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.
Key Biblical Emphasis on Love
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.
Addressing the Calvinist/Determinist Angle
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.
Suggested Response Structure for the Worksheet
Affirm divine simplicity: Yes, God is not divided; His attributes cohere perfectly.
But Scripture highlights love as central: Cite 1 John 4 directly. Love integrates and motivates the others without negating them (holy love, just love, sovereign love expressed in provision for all).
Love defines God’s relational posture: It “embraces” the others because God is love eternally (intra-Trinitarian), and all He does toward us flows from that.
Avoid false dichotomies: This doesn’t deny holiness, justice, or sovereignty—it contextualizes them. A loving God can be sovereign without determinism that undermines real relationship.
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:
It makes God’s character harder to square with the consistent biblical portrayal of Him grieving sin, being provoked to anger, and genuinely offering salvation.
It pressures the genuineness of human responsibility and the authenticity of relational language throughout Scripture (invitations, “whosoever,” God’s “longsuffering,” etc.).
Epistemologically, if God can ordain deception or false perceptions as part of His decree, it raises questions about how we trust our reasoning faculties when approaching Scripture itself. Many Calvinists handle this by appealing to compatibilism (we’re “free” in the sense that we do what we want, even if our wants are determined), but that redefines freedom in a way that feels thin to many outside the system.
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.
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:
“Not only is every atom and molecule, every thought and desire, kept in being by God, but every twist and turn of each of these is under the direct control of God. He has not, as far as we know, delegated that control to anyone else.”
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:
“I am astonished that you are so quickly deserting him who called you in the grace of Christ and are turning to a different gospel— not that there is another one, but there are some who trouble you and want to distort the gospel of Christ. But even if we or an angel from heaven should preach to you a gospel contrary to the one we preached to you, let him be accursed.”
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. ….
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.
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.
Yes, this is from the church I attend. A wonderful place to attend, but definitely Calvinistic. This is a newer pastor, and I must say, even though I vehemently disagree, at least he is preaching honestly. Another pastor months before preached a sermon where he quoted Joshua 24:15 and said:
“Make a choice. Choose this day. In fact, you can choose one of the… He’s not saying that he’s happy if you choose the pagan gods, but he says, in fact, pick one of the pagan gods. Do you know that something that God is extremely kind and gracious to us and that he gave us free will? Did you know that? He didn’t force a relationship on us. He gave us free will. Do you remember what he gave Adam and Eve? Free will. You can make a choice. I’m not gonna force it. Hey, you choose, yeah, you, make the choice.”
When I asked an elder if this pastor really believed this statement he made regarding free will from the pulpit, I got an honest answer of “No.”
So I love the almost Provisionist preaching and call to come to God in faith — but this is not what is REALLYbelieved as these pastors overlay TULIP on to their understanding of Biblical text. I struggle with the good that can come from the “alter call” type preaching of the “Armininian style” while they sleep as a Calvinist. That being said, it is a duplicitous preaching like they make God out to be by overlaying a 16th century philosophy onto God. A Jaundiced view at best. AND, I can truly appreciate the rawness of the logical outcomes being honestly preached from the pulpit. Although even this pastor does not follow his own thinking to their ends without hemming and hawing with a myriad of qualifiers and nuances.
Here is my FACEBOOK comments on this sermon:
So, in the past I have praised good sermons from my church… if I do that, should I at times not critique [as publicly] a bad one? I will be clipping the main idea of it from the video for my site [like I have uploaded some clips from the good ones], but that is in the future tense. I am thankful, however, that this pastor was so forthright, and didn’t hide behind the “preaching as an Arminian, sleep as a Calvinist” idea.
Honest preaching is laudable. This was essentially the sermon:
(a)God decrees and ordains all evil for His glory (b) God saves us from the evil He decreed and ordained…. for His glory.
In other words, while this pastor didn’t follow his sermon to its logical conclusion, it is essentially God saving us from Himself. So, all the pain and suffering mentioned in stories and text… are all God caused. Remember, this pastor chose AW Pink’s book for the last Monday men’s service series. [It could have been more in the pastorate choosing Pink’s book, as far as I know — because I do not actually know how these books are approved.] Pink is a hyper Calvinist, like this Pastor publicly is.
All I was thinking was,
“well, people who don’t get the raw [5-point, Calvinist] truth from other pastors are hearing it now.”
On the flip side of that “positive”, the new people on the “faith fence” — which only makes sense to those of the non-Calvinist soteriological bent — may have wrote off Crossroads as their home. Or worse yet, wrote off God.
Which in this pastor’s view, was also ordained.
The same pastor here eisegetes into Scripture a 16th century doctrine not understood as being the Bible before Calvin popularized it via his doctrinal hero:
The reason I added the SNL skit was to note that right when the sermon was starting to state some good position or truth, it was dashed shortly after by the “doctrines of grace.”
UPDATED CONVO
In another example, after a wonderful, Gospel oriented presentation by a senior pastor at the men’s Monday night class, I was perplexed. I thought I was crazy in fact. I was just about to tender my separation letter to the elders, pastors, and peeps at church. So I asked a question in text of the pastor (again, no names):
Ouch. That confirmed and upset me a bit. Did you catch it? This pastor admits that in order to convert people with the Gospel message, he withholds parts of his systematic because it would interfere with his evangelism.
Um… yeah it would.
But again, it is duplicitous in nature, as stated earlier.
This illustration [via NotWilliangThatAny] is aiming to reflect a real tension in Calvinist theology, not exaggerate it. It takes the idea of election and shows it visually in terms of proportion. One petal represents the elect, while many “nots” represent those passed over. The focus is on how small the number of the elect might be compared to everyone else.
First, this connects to limited atonement. In this view, Christ’s death is effective only for the elect, not for every individual. Passages like John 10:26, “you do not believe because you are not among my sheep,” and John 17:9, “I am not praying for the world but for those whom you have given me,” are often used to support this. The illustration reflects that by showing a small number who are truly loved in a saving sense, and many who are not.
Second, it ties to unconditional election and reprobation. God chooses some to receive mercy while others are passed over. Romans 9:13 says, “Jacob I loved, but Esau I hated,” and Romans 9:22 speaks of “vessels of wrath prepared for destruction.” The many “nots” in the image visually represent this larger group who are not chosen, emphasizing the imbalance.
Third, it reflects the idea that salvific love is not universal. While Calvinists affirm that God shows a kind of general love or kindness to all (Matthew 5:45), His saving love is reserved for a specific people. The illustration presses on that distinction by asking what it means in practice. If most people are not recipients of that saving love, then the experience of humanity is largely outside of it.
This leads to a key question. If Scripture says God “so loved the world” (John 3:16) and desires “all people to be saved” (1 Timothy 2:4), how should we understand the scope of His love? Does the picture of a few loved and many not align with the overall tone and message of the Bible, or should we rethink how we define God’s saving love?
“Don’t be afraid to abandon a point of doctrine that the Bible opposes. Don’t be afraid to go to the *No Opinion* option on a topic the Bible does not address. Don’t be afraid to fight or leave, as God directs, any church or Christian fellowship group that is drawing you away from the Bible as it draws you closer to its members, doctrinal statement, or literature.”
I made this more generic, under advisement that I took to heart. While I shared the letter with many (elders, friends, etc.) so they would know why I disappeared. I am making the public letter less specific.
I love the men I became friends with, most of the teaching… but the stated goals and positions from the pulpit are not really believed. There is “double-talk” going on.
All [A] are [B] but in such a way that some [A] are not [B]
It’s the whole “preach as an Arminian and sleep like a Calvinist” thingy. Even Spurgeon softened on this a bit later in his life*. I did use the initials, but there are 1,500 to 2,000 churches with them.
I love the guys I sit with, but the other day I had to keep my thoughts to myself when they were speaking about the deleterious FX of Satan. I felt like David Attenborough narrating a scene in his calm British accent:
“Look at these fine specimens, many not realizing the redundancy of what they are saying regarding the horned one. Through first causes and secondary causes God has already made it impossible at all — video below — to respond to the Gospel. Following to their logical ends a systematized thought is not being taught here… it is as if they think Satan can go to a grave sight and dig up corpses and place blind folds on them.” (2 Corinthians 4:4 – Hat-Tip to Doc Flowers for the graveyard analogy.)
So while I have had a few people genuinely and heart filled try and talk me out of leaving, I would go bonkers trying to respect conversation and not draw it to logical, reasonable ends.
Just to note, I am not Arminian
* This is what I mean by early or late Spurgeon. When he was a young pastor taking over the now famous Park Street Chapel at 19 he would say stuff like, “Calvinism is the gospel, and nothing else.” [22 years old], or, “A mutable god may be the god for the Arminian—he is not the god for me.” [24 years old]. Later in life, as he matured in his faith, he softened a bit.
At age 28, after having been a shepherd of a flock and rubbing shoulder with people in his congregation for a while, he changed a bit, saying this:
There is some truth in Calvinism and some in Arminianism, and he who would hold the whole Truth of God must neither be cramped by the one system nor bound by the other, but take Truth wherever he can find it in the Bible.
When he was 42 in 1876, he noted the long history of “preaching like an Arminian but sleeping as a Calvinist”:
There has long been a great doctrinal discussion between the Calvinists and the Arminians upon many important points. I am myself persuaded that the Calvinist alone is right upon some points, and the Arminian alone is right upon others. There is a great deal of truth in the positive side of both systems, and a great deal of error in the negative side of both. If I was asked, “Why is a man damned?” I should answer as an Arminian answers, “He destroys himself.”
Finally, by 1881, when Spurgeon is now 47 years old, he says that he has been called “an Arminian Calvinist or a Calvinistic Arminian” and he does not seem to mind either label:
What a host of revised versions we have! Everybody has one of his own. Certain texts which will not fit into our system must be planed and cut down. Have you ever seen the hard work that some Brethren have to shape a Scripture to their mind? One text is not Calvinistic, it looks rather Arminian—of course it cannot be so and, therefore, they twist and tug to get it right. As for our Arminian Brethren, it is wonderful to see how they hammer away at the 9th Chapter of Romans—steam-hammers and screw-jacks are nothing to their appliances for getting rid of Election from that chapter! We have all been guilty of racking Scripture, more or less, and it will be well to have done with the evil, forever! We had far better be inconsistent with ourselves than with the Inspired Word of God.
I have been called an Arminian Calvinist or a Calvinistic Arminian and I am quite content so long as I can keep close to my Bible. I desire to preach what I find in this Book whether I find it in anybody else’s book or not.
From Cage-stage to “Arminian Calvinist or a Calvinistic Arminian”: Charles Spurgeon’s theological journey (BEYOND CALVINISM)
Dear Church Family,
After much prayer, study, and reflection, I want to share something personal with you. I have decided to begin attending another church whose theological direction more closely aligns with my own convictions—particularly in the area of soteriology.
This has not been a quick or emotional decision. CCC has been home to me for many years, through different seasons, buildings, friendships, and growth. I am deeply grateful for the pastors, elders, and members who have invested in my life. Many of my most meaningful conversations, lessons, and spiritual milestones have happened here. I care deeply for this church and its people, and I will always value the time I’ve spent among you.
More specifically, I hold to the conviction that God genuinely desires all people to be saved (1 Timothy 2:4; 2 Peter 3:9), that Christ’s atonement is sufficient for and sincerely offered to all (John 3:16–17), and that individuals are truly responsible for accepting or rejecting the gospel (John 1:12; Romans 10:9–13). I understand these invitations as reflecting a real capacity to respond—not merely an outward call accompanied only by an inward, effectual call for some.
In wrestling through these matters, I have reflected on the distinction often made between God’s revealed will—what He commands and expresses in Scripture—and His decretive or secret will—what He ordains in His eternal purposes. My concern is that when emphasis shifts too heavily toward the hidden decree of God, it can overshadow the plain force of His revealed invitations and commands. The universal call of the gospel can begin to feel less like a genuine appeal to all and more like a formal proclamation intended only for those already determined to respond.
For me, it is essential to maintain that the gospel call truly applies to all who hear it, that faith in Jesus’ promises is the responsibility of every sinner, that Christ is sincerely offered to all without qualification, that God displays real common grace toward the world, and that His love extends in a meaningful way even to those who ultimately reject Him. While I am not suggesting that CCC embraces what is commonly labeled hyper-Calvinism, I do find myself increasingly concerned when theological formulations appear to narrow the scope of the gospel’s free and universal offer.
While I affirm God’s sovereignty in salvation, I do not believe Scripture teaches that God unconditionally determines who will believe and who will not, nor that His decree stands as the ultimate explanation for unbelief. As A.W. Tozer eloquently states:
Here is my view: God sovereignly decreed that man should be free to exercise moral choice, and man from the beginning has fulfilled that decree by making his choice between good and evil. When he chooses to do evil, he does not thereby countervail the sovereign will of God but fulfills it, inasmuch as the eternal decree decided not which choice the man should make but that he should be free to make it. If in His absolute freedom God has willed to give man limited freedom, who is there to stay His hand or say, What doest thou? Mans will is free because God is sovereign. A God less than sovereign could not bestow moral freedom upon His creatures. He would be afraid to do so.
I struggle with formulations that make divine determinism the governing framework—particularly when they risk portraying God as causally ordaining evil (1, 2, 3) or withholding saving grace from those whom He commands to repent.
Additionally, I am persuaded that assurance of salvation ultimately rests in Christ’s finished work and the promise of the gospel, rather than primarily in evaluating the consistency or degree of one’s perseverance. Good works are the fruit of genuine faith, but they are not the foundation of our confidence before God.
I want to say clearly: this decision is not about questioning anyone’s faith, sincerity, or love for the Lord. Faithful believers have long differed on these matters, and I do not doubt that God is at work wherever the gospel is proclaimed. My departure is not a declaration that others are unbiblical or insincere. Rather, it is an acknowledgment that convictions about the character of God and the nature of the gospel are not peripheral—they shape how we preach, invite, disciple, and offer hope.
One of the moments that clarified this for me was realizing that I hesitated to invite an unbelieving young man to CCC —not because of the people here, whom I love, but because I felt I might need to explain or reconcile theological distinctions that, in my understanding, complicate the straightforward and universal nature of the gospel invitation in Scripture. That tension made me recognize it would be more honest and spiritually healthy for me to worship and serve in a church where my convictions are fully aligned with the pulpit, and where I can invite others with complete clarity and confidence.
Please know this decision comes with affection, not frustration. I am thankful for the friendships we’ve built and the ways we’ve sharpened one another. I have no desire for division—only integrity in following my conscience as I seek to grow in Christ.
I leave with gratitude and with prayers for continued faithfulness, unity, and fruitfulness at CCC. I hope our relationships will continue, even as I worship elsewhere.
John Calvin is unabashed in his defense of his views and says, “Many professing a desire to defend the Deity from an invidious charge admit the doctrine of election, but deny that any one is reprobated. This they do ignorantly, and childishly, since there could be no election without this opposite reprobation. God is said to set apart those whom he adopts for salvation. It were most absurd to say, that he admits others fortuitously, or that they by their industry acquire what election alone confers on a few. Those, therefore, whom God passes by he reprobates, and that for no other cause but because he is pleased to exclude them from the inheritance which he predestines to his children”[1]
As I have maintained, all Calvinists, arguments to the contrary notwithstanding, inevitably believe in double predestination, but most shy from the forthrightness of Calvin. They either believe that God actively predestined some to hell, as Calvin does, or He did so by choosing not to offer what surely would have delivered them from hell to heaven, i.e. selective regeneration. Calvin refers to this cold inescapable reality as “his incomprehensible counsel,” i.e. mystery.[2] I find this to be another disquieting reality of Calvinism.
All of the euphemizing in the world will not purge Calvinism of the harsh reality that people are saved because God desired for them to be, and people are in hell for the same reason. This is true even if some Calvinists continue to resist admitting it because according to Calvinism, if God pleased, not only could everyone have been saved, but they would in fact have been saved, which is disquieting reality.
Calvinism asks us to believe that God chose eternal torment for the vast majority of His creation (Matthew 7:13-14). They want us to rejoice in a God who desires and chooses for the vast majority of his creation to go to hell when He could have redeemed them. That is indeed God according to Calvinism, but not the Scripture. Where is the plethora of Scripture where God expresses His desire for the vast majority of His creation to perish in eternal torment, and this with equal clarity and abundance as those Scriptures that declare His indefatigable, sacrificial love and desire that all repent and be saved? I suggest that they do not exist and for good reason.
[1] John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, Book 3, Chapter 23, pages 225-226. [2]John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, Book 3, Chapter 23, page 226.
Ezekiel 33:11 ESV
Say to them, As I live, declares the Lord God, I have no pleasure in the death of the wicked, but that the wicked turn from his way and live; turn back, turn back from your evil ways, for why will you die, O house of Israel?
Ezekiel 18:23 ESV
Have I any pleasure in the death of the wicked, declares the Lord God, and not rather that he should turn from his way and live?
Ezekiel 18:32 ESV
For I have no pleasure in the death of anyone, declares the Lord God; so turn, and live.”
