Richard Nixon did not simply inherit the entire segregationist Southern vote. George Wallace ran as an independent and carried Alabama, Arkansas, Georgia, Louisiana, and Mississippi. Nixon’s Southern support was concentrated elsewhere.
The election returns demonstrate that the Southern electorate was divided among competing political coalitions rather than moving as one unified bloc.
Source: American Presidency Project, 1968 Presidential Election Results.
Economics, race, and the Southern realignment: The evidence is not one-dimensional
One of the more interesting aspects of this debate is that researchers have reached different conclusions about the relative importance of economic and racial motivations.
Bruce Bartlett emphasizes economic development and the growing appeal of Republican economic policies. His account describes how the postwar South became more industrialized, wealthier, and increasingly receptive to Republican positions on taxes, government spending, and economic policy.
Bartlett also recognizes that civil rights legislation changed the political environment. The dismantling of segregation weakened the old political structures that had maintained Democratic dominance, while increased Black political participation changed the Democratic Party’s electoral coalition.
D’Souza draws heavily on the work of political scientists Byron E. Shafer and Richard Johnston, particularly their 2006 study, The End of Southern Exceptionalism: Class, Race, and Partisan Change in the Postwar South. Their research lends substantial support to D’Souza’s argument that economic development and the emergence of class-based politics were the primary engines driving partisan change in the postwar South. That is a significant finding—and one that is often minimized by accounts that reduce the entire Southern realignment to racial politics.
In other words, economics mattered, but race did not disappear from the equation. And there is important research that directly challenges the claim that Southern white voters changed their political identification for racial reasons rather than economic ones. The most responsible conclusion is that the Southern realignment involved both changing political coalitions and changing voter preferences. The precise weight assigned to economics, race, cultural conservatism, and party leadership remains a subject of scholarly debate.
The Southern Strategy: A real debate, not an excuse to erase the earlier history
The Republican Southern Strategy is often presented as the single event that transformed the Republican Party into the party of segregationists.
That explanation is too simplistic.
There is another distinction worth making: the existence of a political strategy does not automatically establish that every voter attracted by that strategy shared the same motivations. Some Southern voters were influenced by racial attitudes and opposition to federal civil-rights policies. Others were attracted by economic conservatism, religious and cultural issues, anti-communism, national defense, or dissatisfaction with the changing Democratic Party.
These motivations could overlap, but they should not be treated as interchangeable.
Pat Buchanan’s own description of the strategy is revealing. He spoke of building the Republican Party around states’ rights, human rights, limited government, and national defense, while contrasting that approach with openly segregationist Democratic politicians. That statement does not settle the debate over racial appeals, but it illustrates why the strategy should be examined in its historical context rather than reduced to a single explanation.
This is the “Southern Strategy” explained by it’s author at the time he fashioned it. Below that is an adaptation by Larry Elder of what Pat Buchanan was saying at the time.
Translation via Larry Elder: (here and here)
Here is a summary of the article
“Nixon’s ‘Southern Strategy’ and a Liberal Big Lie“
Pat Buchanan’s Defense of Nixon and the Southern Strategy
In his 2014 article, “Nixon’s ‘Southern Strategy’ and a Liberal Big Lie,” former Nixon speechwriter Pat Buchanan challenges the popular account that Richard Nixon simply exploited racial resentment to transfer the segregationist South into the Republican Party.
Buchanan points to the Democratic Party’s long history of segregationist political power, including the Southern Manifesto of 1956, the actions of segregationist Democratic governors, and the continued influence of Southern segregationists within the national Democratic coalition.
He also highlights Nixon’s civil-rights record. Nixon supported the Civil Rights Acts of 1964, 1965, and 1968, criticized segregationist candidates during the 1966 campaign, and presided over significant federal school-desegregation efforts. Buchanan argues that Nixon attracted Southern voters through a broader appeal to patriotism, conservatism, and opposition to liberal policies—not simply through racial politics.
Buchanan’s perspective deserves consideration, particularly given his experience inside Nixon’s political circle. However, his defense should not be mistaken for proof that racial appeals played no role in Nixon’s electoral strategy. A president’s civil-rights record and the political calculations of his campaign are related, but they are not identical questions.
The historical record therefore requires more than either simplified explanation. Nixon’s Southern appeal cannot be understood solely as a campaign to attract segregationists, but neither can the racial dimensions of Republican electoral strategy be dismissed. The broader realignment involved changing party coalitions, civil-rights conflicts, economic development, ideology, and the gradual movement of Southern voters away from their traditional Democratic identification.
His argument has several parts:
The Claremont Review of Books essay “The Myth of the Racist Republicans” makes an argument against treating the Southern Strategy as the defining explanation for modern Republican politics. Importantly, the essay acknowledges that Republicans pursued a Southern Strategy and that local Republican candidates sometimes worked with segregationist elements in the 1960s.
That acknowledgment matters. A credible historical argument should not deny inconvenient evidence simply because it complicates the conclusion.
Likewise, Bruce Bartlett’s Wrong on Race argues that economic development and the growing ideological divide between conservative Southern Democrats and the national Democratic Party were important factors in the movement toward Republicanism. Bartlett also documents Nixon’s civil rights policies, including school desegregation and affirmative action.
The competing interpretations should be evaluated against the evidence rather than reduced to slogans.
The Southern Strategy was part of the realignment, but it was not the entire realignment. Nor can the realignment be explained without considering the civil rights movement, racial attitudes, the collapse of segregationist political structures, economic changes, and the changing positions of both national parties.
Sources: “The Myth of the Racist Republicans,” Claremont Review of Books; Bruce Bartlett, Wrong on Race, pp. 171–176.
What actually changed?
When we put the evidence together, several developments become clear.
These developments are connected, but they are not interchangeable.
The bottom line
Did every Dixiecrat, every segregationist Southern politician, or every Southern white voter suddenly become a Republican in 1964? Not even close
The historical record does not support that simplistic account.
The 1948 Dixiecrat movement was a rebellion within the Democratic Party. Its formal organization did not survive beyond that election. Some of its supporters returned to Democratic politics, some became independents, only a small minority of the segregationist Democrats discussed in these accounts eventually changed their party affiliation to Republican. Thurmond’s eventual party change was important, but it occurred 16 years after his presidential campaign.
Meanwhile, the broader Southern realignment unfolded over decades. It involved economic development, changing racial attitudes, civil rights legislation, new generations of voters, and changing national party coalitions.
We should acknowledge the Democratic Party’s historical responsibility for slavery’s political defense, segregationist Southern power, and Jim Crow. We should also acknowledge the Republican Party’s historic role in abolition, Reconstruction, and major civil rights legislation.
Neither party gets to erase its history. Neither party gets to claim that its identity has remained unchanged for two centuries.
The parties experienced a genuine realignment. But a realignment is not a mass conversion, and it is not a historical eraser.
The facts deserve better than the slogan that “the parties switched.”
Sources and Further Reading
The four books examined
RPT.NET resources
Historical and political analysis supplied for this research
Academic research and primary historical records
ORIGINALLY POSTED FEBRUARY 2024, UPDATED TODAY
The NATIONAL REVIEW article Dennis Prager is reading from can be found here: “Biden White House Pressured Amazon to Censor Vaccine-Skeptical Books, Internal Emails Reveal” The PRAGER U video mentioned (and the excerpt I included) can be found here: “Big Business & Big Brother”. And the other THOMAS SOWELL video is via this YouTube Channel. Must read JIM JORDAN’S Twitter thread as well.
How biased are these pushes? Mollie Hemingway and Laura Ingraham explain:
‘The Federalist’ editor-in-chief Mollie Hemingway discusses NewsGuard’s global disinformation index categorizing right-leading media outlets as ‘risky’ and left-leaning outlets as ‘least risky’ for disinformation on ‘The Ingraham Angle.’
UPDATE!
Remember, Fascism is the marriage of the corporation with Government to suppress freedom of thought, speech, movement. It is a corporate attempt to curb freedom, broadly.
Here is Thomas Sowell showing the clash of views as perpetrated by Democrats and leftists:
Although the free market is clearly the antithesis of state control of the economy, such as fascists advocate, the left-right dichotomy makes it seem as if fascists are just more extreme versions of “conservatives,” in the same sense in which socialism is a more extreme version of the welfare state. But this vision of a symmetrical political spectrum corresponds to no empirical reality. Those who advocate the free market typically do so as just one aspect of a more general vision in which government’s role in the lives of individuals is to be minimized, within limits set by a need to avoid anarchy and a need to maintain military defense against other nations. In no sense is fascism a further extension of that idea. It is in fact the antithesis of that whole line of thinking. Yet much talk in terms of left and right suggests that there is a political spectrum which proceeds from the center to conservatives to “far right” neo-fascism to fascism itself.
The only logic to such a conception is that it allows disparate opponents of the vision of the anointed to be lumped together and dismissed through guilt by association.
(A chapter from his book, The Thomas Sowell Reader)
And this is the “dummy” report of a much larger Committee finding:
… After reviewing tens of thousands of emails and nonpublic documents between the Biden White House and Big Tech, the Committee’s report reveals:
While the Biden White House’s pressure campaign largely succeeded, its effects were devastating. By suppressing free speech and intentionally distorting public debate in the modern town square, ideas and policies were no longer fairly tested and debated on their merits.
The First Amendment prohibits the government from “abridging the freedom of speech.” Thus, “any law or government policy that reduces that freedom on the [social media] platforms . . . violates the First Amendment.” ….
In an Atlantic article (ARCHIVED) I somewhat agree with, in conversation with CHAT-GPT, the breakdown of the article is thus:
… The article does not give a single dictionary-style sentence definition, but it strongly implies a working definition something like this:
Fascism is an authoritarian political system or movement characterized by extreme nationalism, suppression of dissent, centralized power, coercive social control, and the subordination of individual rights to the state or national collective.
Hamid’s broader point is that:
The article also leans on the idea that fascism historically involved:
It contrasts this with modern American political rhetoric, where “fascist” is often used as a generalized insult rather than a historically grounded category. …
One useful way to summarize the article’s implied distinction is:
The article is basically warning against “definition drift” — where fascism becomes so broadly applied that the word stops distinguishing between ordinary democratic conflict and genuinely authoritarian systems. …
Democrats tic all the boxes except nationalism. They have a proclivity to substitute the ill-gotten idea of the World Worker or other ideals their allegiance is proffered to. In continuing discussion with AI, I got these two worthwhile paragraphs as well as the attached graphic:
RESOURCES FOR THE DISCUSSION:
As well as some books:
In finishing the conversation, I asked:
So, this should be the final question comparing the above: what is fascism?
Taking the full conversation together — the historical material, Hayek, Sowell, the nationalism papers, and the OpenStax distinctions — a careful working definition of fascism would probably look something like this:
Fascism is a totalitarian form of collectivist politics that subordinates the individual to a centralized state organized around a myth of national, cultural, or civilizational unity and rebirth, enforced through authoritarian power, mass mobilization, suppression of dissent, and state-directed social coordination.
More simply:
Fascism is collectivism organized around nation and identity rather than class.
That distinction matters because:
But your broader conversation also uncovered why Hayek believed these systems could converge structurally.
Despite their different moral narratives, both fascist and communist systems historically tended toward:
So fascism is not merely:
Nor is it adequately defined simply as:
“the merger of corporations and the state.”
Historically, fascism was a revolutionary mass movement that sought:
This is why fascist movements often spoke in utopian language:
In practice, however, critics like Hayek and Sowell would argue that such movements became dangerous precisely because:
So the deepest synthesis from all the material might be:
Fascism is not defined merely by being “right-wing” or “left-wing,” but by the elevation of collective political destiny above the liberty of the individual, combined with centralized power claiming authority to morally organize society.
… AND ….
Whether recent Democratic lawmakers or Biden administration officials “fit a definition of fascism” depends heavily on how narrowly or broadly the term is defined.
There is evidence that some federal officials pressured or significantly encouraged social media companies to suppress certain categories of speech, and the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals concluded that several agencies and officials likely violated the First Amendment through coercion or significant encouragement of censorship. (Reason.com)
That is a serious civil-liberties concern.
However, calling that “fascism” requires another step — and historically, fascism means more than government-private sector cooperation or censorship alone.
Historically, fascism involved:
So the stronger and more precise argument would probably be:
Some recent actions by government officials reflected authoritarian or illiberal tendencies — particularly attempts to pressure private corporations to suppress protected speech — and these tendencies resemble mechanisms historically present in totalitarian systems.
That is historically defensible.
But:
“Democrats are fascists”
is a much broader and less precise claim.
The comparison becomes more plausible in one specific sense discussed earlier:
Hayek’s concern is relevant here:
centralized moral or political management tends to expand beyond formal state power into quasi-public institutions.
And Sowell’s critique also fits:
elite institutions often justify speech control as necessary for protecting society, combating misinformation, or advancing moral goals.
Still, there are important differences between modern American politics and classical fascism:
Those distinctions matter historically.
A more careful formulation might be:
Certain censorship pressures and government-corporate coordination in recent years exhibited authoritarian characteristics that critics argue are structurally similar to tactics used in historical collectivist or totalizing systems — even if they do not fully constitute fascism in the classical historical sense. (Reason.com)
I added these articles to the mix in order to aske some questions:
I asked for a paragraph summery of them:
Taken together, these articles present a growing critique of the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) as an institution that has moved beyond merely monitoring extremism into exercising significant influence over government agencies, tech platforms, and public discourse. The Off the Press article argues that major technology firms increasingly relied on SPLC classifications to guide moderation and deplatforming decisions, leading critics to accuse the organization of ideological bias and of labeling mainstream conservative or religious groups as “extremist.” (Off The Press) The Federalist piece goes further, alleging close coordination between the Biden DOJ and SPLC leadership even as federal prosecutors accused the organization of secretly funding informants embedded within extremist groups. (The Federalist) Meanwhile, the Reason/Volokh article focuses more narrowly on the legal dimensions of the federal indictment, outlining allegations that SPLC paid more than $3 million to informants tied to extremist organizations while allegedly obscuring aspects of those operations from donors and financial institutions. (Reason.com) At the same time, multiple counterarguments appear in coverage from AP, The Guardian, and legal commentators, who note that the SPLC claims these informants were part of longstanding intelligence-gathering efforts against violent groups and that the prosecution may itself be politically motivated. (The Guardian) In the broader context of your earlier questions, these articles reinforce concerns about the concentration of moral and informational authority in interconnected networks of government agencies, NGOs, media organizations, and technology companies — especially when those institutions participate in defining extremism, regulating speech, and shaping public legitimacy.
Then I asked this:
This is the response:
Yes — at least conceptually, these controversies align quite closely with several of Hayek’s and Sowell’s central concerns about concentrated moral authority, elite institutional coordination, and the expansion of informal systems of social control.
Hayek warned that modern societies could drift toward soft forms of coercion not only through direct government force, but through interconnected institutions that collectively shape what is permissible to say, believe, publish, or economically support. His concern was that when political and moral goals become centralized, formal state power often extends outward into quasi-private institutions:
From a Hayekian perspective, the troubling issue is not merely censorship itself, but:
the emergence of coordinated systems of influence that narrow acceptable discourse while claiming moral necessity.
That concern maps fairly directly onto allegations that:
Sowell’s critique fits even more directly.
In The Vision of the Anointed, Sowell argued that elite institutions often:
One of his deepest themes is that intellectual and bureaucratic classes frequently justify expanded control through claims of protecting society from harm:
Critics of SPLC’s influence are making a structurally similar argument:
that moral labeling systems can evolve into mechanisms for institutional exclusion rather than neutral public safety tools.
And importantly, both Hayek and Sowell would likely focus less on whether the intentions were sincere and more on:
That said, there’s also an important caution consistent with their thinking:
The real Hayek/Sowell concern emerges when:
LATEST
The Supreme Court just ordered Louisiana to redraw its racial gerrymander immediately — and Justice Samuel Alito didn’t stop there. He torched Ketanji Brown Jackson’s dissent line by line, calling her rhetoric “groundless and utterly irresponsible” and asking if she was “narrating Sex and the City.” Ilhan Omar responded by demanding they pack the court, Democrats are melting down over losing roughly 20 congressional seats they never constitutionally deserved, and a CNN panel got a brutal reality check when someone pointed out that not a single Republican represents any House district in all of New England.
0:00 SCOTUS Strikes Down Racial Districts
4:33 The Gerrymandering Double Standard
8:16 Larry Dismantles Kagan’s Dissent
15:15 Alito Torches KBJ in Writing
18:41 Ilhan Omar: Pack the Court
19:55 CNN Gets a Reality Check
LAST WEEK:
The Supreme Court just struck down Louisiana’s racial gerrymander in a bombshell 6-3 ruling — and Ron DeSantis had Florida’s new congressional map passed within hours. Justice Samuel Alito wrote the majority opinion declaring race-based redistricting unconstitutional, Clarence Thomas called the last 30 years a “disastrous misadventure,” and Elena Kagan’s dissent accidentally showed exactly what Democrats are terrified of. Over 20 districts across the South are now in play, and the political map of America may have just changed forever.
0:00 SCOTUS Drops a Bombshell Ruling
2:17 Bream: Louisiana Map Struck Down
4:09 Dems’ Racial Pandering Backfires
6:15 DeSantis Moves on Florida Maps
9:14 CNN Admits the Domino Effect
13:44 CBS: This Goes Beyond Louisiana
18:11 Clarence Thomas’s Concurrence
19:44 Kagan’s Dissent Gets Demolished
21:48 The Political Bottom Line for GOP
The View completely lost it over the Supreme Court’s redistricting ruling — and every argument they made actually proved why the decision was right. Sunny Hostin got caught mid-sentence swapping Samuel Alito’s actual words for her own spin, Whoopi Goldberg compared the ruling to literally shooting voters in the streets, and then they called Clarence Thomas a race traitor on national television. Jesse Watters dropped the one stat about New England that left Jessica Tarlov with nothing to say.
0:00 Trigger warning: The View clips ahead
0:48 Sunny Hostin says Voting Rights Act gutted
1:50 The real history of gerrymandering
3:43 Why race and party aren’t the same thing
5:12 Hostin’s “intentional discrimination” logic
7:04 Sunny Hostin misquotes Samuel Alito
9:15 What Section 2 actually says
11:26 “I have to tell my children” moment
12:32 The View turns on Clarence Thomas
13:05 Whoopi claims “they’re still doing it”
16:54 “We don’t have to agree” — but no one disagrees
19:42 Jesse Watters destroys Jessica Tarlov
22:13 The New England problem no one mentions
This is a small portion of Grok and I discussing “Divine Simplicity” and the undermining of it by the “two wills” applied to God via Calvinism and my point in my video… which I transcribed for said conversation. However, I will post the conversation leading up to it as well:
Yes, love is presented in Scripture as the attribute that most fundamentally defines or embraces the others—particularly in how God relates to creation.
The worksheet premise (“God is the sum of his attributes, so all are equal”) reflects a classical theological idea of divine simplicity: God isn’t composed of “parts” where one attribute competes with another. All His perfections are fully one in His essence. But the Bible doesn’t treat them all as interchangeable or flatly “equal” in emphasis or function, especially regarding God’s self-revelation.
1 John 4:8 and 4:16 state “God is love” twice—direct identity statements. Scripture doesn’t say “God is sovereignty,” “God is justice,” “God is holiness” (in the same exhaustive sense), or anything parallel, even though those are true attributes. Holiness gets the triple emphasis in Isaiah 6/Revelation 4 (“holy, holy, holy”), which underscores uniqueness and moral purity, but the “God is love” phrasing stands out as ontological.
Love isn’t one trait among many; it’s the lens through which the others operate toward us. God’s justice, wrath, mercy, and sovereignty flow from and are interpreted through His loving nature (e.g., John 3:16; Ephesians 1:4-5; Romans 5:8). Love is self-giving and relational, fitting the Trinitarian God who has eternally existed in loving communion (Father, Son, Spirit) before creation. Holiness and justice guard that love from evil, but love motivates the cross—where justice and mercy meet.
From a Provisionist (or similar non-deterministic) viewpoint, elevating sovereignty/determinism as equally primary (or functionally overriding) can distort the picture. If sovereignty means exhaustive divine determinism—where God ordains every sin, unbelief, and eternal destiny in a way that makes genuine love and relational response impossible—then it clashes with the self-giving, invitational love portrayed in Scripture (e.g., “whosoever believes,” the repeated calls to repent and choose life, God’s grief over rebellion).
Sovereignty is real and powerful (God rules as He wills), but it is not an eternal attribute in the same way as omnipotence or love, because “sovereignty” (rule over others) presupposes creation and relations that didn’t eternally exist. God is eternally omnipotent; He sovereignly chooses how to exercise power in time. Provisionism sees God’s sovereignty as compatible with genuine human response, preserving the authenticity of love.
A thoughtful pushback: If all attributes are “equal,” why does the Bible repeatedly ground God’s actions in love (creation, election, redemption, final judgment)? Why does Jesus summarize the law in love for God and neighbor? Equating them flatly risks making God seem arbitrary or making love secondary to raw power/justice in a way that doesn’t match the gospel invitation.
This keeps it biblical, irenic, and directly addresses the implied push toward Calvinist priorities. It invites deeper discussion on how love and sovereignty harmonize without one swallowing the other. Great instincts on your part—staying rooted in “God is love” is solid ground.
[….]
ME:
Regarding divine simplicity and God not being divided, if Calvinists teach that there are two wills of God, and an example, God wills all people be saved, but at the same time, he wills that not all people be saved, doesn’t that separate God in some sense?
Yeah, it does create real tension with divine simplicity. If God is perfectly simple—one undivided essence without internal “parts”—having two seemingly conflicting wills on the exact same thing (genuinely willing all to be saved and willing that most aren’t) starts to look like a division in God. Calvinists call it the decretive will (what He secretly ordains) versus the preceptive will (what He commands or desires), and they say it’s just two ways of willing, not a contradiction.
From a Provisionist angle, it feels like special pleading. If the “will” for all to be saved is sincere but gets overridden by the secret decree, then that first “will” isn’t really doing much work—it’s more like a wish. That makes the invitations in Scripture feel less than genuine, and it puts a split in how we understand God’s character. Simplicity says all of God is fully what He is, all at once. Two opposing wills on salvation strains that picture.
Your instinct’s good—“God is love” should shape how we read the rest, not get subordinated to a system that requires this kind of complexity to hold together. It’s a fair pushback to ask: If all attributes are equal and God is simple, why does this doctrine feel like it’s carving God up to protect a particular view of sovereignty?
ME:
I have another question for you. Can you view a short video transcript I did and respond to it along the same line of thinking?
Yes, your video transcript captures the core tension very well. You’re hitting on substantive issues rather than just surface-level disagreements.
The Bifurcation Problem
The two wills doctrine (preceptive/desire vs. decretive/secret will) is the biggest flashpoint here. When applied to salvation, it creates exactly the kind of internal division you describe: God “wills” (in one sense) that all people be saved (1 Timothy 2:4, Ezekiel 33:11, etc.), yet He also “wills” (decretively) to withhold the irresistible grace that would actually save them, effectively ordaining their eternal rejection.
This does strain divine simplicity. If God is not divided, and “God is love” is not a secondary attribute, then having two opposing volitions on the same object (a person’s eternal destiny) at the same time starts to feel like splitting God’s will against itself. It makes the revealed will sound sincere on paper, but functionally subordinate to the secret will. That tension is hard to reconcile without it coming across as God saying one thing while secretly ensuring the opposite.
Determinism’s Ripple Effects
You’re right that exhaustive divine determinism (the idea that God ordains everything, including every sin, every false belief, and every instance of unbelief) creates downstream problems:
The “mystery” card gets overplayed here. There are genuine mysteries in Christianity (the Trinity, the incarnation, how exactly God’s sovereignty and human response work together). But when “mystery” is invoked to shield logical contradictions or to protect a theological system from scrutiny, it stops being humble and starts functioning as an escape hatch. Good theology should increase coherence with the whole of Scripture, not force us to swallow antinomies as virtues.
On “Different Gospel” and Heresy Language
Your nuance is helpful: you’re not writing off Calvinists as non-Christians, but you see the system as distorting. That’s a fair posture. Many strong Calvinists love Jesus, trust the Bible, and show real fruit. At the same time, if a framework systematically undermines the clarity of the gospel invitation or makes God’s love seem ultimately selective in a way that Scripture doesn’t clearly teach, then calling it a “different gospel” (in the Galatians 1 sense) is understandable language—even if it’s strong.
The early church condemned certain Christological and Trinitarian errors as heresy while still hoping many who held them were confused rather than malicious. Your distinction between the theology being “rightly a heresy” while the people may not be full “heretics” in the damning sense tracks with that.
Bottom Line
Your approach—studying it as an apologetic issue defending God’s character, the reliability of Scripture, and basic logic—is healthy. Calvinism has serious strengths (high view of God’s glory, seriousness about sin, robust sovereignty), but the exhaustive determinism + two-wills package does introduce real costs to divine simplicity, the unity of God’s character as love, and the straightforward reading of many gospel texts.
Keep pressing on the “God is love” foundation. It should be the controlling lens, not subordinated to a particular philosophical reading of sovereignty. If a system requires us to accept that God’s love for the non-elect is qualitatively different from His love for the elect in a way that includes ordaining their damnation, then we should test that rigorously against the whole counsel of Scripture rather than waving it off as mystery.
Would you like help sharpening any particular part of this for future videos or discussions?
[….]
“Yeah, your video transcript captures the core tension very well. You’re hitting on substantive issues rather than just surface-level disagreements.
The two wills doctrine is the biggest flashpoint here. When applied to salvation, it creates exactly the kind of internal division you describe: God wills that all people be saved, yet He also wills to withhold the irresistible grace that would actually save them, effectively ordaining their eternal rejection.
This does strain divine simplicity. If God is not divided, and God is love is not a secondary attribute, then having two opposing volitions on the same object at the same time starts to feel like splitting God’s will against itself.
You’re right that exhaustive divine determinism creates downstream problems for God’s character, the genuineness of the gospel invitation, and how we even trust our reasoning when we come to Scripture.
The mystery card gets overplayed here. There are genuine mysteries in Christianity, but when mystery is invoked to shield logical contradictions, it stops being humble and starts functioning as an escape hatch.
Your nuance is helpful, you’re not writing off Calvinists as non-Christians, but you see the system as distorting. That’s a fair posture.
(NOTE: All graphics are linked to articles by artist or their website.)
After an entire year of studies so far, many more to go, I have come to the conclusion that Calvinism teaches a different Gospel. In fact, Calvinism destroys the Gospel and makes good news into anything but.
Among other things TULIP / Calvinist Reformational thinking distorts or undermines:
The biggest issue however, that got me thinking differently on this issue a year ago was an article by Albert Mohler.
Here is the full Al Mohler article: “So… Why Did I Write This? The Delusion of Determinism“
The subversion of moral responsibility is one of the most significant developments of recent decades. Though this subversion was originally philosophical, more recent efforts have been based in biology and psychology. Various theorists have argued that our decisions and actions are determined by genetics, environmental factors, or other forces. Now, Scientific American is out with a report on a study linking determinism and moral responsibility.
The diverse theories of determinism propose that our choices and decisions are not an exercise of the will, but simply the inevitable outcome of factors outside our control. As Scientific American explains, determinists argue that “everything that happens is determined by what happened before — our actions are inevitable consequences of the events leading up to the action.”
In other words, free will doesn’t exist. Used in this sense, free will means the exercise of authentic moral choice and agency. We choose to take one action rather than the other, and must then take responsibility for that choice.
This link between moral choice and moral responsibility is virtually instinctive to humans. As a matter of fact, it is basic to our understanding of what it means to be human. We hold each other responsible for actions and choices. But if all of our choices are illusory — and everything is merely the “inevitable consequence” of something beyond our control, moral responsibility is an exercise in delusion.
Scientific American reports on a study performed by psychologists Kathleen Vohs and Jonathan Schooler. The psychologists found that individuals who were told that their moral choices were determined, rather than free, were also more likely to cheat on an experimental examination.
As Shaun Nichols reports:
The Western conception idea of free will seems bound up with our sense of moral responsibility, guilt for misdeads and pride in accomplishment. We hold ourselves responsible precisely when we think that our actions come from free will. In this light, it’s not surprising that people behave less morally as they become skeptical of free will. Further, the Vohs and Schooler result fits with the idea that people will behave less responsibly if they regard their actions as beyond their control. If I think that there’s no point in trying to be good, then I’m less likely to try.
Even if giving up on free will does have these deleterious effects, one might wonder how far they go. One question is whether the effects extend across the moral domain. Cheating in a psychology experiment doesn’t seem too terrible. Presumably the experiment didn’t also lead to a rash of criminal activity among those who read the anti-free will passage. Our moral revulsion at killing and hurting others is likely too strong to be dismantled by reflections about determinism. It might well turn out that other kinds of immoral behavior, like cheating in school, would be affected by the rejection of free will, however.