RC SPROUL
What predestination means, in its most elementary form, is that our final destination, heaven or hell, is decided by God not only before we get there, but before we are even born. It teaches that our ultimate destiny is in the hands of God. Another way of saying it is this: From all eternity, before we ever live, God decided to save some members of the human race and to let the rest of the human race perish. God made a choice—he chose some individuals to be saved unto everlasting blessedness in heaven and others he chose to pass over, to allow them to follow the consequences of their sins into eternal torment in hell.
R.C. Sproul,Chosen By God (Wheaton, IL: Tyndale House Publishers, 1986), 22.
“The nasty problem for the Calvinist [is]… If God can and does choose to insure the salvation of some, why then does he not insure the salvation of all? [35]
[….]
The only answer I can give to this question is that I don’t know. I have no idea why God saves some but not all. I don’t doubt for a moment that God has the power to save all but I know that he does not choose to save all I don’t know why.
One thing I do know. If it pleases God to save some and not all there is nothing wrong with that. God is not under obligation to save anybody If he chooses to save some, that in no way obligates him to save the rest. Again the Bible insists that it is God’s divine prerogative to have mercy upon whom he will have mercy. [37]
R.C. Sproul, Chosen By God: Know God’s Perfect Plan for His Glory and His Children (Wheaton, IL: Tyndal House Publishers, 1986), 35,37.
Sproul’s hyperbole doesn’t save him from who puts the “mother” in hell. To wit:
ERIC HANKINS
Does Romans 9 teach Calvinistic Reprobation? Guest Dr. Eric Hankins
Eric Hankins, PhD joins Dr. Flowers to discuss Dr. Hankins article recently published at the Journal for Baptist Theology and Ministry from New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary,
There are two places you can read the article being discussed below. One is the PDF extracted piece by Pastor Hankins from the Journal for Baptist Theology and Ministry (spring 2018) volume 15, number 1, HERE. Or the reproduction of it over at Soteriology 101, HERE.
WAYNE GRUDEM
“reprobation,” the decision of God to pass over those who will not be saved, and to punish them for their sins. As will be explained below, election and reprobation are different in several important respects, and it is important to distinguish these so that we do not think wrongly about God or his activity.
The term predestination is also frequently used in this discussion. In this textbook, and in Reformed theology generally, predestination is a broader term and includes the two aspects of election (for believers) and reprobation (for unbelievers). However, the term double predestination is not a helpful term because it gives the impression that both election and reprobation are carried out in the same way by God and have no essential differences between them, which is certainly not true. Therefore, the term double predestination is not generally used by Reformed theologians, though it is sometimes used to refer to Reformed teaching by those who criticize it. The term double predestination will not be used in this book to refer to election and reprobation, since it blurs the distinctions between them and does not give an accurate indication of what is actually being taught. [670]
[….]
When we understand election as God’s sovereign choice of some persons to be saved, then there is necessarily another aspect of that choice, namely, God’s sovereign decision to pass over others and not to save them. This decision of God in eternity past is called reprobation. Reprobation is the sovereign decision of God before creation to pass over some persons, in sorrow deciding not to save them, and to punish them for their sins, and thereby to manifest his justice.
In many ways the doctrine of reprobation is the most difficult of all the teachings of Scripture for us to think about and to accept, because it deals with such horrible and eternal consequences for human beings made in the image of God. The love that God gives us for our fellow human beings and the love that he commands us to have toward our neighbor cause us to recoil against this doctrine, and it is right that we feel such dread in contemplating it.
[….]
In spite of the fact that we recoil against this doctrine, we must be careful of our attitude toward God and toward these passages of Scripture. We must never begin to wish that the Bible was written in another way, or that it did not contain these verses.
Moreover, if we are convinced that these verses teach reprobation, then we are obligated both to believe it and accept it as fair and just of God, even though it still causes us to tremble in horror as we think of it. [684-685]
Wayne Grudem, Systematic Theology: An Introduction to Bible Doctrine (Leicester LE17GP, Great Britain: Inter-Varsity Press, 1994; and, Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan Publishing House, 1994), 670, 684-685.
LORAINE BOETTNER
REPROBATION
The doctrine of absolute Predestination of course logically holds that some are foreordained to death as truly as others are foreordained to life. The very terms “elect” and “election” imply the terms “non-elect” and “reprobation.” When some are chosen out others are left not chosen. The high privileges and glorious destiny of the former are not shared with the latter. This, too, is of God. We believe that from all eternity God has intended to leave some of Adam’s posterity in their sins, and that the decisive factor in the life of each is to be found only in God’s will. As Mozley has said, the whole race after the fall was “one mass of perdition,” and “it pleased God of His sovereign mercy to rescue some and to leave others where they were; to raise some to glory, giving them such grace as necessarily qualified them for it, and abandon the rest, from whom He withheld such grace, to eternal punishments.”50
The chief difficulty with the doctrine of Election of course arises in regard to the unsaved; and the Scriptures have given us no extended explanation of their state. Since the mission of Jesus in the world was to save the world rather than to judge it, this side of the matter is less dwelt upon.
In all of the Reformed creeds in which the doctrine of Reprobation is dealt with at all it is treated as an essential part of the doctrine of Predestination. The Westminster Confession, after stating the doctrine of election, adds: “The rest of mankind, God was pleased, according to the inscrutable counsel of His own will, whereby He extendeth or withholdeth mercy as He pleaseth, for the glory of His sovereign power over His creatures, to pass by, and to ordain them to dishonor and wrath for their sin, to the praise of His glorious justice.”51
Those who hold the doctrine of Election but deny that of Reprobation can lay but little claim to consistency. To affirm the former while denying the latter makes the decree of predestination an illogical and lop-sided decree. The creed which states the former but denies the latter will resemble a wounded eagle attempting to fly with but one wing. In the interests of a “mild Calvinism” some have been inclined to give up the doctrine of Reprobation, and this term (in itself a very innocent term) has been the entering wedge for harmful attacks upon Calvinism pure and simple. “Mild Calvinism” is synonymous with sickly Calvinism, and sickness, if not cured, is the beginning of the end.
Comments by Calvin, Luther, and Warfield
Calvin did not hesitate to base the reprobation of the lost, as well as the election of the saved, on the eternal purpose of God. We have already quoted him to the effect that “not all men are created with a similar destiny but eternal life is foreordained for some, and eternal damnation for others. Every man, therefore, being created for one or the other of these ends, we say, he is predestinated either to life or to death.” And again he says, “There can be no election without its opposite, reprobation.”52That the latter raises problems which are not easy to solve, he readily admits, but advocates it as the only intelligent and Scriptural explanation of the facts.
Luther also as certainly as Calvin attributes the eternal perdition of the wicked, as well as the eternal salvation of the righteous, to the plan of God. “This mightily offends our rational nature,” he says, “that God should, of His own mere unbiased will, leave some men to themselves, harden them and condemn them; but He gives abundant demonstration, and does continually, that this is really the case; namely, that the sole cause why some are saved, and others perish, proceeds from His willing the salvation of the former, and the perdition of the latter, according to that of St. Paul, ‘He hath mercy on whom He will have mercy, and whom He will He hardeneth.”‘ And again, “It may seem absurd to human wisdom that God should harden, blind, and deliver up some men to a reprobate sense; that He should first deliver them over to evil, and condemn them for that evil; but the believing, spiritual man sees no absurdity at all in this; knowing that God would be never a whit less good, even though He should destroy all men.” He then goes on to say that this must not be understood to mean that God finds men good, wise, obedient, and makes them evil, foolish, and obdurate, but that they are already depraved and fallen and that those who are not regenerated, instead of becoming better under the divine commands and influences, only react to become worse. In reference to Romans IX, X, XI, Luther says that “all things whatever arise from and depend upon the Divine appointment, whereby it was preordained who should receive the word of life and who should disbelieve it, who should be delivered from their sins and who should be hardened in them, who should be justified and who condemned.”53
“The Biblical writers,” says Dr. Warfield, “are as far as possible from obscuring the doctrine of election because of any seemingly unpleasant corollaries that flow from it. On the contrary, they expressly draw the corollaries which have often been so designated, and make them a part of their explicit teaching. Their doctrine of election, they are free to tell us, for example, does certainly involve a corresponding doctrine of preterition. The very term adopted in the New Testament to express it—eklegomai, which, as Meyer justly says (Ephesians 1:4), ‘always has, and must of logical necessity have, a reference to others to whom the chosen would, without the ekloga, still belong’—embodies a declaration of the fact that in their election others are passed by and left without the gift of salvation; the whole presentation of the doctrine is such as either to imply or openly to assert, on its very emergence, the removal of the elect by the pure grace of God, not merely from a state of condemnation, but out of the company of the condemned—a company on whom the grace of God has no saving effect, and who are therefore left without hope in their sins; and the positive just reprobation of the impenitent for their sins is repeatedly explicitly taught in sharp contrast with the gratuitous salvation of the elect despite their sins.”54
And again he says: “The difficulty which is felt by some in following the apostle’s argument here (Romans 11 f), we may suspect, has its roots in part in a shrinking from what appears to them an arbitrary assignment of men to diverse destinies without consideration of their desert. Certainly St. Paul as explicitly affirms the sovereignty of reprobation as election,—if these twin ideas are, indeed, separable even in thought; if he represents God as sovereignly loving Jacob, he represents Him equally as sovereignly hating Esau; if he declares that He has mercy on whom He will, He equally declares that He hardens whom He will. Doubtless the difficulty often felt here is, in part, an outgrowth of an insufficient realization of St. Paul’s basal conception of the state of men at large as condemned sinners before an angry God. It is with a world of lost sinners that he represents God as dealing; and out of that world building up a Kingdom of Grace. Were not all men sinners, there might still be an election, as sovereign as now; and there being an election, there would still be as sovereign a rejection; but the rejection would not be a rejection to punishment, to destruction, to eternal death, but to some other destiny consonant to the state in which those passed by should be left. It is not indeed, then, because men are sinners that men are left unelected; election is free, and its obverse of rejection must be equally free; but it is solely because men are sinners that what they are left to is destruction. And it is in this universalism of ruin rather than in a universalism of salvation that St. Paul really roots his theodicy. When all deserve death it is a marvel of pure grace that any receive life; and who shall gainsay the right of Him who shows this miraculous mercy, to have mercy on whom He will, and whom He will to harden?”55
NOTES
The Augustinian Doctrine of Predestination, p. 297.
Ch. III: Sec. 7
Institutes, Book III, Ch. 23.
In Praefat, and Epist. ad Rom., quoted by Zanchius, Predestination, p. 92.
B.B. Warfield, Biblical Doctrines, art. Predestination, p. 64.
Biblical Doctrines. p. 54.
Loraine Boettner, The Reformed Doctrine of Predestination (Phillipsburg, NJ: Presbyterian and Reformed Publishing Co., 1932), 104-108.
Kenneth Keathley
Worse yet, the hidden/revealed wills approach appears to make God out to be hypocritical, which is a fifth problem. God universally offers a salvation that He has no intention for all to receive. Reformed soteriology teaches that the gospel is offered to all, but efficacious grace is given only to the elect.46The limits of salvation are set by the sovereign and secret choice of God. Numerous times—through the prophets, the Savior, and the apostles—God publicly reveals a desire for Israel’s salvation while secretly seeing to it they will not repent. Calvin, citing Augustine, states that since we do not know who is elect and who is reprobate we should desire the salvation of all.47Shank retorts, “But why? If this be not God’s desire, why should it be Calvin’s? Why does Calvin wish to be more gracious than God?”48
Which brings us to a sixth and fundamental objection to the hidden/revealed wills paradigm: it fails to face the very problems it was intended to address. It avoids the very dilemma decretal theology creates. Peterson, in his defense of the Reformed position on God’s two wills, states, “God does not save all sinners, for ultimately he does not intend to save all of them. The gift of faith is necessary for salvation, yet for reasons beyond our ken, the gift of faith has not been given to all.”49But then he concludes, “While God commands all to repent and takes no delight in the death of the sinner, all are not saved because it is not God’s intention to give his redeeming grace to all.”50I must be candid and confess that to me the last quote makes no sense.
Let us remember that there is no disagreement about human responsibility. Molinists, Calvinists, Arminians, and all other orthodox Christians agree that the lost are lost because of their own sin. But that is not the question at hand. The question is not, “Why are the lost lost?” but “Why aren’t the lost saved?” The nasty, awful, “deep-dark-dirty-little-secret” of Calvinism is that it teaches there is one and only one answer to the second question, and it is that God does not want them saved.51Molinism is sometimes accused of having similar problems,52but Reformed theology has the distinction of making this difficulty the foundational cornerstone for its understanding of salvation.
NOTES
See T. R. Schreiner and B. A. Ware, “Introduction” in The Grace of God, the Bondage of the Will, 12. They affirm that efficacious grace is given only to the elect: “Our understanding of God’s saving grace is very different. We contend that Scripture does not teach that all people receive grace in equal measure, even though such a democratic notion is attractive today. What Scripture teaches is that God’s saving grace is set only upon some, namely, those whom, in his great love, he elected long ago to save, and that this grace is necessarily effective in turning them to belief.”
J. Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion (Philadelphia: Westminster, [1559] 1960), 3.23.14.
R. Shank, Elect in the Son (Minneapolis: Bethany House, 1989), 166.
R. Peterson and M. Williams, Why I Am Not an Arminian (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity, 2004), 130.
Ibid.
Both the point and the phrase come from Walls and Dongell, Why I Am Not a Calvinist, 186–87. Cf. Daane, The Freedom of God, 184. Both Dort and Westminster warn about preaching decretal theology publicly. Many thoughtful Calvinists concede that the moral and logical problems with the doctrine of reprobation are irresolvable. See P. Jewett, Election and Predestination (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1985), 76–77, 99–100; and T. R. Schreiner, “Does Scripture Teach Prevenient Grace in the Wesleyan Sense?” in Schreiner and Ware, The Grace of God, the Bondage of the Will, 381–82.
See J. Walls, “Is Molinism as Bad as Calvinism?” Faith and Philosophy 7 (1990):85–98.
Kenneth Keathley, Salvation and the Sovereignty: A Molinist Approach (Nashville, TN: B&H Publishing Group, 2010), 57-58.
ADAM HARWOOD
A widely—though not universally—accepted view in Protestant theological literature is that God determines all things, including the salvation and reprobation of individuals.3 For example, Millard Erickson begins his chapter on predestination with this statement: “Predestination is God’s choice of persons for eternal life or eternal death.”4 Robert Letham writes, “Predestination refers to God’s ordaining this or that immutably from eternity.” Letham adds, “Election is that aspect of predestination that relates to those whom God ordains to salvation in Christ.”5 Alan Cairns refers to predestination in both wide and narrow senses. In a wide sense, predestination refers to God’s foreordaining of all things; in a narrow sense, it refers to God selecting some individuals for salvation and others for reprobation.6 This widely accepted understanding of predestination and election can be traced to Augustine.
One of Augustine’s final writings was the short work titled A Treatise on the Predestination of the Saints.7 The African bishop wrote it in 428 or 429 to warn Prosper and Hilary against Pelagian views.8 Augustine argues that the Lord prepares the will of the elect for faith, and only some people are elected to salvation, which is an act of God’s mercy. Faith is a gift given to only some people, and only some are called by God to be believers. Those elected are called in order to believe. Augustine explains, “He chose them that they might choose Him.”9 Augustine’s views established a grid for understanding predestination and election that has significantly influenced subsequent interpreters. The Calvinist-Arminian tradition adopted his interpretation (though it modified it at certain points), while others (such as the Eastern Orthodox Church) rejected it. Other Christian groups are composed of some who accept his view and others who reject it.10 Though some Christians affirm a version of Augustinian predestination, the view has never gained a consensus in the church.11 [580-581]
[….]
Although Augustinian predestination has influenced many Christian interpreters, Paul is addressing in Romans 9 the temporal rejection and hardening of Israel, not the eternal fate of individuals. 62 The hardening of Israel should be interpreted as God rejecting his people for a period of time to bring in the gentiles rather than God’s precreation choice to condemn certain individuals.63 Reprobation (the view that God decides before creation, whether actively or passively, to condemn certain individuals) was not Paul’s intended meaning in Romans 9 but Augustine’s innovation.64[602-603]
NOTES
3 Election, defined as God’s choice of certain individuals for salvation, is either presupposed or explicitly taught in most of the recent Protestant theological literature. See, e.g., Wayne Grudem, Systematic Theology: An Introduction to Biblical Doctrine , 2nd ed. (Grand Rapids: Zondervan Academic, 2020), 816–41 ; Katherine Sonderdegger, “Election ,” in The Oxford Handbook of Systematic Theology , ed. John Webster, Kathryn Tanner, and Iain Torrance (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 105–20 ; Michael Horton, The Christian Faith: A Systematic Theology for Pilgrims on the Way (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2011), 309–23 ; Millard J. Erickson, Christian Theology , 3rd ed. (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2013), 841–59 ; John M. Frame, Systematic Theology: An Introduction to Christian Belief (Phillipsburg, NJ: P&R, 2013), 163–64 , 206–30 ; Kenneth Keathley, “The Work of God: Salvation ,” in A Theology for the Church , rev. ed., ed. Daniel L. Akin (Nashville: B&H Academic, 2014), 557–70 ; and Robert Letham, Systematic Theology (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2019), 405–39 . A notable exception is Stanley J. Grenz, Theology for the Community of God (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2000), 448–60. He summarizes the Calvinist-Arminian position but prefers Pannenberg’s approach of considering God’s plans for the future rather than past decrees. See also James Leo Garrett Jr., Systematic Theology: Biblical, Historical and Evangelical (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1995), 2:453–54. He wonders whether Augustine and Calvin’s views have “contributed to a hyper-individualization of this doctrine.”