There are limitations to this kind of research, of course, but the report is both revealing and unsurprising. If we are not responsible for our actions, they why would people do the right thing? The most immediate result of such thinking is the subversion of moral accountability.
Of course, this pattern of thought also renders human existence irrational. How can we understand ourselves, our children, our spouses, our friends, or our neighbors if moral responsibility is undermined by determinism. Our legal system would completely collapse, as would the entire experience of relating to other human beings.
Shaun Nichols explains that “the Western conception of free will seems bound up with our sense of moral responsibility.” That “Western conception” is a product of the Christian inheritance and the biblical worldview. The Bible clearly presents human beings as morally responsible. Christians of virtually all theological traditions — including Reformed theology, Arminianism, and Catholicism — affirm moral and spiritual responsibility and the authenticity of the experience of choice.
As a matter of fact, this capacity and accountability is rooted in the biblical concept of the imago Dei — the image of God. Our Creator made us as moral creatures and planted within us the capacity of conscience. All this refutes the concept of moral determinism.
In its most modern forms, determinism is a product of naturalism — the belief that everything must be explained in purely natural terms. Naturalism explains the human mind (including the experience of moral choice) as a matter of chemical reactions in the brain, and nothing more.
Determinism is implied by naturalism and relieves human beings of moral responsibility. There is no moral revolt against the Creator, no Fall, and no need for the Gospel. This subversion of moral responsibility is both a delusion and a trap. And, as the Scientific American report indicates, even those who say they believe in moral determinism are unable to live consistently with this assumption. We know we are responsible.
If Mohler applies that to his own theological determinism, he would have to reject it. More here: Why Both Atheists and Christians Need to Believe in Free Will. It is this “Exhaustive Divine Determination [EDD]”, or theistic determinism, that really got me studying the issue. Because Calvinist apologists show the self-refuting nature of it when dissecting atheism, but they do not apply it to their determinism.
The implications of strict naturalism are grim or even counterintuitive. For example, Bertrand Russell affirmed that any philosophy hoping to stand must ultimately take for granted the (naturalistic) picture of unguided causes and accidental collocations of atoms and must be built on the “firm foundation of unyielding despair.” When it comes to naturalism’s implications for morality, naturalist Kai Nielsen contends that reason can’t bring us to morality; this picture ”is not a pleasant one,” and that reflecting on it ”depresses me.” When it comes to consciousness, naturalist Daniel Dennett considers it an illusion- -something fellow-atheist Thomas Nagel finds utterly confused:
Jaegwon Kim acknowledges the stark picture painted by the naturalistic brush. Naturalism is ”imperialistic; it demands ‘full coverage’ … and exacts a terribly high ontological price.”
Paul Copan and Charles Taliaferro (editors), The Naturalness of Belief: New Essays on Theism’s Rationality (New York, NY: Lexington Books, 2019), viii
Let me restate that last sentence:
Yep.
What are some of the imperialism in theistic determinism? Here is one:
And there is more:
The Origin of Evil… Calvinist’s Say God, Same as the Atheist
John Piper’s Theistic “Dust Particle” Determinism (Soto 101)
Is God the “devil” Behind Satan? | The Redundancy Argument (TRA)
Calvinism: God Meticulously Controls Everything | even this post
However, one of the best dealing with the topic can be found in in the book “Calvin’s Desperation: How John Calvin’s Unbiblical Divine Determinism Destroys the Credibility of the Christian Faith“
This video and the following chapter deal with another aspect of why this “new Calvinism” [really it’s old] is really a degradation of God’s character and trustworthiness. The below is an excerpt of the end of a longer video found over at IDOL KILLER. Here is that videos description:
Author, speaker, debater and self-confessed trouble-maker Phil Bair joins Idol Killer to discuss how to destroy Christian credibility. We discuss the various ways in which Theistic Determinism destroys God’s righteousness, human knowledge, and helps atheists justifiably reject Christian theism. We note how Theistic Determinism is not only in opposition to the Bible, but any reasonable world view and thus should be rejected.
Here is the chapter Phil Bair mentioned in the above video:
I referred earlier to the possibility of whether God can be divided within himself. Calvin is keenly aware of the problem that if God wills that which he condemns, he is indeed a divided being, and worse, is in conflict with himself. Calvin attempts to deal with this objection:
Their first objection—that if nothing happens without the will of God, he must have two contrary wills, decreeing by a secret counsel what he has openly forbidden in his law—is easily disposed of.[246]
How does he “easily dispose of” this objection? Like this:
Still, however, the will of God is not at variance with itself. It undergoes no change. He makes no pretense of not willing what he wills, but while in himself the will is one and undivided, to us it appears manifold, because, from the feebleness of our intellect, we cannot comprehend how, though after a different manner, he wills and wills not the very same thing. Paul terms the calling of the Gentiles a hidden mystery, and shortly after adds, that therein was manifested the manifold wisdom of God (Eph. 3:10). Since, on account of the dullness of our sense, the wisdom of God seems manifold (or, as an old interpreter rendered it, multiform), are we, therefore, to dream of some variation in God, as if he either changed his counsel, or disagreed with himself?[247]
I have observed how Calvin expresses the contradictory postures he attributes to God. For example:
The two propositions above are indisputably contradictory. Now, Calvin claims that the will of God is not at variance with itself. His will is “one and undivided.” It only “appears manifold” to us. But Calvin affirms both of the above propositions. Therefore he absolutely affirms that the will of God is at variance with itself despite his prior denial of the idea. The only way it isn’t is to define God’s will differently between the two propositions. Calvin alludes to this when he says, “we cannot comprehend how, though after a different manner, he wills and wills not the very same thing.” Note the phrase “though after a different manner.” The obvious question is, how are the two “wills” different? If they are “after a different manner,” how does Calvin explain the two kinds of will, and how does he support that explanation? He doesn’t. Instead, he takes a hard left turn that we would never expect from a dignified biblical scholar. Since he denies that the will of God is “multiform” or “manifold,” and tells us that this perception on our part is due to the “feebleness of our intellect,” he has to explain how there aren’t multiple wills that “disagree with himself.”
But for the moment let’s give him the benefit of the doubt. Let’s assume that the word “will” means something different between the two sides of the dilemma. What alternate definition of will might we apply to one or the other? Consider the first proposition 1 quoted above. It’s God’s will that all come to repentance. How do we justify the term will? Acts 17:30 is where it comes from. That verse reads:
In the past God overlooked such ignorance, but now he commands all people everywhere to repent.
So God commands all people everywhere to repent. If God commands something, is it not his will that the command is obeyed? Is this not intuitively obvious and clear to reason?
Consider the captain of a sea-going vessel. The captain issues a command for the first mate to set a course for the mainland. It’s the captain’s will that the first mate obey that command. But what if the first mate doesn’t obey? It would be a valid observation that the first mate did not do the will of his captain. Would it ever be the captain’s will that the first mate disobey his command? Not in this sense of the word. The captain has what we could call “sovereignty” over the crew. And in that sense, the word sovereignty means authority.[248] If the first mate disobeys the captain’s will (expressed by his commands), he has rebelled against the captain’s authority, and thus against his sovereignty.
In this case, the captain’s will does not causally determine the decisions and actions of the crew. But if the crew disobeys the captain’s will, there will be consequences. Why? Because the captain has the authority to impose those consequences on the disobedient.
Now consider an inventor who builds a ship and a dozen or so robots having the ability to be its pilots. Now suppose that the inventor puts on a captain’s uniform and issues a verbal command to the robot he designated as the first mate. The robot cannot “obey” the captain’s command. Obedience implies will, something a robot does not have. The robot will simply respond to the captain’s command because the captain programmed the robot in such a way that it will execute the captain’s orders and cannot do otherwise (assuming the captain’s engineering is flawless).
In the second case, the will of the captain is causal rather than authoritative. The robot will execute the captain’s command not because it chooses to obey, but because it is programmed that way. The captain could still be said to have “sovereignty” over the robots, but the meaning of the term would not be the same as it was in the first analogy. In this case, rather than authority or lordship, sovereignty means causality. The will of the captain is now the cause of everything the robots do, and in fact, the cause of everything that happens on the automated ship.
Do either of these definitions of will sound familiar? Recall Calvin’s fundamental axiom: the will of God is the sole determining cause of all things. Which of the definitions of will is he referring to? The second, obviously. Since Calvin, as I have frequently observed, routinely identifies God’s will as the cause of all things, does he have the luxury of using the term “God’s will” in the first sense? If God’s will is something that can be disobeyed, it cannot be causal; it must be authoritative. But Calvin rules this out. If a creature is able to disobey God’s will, only two possibilities exist: either the creature has a functioning will that can cause something (namely, the disobedience), or the creature is only doing what God has programmed it to do. And since for Calvin God’s will is the sole cause of all things, the first option must be discarded. This is because Calvin asks the rhetorical question “are we, therefore, to dream of some variation in God, as if he either changed his counsel, or disagreed with himself?”[249] To say we could only “dream of” such a variation seals off all exit routes and guarantees there is no “variation” in God’s will.
Where does this leave us? For Calvin, there can only be one kind of God’s will. That would be the causal kind. What does that do to Calvin’s phrase “though after a different manner?” It obliterates it. So he cannot invoke the idea of God’s will working itself out in a “different manner” since for Calvin there is only one species of God’s will: the causal one. This means that for Calvin, the phrase “he wills and wills not the very same thing” cannot be after a different manner but after the same manner, whether he realizes it or can face it or not. What does this mean? It means that Calvin’s conclusion that God “wills and wills not the very same thin, certified indisputable contradiction.
This is the only way Calvin can say that “the will of God is not at varia with itself.” Notice this refers to the “will” (singular) of God, not being variance “with itself” (singular). Calvin believes, and has always believe that there is only one version of God’s will—the causal one. This is the only kind he can deal with. Any other kind introduces the potential condition that God’s will is not the sole cause of all things, and for Cal vi this is too terrifying to conceive. So even the possibility that we could come up with more varieties of God’s will does not solve the problem. if they are not causal, they have to be ruled out. If they are causal, in terms of their outcomes they are ultimately no different from the first variety.
Now Calvin has a serious problem. He denies what he implies in various places: that there is a secret counsel in God’s will that is beyond the reach of human intellect where he wills that which he condemns. There is no such secret counsel. For if indeed the thesis that “the will of God is not at variance with itself” is true, God’s will must be uniform and undivided.
To put it another way, Calvin has two options:
The first option is unreasonable and unacceptable. Why? Because it would mean Calvin is wrong when he says God’s will is not at variance with itself. Calvin can’t admit he’s wrong here or his entire deterministic narrative collapses.
This means Calvin must accept the second option. (There is no third option because of the law of excluded middle.) But accepting the second option means affirming various pairs of propositions that contradict each other. As soon as he writes the words “God’s will is not at variance with itself when he wills and wills not the very same thing,” he is suddenly painfully aware that he has fallen into a trap of his own making. How does he deal with this logical train wreck?
It doesn’t take long to realize that at this point, Calvin has become desperate. He has no choice but to accept a glaring contradiction he can’t pretend isn’t there. His entire ideology has led up to this climax, even though he deals with it in the middle of his Institutes. That doesn’t matter. Two opposing locomotives of thought have been carrying him along the tracks of his thinking and brought him to a point where their hundreds of tons of steel are now fiercely racing toward each other at breakneck speed on the same track. This impending calamity haunts Calvin, knowing that what he is looking at is like the nightmare of an unstoppable force meeting an immovable object. Sooner or later there will be a violent earth-shaking collision. It is only a matter of time.
There is an episode in the original Star Trek series (1966) where Mr. Spock, the champion of logic who has completely suppressed all emotion and passion, finds himself in an impossible situation. He is the pilot of a shuttle craft that has just lifted off to escape a hostile planet. They are in orbit—for now. There is a small handful of passengers On board, all of which know they are doomed. For you see, the ship’s fuel supply is almost gone, the orbit is decaying, and help is nowhere in sight. The situation is hopeless. So Spock makes a decision that defies logic, and the members of the crew are stunned at his irrationality. He jettisons the fuel and ignites it, causing a long luminous trail of burning plasma shooting out of the rear of the shuttle craft. Now they are out of fuel—completely. The shuttle plunges into the atmosphere and begins to incinerate. The cabin fills with toxic smoke and the occupants are choking on it. The dialogue at that moment goes like this:
Doctor McCoy: It may be the last action you’ll ever take, Mister Spock, but it was all human.
Spock: Totally illogical. There was no chance.
McCoy: That’s exactly what I mean.
At the last minute, they are transported out of the shuttle craft and aboard the Enterprise just in the nick of time, where Captain Kirk eventually queries Mr. Spock on the rationale behind his decision:
Kirk: I don’t understand all this, and maybe you can explain, logically of course. When you jettisoned the fuel and ignited it, you knew there was virtually no chance of being seen, and yet you did it anyhow. And that would seem to me to be an act of desperation.
Spock: Quite correct, Captain.
Kirk: Now we all know, and I’m sure the doctor would agree with me, that desperation is a highly emotional state of mind. How does your well-known logic explain that?
Spock: Quite simply, Captain. I examined the problem from all angles, and it was plainly hopeless. Logic informed me that under the circumstances, the only possible action would have to be one of desperation. Logical decision, logically arrived at.
Kirk: Aha. You mean you reasoned that it was time for an emotional outburst.
Spock: Well, I wouldn’t put it in exactly those terms, Captain, but those are essentially the facts.
Kirk: You’re not going to admit that for the first time in your life you committed a purely human, emotional act?
Spock: No, sir.
Kirk: Mr. Spock, you’re a stubborn man.
Spock: Yes, sir.[251]
When you combine desperation with stubbornness, it does not end well. You make decisions that baffle your colleagues (or should), and those who see clearly what is really going on lose all remaining respect they ever had for you. In the Star Trek story, the shuttle craft crew is rescued just before their time runs out. There is no such happy ending for Calvin, who will stubbornly cling to his deterministic ideology until it blasts him into catastrophic rational oblivion. His orbit is definitely decaying, and there is no chance of a rescue. He will never give up his self-inflicted deterministic ruin, because he sincerely believes that to do so will rupture his faulty concept of God’s sovereignty.
Calvin is projecting his own insecurity on God himself, and God does not come off very well as a result. Calvin cannot live with the damage he thinks human libertarian free will inflicts on God’s sovereignty. But neither can he live with the loss of God’s righteousness. He therefore denies that God’s goodness dies of a thousand cuts from how he directly perpetrates the multitudes of evil choices and actions of man. But the only way to deny this is to abandon rationality itself and push the issue into the obfuscating obscurity of the “secret counsel” of God. Calvin must either divide God’s will in two, or divide God’s mind in two. Those are the only choices left, and the first one is unthinkable since it incinerates The Precious: Calvin’s unrelenting deterministic worldview. The following is the ultimate expression of Calvin’s overwhelming desperation:
Nay, when we cannot comprehend how God can will that to be done which he forbids us to do, let us call to mind our imbecility, and remember that the light in which he dwells is not without cause termed inaccessible (1 Tim. 6:16), because shrouded in darkness.[252]
This is the point where the two locomotives of God’s will have their ear-bleeding crash. How can God will (i.e. cause) to be done that which he forbids us to do? Multiple scholars and thinkers have attempted to reconcile these contradictory trains of thought, and many still believe this is possible. But Calvin knew beyond any doubt that they couldn’t. If they could, he would not have had to resort to his irrational desperate maneuver of running away[253] and hiding behind “our imbecility.” This is the only option left, and no one knows this better than Calvin.
As I have already said, there are some “reformed” theologians who will tell us that the solution to the problem is quite simple: there are two aspects of God’s will—his decretive will and his preceptive (or prescriptive) will. But if this was such an obvious and simple solution, why didn’t Calvin ultimately invoke it? It would have saved him one horrific train wreck. As we saw before, Calvin tried, but knew it doesn’t work, which is why he had to resort to such desperate measures. If it worked, he would have adopted it as his grand solution, and presto: problem solved. After all, appealing to two aspects of God’s will is quite easy, and presumably removes the necessity to drag our “imbecility” into the formula to solve the problem. But no. Lest we forget, he, like the preponderance of the “reformed” theologians following in his footsteps, is a determinist. There is nothing more central and all-encompassing in his theology than exhaustive divine determinism. It looms over the entire landscape of his thinking like a solar eclipse. If there’s such a thing as man’s libertarian free will, it has the capacity to be causal, and Calvin loses his mind. The appeal to mystery, which is ultimately what Calvin did, and ultimately what his disciples who truly understand the dilemma do, would not be necessary if the contradiction was not real. Since it is unquestionably real, the “solution” mentioned above is no solution at all. It’s nothing more than a theological game all self-respecting theologians should refuse to play.
To review and recap to settle the matter once and for all, if there’s a separate aspect of God’s will one could call preceptive or prescriptive (as opposed to decretive), the possibility that man could obey it or disobey it based on his own volition suddenly appears on the radar, and Calvin has no choice but to hunt it down and torpedo it. Why? Because it introduces additional causality, and therefore blunts God’s causal sovereignty in the caverns of Calvin’s calculus. Even if a case could be made for the “preceptive” will of God, it must also be causal in order to satisfy the demands of determinism. If it’s not causal, but something that can be obeyed or disobeyed by free agents other than God, something could be “left to fortune” and the world “moves at random,” which causes Calvin’s head to explode. It must therefore be sacrificed to the pagan god EDD, lest it get in the way of Calvin’s desperate maneuver and what
subsequently has become a tragically deformed theology.
That Calvin himself ultimately rejected the possibility that there actually are two species of God’s will is decisively settled by reference to his commentary on Matthew:
if it be objected, that it is absurd to suppose the existence of two wills in God, I reply, we fully believe that his will is simple and one; but as our minds do not fathom the deep abyss of secret election, in accommodation to the capacity of our weakness, the will of God is exhibited to us in two ways.[254]
This excerpt from Calvin’s commentary puts the final seal on the issue: God’s will is “simple and one.” It is not divided, and this ontological split of God’s will into two different halves is a myth. It only seems to us that there are “two wills in God.” It is the same will “exhibited to us in two ways” because “our minds do not fathom the deep abyss of secret election” (a restatement of his never-ending fallacy of begging the question).
But suppose we ignore for the moment Calvin’s indisputable affirmation that God’s will is unquestionably simple and one, and that the concept of two versions of God’s will is a fable. If the preceptive will of God is not causal, the decretive will of God, as I stated earlier, still remains the sole determining cause of all things, including the fact of man’s disobedience to God’s moral and soteriological imperatives. In other words, God’s decretive will is directly and unalterably causing man’s disobedience to his “preceptive will,” removing man from the whole equation entirely. So again, adding an additional species of God’s will changes nothing. And if the preceptive will is causal, we are right back where we started—the entire effort to differentiate between the two is futile, and the rational dilemma remains. Therefore the paltry attempt to split God’s will in half like this is a dead end. Calvin would rather take the option of trashing reason than allow his deterministic ideology to disintegrate as he stares down the barrel of a devastating contradiction.
But how valid is this option? Recall my earlier treatment of the cognitive barrier. We saw that the border between God’s intellect and man’s does not lie along the contours of the laws of logic, but between the limits of man’s comprehension and God’s infinite wisdom. But what Calvin is attempting here is to say that God can reconcile a hard logical contradiction behind the curtain of his “inaccessible” intellect ‑- inaccessible because it is “shrouded in darkness.”[255] This means that Calvin rejects the idea that the cognitive barrier is not located where the laws of logic prevail. He thinks logic is the very locus of the cognitive barrier. Beyond the barrier, God can violate the laws of logic to his heart’s content, expressing the agenda of his dark irrational alter ego lurking somewhere in the godhead, ready to burst into the light whenever some confused theologian somewhere feels the need to embrace abject imbecility.
If we recall the discussion of what happens if God or creation can vitiate rationality, I said there was a reason for bringing it up. If there is a part of God’s mind that can circumvent the laws of logic, the door is open to all sorts of contradictions of the central principles of the nature of reality, the relationship between God and creation, and the reliability of revelation. By embracing the concept of God’s dual mental cavities where one is rational and the other is anti-rational, Calvin has opened this door, and released a panoply of disasters from which there is no recovery. Once this door is open, it can never be closed. The entire superstructure of Christian theism completely breaks down.
Most criminals are desperate, and Calvin’s desperation has driven him to commit the perfect rational crime. He breaks the laws of logic by affirming two contradictory propositions, and demands that God cover for him—giving him a bullet-proof alibi: we puny humans are just too stupid to understand how these contradictory propositions can all be true. But God is so brilliant that he can resolve the unresolvable conundrum on Calvin’s behalf. And since the solution God is expected to provide to bail Calvin out of logic jail is allegedly beyond the cognitive barrier, Calvin doesn’t even have to explain how it works. It’s God’s problem now—if you have an objection, talk to him. Of course, if you do, based on Calvin’s misplacement of the boundaries of the cognitive barrier, no one can guarantee which of the divine schizophrenic personalities you’ll be addressing. In this context, Calvin has just removed himself from the category of serious biblical scholar and his move toward a disappointing form of anti-intellectualism is complete.
But desperate times call for desperate measures. I have seen a similar pattern where some theologians (who consider themselves “reformed”) embrace a bewildering array of irrational and mutually contradictory positions that reveal a disturbing trend that is emblematic of a growing contempt for sound philosophical principles within the orbit of hermeneutics and exegesis. What the Body of Christ needs right now is a renewed recognition that the Word of God is never philosophically inept, the protests of certain anti-philosophical debating opponents notwithstanding. / would strongly suggest that there are some aspects of what is called “reformed” theology that are in dire need of reform. To take what is irrational and correct its incoherent errors is one of the highest expressions of reform we can achieve. I must also restate the fundamental principle I articulated earlier in this volume: anything that violates basic rationality by affirming two contradictory propositions is automatically at war with God’s divine Logos.
In his book The God Who Is There, Francis Schaeffer defends his fundamental thesis that the current gap between the generations is caused by a shift in the concept of truth.[256] Prior to the advent of the gap, almost everyone in our society remained loyal to the law of non-contradiction: that A cannot be non-A at the same time in the same way. But since then, the concept of truth has undergone a fundamental transformation. This is partly due to the influence of the dialectic methodology[257] for arriving at what’s true and false—an approach that finds its roots in the ideas of German philosopher GWF Hegel. Hegel influenced Karl Marx, who influenced the West—and especially the modern-day West—to the point where truth and rationality have become so severely weakened that they have almost reached the point of extinction.
On its face, it is difficult to comprehend the widespread popularity of John Calvin’s incoherent deterministic philosophy. I believe the deterioration of the concept of truth in the West that Schaeffer articulated could be a significant part of the answer. How else can we account for the propensity of so many people of faith to swallow the self‑
contradictory sophistry of Calvinism? If truth is no longer truth in the classical sense, the abandonment of the very categories of true and false is not far behind. I am not suggesting that Calvin was influenced by this shift—it occurred long after he departed this vale of tears. He didn’t accept his contradictions because of the modern erosion of the concept of truth. He accepted them for a different reason: misguided as he was, he sincerely believed God could clean up his reckless logical wet spill with divine brute force and mystery. But this recent emergence of postmodernism could easily be part of the reason why his self-contradictory doctrines find so much sympathy in today’s world. For Calvin, to squander the rules of inference grounded in the divine mind can be justified by appealing to the “secret counsel” of God—which here means cheating while no one is looking. For too many souls in our century, it’s not even called cheating any more.
FOOTNOTES
[245] Jeremy A. Evans, Whosoever Will, 266.
[246] Calvin, Institutes, Book 1, Chapter 18, Section 3, Paragraph 2.
[247] Ibid.
[248] Or lordship.
[249] Calvin, Institutes, Book 1, Chapter 18, Section 3, Paragraph 2.
[250] There may be a temptation to challenge this narrative by saying God occasionally commands his people to kill other human beings within the context of God’s judgment against them. But this is not an example of murder. It is therefore irrelevant to the present discussion.
[251] Star Trek, The Galileo Seven (1967).
[252] Calvin, Institutes, Book 1, Chapter 18, Section 3, Paragraph 2, emphasis mine.
[253] Calvin’s maneuver is a sad reminder of the strategy of the cowardly knights in Monty Python and the Holy Grail: “RUN AWAY!”
[254] John Calvin, Commentary on Matthew, 631.
[255] And all along we’ve been led to believe that God is light, and in him there is no darkness at all (1 John 1:5).
[256] Francis Schaeffer, The Cod Who Is There, 33.
[257] The Socratic Method is often referred to in the literature as the “dialectic method.” This is not what I am referring to here.
Calvinism makes the Word of God null and void through this determinism:
I worked with CHATGPT to redesign this next “Calvinist Toon”
This next section is from Ronnie W. Rogers, Reflections of a Disenchanted Calvinist: The Disquieting Realities of Calvinism (Bloomington, IL: WestBow Press, 2016), 86-97. [Chpt 13, “Preaching of the Gospel” | PDF]
As a pastor, I am intensely concerned with what is included in preaching of the gospel. I realize that all Christians are concerned, and rightly so, but because I do this week in and week out, it is of utmost importance not only to understand the gospel, but to articulate the gospel message in such a way that it clearly reflects what the Scripture teaches and what I believe. I offer the following to elucidate my understanding of the call to preach the gospel.
The means of this grace enablement include but are not limited to: Gods’ salvific love for all (John 3:16), God’s manifestation of His power so that all may know He is the Sovereign (Isaiah 45:21-22) and Creator (Romans 1:18-20), which assures that everyone has opportunity to know about Him. Christ paying for all sins (John 1:29), conviction of the Holy Spirit (John 16:7-11), working of the Holy Spirit (Hebrews 6:1-6), enlightening of the Son (John 1:9), God’s teaching (John 6:4S), God opening hearts (Acts 16:14), and the power of the gospel (Romans 1:16), without such redemptive grace, no one seeks or comes to God (Romans 3:11). Further, I believe that man, because of these gracious provisions and workings of God, can choose to seek and find God (Jeremiah 29:13; Acts 17:11-12). Moreover, no one can come to God without God drawing (John 6:44), and that God is drawing all men, individuals (John 12:32). The same Greek word for draw, helkuo, is used in both verses.” About 115 passages condition salvation on believing alone, and about 35 simply on faith.”[96]Other grace enablements may include providential workings in and through other people, situations, and timing or circumstances that are a part of grace to provide an opportunity for every individual to choose to follow Christ.
John Piper asked the question, “What message would missionaries rather take than the message: Be glad in God! Rejoice in God! Sing for joy in God! …God loves to exalt himself by showing mercy to sinners.”[97] My answer to this question, the truth that when anyone hears this glorious message, is that same someone has a chance, by the grace and mercy of God, to receive the truth of the message by faith. Further, without opportunity for all sinners to accept, that message should be changed to say, “some can be glad in God if He predestined you” or “God loves to exalt Himself by showing mercy to some sinners.” This is the actual message of Calvinism, a disquieting reality, and I would appreciate their due diligence always to make that clear.
I affirm that a truly good faith offer seems to necessitate a willingness to tell a person that Christ died for them. For example, Paul said to the Corinthians, “For I delivered to you as of first importance what I also received, that Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures” (1 Corinthians 15:1-3). Thus, he told them Christ died for “our” sins when they were lost. Peter preached to the Jews saying, “For you first, God raised up His Servant and sent Him to bless you by turning every one of you from your wicked ways” (Acts 3:26). The blessing is the “turning every one of you from your wicked ways,” i.e. salvation. Notice that the blessing is not corporate—Israel—but for “every one” who turns from wickedness, which clearly implies that they can and should. In addition, our Lord said concerning His blood, “And in the same way He took the cup after they had eaten, saying, ‘This cup which is poured out for you is the new covenant in My blood” (Luke 22:20, italics added). When He said that, Judas was sitting there, verse 21.
Commenting on Acts 3:26, John MacArthur says, “All the rich blessings of salvation and all the covenant promises were available. Peter’s hearers could only obtain them, however, by turning from their wicked ways. Repentance was the key that unlocked everything. Peter had clearly shown that the claims of Jesus were consistent with Old Testament prophecy, so that it was a compelling case for his hearers to respond in repentance and belief Tragically, most of Peter’s audience refused to repent. Like their fathers before them, they hardened their hearts and failed to enter God’s rest (Hebrews 3:8; 4:3). As a result, within the lifetime of many in the audience the nation would be destroyed. And those who refused to turn from their sins would find themselves ‘cast out into the outer darkness’ (Matthew 8:12), where they will `pay the penalty of eternal destruction, away from the presence of the Lord and from the glory of His power’ (2 Thessalonians 1:9). Such a fate awaits all those in every age and place who refuse to repent and receive God’s gracious offer of salvation in Jesus Christ.”[98] (italics added)
Now I unconditionally agree with MacArthur’s explanation of this verse; however, his Calvinism turns the otherwise precise interpretation of this verse into double-talk. His comments give every appearance that he believes that, as this Scripture clearly teaches, “All the rich blessings of Salvation…were available” and these could and should repent, but they did not because “[they] refused to repent …. [and] they hardened their hearts.” He deems their refusal to be a tragedy.