6 Alan Cairns, Dictionary of Theological Terms (Greenville, SC: Ambassador Emerald International, 2002), 335–36: “In the widest sense, predestination ‘is the theological doctrine … that from eternity God has foreordained all things which come to pass’ (Boettner). In this sense it is synonymous with God’s decree. However, it is most frequently used in a narrower sense, ‘as designating only the counsel of God concerning fallen men, including the sovereign election of some and the most righteous reprobation of the rest’ (A. A. Hodge). In this sense, predestination is in two parts, election and reprobation (see Westminster Confession, chap. 3, sec. 3, 7).”
7 Augustine, A Treatise on the Predestination of the Saints.
8 For more on Augustine’s views of grace and predestination, see J. N. D. Kelly, Early Christian Doctrines, rev. ed. (New York: HarperCollins, 1978), 366–69. For Augustine’s shift from prioritizing human free will in salvation to prioritizing God’s sovereign choice in election, see David Roach, “From Free Choice to God’s Choice: Augustine’s Exegesis of Romans 9 ,” Evangelical Quarterly 80.2 (2008): 129–41 ; Eric L. Jenkins, Free to Say No?: Free Will in Augustine’s Evolving Doctrines of Grace and Election (Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock, 2012) ; and Kenneth M. Wilson, Augustine’s Conversion from Traditional Free Choice to “Non-free Free Will ,” Studien und Texte zu Antike und Christentum 111 (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2018).
9 Augustine, Treatise on the Predestination 10–11, 16, 32, 34 ( NPNF 1 5:515).
10 My own theological tradition is composed of some who affirm Augustinian predestination, others who reject it, and still others who suspend judgment on the matter. See E. Ray Clendenen and Brad J. Waggoner, eds., Calvinism: A Southern Baptist Dialogue (Nashville: B&H Academic, 2008) , for a collection of essays representing the two major sides of that discussion from within the same convention of churches. The Abstract of Principles (1858) defines election according to Augustinian predestination, but the BFM (2000) is ambiguous. According to Daniel L. Akin, “the nature and basis of election is not defined” in the confession. Akin, “Article V: God’s Purpose of Grace ,” in Baptist Faith and Message 2000: Critical Issues in America’s Largest Protestant Denomination , ed. Douglas K. Blount and Joseph D. Woodell (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2007), 46.
11 Thomas C. Oden, Classic Christianity: A Systematic Theology (New York: HarperOne, 2009), 182–83 , “However great Augustine may have been, his views of predestination were never fully received and often modified, so those particular views can hardly be regarded as having received the consent necessary for being viewed as ancient ecumenical consensual tradition.”
[….]
62 For commentators who argue that Paul is not addressing the eternal fate of individuals in Rom 9, see N. T. Wright, The Climax of the Covenant: Christ and the Law in Pauline Theology (Edinburgh: T & T Clark, 1992), 238–39 ; Joseph A. Fitzmyer, Romans: A New Translation with Introduction and Commentary , AB 33 (New York: Doubleday, 1993), 563 ; Brendan Byrne, Romans , Sacra Pagina 6 (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical, 1996), 299 ; Luke T. Johnson, Reading Romans (New York: Crossroad, 1997), 140 ; Witherington with Hyatt, Paul’s Letter to the Romans , 246–59 ; and Brian J. Abasciano’s three volumes in the Library of New Testament Studies: Paul’s Use of the Old Testament in Romans 9.1–9: An Intertextual and Theological Exegesis (London: T&T Clark, 2005) ; Paul’s Use of the Old Testament in Romans 9:10–18: An Intertextual and Theological Exegesis (London: T&T Clark, 2011) ; and Paul’s Use of the Old Testament in Romans 9:19–24: An Intertextual and Theological Exegesis (London: T&T Clark, forthcoming) . For commentators who argue that Paul is addressing unconditional election to salvation in Rom 9, see Schreiner, “Does Romans 9 Teach,” 89–106; Schreiner, Romans, 2nd ed., BECNT (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2018), 460–529; Douglas J. Moo, The Epistle to the Romans, NICNT (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1996); and John Piper, The Justification of God: An Exegetical and Theological Study of Romans 9:1–23, 2nd ed. (Grand Rapids: Baker, 1993).
63 The temporary hardening of Israel (Rom 9–11) was for gentile salvation (11:25). See Matthew W. Bates, Salvation by Allegiance Alone (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2017), 106.
64 See Eric Hankins, “Romans 9 and the Calvinist Doctrine of Reprobation,” JBTM 15.1 (Spring 2018): 62–74.
Adam Harwood, Christian Theology: Biblical, Historical, and Systematic (Bellingham, WA: Lexham Academic, 2022), 580-581, 602-603.
For his chapters 23 and 24, you can read them here:
At EXAMINING CALVINISM you can read responses in this post to: James White, R.C. Sproul, Robert A. Peterson and Michael D. Williams,
… Some Calvinists have wrongly concluded that the non-Calvinist seeks to downplay the sovereignty of God and highlight the autonomy of man, when in reality we seek to maintain the right biblical understanding of man’s autonomy so as to better highlight the sovereignty, love and holiness of God.
Does God’s sovereignty terminate at the point of being able to create autonomous beings who seek their own purposes?
Does God’s sovereignty terminate at the point of being able to offer such beings an independent choice He does not determine?
If God must meticulously decree every thought, word and deed ever conceived in order to remain “sovereign,” then that wouldn’t say much for divine sovereignty. In contrast to Calvinism, God exhibits being all-wise, all-knowing and all-powerful when He governs without any strings attached. The contrasting Calvinist conception of divine sovereignty would make God out to be pretty mediocre.
All of scripture supports God’s “sovereignty.” The controversy is over how Calvinists try to redefine sovereignty to mean exhaustive, philosophical determinism, and the way that is accomplished is by citing the biblical word, “predestination.” However, the fact that God predestines some things does not necessarily mean that God predestines everything. Moreover, it is critical to correctly understand the manner in which God predestines things. For instance, God predestined to redeem good from evil, but that doesn’t necessarily mean He caused the evil He redeems.
God is the ultimate cause of everything that exists, meaning that without Him, nothing can come to pass, and this is something that all theists can affirm, so long as one incorporates a truly meaningful definition of divine permission, in which in addition to God’s own determinations, He also permits independent agents who possess autonomy of reason to conduct their own libertarianly free choices. The problem in Calvinism, however, is that divine permission is reduced to a matter of God allowing people to do what He exhaustively and meticulously rendered certain and necessary, thus spoiling the aforementioned definition of permission.
God is in control of all things, though He is not all-controlling. Calvinists, however, believe in a type of divine sovereignty which requires that God exhaustively predetermine everything that ever comes to pass, including every person’s thoughts, intentions and actions, for all eternity, including sinful thoughts, intentions and actions, thus drawing a sharp rebuke from non-Calvinists. This is what Calvinists term “predestination,” though the Bible does not teach predestination in such a way. Moreover, such a notion has historically drawn the criticism of being a form of Christian fatalism. Nonetheless, from the Calvinist perspective, an exhaustive eternal decree is necessary for God to truly be in control and to truly be omnipotent. It should be pointed out, however, that the Bible never talks about any such eternal decree. What Calvinists are referring to is just a systemic, doctrinal perspective, rather than something that is firmly taught in Scripture. A decree is simply something that God declares to be, and so if God declares for mankind to have free-will, which is what non-Calvinists hold to, then that’s what God decreed. For instance, non-Calvinists believe that God has decreed, not which choices that we will make, but rather that we would be free in making them. That’s a doctrinal perspective. So when we make free choices, it is understood that we are not countervailing the will of God, but rather we are acting in accordance with the ability God has granted.
Speaking frankly, Calvinistic determinism would mean that God cannot handle free-will, and it would gut all creation of true life. It would render God as a marionette, pulling the strings of dead things. It would be a worthless and humiliating endeavor for a truly glorious, all-powerful, all-knowing and all-wise God. …
Voddie Baucham on Sovereignty
Dr. Leighton Flowers responds to a short snippet from Dr. Voddie Baucham on the sovereignty of God
Ronnie W. Rogers, Reflections of a Disenchanted Calvinist,
I affirm that God is sovereign over everything without exception; therefore, He is in total control; further, I believe that creating a world where men are given a real choice demonstrates God’s sovereignty rather than undermines it. By real free choice, I mean that by grace, God gave man the ability to believe the gospel or not to believe the gospel; as a result, the ones who believe could have not believed, and the ones who disbelieve could have believed unto salvation. Consequently, man’s consignment to hell is due to being born a sinner, sinning, and rejecting a real offer of the redemptive love and mercy of God, which he could have accepted; therefore he is in hell because he chose to be despite God’s provision and desire for him to be saved (2 Peter 3:9). This position does not in any sense minimize or waste the redemptive work of Christ and the power of the cross, or undermine or thwart the sovereignty of God. The work and power of the sacrifice of Christ was to provide salvation for all and secure it for all who would receive it by faith and by God’s gracious provision. I affirm that God’s sovereignty is not minimized because He sovereignly chose to provide a real choice for everyone to accept or reject the gospel. This includes deliverance from eternal hell, men’s just desert, for anyone and everyone who acts in concert with His grace enablement and follows Christ.
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 ofthe 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.”5 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.
I also affirm that the permissive will of God is a part of His decretive will that permitted sin to enter the world and, for a time, continue.6 Holiness is always God’s standard and therefore sin is never God’s perfect, immediate or ultimate desire for His creation or man, but within His sovereign decretive will, He has purposefully permitted it. He commands man to obey, but permits him the freedom to disobey. The choice to disobey God’s commands results in man suffering the consequences of such choice. Thus, with regard to salvation, God desires that all come to salvation (2 Peter 3:9). Accordingly, He enables man to be able to be saved, and thereby permits man to freely choose to believe the gospel or to reject His grace and love and die in his sins. Without question, God’s permissive will does not preclude Him from ever intervening in the decision-making process of man if His purposes so require; however, neither does it necessitate that it be done in order to maintain sovereignty as long as He sovereignly chose to act in that particular way.
I further affirm that God’s full character and attributes, not just His sovereignty or justice, are to be considered when speaking of Him and His plans. This includes His infinity, justice, mercy, compassion, love, grace and power, which He possesses perfectly and infinitely. God is the sum of perfection. Lewis Sperry Chafer notes concerning this balance, “He is free to dispose of His creation as He will; but His will… is wholly guided by the true and benevolent features of His Person ….The attributes of God form an interwoven and interdependent communion of facts and forces which harmonize in the Person of God. An omission or slighting of any of these, or any disproportionate emphasis upon any one of them cannot but lead to fundamental error of immeasurable magnitude.”7
Moreover, I affirm that all of God’s attributes are more accurately reflected by accepting the truths of Scripture, which declare that salvation is provided and genuinely offered to everyone by God, and everyone can by “grace through faith” receive salvation, rather than by accepting the teaching of Calvinism that God only actually offers salvation to some because only that particular some can actually believe; those are the ones He monergistically causes to believe by changing their nature against their will. Calvinism teaches that regeneration is monergistic—God alone—and man has no part in it. After regeneration there becomes a synergistic relationship between God and man, and man exercises faith because he cannot choose to do otherwise. This is a disquieting reality.
Lastly, while some things about God are indeed a mystery because either they are not fully disclosed by God or understood by man or both (Deuteronomy 29:29), this is quite different than mysteries generated by Calvinism’s overemphasis upon certain attributes or concepts like justice or predestination and defining sovereignty to necessarily preclude real free choice. Actually, the Calvinist’s persistent mention of the sovereignty of God tells us nothing about the biblical loyalty of Calvinism since all believers with any biblical fidelity and understanding of God believe in His sovereignty. Further, disavowal of the Calvinist’s definition of sovereignty is not a denial or undermining of the sovereignty of God, but it is what it is, a denial of Calvinism’s definition.
I disaffirm that salvation is monergistic, which means that God actively causes some to be saved by forced regeneration, and that act of regeneration is contrary to and against their sinful, rebellious nature, will, and choice, and that until regeneration, man is totally passive and becomes active only after regeneration. I disaffirm that there is nothing that can be done prior to regeneration with regard to salvation.8 I disaffirm that man is passive in regeneration.9 I further disaffirm that God selects to regenerate some and thereby either actively or passively chooses to leave some in their lost condition,10 and therefore irresistibly pre-determines some to be forever lost and damned to a place created for Satan (Matthew 25:41).
Calvinism asks us to believe that God chose eternal torment for the vast majority of His creation (Matthew 7: 1 3 —14). They want us to rejoice in a God who desires and chose for the vast majority of his creation to go to hell when He could have redeemed them. That is indeed God according to Calvinism, but not the God Scripture. This is a disquieting reality. Where is the plethora of Scripture where God expresses His desire for the vast majority of His creation to perish in eternal torment and this with equal clarity and abundance as those Scriptures that declare His indefatigable, sacrificial love and desire that all repent and be saved? I suggest that they do not exist and for good reason.
Monergism means that salvation is “[God’s] work alone”11, which is based upon the Calvinistic view that salvation depends upon God’s unconditional election to regenerate some prior to and quite apart from anything, even faith. However, if there is nothing that is a part of salvation and no one can do anything, even by the grace of God, to facilitate faith and thereby salvation, then why did Paul reason from the Scriptures in order to prove that Jesus was the Messiah? (e.g., Acts 17:2-4). Why did he attempt to “persuade men”? (2 Corinthians 5:11). Why did he beg people to be “reconciled to God”? (2 Corinthians 5:20). Why did God reconcile the “world”? (2 Corinthians 5:19). Why was Paul able to reason with the Jews concerning Christ, persuading some while others “would not believe”? (Acts 28:24). Notice it was not that they could not believe, but they would not believe. Why would Paul believe and say, “I have become all things to all men, that I may by all means save some”? (1 Corinthians 9:22).
To respond, as Calvinists do, that God has established the means to salvation, and therefore this may be the means of salvation, which in reality according to monergism has no real effect upon conversion, is just simply not what is presented in the Scripture. The picture in Scripture is that these things do have an actual part in salvation. They play a part, as does faith, by the grace and plan of God. To say that Paul was doing and saying this all out of mere obedience, all the while knowing that the people to whom he reasoned and pleaded may be the ones who could not hear or respond any more than a blind person could see you wink, is not the picture that is presented ever so clearly Scripture. Nor is it the implication of most Calvinists’ messages on Paul’s behavior. This is a disquieting reality.
Moreover, according to monergism, if they ever did respond, it would have nothing to do with anything Paul or the respondent had done, which is obviously contrary to Paul’s words (1 Corinthians 10:33; 1 Thessalonians 2:16). Although Calvinists talk, at times, as though what we do matters in a person’s salvation, it is actually absolutely disallowed by their monergistic view of salvation. I do grant that the Calvinist can be disobedient to God’s process, but this disobedience neither hinders nor facilitates salvation—according to monergism.
Man’s passiveness is stated explicitly in The Westminster Confession. “This effectual call [to salvation] is of God’s free and special grace alone, not from anything at all foreseen in man, who is altogether passive therein, until, being quickened and renewed by the Holy Spirit, he is thereby enabled to answer this call, and to embrace the grace offered and conveyed by it.”12 (italics added) I add to this the clarification that he is not only enabled, but according to Calvinism, he is enabled against his will, and not only enabled to believe but made to only be able to believe rather than choose between believing and not believing. I maintain that God indeed has foreknowledge, even of the future, contingent, freewill choices of men and women, which is an indispensible part of His decrees and predestination. That is to say, contrary to Calvinism, He gave free will, paid everything necessary for the salvation of all, sent the call out to receive by faith, provided grace enablements and predestined to salvation those who would receive and respond to His grace.
Further, I disaffirm that the key to God’s sovereignty is causation, as the Calvinists seem to believe. Their definition of sovereignty is actually a product of defining sovereignty, as well as viewing Scriptures relating to sovereignty, through the Calvinist grid. Moreover, I disaffirm that it is possible for a Calvinist to demonstrate how an unfettered decision by God to give man the ability to have a real free choice undermines sovereignty. Finally, I disaffirm the legitimacy of using mystery to serve as a satisfactory alternative to the biblical balance of sovereignty and human responsibility and/or that the response “it is a mystery” is a satisfactory answer to the dilemma caused by the Calvinist teaching of selective regeneration preceding and necessarily resulting in faith. This is a disquieting reality.
Here is the dilemma caused by selective regeneration. If God monergistically selects to regenerate some and not to regenerate others, and all whom He regenerates will necessarily believe, and none whom He does not choose to regenerate can believe, then God is necessarily the one deciding to send the vast majority of sinners to hell. In other words, according to Calvinism’s monergism, everything necessary to save one sinner—God choosing to regenerate prior to faith—is sufficient to save all sinners. The only thing lacking is God choosing to regenerate certain sinners. Therefore, it is an inescapable reality, based on Calvinism, that people are in hell because God sovereignly chose not to regenerate them. God is the sole determiner that certain lost people cannot be saved and therefore must perish in hell. This is a disquieting reality. I maintain that the portrait of God painted by Calvinism is not the picture painted by Scripture.
When I have presented this reality to Calvinists, I am told not to take logic too far—i.e., it is a mystery. Of course they use logic all of the time. While I do agree with the Calvinists’ assertion that God would be just if He sent everyone to hell because everyone is a sinner, and it is grace if He chooses to redeem one; I disagree that this truth in any way answers this dilemma of Calvinism or satisfies the boundless, matchless, and majestic grace, love, and mercy of God presented throughout the Scripture.
It is rather perplexing to see how a Calvinist can sign the Baptist Faith and Message because it says of God, “He is fatherly in His attitude toward all men.”13 Since Calvinism teaches that God actively elected to withhold salvation from most of the lost people of the world, it seems fair to ask in what way is that fatherly. In other words, He chose to pass them by, thereby predestining them irrevocably to eternal torment, which action, according to Calvinism, pleased Him. To say they deserve it, or that God is just, misses the point. For the dilemma is not regarding their just due, but rather what kind of father is God, knowing that He could have exercised selective regeneration through irresistible grace and delivered them from such fate. This indisputably transmogrifies the affectionate and endearing word “fatherly” into something that is horrifyingly dreadful.
6. I am using permissive for that which God decreed to command but not compel. Theologians often distinguish this from God’s decretive will with the term perceptive. Lewis Sperry Chafer, Systematic Theology, vol. I, Prolegomena, Bibliology, Theology Proper, (Dallas, TX: Dallas Seminary Press, 1947), 209.
7. Chafer, Systematic Theology. vol. I, 223. This citation is not intended to indicate Chafer’s endorsement of my overall position, but rather to note the need for balance in handling the attributes of God, which I do not think Calvinists do.
8. Norman Geisler, Systematic Theology, vol. 3, Sin, Salvation (Minneapolis, Minn.: Bethany House, 2004), 192.
9. The Westminster Confession of Faith, A.D. 1646, chapter X, sections 1 and 2, found online at The Center for Reformed Theology and Apologetics.
10. Either actively as Hyper-Calvinism and some other Calvinists maintain or passively as other Calvinists maintain.
11. Geisler, Systematic Theology, vol. 3, 192.
12. The Westminster Confession of Faith (1646), Chapter X, Section II.
Interview with Pastor Ronnie Rogers (1hr and 20-minutes)
This first audio is from A.W. Tozer regarding God’s sovereignty. I also include a partial excerpt from his book, The Knowledge of the Holy: The Attributes of God. Their Meaning in the Christian Life, chapter 22 ~ “The Sovereignty of God” ~ of which the entire chapter is here.
Here is that partial chapter excerpt.
I changed a couple words as can not reads better as cannot:
… While a complete explanation of the origin of sin eludes us, there are a few things we do know. In His sovereign wisdom God has permitted evil to exist in carefully restricted areas of His creation, a kind of fugitive outlaw whose activities are temporary and limited in scope. In doing this God has acted according to His infinite wisdom and goodness. More than that no one knows at present; and more than that no one needs to know. The name of God is sufficient guarantee of the perfection of His works.
Another real problem created by the doctrine of the divine sovereignty has to do with the will of man. If God rules His universe by His sovereign decrees, how is it possible for man to exercise free choice? And if he cannot exercise freedom of choice, how can he be held responsible for his conduct? Is he not a mere puppet whose actions are determined by a behind-the-scenes God who pulls the strings as it pleases Him?
The attempt to answer these questions has divided the Christian church neatly into two camps which have borne the names of two distinguished theologians, Jacobus Arminius and John Calvin. Most Christians are content to get into one camp or the other and deny either sovereignty to God or free will to man. It appears possible, however, to reconcile these two positions without doing violence to either, although the effort that follows may prove deficient to partisans of one camp or the other.
Here is my view: God sovereignly decreed that man should be free to exercise moral choice, and man from the beginning has fulfilled that decree by making his choice between good and evil. When he chooses to do evil, he does not thereby countervail the sovereign will of God but fulfills it, inasmuch as the eternal decree decided not which choice the man should make but that he should be free to make it. If in His absolute freedom God has willed to give man limited freedom, who is there to stay His hand or say, What doest thou? Mans will is free because God is sovereign. A God less than sovereign could not bestow moral freedom upon His creatures. He would be afraid to do so.
Perhaps a homely illustration might help us to understand. An ocean liner leaves New York bound for Liverpool. Its destination has been determined by proper authorities. Nothing can change it. This is at least a faint picture of sovereignty.
On board the liner are several scores of passengers. These are not in chains, neither are their activities determined for them by decree. They are completely free to move about as they will. They eat, sleep, play, lounge about on the deck, read, talk, altogether as they please; but all the while the great liner is carrying them steadily onward toward a predetermined port.
Both freedom and sovereignty are present here and they do not contradict each other. So it is, I believe, with mans freedom and the sovereignty of God. The mighty liner of Gods sovereign design keeps its steady course over the sea of history. God moves undisturbed and unhindered toward the fulfilment of those eternal purposes which He purposed in Christ Jesus before the world began. We do not know all that is included in those purposes, but enough has been disclosed to furnish us with a broad outline of things to come and to give us good hope and firm assurance of future well-being.
We know that God will fulfil every promise made to the prophets; we know that sinners will some day be cleansed out of the earth; we know that a ransomed company will enter into the joy of God and that the righteous will shine forth in the kingdom of their Father; we know that Gods perfections will yet receive universal acclamation, that all created intelligences will own Jesus Christ Lord to the glory of God the Father, that the present imperfect order will be done away, and a new heaven and a new earth be established forever.
Toward all this God is moving with infinite wisdom and perfect precision of action. No one can dissuade Him from His purposes; nothing turn Him aside from His plans. Since He is omniscient, there can be no unforeseen circumstances, no accidents. As He is sovereign, there can be no countermanded orders, no breakdown in authority; and as He is omninpotent, there can be no want of power to achieve His chosen ends. God is sufficient unto Himself for all these things.
In the meanwhile things are not as smooth as this quick outline might suggest. The mystery of iniquity doth already work. Within the broad field of Gods sovereign, permissive will the deadly conflict of good with evil continues with increasing fury. God will yet have His way in the whirlwind and the storm, but the storm and the whirlwind are here, and as responsible beings we must make our choice in the present moral situation.
Certain things have been decreed by the free determination of God, and one of these is the law of choice and consequences. God has decreed that all who willingly commit themselves to His Son Jesus Christ in the obedience of faith shall receive eternal life and become sons of God. He has also decreed that all who love darkness and continue in rebellion against the high authority of heaven shall remain in a state of spiritual alienation and suffer eternal death at last.
Reducing the whole matter to individual terms, we arrive at some vital and highly personal conclusions. In the moral conflict now raging around us whoever is on Gods side is on the winning side and cannot lose; whoever is on the other side is on the losing side and cannot win. Here there is no chance, no gamble. There is freedom to choose which side we shall be on but no freedom to negotiate the results of the choice once it is made. By the mercy of God we may repent a wrong choice and alter the consequences by making a new and right choice. Beyond that we cannot go.
The whole matter of moral choice centers around Jesus Christ. Christ stated it plainly: He that is not with me is against me, and No man cometh unto the Father, but by me. The gospel message embodies three distinct elements: an announcement, a command, and a call. It announces the good news of redemption accomplished in mercy; it commands all men everywhere to repent and it calls all men to surrender to the terms of grace by believing on Jesus Christ as Lord and Saviour.
We must all choose whether we will obey the gospel or turn away in unbelief and reject its authority. Our choice is our own, but the consequences of the choice have already been determined by the sovereign will of God, and from this there is no appeal.
A.W. Tozer, The Knowledge of the Holy: The Attributes of God
(San Francisco, CA: HarperCollins, 1961), 110-111.
God from all eternity did, by the most wise and holy counsel of his own will, freely and unchangeably ordain whatsoever comes to pass; yet so as thereby neither is God the author of sin, nor is violence offered to the will of the creatures, nor is the liberty or contingency of second causes taken away, but rather established. – Westminster Confession, III.I.
Although in relation to the foreknowledge and decree of God, the first cause, all things come to pass immutably and infallibly, yet by the same providence he ordereth them to fall out, according to the nature of second causes, either necessarily, freely, or contingently. – Westminster Confession, V.II.
“So here I see that God’s command is that the sons of Eli ought to listen to and obey their father, yet the will of God was that they would not listen so that He would put them to death.” – Peter Pike
“Nothing has ever come to pass, or ever will, merely because God knew it. The cause of all things is the will of God.” – Arthur Pink
“The question, though, is whether God merely permits evil, or whether in addition he actually brings evil about in some sense. I think the latter is true. Scripture often says that God brings about sinful decisions of human beings… If evil comes from some source other than God, that would be pretty scary.” – John Frame
“That men do nothing save at the secret instigation of God, and do not discuss or deliberate on anything but what he has previously decreed with himself, and brings to pass by his secret direction, is proved by numberless passages of Scripture.” – John Calvin
“But where it is a matter of men’s counsels, wills, endeavours, and exertions, there is greater difficulty in seeing how the providence of God rules here too, so that nothing happens but by His assent and that men can deliberately do nothing unless He inspire it.” – John Calvin
John MacArthur Tells Us There Is No Free Will
God controls first as well as secondary causes… in the determinism that has infected the Christian church. This idea is extra Biblical, brought in by Augustinian gnosis and ramped up by Calvin.
Neoplatonism (ca. AD 250) had invented this crucial theodicy by appealing to the inscrutable secret counsels of God, who is fair by definition, regardless of whatever apparent evils he desires and ordains. Prior Christians had never required this implausible and disingenuous attempt at a defense for their God.
Page 235 of “Calvinism: A Biblical and Theological Critique” (excerpt here)
I asked GROKthe following:
Can you dumb this down like we are discussion this over coffee…
… how foolish and frail is the support of divine justice afforded by the suggestion that evils come to be, not by His will but by His permission. . . . It is a quite frivolous refuge to say that God otiosely permits them, when Scripture shows Him not only willing, but the author of them. . . . Who does not tremble at these judgments with which God works in the hearts of even the wicked whatever He will, rewarding them nonetheless according to desert? Again it is quite clear from the evidence of Scripture that God works in the hearts of men to incline their wills just as he will, whether to good for His mercy’s sake, or to evil according to their merits.
John Calvin, The Eternal Predestination of God, 10:11
Here is GROK’s input:
Alright, let’s grab that coffee and talk this through like normal people—no big theology words unless we have to, and I’ll explain them right away.
So John Calvin (the 1500s guy who shaped a lot of Protestant thinking) is basically saying: “Look, some people try to defend God by saying He doesn’t want evil stuff to happen—He just kinda allows it or ‘permits’ it, like He’s hands-off. But that’s weak sauce, in Calvin’s view. He thinks the Bible shows God is way more involved: God actually wills (decides and makes happen) even the bad things, and in some sense He’s behind them as their ultimate ‘author’ or source.”
He calls the “God just permits it” idea a flimsy excuse (“frivolous refuge”) because Scripture (in his reading) pictures God actively steering everything—including hardening hearts, inclining people’s wills toward evil when they deserve it, and using wicked people to carry out His judgments.
The key bits:
God doesn’t just sit back and go “Eh, okay, let that sin happen if you want.” Nope—He actively works in people’s hearts to turn their desires one way or another.
For good people/actions: God does this out of mercy (He chooses to make someone want good).
For bad people/actions: He does it “according to their merits” (they deserve judgment, so He inclines them toward evil as part of punishing them fairly).
Even so, God still judges and punishes them for what they did—He rewards “according to desert” (what they deserve).
In coffee terms: Imagine you’re watching a movie where the director not only lets the villain do villainous things but actually scripts and directs every move the villain makes—down to the thoughts in their head. The villain is still 100% guilty and evil for choosing/doing it, but nothing happened outside the director’s plan. Calvin’s saying God is that ultimate Director over everything, including the evil plot twists. The “He just permitted it” line feels like downplaying how in control the Director really is.
This ties into his bigger idea of predestination: God has already decided from eternity who gets saved (by His mercy) and who doesn’t (left to their deserved fate), and He sovereignly shapes everything—including sins—to bring that about.
A lot of people (then and now) hear this and go “Whoa, that makes God sound like the author of evil!” Calvin would push back hard: No, because the evil comes from the person’s wicked heart and desires (they really want it, they’re not robots forced against their will). God just sovereignly uses and directs it for His purposes, without being tainted by it Himself. But yeah—he’s not shy about saying God is behind it all, not merely watching from the sidelines.
Modern Calvinists sometimes soften this a bit (they talk more about “permission” but insist it’s not “bare” or passive permission—God ordains what He permits). But Calvin himself? In this passage, he’s pretty blunt:
the permission idea is foolish if it pretends God isn’t willing and authoring these things in some real sense.
Heavy stuff over coffee, right? Makes you wonder about free will, justice, and how a good God runs a world with so much darkness. What’s your take—does that framing help, or does it still feel off?
In a wonderful article, I excerpt a long clip from the end of it:
Chapter 3 – The Calvinist Theological and Soteriological Doctrines
…. Predestination refers to what God will surely do for the believer once that choice is made. Believers are predestined to adoption, sanctification, salvation, and eternal life. Unbelievers are predestined to alienation from God, eternal death, and hell. God has not predestined or predetermined the “obedience of faith” for certain unconditionally elected individuals and the “love of darkness,” “rebellion,” “spiritual alienation,” and “eternal death” for all others. No doubt, the Bible teaches that there are special divine predeterminations regarding God’s plans and purposes for the world, especially concerning salvation history. God is personal. Therefore, we would expect God to act personally in his world with creatures made in his image. These divine predeterminations apply in special ways to certain individuals and groups. These individuals are divinely appointed to certain tasks, as in the case of Jesus himself, to be the Christ, our Savior. The nation of Israel was established by God through the revelation of Himself to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob (i.e., Israel) and therefore “chosen” by God to fulfill a certain role in salvation history. Israel is spoken of as God’s “chosen people,” and yet the group was obviously comprised of individuals with free moral agency. The church also is comprised of individuals designated as “a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, a people for his own possession…” (1 Pet. 2:9) because they believe in God and Christ as the way of salvation. These believers are referred to in terminology corresponding to the descriptions used of Israel in the Old Testament. The relationship God had with Israel, of which Abraham’s faith is paradigmatic, is now applied to Gentiles who are of the faith of Abraham. Only now Christ has come, and New Testament believers live on this side of an unfolding salvation history. Therefore, these New Testament believers – both Jew and Gentile – are now among “the elect” by virtue of being “in Christ” by faith; a faith like that of Abraham, exercised freely upon hearing from God (OT) or the gospel message (NT). These believers, spoken of in language reminiscent of Israel’s status in the Old Testament, were once “not a people, but now you are God’s people; once you had not received mercy, but now you have received mercy.” (I Pet. 2:10) Sinners are among “the elect” because they believe in Christ who is the Chosen One, that is, as they “come to him, a living stone rejected by men but in the sight of God chosen and precious…” (1 Pet. 2:4).
The point is that Scripture testifies to the fact that divine sovereignty cannot mean that God predetermined the minutest details of all human thought and action, along with each person’s eternal destiny, which lands us in an inevitable and nonsensical theistic determinism. This is not the biblical meaning of “election” or “predestination.” We know this by virtue of the logical and moral incoherence of the Calvinist interpretations. An objective, rational, moral assessment of Scripture and human history, from the past to the present, makes evident that theistic determinism is false. Rather than looking through the lens of theistic determinism, we can see that God’s purposes are realized through his divine actions in relation to submissive and cooperative persons as well as through indifferent or hostile persons. All that occurs is not decreed to happen as it does by the will of God and therefore caused by God, for this would logically indict God as the author and doer of evil. Rather, certain actions and events occur by the free decisions of human beings, especially evil doings. But God is still sovereign. He can incorporate what he sees fit into his ultimate plans and purposes for the world and mankind by either his direct intervention and spiritual activity and influence, or his final judgment. But the believer has this promise – “And we know that in all things God works for the good of those who love him, who have been called according to his purpose.” (Rom. 8:28, NIV). Those who love him are those who put their faith in God and Christ as savior when they heard the call of the message of “good news.” Those “called according to his purpose” refer to all those who, having heard the “good news” of Jesus Christ, believed it, and have received eternal life. All this was the result of God’s purpose to save mankind in Christ. It has been God’s purpose to save sinners by sending Christ to die and bring this good news to all from the very beginning (Gen. 3:15). And this salvation is for everyone. “For God has bound everyone over to disobedience so that he may have mercy on them all.” (Rom. 11:32, NIV)
In addition, God will also bring about a final conquering of all his enemies. Not all things are good, and God is not responsible for evil acts. Therefore, God has not ordained “whatsoever comes to pass” as stated in the Westminster Confession of Faith. This is evident in that at Christ’s second coming, he will judge, punish, and rectify evil and injustice. Again, to believe that God predetermined and is the ultimate cause of the evil he will one day judge and punish would be nonsense. Furthermore, it impugns the character of God.