From a non-Calvinist interpretation, it is indeed an eternal tragedy, but from a Calvinist perspective, it is not. Because according to Calvinism’s unconditional election, irresistible selective regeneration, and monergistic salvation, their non-repentance was exactly what God desired and predetermined that they could only do; they will spend eternity in torment, as He also desired. They will serve as predetermined monuments of His wrath. Furthermore, they did not refuse to repent, in any sense of being able to have chosen to do otherwise. As an incontrovertible fact of Calvinism, they did the only thing they could do; thereby proving they were not the elect. Moreover, everyone of God’s elect who heard this was selectively regenerated against his will so that he would unavoidably believe in the Messiah. From his Calvinism, there can be nothing tragic about this event, for everything went according to God’s plan, a disquieting reality, whereas, from a non-Calvinist perspective, it is tragic indeed, and heart wrenchingly so. For they have truly rejected “the rich blessings of salvation” which God had made available through grace-enabled faith.
Calvinism is not devoid of passion for seeing the lost come to Christ. Nevertheless, if logic prevails, it is only a vertical passion. That is to say, it is a passion to carry out the mandate of God, to be used by God to gather His elect. It cannot be a Holy Spirit led horizontal passion, which is a burden, love and hurt for all of the lost of the world, or even each particular individual, to come to know Christ. For God, according to Calvinism, does not even have such passion. A consistent Calvinist’s passion is not actually toward the individual but always toward God, which some Calvinists would revel in as vindicating Calvinism; however, that is only true if the Scripture supports such, and I do not think it does. Further, if Calvinism is true, unless the Calvinist knows that God has truly drawn him to one of His elect—which seems impossible to objectively know—the Calvinist needs to refuse to give in to horizontal passion because it can only be mere human sentiment or satanic influence, both of which would actually be contrary to God’s passion.
Paul clearly had a vertical passion for God, but equally clear was his horizontal passion for the lost. He said, “I am telling the truth in Christ, I am not lying, my conscience testifies with me in the Holy Spirit, that I have great sorrow and unceasing grief in my heart. For I could wish that I myself were accursed, separated from Christ for the sake of my brethren, my kinsmen according to the flesh, who are Israelites” (Romans 9:1-4a).
Paul’s passion for his fellow Jews who were rejecting Christ and therefore headed for hell was inconsolable. Although he knew that he could not relinquish his salvation, and even if he did that would not cause others to receive salvation, he did actually love them so deeply and hurt so profoundly for them that he would have surrendered his own salvation and home in heaven for an eternity in the hollows of hell for their sake. This is truly the love of God ( John 3:16) and of Jesus who died willingly for all (John 1:29). Paul’s love for his lost countrymen was of the sacrificial quality that is seen in God who loved the fallen and rebellious human race and therefore, “He who did not spare His own Son, but delivered Him over for us all (Romans 8:32). It is seen in Jesus “who gave Himself as a ransom for all” (1 Timothy 2:6), and therefore sacrificed everything that was rightfully His for this same undeserving humanity. And it is seen in Paul in that he would willingly give up the greatest love and future ever known for his countrymen.
This kind of passion and desire for the lost is exceedingly convicting and constantly challenges me to unreservedly disdain and resist excusing my own jejune love for the lost. Of course, if God has elected only some of the Jews for whom Paul so passionately grieved, then Paul’s passion and burden seem at best nothing more than a misdirected human sentimentalism that is quite contrary to the heart and love of God; possibly even the sin of arrogance. For how can Paul be led by the Holy Spirit who, according to Calvinism, cares not one whit about the final destiny of some of those Paul is so deeply concerned about.
Calvinism’s passion cannot logically, being consistent with Calvinism, be toward the lost in the same way as the simple reading of the Scripture conveys God’s, Christ’s, Paul’s or others’ passion toward all, each person, the lost of the world. If a Calvinist is so disposed, it is an inconsistency with Calvinism rather than a corollary of Calvinism. This is a disquieting reality. As a Calvinist, I would have denied—double-talked my way out of—the truthfulness of this conclusion, but as a disenchanted Calvinist, its undeniableness is indubitable.
This is not to say that Calvinists do not claim to be justified in having passion for the lost and a sense of urgency in reaching them. Regarding God’s secret will to deliver some by unconditional election, J.I. Packer says, “But this does not help us to determine the nature of the evangelistic task, nor does it affect our duty to evangelize universally and indiscriminately. The doctrine of God’s sovereignty in grace has no bearing on these things.” [99] (italics added)
The proposition that either God loves every individual and grace enables each person with an opportunity to receive forgiveness or that God only loves some enough to unconditionally elect them to salvation and loves the rest of the world to hell, and then saying that this has “no bearing” on evangelism is the apotheosis of double-talk. Furthermore, “indiscriminately” intimating or telling people that God loves them and desires for them to be saved is not a message sanctioned by God, according to Calvinism, since He does not so love everyone. They may well seek to justify their doing so, but they cannot claim that God is leading them to do so.
With regard to urgency, Packer says, “the belief that God is sovereign in grace does not affect the urgency of evangelism …. And we who are Christ’s are sent to tell them of the One—the only One—who can save them from perishing. Is not their need urgent? …. If you knew that a man was asleep in a blazing building, you would think it a matter of urgency to try and get to him, and wake him up, and bring him out. The world is full of people who are unaware that they stand under the wrath of God: is it not similarly a matter of urgency that we should go to them, and try to arouse them, and show them the way of escape?”[100]
My heart is truly saddened each time I read such double-talk. First, if truth prevails, the Calvinist must not only tell the lost that Christ is the only One who can save them from perishing, but also the devastating news that the “only One” may have been more pleased to damn them to hell—time will tell, i.e. que sera sera. Second, I agree that their need is urgent, perilously so, and that it is the good and loving thing to rescue sleeping men from blazing buildings, and analogically to arouse the lost who stand under the wrath of God by showing them the way of escape. However, that is not the gospel of Calvinism because according to Calvinism, God does not love everyone that much. How can the Calvinist be so deluded, or believe we are so credulous, to believe that he can love more than God? All the Calvinist can honestly say is, here is the way of escape for some and the rest must burn. It is indeed odd and misleading for Calvinists to attribute a greater passion to themselves for rescuing people who are perishing than they claim for God.
Packer argues that their being the non-elect “should make no difference in our actions. In the first place, it is always wrong to abstain from doing good for fear that it might not be appreciated …. our calling as Christians is not to love God’s elect, and them only, but to love our neighbor, irrespective of whether he is elect or not. Now, the nature of love is to do good and to relieve need. If, then, our neighbor is unconverted, we are to show love to him as best we can by seeking to share with him the good news without which he must needs perish.”[101] (italics added) That there are non-elect and elect must make a difference in actions if one is going to be led by the Holy Spirit who does not love everyone enough to offer salvation that can be accepted by all. I agree “the nature of love is to do good and to relieve need.” However, the Calvinist cannot claim that it is showing our unconverted neighbors love to share the gospel since God, who is love, does not and actually withholds the very love and deliverance some of our neighbors need. Moreover, the Calvinist gospel is definitely not good news to the non-elect, and no amount of double-talk can make it so, a disquieting reality.
He further claims, “The belief that God is sovereign in grace does not affect the genuineness of the gospel invitations, or the truth of the gospel promises. Whatever we may believe about election, and, for that matter, about the extent of the atonement, the fact remains that God in the gospel really does offer Christ and promise justification and life to ‘whosoever will’. `Whosoever shall call upon the name of the Lord shall be saved.”[102] Actually God, according to Calvinism, does not offer Christ and a genuine promise of justification and life to whosoever because only some whosoevers can actually believe. Moreover, in what meaningful sense can an offer that has been sovereignly predetermined to be absolutely unavailable to some who hear be touted as real and genuine? To do so is to egregiously transmogrify those words into the bafflegab of all bafflegab; therefore, to the non-elect, it is neither a genuine or real offer, but rather a crushing illusion and a disquieting reality.
Piper says, “The doctrine of irresistible grace means that God is sovereign and can overcome all resistance when he wills.”[103] It is vitally important to recognize that the Calvinist, as well as Piper’s position, is actually stronger than this with regard to salvation. Their position is that not only does the doctrine of irresistible grace mean that God can overcome, but it actually means He will or must. And later in the same document Piper says, “Irresistible grace never implies that God forces us to believe against our will ….On the contrary, irresistible grace is compatible with preaching and witnessing that tries to persuade people to do what is reasonable and what will accord with their own best interests.”[104] With all due respect to Piper, this is the very kind of obfuscating verbal gymnastics that causes such confusion about the harsh realities of Calvinism. This is a disquieting reality.
Of course, technically speaking, Piper is correct. God does not force faith upon anyone, and I have never contended that Calvinism teaches that He does. However, He does in fact, according to the doctrine of irresistible grace, invincibly impose a new nature upon the elect against their will by means of “irresistible grace” so they will necessarily choose to believe. Furthermore, persuasion, prayers, preaching, etc., have nothing to do with assuring, aiding or impeding the imposition of a new nature because it is a sovereign monergistic act of God, irrespective of anything done by humans or angels. The Calvinist’s response that what they do is a part of the process, or obedience, does not change the nature of the irresistible imposition of a new nature. Steve Lemke comments, “The Synod of Dort insisted that such attempts at moral persuasion of unsaved persons was wasted time.”[105]
When Calvinists respond that witnessing, praying, persuasion, etc., are a part of the process of God bringing people to salvation, they do not mean the same thing as a disenchanted or non-Calvinist saying that God uses such because we mean that they are actual substantive and integral parts of enabling grace. In contrast, according to Calvinism’s soteriology, nothing contributes one whit to the change of the elect’s nature except the monergistic, selective, irresistible, regenerative act of God. Therefore, as far as the process for what leads up to that act, God could have replaced whatever did happen with having His chosen Calvinists to recite the code of Hammurabi in tongues backwards or the national anthem of Bangladesh in Swahili, because nothing actually substantively matters except unconditional election, followed by irresistible grace in selective regeneration. That is a disquieting reality.
I am well aware of the answers to this by Calvinism, but is it not a little disingenuous to proclaim the message without telling the listeners the all too often undisclosed truth of Calvinism? If I preached to the jailer and said Paul’s words, underlying that message would be the truth that the jailer, or any jailer who heard the message, should and could repent, and that is what I believe Paul clearly believed and meant. However, if a Calvinist said it, the underlying message would be that “although I told you to believe you can’t until you are regenerated and if you are regenerated you will believe” and that is a quite different gospel.[106] This is a disquieting reality.
Again, my concern here has nothing to do with whether someone believes it is a good faith offer on the part of the Calvinist, but whether the person hearing it has a real chance to be saved or not. That is to say, if all of the Scriptures that seem to indicate God really wants everyone to be saved and has provided for that possibility are what they appear to be, and if Calvinists really believe what they say, which is that He really does not want everyone saved because according to irresistible grace, if He did, they would be; they should make sure their message makes that clear because it is an extraordinarily important and an indispensable component of their belief and message. Thus, I am satisfied that Calvinists may possibly make a good faith offer because they do not know who the elect are, and that is not my concern here. I am concerned with the idea that some believe that claim exonerates God from appearing to make a real offer because He does know. Therefore, while it is crucial that my offer of the gospel is in good faith, it is infinitely more vital that God’s offer of the gospel is one of good faith as well.
I further disaffirm that God wants the gospel presented to all, and calls on all to repent, but has no intention of those offers of the gospel being real chances for salvation except for some.[107] I believe we should replace the term general call with the more biblically coherent term sufficient call. The sufficient call, along with God’s grace enablement, is sufficient for anyone and everyone to receive salvation. The sufficient call is simply the proclamation of the good news to the world. It is the call of God on men and women everywhere to heed the call to repent and believe the gospel before it is everlasting too late (Acts 17:30-31). It is the call of the Great Commission (Matthew 28:18-20). It is the message preached by Jesus and His disciples (Mark 6:12, 8:35; Luke 3:18, 4:18; Acts 8:12, 8:37, 13:32, 13:38-40, 16:10, 21:28; Romans 1:16, 10:8; Revelation 22:17). Whereas, the efficacious call is received after the sufficient call is heeded, resulting in regeneration and consummating in salvation for those whom God foreknew, predestined, called, justified, and glorifies (Romans 8:28-30).
The means of this grace enablement include but are not limited to: Gods’ salvific love for all (John 3:16), God’s manifestation of His power so that all may know He is the Sovereign (Isaiah 45:21-22) and Creator (Romans 1:18-20), which assures that everyone has opportunity to know about Him. Christ paying for all sins (John 1:29), conviction of the Holy Spirit (John 16:7-11), working of the Holy Spirit (Hebrews 6:1-6), enlightening of the Son (John 1:9), God’s teaching ( John 6:45), God opening hearts (Acts 16:14), and the power of the gospel (Romans 1:16), without such redemptive grace, no one seeks or comes to God (Romans 3:11). Further, I believe that man, because of these gracious provisions and workings of God, can choose to seek and find God (Jeremiah 29:13; Acts 17:11-12). Moreover, no one can come to God without God drawing (John 6:44), and that God is drawing all men, individuals (John 12:32). The same Greek word for draw, helkuo, is used in both verses.” About 115 passages condition salvation on believing alone, and about 35 simply on faith.”[108] Other grace enablements may include providential workings in and through other people, situations, and timing or circumstances that are a part of grace to provide an opportunity for every individual to choose to follow Christ.
Those whom God foreknew would, once graciously enabled to exercise faith or not exercise faith in Christ, trust His salvation message, quite unlike Adam did in the garden, receive the efficacious call that consummates His gracious and genuine offer of salvation. That God foreknows and predestines those whom He foreknows “to be conformed to the image of His Son” is not a point of contention. Neither is the reality that God efficaciously calls those He predestined to “be conformed to the image of His Son” by sanctification, justification, and glorification because salvation requires not only enabling grace, but also sustaining and completing grace. The point of disagreement with my Calvinist friends is whether foreknowledge means, “to know beforehand” or “determine”. I believe that the evidence points to it meaning to know beforehand rather than to determine beforehand. Further, to use verses such as Romans 8:28 or 1 Corinthians 1:24 in order to prove that the effectual call of God is as the Calvinist explains it is to read into the text more than is warranted. They simply assume their answer rather than prove it.