The point to note is that divine sovereignty, election, predestination, and foreknowledge do not require theistic determinism. The scriptures everywhere affirm both God’s sovereignty and substantial, meaningful human freedom and responsibility. Therefore, God’s sovereignty, biblically defined, cannot be understood as divine determinism but rather should be understood as God’s personal and authoritative involvement in human affairs and his creation. The scope of divine providence certainly extends to the minutest details regarding his care and concern for his creatures, especially believers. But divine providence is not divine determinism. Providence includes God’s ability to intervene in the affairs of this world and on behalf of believers as he wills. It includes his ability to employ actions that are evil and wrong to serve his purposes (Gen. 50:15-31). This certainly is the biblical testimony regarding divine sovereignty and providence. If there is “mystery” to be had, it lies here. It does not lie in accepting what we know to be incoherent, inconsistent, and contradictory interpretations of the Bible. That is just to ignore the God-given rules of logic and our moral intuitions in one’s hermeneutic. Hence, biblical sovereignty and providence cannot be defined as the universal divine causal determinism of Calvinism. Therefore, Calvinism is untenable and a misinterpretation of Scripture. It is to be rejected.
Conclusions
We have seen that the Calvinists’ interpretation of the eternal divine decree and God’s sovereignty amounts to a universal divine causal determinism. Hopefully, you may have begun to grasp the negative logical and moral implications of this theistic determinism. In a world that is predetermined by God down to the minutest details, which includes everyone’s thoughts, beliefs, desires, and actions, what happens to human freedom, decision-making, and choices? What happens to personal moral responsibility, culpability, judgment, and justice? And what do we do with the fact that everyone’s eternal destiny is already decided unilaterally by God himself and has absolutely nothing to do with you, me, or anyone else? What do human beings become in a world in which God predetermined every detail? Robots? Puppets? These analogies are appropriate. Furthermore, who is among the elect, and who is among the non-elect, remains unknown to us. The Calvinist will respond that, regardless of these problematic implications, we need to accept these Calvinist tenets because the Bible teaches them.
But how do we know the Bible teaches them, especially when they do not square with the fact that the Bible overwhelmingly testifies to a contingent reality and human responsibility? How do we know this is what the Bible teaches when theistic determinism wreaks logical and moral havoc with other things that this same Bible clearly teaches, especially regarding the definition of the gospel as “good news,” the nature of faith, and God’s character as loving and just? Where has the gospel gone? You may also be asking, if God is the sole agent and cause of everything that occurs, doesn’t that make him the source and doer of all evil? If not, why not? Moreover, if you cannot know that God loves you, desires that you be saved, and has provided for your salvation, how does that influence your relationship to God and the meaning and purpose of life? These questions are profound and therefore need answers. Calvinists need to answer them. We will deal with them in due course.
Having reviewed the Reformed Calvinist doctrines, we can conclude that Calvinism amounts to a theistic determinism. That theistic determinism, by virtue of being a determinism, is contrary to Scripture. As such, Calvinism is unbiblical.
How Calvinists Get God’s Sovereignty Wrong Leighton Flowers | Calvinism | Soteriology 101
Calvinists love to talk about God’s sovereignty, but do they define sovereignty correctly? Calvinists typically choose to define sovereignty as meticulous determinism, i.e. that God controls and/or brings about everything that happens…including all evil.Check out the full video here: Calvinism is Determinism
Thus in a world governed by meticulous, divine determinism, beliefs are not the product of examination, analysis, reason and contemplation whereby we search for truth and weigh various options and make informed decisions. Rather they are just the spin-offs of God’s universal, exhaustive, meticulous divine decrees. White would have to concede that a person who believes in meticulous, divine determinism does so for the same reason that another person disbelieves meticulous, divine determinism. It has nothing to do with evaluation, truth and reason—and everything to do with what has been determined for them to believe! — A Theology in Tension (hat-tip to SOTO 101, “Calvinism’s Greatest Fallacy“)
The following is with a Hat-Tip to Brian H.W. — adding to a thought I had:
Religio-Political Talk (RPT), Here’s enough that should get Calvinists to rethink! Unfortunately too many are now too heavily invested in defending it, their pride keeps them from rejecting it.
Those who call themselves “Calvinist” – On which of the following do you DISAGREE with Calvin… and why label yourself after the name of a fallible man? Would Jesus want you to?
Evanescent Grace: God making some reprobates think they are elect to better convict them
Impassibility: God did not grieve in his heart for the lost in Noah’s day
Capital Punishment for heretics: Including those who write against his doctrine of predestination
Born to Burn: Some are damned by God from birth, to be tormented in hell for God’s glory and pleasure.
Scripture’s Description of God can not be known from His perspective: but only as a false one, not as He really is.
Disproving Calvin’s predestination doctrine: according to Calvin is only attempted by those who think they are wiser than the Holy Spirit.
1) “… experience shows that the reprobate are sometimes affected in a way so similar to the elect, that even in their own judgment there is no difference between them. … a taste of heavenly gifts, … a temporary faith, is ascribed to them. Not that they truly perceive the power of spiritual grace and the sure light of faith; but the Lord, the better to convict them, and leave them without excuse, instills into their minds such a sense of his goodness as can be felt without the Spirit of adoption.” (Institutes – 3.2.11)
2) “The repentance which is here ascribed to God does not properly belong to him…. The same reasoning, and remark, applies to what follows, that God was affected with grief. Certainly God is not sorrowful or sad; but remains forever like himself in his celestial and happy repose….” (Comm. Gen 6:6)
3) In his letter to the church in Poitiers, #389 SLW6 – “…papers and books of his Castalion [former reformer in Geneva with Calvin], in which an attempt was made to impugn our doctrine touching predestination, have been condemned with a prohibition to publish them 👉on pain of death👈…. that indeed the least we can expect is that the Seigneurs, to whom have been entrusted the sword and authority, should not permit the faith in which they are instructed to be lightly spoken of in their own city. “
4) “…he arranges all things by his sovereign counsel, in such a way that individuals are born, who are 👉doomed from the womb👈 to certain death and are to glorify him by their destruction.” (Institutes – 3.23.6) And – “We say, then, that Scripture clearly proves this much, that God by his eternal and immutable counsel determined once for all those whom it was his pleasure one day to admit to salvation, and those whom, on the other hand, it was 👉his pleasure to doom👈 to destruction.” Calvin, ICR, 3.21.7
5) “…any description which we receive of him must be lowered to our capacity in order to be intelligible. And the mode of lowering is 👉to represent him not as he really is👈, but as we conceive of him.” (Institutes – 1.17.13)
6) “The observation with which I opened this discussion, I now repeat at its close: that no one will ever attempt to disprove the doctrine which I have set forth herein, but he who may imagine himself to be 👉wiser than the Spirit of God👈.” (Eternal Predestination of God, trans. Cole, p. 170, the translation by Reid says – “… no one can disprove…”, p.162)
Calvinism: A Biblical and Theological Critique, by David L. Allen (Editor), Steve W Lemke (Editor),
CHAPTER 6 by Ken Wilson — pages 230-237.
The Fatal Error of Calvinists
A Critique of Augustine’s Reversion to Pagan Concepts
When he redefined Christian terms and concepts, Augustine misrepresented earlier Christian authors. Lewis Ayres politely noted, “Augustine was an attentive reader of his forebears, but one whose interpretations of them were frequently very much his own.”44 As a result, Luther and Calvin mistakenly believed that Augustine was merely teaching what all of the earlier church fathers had taught.45 But in fact, Augustine himself admitted that he had tried but failed to continue in the Christian doctrine of free will of the first four centuries. He consistently utilized the same Christian terms but inserted new meanings into those terms.46 Roger Haight wrote, “Grace for Augustine was delight in the good, a new form of liberty that required an internal modification of the human will. No one [Christian] prior to Augustine had really asserted anything like this need for an inner working of God within human freedom.”47 Augustine redefined free will, utilizing Stoic concepts, deformed original sin with Manichaean dualism, and mutilated faith into a divine gift to match Gnostic and Manichaean unilateral election.48 Augustinian scholar Eugene TeSelle noted:
Augustine always reacted vigorously to the suggestion that he taught what amounted to a doctrine of fate. Now it is undeniable that he did hold to something like what is usually meant by fate. . . . To him fate meant something precise: the doctrine that external occurrences, bodily actions, even thoughts and decisions are determined by the position of the heavenly bodies [C. dua ep Pel., II,6,12] or more broadly, universal material determinism [C. dua ep Pel. II, 6,12; De Civ. Dei. IV.33, V.1,8].49
Augustine said if anyone “calls the will of God or the power of God itself by the name of fate, let him keep his opinion but correct his language” (C. dua ep. Pel.1.2.4). Over a thousand years later, Augustine’s novel and syncretistic reinterpretations of Christian Scripture (TULIP) would be faithfully replicated by Calvin and his followers.
Similarly, modern Calvinists (such as the contributing authors of Whomever He Wills) vehemently defend their theology using Scripture. But they refuse to admit their own interpretations are based on the pagan philosophies and Manichaean religion deeply imbedded into their current syncretistic scriptural interpretations by Augustine.50 God as micromanager of the universe (Stoic sovereignty) stands foremost and paramount: total depravity (Manichaean) follows logically from it (using the same pagan arguments).51 For Calvinists like Andrew Davis, “Romans 9:11–13 is the mortal wound for conditional election.”52 This replicates the “biblical” arguments by Gnostics and Manichaeans for unconditional election (determinism); but all pre-Augustinian Christian writings opposed this pagan doctrine. Thomas Schreiner claimed all Christians will inevitably persevere. This assumes the perfect divine gift of faith unilaterally infused by (the Gnostic/Manichaean) God cannot fail, because ultimate salvation requires perseverance—faith plus works (i.e., not our own but fruit God produces, per Augustine). This includes Schreiner’s appeal to Phil 1:6, repeating Augustine’s tortured interpretation.53 Bruce Ware’s chapter on the compatibility of determinism and freedom could have been argued by a Stoic or Manichaean who was familiar with Scripture. His argument for compatibility was unnecessary in pre-Augustinian Christian theology.54 Likewise, Stephen Wellum repeated Augustine’s appeal to “mystery” that was not required until his Stoic god unilaterally desired, predetermined, and ordained all things, including monstrous evils (such as genocide, rape, torture, and child sacrifice).55 Matthew Barrett’s “The Scriptural Affirmation of Monergism” would have shocked all pre-Augustinian Christians, while making the ancient monergistic Manichaeans proud.56
For Calvinists, the only reasonable theological choice must be Calvinism, since in Arminianism, “God is robbed of his glory at the expense of demanding libertarian freedom.”57 This false disjunction (limited to two poor choices of Calvinism and Arminianism) ignores the centuries of unanimous pre-Augustinian Christian theology on human free will and God’s general sovereignty. Calvinism’s God is puny. Calvinism limits God’s sovereignty.
Calvinists must either ignore these facts or attempt to marginalize them. The vast majority of Christianity—Catholics, Orthodox, Protestants, and other Christian groups—have been unsuccessful in using these facts to convince Calvinists of their errors. We cannot seem to break through the resilient barrier of indoctrinated self-deception to reach adherents of modern Calvinism. In Calvinism, tradition has triumphed over truth.
Conclusion
Augustine of Hippo subverted Christian theology in AD 412 by incorporating his prior Stoic view of meticulous providence and his prior Manichaean doctrine of Divine Unilateral Predetermination of Eternal Destinies (DUPED). All prior Christians had fought against Stoic meticulous providence and Gnostic/Manichaean DUPED. They taught the Christian God is relational and exercises general (not specific) sovereignty for the purpose of allowing human freedom. The Christian God chooses persons for salvation based upon his foreknowledge of their free choices. Augustine reverted to his Manichaean deterministic interpretations of Scripture when attempting to explain infant baptism against the Pelagians. For twenty-five years he had refuted those interpretations as heresy.
After AD 411, Augustine’s final eighteen years of theology was DUPED as the Manicheans had claimed—monergistic, to the glory of Augustine’s new inscrutable sovereign God who creates then damns innocent babies to hell.58 He confessed, “I cannot find a satisfactory and worthy explanation— because I can’t find one, not because there isn’t one” (Serm.294.7). After 1,600 years, no philosopher or theologian has found a “satisfactory and worthy explanation” to salvage Augustine’s syncretism of pagan ideas into Christianity that damns innocent babies to hell. It will forever remain a “mystery.”
Cicero (ca. 50 BC), one of Augustine’s favorite authors, had argued for the in-compatibility between divine omniscience and human free will. Augustine’s final answer was to claim that divine foreknowledge of the future occurs only through God’s unilateral predetermination and ordaining of every event, both good and evil (Civ.5). By this move he departed from all prior Christian teaching and syncretized a concept common in Stoicism: “God foreordains human wills.”59 The Stoic scholar John Rist concluded that Augustine’s novel Christian determinism produced “a theology which fails to do justice to his own theory of God’s love.”60 In contrast, Jerome succeeded in refuting the Pelagians without adopting the extremes of Augustinianism (Against the Pelagians 3) and retained the traditional Christian beliefs in God’s general sovereignty, grace, and free will.61
Harry Wolfson, historian and philosopher at Harvard University’s Judaic Studies Center, concluded, “Augustine’s doctrine of grace is only a Christianization of the Stoic doctrine of fate.”62 Because of Augustine’s AD 412 reversion to pagan ideas, the exalted justice of the relational Christian God (used to combat pagan philosophies and heresies) was instantly transformed into inscrutable theology—deformed theology. Augustine overtly wrote of God’s predestination of the ones he purposefully created for damnation in eternal torment (“double predestination”; Nat. orig.1.14, Civ.14.26, 15.1; Serm.229S, Serm.260D.1; An.et or.4.16).63 Augustine borrowed his prior Neoplatonic inscrutable mystery as his defense for this horrendous divine injustice (Serm.D.29.10 and Serm.294.7). Neoplatonism (ca. AD 250) had invented this crucial theodicy by appealing to the inscrutable secret counsels of God, who is fair by definition, regardless of whatever apparent evils he desires and ordains. Prior Christians had never required this implausible and disingenuous attempt at a defense for their God.
Modern Calvinists teach Augustine’s theology. Calvinists appeal to the same deterministic interpretations of the same Scripture passages taught by Manichaeans. Calvinism’s historical foundation is dangerously unstable. Its foundation relies on the Manichaean interpretations of Scripture by a single man in the ancient church who rejected three hundred years of unanimous church teaching of free will, a teaching that had refuted Stoic and Gnostic/Manichaean determinism. This man was indoctrinated for decades in extremely deterministic pagan philosophies and heretical Manichaeism. Augustine admitted he changed his theology regarding free will: he abandoned the Christian rule of faith regarding free choice. “In the solution of this question I struggled in behalf of free choice of the will, but the grace of God won out” (Retr.2.1).
But the grace that “won out” was not Christian grace: it was Manichaean grace. According to Augustine (Conf.7.5), he only escaped the philosophical prison of Manichaean DUPED by accepting Christian free choice. This freed him from viewing God as punishing unjustly. But ironically, after finally escaping, Augustine’s later “inscrutable justice” of Christianized pagan DUPED reimprisoned both himself and his followers.
In contrast, the prior nearly unanimous Christian teaching (that God offers his grace to every human equally) persisted throughout the Patristic period into the eighth century with John of Damascus (d. ca. AD 760): “We ought to understand that while God knows all things beforehand, yet He does not predetermine all things. . . . So that predetermination is the work of the divine command based on foreknowledge” (Exp. fid.44). Eleonore Stump astutely concluded, “Unless Augustine is willing to accept that God’s giving of grace is responsive to something in human beings, even if that something is not good or worthy of merit, I don’t see how he can be saved from the imputation of theological determinism with all its infelicitous consequences.”64
A willingness to return to the universal Christian theology that God gives grace as a response to human choice would never come for Augustine. The famous rhetorician never looked back in his resolve to win his debate against the Pelagians at all costs. William Frend explained, “Augustine could not concede a single point to his adversaries and this was his undoing.”65 Augustine died eighteen years after reverting to his pagan monergistic determinism, still trusting in his self-crafted syncretistic theology.
As we observed in the introduction, Calvinists address the blatant absence of their theology in the pre-Augustinian centuries in one of two possible ways. The less scholarly Calvinists invent proto-Calvinists among early Christian authors. Scholarly Calvinists claim Augustine was the first theologian since the apostle Paul to interpret Scripture correctly. Benjamin Warfield opined Augustine’s “doctrine was not new” but was lost for four centuries between the time the apostle Paul wrote it and Augustine “ recovered” it for the church (the Calvinist Gap Theory).66 These scholars appear oblivious to the enormous chasm separating Paul from Augustine. This formidable chasm is Augustine’s Stoicism, Neoplatonism, and Manichaeism. It separates Paul from Augustine by hundreds of years and thousands of miles. Calvinists attempt to bridge this insurmountable gap by using the “hermeneutical” lens of Augustine’s Manichaeism to reinterpret Pauline (and other) Scriptures within their own paradigm.
Calvinism’s alleged “biblical foundation” rests on Augustine’s deterministic interpretations of Scripture from his decade of Gnostic/Manichaean training (John 6:44–66; 14:6; Rom 9–11; Eph 2:1–3, 8–9; Phil 2:13; etc.). Such a dangerous foundation requires a precarious “faith” in Augustine’s “Sovereign God,” caricatured through syncretism with Stoic and Neoplatonic philosophy and the heretical Manichaean religion.67 He baptized his prior pagan philosophies and religion into Christianity, resulting in an unrecognizable doctrinal conglomeration. Calvinism is Augustinianism. Augustinianism is Christian theology scrambled with Gnostic/Manichaean theology and Stoic/Neoplatonic philosophy. As John Rist concluded, Augustinianism is “Ancient [pagan] Thought Baptized.”68
Nevertheless, these serious syncretistic errors did not make Augustine a heretic or a non-Christian. Augustine still embraced the essential doctrines of the Christian faith. Modern Calvinists also embrace the major tenets of Christianity regarding Jesus Christ as God in the flesh and Savior from sin. Despite their divergent views (sovereignty, total depravity/inability, and DUPED determinism) imported from Augustine’s paganism, Calvinists remain Christian brothers and sisters worthy of respect, love, and fellowship —contrary to the opinion of one extreme evangelical sect.69 In this anti-Christian period of history, Christians of all persuasions must be unified, despite our internal disagreements.
NOTES
44 Lewis Ayres, Augustine and the Trinity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 86.
45 See Martin Luther, “To George Spalatin—Wittenberg, October 19, 1516,” in Luther’s Works, 48:23 (see chap. 5, n. 13); Luther, “Lectures on Romans: Glosses and Scholia,” in Luther’s Works, vol. 25; Calvin, Institutes, trans. Battles, 1:158–59 (I.xiii.29) (see chap. 4, n. 85); Harry Wolfson, Religious Philosophy: A Group of Essays (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1961), 158– 76, in which he explained the centuries-old traditional Judeo-Christian understanding of free will (despite the sinful inclination) that persisted until the “later Augustine” introduced Stoic ideas into Judeo-Christian theology, and especially Augustine’s misunderstanding of concupiscentia in his Latin translation of Wisdom of Solomon 8:21.
46 This included the terms original sin, grace, predestination, free will, and so forth. “For example, in the early patristic writers we find references to the origin of sin, to a fall, and to the inheritance of sin, but what is meant is often different from the meaning given to those terms in the later classical tradition influenced by Augustine.” Tatha Wiley, Original Sin: Origins, Developments, Contemporary Meanings (New York: Paulist Press, 2002), 53; italics in the original; Ralph Mathiesen, “For Specialists Only: The Reception of Augustine and His Teachings in the Fifth Century Gaul” in Collectanea Augustina: Presbyter Factus Sum, ed. Joseph Lienhard, Earl Muller, and Roland Teske (New York: Peter Lang, 1993), 30–31; Rebecca Weaver, s.v. “Predestination,” in Encyclopedia of Early Christianity, 2nd ed., ed. Everett Ferguson (New York: Garland, 1998): “The now centuries-old characterization of the human being as capable of free choice and thus accountable at the last judgment had been retained, but the meaning of its elements had been considerably altered”; Peter J. Leithart, “Review of Adam, Eve, and the Serpent” by Elaine Pagels, Westminster Theological Seminary Journal 51, no. 1 (Spring 1989): 186. “Augustine’s concept of free will certainly differs from that of earlier theologians.”
47 Roger Haight, The Experience of Language of Grace (New York: Paulist, 1979), 36.
48 In Stoicism, fate controls every minute occurrence in the universe (Cicero, Div.1, 125–26), and although a person has no possibility of actuating an opportunity, “free will” remains solely by definition (Cicero, Fat.12–15). See Margaret Reesor, “Fate and Possibility in Early Stoic Philosophy,” Phoenix 19, no. 4 (1965): 285–97, esp. 201; Stoics, “took elaborate precautions to protect their system from rigid determinism.” Neoplatonists did the same.
49 TeSelle, Augustine the Theologian, 313; emphasis in the original.
50 Barrett and Nettles, Whomever He Wills (see intro., n. 22).
51 Steven Lawson, “Our Sovereign Savior,” 3–15; and Mark DeVine, “Total Depravity,” 16–36, in Whomever He Wills.
52 Andrew Davis, “Unconditional Election: A Biblical and God-Glorifying Doctrine,” in Whomever He Wills, 51.
53 Thomas Schreiner, “Promises of Preservation and Exhortations to Persevere,” in Whomever He Wills, 188–211, esp. 192. His “biblical” arguments all rest on those pagan assumptions inherited from Augustine. Distinguishing works as necessary fruit for final salvation but not the basis of it mimics Roman Catholicism’s theology. Calvinists merely replace (Faith + Works ➡ Salvation) with (Faith ➡ Works ➡ Salvation). Neither Roman Catholics nor Calvinists believe in faith alone for salvation—both require good works.
54 Bruce Ware, “The Compatibility of Determinism and Human Freedom,” in Whomever He Wills, 212–30. There was no Christian tension between general sovereignty and free will for centuries before Augustine; Fergusson, s.v. “Predestination,” Oxford Companion.
55 Stephen Wellum, “God’s Sovereignty over Evil,” in Barrett and Nettles, Whomever He Wills, 256.
56 Barrett, “Monergism,” 120–87 (see intro., n. 22).
57 Barrett and Nettles, introduction to Whomever He Wills, xxvi.
58 See Augustine, Serm.294.7: “Here too I like to exclaim with Paul, Oh the depths of the riches! (Rom 11:33). Unbaptized infants go to damnation; they are like the apostles’ words, after all: From one to condemnation (Rom 5:16). I cannot find a satisfactory and worthy explanation . . . [he cited all of Rom 11:33–36].” See The Works of Saint Augustine, III/8, 196n8, with Hill’s comments: “Babies who die unbaptized therefore go to hell. . . . It is precisely this assumption that renders his whole argument weak, and his conclusion highly questionable.”
59 Christopher Kirwan, Augustine, The Arguments of the Philosophers (New York: Routledge, 1989), 98–103.
60 John Rist, Augustine: Ancient Thought Baptized (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 307.
61 See Vít Hušek, “Human Freedom According to the Earliest Latin Commentaries on Paul’s Letters,” Studia Patristica 44 (2010): 385–90.
62 Harry Wolfson, Religious Philosophy: A Group of Essays (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1961), 176. See also Michael Frede and Halszka Osmolska, A Free Will: Origins of the Notion in Ancient Thought (Berkley, CA: University of California Press, 2011), especially 153–174, “Chapter Nine—Augustine: A Radically New Notion of a Free Will?”
63 Gerard O’Daly, “Predestination and Freedom in Augustine’s Ethics,” in The Philosophy in Christianity, ed. Godfrey Vesey (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 90.
64 Eleonore Stump, “Augustine on Free Will,” in The Cambridge Companion to Augustine, ed. Eleonore Stump and Norman Kretzmann (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 124–147 at 142.
65 William H. C. Frend, “Doctrine of Man in the Early Church: An Historical Approach,” Modern Churchman 45, no. 3 (1955): 227.
66 Warfield, Tertullian and Augustine, 129.
67 Wilson, Foundation of Augustinian-Calvinism, 97–103. Translated into Spanish—Fundación del Calvinismo Agustiniano; into German—War Augustin der erste Calvinist?; and into Portuguese —Fundamento do Calvinismo-Agostiniano.
68 See note 60. Rist’s focus was pagan Stoicism.
69 Some Christian groups can press anti-Calvinism too far, so much that they themselves violate the limits of historical orthodoxy. See, e.g., Kenneth Wilson, Heresy of the Grace Evangelical Society: Become a Christian without Faith in Jesus as God and Savior (Montgomery, TX: Regula Fidei Press, 2020). Bob Wilkin and his Grace Evangelical Society teach “assurance is of the essence of saving faith.” Calvinists cannot have assurance of their own eternal security because Calvinists teach perseverance in faith and works until physical death is required for final salvation. Therefore, Calvinists are not Christians. This GES heresy requires absolute assurance in Jesus’s promise of personal eternal security to become a Christian, yet does not require faith in Jesus as God and Savior.
The long debate [which I won’t replicate here] from Soteriology 101 Discussion’s Facebook Page, is over — essentially — this portion of Leighton Flower’s’ book, “Drawn by Jesus.” BUT FIRST, what I will reproduce is the extent of the debate summed up in these two back-n-forths:
ROGER H. responds to Jason R.
[Jason R said] “This is a clear logical impasse you are confronted with…“
What is the logical impasse? A person is born with no ability to choose God. This requires that the person be regenerated. Once regenerated, a person can desire God and can choose God.
[Jason R said] “and there is no compatibilism that can harmonize this faulty logic.”
Once a person is regenerated, he has new desires. He can choose according to his greatest desire.
I don’t see a problem.
JASON R. responds to ROGER H.
it is fascinating to observe how you see no problem with the fact that God ultimately judges the majority of humanity for not receiving Christ when He determined that they never could do so in the first place. You seem content to accept that God can judge someone for their sin of non-repentance even though they have no way of repenting. This is blatantly unjust. You admit that God necessarily has to regenerate someone so that they can believe which equates to conceding that man cannot choose God unless God first chooses and changes them. Man is born into a hopeless state of inability and you cannot see a problem with God judging and condemning man for this inability when he has no way of escaping its pre-determined inevitabilities. I have never heard a sound defense against this Achilles heel of Calvinism… only concessions such as yours.
The entire discussion is enlightening, as it is a real working out of the issue. But this is the portion that Roger H. started out with, mistakenly saying it was from chapter 3:
Chapter 5
The Calvinistic Presupposition of Total Inability
A presupposition is “a thing tacitly assumed beforehand at the beginning of a line of argument.”23 We all have presuppositions. Some of them are right, but others are wrong. Wrong presuppositions brought to a passage can influence people to draw erroneous conclusions about the meaning of the text in question. This is why objectively evaluating our presuppositions is so important when any passage is in dispute between well-intending brethren.
Your theological opponents have every right to challenge your presuppositions. After all, wrong presuppositions lead to bad exegesis. And assuming your presuppositions are correct is just a fallacious game of question-begging. Unfortunately, this has been James White’s bread and butter. When non-Calvinists have challenged one of his presuppositions in the past, he accuses us of either “changing the topic,” “running off to other scriptures,” or “doing improper exegesis.” This is ironic, given that proper exegesis requires biblically correct presuppositions.
Calvinism’s underlying premise is that God decreed for all people since the Fall to be born morally unable to believe what He Himself teaches, so unless you were unconditionally chosen before you were born and irresistibly regenerated into a new creation by a supernatural intervening work of God, you will never be morally capable of believing in Him.24 Needless to say, that premise will greatly influence how you understand the Bible regardless of the hermeneutical methodologies, grammatical nuances, contextual considerations, or semantic word studies. A wrong premise skews everything and, therefore, must be evaluated objectively prior to getting into the other pertinent matters. So, let’s start by looking at these three major presuppositions White brings into John 6 based primarily upon his Calvinistic interpretation of Paul.25
Total Inability26
The entire sixth chapter in White’s book on the topic, titled “Human Inability,” sets out to establish this doctrine. Based on his interpretation of other scripture, White presupposes that God decreed for all people (since the Fall) to be born unable to believe His own teachings, but God still punishes all who do not believe. Therefore, when White reads John 6 through those presuppositional lenses, he understands the phrase “no one can come” to mean that the natural condition of everyone from birth is such that they cannot understand and believe what God teaches.27 For instance, White wrote,
In response to the crowd’s disbelief, Jesus also gives forth a clear explanation of their inability to understand and their inability to come to Him as the one and only source of spiritual life.
Notice that White assumes that the reason the crowds cannot come to Christ is due to a universal inherent condition in which they were born, something God Himself decreed and the individuals had absolutely no control over. In other words, in White’s view, the crowd remains in unbelief because they were born inherently blinded to divinely revealed truth, and God has not intervened to irresistibly change their inherent “default” condition. This is the root of what is known as theistic determinism, a primarily philosophical commitment to the idea that God unchangeably brings to pass (or determines) every meticulous detail, including all moral evil.28
NOTES
23 Oxford Languages Online Dictionary (Oxford University Press)
24 This represents the T,U and I of the Calvinistic TULIP, which will be explored further in the following pages.
25 White wrote, “When the doctrine of election is discussed, most people think immediately of the discussions provided by the Apostle Paul in such great passages as Romans 8-9 and Ephesians 1.” James R. White, The Sovereign Grace of God (New York: Great Christian Books, 2003), 68.
26 White wrote, “Some Reformed writers like others names for this doctrine. One of the best alternatives is `total inability.” Ibid., 48.
27 White wrote, “[Man] is utterly… incapable of coming to Christ, incapable of accepting and understanding spiritual things…” Ibid., 59. Given that White also affirms the 1689 London Baptist Confession of Faith, we know that he affirms God’s universal exhaustive decree of whatsoever comes to pass, which must necessarily include mankind’s innate “default” inability to believe.
28White wrote, “God’s knowledge of the future is related to His role as Creator —He knows the future because He ordained the future! The course of the future is certain because God created it.” Ibid., 68. Vicens wrote, “We might, for instance, take Feinberg’s definition of an `unconditional’ decree as one `based on nothing outside of God that move[s] Him to choose one thing or another’ (2001, p. 527) and then characterize theological determinism as the view that God unconditionally decrees every event that occurs in the history of the world. Such a view would exclude the possibility that God merely permits some events which He foresees will happen in some circumstances but which He does not Himself determine.” Leigh Vicens, Theological Determinism (Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy: A Peer-Reviewed Academic Resource) accessed online on 12/19/2023. [RPT: 1/29/2026]
Leighton [Charles] Flowers, Drawn By Jesus (Trinity Academic Press, 2024), 47-49.
ROMANS 3:11
A common verse I hear from my fellow believers is “…there is no one who understands; there is no one who seeks God.” – Romans 3:11
In an effort to demonstrate that all people have fallen short of the glory of God and broken His law, Paul quotes from Psalm 14:2-3, which says:
“The Lord looks down from heaven on all mankind to see if there are any who understand, any who seek God. All have turned away, all have become corrupt; there is no one who does good, not even one.”
There are basically two theological approaches for interpreting this passage:
(1) Calvinistic Approach: Apart from a Divine irresistible work of regeneration (by which God changes a chosen individual’s nature and desires), mankind cannot willingly seek to know, understand, or follow God. (2) Non-Calvinistic (Traditionalist) Approach: Apart from God’s gracious initiative in bringing His Son, the Holy Spirit, and the inspired gospel appeal, no one can merit salvation or consistently seek to obey God in a way that will attain his own righteousness.
The contrast between these two perspectives can be illustrated by this simple question: Does proof that I am incapable of calling the president on the telephone also prove that I am incapable of answering the telephone if the president were to call me? Of course not, yet that is essentially the principle a Calvinist is assuming in their theological approach to this text.
Calvinists read this text to mean that our lack of initiative somehow proves our inability to respond positively to His initiative. They presume that God’s work in sending His Son, the Holy Spirit, and the inspired gospel, calling for all to be reconciled through faith in Christ, is insufficient to enable the lost to respond in faith. But the text simply never says this.
In Romans chapter 3:10-20 the apostle is seeking to prove that no one can attain righteousness by means of the law. But in verse 21 he shifts to reveal a righteousness that can be obtained by means of grace through faith in Christ.
Calvinists seem to think that because mankind is unable to attain righteousness by means of the law that they must equally be unable to obtain righteousness by means of grace through faith in Christ. This, however, is never established anywhere in the pages of Scripture.
Of course, we all can affirm that no one is righteous with regard to the demands of the law. But there have been many throughout the pages of Scripture who have been declared righteous by means of grace through faith.
Calvinists wrongly assume that because mankind is unable to fully keep the demands of the law that they are equally unable to admit their inability to keep those demands and trust in the One who has. Again, this is simply never established in the Bible. HERE>
THE “HERE>” EXCERPT
… If I told my son to clean up his room it would strongly imply that I believed it was within his abilities to do so, especially if I punished him for failure to do so. No decent parent would tell their two day old infant to clean up a mess and then punish them for not doing so. Such an action would expose the parent as insane or completely immoral.
This is basic common sense, but is it applicable to how God deals with humanity? Is the implication in scripture of “you should” mean that “you could?” I think we can all agree that “ought” strongly implies moral ability for all practical purposes, but is that a biblical reality? Sometimes the Bible defies our practical sensibilities and turns our reality up on its ear. Is that the case here? Do God’s expressions of what we SHOULD do imply that we actually COULD do it.[1]
Could the “Rich Young Ruler” have willingly given up his wealth to follow Christ as Zacchaeus does in the very next chapter? Or was Zacchaeus granted an ability that was withheld from the Rich Young Ruler? (Note: I’m speaking of man’s moral/spiritual abilities to repent in faith, not their physical ability or mental assent, so please don’t try to rebut this article with the all too often “catch all” phrase of, “He is able but not willing.”)
Calvinists would agree with the Traditionalists that both Zacchaeus and Rich Young Ruler SHOULD have given up everything to follow Christ, but only the Traditionalist maintains that both of them COULD have willingly done so.