Thus, in contradistinction to Calvinism, I maintain that God made salvation available to everyone through His grace enablements via the sufficient call of the gospel. As a result, because of God’s grace enablements, anyone can accept by faith the sufficient call or reject it. If a person accepts the sufficient call, he receives the efficacious call that consummates salvation. Therefore, the efficacious call is the consummation of salvation for all who believe rather than the initiation in order for some to believe. God sovereignly determined the order and purpose of the two calls. Consequently, being predestined to salvation is not a requirement for receiving the sufficient call of the gospel; it is a requirement for receiving the efficient call of the gospel.
I also disaffirm that the whole mission enterprise is merely obedience, an endeavor that has no real effect upon anyone’s opportunity to receive or reject the gospel and salvation. This disaffirmation is in direct contrast with Calvinism because from a Calvinist view, it does not matter if anyone ever witnesses—beyond being merely a part of the salvific process or only an act of obedience. Moreover, I disaffirm that the Calvinist’s answer that preaching the gospel is the means by which God saves is either satisfactory or adequate if, as the Calvinist believes, salvation is monergistic, and prior to monergistic regeneration, any and every appeal to the heart and mind is meaningless to the person addressed by the Calvinist. Regeneration is an act totally against the person’s will, mind and heart regardless of what he hears or has not heard. This is a disquieting reality.
The Calvinist is right to say that a person is not forced to trust God against his will because according to the doctrine of “irresistible grace”, along with a compatibilist view of free will, God changes the nature of a person by regenerating him, and the changed person then freely chooses to believe in Christ. However, the irresistible change of the nature via regeneration, which results in the free exercise of faith, is an act that is invincibly forced upon the unsaved. Thus, since regeneration is a part of salvation, and according to Calvinism, regeneration is imposed against the will of the unsaved prior to faith; Calvinists err in saying or implying that salvation is by faith alone. This is a disquieting reality. This is a subtle but crucial distinction in understanding how Calvinists feel free to say that a person freely exercises faith in Christ even though he is also irresistibly drawn. When these two essential components of Calvinism’s salvific process are fully understood, the heraldic sign “saved by faith” becomes tarnished. This is a disquieting reality.
I disaffirm that any person cannot repent, or by the grace of God, answer the call of the gospel, which is in fact the ultimate meaning of Calvinism because Calvinists believe that prior to regeneration a person cannot repent and after regeneration they cannot not repent. Further, I disaffirm that preaching out of mere obedience to God is the picture presented in Scripture, where Jesus (Matthew 23:37-39) and Paul (Acts 17:4, 18:4, 18:13; 2 Corinthians 5:11) passionately sought to persuade and were emotional because they spoke to people who would not repent or might not repent. Their passionate appeals seem disingenuous if they actually knew certain ones could come and they would, and certain ones could not come and they would not, and nothing could ever change that or even affect it in the most infinitesimal degree. Moreover, I disaffirm that it is an escapable reality of Calvinism that God must desire those who go to hell to be in hell because everyone He regenerates is saved from hell and the ones He chooses not to regenerate must go to hell. This is a disquieting reality. I wish they would preach this more often so that it could be compared to the quite contrary picture of God in the Scripture.
Why don’t all true Calvinists regularly stand in the pulpit and celebrate their doctrine that selective regeneration precedes faith by saying repeatedly to those who are listening that you cannot be saved unless God regenerates you: if He does you will be saved, if He doesn’t you will not, and nothing can change that or add to it? To preach repent and believe in any way that steers one away from the aforementioned truth of Calvinism is, at best misleading, and at times even deceptive because people cannot believe prior to regeneration and if they are regenerated, they will believe. This is a disquieting reality.
The Calvinist may answer, “We preach believe and repent because we are commanded to.” I would agree, but God also commands us to “speak the truth in love.” Therefore, Calvinists should tell everything they really believe and guard against misleading people to think that Christ loves all of them and they can really receive salvation. They should at least do this as fiercely as they guard their understanding of God’s sovereignty or the TULIP. Some Calvinists do this, and I appreciate and respect them for doing so. I am not referring to them. That the Scripture says to preach the gospel is true, but it does not affirm irresistible grace or the experience of the new birth prior to exercising faith.
FOOTNOTES
[96] Chafer, Systematic Theology, vol. VII, 273-274.
[97] Piper, Let the Nations Be Glad, 33.
[98] John MacArthur, Acts (Chicago: Moody Press, 1994, c1996), 123.
[99] J.I Packer, Evangelism and the Sovereignty of God (Downers Grove, IL., InterVarsity Press, 1961), 97.
[100] Ibid., 98-99.
[101] Ibid., 99.
[102] Ibid., 100.
[103] J. Piper and the Bethlehem Baptist Church staff, “What We Believe About the Five Points of Calvinism,” as quoted in Allen and Lemke, Whosoever Will, 112. [RPT: the full fifth chapter is here for an excellent read.]
[104] Ibid.
[105] Allen and Lemke, Whosoever Will, 113.
[106] I am not making a reference to Galatians 1:6, nor implying heresy in the Calvinist message. I simply mean that some can be saved and some cannot, in contrast with the message that everyone can be saved by faith, is a very different message.
[107] Thomas R. Edgar has written an extensive article on this issue which is worth reading: THE MEANING OF PROGINWSKW (“FOREKNOWLEDGE”). Found at Chafer Theological Seminary | and at Evangelical Arminians | as well as RPT.
[108] Chafer, Systematic Theology, vol. VII, 273-274.
In discussing this with Grok, I wanted a reasonable response to a video merely noting “Zionist Massacres” as if they happened in a vacuum. I will recommend some books at the end, but suffice to say, the person that posted the video has zero understanding of the abuse under dhimmitude.
Here’s an adjusted synthesis of our conversation, incorporating the key evidence from the Fondapol study by historian Georges Bensoussan (“Pogroms in Palestine before the creation of the State of Israel, 1830-1948“).
Core Adjustment to the Framing
The palestine-index.org/massacres list presents a selective narrative of “Zionist massacres” as if they represent unprovoked colonial aggression. This framing is incomplete and misleading because it largely erases or downplays the long preceding history of anti-Jewish pogroms and riots in the region. These attacks targeted Jews (both long-established “Old Yishuv” communities and newer Zionist immigrants) well before the creation of Israel in 1948, and often before significant Zionist settlement. fondapol.org
Bensoussan’s study, drawing on primary sources (archives, traveler accounts, inquiry commissions), documents a pattern of murderous violence against Jews in Palestine under Ottoman rule and the British Mandate. The violence was rooted in the traditional dhimmi status of Jews (inferior protected minority under Islamic rule), religious incitement, and growing opposition to Jewish national aspirations. It intensified with waves of Jewish immigration and political events like the Balfour Declaration, but the underlying hostility predated modern Zionism.
Key events from the Fondapol study (pre-1948 anti-Jewish violence)
These were not isolated “clashes.” They often involved mobs targeting civilians indiscriminately, religious leaders inciting violence, and local Arab forces/police failing to protect (or joining) the attackers. Brutality included mutilation, sexual violence, and destruction of cultural sites.
How this adjusts the response to the original list
This doesn’t justify every Israeli action or civilian death on the Palestinian side—war produces excesses on multiple sides, and some listed events involved indefensible conduct.
However, the Fondapol study strongly supports your assumption:
The one-sided list erases Jewish victims (hundreds killed in these pre-1948 pogroms) and Arab agency.
Broader implications
The conflict’s roots involve competing nationalisms and religious claims, but the historical record shows deep-seated anti-Jewish violence in the region well before 1948, not merely as a reaction to “occupation” or Zionism.
Post-1948, this dynamic continued through fedayeen raids, terrorism, rejected peace offers, and events like the Oct 7, 2023 massacre (explicitly called a pogrom in the study’s framing).
For balance, cross-reference with Benny Morris on 1948 specifics (he documents Israeli massacres/expulsions but stresses the defensive context of a war Arabs started). Sites like the Jewish Virtual Library detail the Arab riots timeline.
Arab Riots of the 1920’s (Jewish Virtual Library)
The Arab Riots of the 1920s (Isreal My Glory)
Pre-State Israel: Photographs from 1936 Arab Riots
In short: You’re not wrong.
Context reveals a longer, bloodier pattern of anti-Jewish aggression that the selective “massacres” list obscures. Understanding requires acknowledging violence and grievances on both sides without sanitizing either.
BOOKS I RECOMMEND:
I have these digitally as well as some physical:
CLICK TO ENLARGE
It is hard for me to sit quiet and hear person’s I adore talk about the gospel and salvation, and they put meaning behind these ideas/words when ultimately they reject these meanings. One of the [many] reasons I reject TULIP [theistic determinism] is because IT rejects the sufficiency of the living Word of God (the Gospel), as well as Calvary (the lynchpin to the Gospel).
The Gospel of God vs. The Gospel of Calvinism (Ronnie Rogers)
…. Calvinists may respond that they believe the gospel is the “power of God to everyone who believes.” By which they seem to mean, when you believe, you will experience the power of God, and that is true for everyone who believes. But, hidden in this explanation is that while this is trivially true, it is not an actualizable truth as it stands (that the listener can benefit from or by simple faith) without UE, IG, and SR, so one can and will believe, all of which is reserved for the elect and withheld from the non-elect.
As it stands in Scripture, the gospel is portrayed and understood by those who hear it to be sufficiently imbued by God’s power to save the most wretched of sinners if they only believe. Therefore, I beseech Calvinists to be more forthcoming in their gospel encounters with the lost about the other Calvinist requirements, by telling the listener what else must happen before they can believe and experience the power of the gospel—that is, the whole nature of the gospel according to Calvinism. Please fully explain to those who reject the gospel why they did so according to Calvinism. Do not let them leave with a false notion that it was because they rejected the gospel when they should have, and could have, accepted it. It was not just an act of the grace-enabled will, as they think and Scripture testifies.
The biblical gospel is simple and clear (John 3:16; 1 Cor 15:1–4). Anyone can believe and be saved by simply believing this revelation—the gospel—in which resides the power of God almighty to overcome any and all obstacles to salvation by faith. Calvinists should be equally clear about their quite different full understanding of the gospel of Christ. As Calvinists, please tell those whom you evangelize that belief in the gospel is the effect of God’s eternal and unconditional election, the internal efficacious call of God reserved for only the elect, and the renewing pre-faith work of God (regeneration or some form of renewal) of some, rather than what it is in Scripture and the minds of most, if not all, that hear the good news; that believing the gospel is the activating event that results in salvation and all that entails. Contrary to the biblical simple gospel, Calvinism’s gospel should only be shared in a way that listeners understand the gospel is not good news for everyone, and its real good news is that if you accept it, you can know you are one of the elect.
Therefore, according to Calvinism, hearing and believing in the gospel is not the sufficient call to move sinners from being a lost hell-bound sinner to being a child of God by faith. That requires the person to be elected in eternity past, a recipient of the internal efficacious call, and selectively regenerated by God. All of that empowers one to respond positively to the external call of the gospel, without which the gospel is incapable of doing anything except confirming the irreversible state of the damned.
Any veneer of Calvinism that even suggests, or leaves the listener thinking they have a choice to believe or not believe the gospel, is deception, because only after those monergistic renewal works can one truly believe the gospel unto salvation. Moreover, believing the gospel is not the turning point in a person’s eternal destination; it is actually the conduit that brings the truth to a person whose turning point in their life was being unconditionally elected in eternity past, from which believing the gospel is a result. Calvinism undermines the intelligibility of God so that the message derived from a normal reading of Scripture in light of Calvinism makes God appear indecipherable unless one possesses the Calvinist code. …..
Is God’s Word Enough?
Billy Wendeln, of the Bible Brodown is back to talk about God’s witness of Himself to the world and what the Bible teaches us about the sufficiency of the Divine revelation made known to all people.
FREE THINKING MINISTRIES discussed if “Calvinism a Different Gospel?“, to which they discussed the lowering of God’s
… Notable Calvinist scholar, Matthew J. Hart, is clear: “Calvinists . . . are theological determinists. They hold that God causes every contingent event, either directly . . . or indirectly.” Since human thoughts and states of belief are contingent events, this means that God, according to Calvinistic determinism, causes each and every thought and belief, including all of our false and evil beliefs. In his work titled The Providence of God, Paul Helm — who many consider to be the world’s leading Calvinist philosopher — explains where our thoughts come from according to his Calvinistic view:
If these scholars are correct in their assessment of Calvinism (that Calvinism entails exhaustive determinism), then I contend that Calvinism — the view that God determines all things about humanity — promotes the following incorrect views:
1- A low view of God.
As I’ve explained elsewhere, if exhaustive divine determinism is true, then God is a deity of deception and an untrustworthy source of theological beliefs.
2- A low view of God’s word.
Based on the transfer of trust principle, if God is an untrustworthy source of theological beliefs, then why should we trust a book authored by a deity of deception that is full of theological statements you are supposed to believe? If God is untrustworthy, so is a book he inspired. Thus, appealing to Bible verses or to the original Greek does nothing to escape this presupposed false and low view of God and His word.
3- A low view of man.
Man does not have the ability to reason free from antecedent conditions which are sufficient to necessitate all of his thoughts and beliefs. Man is nothing but a caused cause or a passive cog (a puppet) who is always tethered to prior deterministic forces.
Thus, on this view, man does not have the active power to infer better beliefs in a deliberative circumstance. He is merely a passive cog who is determined (by something or someone else) to believe truth or to believe falsities.
4- A low view of sin.
The definition of sin is to “miss the mark.” However, there is no missing the mark if God determines all things about humanity. Everyone always hits the mark perfectly — exactly as God determined.
5- A low view of the gospel.
This, in my opinion, is the deal-breaker. Calvinism is a low view of the gospel. The gospel literally means “the good news.” Here’s how Christianity has traditionally understood this “good news” with the help of the G.O.S.P.E.L. acronym:
G – God–a perfect being–created all people to be in an eternal loving relationship with Him (that is the objective purpose of life – this is why humanity exist).(Psalm 100:3)
O – Our sins (emphasis on “our”) infect us and separate us from God (like oil and water, necessary perfection and infection do not mix). (Romans 3:23)
S – Sins cannot be removed by good deeds (there’s nothing we as infected people can do about it – we need a miracle). (Isaiah 64:6)
P – Paying the price for sin, Jesus died and rose again (this is that miracle – Jesus paid it all). (Romans 5:8)
E – Everyone who freely trusts in Christ alone – and has not rejected His offer of love and grace – has eternal life (John 3:16).