Why do Calvinists insist that COULD doesn’t imply SHOULD when it comes to the Biblical revelation?
Dr. Wayne Grudem, a Calvinistic scholar, explains the issue in this manner:
“Advocates of the Arminian position draw attention to the frequency of the free offer of the gospel in the New Testament. They would say that these invitations to people to repent and come to Christ for salvation, if bona fide, must imply the ability to respond to them. Thus, all people without exception have the ability to respond, not just those who have been sovereignly given that ability by God in a special way.” [2]
Grudem, like John Hendryx of mongerism.com, rebuts this perspective by making arguments such as:
“What the Scriptures say we ‘ought’ to do does not necessarily imply what we ‘can’ do. The Ten Commandments, likewise, speak of what we ought to do but they do not imply that we have the moral ability to carry them out. The law of God was given so that we would be stripped of having any hope from ourselves. Even faith itself is a divine command that we cannot fulfill without the application of God’s regenerative grace by the Holy Spirit.”[3]
Are you following the Calvinistic argument? Here it is put very simply:
God tells man they SHOULD keep all the commandments.
Man CANNOT keep all the commandments.
God also tells man they SHOULD believe and repent for breaking commandments.
Therefore man also CANNOT believe and repent for breaking commandments.[4]
If the fallacy in this argument is not obvious to you, please allow me to explain in this way:
Back when my kids were younger we did a family activity that our church had suggested. I stood at the top of the stairs with my four children at the bottom.
I said to them, “Here are the rules. You must get from the bottom of the stairs to the top of the stairs without touching any of the railing, the wall or even the stairs. Ready, go!”
My kids looked at me and then each other and then back at their mother. With bewilderment in their eyes, they immediately began to whine and complain saying, “Dad, that is impossible!”
I told them to stop whining and figure it out.
The youngest stood at the bottom and started trying to jump, slamming himself into the steps over and over. The more creative one of the bunch began looking for tools to help build some kind of contraption. Another set down on the floor while loudly declaring, “This is just stupid, no one can do that!”
Finally, in exasperation one of the kids yelled out, “Dad, why don’t you just help us?” I raised my eyebrows as if to give them a clue that they may be on the right track. The eldest caught on quickly.
“Can you help us dad?” he shouted.
I replied quietly, “No one even asked me.”
“Can you carry us up the stairs?” he asked.
“I will if you ask me,” I said.
And one by one, I carried each child to the top after they simply asked.
Then, we sat down and talked about salvation. We talked about how it is impossible for us to get to heaven by our own efforts, but if we ask Christ for help then He will carry us. It was a great visual lesson of God’s grace in contrast with man’s works.
But suppose that my children’s inability to get to the top the stairs also meant they were incapable of asking me for help. Imagine how this story would’ve played out if it was impossible for my children not only to get to the top of the stairs but equally impossible for them to recognize that inability and request help when it was offered.
This illustrates the mistake of Calvinism. Let’s go back to their fallacy above as it relates to my story:
Dad tells his kids they SHOULD get to the top of stairs.
Kids CANNOT complete this task as requested.
Dad also tells the kids they SHOULD ask for help.
Therefore the kids CANNOT ask for help.
Do you see the problem now? The whole purpose of presenting my kids with that dilemma was to help them to discover their need for help. To suggest that they cannot realize their need and ask for help on the basis that they cannot get to the top of stairs completely undermines the very purpose of the giving them that dilemma. ….
George C. Scott Explains Calvinism
A scene from the 1979 movie Hardcore, in which an old Calvinist elder goes to find his runaway daughter in the porn underbelly of Los Angeles. This scene with George C. Scott inspired Richard Mouw’s book “Calvinism in the Las Vegas Airport.” HEADS UP: there’s some saucy language. And the rest of the film is what you’d expect from a movie about the porn industry in the 70’s.
I affirm that the grace of God can be and is at times resisted, and this includes but is not limited to the genuine offer of salvation and resisting the Holy Spirit. The Bible says in 2 Thessalonians 2:10 that reprobates “perish because they refused to love the truth and so be saved.” (italics added) Of course, I am rejecting the Calvinist and compatibilist answer that a person refuses because, as a sinner, that is all that he can do. It seems crystal clear in reading the passage without Calvinist spectacles on that the context and language clearly imply that they “should not have refused” and therefore could have believed which entails the idea of otherwise choice, exactly what Calvinism denies.
Further, I affirm that the ability of man to accept or to resist God’s genuine offer of salvation is a part of God’s plan and redounds to His glory; moreover, this genuine offer of the gospel is more than “a good faith offer” as taught by the Calvinist. It is an actual offer from God through His chosen medium, which can be accepted by faith or rejected unto damnation. Finally, this includes the reality that God has given the gift of repentance, and that the clear call of Scripture is for everyone everywhere (Acts 17:30) to repent and be saved, which implies that those called upon to repent can, by the grace of God, repent (Matthew 3:2, 4:17, 11:20; Mark 6:12; Luke 5:32, 13:3, 13:5, 24:47; Acts 2:38, 3:19, 5:31, 11:18, 20:21, 26:20; Romans 2:4; 2 Peter 3:9).
Jesus pronounced woe upon all the people of Chorazin and Bethsaida because they did not repent, obviously indicating He believed they had the capacity to repent (see Matthew 11:21). The book of Revelation leaves believers stunned that unregenerate people refuse to repent even when they are suffering from the wrath of God (see Revelation 9:20-21, 16:9, 11). Acts 17:30 reminds us that the call of God to repent is for everyone. Paul said, “and with all the deception of wickedness for those who perish, because they did not receive the love of the truth so as to be saved” (2 Thessalonians 2:10). The implication obviously means that they could have received the love of the truth and been saved.
In like manner, Stephen preached, “You men who are stiff-necked and uncircumcised in heart and ears are always resisting the Holy Spirit; you are doing just as your fathers did”(Acts 7:51). The writer of Hebrews said of those who draw back unto destruction, “How much severer punishment do you think he will deserve who has trampled underfoot the Son of God, and has regarded as unclean the blood of the covenant by which he was sanctified, and has insulted the Spirit of grace”? (Hebrews 10:29, italics added). In Noah’s day, God said, “My Spirit shall not strive with man forever” (Genesis 6:3), clearly implying that He was then. Also why did God bring judgment upon leaders and Jews so they could not hear and see and return if that in fact was their state already? (Isaiah 6:9-10 and Matthew 13:10-17).
Lastly, I affirm the biblical doctrines of grace. Calvinists refer to their beliefs as “The Doctrines of Grace,” which is fine, but it actually does not tell us much. That is to say, the doctrines of any Biblicist are all “doctrines of Grace.” There simply are no other kinds. It is similar to the Calvinist’s continual reference to the sovereignty of God. It tells us nothing since all believers with any biblical fidelity and understanding of God believe in His sovereignty. Further, disavowal of the Calvinist’s definition of the doctrines of grace and sovereignty is not a denial or undermining of the doctrines of grace or the sovereignty of God, but it is what it is, a denial of Calvinism’s definition.
I disaffirm that the Bible teaches that God carries out His salvation plan through selective “irresistible grace.” John Piper describes irresistible grace thusly, “When a person hears a preacher call for repentance he can resist that call. But if God gives him repentance he cannot resist because the gift is the removal of the resistance. Not being willing to repent is the same as resisting the Holy Spirit. So if God gives repentance it is the same as taking away the resistance. This is why we call this work of God “irresistible grace.”63 Note that those who receive this act of grace against their will can only believe and those who don’t receive this cannot be saved; therefore, any talk from a Calvinist that God loves people, the lost, hurting, etc., is double-talk because He, according to Calvinism, actually only loves some lost and hurting people enough to offer help. This is a disquieting reality.
Piper says also, “The doctrine of irresistible grace means that God is sovereign and can overcome all resistance when he wills.”” I would note that the Calvinist, as well as Piper’s position, is actually stronger than this in that, not only does the doctrine of irresistible grace mean that God can overcome, but it actually means He will or must. Further, I disaffirm that all verses that say, teach, or imply that man can resist are merely reiterating the position of compatibilism—sure they resist salvation because that is all, according to their nature, that they can do. Moreover, I disaffirm that an offer of salvation through proclamation of the gospel by anyone who views salvation through the grid of Calvinism constitutes a real offer of salvation from God if it can be resisted; because according to Calvinism and compatibilism the real offer of salvation, in any meaningful sense to the person, cannot be resisted because the real offer of salvation from God always results in regeneration. This is a disquieting reality. An example of my point is, in what sense can a person be said to be offered a job if it is impossible for him to accept it, and not only is there no intent to actually give it to him, but in reality there was a predetermined unalterable decision by the CEO not to give it to him; this is in spite of the personnel manager’s sincerity in offering the job. The answer seems obvious, NONE!
Let me elucidate this further. Calvinists seek to emphasize the positive of irresistible grace, e.g., God saves some unworthy sinners who otherwise would perish in hell. But the dark side of irresistible grace is that although the “good faith offer” of a Calvinist seems to exonerate him from being guilty of making an artificial offer of salvation (as long as he is careful not to say specifically to someone things like “God loves you or God cares about you or God wants you to go to heaven”) to sinners who cannot, according to Calvinism, really repent, believe, and be saved, because the Calvinist can never be sure who God has selected to regenerate. However, even if the Calvinist is vindicated, it does not exonerate God from using language, commands, parables, etc., which clearly picture God as wanting all to be saved even though, according to Calvinism, He is the sole determiner and only reason they cannot be saved. Therefore, Calvinism’s irresistible grace makes God the sole determiner of who goes to heaven and who goes to hell because He could have saved everyone. This truth is dramatically contrary to the picture of God and His offer of salvation as drawn in Scripture, a disquieting reality.
We all seek to emphasize what we deem to be the positives of our message or position. However, it is morally incumbent upon every messenger to quest for full disclosure and to shun any appearance of obscuring the negative or harsher teachings of our position. The Calvinist emphasis that irresistible grace assures salvation for some, while minimizing the truth that irresistible grace just as assuredly and irrevocably destines some to eternal torment in hell, reminds me of the Darwinist obsession with the beauty of natural selection’s determination that the strong and healthy survive, while they seldom with the same clarity and enthusiasm speak of the dark side of natural selection that requires the brutal and merciless elimination of the weak.
Consequently, the insurmountable obstacle to irresistible grace determining who receives eternal salvation—besides the fact that it is not taught in Scripture—is that it puts God the Father, the Lord Jesus, and the Holy Spirit in the position of appearing to offer deliverance from the wrath to come to all who cry for mercy while, actually, God has no intention of doing so. For, according to Calvinism, He predetermined, contrary to what the gospel and the Scriptures say, to offer salvation to only a few. In other words, it makes God the CEO who allows, yea commands, and says He wants all to be hired, but He has in reality predetermined long ago that they cannot ever be hired even though his personnel managers continue to offer jobs to them. This is a disquieting reality. In order to sustain the idea of irresistible grace, it appears that we must turn common language upon its head, take the obvious and simple meaning of language as seen in Scripture and used in everyday life, and subject it to biblically unnecessary restrictions and meanings, which is one of the pervasive problems in Calvinism. This is a disquieting reality.
For example, Christ felt love for the rich young ruler and out of that love told him how to receive salvation, but the young man refused; after which Jesus noted how difficult it was for a rich person to “enter the kingdom of heaven.” The passage clearly indicates that the young man could have been saved if he had chosen to follow Christ, and part of the reason that he chose not to follow Christ was that he was rich (Mark 10:21-23). From the standpoint of Calvinism, whether he was rich or poor had no bearing on whether he would come or not because the draw is irresistible. Christ’s encounter with this young man also demonstrates that Christ loves the lost and loves them enough to tell them how to have eternal life. By every normal meaning, those words meant he could have received salvation at that time had he chosen to believe. The idea of a “good faith offer” may relieve the human Calvinist of malicious deception, but it cannot be so of Jesus or the Trinity. The statement that “all things are possible with God” is exactly my point and in no way proves Calvinism true, but is actually contrary to their system. This is a disquieting reality. Therefore, I absolutely disaffirm that the Scripture teaches or logic demands that God’s sovereignty is undermined or minimized when He grants the opportunity to resist His genuine offer of salvation because He sovereignly chose to grant that choice.
Finally, I disaffirm that the doctrine of irresistible grace applied to some in salvation is what the Scriptures teach, or that it is consistent with what God reveals about Himself. The truth is that God revealed Himself in Scripture as actually loving the world—human race—so much that He sent His own Son to die for them (John 3:16), thereby providing for their salvation. And any human can receive this salvation if he will obey God’s command and repent and believe, which he can do by God’s grace. I do not believe that God offers what cannot be accepted or what He has no intention of providing. Nor do I believe that God condemns people for rejecting what He predetermined that they could not accept.
This [cartoons and commentary] is via NOT WILLING THAT ANY, an important aspect of the jaundiced view of salvation embedded into the warped view of the Reformation (click toons to enlarge):
Quick Take:
When you share the gospel, are you saying the same thing your theology actually believes?
This image shows a common tension in Calvinist evangelism. In public, the message sounds simple and open: believe in Jesus and you will be saved. But when the theology is explained, the unbeliever learns that they cannot believe, cannot want to believe, and cannot even seek God unless God first changes them. The invitation sounds real at first, but once the system is understood, it becomes hard to see how salvation is truly something the listener can respond to at all.
Is it an accurate picture of Calvinism?
To understand this image fairly, we have to describe Calvinism the way Calvinists themselves do. Calvinism teaches that all people are commanded to believe the gospel, but no one has the ability to do so unless God first gives them a new heart. People are responsible to believe, even though they are unable to believe on their own (John 6:44, Romans 8:7–8, Ephesians 2:1).
The Public Gospel Call
Panel 1 shows a Calvinist evangelist preaching the gospel the way most Calvinists do. The message, “Believe on the Lord Jesus and you will be saved,” comes straight from Scripture (Acts 16:31). It is spoken to everyone and sounds like a real choice. This is accurate. Calvinists believe the gospel should be preached freely to all people, even though only some will be able to respond.
Human Inability to Believe
Panel 2 explains what Calvinism believes is happening underneath that message. According to Calvinism, a person cannot accept the gospel unless God first regenerates them (John 3:3, John 6:65, 1 Corinthians 2:14). The evangelist’s explanation is not exaggerated. It is a direct statement of Calvinist doctrine. The unbeliever’s confusion makes sense because the call sounded like something he could do, but the explanation says he cannot.
Inability to Seek God
Panel 3 simply follows the logic of Calvinism. If a person cannot believe or desire salvation, then they also cannot seek God or even pray rightly unless God acts first (Romans 3:10–11). The unbeliever is not arguing against Calvinism here. He is repeating it back in his own words. The image lets the theology speak for itself.
Returning to Evangelistic Language
In Panel 4, the evangelist turns back to the crowd and resumes preaching in general terms. He again speaks about believing and being saved, without mentioning inability or regeneration. This reflects how Calvinist evangelism often works in practice. Calvinists believe God uses the preached word to give faith to the elect (Romans 10:17), even though the hearer has no control over whether they will be given that ability.
Taken together, the image shows Calvinism accurately. The gospel is preached to everyone, but the ability to respond is given only to some (Romans 9:16–18). The tension the unbeliever feels is not because he misunderstands, but because he understands clearly.
And that leads to a simple question worth thinking about. If the gospel sounds like it is up to you until the theology is explained, and once explained it no longer is, what is the unbeliever really being asked to do? And is it possible that the picture in Panel 4, where God truly desires all to be saved and genuinely enables all to respond, better matches both the message of the gospel and the character of God?
Quick Take:
Why would a human being want everyone to be saved, while God does not?
That question drives the tension in this illustration. Within Calvinist theology, God’s saving love is not extended to all people in the same way. Because of that, broad statements about God loving and wanting to save everyone eventually need to be qualified. The preacher’s shift is not meant to deceive, but to stay consistent with doctrine. What feels uneasy is not a mistake, but watching theology reshape the message in real time.
Is it an accurate picture of Calvinism?
At its core, this illustration is trying to show Calvinism honestly, not mock it. The preacher is not confused or hypocritical. He is adjusting his words to line up with what Calvinism actually teaches about salvation. The tension in the image comes from doctrinal faithfulness, not emotional struggle. In that sense, the illustration reflects Calvinism accurately.
Salvation depends on God’s choice, not human desire (Unconditional Election)
In the illustration, the preacher admits that he would choose salvation for everyone if he could, but recognizes that God does not. This matches the Calvinist belief that God chooses who will be saved based on His will alone, not on human desire or response (Romans 9:11–13; Ephesians 1:4–5). The preacher’s internal correction reflects this belief. If salvation is based on God’s choice, then God does not intend to save all people.
God’s saving love is limited to the elect (Limited Atonement)
The preacher realizes that his original statement sounded like his own love rather than God’s. In Calvinism, God’s saving love is not universal. Christ’s death is understood to be effective only for those God has chosen (John 10:14–15; Matthew 1:21). Because of this, the preacher feels the need to clarify his message so it does not suggest that God’s saving love applies to everyone.
God saves those He chooses without fail (Irresistible Grace)
Calvinism teaches that when God chooses to save someone, His grace cannot be resisted and will always succeed (John 6:37, 44; Romans 8:30). This matters because if God can save anyone He wants and does not fail, then the fact that many remain unsaved means God does not intend to save all. This belief explains why the preacher narrows his message in the final panel.
This illustration does not claim Calvinists lack compassion or sincerity. It shows how Calvinist doctrine shapes the way salvation is talked about. If this is an accurate picture of Calvinism, the question for the reader is simple: are you comfortable with this picture of God’s saving love, and does it reflect what you believe Scripture teaches about God’s character?
Wanna see a visual of this?
Quick Take:
What does it say about God’s character if rescue is limited not by ability, but by choice?
This illustration presses the tension between a God who has abundant power to save and a framework in which that power is applied only to some, even while others remain in the same danger. Scripture consistently presents God as one who is able and willing to save, who does not delight in destruction but calls people to turn and live (Ezekiel 18:23; 33:11). The gospel is proclaimed as good news for all, with Christ described as the Savior of the world and the atoning sacrifice not only for our sins but for the sins of the whole world (John 3:16–17; 1 John 2:2). The image raises the question of whether it best reflects the biblical witness to see God’s selective rescue as rooted in an eternal decision that leaves others without remedy, or to understand judgment as the tragic result of rejecting a salvation God genuinely extends and desires all to receive (2 Peter 3:9; 1 Timothy 2:3–6).
Is it an accurate picture of Calvinism?
The aim of this illustration is accuracy, not mockery. It is intended to engage Calvinist theology on its own terms rather than caricature it. A meaningful critique must begin by representing Calvinism as its advocates themselves describe it, allowing the system to be evaluated based on its actual claims.
Total Inability: The prisoners are entirely unable to rescue themselves from the fire, reflecting the Calvinist teaching that fallen humanity is spiritually dead and incapable of coming to God apart from divine intervention (Ephesians 2:1–3; Romans 8:7–8).
Sovereign Election: The firefighter chooses whom to rescue based solely on his own decision rather than any quality, action, or response found in the prisoners. This mirrors unconditional election, where God’s saving choice rests in His sovereign will alone (Romans 9:15–16; Ephesians 1:4–5).
Effectual Grace: The rescue of the chosen prisoner is decisive and successful. Once the firefighter acts, the outcome is guaranteed, reflecting the Calvinist claim that God’s saving grace unfailingly accomplishes salvation for those He intends to save (John 6:37; John 6:44).
Particular Redemption: The firefighter’s efforts are directed toward one individual rather than all those in danger. This aligns with the doctrine of particular redemption, where Christ’s atoning work is understood to be designed to secure salvation for the elect in a definite and effective way (John 10:11, 15; Matthew 1:21).
God-Centered Glory: The rescued prisoner responds with gratitude that highlights the rescuer’s choice and action rather than questioning the scope of the rescue. This reflects the Calvinist emphasis that salvation ultimately exists to magnify God’s glory and initiative rather than human response or cooperation (Ephesians 1:5–6; Romans 11:36).
Taken together, these elements show that the illustration is engaging real Calvinist theology rather than a strawman. It portrays a system in which salvation is entirely God-driven, selective by divine purpose, and effectual for those chosen.
The question that remains is not whether the illustration is fair, but whether this portrayal of salvation is one you believe best reflects the character of God revealed in Scripture?
(Below Video Description) Dr. Leighton Flowers plays clips from Drs. James White, RC Sproul and John Piper on the question of the origin of moral evil so as to compare and contrast the various perspectives and the apparent inconsistencies of the Calvinistic worldview.
William Lane Craig discusses [below] being a “consistent Calvinist” vs. an “inconsistent Calvinism”
Is the Calvinist God the Author of Evil? w/ William Lane Craig Dr. William Lane Craig explains why he believes that Calvinism is forced to conclude that God is the author of evil.
Any consideration of the goodness of God at once threatens us with the following dilemma.
On the one hand, if God is wiser than we His judgement must differ from ours on many things, and not least on good and evil. What seems to us good may therefore not be good in His eyes, and what seems to us evil may not be evil.
On the other hand, if God’s moral judgement differs from ours so that our ‘black’ may be His ‘white’, we can mean nothing by calling Him good; for to say ‘God is good’, while asserting that His goodness is wholly other than ours, is really only to say ‘God is we know not what’. And an utterly unknown quality in God cannot give us moral grounds for loving or obeying Him. If He is not (in our sense) ‘good’ we shall obey, if at all, only through fear—and should be equally ready to obey an omnipotent Fiend. The doctrine of Total Depravity— when the consequence is drawn that, since we are totally depraved, our idea of good is worth simply nothing— may thus turn Christianity into a form of devil-worship.
The escape from this dilemma depends on observing what happens, in human relations, when the man of inferior moral standards enters the society of those who are better and wiser than he and gradually learns to accept their standards—a process which, as it happens, I can describe fairly accurately, since I have undergone it. When I came first to the University I was as nearly without a moral conscience as a boy could be. Some faint distaste for cruelty and for meanness about money was my utmost reach—of chastity, truthfulness, and self-sacrifice I thought as a baboon thinks of classical music. By the mercy of God I fell among a set of young men (none of them, by the way, Christians) who were sufficiently close to me in intellect and imagination to secure immediate intimacy, but who knew, and tried to obey, the moral law. Thus their judgement of good and evil was very different from mine. Now what happens in such a case is not in the least like being asked to treat as ‘white’ what was hitherto called black. The new moral judgements never enter the mind as mere reversals (though they do reverse them) of previous judgements but ‘as lords that are certainly expected’. You can have no doubt in which direction you are moving: they are more like good than the little shreds of good you already had, but are, in a sense, continuous with them. But the great test is that the recognition of the new standards is accompanied with the sense of shame and guilt: one is conscious of having blundered into society that one is unfit for. It is in the light of such experiences that we must consider the goodness of God. Beyond all doubt, His idea of ‘goodness’ differs from ours; but you need have no fear that, as you approach it, you will be asked simply to reverse your moral standards. When the relevant difference between the Divine ethics and your own appears to you, you will not, in fact, be in any doubt that the change demanded of you is in the direction you already call ‘better’. The Divine ‘goodness’ differs from ours, but it is not sheerly different: it differs from ours not as white from black but as a perfect circle from a child’s first attempt to draw a wheel. But when the child has learned to draw, it will know that the circle it then makes is what it was trying to make from the very beginning.
This doctrine is presupposed in Scripture. Christ calls men to repent—a call which would be meaningless if God’s standards were sheerly different from that which they already knew and failed to practise. He appeals to our existing moral judgement—‘Why even of yourselves judge ye not what is right?’ (Luke 12:57) God in the Old Testament expostulates with men on the basis of their own conceptions of gratitude, fidelity, and fair play: and puts Himself, as it were, at the bar before His own creatures—‘What iniquity have your fathers found in me, that they are gone far from me?’ (Jeremiah 2:5.) …
CS Lewis | The Problem of Pain (Chapter 3)
“Human Wickedness”
…A recovery of the old sense of sin is essential to Christianity. Christ takes it for granted that men are bad. Until we really feel this assumption of His to be true, though we are part of the world He came to save, we are not part of the audience to whom His words are addressed. We lack the first condition for understanding what He is talking about. And when men attempt to be Christians without this preliminary consciousness of sin, the result is almost bound to be a certain resentment against God as to one always inexplicably angry. Most of us have at times felt a secret sympathy with the dying farmer who replied to the Vicar’s dissertation on repentance by asking ‘What harm have I ever done Him?’ There is the real rub. The worst we have done to God is to leave Him alone—why can’t He return the compliment? Why not live and let live? What call has He, of all beings, to be ‘angry’? It’s easy for Him to be good!
Now at the moment when a man feels real guilt— moments too rare in our lives—all these blasphemies vanish away. Much, we may feel, can be excused to human infirmities: but not this—this incredibly mean and ugly action which none of our friends would have done, which even such a thorough-going little rotter as X would have been ashamed of, which we would not for the world allow to be published. At such a moment we really do know that our character, as revealed in this action, is, and ought to be, hateful to all good men, and, if there are powers above man, to them. A God who did not regard this with unappeasable distaste would not be a good being. We cannot even wish for such a God—it is like wishing that every nose in the universe were abolished, that smell of hay or roses or the sea should never again delight any creature, because our own breath happens to stink.
When we merely say that we are bad, the ‘wrath’ of God seems a barbarous doctrine; as soon as we perceive our badness, it appears inevitable, a mere corollary from God’s goodness. To keep ever before us the insight derived from such a moment as I have been describing, to learn to detect the same real inexcusable corruption under more and more of its complex disguises, is therefore indispensable to a real understanding of the Christian faith. This is not, of course, a new doctrine. I am attempting nothing very splendid in this chapter. I am merely trying to get my reader (and, still more, myself) over a pons asi-norum—to take the first step out of fools’ paradise and utter illusion. But the illusion has grown, in modern times, so strong, that I must add a few considerations tending to make the reality less incredible.
We are deceived by looking on the outside of things. We suppose ourselves to be roughly not much worse than Y, whom all acknowledge for a decent sort of person, and certainly (though we should not claim it out loud) better than the abominable X. Even on the superficial level we are probably deceived about this. Don’t be too sure that your friends think you as good as Y. The very fact that you selected him for the comparison is suspicious: he is probably head and shoulders above you and your circle. But let us suppose that Y and yourself both appear ‘not bad’. How far Y’s appearance is deceptive, is between Y and God. His may not be deceptive: you know that yours is.
Does this seem to you a mere trick, because I could say the same to Y and so to every man in turn? But that is just the point. Every man, not very holy or very arrogant, has to ‘live up to’ the outward appearance of other men: he knows there is that within him which falls far below even his most careless public behaviour, even his loosest talk. In an instant of time—while your friend hesitates for a word—what things pass through your mind? We have never told the whole truth. We may confess ugly facts— the meanest cowardice or the shabbiest and most prosaic impurity—but the tone is false. The very act of confess-ing—an infinitesimally hypocritical glance—a dash of humour—all this contrives to dissociate the facts from your very self. No one could guess how familiar and, in a sense, congenial to your soul these things were, how much of a piece with all the rest: down there, in the dreaming inner warmth, they struck no such discordant note, were not nearly so odd and detachable from the rest of you, as they seem when they are turned into words. We imply, and often believe, that habitual vices are exceptional single acts, and make the opposite mistake about our virtues—like the bad tennis player who calls his normal form his ‘bad days’ and mistakes his rare successes for his normal. I do not think it is our fault that we cannot tell the real truth about ourselves; the persistent, life-long, inner murmur of spite, jealousy, prurience, greed and self-complacence, simply will not go into words. But the important thing is that we should not mistake our inevitably limited utterances for a full account of the worst that is inside.
A reaction—in itself wholesome—is now going on against purely private or domestic conceptions of morality, a reawakening of the social We feel ourselves to be involved in an iniquitous social system and to share a corporate guilt. This is very true: but the enemy can exploit even truths to our deception. Beware lest you are making use of the idea of corporate guilt to distract your attention from those humdrum, old-fashioned guilts of your own which have nothing to do with ‘the system’ and which can be dealt with without waiting for the millennium. For corporate guilt perhaps cannot be, and certainly is not, felt with the same force as personal guilt. For most of us, as we now are, this conception is a mere excuse for evading the real issue. When we have really learned to know our individual corruption, then indeed we can go on to think of the corporate guilt and can hardly think of it too much. But we must learn to walk before we run.
We have a strange illusion that mere time cancels sin. I have heard others, and I have heard myself, recounting cruelties and falsehoods committed in boyhood as if they were no concern of the present speaker’s, and even with laughter. But mere time does nothing either to the fact or to the guilt of a sin. The guilt is washed out not by time but by repentance and the blood of Christ: if we have repented these early sins we should remember the price of our forgiveness and be humble. As for the fact of a sin, is it probable that anything cancels it? All times are eternally present to God. Is it not at least possible that along some one line of His multi-dimensional eternity He sees you forever in the nursery pulling the wings off a fly, forever toadying, lying, and lusting as a schoolboy, forever in that moment of cowardice or insolence as a subaltern? It may be that salvation consists not in the cancelling of these eternal moments but in the perfected humanity that bears the shame forever, rejoicing in the occasion which it furnished to God’s compassion and glad that it should be common knowledge to the universe. Perhaps in that eternal moment St Peter—he will forgive me if I am wrong— forever denies his Master. If so, it would indeed be true that the joys of Heaven are for most of us, in our present condition, ‘an acquired taste’—and certain ways of life may render the taste impossible of acquisition. Perhaps the lost are those who dare not go to such a public Of course I do not know that this is true; but I think the possibility is worth keeping in mind.
We must guard against the feeling that there is ‘safety in numbers’. It is natural to feel that if all men are as bad as the Christians say, then badness must be very excusable. If all the boys plough in the examination, surely the papers must have been too hard? And so the masters at that school feel till they learn that there are other schools where ninety per cent of the boys passed on the same papers. Then they begin to suspect that the fault did not lie with the examiners. Again, many of us have had the experience of living in some local pocket of human soci-ety—some particular school, college, regiment or profession where the tone was bad. And inside that pocket certain actions were regarded as merely normal (‘Everyone does it’) and certain others as impracticably virtuous and Quixotic. But when we emerged from that bad society we made the horrible discovery that in the outer world our ‘normal’ was the kind of thing that no decent person ever dreamed of doing, and our ‘Quixotic’ was taken for granted as the minimum standard of decency. What had seemed to us morbid and fantastic scruples so long as we were in the ‘pocket’ now turned out to be the only moments of sanity we there enjoyed. It is wise to face the possibility that the whole human race (being a small thing in the universe) is, in fact, just such a local pocket of evil—an isolated bad school or regiment inside which minimum decency passes for heroic virtue and utter corruption for pardonable imperfection. But is there any evidence—except Christian doctrine itself—that this is so? I am afraid there is. In the first place, there are those odd people among us who do not accept the local standard, who demonstrate the alarming truth that a quite different behaviour is, in fact, possible. Worse still, there is the fact that these people, even when separated widely in space and time, have a suspicious knack of agreeing with one another in the main—almost as if they were in touch with some larger public opinion outside the pocket. What is common to Zarathustra, Jeremiah, Socrates, Gautama, Christ1 and Marcus Aurelius, is something pretty substantial. Thirdly, we find in ourselves even now a theoretical approval of this behaviour which no one practises. Even inside the pocket we do not say that justice, mercy, fortitude, and temperance are of no value, but only that the local custom is as just, brave, temperate and merciful as can reasonably be expected. It begins to look as if the neglected school rules even inside this bad school were connected with some larger world—and that when the term ends we might find ourselves facing the public opinion of that larger world. But the worst of all is this: we cannot help seeing that only the degree of virtue which we now regard as impracticable can possibly save our race from disaster even on this planet. The standard which seems to have come into the ‘pocket’ from outside, turns out to be terribly relevant to conditions inside the pocket—so relevant that a consistent practice of virtue by the human race even for ten years would fill the earth from pole to pole with peace, plenty, health, merriment, and heartsease, and that nothing else will. It may be the custom, down here, to treat the regimental rules as a dead letter or a counsel of perfection: but even now, everyone who stops to think can see that when we meet the enemy this neglect is going to cost every man of us his life. It is then that we shall envy the ‘morbid’ person, the ‘pedant’ or ‘enthusiast’ who really has taught his company to shoot and dig in and spare their water bottles.
[….]
This chapter will have been misunderstood if anyone describes it as a reinstatement of the doctrine of Total Depravity. I disbelieve that doctrine, partly on the logical ground that if our depravity were total we should not know ourselves to be depraved, and partly because experience shows us much goodness in human nature. Nor am I recommending universal gloom. The emotion of shame has been valued not as an emotion but because of the insight to which it leads. I think that insight should be permanent in each man’s mind: but whether the painful emotions that attend it should also be encouraged, is a technical problem of spiritual direction on which, as a layman, I have little call to speak. My own idea, for what it is worth, is that all sadness which is not either arising from the repentance of a concrete sin and hastening towards concrete amendment or restitution, or else arising from pity and hastening to active assistance, is simply bad; and I think we all sin by needlessly disobeying the apostolic injunction to ‘rejoice’ as much as by anything else. Humility, after the first shock, is a cheerful virtue: it is the high-minded unbeliever, desperately trying in the teeth of repeated disillusions to retain his ‘faith in human nature’, who is really sad. I have been aiming at an intellectual, not an emotional, effect: I have been trying to make the reader believe that we actually are, at present, creatures whose character must be, in some respects, a horror to God, as it is, when we really see it, a horror to ourselves. This I believe to be a fact: and I notice that the holier a man is, the more fully he is aware of that fact. Perhaps you have imagined that this humility in the saints is a pious illusion at which God smiles. That is a most dangerous error. It is theoretically dangerous, because it makes you identify a virtue (i.e., a perfection) with an illusion (i.e., an imperfection), which must be nonsense. It is practically dangerous because it encourages a man to mistake his first insights into his own corruption for the first beginnings of a halo round his own silly head. No, depend upon it; when the saints say that they—even they—are vile, they are recording truth with scientific accuracy.