L – Life with Jesus starts now and lasts forever (to infinity . . . and beyond). (John 10:28)
But Calvinism literally preaches a different gospel. Consider Paul’s words in Galatians 1: 6-8:
Here’s the Calvinist’s different G.O.S.P.E.L.*:
G* – God created a few people to be with him. Most people were created for the specific purpose of eternal suffering in Hell.
Right off the bat, we see that this is not the Gospel message that has been preached in Scripture or through the history of the Christian Church. At the least, it’s a radically different message than what most Christians have had in mind over the past 2,000 years when sharing the good news.
It gets worse . . .
O* – Our separation from God is caused and determined by God.
Let that sink in!
S* – Sins are illusory.
As noted above, no one ever misses the mark (the definition of sin), but everyone does exactly what God determines us to do. Every arrow hits the bulls eye.
P* – Paying the price for what God caused and determined all people to do, Jesus died and rose again.
At least Calvinists and non-Calvinist Christians all affirm the historical resurrection (but so do Mormons).
E* – Everyone who God determines to go to heaven goes to heaven; everyone else (the majority of humanity) is determined to suffer in the fires of hell.
Unless, of course, the Calvinist affirms universalism and argue that allpeople are given irresistible grace and determined to go to heaven. Calvinists can also affirm annihilationism and contend that eternal separation from God is still determined by God (so the problem still remains), but there is no eternal conscious suffering. Both views are typically rejected by most Calvinists.
L* – Life in hell lasts forever.
Does this sound like “good news”? No, in fact, it’s horrible news to the vast majority of humanity. Calvinism is not the message of Christianity. It is a distorted understanding of the gospel that ought to be rejected by Christ followers. ….
Calvinism: A Different Gospel
If Calvinists, Molinists, and Arminians are all Christians, why does Tim Stratton spend so much time arguing about free will, divine providence, and salvation? The answer might make some angry or uncomfortable. But if we are committed to truth, we should have an open dialogue and respectful conversations. Stratton believes that Calvinism contains within itself several problems that must be addressed. He agues that Calvinism presents us with a low view of God, a low view of God’s word, and a low view of the Gospel! (To name a few.) Because of this and other reasons, it is reasonable to conclude that Calvinism presents a different Gospel, which we ought to vehemently reject.
JUMP TO THE MANIFESTO
Why would a teacher named Cole Allen, A registered Democrat who donated to Kamala Harris, travel across the country to kill President Trump? The same reason a mother named Renee Good tried to run over an ICE agent doing his job and Tyler Robinson drove 250-miles to shoot Charlie Kirk.
Leftists are awash and indoctrinated by LIES and pure hate coming from Democratic leaders and legacy media! They’ve targeted Christian churches and schools, and abort millions of babies. The Democrat Party is a violent criminal death cult.
Why? Because they believe LIES!
This latest of now 4 attempts…
….On Trumps life brought to mind a couple older audios by Dennis Prager. The first deals with Prager dealing with lies from and April 2019, although I heard him talk about it many times earlier on his radio broadcast.
One may wish to include these longer posts of mine for more examples:
Lies Foment Evil Acts
This is a clip of a larger video: “Fireside Chat Ep. 76 — Lies Are the Root of Evil” | On this Fireside Chat, Dennis begins by discussing how the lies of the Left have harmed world history. Two lies he focuses on are “The Blood Libel” claim and the lie that “America is a racist country.” Dennis then answers questions from viewers.
Hysteria and Lies – “Trump is Evil”
Dennis Prager reads from a NEW YORK TIMES article, “Talking Apocalypse With My Son” (ARCHIVED) — this article shows the hysteria of the Left. Prager also plays some audio (I add the video) of Donny Deutsch on the Morning Joe Show on MSNBC. This is another example of people fighting faux evil rather than real evil (see NEWSBUSTERS for more)
Some laughter to get us through these crazy times!
MANIFESTO ADDED!
HOT AIR rightly notes in their article title that “Manifesto Released: He Believed All the Lies the Democrats Now Claim They Never Said“
This is via TOWNHALL. I wish to note that there is a bit of Messianic thinking on the left. Man is killing the planet, therefore I will save it. Man is holding back personal expression, therefore I will make it against the law to even counsel people that chopping of their breasts at 15 is not the best choice. I believe the lies that Trump is a NAZI pedophile, therefor I will save America from this fascist.
To Wit….
Hello everybody!
So I may have given a lot of people a surprise today. Let me start off by apologizing to everyone whose trust I abused.
I apologize to my parents for saying I had an interview without specifying it was for “Most Wanted.”
I apologize to my colleagues and students for saying I had a personal emergency (by the time anyone reads this, I probably most certainly DO need to go to the ER, but can hardly call that not a self-inflicted status.)
I apologize to all of the people I traveled next to, all the workers who handled my luggage, and all the other non-targeted people at the hotel who I put in danger simply by being near.
I apologize to everyone who was abused and/or murdered before this, to all those who suffered before I was able to attempt this, to all who may still suffer after, regardless of my success or failure.
I don’t expect forgiveness, but if I could have seen any other way to get this close, I would have taken it. Again, my sincere apologies.
On to why I did any of this:
I am a citizen of the United States of America.
What my representatives do reflects on me.
And I am no longer willing to permit a pedophile, rapist, and traitor to coat my hands with his crimes.
(Well, to be completely honest, I was no longer willing a long time ago, but this is the first real opportunity I’ve had to do something about it.)
While I’m discussing this, I’ll also go over my expected rules of engagement (probably in a terrible format, but I’m not military so too bad.)
Administration officials (not including Mr. Patel): they are targets, prioritized from highest-ranking to lowest
Secret Service: they are targets only if necessary, and to be incapacitated non-lethally if possible (aka, I hope they’re wearing body armor because center mass with shotguns messes up people who *aren’t*
Hotel Security: not targets if at all possible (aka unless they shoot at me)
Capitol Police: same as Hotel Security
National Guard: same as Hotel Security
Hotel Employees: not targets at all
Guests: not targets at all
In order to minimize casualties I will also be using buckshot rather than slugs (less penetration through walls)
I would still go through most everyone here to get to the targets if it were absolutely necessary (on the basis that most people *chose* to attend a speech by a pedophile, rapist, and traitor, and are thus complicit) but I really hope it doesn’t come to that.
Rebuttals to objections:
Objection 1: As a Christian, you should turn the other cheek.
Rebuttal: Turning the other cheek is for when you yourself are oppressed. I’m not the person raped in a detention camp. I’m not the fisherman executed without trial. I’m not a schoolkid blown up or a child starved or a teenage girl abused by the many criminals in this administration.
Turning the other cheek when *someone else* is oppressed is not Christian behavior; it is complicity in the oppressor’s crimes.
Objection 2: This is not a convenient time for you to do this.
Rebuttal: I need whoever thinks this way to take a couple minutes and realize that the world isn’t about them. Do you think that when I see someone raped or murdered or abused, I should walk on by because it would be “inconvenient” for people who aren’t the victim?
This was the best timing and chance of success I could come up with.
Objection 3: You didn’t get them all.
Rebuttal: Gotta start somewhere.
Objection 4: As a half-black, half-white person, you shouldn’t be the one doing this.
Rebuttal: I don’t see anyone else picking up the slack
Objection 5: Yield unto Caesar what is Caesar’s.
Rebuttal: The United States of America are ruled by the law, not by any one or several people. In so far as representatives and judges do not follow the law, no one is required to yield them anything so unlawfully ordered.
I would also like to extend my appreciation to a great many people since I will not be likely to be able to talk with them again (unless the Secret Service is *astoundingly* incompetent.)
Thank you to my family, both personal and church, for your love over these 31 years.
Thank you to my friends, for your companionship over many years.
Thank you to my colleagues over many jobs, for your positivity and professionalism.
Thank you to my students for your enthusiasm and love of learning.
Thank you to the many acquaintances I’ve met, in person and online, for short interactions and long-term relationships, for your perspectives and inspiration.
Thank you all for everything.
Sincerely,
Cole “coldForce” “Friendly Federal Assassin” Allen
PS: Ok now that all the sappy stuff is done, what the hell is the Secret Service doing? Sorry, gonna rant a bit here and drop the formal tone.
Like, I expected security cameras at every bend, bugged hotel rooms, armed agents every 10 feet, metal detectors out the wazoo.
What I got (who knows, maybe they’re pranking me!) is nothing.
No damn security.
Not in transport.
Not in the hotel.
Not in the event.
Like, the one thing that I immediately noticed walking into the hotel is the sense of arrogance.
I walk in with multiple weapons and not a single person there considers the possibility that I could be a threat.
The security at the event is all outside, focused on protestors and current arrivals, because apparently no one thought about what happens if someone checks in the day before.
Like, this level of incompetence is insane, and I very sincerely hope it’s corrected by the time this country gets actually competent leadership again.
Like, if I was an Iranian agent, instead of an American citizen, I could have brought a damn Ma Deuce in here and no one would have noticed shit.
Actually insane.
Oh and if anyone is curious is how doing something like feels: it’s awful. I want to throw up; I want to cry for all the things I wanted to do and never will, for all the people whose trust this betrays; I experience rage thinking about everything this administration has done.
Can’t really recommend it! Stay in school, kids.
— Bruce Bartlett, Wrong on Race: The Democratic Party’s Buried Past (New York, NY: Palgrave MacMillan, 2008), ix;
— Ann Coulter, Mugged: Racial Demagoguery from the Seventies to Obama (New York, NY: Sentinel [Penguin], 2012), 19.
There has been some excellent responses to the story of the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) paying racist organizations so they could fundraise. I have quite a few posts on the SPLC, so First I will link many of those for the interested party’s. (Newest to the oldest)
Three Biggins:
A FOX NEWS QUICKIE
KANEKOA THE GREAT shared the above video with the below being his commentary:
(You don’t dislike Democrats enough)
The Southern Poverty Law Center leveraged its credibility from fighting the KKK to smear mainstream conservatives — placing them on a “hate map” and “extremist watch list” alongside neo-Nazis and actual Klan chapters.
Targets included:
These are mainstream conservative figures—authors, scholars, influencers, elected officials, student organizations, and parent groups—branded as extremists for political disagreement.
Their sole offense was disagreeing with the SPLC’s politics.
Yet the SPLC listed them in the same database as terrorist organizations and white supremacist hate groups.
The real-world consequences followed.
In 2012, a gunman targeted the Family Research Council after using the SPLC’s “hate map” as a guide.
Months before Charlie Kirk’s murder, the SPLC added Turning Point USA to that same map.
One day before his death, it published a Hatewatch article smearing him under “Dismantling White Supremacy.”
When Tyler Robinson was asked by his parents why he killed Charlie, he said, “the guy spreads too much hate.”
For decades, the SPLC exploited its reputation to recast political opposition as hatred — pressuring the federal government, Big Tech, and the American public to treat conservative Americans as domestic enemies.
Yesterday we learned it was also secretly funding the very neo-Nazis and Klan members it claimed to oppose — using donor money to pay the leaders of the same hate groups it was publicly denouncing.
How many reputations and lives did they destroy while secretly funding the very hate groups they claimed to oppose?
DAVID SACKS
SPLC invested $270k in Charlottesville and got $81 million in additional donations. Extraordinary returns.
LOUDER with CROWDER
The Department of Justice just indicted the Southern Poverty Law Center, the organization that partnered with Google, Amazon, YouTube, Facebook, and Mastercard to label YOU an extremist, for secretly funding white supremacist groups including the KKK, the National Alliance, and the organizers of the Charlottesville Unite The Right rally. Click here for today’s sources:
LARRY O’CONNOR
A grand jury just hit the Southern Poverty Law Center with an 11-count indictment — six counts of wire fraud, four counts of bank fraud, and conspiracy to commit money laundering — after the DOJ found the SPLC paid over $3 million to members of the KKK, Aryan Nations, and neo-Nazi groups, then fundraised off the very extremism it manufactured. Acting Attorney General Todd Blanch laid out the charges, including $270,000 paid to a Charlottesville rally organizer, while Kash Patel delivered a JAW-DROPPING response to an Atlantic reporter and announced a $250 million defamation lawsuit.
0:00 SPLC indicted on 11 federal counts
2:40 Todd Blanch drops the indictment
4:59 How the SPLC’s fraud scheme worked
6:53 Blanch corrects a reporter’s spin
10:46 $3M paid to KKK and neo-Nazis
14:59 Charlottesville was an SPLC operation
18:08 SPLC’s hate list inspired a shooting
20:21 Kash Patel DESTROYS Atlantic reporter
RUTHLESS PODCAST
[Since Ruthless does not splice up their videos, I isolated it] SPLC and Democrats’ “Fake hate” exposed. This is how Democrats use the Southern Poverty Law Center to manufacture extremism for power and profit.
NEW NAZI TATTOOS JUST DROPPED!
(My paper on how the Mormon “god” is not big enough is titled “Infinitely Finite: Mormon Materialism” – PDF) Here is an update via Tim Stratton on this older post [December 2023]. I am only carving out the beginning of his post over at FREE THINKING MINISTRIES, Enjoy the update!
UPDATE
Step One: The Ontological Argument
Let’s begin with one of the most discussed arguments in philosophy of religion: the Ontological Argument.
Here is a standard version based on the laws and rules of modal logic:
The Ontological Argument
This isn’t some philosophical Jedi mind trick—it’s a logically deductive argument based on the laws of logic, the rules of reason, and the rules of modal logic. So, if the premises are true, the conclusion must follow. If it’s even possible for a maximally great being (the definition of God) to exist, then God must exist.
(For a fuller explanation of these premises, see Chapter 16 in the forthcoming second edition of Human Freedom, Divine Knowledge, and Mere Molinism.)
In Plain English
Here’s what that means in everyday language:
If it’s even possible that a maximally perfect, all-powerful (omnipotent), all-knowing (omniscient), perfectly good and loving (omnibenevolent) being exists…
Then that being wouldn’t be limited, temporary, dependent, or contingent upon anything else. It would exist necessarily—meaning: It cannot fail to exist.
And if such a being exists necessarily, then: It doesn’t just exist in our minds—it exists in reality.
Why This Matters for the LDS View
The LDS view of God does not affirm a maximally great being in this sense.
Instead, it teaches:
That creates a serious philosophical problem:
But an infinite regress of contingent beings does not explain reality. It postpones the question (infinitely)—it doesn’t answer it. It never answers it! It continually and endlessly sweeps the problem under the rug or kicks the can down the road.
So at a deeper level, the LDS view—while perhaps easier to understand—does not “make more sense”—at least if we are discussing logical sense.
The LDS view fails to provide a final explanation at all.
[/unupdate]
Just thought of this today. I have dealt with in the past the “sinfulness” of “god,” in Mormon theology. See my main post on the issue just updated with PDF inks to resources and video to help explain this fact of LDS theology — as well as GOD NEVER SINNED website.
And in conversation as to whether Jehovah’s Witnesses AND Mormons are Christian “denomination’s.” (Not an official denomination like Lutheran or Baptist, rather, should they be considered as part of the Christian faith in their essence.) Here is some of my responses — if they make sense:
Mark is closer in thinking J-Dubs are a “christian” theological cult…. they AT LEAST posit Jehovah as the Creator of the space-time continuum. Creation ex nihilo. Mormons believe Heavenly Father was born [through sexual congress] into this cosmos…. and thus, natural laws impose laws of nature on these gods. In fact, there was no time material did not exist apart from these spirits, and then men, and then exalted men. After my routine with Mormons, I always end with, your “god” is too small.
[….]
Jeff, I guess the easiest way to categorize this in a quip like fashion is to say Jehovah’s Witnesses could incorporate the Ontological Argument into their understanding/apologetic. However, the LDS cannot use that philosophical apologetic. The Mormons cannot be included or acclimated into the theistic understanding of the Judeo-Christian God. YHWH. The I AM. And is not Holy, Holy, Holy. In Mormon theology there is nothing “maximal” about their “god”
The Ontological Argument
BONUS via …
Dictionary of the Later New Testament and Its Developments
2. The Old Testament Background
2.1. The Fundamental Character of God. The starting point for an understanding of these words in the NT and other early Christian writings is the OT. The OT writers reiterate that the Lord God is holy (Lev 19:2; 21:8; Josh 24:19; Ps 22:3; Is 57:15, passim)—“holy” being the fundamental characteristic of God under which all other characteristics are subsumed—and that humans are sinful (Gen 18:20; 1 Kings 8:46; Ps 51:3; Eccles 7:20, passim).
As holy, God is transcendent above, different from, opposite to, Wholly Other (Otto, 6, 25), separate from sin and sinful people (Is 6:1–9; 55:8, 9; cf. Ex 19:20–24; Num 18:3; Heb 7:26). Sinful people, who have become so by their own choice against God (Gen 2:16, 17; 3:1–7; cf. Rom 5:12), are thereby alienated from God and powerless in that they are incapable of closing the chasm that exists between themselves and God, between the holy and the unholy (Is 50:1; 59:1, 2). God, the Holy, is also the “I am, the One who is” (Ex 3:14): God is Life. For people to be separated from God because of their sin is for them to be separated from Life. Those who were made for the purpose of living (cf. Gen 1:26) are faced with its opposite—death (Ezek 18:4).
2.2. The Actions of God. God, however, did what humans could not do. The holiness of God cannot be described merely as a state of being indicative of what God is, but also as purposeful, salvific action indicative of what God plans and carries out. The OT viewed God as transcendent in that he was distinct from sinful humans but not remote or indifferent to them (Snaith, 47). God took the initiative to make the unholy holy, to make the alien a friend, to reconcile sinners to himself (see Salvation).
An example of this is when God the holy One took the initiative to reveal himself to Israel at Sinai and to call this people out from among other nations into a special personal relationship with himself through covenant, law and sacrifice (Ex 20, 24:1–8; Lev 16). Thus, it was God who made Israel a priestly kingdom and a holy nation (Ex 19:6; Deut 7:6), a people that must preserve its distinctiveness by pursuing a way of life different from that practiced by other peoples (Deut 7:5–6; see Levine, 256), a people fit for the service of God and dedicated to do his will, a light to the nations around them (Is 49:6).
Because of God’s special relation to parts of his creation it was possible even for things to be called holy—holy only in the strict sense that they were different from the profane—wholly given over to divine purposes: the ground around a burning bush (Ex 3:5), Jerusalem (Is 48:2), the temple (Is 64:10), the Sabbath (Ex 16:23), priestly garments (Ex 31:10), and so on.
2.3. The Ethical Response to God. The OT meaning of “holy/holiness,” however, is not exhausted with such ideas as “separate from,” “dedicated to,” “sacred” and the like, although these may have been the primary meanings of the words. There are also ethical and moral meanings attached to them. Again such meanings find their origin in the nature of God, for the nature of God is the determining factor that gives meaning to everything (2.1 above). Leviticus 19:1–18 clearly illustrates the moral side of God’s holiness. Here it becomes clear that to be holy as God is holy is not simply to be pure and righteous, but to act toward others with purity and goodness, with truthfulness and honesty, with generosity, justice and love, particularly toward the poor and those who are in no position to help themselves (see esp. Lev 19:9–10, 14). Religion and ethics, the sacred and moral, belong together in the OT; relationship to the Lord God of the OT demands an ethical/moral response. God’s people must not only be like God but also act like God.
3. The Idea of the Holy in the New Testament and Apostolic Fathers
The meaning of the words holy and holiness, although expanded in the literature under study, is squarely based on the writings of the OT. The primary meaning of holy as “separate from” is to be found in the actions of Paul and others who engaged in purification/sanctification rites (hagnizō, hagnismos) by which they ceremoniously separated themselves from the profane so as to be considered fit to enter the sacred precincts of the house of a holy God (Acts 21:24, 26; 24:18; cf. Num 6:5, 13–18; see Douglas, passim; also Barn. 8.1; 15.1, 3, 6–7). That narrow but fundamental meaning of “holy” is nevertheless inadequate to interpret all the texts that treat this concept.
3.1. The Holiness of God. In our early Christian writings “the holiness of God the Father is everywhere presumed … though seldom stated” (Procksch, 101). Nevertheless it is stated: God’s name, the very essence of his person, is holy (Did. 10.2; 1 Clem. 64). Making use of the vocabulary of Leviticus, especially the Holiness Code in Leviticus 19–26, Peter tells those to whom he writes that it is incumbent upon them to be holy as God is holy (hagios, 1 Pet 1:15–16; cf. Lev 19:2; see Selwyn).
The writer of Hebrews explains the disciplinary action of God as his creative work in human lives so that they may share in his holiness (hagiotēs, Heb 12:10). Once again the trisagion (see Liturgical Elements) is sung to God (cf. Is 6:3), this time by the four living creatures of the Seer’s vision—hagios, hagios, hagios (holy, holy, holy). They acclaim that God is holy to the ultimate degree and as such is the Almighty, the Pantokratōr, the one who is, who was and who is to come, eternal and omnipotent, transcendent, Wholly Other (Rev 4:8; see also 1 Clem. 34.6; 59.3). Those who were victorious over the beast sang, “Great and amazing are your deeds, Lord God the Almighty!… For you alone are holy” (hosios [hagios] Rev 15:3–4; 1 Clem. 59.3), and the angel of the waters, “You are just, O Holy One” (ho hosios, Rev 16:5). The martyrs, asking for vengeance upon those who slaughtered them for serving God, address God as “Sovereign Lord, holy and true (ho hagios kai alēthinos),” because they know that God, as holy, stands apart from and opposed to sin and evil and that he alone is able to administer justice and judge rightly (Rev 6:10).
God as holy is to be feared (cf. Ps 89:7; 99:3; 111:9); he is a consuming fire (Heb 12:29). He owns the right to judge and to take vengeance (cf. Deut 32:35). But in the NT and other early Christian writings God takes no delight in banishing sinners from him. He delights instead in making them holy, in creating a people fit for his presence, in bringing them close to himself and in giving them sacred work to do (cf. Is 6:1–8). As a consequence God sends his good news (see Gospel) out into the world so that sinful people may “turn from darkness to light and from the power of Satan to God, so that they may receive forgiveness of sins and a place among those who are sanctified [hēgiasmenoi],” i.e., among those who have been made holy and have been set apart to God (Acts 26:18; cf. 20:32). It is important to note here that the expression “those who are sanctified” is a passive participle (from hagiazō, make holy, consecrate, sanctify) that has been termed a “divine passive.” That is, God is the agent of the action. He has taken the initiative not to destroy sinners but to make them holy (cf. Herm. Vis. 3.9.1).
It is God’s will that sinful people be made holy (Heb 10:10). But it was costly for God to realize this wish. Under the old covenant sinners were made holy on the basis of animals being properly sacrificed year after year in their behalf (Lev 16)—tentatively made holy (cf. Rom 3:25; Heb 10:4). Under the new covenant sinners are made holy or sanctified (hēgiasmenoi/hagiazomenous) by a much more profound act—the conscious, deliberate choice of Jesus Christ, God’s Son, radically to obey his Father and offer his body in death as a single sacrifice for sins forever (Heb 10:5–10, 12, 14, 29; cf. Phil 2:8; Diogn. 9.2; see Death of Christ). The blood of Jesus (an expression that refers to the self-determined action of Jesus to die on behalf of sinful human beings) is that by which sinful persons are made holy. The explicit purpose of his suffering and death was that the unclean might become clean, that he might make unholy people holy (hagiasē, Heb 13:12; see also 9:13; 1 Clem. 32.4; 59.3; Barn. 5.1).
In the writings under consideration, as in the OT, places and things as well as persons can be considered holy. Thus the temple is called “the holy place” (Acts 6:13; 21:28). The two tents of the tabernacle are referred to as “the holy place” (hagia, Heb 9:1) and “the Holy of Holies” (hagia hagiōn, Heb 9:3; see also 9:1, 12, 24, 25; 10:19; 13:11). The mountain on which Jesus was transfigured is designated as “the holy [hagios] mountain” (2 Pet 1:18; cf. Barn. 11.3). The Christian faith is termed “the most holy [hagiōtatē faith” (Jude 20). Jerusalem is called “the holy [hagian] city” (Rev 11:2; 21:2, 10; 22:11, 19). Presbyters are holy (Ign. Magn. 3.1), the Eucharist is holy (Did. 9.5), the church is holy (Herm. Vis. 1.1.6; Mart. Pol. presc.), prophets are holy (Acts 3:21; 2 Pet 3:2), angels are holy (Acts 10:22; cf. Jude 14; Rev 14:10; 1 Clem. 39:7; Herm. Sim. 5.4.4; Herm. Vis. 5.5.3).
3.2. The Holiness of Jesus Christ. The NT describes Jesus as holy, a person set apart to God, anointed by him (Acts 4:27; see Anointing), dedicated to God and designated as his unique instrument to carry out his predestined plan in the world (Acts 4:28). But holy is also used of Jesus as it is used of God the Father.
The early church understood Psalm 16:10, said to be written by David and about David, to have had its fulfillment in the resurrected Jesus—“You will not … let your Holy [hosion] One experience corruption” (Acts 2:27; 13:35). Peter referred to Jesus as “the Holy [ton hagion] and Righteous One” (Acts 3:14), seemingly in the moral sense of innocent since he linked the word so closely with the anarthrous dikaion (“righteous”—ton hagion kai dikaion; cf. Lk 23:47 and see Conzelmann, 28). In a later sermon Peter speaks of Jesus as God’s “holy [hagion] servant/son” (pais, Acts 4:27; 30).
But the NT and early Fathers say more than this about Jesus. He is the one who makes others holy (ho hagiazōn, Heb 2:11; 13:12), who consecrates them to God and his service that they might be admitted into his presence (cf. Procksch, 89–97). “Jesus is here [in Heb 2:11] exercising a divine function since, according to the OT, it is God who consecrates” (Montefiore, 62; cf. Ex 31:13; Lev 20:8; 21:15; 22:9, 16, 32; Ezek 20:12; 37:28; but see Attridge, 88 n. 107).
Borrowing the language of Isaiah 8:12–13 Peter calls upon Christians to “sanctify [hagiasate] Christ as Lord” (1 Pet 3:15). They are to acknowledge that he is holy (cf. Is 29:23; Ezek 20:41; Ecclus 36:4, Mt 6:9)—holy in the sense that God is holy—for as J. N. D. Kelly has remarked, this verse “has a bearing on 1 Peter’s Christology.… [As] in ii,3 the title ‘the Lord’, which in the Hebrew original denotes God, is unhesitatingly attributed to Christ” (Kelly, 142; see Christology; 1 Peter).
“The Holy One,” a frequent name of God in the OT (2 Kings 19:22; Ps 71:22; 78:41; Is 1:4, passim), appears also in 1 John 2:20 (“you have been anointed by the Holy One [tou hagiou]).” Although there is debate over whether this expression refers to God the Father or to Jesus Christ, in light of the context and especially in light of 2:27–28 it seems more likely that it is a title given to Jesus (see also Diogn. 9.2).
In his vision the Seer reads a letter addressed to the church at Philadelphia. It begins, “These are the words of the Holy One” (ho hagios, Rev 4:7). From the context of this letter (see Rev 2:18; 3:1) this Holy One is none other than the crucified, dead and risen Christ, the one who was and is and will forever be (Rev 1:17–18; cf. Rev 4:8; Diogn. 9.2). These writers want everyone to understand that Jesus is holy in the sense that God is holy—“holy [hosios, a word chosen to emphasize the moral dimension of holiness], blameless, undefiled, separated from sinners, and exalted above the heavens” (Heb 7:26). In naming him “the Holy One” they claim for him the title of deity.
Gerald F. Hawthorne, “Holy, Holiness,” in Dictionary of the Later New Testament and Its Developments, ed. Ralph P. Martin and Peter H. Davids (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1997), 485–488.
I am realizing, much like Mormons and J-Dubs, they isolate a scripture verse and rip is from it’s context. You must pause and read before and after the verse… just like with cult members.
Dr. Leighton Flowers, Director of Evangelism and Apologetics for Texas Baptists, addresses 1 Cor. 2:14, a common proof text used by Calvinists to teach that mankind is born morally unable to understand and willingly believe the gospel unless they are first born again.
Two articles related to the above and below:
The fuller presentation by Dr. Flowers go to “Rebutting Calvinistic Proof Texts” at SOTERIOLOGY 101’s YouTube Channel. Here is my clip from it:
