CS Lewis

How the Cults Redefine Biblical Terms

Published by Papa Giorgio

i wanted to start with a large excerpt from Walter Martin’s Kingdom of the Cults (6th edition) to get the main idea across… I was reading Micah Coate’s book, “The Cultish Side of Calvinism, and he had some great sections of a chapter that are incredibly important. But first, Walter Martin:

The Riddle of Semantics

The problem of semantics has always played an important part in human affairs, for by its use or abuse, whichever the case may be, entire churches, thrones, and even governments for that matter, have been erected, sustained, or overthrown. The late George Orwell’s stirring novel 1984, in which he points out that the redefinition of common political terms can lead to slavery when it is allowed to pass unchallenged by a lethargic populace, is a classic illustration of the dangers of perverted semantics. It should be of no particular surprise to any student of world history that trick terminology is a powerful propaganda weapon. The communist dictatorship of China, which even the Russian theorists rejected as incalculably brutal and inept, dares to call itself the People’s Republic of China. As history testifies, the people have very little, if any, say in the actual operation of communism, and if democracy is to be understood as the rule of the people, the Chinese communists have canonized the greatest misnomer of all time!

Both the Chinese communists and the Russians have paid a terrible price for not defining terminology, and for listening to the siren song of Marxism without carefully studying and analyzing the atheistic collectivism through which the music came.

Applying this analogy to the field of cults, it is at once evident that a distinct parallel exists between the two systems. For cultism, like communism, plays a type of hypnotic music upon a semantic harp of terminological deception. And there are many who historically have followed these strains down the broad road to spiritual eternal judgment. There is a common denominator then, and it is inextricably connected with language and the precise definition of terminology. It is what we might call the key to understanding cultism.Precisely how to utilize the key that will help unlock the jargon of cult semantics is best illustrated by the following facts, drawn from over thirty years of research and practical fieldwork with cultists of every variety.

The average non-Christian cult owes its very existence to the fact that it has utilized the terminology of Christianity, has borrowed liberally from the Bible (almost always out of context), and sprinkled its format with evangelical clichés and terms wherever possible or advantageous. Up to now this has been a highly successful attempt to represent their respective systems of thought as “Christian.”

On encountering a cultist, then, always remember that you are dealing with a person who is familiar with Christian terminology, and who has carefully redefined it to fit the system of thought he or she now embraces.

A concrete example of a redefinition of terms can be illustrated in the case of almost any of the Gnostic cult systems that emphasize healing and hold in common a pantheistic concept of God (Christian Science, New Thought, Unity, Christ Unity Science, Metaphysics, Religious Science, Divine Science).

In the course of numerous contacts with this type of cultist, the author has had many opportunities to see the semantic maze in full operation, and it is awesome to behold. Such a cult adherent will begin talking at length about God and Christ. He will speak especially about love, tolerance, forgiveness, the Sermon on the Mount, and, as always, the out-of-context perversion of James’s “faith without works is dead.”

It should be noted that hardly ever in their discourses will such cultists discuss the essential problem of evil, the existence of personal sin, or the necessity of the substitutionary atonement of Christ as the sole means of salvation from sin, through the agency of divine grace and the exercise of faith. In fact, they conscientiously avoid such distasteful subjects like the proverbial plague and discuss them only with great reluctance. Of course, there are exceptions to this rule, but on the average it is safe to assume that reticence will characterize any exploration of these touchy issues. Both Christian Science and Unity talk of God as Trinity; but their real concept of God is a pantheistic abstraction (Life, Truth, and Love constitute the triune divine principles—Christian Science).

The historic doctrine of the Trinity is seldom, if ever, considered without careful redefinition. If the reader consults the Metaphysical Bible Dictionary, published by the Unity School of Christianity, he will see the masterpiece of redefinition for himself. For in this particular volume, Unity has redefined exhaustively many of the cardinal terms of biblical theology, much as Mary Baker Eddy did in her Glossary of Terms in the book Science and Health With Key to the Scriptures. The reader will be positively amazed to find what has happened to biblical history, the person of Adam, the concept of human sin, spiritual depravity, and eternal judgment. One thing, however, will emerge very clearly from this study: Unity may use the terminology of the Bible, but by no stretch of the imagination can the redefinition be equated with the thing itself.

Another confusing aspect of non-Christian cultists’ approach to semantics is the manner in which they will surprise the Christian with voluminous quotations from no less authority than the Bible, and give the appearance of agreeing with nearly every statement the Christian makes in attempting to evangelize the cultist. Such stock phrases as “We believe that way too; we agree on this point” or the more familiar: “Mrs. Eddy, Mr. or Mrs. Fillmore, Mr. Evans, Dr. Buchman, Joseph Smith, or Brigham Young says exactly the same thing; we are completely in agreement.” All such tactics based upon the juggling of terms usually have the effect of frustrating the average Christian, for he is unable to put his finger on what he knows is error, and is repeatedly tantalized by seeming agreement which, as he knows, does not exist. He is therefore often forced into silence because he is unaware of what the cultist is actually doing. Often, even though he may be aware of this in a limited sense, he hesitates to plunge into a discussion for fear of ridicule because of an inadequate background or a lack of biblical information.

The solution to this perplexing problem is far from simple. The Christian must realize that for every biblical or doctrinal term he mentions, a redefinition light flashes on in the mind of the cultist, and a lightning-fast redefinition is accomplished. Realizing that the cultist will apparently agree with the doctrine under discussion while firmly disagreeing in reality with the historical and biblical concept, the Christian is on his way to dealing effectively with cult terminology. This amazing operation of terminological redefinition works very much like a word association test in psychology.

It is simple for a cultist to spiritualize and redefine the clear meaning of biblical texts and teachings so as to be in apparent harmony with the historic Christian faith. However, such a harmony is at best a surface agreement, based upon double meanings of words that cannot stand the test of biblical context, grammar, or sound exegesis. Language is, to be sure, a complex subject; all are agreed on this. But one thing is beyond dispute, and that is that in context words mean just what they say. Either we admit this or we must be prepared to surrender all the accomplishments of grammar and scholastic progress and return to writing on cave walls with charcoal sticks in the tradition of our alleged stone-age ancestors. To illustrate this point more sharply, the experience of everyday life points out the absurdity of terminological redefinitions in every way of life.

An attorney who is retained by his client must know the laws that govern trial procedure, cross-examination, and evidence. But above all else he must believe in the innocence of his client. A client who tells his attorney that he is guilty of a misdemeanor but not a felony is using the vocabulary of law. But if his attorney finds out that his client has perverted that vocabulary so that the terms are interchangeable, he will either refuse to defend him or will clarify the terminology before the court, because by definition a misdemeanor is a misdemeanor and a felony is a felony. A man who says he stole only ninety dollars (petty theft), but who really means that it was ninety dollars more or less, and in reality knows that it was in excess of five hundred dollars (grand theft), is playing a game that the law will not tolerate. He will most certainly be punished for such perversions of standard legal terms. In the realm of medicine, a doctor who announces that he will perform an open-heart operation, then proceeds in the presence of his colleagues to remove the gall bladder, and then attempts to defend his action by the claim that open-heart surgery actually means removal of the gall bladder in his vocabulary, could not practice medicine for long! Open- heart surgery is delicate repair of the heart muscle. Removal of the gall bladder is, by definition, surgery of another type. In law and in medicine, therefore, terms are what they are by definition. On the business and professional level this also holds true. But to the cultists words do not always mean what they have always meant by definition in specific context. And just as the American Bar Association will not tolerate confusion of terminology in the trial of cases, and as the American Medical Association will not tolerate redefinition of terminology in diagnostic and surgical medicine, so also the Church of Jesus Christ has every right not to tolerate the gross perversions and redefinitions of historical, biblical terminology simply to accommodate a culture and a society that cannot tolerate an absolute standard or criterion of truth, even if it be revealed by God in His Word and through the true witness of His Spirit.

The major cult systems, then, change the definition of historical terms without a quibble. They answer the objections of Christian theologians with the meaningless phrase, “You interpret it your way and I’ll interpret it mine. Let’s be broad-minded. After all, one interpretation is as good as another.”

A quick survey of how cults redefine Christian terminology illustrates this important observation:

Click to enlarger

Is it any wonder, then, that orthodox Christians feel called upon to openly denounce such perversions of clearly defined and historically accepted biblical terminology, and claim that the cults have no rights—scholastically, biblically, or linguistically—to redefine biblical terms as they do?

We ought never to forget for one moment that things are what they are by definition. Any geometric figure whose circumference is 2πr is by definition circular. Any two figures whose congruency can be determined by the application of angle-side-angle, side-angle-side, or side-side-side is, by definition, a triangle. To expand this, we might point out that any formula that expresses hydrogen to be in two parts and oxygen to be in one is water, and hydrogen to be in two parts, sulfur in one part, and oxygen in four parts is sulfuric acid. H2O can never be H2SO4. Nor can the Atonement become at-one-ment as the theology of the Gnostic cults (Christian Science, Unity, New Thought) explains it. It simply cannot be, if language means anything.

To spiritualize texts and doctrines or attempt to explain them away on the basis of the nebulous word interpretation is scholastic dishonesty, and it is not uncommonly found in leading cult literature. Cultists are destined to find out that the power of Christianity is not in its terminology but in the relationship of the individual to the historic Christ of revelation. The divine-human encounter must take place. One must become a new creation in Christ Jesus, and the emptying of Christian terminology of all its historic meanings serves only the purpose of confusion and can never vitiate the force of the Gospel, which is the Person of the Savior performing the historic function of redeeming the sinner by grace.

The Christ of Scripture is an eternal, divine personality who cannot be dismissed by a flip of the cultist’s redefinition switch, regardless of how deftly it is done. The average Christian will do well to remember the basic conflict of terminology that he is certain to encounter when dealing with cultists of practically every variety.

Summary

Whenever a Christian encounters a cultist, certain primary thoughts must be paramount in his mind: (1) he must strive to direct the conversation to the problem of terminology and maneuver the cult adherent into a position where he must define his usage of terms and his authority, if any, for

drastic, unbiblical redefinitions, which are certain to emerge; (2) the Christian must then compare these “definitions” with the various contexts of the verses upon which the cultist draws support of his doctrinal interpretations; (3) he must define the words interpretation and historic orthodoxy, and standard doctrinal phrases such as the new birth, atonement, context, exegesis, eternal judgment, etc., so that no misunderstanding will exist when these things come under discussion, as they inevitably will; (4) the Christian must attempt to lead the cultist to a review of the importance of properly defining terms for all important doctrines involved, particularly the doctrine of personal redemption from sin, which most cult systems define in a markedly unbiblical manner; (5) it is the responsibility of the Christian to present a clear testimony of his own regenerative experience with Jesus Christ in terminology that has been carefully clarified regarding the necessity of such regeneration on the part of the cultist in the light of the certain reality of God’s inevitable justice. It may be necessary also, in the course of discussing terminology and its dishonest recasting by cult systems, to resort to occasional polemic utterances. In such cases, the Christian should be certain that they are tempered with patience and love, so that the cultist appreciates that such tactics are motivated by one’s personal concern for his eternal welfare, and not just to “win the argument.”

Let it never be forgotten that cultists are experts at lifting texts out of their respective contexts without proper concern for the laws of language or the established principles of biblical interpretation. There are those of whom Peter warns us, who “wrest . . . scriptures, unto their own destruction” (2 Peter 3:16). This is an accurate picture of the kingdom of the cults in the realm of terminology.

Looking back over the picture of cult semantics, the following facts emerge:

  1. The average cultist knows his own terminology very thoroughly. He also has a historic knowledge of Christian usage and is therefore prepared to discuss many areas of Christian theology intelligently.
  2. The well-trained cultist will carefully avoid definition of terms concerning cardinal doctrines such as the Trinity, the Deity of Christ, the Atonement, the Bodily Resurrection of our Lord, the process of salvation by grace and justification by faith. If pressed in these areas, he will redefine the terms to fit the semantic framework of orthodoxy unless he is forced to define his terms explicitly.
  3. The informed Christian must seek for a point of departure, preferably the authority of the Scriptures, which can become a powerful and useful tool in the hands of the Christian, if properly exercised.
  4. The concerned Christian worker must familiarize himself to some extent with the terminology of the major cult systems if he is to enjoy any measure of success in understanding the cultist’s mind when bearing a witness for Christ.

We have stressed heavily the issue of terminology and a proper definition of terms throughout this entire chapter. It will not have been wasted effort if the reader has come to realize its importance, and will be guided accordingly when approaching the language barrier, which is an extremely formidable obstacle both to evangelizing cultists and to giving a systematic and effective defense of the Christian faith against their perversions.

As an armchair apologist and reading these ideas in the first edition… it made an impact on me. So much so that it is now a basis I incorporate into my understanding of how Calvinist “Reformed” ideology goes astray. In one of the best books I have read yet, there is some great apologetic themes in his critique of Calvinists changing terms that should be simply understood.

I will introduce each excerpt.

Section Introduction — “His Writing”

In this opening section, Coate examines the formative role of John Calvin’s writings—particularly the Institutes of the Christian Religion—in the development and interpretation of Calvinist theology. He argues that Calvin’s writings became more than historical works of theology: they became a framework through which Scripture was subsequently read and understood. Coate traces Calvin’s intellectual influences, his use of Augustine and earlier Reformers, and the continuing influence of Calvin’s commentary traditions, including the Geneva Bible and later Reformed study materials. His central concern is whether a theological system can remain genuinely Scripture-driven when the writings and interpretations of its principal theologian become the lens through which Scripture itself is interpreted.

The question Coate ultimately puts before the reader is simple:

  • Are we allowing Scripture to determine our theology, or are we allowing a theological system to determine how we read Scripture?

His Writing

Calvin goes on from the original Protestant experience of conversion to build a system, to extrapolate, to raise all the dark questions and give without flinching the dark answers.[1]  

—C. S. Lewis, on Calvin’s Institutes

Cult leaders rarely lead without their own writings. Mary Baker Eddie penned her Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures; Joseph Smith wrote The Book of Mormon; Ron Hubbard, Dianetics: The Modern Science of Mental Health; and John Calvin has his famed Institutes. Out of all his writings and commentaries, which by his own words were subordinate to his Institutes, no other writing has so “determined the course of history and changed the face of Europe” as have Calvin’s Institutes.[2] So influential are the Institutes that comparing them to other cultish writings might at first seem absurd.

To refresh our memory, John Calvin was eight years old when Martin Luther penned his Ninety-Five Theses in 1517. Born in one of the most tumultuous times in church history, John Calvin grew up in the midst of heavy Roman Catholic influence. Although Calvin officially broke allegiance to the Catholic Church at the age of twenty-five, a majority of his education had been completed under its authority. He studied at the University of Paris and later studied law at the University of Orleans. He wrote the first edition of his Institutes of the Christian Religion in 1536 at the age of twenty-seven. Because Calvin was so young, some scholars question his credibility. Dave Hunt states that the Institutes:

. . . could not possibly have come from a deep and fully developed evangelical understanding of Scripture. Instead, they came from an energetic enthusiasm of a recent law graduate and a fervent study of philosophy and religion, a young genius devoted to Augustine and a newly adopted cause.[3]

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It is also important to note that five years after writing the Institutes, the Genevan authorities asked Calvin to draft the Ecclesiastical Ordinances, an outline of church structure and doctrine. “Calvin borrowed Bucer’s assertion that the New Testament indicated four functions of ministry: pastors, doctors, elders, and deacons [but] was himself never ordained as priest or minister in any Church.” Nevertheless, he classified himself as a doctor. “Together the pastors and the senior doctors, who were obviously close to them in ministry, notably Calvin himself, formed a company of Pastors.” [4]

Although people have said that Calvin gave Protestantism its first systemized theology, it can hardly be said that he was the sole mind in formulating it. Calvin was well-read in the works of Reformers before him, and he relied heavily upon Bucer and Luther. However, he referred to no other theologian more than Augustine of Hippo, who is quoted in Calvin’s Institutes over 400 times. Spurgeon, acknowledging Calvin’s use of Augustine’s works, observes, “Perhaps Calvin himself derived it [sotereological system] mainly from the writings of Augustine,” and affirms that “Augustine obtained his views, without doubt, through the Spirit of God, from the diligent studies of the writings of Paul, and Paul received them from the Holy Ghost, from Jesus Christ.”[5]  

If Augustine “without doubt” received his views from the Holy Spirit and Calvin heavily received his views from Augustine, then one could nearly conclude that the Institutes of John Calvin are divinely inspired. Many Calvinists seem to have concluded just that. From the Institutes, Calvinism draws its doctrine, interpretation of Scripture, systemized theology, and distorted view of God. Claiming to be a Calvinist is nothing less than trusting that the Institutes are unparalleled in defining “true” Christianity. After the Institute’s twenty-three years of revisions, it was finally finished in 1559, just five years before Calvin’s death on May 27, 1564.

In most cults, the leader’s writings and doctrines determine the followers’ involvement with and interpretation of the Bible. Instead of plain Scripture leading to doctrine, doctrine leads the interpretation of Scripture. Although we will look at this in more depth in the next chapter, here are two examples: Those who follow The Book of Mormon consider it to be the fullness of the gospel. Thus, they deem it as more authoritative than the Bible itself. Those who follow the doctrines of Charles Taze Russell consider any translation of the Bible other than the New World to be incorrect. Cult members also interpret the Bible to fit the theology of their leader. For example, the audience of Mary Baker Eddie’s Key to the Scriptures interprets the Scripture from a very mystical, nonliteral perspective. The same can be said of Jehovah’s Witnesses and Mormons. Likewise, when Calvinists read the Scriptures, they usually do so in the light of John Calvin’s Institutes, confirming the words of Kent R. Rieske:

Calvinists hold John Calvin in such a high esteem that his writings and teachings are studied and quoted in preference to Scripture. His teachings are used by Calvinists to interpret Scripture rather than the sound doctrine of using Scripture to interpret Scripture.[6]  

In Calvin hotbeds, the Institutes is referred to as often as the Bible, and is even studied in the same manner. Latter-day Saints are educated in the book of Mormon just as students at Calvin Theological Seminary in Grand Rapids, Michigan, can take classes on Calvin’s Institutes and commentaries. Brigham Young founded the Mormon Brigham Young College (BYC) in Logan, Utah, on July 24, 1877, just two years after he founded Brigham Young Academy (Brigham Young University from 1903) in Provo, Utah. In the Mormon schools, students learn theology and read the Scriptures as interpreted by Joseph Smith, just as students in both Calvin Seminary and Calvin College learn the Bible as interpreted by John Calvin. At one school, Joseph Smith is highly esteemed; in the other, John Calvin is greatly revered.

Other than his Institutes, John Calvin offered much commentary in the marginal notes of the Geneva Bible. When England was ruled under Queen Mary I, many Protestant scholars escaped her persecution to Geneva. The city of Geneva was ruled by John Calvin who we know lead both church and civil matters. The Geneva Bible was partially printed in England in 1575 and fully printed a year later. There were over 150 editions made. With John Knox collaborating with Calvin in the new Bible, a law was passed in Scotland in 1579 requiring all houses to purchase a copy if financially possible. The commentary in the Bible’s margins was prized by Calvinists but was not liked by the Church of England nor King James, who later commissioned the “Authorized Version” or King James Version to replace it in 1611. Until the English Civil War, the Geneva Bible was widespread among all Puritans and Calvinists.

Kent Rieske astutely notes the apparent “need” for the Geneva Bible to be full of Calvin’s commentary. He writes, “Calvin’s theology could not be ascertained by the typical student of the Bible without the external study of Calvin’s Institutes . . . Calvin wrote commentary notes in the margin of the Bible to be used as the interpretation of the Scripture.”[7] Although soundly translated from Greek and Hebrew, the marginal notes of the Geneva Bible made it what is was. To its credit, the Geneva Bible was in fact the first “‘Study Bible,’ with extensive commentary notes in the margins.”[8] With Calvin’s commentaries included in its 1599 edition, the Geneva Bible was “the most complete study aide for Biblical scholars and students” at that time; the “extensive collection” of commentary was not a trivial part of the new Bible, for it is still considered the “greatest distinction of the Geneva Bible.”[9] Calvin’s notes comprise nearly 300,000 words, or nearly one-third the length of the Bible itself, and they are justifiably considered “the most complete source of Protestant religious thought available.”[10] As a result, the Geneva Bible became:

. . . the most widely read and influential English Bible of the 16th and 17th centuries. It was continually printed from 1560 to 1644 in over 200 different editions. It was the Bible of choice for many of the greatest writers, thinkers, and historical figures of the Reformation era. [11]

With men such as William Shakespeare, John Milton, John Bunyan, and Oliver Cromwell using the Geneva Bible, we can again see why Calvinism has had a strong foothold on theology.

Despite the wide acceptance of the Geneva Bible, its place in history was relatively short. Although the Geneva translation was accurate, the “not so marginal” notes of John Calvin so angered the Catholic Church, namely King James of England, that it was promptly replaced by the widely known 1611 King James translation, which was published without commentary. From then on, the Geneva Bible has gone mostly unnoticed in Christianity. And now that Calvinism is making a comeback, the new Reformation Study Bible[12] has recently appeared on the scene. Although it uses both the New King James Version and English Standard Version translations, it is full of marginal notes written by leading Calvinists.

One could rightly argue that this fact is unimportant, since most of today’s Calvinists are not even familiar with the Geneva Bible. However, although many Calvinists might not use either the new Reformation Study Bible or old Geneva Bible or hold them in the same light that past Calvinists have, the readers are indeed affected by their adherence to Calvin’s biblical interpretation. This point is made clear by a conversation I had recently with a Jehovah’s Witness as my truck was being fixed. We briefly discussed the New World Translation. (This purposely mistranslated Bible was proved in a court of law to have mangled the original language of the Bible for the intent of substantiating unorthodox views of Jesus and other biblical doctrines that accompany salvation). He was quick to mention that he reads all translations of the Bible. Regardless of this fact, the damage has already been done for him. Whenever this man had read other translations, his views of God, which are based on ideas by Charles Taze Russell, twisted his interpretation of even correctly translated verses that reveal the deity of Jesus.

Ultimately, no matter what translation of the Bible the man may read, his unorthodox views of Jesus will remain unchanged, because he holds to Russell’s teachings. The same can be said of the Mormon. Mormons read orthodox translations of the Bible. Yet, the unorthodoxy from Joseph Smith’s writings has horribly corrupted the sound interpretation found in other Bibles. Likewise, the Key to the Scriptures and Watchtower magazines can pervert the minds of readers and obscure their vision of plain scriptural truth.

This is true for many Calvinists today. They might not have a clue that the footnotes in the Geneva Bibles are unorthodox, but they still understand John 3:16 to mean something other than that Christ died for all of humanity. When one professes to be a Calvinist or a Reformed Christian, the damage has already been done. Calvinists align themselves with John Calvin’s beliefs and his interpretation of selective salvation. They align themselves with all his writings and footnotes—both the orthodox and the unorthodox.

Collin Hansen has recently noted that John Calvin, “appear[s] not to be a major figure among the latest generation to claim the theology he made famous.”[13] How can one not acknowledge John Calvin in Calvinism? Despite the claims from most cultists that they hold their leader’s writings as merely being equal to the Bible, in practice, the Bible usually takes a back seat. The Book of Mormon is blatantly tagged as “the fullness of the gospel.” Ellen G. White, the Seventh-day Adventists’ prophetess, claims that she writes not her own ideas but “what God has opened before me in vision.”[14] Although most Calvinists would never be so bold as to say that the Institutes are as authoritative as Scripture, the outcome of their biblical theology suggests otherwise. As with Joseph Smith, Charles Russell, Ellen White, Mary Eddie, and many other cult leaders, John Calvin’s writings have radically changed the way his followers interpret the Bible.

NOTES

  1. C.S. Lewis, Quote 139, “Calvin, John,” taken from the Introduction to English Literature in the Sixteenth Century, para. 61, p. 42, in The Quotable Lewis, ed. Wayne Martindale and Jerry Root (Wheaton, IL: Tyndale House Publishers, 1898), 83.
  2. Alister McGrath, A Life of John Calvin (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1990), xiii, 209.
  3. Hunt, What Love Is This?
  4. MacCulloch, The Reformation, 238.
  5. Charles H. Spurgeon, message delivered at the opening ceremony of the inaugural ceremonies for the new Metropolitan Tabernacle, in “Expositions of the Doctrines of Grace,” sermons 385-388 of The Spurgeon Archive [online]; accessed 28 January 2010; available from; Internet.
  6. Rieske, “Calvinism.”
  7. Rieske, “Calvinism.”
  8. Greatsite Marketing website, [online]; accessed 23 December 2010;
  9. “1599 Geneva Bible,” Introduction from L. L. Brown Publishing [online]; accessed 25 June 2010; available from website, Link.
  10. Ibid.
  11. Ibid.
  12. “Widely considered one of the best tools available for Bible study and previously only available in the New King James translation, The Reformation Study Bible has been updated to the readable and accurate English Standard Version (ESV). This foundational resource was created by more than fifty scholars and features thousands of in-depth study notes, 96 theological articles, 19 in-text maps, colored maps, and 12 charts to help you understand the Bible better.” [online]; accessed 23 December 2010; (LINK)
  13. Hansen, “Young, Restless, Reformed.”
  14. Ellen G. White, Testimonies for the Church Volume 5, 67 [online]; accessed 2 February 2010; all volumes.

Section Introduction — “Its Twisting of Scripture”

In this section, Coate shifts from the influence of Calvin’s writings to the more specific question of how Scripture is interpreted through a theological system. He argues that the central problem is not necessarily a new translation of the Bible, but the reinterpretation of biblical words, passages, contexts, and even study notes to make them conform to established Calvinist doctrines. Coate compares this approach with other examples of religious movements interpreting Scripture through the lens of their own authorities, then focuses on Calvinist treatments of passages concerning “world,” “all,” “whosoever,” human freedom, God’s desire for salvation, and the atonement.

A recurring theme throughout the section is redefinition: Coate argues that when a biblical passage appears to conflict with TULIP theology, the solution is sometimes found not by changing the doctrine, but by changing the way the biblical language is understood. He summarizes the concern through Norman Geisler’s description of theological “doublespeak” and Kent Rieske’s claim that Calvinism redefines biblical terminology and applies passages in ways that conform them to Calvin’s theological system.

The central question Coate raises in this section is therefore:

  • Are we allowing Scripture to interpret Scripture, or are theological conclusions being used to determine what Scripture is allowed to mean?

Its Twisting of Scripture

    • The fact is, the cults are notorious Scripture-twisters. When dealing with cults, one must keep in mind that they are always built not upon what the Bible teaches but upon what the founders or leaders of the respective cults say the Bible teaches.[1]

—Norman L. Geisler and Ron Rhodes

    • I am deeply troubled over the Reformed version of grace because through it, the precious and scriptural truths concerning grace are so maligned.[2]

—George Bryson

Manipulation of Scripture in order to construe a certain meaning that was not or could not be intended for the reader is the hallmark of a cult. The “Bible Answer Man,” Hank Hanegraaff, writes, “The first mark of a cult is its manipulation of Scripture. The Bible is twisted to fit the leader or group’s interpretation.”[3] Nothing has done more damage in Christianity than the use of unorthodox hermeneutics. As an example, there has been no more flagrant forgery of Scripture than the New World Translation of the Bible. Jehovah’s Witnesses claim that this so-called Bible was translated by Greek, Aramaic, and Hebrew scholars and theologians. However, not only did the purported translators lie about having an education in Greek and Hebrew, the entire translation committee was sponsored solely by Jehovah’s Witnesses and composed by members of the Watchtower Bible and Tract Society.

Because Jehovah’s Witnesses do not believe that Jesus Christ was God, verses from the Bible that reveal His being more than a man or an angel, were altered to support their heretical belief. Correct words were purposely omitted and false words were intentionally added in order to change an essential doctrine of the Bible— namely, that Jesus is God. Here are some examples of their twisting of Scripture.

The New World Translation (NWT) has exchanged the truth for a lie. In the NWT, Zechariah 12:10 reads, “They will look upon the one whom they have pierced.” Here the Hebrew “. . . look upon me whom they have pierced”—in which God is the speaker—has been altered in order to avoid the implication that the one who is to be pierced (on the cross) is God Himself.

Again, because the cult teaches that Jesus was a created being rather than the Creator God, Colossians 1:15–17 in the NWT reads:

He is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation; because by means of him all [other] things were created in the heavens and upon the earth, the things visible and the things invisible, no matter whether they are thrones or lordships or governments or authorities. All [other] things have been created through him and for him. Also, he is before all [other] things and by means of him all [other] things were made to exist.[4] 

The word “other” has been inserted several times to avoid the deity of Jesus. The first edition of the NWT was printed without brackets.

The NWT version of Hebrews 1:8 reads: “God is your throne forever.”[5] Despite that the translation makes no grammatical or logical sense, it continues to be used in place of the correct translation, which is, “Your throne, O God, is forever.”[6] Again, the text was altered because the original statement is referring to the Christ.

The most famous of the Watchtower mistranslations is found in John 1:1, where one letter, the article “a,” is slipped into the passage with huge theological consequences. The NWT translates John 1:1 as, “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was a god.”[7] The correct translation is, “. . . and the Word was God.” The distorted translation of the NWT implies that Jesus was merely an angelic or supernatural being rather than God Himself.

Although the Watchtower Bible and Tract Society has been proven guilty of lies and perjury in an American court of law (March 17, 1913, Russell v. Ross) the incorrect renditions have not been retracted. Because the Jehovah’s Witnesses use the NWT as their scriptures they are continually misled and intellectually compromised, believing unbiblical doctrine. The NWT is a “translation” of the Bible written to fit a particular group’s beliefs by means of deception through the manipulation of God’s revealed words.

Since Mormons adhere to The Book of Mormon more than the Bible, a need to distort the Bible’s message is less essential. When essential contradictions are found between The Book of Mormon and the Bible, Mormons look to The Book of Mormon as their ultimate authority. Therefore, the need for Mormons to alter biblical doctrines is not as great as for Jehovah’s Witnesses, whose doctrine is supposedly derived directly from the Bible itself. Because Jehovah’s Witnesses do not have the option to claim another source of authority, they must make their peculiar doctrine seem as sound as possible. Mormons, nevertheless, do their fair share of mangling Scripture in hopes of passing their theology off as orthodox.

Because the founders of Mormonism were polygamists, Mormon doctrine concludes that a man should practice polygamy in order to enter the highest heaven.[8] This doctrine supposedly came from Joseph Smith’s “revelation.” Today, polygamy is still practiced among various sects of Mormonism even in light of the Bible’s denouncing of it. Mormon theology has purposefully misconstrued many biblical verses showing God’s tolerance of the practice in the Old Testament, for He clearly commanded His people not to “multiply wives” in Exodus 20:14–17. Other like verses include Deuteronomy 17:17; 1 Kings 11:1; and Matthew 19:9. There are also a number of other verses referring to the folly of practicing polygamy that are either ignored or twisted to confuse their intended purpose.

The Catholic Answers Web site also notes the Mormons’ misinterpretation of God’s Word. Concerning Ezekiel 37 they write:

Mormons neglect the plain sense of the words and ignore their true interpretation, given by God—in the very same chapter. The text makes clear, this is a prophecy of national reunification, not about the appearance of hidden scriptures. The Hebrew term translated as “stick” (aits) is never used anywhere in the Old Testament to mean “book,” “scroll,” “writing” or anything similar. It is variously translated as “wood” or “branch,” “timber,” or “tree.” Needless to say, the Book of Mormon was allegedly written on metal plates, not scrolls or sticks.

Only Mormonism can manage to mistake “timber” for “scrolls” and “nations” for “metal plates.”[9]

Mormons also teach that God the Father has a physical body. They pull the doctrine from Genesis 1:26–27, in which God says, “Let Us make man in Our image” (NKJV). From this statement, Mormons conclude that God has a body.[10] This idea contradicts what Jesus says, “God is Spirit, and those who worship Him must worship in spirit and truth”[11] (John 4:24, NKJV). Jesus also points out that “a spirit has not flesh and bones” (Luke 24:39, NKJV).[12] Mormons choose to disregard any verse that clearly counters their doctrine. More verses distorted or ignored by Mormons about the nature of God include Numbers 23:19; Isaiah 45:12; Hosea 11:9; and Romans 1:22–23.

Likewise, unorthodox “Word Faith” leaders like Kenneth Hagin, Kenneth Copeland, Paul Crouch, and Benny Hinn also misconstrue Genesis 1:26–27. They teach that according to these verses, God’s followers are themselves “little gods.”[13] Although this belief is held at different levels of intensity by Word Faith followers, it is an unbiblical doctrine needing correction. The complete and “purest” meaning of Genesis 1:26–27 can indeed be argued and debated (as with many other verses), but its interpretation cannot fly in the face of other parts of Scripture if it is to be true. The two errant doctrines teaching that Christians are little gods and that God the Father has a physical body arise from poorly interpreted verses and discount others verses relevant to the subject. Despite claiming a biblical foundation for these doctrines, both Mormon and Word Faith teachers set themselves clearly against biblical orthodoxy.

John Calvin’s practice of manipulating Scripture is obvious to those who have taken a careful look at his theology. Although the majority of his commentaries are accurate, he was not afraid to change the words and meanings of certain verses in order to make his particular interpretation work. Historian Diarmaid MacCulloch writes:

Like the mainstream tradition of Judaism, he [Calvin] felt that imagery in relation to the divine was best restricted to words, where it could be extravagant or as startling as he pleased: in one sermon on Deuteronomy preached in 1555–6, for instance, he radically adapted some words of Jesus in order to compare God’s coming in flesh in the birth of Jesus Christ to a hen stooping down to the ground.[14]  

As we remember the words of historian James P. Byrd, Jr. when he states what Roger Williams thought of Calvin’s poor interpretive skills concerning ecclesiastical government over civil affairs, we see the validity of Williams’ claim. Byrd writes, “Williams revered Calvin’s theological genius and considered him a great man, but he attacked Calvin’s biblical interpretation, calling it a dangerous perversion that turned the Holy Word into a bloody instrument of persecution.”[15]

We will see many examples of how Calvin and his followers have misinterpreted portions of Scripture for the sake of TULIP. Calvinists have not invented their own religious books, as have the Mormons, nor have they created a new translation of the Bible, as have the Jehovah’s Witnesses, but they have taken a step in that direction. Although the Geneva Bible was once banned by King James of the Catholic Church, Thomas Nelson Publishing began printing the New Geneva Study Bible, or the Reformation Study Bible (RSB) in 1995 with the English Standard Version (ESV). Leading Calvinist R. C. Sproul gives the introduction, titled “Reformation Truth,” to the RSB with its explanations of Scripture. The Christian must ask: can absolute biblical truth be reformed? Sure, it can . . . but only into something less than absolute biblical truth. Look how clearly we can see this in the following attempts of the Reformation Study Bible to do away with the biblical doctrine of man’s free will and God’s offer of salvation to the whole world.

The ESV correctly translates John 3:16 as, “For God so loved the world, that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life.” However, under the guise of “Reformation Truth,” the RSB footnote interprets the verse to mean something quite different:

Some have insisted that God sent Jesus to die for the purpose of bringing salvation to everyone without exception, but only as a possibility . . . The point made by the “world” is that Christ’s saving work is not limited to one time or place but applies to the elect from all over the world.[16]

Again, knowing that the message of John 3:16 does away with Calvin’s third point of TULIP, Calvinists twist the Scripture at all cost. Leading Calvinist James White says that “whosoever believeth on him should not perish” actually means “in order that everyone believing on him should not perish.”[17] With the addition of a few words, White defends Calvinism by saying that the elect alone believe and thus Christ died for them only. How does this differ from the Jehovah’s Witnesses’ practice of adding words to the text and thereby changing its meaning?

The twisting of Scripture in the Reformation Study Bible is no less devious than that of the New World Translation. Orthodox Christian leaders often speak against Jehovah’s Witnesses for their new interpretation of the Bible while remaining silent regarding Calvinists, who also add words to scriptural texts in order to support their false claims.

First Timothy 2 speaks of God’s concern for all men and women of all classes. We are commanded to pray, intercede for, and give thanks for all people. In the RSB, 1 Timothy 2:1 reads, “First of all, then, I urge that supplications, prayers, and thanksgivings be made for all people . . .” (ESV). Here, however, a footnote appears, explaining that “all people” really does not “mean ‘every human being’ but rather ‘all types of people,’ whatever their station of life” (RSB).[18]

In verse 1 Timothy 2:3–4, Paul continues his thought: “. . . God our Savior, who desires all people to be saved and to come to the knowledge of the truth” (ESV). Once again, the RSB attempts to “reform” this truth in its footnote:

. . . who desires all people to be saved. This does not mean that God sovereignly wills every human being to be saved . . . It may refer to God’s general benevolence in taking no delight in the death of the wicked, or to God’s desire that all types be saved (i.e., God does not choose His elect from any single group).[19]

With many verses contradicting TULIP theology within the English Standard Version, the RSB must rely on its footnotes to provide some connection between the actual text and its Calvinistic ideas and undertones.

Another example of the Reformation Study Bible’s mutilation of the intended meaning of the Word is in 2 Corinthians 5:14. The ESV reads, “For the love of Christ controls us, because we have concluded this: that one has died for all, therefore all have died.” Without reading into the verse’s meaning, we understand that Christ is the “one” who “died” literally “for all.” If Christ died for all, then all—not some—have died. Because this Scripture affirms what the five points of Calvinism deny, the footnote in the RSB reads, “The ones He died for are the same as the ‘all’ who ‘died’ with Him as a result of His death . . .”[20] No. The verse does not say nor give any indication that the ones for whom He died are the “ones who died with Him.” The verse clearly reads that the “one,” who is Christ, “has died for all.” Christ has died for all, regardless of whether or not we who have placed faith in Him undergo the salvific process of dying “with Him as a result of His death.”

This kind of biblical interpretation illuminates Kent R. Rieske’s radical statement that, “Calvinists have typically taught from the margin notes in the Calvinist’s Geneva Bible in preference to the Scriptural text.”[21] Although Calvinists would vehemently disagree, the few examples above show that when a verse clearly contradicts a doctrine of TULIP, it is usually supplemented by a footnote misinterpreting the verse to fit the doctrine. Like most cults, when confronted with scriptural truth that affirms what they deny, the followers are led by the founder’s interpretation.

Biblical footnotes can be very useful, but they can only be trusted when Scripture is interpreting Scripture. Did the above footnotes from the Reformation Study Bible sound like Scripture was being used to interpret Scripture or like Calvin’s TULIP was being used to interpret Scripture? We will answer this question in more detail later.

Many Calvinists praise John Calvin in an unhealthy and unbalanced way, heralding him as the apostle Paul’s “faithful interpreter.”[22] By this selective mentality, a Reformed conscience can be held captive by Calvin’s radical and unorthodox interpretations. Josh McDowell claims that one of the key characteristics of a cult is its offering “new interpretations of the Scripture.” He states, “Some cults make no claim to know truth or extra-biblical revelation, but believe they alone have the key to interpreting the mysteries in the Bible.”[23] Let’s stop here and note that a great mystery found within the Bible is how man’s free will and God’s sovereignty work together. But Calvinism claims to have the answer! This theological system does away with the mystery by doing away with man’s free will. Calvinists believe that, “they alone have the key to interpreting the mysteries in the Bible.”[24]  Reformed Theology, as Calvinist W. Robert Godfrey asserts, even has a “Reformed interpretation of Romans.”[25] Godfrey assumes that non-Reformed churches likely “miss the real meaning of the Word of God,” as well as “the real need of the un-churched—namely, the gospel of the grace of Jesus Christ.” He then concludes that, “To find that real meaning, we must turn from stories to a system.”[26]

Also note that Calvinism has cleverly interpreted the mysteries of the Bible without claiming (as most cults do) to have “new truth” or “extra-biblical revelation.” Instead, as McDowell states:

The scriptures are their only acknowledged source of authority, but . . . are interpreted unreasonably and in a way different from that of orthodox Christianity. They testify that the historic beliefs and interpretations of Scripture are based upon a misunderstanding of the Bible or were pagan in origin.[27]  

Is it a coincidence that leading Calvinists claim that the traditional doctrines of orthodox Christianity are at odds with TULIP theology? Since Calvinists believe that their interpretation is the “true gospel” message (coming on the scene 1500 years after the birth of Christianity), every Christian doctrine before their time must have been somewhat unorthodox. Could this be true?

Were the doctrines of the free will of man, God’s desire for all men to be saved, and Christ’s universal offer of atonement merely man-made teachings, having their roots in humanistic tradition rather than Scripture?

Leading Calvinist James Whites believes that:

If we derive our beliefs from the Bible (rather than assuming them as a tradition . . . ), we will conclude that the phrase, “God is love” does not mean that God has the same kind and level of love for all things, including for each and every single individual human being.[28] [Italics mine.]

He continues:

Surely it is part of the modern evangelical tradition to say, “God loves you and has a wonderful plan for your life,” but providing a meaningful biblical basis for this assertion is significantly more difficult. Unfortunately, most are never challenged to think through their traditions.[29] [Italics mine.]

Though the Bible-believing Christian should be challenged to think through traditions, to say that God’s love for humanity stems from tradition rather than “biblical truth” is simply ludicrous—but then again, so are most twisted interpretations of the Bible. Mormons defend their trust in The Book of Mormon by asserting that the Bible has been corrupted, whereas Calvinists defend their trust in TULIP theology by asserting that the mainstream understanding of God’s universal offer of salvation is a man­made tradition and a “denial of biblical truth.”

McDowell concludes that cults reinterpret the Bible:

. . . usually out of context, to justify the peculiar doctrines of a cult. Without an objective and reasonable way to understand what the Bible teaches, the cult member is at the whims of the cult leader.[30]

Again, we see a perfect example of this through John Calvin’s attempt to justify one of his peculiar doctrines concerning his strict ecclesiastical rule over Geneva. Concerning Jesus’ parable of the weeds in Matthew 13, American historian James P. Byrd, Jr. states:

Above all, Calvin believed that the parable of the weeds contained valuable instruction on church discipline. . . . Calvin’s argument that the parable had to do with church discipline rested on his belief that the field signified the church. This presented an embarrassing dilemma because, as Jesus himself explained, “the field is the world (Matt 13:38).” Calvin’s exegesis of the parable therefore seemed to contradict the explanation that Christ gave to his disciples. In treating this delicate problem, Calvin argued that although Christ called the field the world, he intended “to apply” the field “to the Church, about which, after all, he was speaking,”. . . Calvin solved the apparent conflict by not taking literally Jesus’ interpretation of the field as the world. Calvin claimed that Jesus “transfers by synecdoche to the world what is more apt a part of it.” Jesus did not mean that the field was the world itself, but rather the church that existed within the world.[31]

James Byrd concludes that “Calvin rejected a simple reading of the Christ’s interpretation of the field as the world, preferring instead a figural interpretation at this crucial juncture in the parable.”[32] Therefore, Calvin arrogantly altered the actual meaning of Jesus’ words in this parable because they posed a threat to his conscience and his systematic approach to understanding the Bible.

Apart from changing the definitions of biblical words, the main aspect of twisting Scripture is taking a verse out of its immediate context, placing it in a different area of Scripture, and then using it to uphold a false doctrine. Sometimes this is done innocently and sometimes not. As we have seen before, the account of Jesus raising Lazarus from the dead has been used a number of times by Calvinists to support their false doctrine of Total Depravity, as well as other doctrines in TULIP. We also see an example of this in James White’s book, Debating Calvinism. White uses Ezekiel 37:1– 14 to support “man’s inability” to come to Christ. However, Ezekiel 37 narrates a one-time event, experienced by one man, that took place in the Old Covenant, and it is meant to point to the future restoration of the nation and people of Israel. But White moves this passage from its context and places it as central to the salvation of all New Covenant believers, in order to support the belief that regeneration somehow precedes faith.

In responding to James White’s book, The Potter’s Freedom (a refutation of Geisler’s book, Chosen but Free), Norman Geisler states:

“Another technique employed by PF [Potter’s Freedom] to further its position is to redefine terms that cover the harsh reality of a biblically, morally, and rationally indefensible view.”[33] [italics mine]

Geisler also says:

A similar problem emerges when PF [Potter’s Freedom] employs a kind of theological doublespeak to forward its view. For example, it affirms that fallen humans can will, but yet they have no will (192); that grace is irresistible, but yet it is not coercive (161); that depraved humans are dead but are alive enough to hear and reject the gospel (101); that God does not force anyone, but He regenerates them contrary to their will (200). [34]

Calvinists have not produced a whole new book to support their theology as did the Mormons. They need only to explain away those verses that contradict TULIP. As Geisler states above, this is done by redefining terms and theological doublespeak. Kent Rieske also explains how this is accomplished:

Calvinism consists of theological doctrines which use words found in the Bible. However, Calvinism consistently redefines those words, takes them out of context, applies the doctrines inappropriately, exaggerates the meaning of the words to the extreme, or in some other way distorts the Word of God to match the theology written by John Calvin in his book, Institutes of the Christian Religion.[35]

While an orthodox Christian can easily point out the flaws found within the New World Translation, the theology of Calvinism is not so blatantly twisted since there is not a Calvinistic translation of the Bible. In dissecting Calvinism’s TULIP, one must point to the ill interpreted as opposed to ill translated verses. In either case, both pose serious problems with similar consequences. Using twisted footnotes, words, and contexts are all ways to pull unintended meanings from the Bible.

And yet it is under an intellectual guise of spiritual fervency that Calvinism shows just how it’s done.

NOTES

  1. Geisler and Rhodes, Correcting the Cults, 18.
  2. Bryson, The Dark Side of Calvinism, 30.
  3. Hanegraaff, “What Are Some Common Marks of a Cult?”
  4. New World Translation of the Holy Scriptures (NWT) (New York: Watch Tower Bible and Tract Society of Pennsylvania, 1961).
  5. NWT, Hebrews 1:8.
  6. NKJV, Hebrews 1:8.
  7. NWT, John 1:1.
  8. Smith, Introduction to The Book of Mormon.
  9. Isaiah Bennett, Catholic Answers (San Diego, CA, 1979-2008) [online]; accessed 5 July 2006; available from [Best I could find]
  10. Smith, The Book of Mormon, Doctrine and Covenants 130:3.
  11. NKJV, John 4:24.
  12. NKJV, Luke 24:39.
  13. Geisler and Rhodes, Correcting the Cults, 21.
  14. MacCulloch, The Reformation, 249.
  15. Byrd, The Challenges of Roger Williams, 190.
  16. C. Sproul, ed., The Reformation Study Bible (RSB), (Orlando, FL: Ligonier Ministries, 2005) p. 1,514.
  17. James White, “Blinded By Tradition: An Open Letter to Dave Hunt Regarding His Newly Published Attack Upon the Reformation, What Love Is This? Calvin’s Misrepresentation of God” [online]; accessed 13 July 2007; (Link).
  18. RSB Footnote, p. 1,752.
  19. RSB Footnote, p. 1,752.
  20. RSB Footnote, p. 1,679.
  21. Rieske, “Calvinism.”
  22. Godfrey, An Unexpected Journey, p. 60
  23. McDowell, Handbook of Today’s Religions, 20.
  24. Ibid.
  25. Godfrey, An Unexpected Journey, 26.
  26. Ibid., 36.
  27. McDowell, Handbook of Today’s Religions, 21.
  28. White, in Debating Calvinism, p. 268.
  29. , 265.
  30. McDowell, Handbook of Today’s Religions, 21.
  31. Byrd, The Challenges of Roger Williams, 94–95; Byrd quotes
  32. Matthew 13:38 and Calvin, Harmony of the Gospels, Vol. 2 of Calvin’s Commentaries, 75.
  33. Ibid., 261.
  34. Geisler, Chosen but Free, p. 261.
  35. Ibid.
  36. Rieske, “Calvinism.”

Section Introduction — “Its Ignoring of Scripture”

In this section, Coate moves from the problem of twisting or redefining Scripture to the related problem of selectively ignoring Scripture. His argument is that a theological system can appear consistent when it focuses on the passages that support its conclusions while minimizing, excluding, or reinterpreting passages that create tension with those conclusions. He uses examples from several religious movements before applying the same principle to Calvinism, particularly concerning God’s sovereignty, human freedom, and God’s desire for all people to be saved.

Coate’s central concern is that Scripture must be considered as a whole rather than selectively. He argues that affirming God’s sovereignty does not require ignoring passages concerning human responsibility or God’s universal saving desire. Likewise, affirming human freedom or a universal offer of salvation should not require ignoring passages concerning God’s sovereignty and election.

The section therefore builds on the previous one: where the preceding section examines the reinterpretation of difficult passages, this section examines what happens when passages are simply left out of the theological equation. Coate ultimately argues that both practices can produce the same result—allowing a theological system to determine which biblical data receive controlling weight.

The question Coate places before the reader is:

  • Are we allowing the whole counsel of Scripture to shape our theology, or are we constructing our theology from selected passages and then finding ways to deal with everything else?

Its Ignoring of Scripture

When certain Scripture is ignored, the most ridiculous teachings can easily fool the novice and usher in a tidal wave of theological confusion. Although this practice varies among cults, it is indeed found to some degree in every cult. Radical cults with more glaringly unorthodox doctrines disregard hosts of passages, whereas more conservative cults may choose to overlook only the few passages that obstruct their beliefs. Either way, ignoring parts of Scripture to any degree has huge theological consequences for the cult’s followers.

A tragic example of a cult that excluded a vast majority of Scripture, despite claiming to have a biblical foundation, was the “Children or God” or “The Family” cult. The biblical “foundation” this cult claimed was from Matthew 4:19, in which Jesus says, “Follow me, and I will make you fishers of men.” Yet in the hands of Children of God leader David Berg, Matthew 4:19 was bizarrely twisted into a justification of religious prostitution. This cult formed in 1974 and ended in 1987 (partially due to the AIDS scare). In David’s theology, being a fisher of men was the call for women to win converts by sexual attraction. These women were called “hookers for Jesus” and their offspring were sadly referred to as “Jesus Babies.” Prostitution was widely used as a means for “converts” or solicitors to donate or raise money for the cult. David’s foul “teaching” of the Scriptures were so perverted they insult and degrade common sense. Yet, internal records of the Children of God indicate that over 223,000 people or “fish” took the bait. These naïve people believed the lie and were sexually loved between 1978 and 1988.[1] The point is made: any doctrine, no matter how absurd, can amass a large cult following by claiming biblical roots and godly motives when Scripture is picked apart and discarded.

A fundamental difference between orthodox Christianity and Calvinism is that one holds two truths equally whereas the other holds one truth to the detriment of the other. The non-Calvinist does not rail against the truth that God is completely sovereign. The Calvinist, however, would have you believe that if you accept that God is sovereign, you cannot also believe that man has a free will. Orthodox Christians hold both to be true.

Think of it this way: If I were to debate a Calvinist, I would never deny the scriptural fact that God is completely sovereign. My opponent could go through a plethora of verses revealing that God is sovereign over creation and has an elect people. I would not argue or debate with these. We are not discussing whether or not God is sovereign. That is a biblical fact. But because the Calvinist ignores the biblical truth that man has a free will and that God offers salvation to all men, he must do one of two things when handling the Bible. Like a typical cultist, he must either falsely interpret any verses that testify to whatever he does not believe in, or more simply, to ignore those portions of Scripture altogether. Again, while the orthodox Christian should hold both truths in equality, Calvinists hold one truth—God’s sovereignty—over the other— man’s free will.

If I were trying to persuade you to believe that God is not sovereign and that there is no such thing as the elect, I would have to ignore that part of Scripture that teaches otherwise. I would only teach and focus on those passages that support my theology—and that would be absurd. Could I make a case that man has free will and that God desires to save all men, without regard to God’s sovereign elect? Of course . . . as long as I ignore the part of Scripture about God’s sovereign elect. Could the Calvinist make a case that God is sovereign and that He has an elect, without regard to man’s free will and God’s desire to save all men? Of course . . . as long as he ignores the part of Scripture about man’s free will.

To ignore means to refuse to notice or pay attention to somebody or something. The word stems from the Latin word ignorant, which means “to not know” or “to be without knowledge.”[2] But to ignore is different than simply not knowing. To ignore is purposefully to disregard. I might understand the reasoning behind Calvinistic theology if its followers withheld those scriptural texts that teach man’s free will and God’s universal offer of salvation to mankind. But no Scripture is withheld from the Calvinist, and they are accountable for purposefully ignoring parts of Scripture.

Dave Hunt argues, in his response to James White’s defense of “man’s inability”:

To support Calvinism’s denial of human ability and responsibility, White gives a few favorite proof texts while ignoring a plethora of passages that present the other side. He offers inferences but not one Scripture that clearly states that unregenerate man is unable to believe the gospel.[3]

In his book, Problems with Evangelical Theology, Ben Witherington notes this particular problem within Calvinism (especially among those who like to debate). He states, “It is perfectly possible to argue consistently and logically about something, but draw the circle of argumentation too narrowly, and so wrongly exclude some of the most important data.”[4] Excluding Scripture, or “important data,” is precisely the error of all cults. In order to practice prostitution and fulfill his own lusts, David Berg paid no attention to the parts of Scripture that deals with sexual purity, monogamy, and marital faithfulness. To uphold his book and writings, Joseph Smith disregarded the part of the Bible that condemned adding to it or subtracting from it. He upheld his book as the “fullness of the gospel” anyway, caring nothing for the words of Paul written to the Galatian believers: “But even if we, or an angel from heaven, preach any other gospel to you than what we have preached to you, let him be accursed” (Galatians 1:8, NKJV).[5] Likewise, in holding their belief that the apostle Peter was never married (being the supposed first pope), Catholics close their eyes to Matthew 8:14, “Now when Jesus had come into Peter’s house, He saw his wife’s mother lying sick with a fever.” In believing Jesus to be less than God, Jehovah’s Witnesses choose not to take into account that Jesus “is the image of the invisible God . . . For by Him all things were created . . . All things were created through Him and for Him. And He is before all things, and in Him all things consist” (Colossians 1:15– 17, NKJV).[6] Lastly, to believe that man has no free will and that God does not desire all to be saved, Calvinism simply glosses over verses like John 3:16, “For God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son, that whoever believes in Him should not perish but have everlasting life,” and 1 Timothy 2:3–4, “For this is good and acceptable in the sight of God our Savior, who desires all men to be saved and to come to the knowledge of the truth” (NKJV). While very few cults would ever admit to purposefully ignoring certain verses, some attempt to get around any verse that appears to threaten the validity of their doctrines by simply redefining the meanings of words. This maneuver is not easy to detect and usually misleads those not familiar with the details of the passage at hand. We see this clearly in Calvinism.

NOTES

  1. http://www.xfamily.org/index.php/Main_Page; Under “Flirty Fishing” (CAUTION: The article under ‘Flirty Fishing’ contains explicit text and/or images that some may find disturbing or offensive.), [online]; accessed 25 June, 2007; Internet. Found it in GROKEPEDIA
  2. Webster’s New World Dictionary, s.v. “Ignorant”.
  3. Hunt, in Debating Calvinism, 75.
  4. Witherington, The Problem with Evangelical Theology, 5.
  5. NKJV, Galatians 2:8.
  6. NKJV, Colossians 1:15 – 17.

Section Introduction — “Its Twisted Terminology”

This is the section where Coate brings the preceding arguments together most directly: theological systems can preserve familiar biblical vocabulary while assigning that vocabulary meanings that serve the system itself. He argues that this makes theological disagreement especially difficult, because two people can use the same words—grace, calling, election, foreknowledge, atonement, world, love, and others—while actually communicating different concepts.

Coate begins with the broader principle that terminology matters. He draws on Hank Hanegraaff, George Bryson, Walter Martin, and others to argue that using orthodox Christian words does not necessarily establish orthodox definitions. He then applies that concern specifically to Calvinist theology, examining distinctions such as external and internal calling, general and particular election, foreknowledge as “forelove,” common and regenerating grace, and various descriptions of the atonement.

The centerpiece of the section is Coate’s examination of words such as “world” and “love.” He argues that the theological significance of these words becomes especially apparent when their ordinary contextual meanings create difficulties for limited atonement or particular redemption. He therefore examines how writers such as A. W. Pink interpret passages containing world and how Calvinist explanations of God’s love distinguish between kinds of divine love.

Coate closes by returning to a principle emphasized by Hanegraaff:

  • biblical interpretation should follow the basic rules of language rather than assuming that ordinary words acquire hidden meanings whenever a theological system requires them to do so.

The central question of this section is perhaps the simplest—and the most important:

  • When two theological systems use the same biblical words, are they actually talking about the same things?

Its Twisted Terminology

[Cults] manipulate the Scriptures to fit their own beliefs. Although they may claim to serve Jesus Christ, and may even use the same terminology orthodox Christians use, their definitions are vastly different.[1]  

—Hank Hanegraaff

Monergism can, however, be defined unscripturally—as it is in Reformed Theology. The same can be said for just about any theological term. In the wrong hands, an otherwise good term can be used to convey a bad concept. So it is with monergism in the hands of a Calvinist.[2]

—George Bryson

Having a proper understanding of a cult’s terminology is paramount in differentiating the orthodox from the unorthodox. The novice might ask:

How does the Latter-day Saint differ from me? They believe that we all need God’s grace, and that we are all sinners. They believe in the Holy Spirit and in the work of Jesus on the cross and redemption.

The key words in the statements above are God, grace, sinners, Holy Spirit, Jesus, and forgiveness. Jonathan Rowe, a critic of Mormonism writes, “There is a lot of Christian terminology on the official [Mormon] website, but upon examination, you come to understand that though the terms are familiar, the meanings of those terms are foreign and heretical.”[3]

Although cults use Christian words, their definitions of them are far from orthodox. Some examples include the following:

The orthodox Christian believes in one God. The Mormon believes in many gods. The orthodox Christian believes that Jesus is the Son of God and Creator of all. Jehovah’s Witnesses believe Jesus was created and that He is not God. The orthodox Christian believes that sin is disobedience to God. Christian Science believes that sin is an illusion and merely an err in humanity. The orthodox Christian believes that salvation is reconciliation to God by Jesus’ death and resurrection. The New Age follower believes that salvation is being one with the universe. The orthodox Christian believes that God desires all of mankind to be saved. The Calvinist must logically believe that God desires a majority of mankind not to be saved but eternally punished in Hell.

In a frustrating argument with a Calvinist, in which no progress was made, Josh McDowell’s warning rang very true to me. He writes:

A feature of some cultic groups is that they say one thing publicly but internally believe something totally different. Many organizations call themselves Christians when in fact they deny the fundamentals of the faith. . . . One therefore must be on the alert for the organizations that advertise themselves as “Christians” but whose internal teachings disagree with Scripture.[4]

Cult leaders form new meanings of passages by redefining the words of the text. When faced with Scripture that seemed contradictory to his own teachings, John Calvin did just that. In his commentary on 1 Timothy 2:1–4, Calvin wrote that the modifier “all” men “doesn’t mean all men but all kinds and races of men.”[5] Dave Hunt writes, “Calvin’s audacity in changing the meaning of Scripture is breathtaking.”[6] He also writes, “For turning all men into all kinds and races of men and ‘princes and foreign nations’ in order to accommodate their system of theology, Calvinists will answer to God.”[7]

In his classic Kingdom of the Cults, Walter Martin challenges the Christian to tolerate absolutely no confusion of Christian terminology. He writes:

And just as the American Bar Association will not tolerate confusion of terminology in the trial of cases, and as the American Medical Association will not tolerate redefinition of terminology of diagnostic and surgical medicine, so also the church of Jesus Christ has every right to not tolerate the gross perversions and redefinitions of historical and Biblical terminology simply to accommodate a culture and a society that cannot tolerate an absolute standard or criterion of truth, even if it is revealed by God in his Word and through the true Witness of His Holy Spirit.[8]

In order to argue effectively and dialogue with a Calvinist, one must know his language. Calvinists often refer to the term regenerational grace (a term nowhere found in the Bible). As we have seen earlier, the terms total depravity of man, and the fall also take on new meanings with the Calvinist, as do the words, grace, atonement, mankind, and race. Concerning the word “grace,” George Bryson notes that, “It cannot be reasonably denied that Calvinists hold to a distinctive definition of grace.”[9] It is when we correctly understand how the Calvinist uses these terms that the playing field of argumentation will be even.

Not only do biblical words referring to salvation have different meanings as Calvinist terminology but the invention of new words and ideas seems to have no end. For example, Sproul’s What Is Reformed Theology? contains numerous terms in both categories, including monergism, synergism, operative grace, cooperative grace, prescient view, external call, internal call, effectual calling, ordo salutis, (order of salvation), pelagianism, semi-pelagianism, moral inability, moral ability, double predestination, reprobation, active decree, antinomianism, civil virtue, common grace, condign merit, congruous merit, consubstantiation, dynamic monarchianism, determinism, decretive will, general revelation, infralapsarianism, modalism, neo-platonism, passive decree, permissive will, pluralism, perceptive will, radical corruption, and utter depravity.[10] Thankfully, he includes a “Glossary of Foreign Terms.”[11] Although some of these words have the potential to clarify biblical theology, some do just the opposite. Again, in order to defend TULIP rather than the message of the Bible, Calvinists have been forced to invent new terms and redefine others. The Bible clearly reveals that God desires all to be saved and thus, calls all to repentance. But because Calvinists hold that God only calls those who will believe, they make a distinction regarding the word “call.” As Sproul says, “In Theology, we distinguish between two kinds of divine calling: the external call and the internal call.”[12] Only the theology of Calvinism and other Christian cults make such distinctions about vital biblical words pertaining to salvation. The Bible does not identify an “internal” and “external” calling, but simply a “calling.” Because the Scriptures were not written only for biblical scholars, the obvious and intended meaning of this “calling” and other words like it, are intended to be straightforward, with no double or hidden meanings.

John Calvin himself redefined the word “election.” Diarmaid MacCulloch explains Calvin’s interpretation of the “elect” within both the Old and New Testament:

Israel was the Old Testament equivalent of the true Church; it had been a covenanted, chosen nation. Everyone in Israel was elect: they enjoyed a “general election.” But not all Israelites followed God’s commandments . . .[13]

Calvin wrote, “We must now add a second, more limited degree of election . . . when from the same race of Abraham God rejected some but showed that he kept others among his sons by cherishing them in the Church.”[14] Yet the Bible does not speak of a “general election” or a “more limited degree of election.” While these terms are not even mentioned in Scripture, John Calvin and his followers have taken the liberty not to only invent them but to establish doctrine on their foundation, as well.

Because many non-Calvinists believe that the doctrine of election is based upon God’s foreknowledge of who will choose to receive Jesus, leading Calvinists have boldly changed the meaning of “foreknew” in Romans 8:28 (“For those whom He foreknew He also predestined . . .”). Steele, Thomas, and Quinn write in their book The Five Points of Calvinism that, “The word ‘foreknew’ as used here is thus understood to be equivalent to ‘foreloved’— those who were the objects of God’s love He marked out for salvation.”[15] This is what Calvinists believe.

This concept of adjusting definitions is also found with the salvific word “grace.” To accurately define the word “grace” in all of its multifaceted relations to mankind and the world is impossible. Nevertheless, Calvinists have meddled with the word to make distinctions like operative grace, cooperative grace, regenerational grace, and common grace, in order to promote Calvin’s TULIP. Titus 2:11 says, “For the grace of God that brings salvation has appeared to all men . . .” But because this verse and many like it give the idea that God desires all to be saved and has extended His grace to everyone, the word “grace” undergoes a butchering, or in the words of a Calvinist, a “distinction.” George Bryson understands how Calvinists define grace differently than does the Bible, writing, “It cannot be reasonably denied that Calvinists hold to a distinctive definition of grace . . . I am deeply troubled over the Reformed version of grace because through it, the precious and scriptural truths concerning grace are so maligned.”[16] Once again, since Titus 2:11 reads that the “grace of God has appeared to all men,” the Calvinist is compelled to interpret “grace” as meaning common grace, as opposed to regenerational grace. “Common grace” does not lead to salvation and can be resisted, whereas “the grace of regeneration is irresistible.”[17] Again, these words do not appear in Scripture and are not even used consistently by major defenders of Calvinism. Ephesians 2:8 reads that grace is essential to one’s salvation: “For by grace you have been saved through faith.” Calvinism totally distorts this idea by redefining the word “grace.”

Several more words in Calvinism’s dictionary have been born from mere speculative philosophy, such as double predestination and reprobation. Sproul uses twisted and invented terminology both to defend and “sugar coat” the true doctrines of Calvinism. He even goes so far as to label himself not as a Calvinist but as a Reformed theologian. Richard Mouw, however, remains faithful to his Calvinist label, saying that such labels “serve us well when they are informative, when they tell us something important about the person who chooses to use a specific label.”[18] R. C. Sproul, however, seems to shy away from traditional Calvinistic names. Thus, he titled his book: What Is Reformed Theology? not What Is Calvinism? Inside, he goes further in renaming the Five Points of Calvinism “The Five Points of Reformed Theology.” He continues in this vein by revising the name of each point. Total Depravity is changed to “Humanity’s Radical Corruption”; Unconditional Election is “God’s Sovereign Choice”; and Irresistible Grace is the “Spirit’s Effective Call.” No longer is Christ’s atonement “limited” (lest the word “limited” suggest that Jesus died only for a few)—Sproul calls it Purposeful. One specific doctrine in Calvinism that has undergone many different name changes is Limited Atonement. Whether referred to as “limited,” “specific,” “particular,” “effective,” or “definite and personal,” calling Limited Atonement by other names “can never change the fact of what it really is.”[19]

Kent R. Rieske has also noted Calvinism’s modification of words and ideas:

John Calvin defined important doctrinal Bible words differently than the orthodox and historic Christian interpretation. These erroneous definitions are needed to give logical support to Calvin’s blasphemous doctrines. This technique is typical of cults such as Mormons who hold Joseph Smith in high esteem and base their doctrines on his writings. Calvinists are so indoctrinated with these false definitions that they cannot understand the opposition to their doctrines. Naturally Calvinists believe the false doctrines of John Calvin because they believe the false definitions of major doctrinal words.[20]

No other word in the history of Calvinism has been so maligned as the word “world.” How this word is interpreted determines whether Jesus’ atonement was limited or not, and ultimately whether TULIP blooms or dies. Calvinist author Duane Spencer says, “Much of what we think about the atoning death of Christ will be tempered by what we understand the simple word world to mean.”[21] At least he acknowledges that the word is indeed “simple,” but ironically, in the hands of a Calvinist, it is anything but simple. The word, instead, takes on several mysteriously incorrect and inconsistent meanings. In examining the theological weight of this word, Vance rightly states that “everything hinges on the meaning of the word world.”[22] The following verses give light to the fact that the standard meaning of the word “world” poses a great threat to the doctrine of Limited Atonement and TULIP as a whole.

John 1:29: “The next day John saw Jesus coming toward him, and said, ‘Behold! The Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world.’”

John 3:16: “For God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son, that whoever believes in Him should not perish but have everlasting life.”

John 4:42: “Then they said to the woman, ‘Now we believe, not because of what you said, for we ourselves have heard Him and we know that this is indeed the Christ, the Savior of the world.’”

John 6:33: “For the bread of God is He Who comes down from Heaven and gives life to the world.”

John 6:51: “I am the living bread which came down from Heaven. If anyone eats of this bread, he will live forever; and the bread that I shall give is My flesh, which I shall give for the life of the world.”

John 12:47: “. . . for I did not come to judge the world but to save the world.”

1 John 2:2: “And He Himself is the propitiation for our sins, and not for ours only but also for the whole world.”

2 Corinthians 5:19: “. . . God was in Christ, reconciling the world to Himself . . .”

1 John 4:14: “And we have seen and testify that the Father has sent the Son as Savior of the world.”

In order to remain faithful to TULIP theology, the Calvinist must reinterpret what the word “world” really means.

A.W. Pink, a popular expositor for Calvinism, goes to great lengths to avoid the plain truth of John 1:29 (see above). He changes the meanings of two words in the text: “‘Sin,’ here signifies guilt (condemnation) as in Hebrews 9:26; and ‘the world,’ refers to the world of believers.”[23] The word “sin” in this verse actually has no abnormal implication of guilt or condemnation in the original language and has no connection at all to Hebrews 9:26. Furthermore, saying that “the world” refers to the “world of the elect” is completely speculative and fundamentally changes the meaning of the word, verse, and message of the Bible.

In the example below, the word “world” is again interpreted by the Calvinist as the world of the godly.

In response to John 4:42 (see above), Pink proclaims, “This does not mean that Christ is the Saviour of the human race, but is a general term used in contradistinction from Israel, including all believing Gentiles scattered throughout the earth.”[24]

Another example of how “world” equates to the world of believers is found in the Calvinist’s most feared verse in all the Bible:

1 John 2:2 (see above). Regarding this verse, Pink explains:

. . .when John says, “He is the propitiation for our sins” he can only mean for the sins of Jewish believers. . . . when John added, “And not for ours only, but also for the whole world,” he signified that Christ was the propitiation for the sins of the Gentile believers too, for, as previously shown, “the world” is a term contrasted from Israel.[25]

Similarly, regarding John 6:33 (see above), Pink again writes, “The ‘world’ here does not include the whole human race . . . It is the ‘world’ of believers who are here in view.” [26]

According to Pink’s interpretations, Christ came for the elect only. Christ Himself said, however, that He had come for the sick and sinful, as opposed to the healthy and righteous: “When Jesus heard it, He said to them, ‘Those who are well have no need of a physician, but those who are sick. I did not come to call the righteous, but sinners, to repentance’” (Mark 2:17, NKJV).

After studying the eighty appearances of the word “world” in the Gospel of John, Vance emphatically concluded: “Not only does the word ‘world’ never denote the elect, it is unequivocally demeaned and condemned by God.”[27] In fact, the word “world” was written over two hundred times in the New Testament and never does it denote or even vaguely imply God’s elect.

The other most misused and incriminating word in Calvinist theology is the word “love.” Recognizing this, Dave Hunt based the title of his book on the question Calvinists have yet to adequately answer: What Love Is This? Calvinism defenders, Doug VanderMeulin and Steve Watkins, have tried to answer the question by confronting Dave Hunt on the grounds that his book inaccurately portrays Calvinism. Though after a two-hour discussion, Doug and Steve might have clarified some nonessentials of their faith, they only solidified the vital claims of Mr. Hunt’s book. When Dave Hunt asked, “Does God love those that he has predestined from eternity past to eternal doom?”[28] They replied, “Yes, He loves them . . . with an ‘agape’ love.”[29] To this, Hunt replied, “And that is why I titled my book, What Love Is This?”[30]

George Bryson also acknowledges the Calvinistic redefinition of the word “love,” stating, “Even those Calvinists who believe God loves all people have redefined that love, in their thinking and theology, to exclude any kind of saving grace for some of the people they say God loves.” [31] We find this to be true in how Calvinists such as Doug VanderMeulin and Steve Watkins justify the assertion that God does indeed love the people He has predestined to eternal doom by giving the definition of “love” a new meaning. Although the Greek language has four words for different kinds of love, not one of them hints of a love that is “salvific” in nature.[32] Not even eros, the most fleshly sort of love, would justify the act of forcing someone to suffer eternal punishment. The kind of love prescribed in Calvinism is well summarized by Hunt: “I’m going to shoot you guys, I’m going to torture you, I’m going to shoot you, but I want to show some love towards you and some mercy towards you, so I’m going to give you a good meal.”[33] 

Norman Geisler has also identified how Calvinist leader James White redefines certain verses in his book The Potter’s Freedom:

Yet PF [Potter’s Freedom] repeatedly reads “some men” into passages that clearly and emphatically say “all men” (140, 142). It insists against the context that 2 Peter 3:9 (where God desires that all men be saved) is not speaking about salvation (146–147) . . . It distorts the word “saves” to “saves himself” (64), and so on. . . . PF [Potter’s Freedom] is permeated with logical fallacies and reveals an inadequate comprehension of the unjustified theological and philosophical underpinnings of extreme Calvinism. . . . PF futilely attempts to make the implausible sound plausible and the unbiblical seem biblical.[34]

Geisler provides another example of problematic Calvinist terminology:

From the time of the later Augustine this text [1 Timothy 2:3–4] has been manhandled by extreme Calvinists. Spurgeon summarizes their attempts to avoid the obvious. He said here is how “our older Calvinistic friends deal with this text. ‘All men,’ say they—‘that is, some men’: as if the Holy Ghost could not have said ‘some men’ if he had meant some men. ‘All men,’ say they; that is, ‘some of all sorts of men’; as if the Lord could not have said ‘All sorts of men’ if he had meant that. The Holy Ghost by the apostle has written ‘all men,’ and unquestionably he means all men.’[35]  

Similarly,

Of this and like passages John Owen [also] offers the dubious view that “all” does not mean “all” here.[36]

In his book, The Apocalypse Code, Hank Hanegraaff writes about how unorthodox views of the Bible can stem from changing the meanings of simple words. He prefaces his argument by stating that we should “interpret the Bible in accordance with the basic rules of language.”[37] He then writes:

Suppose I told my children, “I don’t want you to touch this gingerbread cake, because we are going to have dinner soon!” They wouldn’t need an advanced degree in English from Yale to understand that by “this” I meant this gingerbread cake—not that gingerbread cake, as in a gingerbread cake that would be baked for their twenty-first birthday. Nor are they the least bit confused about the meaning of the “you,” which in context refers to them, not to children of a future generation. “Soon” is equally unambiguous. To say we were going to have dinner “soon” could possibly mean dinner in the distant future. When it comes to interpreting scripture, we should not suppose that the rules of grammar mysteriously change.[38]

Calvinists would do well to reconsider the core tenets of their theology in light of Hanegraaff’s advice. Let’s again ponder closely the words of Walter Martin on the danger of twisting the Bible’s words:

And just as the American Bar Association will not tolerate confusion of terminology in the trial of cases, and as the American Medical Association will not tolerate redefinition of terminology of diagnostic and surgical medicine, so also the church of Jesus Christ has every right to not tolerate the gross perversions and redefinitions of historical and Biblical terminology . . .[39]

Despite Calvinism’s historical and biblical appearance of intellectual orthodoxy, its insistence on maintaining the doctrines of TULIP has led it perilously close to “the kingdom of the cults.”

Most Christians would say that Calvinism is simply a Christian theology based upon John Calvin’s teachings. In my explanation of the five points, I argued that Calvinism is a Christian but cultlike theology that strips humanity of free will. Although descriptions may vary, the essential philosophy of Calvinistic religion has a name—fatalism. As George Bryson writes:

For all practical purposes, Calvinism amounts to Theistic Fatalism. A theist believes in a personal God. A fatalist believes the future (especially regarding the destiny of individuals) is fixed. A Theistic Fatalist believes that a personal God unconditionally determines where individuals go when they die, that is, whether they go to heaven or hell. . . When I say that Calvinism amounts to Theistic Fatalism or that it has a dark side, it is not for the purpose of offending Calvinists, though some will no doubt take offense at my use of these words. I use the label Theistic Fatalism because it perfectly describes Reformed Theology. I use the words dark side, because Calvinism has, as a central tenet, a very dark and disturbing distinctive.[40]

Lawrence Vance, as well, deduces the following:

Although Calvinists go out of their way to distance themselves from fatalism, they are in essence teaching the same thing. When a philosopher believes “what is to be will be” it is called determinism. When a stoic believes “what is to be will be” it is called fate. When a Muslim believes “what is to be will be” it is called fatalism. But when a Calvinist believes “what is to be will be” it is called predestination.[41]

Geisler likewise states that “there is no real difference . . . between the extreme Calvinists and fatalistic Islam,”[42] concluding that:

. . . some Calvinists reject this “double-predestination” in favor of God simply “passing over” the non-elect, but even they must admit that the result is the same: since God did not give them the desire to be saved “they are condemned to eternal misery.”[43]

NOTES

  1. Hanegraaff, “What Are Some Common Marks of a Cult?”
  2. Bryson, The Dark Side of Calvinism, 352.
  3. (This link was dead, so I tracked down the article and PDF’ed it.)
  4. McDowell, Handbook of Today’s Religions, 22-23.
  5. Calvin, Commentary, 1 Timothy 2:3–4, also noted in, [online] accessed 2 February 2010; available from Internet Link.
  6. Hunt, in Debating Calvinism, 316.
  7. Ibid., 317.
  8. Martin, The Kingdom of the Cults, 31.
  9. Bryson, The Dark Side of Calvinism, 28.
  10. Sproul, What Is Reformed Theology?
  11. Ibid., 225.
  12. Ibid., 143.
  13. MacCulloch, The Reformation, 244.
  14. John Calvin, Institutes, vol. 2, ed. John Thomas McNeill (Westminster Press, Louisville Kentucky, 1960, Reprinted in 2006), p. 929.
  15. Steele, Thomas, and Quinn, The Five Points of Calvinism
  16. Bryson, The Dark Side of Calvinism, 28-30.
  17. Sproul, What Is Reformed Theology?
  18. Mouw, Calvinism in the Las Vegas Airport, 18–19.
  19. Vance, The Other Side of Calvinism, 407.
  20. Rieske, “Calvinism.”
  21. Duane E. Spencer, Duane E., TULIP, The Five Points of Calvinism in the Light of Scripture (Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 1979), 46.
  22. Vance, The Other Side of Calvinism, 435.
  23. W. Pink, Exposition of the Gospel of John, Volume One, John 1–7, (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1945), 59.
  24. Ibid., 225.
  25. Arthur W. Pink, The Sovereignty of God (I. C. Herenedeen, 1930; Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 1984), 259.
  26. Ibid., 325.
  27. Vance, The Other Side of Calvinism, 435.
  28. Dave Hunt, Conversation on Calvinism (Bend, OR: The Berean Call, 2002) [CD-ROM].
  29. Ibid.
  30. Ibid.
  31. Bryson, The Dark Side of Calvinism, 26.
  32. Hunt, Conversation on Calvinism.
  33. Ibid.
  34. Geisler, Chosen but Free, p. 262–63.
  35. ,Ibid. 210; Footnote 19: Cited by Murray, Spurgeon v. Hyper-Calvinism, 150–151.
  36. Ibid., 211.
  37. Hanegraaff, Hank, The Apocalypse Code (Nashville: Thomas Nelson, Nashville, 2007), 72.
  38. Ibid., 72.
  39. Martin, The Kingdom of the Cults, 31.
  40. Bryson, The Dark Side of Calvinism, 21–22.
  41. Vance, The Other Side of Calvinism, 278.

Section Introduction — “The Calvinist Redefinition of Biblical Language”

This section brings together the terminology Coate examines throughout The Cultish Side of Calvinism and presents it in a more systematic way. Rather than focusing on a single disputed passage, the comparison looks at a broad range of biblical terms and theological concepts—including all, world, whosoever, love, sovereignty, grace, call, election, foreknew, predestination, regeneration, faith, repentance, free will, atonement, propitiation, perseverance, warning, monergism, synergism, common grace, effectual grace, gospel, and exegesis. The purpose is to show how the same biblical vocabulary can take on substantially different meanings within competing theological systems.

The chart is intentionally framed as “Biblical Term / Concept,” “Calvinistic Change / Redefinition as Characterized by the Sources,” and “Biblical / Traditional Reading.” It therefore does not claim that every Calvinist uses every term in exactly the same way. Rather, it identifies recurring definitions, distinctions, and theological usages presented in the sources and contrasts them with the readings argued for by the non-Calvinist sources.

One of the most important patterns is that the issue is not limited to individual words such as “all” or “world.” The same interpretive question extends into larger theological concepts: sovereignty and determinism, grace and regeneration, calling and effectual calling, election and individual selection, foreknowledge and forelove, faith and regeneration, atonement and particular redemption, and perseverance and the interpretation of apostasy warnings.

The chart should therefore be read as a comparative theological vocabulary guide, not as a claim that the English words themselves have only one possible meaning. Context matters. The central question is whether a particular meaning is being drawn from the biblical text and its context—or supplied by a theological system and then brought back to the text.

In short:

  • before debating a doctrine, we need to make sure we are using the same dictionary.
BIBLICAL TERM / CONCEPT CALVINISTIC CHANGE / REDEFINITION AS CHARACTERIZED BY THE SOURCES BIBLICAL / TRADITIONAL READING
All “All” may be restricted to all kinds, classes, or races of people, or to all of the elect, rather than every person under discussion. All means the whole of the group or persons specified by the context. The word itself does not inherently mean “all kinds” or “the elect.”
World “World” can mean the world of the elect, believing Gentiles, or people from every nation rather than humanity generally. World ordinarily refers to the world, humanity, or created order. Its precise scope is determined by context; it does not inherently mean “the elect.”
Whosoever “Whosoever” can effectively become whoever among the elect believes. Whosoever means whoever responds to the stated condition—such as whoever believes. The invitation is genuinely open to anyone who responds.
Love God may love the non-elect while simultaneously having eternally decreed their condemnation; divine love is therefore distinguished from an intention to save. Love describes God’s genuine benevolence and affection. Biblical statements about God’s love for the world are not inherently restricted to the elect.
Sovereignty God’s sovereignty is understood as exhaustive determinism: God has decreed everything that comes to pass, including human decisions and sinful actions. Sovereignty means God’s supreme authority, kingship, and rule. God is sovereign without the word itself meaning that He determines every human choice.
Grace Grace is narrowed into effectual / regenerating grace—God’s sovereign action toward the elect that regenerates them and guarantees their salvation. Grace is God’s unmerited favor and gracious provision. It is proclaimed through the gospel and genuinely offered to humanity.
Call A distinction is made between an external / general call and an internal / effectual call, with only the latter actually bringing the elect to salvation. Call is God’s summons through the gospel, genuinely extended to those who hear it and calling them to respond.
Election Election becomes unconditional individual selection: God chooses particular individuals for salvation before they believe and passes over others. Election means God’s choosing. Scripture speaks of God choosing people and peoples for particular purposes—including Israel and the church. The context determines whether a passage concerns individuals, a people, or a purpose.
Foreknew “Foreknew” is understood essentially as “foreloved”—God’s prior choice or love of particular individuals whom He marks out for salvation. Foreknew means to know beforehand or previously know. Its theological implications must be determined by the passage rather than automatically equating foreknowledge with predestination.
Predestination Predestination becomes God’s eternal determination of the individual destinies of the elect and, in many formulations, the corresponding reprobation of others. Predestination means determining beforehand. Scripture associates it particularly with the destiny and purpose of believers in Christ, such as conformity to Christ and adoption.
Regeneration The new birth is placed before faith, becoming the divine act that makes faith possible. Regeneration / new birth is the spiritual rebirth associated with conversion to Christ. The sources argue that Scripture does not require an unconscious regeneration to occur before a person can believe.
Faith Faith becomes a special supernatural gift given to the elect after regeneration, rather than the human response of believing the gospel. Faith is believing or trusting in Christ and the gospel—the human response to what God has revealed and offered.
Repentance Repentance is understood as a grace or gift irresistibly produced in the elect as the result of regeneration. Repentance is a genuine turning from sin toward God. Scripture commands people to repent and presents repentance as a genuine response to God’s summons.
Sin Sin is understood as an inherited condition so comprehensive that humanity is unable to respond positively to God apart from prior regeneration. Sin is rebellion, disobedience, and transgression against God—something human beings actually commit and for which they are morally responsible.
Dead / Dead in sin “Dead in sin” is interpreted as absolute spiritual inability: the sinner cannot respond to God in faith unless first regenerated. “Dead in sin” describes profound spiritual alienation and enslavement to sin; the term does not by itself establish absolute inability to respond to God’s gracious initiative.
Free Will Human libertarian freedom is rejected; human choices are understood as determined by God’s decree while remaining morally responsible. Free will / choice means that human beings genuinely make choices and are accountable for those choices. Genuine choice does not mean that humans save themselves by works.
Works “Works salvation” may be applied to any doctrine in which a human response or choice has a meaningful role in receiving salvation. Works are human deeds. Salvation is not earned by works, but a response of faith is therefore not automatically equivalent to earning salvation.
Salvation Salvation is narrowed to the elect and organized through a system of justification, regeneration, and sanctification in which the decisive saving act occurs before faith. Salvation is God’s rescue and reconciliation of sinners through Christ, received through faith.
Atonement Christ’s atonement becomes limited / definite / particular / effectual, with its saving intention specifically directed toward securing salvation for the elect. Atonement is Christ’s sacrificial provision for sin. The sources argue that Scripture presents Christ’s provision as extending to all humanity, with its saving benefits received through faith.
Propitiation Passages saying Christ is the propitiation for the “whole world” are restricted to the elect throughout the world. Propitiation refers to Christ’s sacrifice dealing with sin and satisfying God’s righteous judgment. “Whole world” should not automatically be converted into “the elect.”
Righteousness Imputed righteousness is understood as Christ’s righteousness being credited to the believer as the basis of justification. Righteousness concerns conformity to what is right before God. Justification involves God declaring the believer righteous on the basis of Christ.
Sanctification Sanctification is understood as an inevitable progressive work in the elect, with continuing sin expected throughout the Christian life. Sanctification is being set apart to God and growing in holiness through obedience to Him.
Holiness Holiness is understood as compatible with the continuing presence and inevitability of sin in the believer. Holiness means separation from sin and dedication to God; believers are repeatedly commanded to pursue it.
Perseverance “Perseverance of the saints” means that everyone truly regenerated will inevitably persevere to the end; ultimate apostasy demonstrates that a person was never genuinely saved. Perseverance describes continuing faithfully in Christ. Biblical warnings concerning falling away are treated as genuine warnings rather than automatically hypothetical descriptions.
Fall Away / Depart from the Faith Passages describing falling away or departing from the faith are interpreted to mean that the person was never truly saved. “Fall away,” “depart,” and similar expressions should be understood according to their immediate context rather than automatically supplied with “was never saved.”
If Biblical conditional statements may be interpreted as hypothetical descriptions rather than genuine conditions or possibilities. If ordinarily introduces a condition or possibility; its precise force is determined by context.
Warning Biblical warnings to believers can be understood as means God uses to preserve the elect rather than as genuine warnings concerning the danger they describe. Warning is a genuine admonition to avoid a stated danger; the warning should not be emptied of its apparent force.
Justice Divine justice is understood as compatible with God determining a person’s actions and eternal destiny while still holding that person responsible for those actions. Justice means judging rightly and impartially according to what a person does and is responsible for.
Reprobation Reprobation is a theological category describing God’s eternal decision to pass over some individuals and consign them to condemnation. Scripture clearly speaks of judgment and condemnation; whether Scripture teaches an eternal individual decree of reprobation in the specifically Calvinistic sense is a separate theological question.
Double Predestination God eternally determines both the salvation of the elect and the condemnation of the non-elect. The Bible teaches predestination, election, judgment, and condemnation; whether these constitute the Calvinistic doctrine of symmetrical “double predestination” is a separate theological question.
Monergism Salvation is understood as God alone acting, with the human response contributing nothing to the saving process, even as a genuine response. Salvation is entirely dependent upon God’s grace, while Scripture nevertheless calls people to believe, repent, receive Christ, and respond to the gospel.
Synergism Human cooperation with God is treated as compromising divine sovereignty or turning salvation into human works. Cooperation does not necessarily mean earning salvation. Scripture can command a genuine human response while salvation remains entirely dependent upon God’s grace.
Sovereign “Sovereign” becomes virtually synonymous with deterministic control of every event and human decision. Sovereign means supreme ruler—one who possesses supreme authority and the right to govern.
Common Grace “Common grace” becomes a special theological category explaining God’s goodness toward all people while reserving saving / regenerating grace for the elect. Scripture speaks of God’s goodness and grace toward humanity. Whether “common grace” and “saving grace” constitute fundamentally different kinds of grace is a theological distinction rather than a definition inherent in the word “grace.”
Effectual / Irresistible Grace Grace becomes God’s irresistible regeneration of the elect, guaranteeing their response and salvation. Grace is God’s unmerited favor. The gospel calls people to respond, and the sources argue that Scripture portrays people as capable of resisting God’s gracious appeal.
Gospel The gospel invitation can function primarily as the means by which those already determined to be elect are brought to faith rather than as a genuine offer of salvation to everyone who hears. The gospel is the good news of Christ’s death and resurrection and the means by which people are called to believe and be saved.
Evangelism Evangelism becomes the means by which the already-determined elect are brought to faith, while the evangelist does not know who those elect are. Evangelism is genuinely proclaiming the gospel so that people may hear, believe, repent, and be saved.
Context Context can be invoked within a theological system to interpret difficult passages in accordance with established Calvinistic conclusions. Context means interpreting a word or passage according to its surrounding literary, historical, grammatical, and theological setting.
Exegesis Exegesis can become the process of extracting a predetermined Calvinistic conclusion from the biblical text rather than allowing the text to determine the conclusion. Exegesis means drawing the meaning out of the text rather than importing a theological conclusion into it.
Hermeneutics A theological system can establish interpretive principles that consistently produce Calvinistic readings of disputed passages. Hermeneutics is the principles and practice used to interpret Scripture.
Pelagian The term can be used broadly as a label for those who reject Calvinistic doctrines of human inability, unconditional election, or irresistible grace. Pelagian properly refers to the specific theological position associated with Pelagius. Rejecting Calvinism does not automatically make someone Pelagian.
Calvinism Calvinism may be presented as synonymous with biblical Christianity or the gospel itself. Calvinism is a particular historical theological system within Christianity; it is not itself a synonym for Christianity or the gospel.
Reformed “Reformed” can function as a broader theological designation for the Calvinistic system. Reformed is a historical designation associated with the Protestant Reformation and a family of theological traditions; it is not itself a biblical synonym for “Christian.”

Resources for the above

  • Walter Martin — The Kingdom of the Cults, 6th ed.
  • Micah Coate — A Cultish Side of Calvinism
  • Leighton Flowers — The Potter’s Promise: A Biblical Defense of Traditional Soteriology
  • Leighton Flowers — Drawn by Jesus: A Biblical Defense of God’s Provision for All
  • “Language and Calvinism” — supplied PDF/article
  • Kerrigan Skelly — The Calvinism Dictionary (Official)
  • Brian’s Notebook — The Code Words of Calvinism
  • “Calvinism is Stupid: Redefining Words — Exposing the Calvinist Playbook — Part #1” — YouTube video/transcript
  • “War of the Words: How Calvinism Quietly Redefines Theological Terms” — YouTube video/transcript

Does Calvinism Leave Room For Genuine Choice (video added)

Published by Papa Giorgio

IS “PASSING OVER” AN ACTIVE CHOICE BY GOD?

Within the Calvinist system itself:

It is a sovereign decision that is part of God’s eternal decree, but Reformed theologians deliberately describe it as passive / negative rather than active in the same way election is active.

ELECTION
Equels
God positively acts (chooses, regenerates, grants faith).

PASSING OVER / REPROBATION
Equels
God withholds that positive action and leaves the person in their fallen state.

So Calvinists say it is not “as active” as election.

I disagree, under exhaustive sovereignty, the decision not to elect is still a deliberate, decisive choice by God. Calling it “passing over” changes the verb but does not remove the determination. In that sense, yes — it is still an active choice of the decree, even if executed by omission.

IS COMPATIBILISM DETERMINISTIC?

Yes.

Compatibilism is a form of determinism (specifically soft determinism). It affirms that every event, including every human choice, is determined by prior causes (ultimately God’s decree). It simply defines “freedom” as acting according to one’s own desires/nature without external coercion. John Hendryx’s statement is accurate: compatibilism is no less deterministic than hard determinism; the difference lies only in whether that determinism is considered compatible with moral responsibility.

Bottom line in the MacArthur / Reformed framework:

  • God’s decree determines both the salvation of the elect and the non-salvation of the reprobate. The elect are saved by God’s active, effectual intervention; the non-elect are left in their sin by God’s sovereign decision to pass them over. Compatibilism is the philosophical tool that allows Calvinists to call both outcomes determined while still affirming that people make real, responsible choices according to their natures.

“Does calvinism leave room for genuine choice?” but “If exhaustive divine determinism determines our beliefs and reasoning, what grounds do we have for trusting the theological conclusions we reach—including Calvinism itself?”

JOHNNY MAC’s TRANSCRIPT

You say, well, in a world of multiple religions, how can there only be two choices? Because you either choose the way that leads to heaven or you choose a way that does not. And while there may be varieties of that, it’s the same thing. It ends up in the same place. There really are only two religions in the world. There is the religion of human achievement, and that’s all religion in the world that offers heaven for good works, morality, religious ceremonies, rituals. On the other hand, there’s the religion of divine accomplishment which offers heaven to those who admit there is nothing they can do to earn it. One comes the way of works and flesh and merit and ceremony and ritual and ends up in hell, whatever its label. And the true way is by faith and grace and the Holy Spirit. The first way involves what we do and the true way involves what God did.

The Free-Thinking Argument is especially useful here because it explicitly applies the problem to exhaustive divine determinism. (PDF)

MacArthur’s distinction between the “religion of human achievement” and the “religion of divine accomplishment” sounds compelling, but it creates a problem for his own theology. No one who believes salvation is by grace through faith is claiming that a person’s decision to trust Christ is a meritorious contribution to Christ’s saving work.

  • Faith does not compete with divine accomplishment.
  • Christ accomplishes salvation;
  • faith receives what Christ has accomplished.

The person who trusts Christ is not saying, “I helped save myself.” He is saying, “I could not save myself; I am trusting the One who did.” To equate the exercise of faith with “human achievement” is therefore a category error. The disagreement is not over whether salvation is God’s accomplishment. It is over whether God must first determine the individual’s response in order for that response to be genuine faith.

The deeper problem arises when MacArthur’s “two religions” argument is placed alongside his Calvinistic doctrine of sovereign determination. If God unconditionally determines who will be saved, and effectually gives the elect the faith and repentance necessary for salvation, then the elect do not independently determine that outcome. Their faith is the result of God’s prior determination, not the cause of it. But the same logic necessarily applies to those who remain lost. If God sovereignly chooses not to give them that saving grace—what Calvinists call “passing over”—then their unbelief and eventual condemnation are likewise the inevitable result of God’s sovereign decision.

Calling one side “active election” and the other “passive passing over” does not remove the divine determination from the second side. It changes the description of how God brings about the two outcomes, but it does not change the fact that both outcomes are ultimately grounded in God’s decree. As George Bryson documents, even the Reformed distinction between a “positive” decree and a “negative” decree leaves reprobation ultimately connected to the divine decree.

This makes MacArthur’s “Make your choice” language particularly difficult. The issue is not whether people make choices—they obviously do. The issue is whether they ultimately determine which choice they will make. Calvinistic compatibilism answers that the person makes a real choice, but that choice is itself determined by God’s sovereign decree and the person’s God-determined nature and desires. That may be called “freedom” within a compatibilist framework, but it is not self-determination in the ordinary sense. And this is where MacArthur’s own argument about evil becomes relevant. MacArthur has argued that if God is the primary cause and human beings are merely secondary causes “moved by the primary cause,” then people are not free and God would be responsible for their actions. Yet in his soteriology, God’s sovereign determination of the human will is precisely what guarantees the saving response of the elect.

If divine determination of the will destroys meaningful freedom when explaining evil, why does that same determination preserve meaningful freedom when explaining salvation?

There is an even deeper epistemological problem. If exhaustive divine determinism means that God determines not merely what we choose, but our desires, thoughts, evaluations, judgments, and beliefs, then the problem extends beyond salvation and free will to our ability to know that our beliefs are true in the first place. Timothy Stratton and J. P. Moreland’s “Free-Thinking Argument” specifically defines exhaustive divine determinism as the view that God necessitates all events, including human “desires, thoughts, intuitions, beliefs, actions, behaviors, evaluations, and judgments.”

They argue that if our beliefs are exhaustively determined, and we know that human beings sometimes believe false things, then we have a serious epistemic problem: if something or someone else determines us to affirm a falsehood, what gives us confidence that we could have arrived at a better or true belief in the same circumstances?

That raises a devastating question for theological determinism: If God determines every belief, including false theological beliefs held by Christians, how do I know that my belief that Calvinism is true is not simply another belief God has determined me to hold? I cannot appeal to my reasoning process as an independent check if God also determined the reasoning process, the premises I find persuasive, the conclusions I draw, and even my confidence that I have reasoned correctly.

The Free-Thinking Argument presses precisely this concern: under exhaustive determinism, if something or someone else determines our thoughts, there is no obvious basis for claiming epistemic responsibility for those thoughts; and if our cognitive faculties are not reliably aimed at truth, our conclusions—including our conclusions about determinism—are themselves subject to rational doubt.

Under Calvinistic determinism, the problem extends beyond our choices to our theological beliefs themselves. If God exhaustively determines every thought, desire, judgment, and belief, then He necessarily determines not only true theological beliefs but also the false theological beliefs people hold. A Calvinist who rejects the Trinity, misunderstands Scripture, embraces Islam, or simply arrives at a false interpretation of a biblical passage does so because God sovereignly determined the cognitive circumstances and beliefs that led him there.

The obvious epistemological question follows: if God determines both true and false beliefs, what makes my belief that Calvinism is true trustworthy? I may sincerely believe that I have arrived at Calvinism through careful exegesis and sound reasoning—but if God also determined my reasoning, premises, intuitions, and conclusion, sincerity and rational confidence cannot by themselves demonstrate that my conclusion is actually true. The problem is not that truth ceases to exist; it is that exhaustive determinism seems to undermine our ability to know that our determined beliefs correspond to it.

This is the concern I have explored elsewhere in “If God Determines Every Belief, Why Trust Yours?”: exhaustive divine determinism does not necessarily deny that objective truth exists, but it raises the question of how a determined creature can reliably distinguish truth from divinely determined error.

That brings us back to MacArthur’s “two religions.” Within his system, the elect are sovereignly determined to receive divine accomplishment, while the reprobate are sovereignly determined to remain without it. One person believes because God sovereignly grants the necessary grace; another remains unbelieving because God sovereignly passes him over. And if God also determines the beliefs and reasoning processes by which we arrive at our theological conclusions, then even the Calvinist who concludes, “Calvinism is true because Scripture teaches it,” must acknowledge that his interpretation of Scripture is itself the product of the same divine determination.

The question therefore becomes unavoidable: What makes his conclusion a genuine discovery of truth rather than simply the belief God determined him to hold?

This is why the issue cannot be dismissed by saying, “But people still make choices.” Of course they do. A determined person can experience deliberation, make choices, form beliefs, and sincerely believe he has reasoned correctly. The question is whether he is the ultimate rational agent directing that process or merely the endpoint of a causal chain he did not originate. Stratton and Moreland describe the alternatives starkly: are we genuinely responsible agents “steering the ship,” or are we passive passengers waiting to see where the antecedent causal chain takes us?

If MacArthur wants to insist that human beings possess genuine self-determination because otherwise God becomes responsible for their evil, then he needs to explain why that same self-determination disappears when discussing salvation, while the resulting determination of beliefs and choices somehow remains sufficient for genuine epistemic responsibility.

So the problem with MacArthur’s two-religion illustration is not that it distinguishes works from grace. We [non-Calvinists] agree with that distinction. The problem is that his illustration presents salvation as though two genuinely available alternatives stand before the individual—“human achievement” or “divine accomplishment”—while his theological determinism ultimately makes the individual’s choice itself the product of God’s prior determination. The non-Calvinist does not believe that trusting Christ earns salvation, contributes merit to the cross, or makes Christ’s accomplishment possible.

We believe Christ accomplished salvation and that the sinner is genuinely called to trust Him. Faith receives; it does not merit. And unlike exhaustive determinism, this preserves something essential not only to moral responsibility but to rational responsibility: the human being is an active agent capable of responding to reasons, evaluating evidence, rejecting error, and genuinely trusting the truth rather than merely being determined to believe whatever God has decreed him to believe.

BOTTOM LINE:

MacArthur says there are “two religions,” but exhaustive Calvinistic determinism ultimately leaves us with only one determining power: God. There may be two religious outcomes, two paths, and two destinations, but there are not two ultimately autonomous alternatives. God determines who believes, what they believe, which path they take, and where they finally arrive. The apparent dualism disappears. There aren’t two competing religions ultimately determining human destiny. There is one sovereign decree determining two outcomes.

JOHNNY MAC’s TRANSCRIPT 2.0

You say, “In a world of multiple religions, how can there only be two choices?” Because ultimately there are only two destinations: heaven or hell. There may be thousands of religious labels and countless variations, but every person will end up on one of those two paths.

There really are only two religions in the world. There is the religion of human achievement—every system that looks to works, morality, religious ceremonies, rituals, merit, or human effort as the basis for acceptance with God. That is the way of the flesh, and it ends in condemnation, whatever name the religion bears.

On the other hand, there is the religion of divine accomplishment. Salvation is entirely God’s work. The elect do not contribute anything to their salvation; God chose them before the foundation of the world, regenerated them, granted them faith and repentance, and brought them irresistibly to Christ. Their believing is not what ultimately distinguishes them from the unbelieving; God’s sovereign choice does. Their faith is the result of God’s saving determination, not the determining cause of it.

And that means the two paths are not ultimately two independently available choices that determine one’s eternal destiny. The elect believe because God sovereignly determined to save them and effectually gave them the grace to believe. The non-elect do not believe because God did not choose to give them that saving grace. He “passes them over,” leaving them in their fallen condition. Thus, one person arrives at heaven because God sovereignly determined to give him saving grace, while another arrives at hell because God sovereignly determined not to give him that grace.

So the first way involves what God has determined to leave the sinner to, while the true way involves what God has sovereignly determined to accomplish. The decisive difference is not ultimately the sinner’s choice; it is God’s decree. The sinner certainly chooses, but even that choice is the result of the nature, desires, and grace God sovereignly determined for him.

Therefore, when I say, “Make your choice,” I do not mean that the sinner possesses an autonomous ability to determine which eternal destiny he will choose. I mean that God has sovereignly ordained both the destination and the means by which each person will arrive there. The elect will choose Christ because God determined to give them the grace to choose Christ; the reprobate will reject Christ because God determined to pass them over.

There are therefore two roads—but within exhaustive divine determinism, God ultimately determines who walks each road.

If God determines the belief, the reasoning, and the moral judgment by which I conclude that God is good, what makes that conclusion trustworthy?

In putting together this post the CS LEWIS illumination from his The Problem of Pain and my posts on it

CS Lewis: Our White Being God’s Black

Lewis’s point becomes especially relevant when applied to exhaustive theological determinism. If God determines not only what we choose, but also what we believe, how we reason, what we judge, and even what we call “good,” then God necessarily determines both true and false theological conclusions. If our moral and rational faculties are sufficiently corrupted that we cannot trust them, while God simultaneously determines the beliefs we arrive at through those faculties, what independent basis do we have for knowing that our conception of God’s goodness is actually good—or that our theology is actually true? We don’t need human judgment to be infallible, but we do need it to be sufficiently connected to truth that we can recognize when we are wrong.

This is where Lewis’s argument cuts against the claim that God’s morality can simply be “beyond” ours. If “God is good” could mean that God calls good what we rightly recognize as evil, then the statement “God is good” becomes practically meaningless; we could just as easily obey an omnipotent fiend. Lewis is not arguing for human moral autonomy—he allows that our moral judgments can be corrected and brought into greater conformity with God’s. His point is that God’s goodness transcends our moral understanding without becoming its opposite or becoming unintelligible. Likewise, if Calvinistic determinism makes God the ultimate determiner of our reasoning, beliefs, and moral judgments, then the Calvinist needs to explain what makes his determined conclusion about God’s goodness—and his theology generally—trustworthy. Otherwise, both “God is good” and “Calvinism is true” risk becoming assertions without a meaningful epistemic standard by which we can know either one is actually true.

The Consequences of Exhaustive Divine Determinism

Published by Papa Giorgio

A theological system should be judged not only by the verses it cites,
but by the world it creates when all of its doctrines are held together.

The Consequences of Exhaustive Divine Determinism

One of the least discussed aspects of Calvinism is its commitment to compatibilism—the view that God’s exhaustive sovereignty and man’s moral responsibility are compatible because people freely choose according to the desires God has ordained. Compatibilism is not an alternative to determinism; it is a particular form of determinism. As John Hendryx explains, compatibilism is no less deterministic than hard determinism; it simply attempts to reconcile exhaustive divine causation with human accountability.[1]

Ironically, John MacArthur has articulated what many critics see as the central problem with determinism. He argues that if God is the primary cause who compels and determines every human action, then God—not man—would ultimately bear responsibility for evil, divine judgment, and eternal punishment. He concludes that this is a view of God many people simply cannot accept.[2]

Yet many leading Reformed theologians openly affirm that God’s eternal decree extends to every event, including the Fall itself.

Loraine Boettner writes:

“Even the fall of Adam, and through him the fall of the race, was not by chance or accident, but was so ordained in the secret counsels of God.”[3]

Jerome Zanchius is even more explicit:

“Surely, if God had not willed the fall, He could, and no doubt would, have prevented it; but He did not prevent it: ergo He willed it. And if He willed it, He certainly decreed it.”[4]

Arthur W. Pink likewise rejects the idea that God merely permitted sin:

“Plainly it was God’s will that sin should enter this world, otherwise it would not have entered, for nothing happens except what God has eternally decreed. Moreover, there was more than a simple permission, for God only permits things that fulfill His purpose.”[5]

Pink continues:

“Not only did God have a perfect foreknowledge of the outcome of Adam’s trial; not only did His omniscient eye see Adam eating of the forbidden fruit, but He decreed beforehand that he should do so.”[6]

Contemporary Calvinist philosopher Vincent Cheung states the conclusion without qualification:

“I would not say that God permitted Adam to fall, but that God caused it.”[7]

John Calvin himself wrote:

“God not only foresaw the fall of the first man, and in him the ruin of his posterity; but also at His own pleasure arranged it…. Though their perdition depends on the predestination of God, the cause and matter of it is in themselves…. Man therefore falls, divine providence so ordaining, but he falls by his own fault.”[8]

Likewise, Gordon H. Clark argued:

“I wish very frankly and pointedly to assert that if a man gets drunk and shoots his family, it was the will of God that he should do so…. In Ephesians 1:11, Paul tells us that God works all things, not some things only, after the counsel of his own will.”[9]

John Piper and Justin Taylor likewise argue that God does not merely permit evil but actively brings it about according to His sovereign purpose. They write:

“…he himself brings about these evil aspects for his glory…. This includes—as incredible and as unacceptable as it may currently seem—God’s having even brought about the Nazis’ brutality at Birkenau and Auschwitz, as well as the terrible killings of Dennis Rader and even the sexual abuse of a young child.”[10]

These quotations are not drawn from obscure hyper-Calvinists. They represent respected voices within the Reformed tradition and reveal a consistent theological principle: the Fall was not merely foreknown or permitted—it was specifically decreed.

That conclusion raises an unavoidable theological question. Scripture opens by declaring:

“God saw all that he had made, and it was very good indeed.” (Genesis 1:31, CSB)

Yet if Adam’s sin was eternally decreed before creation, then humanity was declared “very good” while already destined by divine decree to rebel. Scripture also records God condemning the burning of children to Molech:

“…something I never commanded or mentioned; I never entertained the thought.” (Jeremiah 19:5) (CSB)

 

Those words appear difficult to reconcile with the claim that every evil act was specifically ordained from eternity. Which leads to the central question:

If God eternally decreed every sin—including Adam’s fall, every murder, every rape, and every atrocity—then isn’t the cross ultimately saving humanity from the consequences of God’s own decree?

Or stated another way:

If the Fall was not merely permitted but specifically decreed as part of God’s eternal plan, in what meaningful sense is humanity being saved from anything other than the consequences of God’s own decree?

C.S. Lewis recognized the danger of resolving this tension by redefining God’s goodness. He observed that if God’s moral standard bears no meaningful resemblance to ours, then calling Him “good” becomes an empty statement. We could no longer distinguish the God of Scripture from an omnipotent tyrant. Lewis warned that when the doctrine of total depravity is extended to mean that mankind’s understanding of good is entirely worthless, Christianity risks collapsing into a form of what he called “devil-worship.”[11]

The issue, then, is not whether God is sovereign. Critics of exhaustive divine determinism [Calvinism] do not deny God’s sovereignty. The issue has never been whether God determines some events. Scripture plainly teaches He does. The question is whether Scripture teaches that God determines every thought, desire, and sinful act. The issue, then, is what kind of sovereignty Scripture actually teaches.

Does God’s sovereignty require that He eternally decree every evil act in order to accomplish His purposes? Or is God’s wisdom, power, and providence so great that He can infallibly accomplish His redemptive plan without specifically decreeing every sin that made redemption necessary?

Clay Jones notes: Paul promises that with every temptation God provides “the way of escape” (1 Cor. 10:13). If every sinful choice has already been eternally determined, from what exactly is the believer escaping? No one can escape what God has decreed must occur.

Every theological system must harmonize difficult passages. The question is whether our theology is being shaped by Scripture, or whether Scripture is continually being reshaped to preserve the system. When the plain meaning of passage after passage must be qualified, restricted, redefined, or explained away to fit a prior theological commitment—when ordinary words such as “all,” “world,” “whoever,” or “desires” are repeatedly given specialized meanings, or when distinctions such as God’s “decretive” will and “preceptive” will are invoked to reconcile texts that appear to conflict—it is worth asking whether these interpretive moves arise naturally from the biblical text or from the theological framework brought to it.

At some point, the question is no longer whether Scripture is shaping our theology, but whether our theology is reshaping Scripture.

[1] John MacArthur, “Why Doesn’t God Save Everyone?” Grace to You. (Insert the exact sermon or transcript citation once verified.)

[2] John Hendryx, “What Is Compatibilism?” Monergism.

[3] Loraine Boettner, The Reformed Doctrine of Predestination (Philadelphia: Presbyterian and Reformed Publishing Co., 1932), 234.

[4] Jerome Zanchius, The Doctrine of Absolute Predestination, chap. 2, sec. 2, para. 4.

[5] Arthur W. Pink, The Sovereignty of God (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Book House, 1930), 162.

[6] Ibid., Appendix II, “The Case of Adam,” 283.

[7] Vincent Cheung, “The Author of Sin,” accessed July 29, 2025.

[8] John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, trans. Henry Beveridge (Peabody, MA: Hendrickson Publishers, 2008), 3.23.7–8.

[9] Gordon H. Clark, Religion, Reason and Revelation (Nutley, N. J.: Craig Press, 1961), 221.

[10] John Piper and Justin Taylor, eds., Suffering and the Sovereignty of God (Wheaton, IL: Crossway Books, 2006), 42.

[11] C. S. Lewis, The Problem of Pain (New York: HarperOne, 2001), chap. 3, “Divine Goodness.”

CS Lewis: Our White Being God’s Black

Published by Papa Giorgio

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

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

“Divine Goodness”

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

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

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

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

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

CS Lewis | The Problem of Pain (Chapter 3)

“Human Wickedness”

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

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

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

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

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

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

[….]

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

CS Lewis | The Problem of Pain (Chapter 4)

THE STONE IN THE SHOE:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[….]

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

If God is sovereign, is He responsible for evil?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[….]

‘Meaningful rape’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I have a collection of quotes related to this here.

The Origin of Evil… Calvinist’s Say God, Same as the Atheist

Published by Papa Giorgio

CLICK TO ENLARGE

(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.

See my other posts on this topic:

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.

The below is from my “Challenges To Strict 5-Point Calvinism | Tozer/Winger/Geisler/Lewis“

“Divine Goodness”

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

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

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

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

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

CS Lewis | The Problem of Pain (Chapter 3)

“Human Wickedness”

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

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

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

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

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

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

[….]

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

CS Lewis | The Problem of Pain (Chapter 4)

Is Evil Proof Against God? Where Does It Come From?

Published by Papa Giorgio

Originally posted January of 2016 – fixed some media today

Description of the above video:

  • If there is a God, why is there so much evil? How could any God that cares about right and wrong allow so much bad to happen? And if there is no God, who then determines what is right and what is wrong? The answers to these questions, as Boston College philosopher Peter Kreeft explains, go to the heart of ethics, morality and how we know what it means to be a decent person.

The moment you say that one set of moral ideas can be better than another, you are, in fact, measuring them both by a standard, saying that one of them conforms to that standard more nearly than the other. But the standard that measures two things is something different from either.

[….]

My argument against God was that the universe seemed so cruel and unjust. But how had I got this idea of just and unjust? A man does not call a line crooked unless he has some idea of a straight line. What was I comparing this universe with when I called it unjust?

C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 2002), 13, 38.

Description of the above video:

  • Isn’t human suffering proof that a just, all-powerful God must not exist? On the contrary, says Boston College Professor of Philosophy Peter Kreeft. How can “suffering” exist without an objective standard against which to judge it? Absent a standard, there is no justice. If there is no justice, there is no injustice. And if there is no injustice, there is no suffering. On the other hand, if justice exists, God exists. In five minutes, learn more.

Description of the above video:

  • A student asks a question of Ravi Zacharias about God condemning people [atheists] to hell. This Q&A occurred after a presentation Ravi gave at Harvard University, and is now one of his most well-known responses in the apologetic sub-culture. This is an updated version to my 2nd edit of this on my YouTube.

Description of the above video:

  • Is evil rational? If it is, then how can we depend on reason alone to make a better world? Best-selling author Dennis Prager has a challenging answer.

Description of the above video:

  • Atheists Trying to Have Their Cake and Eat It Too on Morality. This video shows that when an atheist denies objective morality they also affirm moral good and evil without the thought of any contradiction or inconsistency on their part.

EVERY ONE HAS HEARD people quarreling. Sometimes it sounds funny and sometimes it sounds merely unpleasant; but however it sounds, I believe we can learn something very important from listening to the kinds of things they say. They say things like this: “How’d you like it if anyone did the same to you?”–‘That’s my seat, I was there first”–“Leave him alone, he isn’t doing you any harm”–“Why should you shove in first?”–“Give me a bit of your orange, I gave you a bit of mine”–“Come on, you promised.” People say things like that every day, educated people as well as uneducated, and children as well as grown-ups.

Now what interests me about all these remarks is that the man who makes them is not merely saying that the other man’s behavior does not happen to please him. He is appealing to some kind of standard of behavior which he expects the other man to know about. And the other man very seldom replies: “To hell with your standard.” Nearly always he tries to make out that what he has been doing does not really go against the standard, or that if it does there is some special excuse. He pretends there is some special reason in this particular case why the person who took the seat first should not keep it, or that things were quite different when he was given the bit of orange, or that some thing has turned up which lets him off keeping his promise. It looks, in fact, very much as if both parties had in mind some kind of Law or Rule of fair play or decent behavior or morality or whatever you like to call it, about which they really agreed. And they have. If they had not, they might, of course, fight like animals, but they could not quarrel in the human sense of the word. Quarreling means trying to show that the other man is in the wrong. And there would be no sense in trying to do that unless you and he had some sort of agreement as to what Right and Wrong are; just as there would be no sense in saying that a footballer had committed a foul unless there was some agreement about the rules of football.

(accuser) “How’d you like it if anyone did the same to you?”

(responder) “Your right, I apologize.”

(accuser) “That’s my seat, I was there first!”

(responder) “Your right, you were. Here you go.”

(accuser) “Give me a bit of your orange, I gave you a bit of mine.”

(responder) “Oh gosh, I forgot, here you go.”

(accuser) “Come on, you promised.”

(responder) “Your right, lets go to the movies.”

Now this Law or Rule about Right and Wrong used to be called the Law of Nature. Nowadays, when we talk of the “laws of nature” we usually mean things like gravitation, or heredity, or the laws of chemistry. But when the older thinkers called the Law of Right and Wrong “the Law of Nature,” they really meant the Law of Human Nature. The idea was that, just as all bodies are governed by the law of gravitation and organisms by biological laws, so the creature called man also had his law–with this great difference, that a body could not choose whether it obeyed the law of gravitation or not, but a man could choose either to obey the Law of Human Nature or to disobey it.

This law was called the Law of Nature because people thought that every one knew it by nature and did not need to be taught it. They did not mean, of course, that you might not find an odd individual here and there who did not know it, just as you find a few people who are color-blind or have no ear for a tune. But taking the race as a whole, they thought that the human idea of decent behavior was obvious to every one. And I believe they were right. If they were not, then all the things we said about the war were nonsense. What was the sense in saying the enemy were in the wrong unless Right is a real thing which the Nazis at bottom knew as well as we did and ought to have practiced! If they had no notion of what we mean by right, then, though we might still have had to fight them, we could no more have blamed them for that than for the color of their hair.

I know that some people say the idea of a Law of Nature or decent behavior known to all men is unsound, because different civilizations and different ages have had quite different moralities.

But this is not true. There have been differences between their moralities, but these have never amounted to anything like a total difference. If anyone will take the trouble to compare the moral teaching of, say, the ancient Egyptians, Babylonians, Hindus, Chinese, Creeks and Romans, what will really strike him will be how very like they are to each other and to our own. Some of the evidence for this I have put together in the appendix of another book called The Abolition of Man; but for our present purpose I need only ask the reader to think what a totally different morality would mean. Think of a country where people were admired for running away in battle, or where a man felt proud of double-crossing all the people who had been kindest to him. You might just as well try to imagine a country where two and two made five. Men have differed as regards what people you ought to be unselfish to–whether it was only your own family, or your fellow countrymen, or everyone. But they have always agreed that you ought not to put Yourself first. selfishness has never been admired. Men have differed as to whether you should have one wife or four. But they have always agreed that you must not simply have any woman you liked.

But the most remarkable thing is this. Whenever you find a man who says he does not believe in a real Right and Wrong, you will find the same man going back on this a moment later. He may break his promise to you, but if you try breaking one to him he will be complaining “It’s not fair” before you can say Jack Robinson. A nation may say treaties do not matter; but then, next minute, they spoil their case by saying that the particular treaty they want to break was an unfair one. But if treaties do not matter, and if there is no such thing as Right and Wrong–in other words, if there is no Law of Nature–what is the difference between a fair treaty and an unfair one? Have they not let the cat out of the bag and shown that, whatever they say, they really know the Law of Nature just like anyone else?

It seems, then, we are forced to believe in a real Right and Wrong People may be sometimes mistaken about them, just as people sometimes get their sums wrong; but they are not a matter of mere taste and opinion any more than the multiplication table. Now if we are agreed about that, I go on to my next point, which is this. None of us are really keeping the Law of Nature. If there are any exceptions among you, 1 apologize to them. They had much better read some other work, for nothing I am going to say concerns them. And now, turning to the ordinary human beings who are left:

I hope you will not misunderstand what I am going to say. I am not preaching, and Heaven knows I do not pretend to be better than anyone else. I am only trying to call attention to a fact; the fact that this year, or this month, or, more likely, this very day, we have failed to practice ourselves the kind of behavior we expect from other people. There may be all sorts of excuses for us. That time you were so unfair to the children was when you were very tired. That slightly shady business about the money–the one you have almost forgotten-came when you were very hard up. And what you promised to do for old So-and-so and have never done–well, you never would have promised if you had known how frightfully busy you were going to be. And as for your behavior to your wife (or husband) or sister (or brother) if I knew how irritating they could be, I would not wonder at it–and who the dickens am I, anyway? I am just the same. That is to say, I do not succeed in keeping the Law of Nature very well, and the moment anyone tells me I am not keeping it, there starts up in my mind a string of excuses as long as your arm. The question at the moment is not whether they are good excuses. The point is that they are one more proof of how deeply, whether we like it or not, we believe in the Law of Nature. If we do not believe in decent behavior, why should we be so anxious to make excuses for not having behaved decently? The truth is, we believe in decency so much–we feel the Rule of Law pressing on us so–that we cannot bear to face the fact that we are breaking it, and consequently we try to shift the responsibility. For you notice that it is only for our bad behavior that we find all these explanations. It is only our bad temper that we put down to being tired or worried or hungry; we put our good temper down to ourselves.

These, then, are the two points I wanted to make. First, that human beings, all over the earth, have this curious idea that they ought to behave in a certain way, and cannot really get rid of it. Secondly, that they do not in fact behave in that way. They know the Law of Nature; they break it. These two facts are the foundation of all clear thinking about ourselves and the universe we live in.

C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity (New York, NY: Simon & Schuster, 1996), 17-21.

After reading that portion of CLASSIC Lewis, here is some thoughts from a philosopher that I disagree with on many points (he is an atheist after all), but he argues well for the following, even if later rejecting it:

If the reader is not familiar with Mere Christianity, I would urge him or her to buy it. The first chapter alone is worth the cost of the book. It is a brilliant piece of psychology. In it, Lewis sums up two crucial aspects of the human condition. We can see the first aspect in the passage quoted. Human beings do quarrel in the way Lewis describes. We are moral agents who cannot help feeling that there are some things we ought to do, and that there are other things we ought not to do. We believe, sometimes despite ourselves, that there is such a thing as right and wrong, and that there are certain principles of conduct to which we and all other human beings ought to adhere. In our dealings with other people we constantly appeal to those principles. We are quick to notice when others violate them. We get defensive and make excuses when it appears that we have violated them ourselves. We get defensive even when no one else is around. We accuse ourselves when no else does, and we rationalize our behavior in front of our consciences just as we would in front of another person. We cannot help applying to ourselves the principles we firmly believe apply to all. To use Alvin Plantinga’s term, the belief in morality is basic. Even when we reject that belief in our theoretical reasoning, it comes back to haunt us at every turn. We can never really get away from it. There is a reason why our legal system defines insanity as the inability to tell right from wrong: people who lack that ability have lost an important part of their humanity. They have taken a step down towards the level of beasts.

Even if, in our heart of hearts, we all believe in morality, we do not necessarily share the exact same moral values. Differences regarding values are at least a part of what we quarrel about. Yet Lewis correctly recognizes that our differences in this area never amount to a total difference. The moral beliefs human beings entertain display broad cross-cultural similarities. Ancient Egyptians did not appreciate having their property stolen any more than we do. A brother’s murder, a wife’s infidelity, or a friend’s betrayal would have angered them, just as it angers us. Human nature has not changed much for tens of thousands of years. It does not change at all when one travels to the other side of the globe.

I did not believe Lewis the first time I read him, or even the second time. This idea, that there is a fundamental underlying unity to the moral fabric of humanity, is a hard one to accept. Think about those suicidal fanatics who crashed planes into the World Trade Center. They “knew” they were doing the right thing, that Allah would reward them in heaven with virgins galore. How radically different from our own values the values of some Muslims must seem! Yet there is common ground. Even the most militant Muslims despise thieves, cheats, and liars, just as Christians. Jews, and atheists do. They value loyalty and friendship. just as we do. They love their children and their parents. just as we do. They even condemn murder, at least within their own societies. It is only when they deal with outsiders like us that some of them may seem like (and in fact, be) monsters. To distinguish between insiders and outsiders, and to treat the latter horribly, is actually not so unusual in human history. Expanding one’s “inside group” until it encompasses all of humanity is something of an innovation. When we consider all this, the moral gulf between us and them does not seem so unbridgeable. Our admittedly great differences occur against a background of fundamental similarities. Similarities guaranteed by the fact that we are all stuck being human. So it seems Lewis was right, despite my earlier skepticism. Universal moral themes can and do underpin the diversity of our moral opinions.

[….]

Moral statements, then, cannot be mere matters of taste and opinion. They essentially involve an appeal to principles that transcend both the wishes of any one individual, and the customs of any one culture or society. That there are such principles, and that we cannot really escape from them, are points Lewis successfully illuminates. It thus seems very plausible to suppose that when our moral statements appeal to these principles in an appropriate and rational manner, they deserve to be called truths.

Andrew Marker, The Ladder: Escaping from Plato’s Cave (iUniverse.com, 2010), 108-110, 111-112.

These two babies explain better:

Challenges To Strict 5-Point Calvinism | Tozer/Winger/Geisler/Lewis

Published by Papa Giorgio

This post will include lengthy excerpts combined with media… so buckle up buttercup!

  • Let him, therefore, who would beware of such unbelief, always bear in mind, that there is no random power, or agency, or motion in the creatures, who are so governed by the secret counsel of God, that nothing happens but what he has knowingly and willingly decreed. – John Calvin

I reject this strict interpretation by Calvin… Tozer reopens this “knowingly and willingly decreed” to a slightly different understanding that I see is a better fit to this mystery God has unveiled.

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.

Here is the excellent first question [of twenty] Mike was attempting to get to get through, which then prompted me to go thru a bunch of his videos. I will include links to those below the video I grabbed the response to that first question from:

Why God Hardens Hearts: Romans 9:17-24 (YouTube) – This topic is what, many years ago led me to come up with the idea that as God [in His perfect justice] and Man [in his freedom to rebel] working in a mystery together led to the eventual hardening of Pharoah’s heart. God’s perfect sovereignty and man’s limited freedom will culminate in God’s will/plan/glory being executed perfectly.

AND THIS IS A MYSTERY

Our freedoms — as such, and God’s sovereignty. Working in tandem. One of many mysteries involving an infinite Being: the Judeo/Christian God, YHWH.

  • “But I will harden Pharaoh’s heart and multiply my signs and wonders in the land of Egypt.”  – Exodus 7:3
  • “But the LORD hardened Pharaoh’s heart and he did not listen to them, as the LORD had told Moses.” – Exodus 9:12
  • “Then the Lord said to Moses, ‘Go to Pharaoh, for I have hardened his heart and the heart of his servants, that I may show these signs of mine among them.’” – Exodus 10:1
  • “I will harden Pharaoh’s heart so that he will pursue them. Then I will receive glory by means of Pharaoh and all his army, and the Egyptians will know that I am the LORD.” So the Israelites did this.” – Exodus 14:4
  • “The LORD hardened the heart of Pharaoh king of Egypt, and he pursued the Israelites, who were going out defiantly.” – Exodus 14:8

— combined with Romans 1:18-25:

For God’s wrath is revealed from heaven against all godlessness and unrighteousness of people who by their unrighteousness suppress the truth, since what can be known about God is evident among them, because God has shown it to them. For his invisible attributes, that is, his eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly seen since the creation of the world, being understood through what he has made. As a result, people are without excuse. For though they knew God, they did not glorify him as God or show gratitude. Instead, their thinking became worthless, and their senseless hearts were darkened. Claiming to be wise, they became fools and exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images resembling mortal man, birds, four-footed animals, and reptiles.

Therefore God delivered them over in the desires of their hearts to sexual impurity, so that their bodies were degraded among themselves. They exchanged the truth of God for a lie, and worshiped and served what has been created instead of the Creator, who is praised forever. Amen.

A good dealing with the order of the verbs in these and other passages of the hardening of Pharoah’s heart is HERE (it is a must read in my opinion, even though it is long). The author is more on the hard-Armenian side of the aisle, but nonetheless his treatment of the issue is one I made years ago. I believe both the strict 5-pointer and the Arminian over-step their bound like we try to relegate the Trinity to water/ice/steam. We all misuse language in trying to describe the God who saved us, and we will continue in this failure/endeavor in our discussions. Thankfully the Holy Spirit is the giver of real Truth by pointing us to Jesus for the Glory of the Father:

… fundamentally, the way we know Christianity to be true is by the self-authenticating witness of God’s Holy Spirit. Now what do I mean by that? I mean that the experience of the Holy Spirit is veridical and unmistakable (though not necessarily irresistible or indubitable) for him who has it; that such a person does not need supplementary arguments or evidence in order to know and to know with confidence that he is in fact experiencing the Spirit of God; that such experience does not function in this case as a premise in any argument from religious experience to God, but rather is the immediate experiencing of God himself; that in certain contexts the experience of the Holy Spirit will imply the apprehension of certain truths of the Christian religion, such as “God exists,” “I am condemned by God,” “I am reconciled to God,” “Christ lives in me,” and so forth; that such an experience Provides one not only with a subjective assurance of Christianity’s truth, but with objective knowledge of that truth; and that arguments and evidence incompatible with that truth are overwhelmed by the experience of the Holy Spirit for him who attends fully to it.

William Lane Craig, Reasonable Faith: Christian Truth and Apologetics, 3rd ed. (Wheaton, IL: Crossway Books, 2008), 43

Other Mike Winger YouTube discussions are…

BTW, there are many debates I have watched on this topic by James White. I highly recommend Dr. White and his ministry, they have had a huge apologetic influence on me over the years.

I also use thinking over the years to note this idea of God’s sovereignty and foreknowledge in my life in a two page testimony I use this graphic in:

Another influential apologetics “coach” in my life was Dr. Norman Geisler. Here is a presentation I uploaded for this post:

CS LEWIS was another huge influence on my apologetic life. I noted in his book, The Problem of Pain, this part from chapter 3 and 4,

“Divine Goodness”

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

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

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

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

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

CS Lewis | The Problem of Pain (Chapter 3)

“Human Wickedness”

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

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

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

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

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

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

[….]

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

CS Lewis | The Problem of Pain (Chapter 4)

Needless to say I have been privy to this debate since the 80’s.

I like to say I am a Baptist except for dress and drink… but a Baptist nonetheless. I am not a 1689 Confession type Baptist. I have always joked that I am a 3.5 Calvinist when I read Norman Geisler, and a 4.5 Calvinist when I read James White.

No more.

This next part comes from a post about preaching the Gospel to ourselves. And in the middle of this post I have the following. And THE REASON I put that there was to note that a majority of Calvinists give lip play to a distinction between “total” and “utter” depravity, but many use language and ideas to the “utter” end of the spectrum.

A TEACHING BREAK

A spiritually dead person, then, is in need of spiritual life from God. But he does exist, and he can know and choose. His faculties that make up the image of God are not absent; they are simply incapable of initiating or attaining their own salvation. Like a drowning person, a fallen person can reach out and accept the lifeline even though he cannot make it to safety on his own.

The below is from Geisler’s book, Chosen but Free:

Sproul has a wonderful ministry, and he [Sproul] has asked ~ rhetorically ~ how: anyone could be involved in believing in the value of human worth and at the same time believing in TOTAL depravity? He responds:

The very fact that Calvinists take sin so seriously is because they take the value of human beings so seriously. It is because man was made in the image of God, called to mirror and reflect God’s holiness, that we have the distinction of being the image-bearers of God.

But what does ‘total depravity’ mean? Total depravity means simply this: that sin affects every aspect of our human existence: our minds, our wills and our bodies are affected by sin. Every dimension of our personality suffers at some point from the weight of sin that has infected the human race.

So the argument is nuanced and deep.

Thus I split the horns and end up tweaking some of the 5-points, and getting rid of others.

Again:

  • Let him, therefore, who would beware of such unbelief, always bear in mind, that there is no random power, or agency, or motion in the creatures, who are so governed by the secret counsel of God, that nothing happens but what he has knowingly and willingly decreed. – John Calvin

I do not take that as Gospel Truth, in other words. The following graph serves as a good comparison between the two (larger here):

 

Wisdom from Chapter 4 of “God In The Dock” | CS LEWIS

Published by Papa Giorgio

These are all from the audio version of the 4th chapter (Answers to Questions on Christianity) in CS Lewis’ collection of essays, God in the Dock. These are small clips I isolated as a group and I read through this chapter. Enjoy

CS Lewis On Being Christ Like

Christian Suffering and Relations with God | CS LEWIS

Cantankerous Christians

CS Lewis’ “Hotel of Discomfort”

Philosophical Naturalism (Self-Stultifying) | CS LEWIS

For the above video:

  • Determinism is self-stultifying. If my mental processes are totally determined, I am totally determined either to accept or to reject determinism. But if the sole reason for my believing or not believing X is that I am causally determined to believe it I have no ground for holding that my judgment is true or false.

Huw Parri Owen, Christian Theism: A Study in its Basic Principles (Edinburgh, London: T & T Clark, 1984), 118-119; originally found in, J.P. Moreland and William Lane Craig, Philosophical Foundations for a Christian Worldview (Downers Grove, IL: IVP Academic, 2003) 241.

ROBOTS AND COSMIC PUPPETRY: THE SCIENTIFIC CHALLENGE TO FREEDOM

Since at least the time of Sir Isaac Newton, scientists and philosophers impressed by the march of science have offered a picture of human behavior that is not promising for a belief in freedom. All nature is viewed by them as one huge mechanism, with human beings serving as just parts of that giant machine. On this view, we live and think in accordance with the same laws and causes that move all other physical components of the universal mechanism.

According to these thinkers, everything that happens in nature has a cause. Suppose then that an event occurs, which, in context, is clearly a human action of the sort that we would normally call free. As an occurrence in this universe, it has a cause. But then that cause, in turn, has a cause. And that cause in turn has a cause, and so on, and so on [remember, reductionism].

  • “Everything is determined, the beginning as well as the end, by forces over which we have no control. It is determined for the insect as well as for the star. Human beings, vegetables, or cosmic dust, we all dance to a mysterious tune, intoned in the distance by an invisible player” ~ Albert Einstein.

As a result of this scientific world view, we get the following picture:

  • Natural conditions outside our control…
  • cause…
  • Inner bodily and brain states,
  • which cause…
  •  mental and physical actions

But if this is true, then you are, ultimately, just a conduit or pipeline for chains of natural causation that reach far back into the past before your birth and continue far forward into the future after your death. You are not an originating cause of anything [this includes brain activity of all degrees, that is, love, pain, etc.). Nothing you ever do is due to your choices or thoughts alone. You are a puppet of nature. You are no more than a robot programmed by an unfeeling cosmos.

Psychologists talk about heredity and environment as responsible for everything you do. But then if they are, you aren’t. Does it follow that you can then do as you please, irresponsibly? Not at all. It only follows that you will do as nature and nurture please. But then, nature on this picture turns out to be just an illusory veil over a heartless, uncaring nature. You have what nature gives you. Nothing more, nothing less.

Where is human freedom in this picture? It doesn’t exist. It is one of our chief illusions. The natural belief in free will is just a monstrous falsehood. But we should not feel bad about holding on to this illusion until science corrects us. We can’t have helped it.

This reasoning is called The Challenge of Scientific Determinism. According to determinists, we are determined in every respect to do everything that we ever do.

This again is a serious challenge to human freedom. It is the reason that the early scientist Pierre Laplace (1749-1827) once said that if you could give a super-genius a total description of the universe at any given point in time, that being would be able to predict with certainty everything that would ever happen in the future relative to that moment, and retrodict with certainty anything that had ever happened in any moment before that described state. Nature, he believed, was that perfect machine. And we human beings were just cogs in the machine, deluded in our beliefs that we are free.

Tom Morris, Philosophy for Dummies (Foster City, CA: IDG Books; 1999), 133-134.

The Narnia Code (2009) | BBC

Published by Papa Giorgio

This was a video I played as part of an adult Sunday school class when the leader went on a missions journey to India. It is a documentary examining claims that CS Lewis’s Narnia Chronicles contain a hidden meaning.

CS Lewis wrote the Narnia Chronicles over 50 years ago, yet they are more popular today than ever. When they were first published, many critics thought them little more than childish scribblings, replete with random characters and unexplained events. Even Lewis’s good friend JRR Tolkien thought them confused and misconceived.

Other scholars were sure there was something more, something hidden beneath the stories. Although many tried, none could find this secret key of Narnia – until now. Dr Michael Ward, a young academic and expert in all things Lewisian, claims he has found the answer at last: he has discovered the Narnia Code.

Using dramatisations of Lewis’s early life and career, the programme travels the world, from the Mid-West of modern America to the battlefields of the First World War, meeting experts, testing evidence and uncovering surprising questions and ideas that still challenge readers today.

Trump’s “for every new regulation 2 have to go”

Published by Papa Giorgio

The reason for bringing two older posts (2022 and 2021) together and combining them with this Forbes article about Trump’s promise is simple… the Republican base wants less government interference – that is me, the GOP base. The Democrat base wants increased government interference in our daily lives.

Why this “adding of the FORBES article” as a preface of these other posts?

I was asked on the way out of a gathering by a family friend over this past weekend “why I [she] should vote for Trump?” I believe the question COULD HAVE BEEN asked for varying reasons, and as I write a couple of them, keep in mind the opposite could be true:

  • She is a diehard Democrat who is honestly is trying to understand the opposing view of almost half of the voting public. (Alternatively, she thinks that there is no foundation or good reason to vote for Trump and is trying to show the superiority of being “anti-racist” [in modern parlance] or progressive to the point that her vision of caring for the downtrodden is a way to “show up” [so-to-speak] the other side by being on the side of angels.);
  • She is a life-long Democrat who sees the attacks on things such as free-speech and gender and is dismayed on how quickly the political culture of her party has changed and is struggling with where her vote should land. (Alternatively, she supports these agendas, whether in good faith or not [based on false agendas and political propaganda] and is dismayed by the Republican Party — which is defined with these ideas in mind:

sexist, intolerant, xenophobic, homophobic, Islamophobic, racist, bigoted (S.I.X.H.I.R.B.)

HILLARY’S version:

  • “You know, to just be grossly generalistic, you could put half of Trump’s supporters into what I call the basket of deplorables. Right? The racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamophobic—you name it. And unfortunately, there are people like that. And he [Trump] has lifted them up.”

  • Etc, etc.

I think, as human beings – me included – are as complicated as the day is long and we battle many influences and experiences and habits… it would be in some measure a combination of all of the above and much more. I carry many prejudices and experiences that I try to temper with faith, accountability, and checking myself through reading and discussion [putting my viewpoint out in the public to be peer reviewed – sorta].

The largest difference I can point out between her political and economic viewpoint vs. my demographic of religiously conservatarianism is that she thinks mankind and men/women in general are good people… and I believe they are corrupted and fallen in the real sense of original sin.

These two opposite views come out in different senses, say, economics by way of example. Keynsian Economics, the guiding principle founder of much of the Democrat Party’s direction of their economic planning:

John Maynard Keynes hailed the Soviet Union in a 1936 radio interview as,

“engaged in a vast administrative task of making a completely new set of social and economic institutions work smoothly and successfully.”

And in a preface he wrote to the 1936 German edition of his General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money, Keynes stated that his economic theory,

“is much more easily adapted to the conditions of a totalitarian state” than to “conditions of free competition and a large measure of laissez-faire.” (this quote and the above is from James Bovard’s book Freedom in Chains: The Rise of the State and the Demise of the Citizen, pp. 14,20,21)

Another Keynes quote lets the individual in on the result of his theories, which most nations use (i.e., central banking; e.g., the Federal Reserve Bank):

“By a continuous process of inflation, governments can confiscate, secretly and unobserved, an important part of the wealth of their citizens. By this method, they not only confiscate, but they confiscate arbitrarily; and while the process impoverishes many, it actually enriches some . . .. The process engages all of the hidden forces of economic law on the side of destruction, and does it in a manner that not one man in a million can diagnose.”  (Partially quoted from Money Mischief: Episodes in Monetary History, by Noble Prize holder in economics, Milton Friedman.)

This last quote is what happens with Keynesian economics!  An unseen taxation of citizens, on top of normal taxation.

Versus

According to Adam Smith, it is when the businessman “intends only his own gain” that he contributes— via the process of competition— to promote the social good “more effectually than when he really intends to promote it.” Smith added: “I have never known much good done by those who affected to trade for the public good.”

Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (New York: Modern Library, 1937), p. 423; from, Thomas Sowell, A Conflict of Visions: Ideological Origins of Political Struggles (New York, NY: basic Books, 2007), 57.

I can imagine no man who will look with more horror on the End than a conscientious revolution­ary who has, in a sense sincerely, been justifying cruelties and injustices inflicted on millions of his contemporaries by the benefits which he hopes to confer on future generations: generations who, as one terrible moment now reveals to him, were never going to exist. Then he will see the massacres, the faked trials, the deportations, to be all ineffaceably real, an essential part, his part, in the drama that has just ended: while the future Utopia had never been anything but a fantasy.

C.S. Lewis, The World’s Last Night, p. 131.

Of all tyrannies, a tyranny exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It may be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron’s cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience. They may be more likely to go to Heaven yet at the same time likelier to make a Hell of earth. Their very kindness stings with intolerable insult. To be ‘cured’ against one’s will and cured of states which we may not regard as disease is to be put on a level of those who have not yet reached the age of reason or those who never will; to be classed with infants, imbeciles, and domestic animals.

  1. S. Lewis, God in the Dock, p. 292.

My own affections have been deeply wounded by some of the martyrs to this cause [the French Revolution], but rather than it should have failed, I would have seen half the earth desolated.

Thomas Jefferson, Letter of January 3, 1793, The Portable Thomas Jefferson, ed. Merrill D. Peterson (New York: Penguin Books, 1975), p. 465; from, Thomas Sowell, A Conflict of Visions: Ideological Origins of Political Struggles (New York, NY: basic Books, 2007), 29.

Simply put, one side thinks mankind can qualitatively guide by elitism our economy and lives, whereas the other side does not. “The larger the government the smaller the individual.”

So, with this unnecessarily long introduction, let us get into the FORBES article:

Bookending four years of its infamous one-in, two-out requirement for issuing significant new regulations, the Trump administration quietly just released its status roundup called “Regulatory Reform Results for Fiscal Year 2020.”

According to the administration, agencies in the 2020 fiscal year issued 145 deregulatory actions and 45 significant regulatory actions, for an out-to-in ratio of 3.2 to one.

Of those deregulatory actions, 58 were deemed “significant” by agencies and the administration. Comparing significant-in to significant-out still gives a ratio of 1.3 to one.

[….]

The overall ratio for the entire four-year stretch is 2.5 to one. And since rules considered non-significant may be used to offset significant rules added per E.O. 13,771, the ratios are actually better, as each year’s respective roundup at the White House shows.  

We are not engaging here the debates over whether the cuts in regulations are genuinely highly significant or overblown. Employing different methodologies, the Council of Economic Advisers for its part estimated far more savings from a separate set of Trump-era reforms than the OMB’s year-end reports have claimed. 

But nor does this survey address the warning signs of Trump’s own regulatory actions taken, sometimes of the sort that do not appear in White House Office of Management and Budget compilations. Examples include antitrust regulation, regulation of online content (or the pursuit of it), federal guidance on artificial intelligence, trade restrictions and more. These are capable of swamping regulatory savings.

Note also that E.O. 13771 did not apply to non-significant rules added (although in the year-end updates and in the new Unified Agenda editions, these “Regulatory” actions were also identified). Nor did the Trump order apply to rules mandated by Congress as opposed to ones driven by agency discretion; nor to rules from the so-called independent agencies like the Federal Communications Commission and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.

In any event, the leading edge of the one-in, two-out has been the claimed capping of spending rather than the ratio of cuts to additions. Criticisms notwithstanding, other presidents have not implemented a program as ambitious as Trump’s.

We know the generation of new regulations dropped significantly under Trump. But in terms of rollbacks, it would naturally become harder for an administration acting alone (with no help from Congress) to pick the “significant deregulatory action” fruit over time capable of generating rapid rule and cost rollbacks. Major rollbacks like those involving Clean Power Plan and Waters of the United States rules entail years of public consultation, writing, and legal challenges. 

So, for the record and for posterity, Table 1 below presents the inventory of the significant regulatory actions eliminated by the Trump administration per E.O. 13,771, broken down by agency as derived from the administration’s fiscal year 2020 chart. Table 2 presents the significant regulations added….

So, was it as “successful” as Trump said or hoped it to be.

No.

Sounds like a politician or contractor to me – no surprise there.

Was it successful in shrinking control over the American business man/woman?

Yes….

which leads into why we should all want to shrink the role of government in our every-day lives:

TWO OLDER POSTS

Here are the two articles mentioned in the below audio by Armstrong and Getty (Hour 1 Thursday, and Hour 3 – same day):

  • America’s Welfare State Is on Borrowed Time — Biden has fully embraced the mad goal of giving 98% of the population lavish benefits at no cost. (WALL STREET JOURNAL | THE RED LINE [no pay wall])
  • Democrats Are Killing the American Dream — Joe Biden’s American Families Plan replaces individual striving with middle class entitlements. (WALL STREET JOURNAL | BLACK REPUBLICAN)

REASON.COM has been on fire as of late:

Since the start of the Covid crisis, the American economy has been turned on its head. Times are good for the big guys — Big Business and Big Government. But what about for the small business owner, the personification of the American dream? Carol Roth discusses Crony Corporatism/Capitalism and is the author of, “The War on Small Business: How the Government Used the Pandemic to Crush the Backbone of America“

UPDATED my “BAM! What Is Crony Capitalism“ with this Prager U video.

Modern Man’s “Red Herring”

Published by Papa Giorgio

ORIGINALLY POSTED IN JANUARY OF 2014

Jump to Bradley Monton’s Isaac Newton and the methodological method.

... LAWS!

  • Newton is a leading contributor to the scientific worldview, and yet he does not bind himself by the assumption of uninterruptible natural law ~ Bradley Monton
  • The divine art of miracle is not an art of suspending the pattern to which events conform but of feeding new events into that pattern ~ CS Lewis
  • Meredith’s whole argument about ID, miracles, and the so-called “breaking” of natural laws is nothing but a red herring. Again, the real issue is about the nature of causation not about natural law ~ Michael Flannery

In the most recent issue of FIRST THINGS (February 2014), Stephen Meredith attempted to critique Intelligent Design theory, by, essentially creating straw-men arguments or by debating issues others have dealt with well.

Later in this “short” review of topics that caught my critical eye, we will see the similar vein John Derbyshire takes in the January/February (2014) issue of The American Spectator in comparing ID to Islam.

AT LEAST American Spectator had the foresight to have an alternative view side-by-side, so you get to see what an erudite, idea filled presentation looks like (Stephen Meyer’s)…

— a portion of which I will publish at the bottom from a magazine I recommend highly —

…alongside another filled with fallacious arguments, non-sequiturs, and a lack of intelligence in laying out a positive case (John Derbyshire).

First, however, my mind went immediately to David Hume and CS Lewis after reading the following from Stephen Meredith in the First Things article:

If God is omnipotent—that is, can do all that is possible without self-contradiction—what is the re­lationship between God and causality? Is there any causality outside an omnipotent God? Or is anything in nature that seems to act as an efficient cause only carrying out the causality of God, with no agency of its own? These questions get to the heart of a philosophical problem posed by Intelligent Design: It supposes that natural law, which is the basis for science, operates most of the time but is periodically suspended, as in the Cambrian “explosion” and the origin of life itself.
As well as reading John Derbyshire in the American Spectator article:
…IT IS THE religious aspect that causes most scientists to shy away from ID. Not that scientists all hate God. Many of them are devout.…

…The metaphysics of ID is occasionalist. It holds, to abbreviate the doctrine rather drasti­cally, that causation is an illusion; that every­thing happens because God makes it happen.

Why does ice float on water? Aristotle thought it was a matter of shape (see On the Heavens, IV.6). Science says it’s because ice is less dense than water. The occasionalist says it’s because God wills it so….

…But: Ice floats on water because God wills it so? Oh.

This straw-man built up by Mr. Derbyshire seems likewise heavily influenced by Hume, who said in his well known essay entitled, An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, the following:
“A miracle is a violation of the laws of nature; and as a firm and unalterable experience has established these laws, the proof against a miracle, from the very nature of the fact, is as entire as any argument from experience as can be imagined  … It is no miracle that a man, seemingly in good health, should die on a sudden: because such a kind of death, though more unusual than any other, has yet been frequently observed to happen. But it is a miracle that a dead man should come to life; because that has never been observed, in any age or country. There must, therefore, be a uniform experience against every miraculous event, otherwise the event would not merit that appellation.”

(David Hume: The Essential Philosophical Works, eBook, [2012], pages 662 and 663)

JOHN LENNOX breaks down Hume’s argument thus:
A. Argument from the uniformity of nature:

1. Miracles are violations of the laws of nature
2. These laws have been established by ‘firm and unalterable’ experience
3. Therefore, the argument against miracle is as good as any argument from experience can be

B.  Argument from the uniformity of experience:

1. Unusual, yet frequently observed, events are not miracles – like a healthy person suddenly dropping dead
2. A resurrection would be a miracle because it has never been observed anywhere at any time
3. There is uniform experience against every miraculous event, otherwise it would not be called miraculous

Dr. Lennox continues:

Are miracles ‘violations of the laws of nature’

Argument 1.    Hume says that accounts of miracles ‘are observed chiefly to abound among ignorant and barbarous nations’ (op.cit. p.79).

Fallacy. In order to recognize some event as a miracle, there must be some perceived regularity to which that event is an apparent exception! You cannot recognize something which is abnormal, if you do not know what is normal. Example: 1) virgin conception of Jesus; 2) conception of John the Baptist.

Argument 2.    Now that we know the laws of nature, belief in miracles is impossible.

Fallacy. The danger of confusion between legal and scientific use of word law. Why it is inaccurate and misleading to say that miracles ‘violate’ the laws of nature. It is rather, that God feeds new events into the system from time to time. There is no alteration to or suspension of the laws themselves.   

‘If God annihilates or creates or deflects a unit of matter, He has created a new situation at that point.  Immediately all nature domiciles this new situation, makes it at home in her realm, adapts all other events to it. It finds itself conforming to all the laws. If God creates a miraculous spermatozoon in the body of a virgin, it does not proceed to break any laws. The laws at once take over. Nature is ready. Pregnancy follows, according to all the normal laws, and nine months later a child is born’ (C.S Lewis, Miracles. p.63).

Continuing with CS Lewis and his relating to us this “red herring” of naturalism in rejecting the miraculous/metaphysical aspects of reality:
The first Red Herring is this. Any day you may hear a man (and not necessarily a disbeliever in God) say of some alleged miracle, “No. Of course I don’t believe that. We know it is contrary to the laws of Nature. People could believe it in olden times because they didn’t know the laws of Nature. We know now that it is a scientific impossibility.”

By the “laws of Nature” such a man means, I think, the ob­served course of Nature. If he means anything more than that he is not the plain man I take him for but a philosophic Natu­ralist and will be dealt with in the next chapter. The man I have in view believes that mere experience (and specially those artificially contrived experiences which we call Exper­iments) can tell us what regularly happens in Nature. And he finks that what we have discovered excludes the possibility of Miracle. This is a confusion of mind.

Granted that miracles can occur, it is, of course, for experi­ence to say whether one has done so on any given occasion. But mere experience, even if prolonged for a million years, cannot tell us whether the thing is possible. Experiment finds out what regularly happens in Nature: the norm or rule to which she works. Those who believe in miracles are not deny­ing that there is such a norm or rule: they are only saying that it can be suspended. A miracle is by definition an exception.

[….]

The idea that the progress of science has somehow altered this question is closely bound up with the idea that people “in olden times” believed in them “because they didn’t know the laws of Nature.” Thus you will hear people say, “The early Christians believed that Christ was the son of a virgin, but we know that this is a scientific impossibility.” Such people seem to have an idea that belief in miracles arose at a period when men were so ignorant of the cause of nature that they did not perceive a miracle to be contrary to it. A moment’s thought shows this to be nonsense: and the story of the Virgin Birth is a particularly striking example. When St. Joseph discovered that his fiancee was going to have a baby, he not unnaturally decided to repudiate her. Why? Because he knew just as well as any modern gynaecologist that in the ordinary course of na­ture women do not have babies unless they have lain with men. No doubt the modern gynaecologist knows several things about birth and begetting which St. Joseph did not know. But those things do not concern the main point—that a virgin birth is contrary to the course of nature. And St. Joseph obviously knew that. In any sense in which it is true to say now, “The thing is scientifically impossible,” he would have said the same: the thing always was, and was always known to be, impossible unless the regular processes of nature were, in this particular case, being over-ruled or supple­mented by something from beyond nature. When St. Joseph finally accepted the view that his fiancee’s pregnancy was due not to unchastity but to a miracle, he accepted the miracle as something contrary to the known order of nature. All records

[….]

It is therefore inaccurate to define a miracle as something that breaks the laws of Nature. It doesn’t. If I knock out my pipe I alter the position of a great many atoms: in the long run, and to an infinitesimal degree, of all the atoms there are. Nature digests or assimilates this event with perfect ease and harmonises it in a twinkling with all other events. It is one more bit of raw material for the laws to apply to, and they ap­ply. I have simply thrown one event into the general cataract of events and it finds itself at home there and conforms to all other events. If God annihilates or creates or deflects a unit of matter He has created a new situation at that point. Imme­diately all Nature domiciles this new situation, makes it at home in her realm, adapts all other events to it. It finds itself conforming to all the laws. If God creates a miraculous sper­matozoon in the body of a virgin, it does not proceed to break any laws. The laws at once take it over. Nature is ready. Preg­nancy follows, according to all the normal laws, and nine months later a child is born. We see every day that physical nature is not in the least incommoded by the daily inrush of events from biological nature or from psychological nature. If events ever come from beyond Nature altogether, she will be no more incommoded by them. Be sure she will rush to the point where she is invaded, as the defensive forces rush to a cut in our finger, and there hasten to accommodate the new­comer. The moment it enters her realm it obeys all her laws. Miraculous wine will intoxicate, miraculous conception will lead to pregnancy, inspired books will suffer all the ordinary processes of textual corruption, miraculous bread will be di­gested. The divine art of miracle is not an art of suspending the pattern to which events conform but of feeding new events into that pattern.

[….]

A miracle is emphatically not an event without cause or without results. Its cause is the activity of God: its results fol­low according to Natural law. In the forward direction (i.e. during the time which follows its occurrence) it is interlocked with all Nature just like any other event. Its peculiarity is that it is not in that way interlocked backwards, interlocked with the previous history of Nature. And this is just what some people find intolerable. The reason they find it intolerable is that they start by taking Nature to be the whole of reality. And they are sure that all reality must be interrelated and consistent. I agree with them. But I think they have mistaken a partial system within reality, namely Nature, for the whole.

CS Lewis, Miracles (New York, NY: Touchstone Publishers, 1996), 62-63, 64-65, 80-81, 81-82.

This is mainly the point Michael Flannery makes near the end of this portion of his critique of the First Things article, entitled: “Writing in First Things, Stephen Meredith Offers Confusion in the Guise of Critique“:

…He [Stephen Meredith]  has

1) a faulty view of ID’s relationship to nature, miracles, and the supernatural;

2) no clear definition of what ID really is; and

3) an erroneous view of much of the history related to ID, evolution, and theology.

In company with John Derbyshire, Meredith, insists that ID proponents are “occasionalists,” holding to a particular theological understanding of causation. As occasionalists they do “not credit natural or physical law with enough causal power to enact evolution on its own.” Instead they “educe supernatural causes to do most of the heavy lifting in worldly events.” This is a fundamental misunderstanding. ID does not require the “breaking” of natural law or the notion that a natural law would have done X but instead Y happened. As William A. Dembski has pointed out, ID doesn’t need this “counterfactual substitution.” People act, for example, as intelligent agents not by “breaking” or “suspending” natural laws but by arranging or front-loading laws to suite particular ends (The Design Revolution, pp. 181-182). Meredith seems to argue that ID is incongruous with modern science because it invokes miracles and yields to supernatural causes. Here Meredith is making an old mistake, called out again by Dembski: “The contrast between natural law and supernatural causes is the wrong contrast. The proper contrast is between undirected natural causes on the one hand and intelligent causes on the other” (p. 189).

Furthermore, Meredith’s concern regarding miracles contravening natural laws seems to suggest a position of tension between the miraculous and science itself. However, this is not a scientific position. It is a philosophical one suggestive of methodological naturalism. “Scientists, as scientists,” Norman Geisler explains, “need not be so narrow as to believe that nothing can ever count as a miracle. All a scientist needs to hold is the premise that every event has a cause and that the observable universe operates in an orderly way” (Baker Encyclopedia of Christian Apologetics, p. 467). Meredith’s whole argument about ID, miracles, and the so-called “breaking” of natural laws is nothing but a red herring. Again, the real issue is about the nature of causation not about natural law…

Even atheist philosophers refute the idea that to incorporate a theistic view into nature is NOT anti-science, and works within the scientific paradigm:

FOLLOWING SUPERNATURALISM MAKES THE SCIENTIST’S TASK TOO EASY

Here’s the first of Pennock’s arguments against methodological naturalism that I’ll consider:

allowing appeal to supernatural powers in science would make the scientist’s task too easy, because one would always be able to call upon the gods for quick theoretical assistance…. Indeed, all empirical investigation beyond the purely descriptive could cease, for scientists would have a ready-made answer for everything.

This argument strikes me as unfair. Consider a particular empirical phenomenon, like a chemical reaction, and imagine that scientists are trying to figure out why the reaction happened. Pennock would say that scientists who allow appeal to supernatural powers would have a ready-made answer: God did it. While it may be that that’s the only true explanation that can be given, a good scientist-including a good theistic scientist—would wonder whether there’s more to be said. Even if God were ultimately the cause of the reaction, one would still wonder if the proximate cause is a result of the chemicals that went into the reaction, and a good scientist—even a good theistic scientist—would investigate whether such a naturalistic account could be given.

To drive the point home, an analogy might be helpful. With the advent of quantum mechanics, scientists have become comfortable with indeterministic events. For example, when asked why a particular radioactive atom decayed at the exact time that it did, most physicists would say that there’s no reason it decayed at that particular time; it was just an indeterministic event!’ One could imagine an opponent of indeterminism giving an argument that’s analogous to Pennock’s:

allowing appeal to indeterministic processes in science would make the scientist’s task too easy, because one would always be able to call upon chance for quick theoretical assistance…. Indeed, all empirical investigation beyond the purely descriptive could cease, for scientists would have a ready-made answer for everything.

It is certainly possible that, for every event that happens, scientists could simply say “that’s the result of an indeterministic chancy process; there’s no further explanation for why the event happened that way.” But this would clearly be doing bad science: just because the option of appealing to indeterminism is there, it doesn’t follow that the option should always be used. The same holds for the option of appealing to supernatural powers.

As further evidence against Pennock, it’s worth pointing out that prominent scientists in the past have appealed to supernatural powers, without using them as a ready-made answer for everything. Newton is a good example of this—he is a devout theist, in addition to being a great scientist, and he thinks that God sometimes intervenes in the world. Pennock falsely implies that this is not the case:

God may have underwritten the active principles that govern the world described in [Newton’s] Principia and the Opticks, but He did not interrupt any of the equations or regularities therein. Johnson and other creationists who want to dismiss methodological naturalism would do well to consult Newton’s own rules of reasoning….

But in fact, Newton does not endorse methodological naturalism. In his Opticks, Newton claims that God sometimes intervenes in the world. Specifically, Newton thinks that, according to his laws of motion, the orbits of planets in our solar system are not stable over long periods of time, and his solution to this problem is to postulate that God occasionally adjusts the motions of the planets so as to ensure the continued stability of their orbits. Here’s a relevant passage from Newton. (It’s not completely obvious that Newton is saying that God will intervene but my interpretation is the standard one.)

God in the Beginning form’d Matter in solid, massy, hard, impenetrable, moveable Particles … it became him who created them to set them in order. And if he did so, it’s unphilosophical to seek for any other Origin of the World, or to pretend that it might arise out of a Chaos by the mere Laws of Nature; though being once form’d, it may continue by those Laws for many Ages. For while Comets move in very excentrick Orbs in all manner of Positions, blind Fate could never make all the Planets move one and the same way in Orbs concentrick, some inconsiderable Irregularities excepted, which may have risen from the mutual Actions of Comets and Planets upon one another, and which will be apt to increase, till this System wants a Reformation…. [God is] able by his Will to move the Bodies within his boundless uniform Sensorium, and thereby to form and reform the Parts of the Universe….

A scientist who writes this way does not sound like a scientist who is following methodological naturalism.

It’s worth noting that some contemporaries of Newton took issue with his view of God occasionally intervening in the universe. For example, Leibniz writes:

Sir Isaac Newton and his followers also have a very odd opinion concerning the work of God. According to them, God Almighty needs to wind up his watch from time to time; otherwise it would cease to move. He had not, it seems, sufficient foresight to make it a perpetual motion.”

Note, though, that Leibniz also thought that God intervened in the world:

I hold that when God works miracles, he does not do it in order to supply the wants of nature, but those of grace.

Later investigation revealed that in fact planetary orbits are more stable than Newton thought, so Newton’s appeal to supernatural powers wasn’t needed. But the key point is that Newton is willing to appeal to supernatural powers, without using the appeal to supernatural powers as a ready-made answer for everything.

Pennock says that “Without the binding assumption of uninterruptible natural law there would be absolute chaos in the scientific worldview.” Newton’s own approach to physics provides a good counterexample to this—Newton is a leading contributor to the scientific worldview, and yet he does not bind himself by the assumption of uninterruptible natural law.

Bradley Monton, Seeking God in Science: An Atheist Defends Intelligent Design, (Peterborough, Ontario [Canada]: Broadview Press, 2009), 62-64.

How one can go from the above rational positions by a Christian (CS Lewis), and an atheist (Bradley Monton), to comparing floating ice as an unnatural event held in situ by God’s continuous miraculous intervention. And then compare this straw-man to the Islamic understanding of extreme fideistic occasionalism?

The claim that there is a God raises metaphysical questions about the nature of reality and existence. In general, it can be said that there is not one concept of God but many, even among monotheistic traditions. The Abrahamic religions are theistic; God is both the creator of the world and the one who sustains it. Theism, with its equal stress on divine transcendence of the universe and immanence within it, constitutes a somewhat uneasy conceptual midpoint between deism and pantheism. Deist conceptions of the divine see God as the creator of a universe that continues to exist, without his intervention, under the physical impulses that he first imparted to it. In pantheism, God is identified with the universe as a whole. Theism itself has numerous subvarieties, such as occasionalism, which holds that the only real cause in the universe is God; thus, all other causes are simply signs of coincidence and conjunction between kinds of events occurring within the created order. For example, heat is not what causes the water in a teakettle to boil but is simply what uniformly occurs before the water boils. God himself is the cause of the boiling.

An important object of metaphysical reflection is God’s nature, or the properties of that nature. Is God simple or complex? If omniscience, omnipotence, and beauty are part of the divine perfection, what exactly are these properties? Is timeless eternity part of God’s perfection? Can an omnipotent being will that there be a four-sided triangle or change the past? Does an omniscient being know the future actions of free agents? (If so, how can they be free?) Does an omniscient being who is timelessly eternal know what time it is now?

(HISTORY OF RELIGION)

Nor do Christians suspend belief or do not question their own understanding or nature’s causes for events, like Islam has, historically:
We humans have an inner balance with which we weigh good and evil. This balance, in Muslims stopped working. The indicator is stuck on zero. Muhammad’s companions could no longer register right and wrong. Because it’s hard to envision how a human being could be this ruthless, they persuaded themselves that he must be from God. As for why this god is so demonic, they fooled themselves with the lies that he told them. He told them that it is not up to man to question God. This absurd explanation satisfied his benighted followers. They resorted to fideism and argued that reason is irrelevant to religious belief. The great Imam Ghazali (1058 – 1111) said: “Where the claims of reason come into conflict with revelation, reason must yield to revelation.” A similar thesis in defense of foolishness is presented by Paul in 1 Cor. 1:20-25 where he argues “the foolishness of God is wiser than (the wisdom of) men”. The statement “Credo quia absurdum” (I believe because it is absurd), often attributed to Tertullian, is based on this passage of Paul. In DCC 5 he said: “The Son of God died; it is by all means to be believed, because it is absurd.” Upon this belief in absurdity fideism is founded and it is the position that has been adopted by Muslims. This fideistic attitude allowed the early believers to abandon reason and accept whatever Muhammad did, even his blatant crimes, without questioning him.

(WHY CAN’T ISLAM BE REFORMED?)

And when something “unnatural” is introduced into nature, this does not interfere one iota with science or the natural order of events, causality, or the like. As CS Lewis said many years ago, this is a Red Herring. Not to mention, that in reality, neo-Darwinian thinking IS A METAPHYSICAL PREMISE at its core. So often times it is the kettle calling the pot… well, you know.

IN a great presentation from True U. (Focus on the Family store | Discovery Institute), Dr. Stephen Meyer shows how — by using the supposition from Hinduism that the earth sits atop a turtle used by Stephen Hawking’s — the materialist position differs little from this religious supposition. This video is to replace an old, defunct, MRCTV video uploaded early 2014, but here today (11/4/2023). I added a William Provine clip from his 1994 debate with Phillip Johnson at Stanford. The entire debate can be see HERE.

“We must ask first whether the theory of evolution by natural selection is scientific or pseudoscientific …. Taking the first part of the theory, that evolution has occurred, it says that the history of life is a single process of species-splitting and progression. This process must be unique and unrepeatable, like the history of England. This part of the theory is therefore a historical theory, about unique events, and unique events are, by definition, not part of science, for they are unrepeatable and so not subject to test.”

Colin Patterson [1978] (Dr. Patterson was Senior Principal Scientific Officer of the Paleontology Department of the British Museum of Natural History in London.)

People think evolution is “science proper.” It is not, it is both a historical science and a [philosophical] presupposition in its “neo-Darwinian” form. The presupposition that removes it from “science proper and moves it into “scientism” is explained by an atheist philosopher:
If science really is permanently committed to methodological naturalism – the philosophical position that restricts all explanations in science to naturalistic explanations – it follows that the aim of science is not generating true theories. Instead, the aim of science would be something like: generating the best theories that can be formulated subject to the restriction that the theories are naturalistic. More and more evidence could come in suggesting that a supernatural being exists, but scientific theories wouldn’t be allowed to acknowledge that possibility.

Bradley Monton, author of Seeking God in Science: An Atheist Defends Intelligent Design ~ Apologetics315 h/t

In other words, the guy most credited in getting us to the moon used science to get us there, but was a young earth creationist. His view on “origins” (origin science) is separate from his working science. Two categories.

Likewise one of the most celebrated pediatric surgeons in the world, whom a movie was made after, “Gifted Hands,” is a young earth creationist. And the inventor of the MRI, a machine that diagnosed my M.S., is also a young earth creationist.

Evolutionary Darwinism is first and foremost an “historical science” that has many presuppositions that precede it, making it a metaphysical belief, a philosophy, as virulent anti-creationist philosopher of science, Michael Ruse explains:

Evolution is promoted by its practitioners as more than mere science. Evolution is promulgated as an ideology, a secular religion—a full-fledged alternative to Christianity, with meaning and morality. . . . Evolution is a religion. This was true of evolution in the beginning, and it is true of evolution still today.

Michael Ruse, “Saving Darwinism from the Darwinians,” National Post (May 13, 2000), p. B-3. (Via ICR)

….Nevertheless, there is a second, and arguably deeper, mystery associated with the Cambrian explosion: the mystery of how the neo-Darwinian mechanism of natural selection and random mutation could have given rise to all these fundamentally new forms of animal life, and done so quickly enough to account for the pattern in the fossil record. That question became acute in the second half of the twentieth century as biologists learned more about what it takes to build an animal.

In 1953 when Watson and Crick elucidated the structure of the DNA molecule, they made a startling discovery, namely, its ability to store information in the form of a four-character digital code. Strings of precisely sequenced chemicals called nucleotide bases store and transmit the assembly instructions—the information—for building the crucial protein molecules that the cell needs to survive. Just as English letters may convey a particular message depending on their arrangement, so too do certain sequences of chemical bases along the spine of a DNA molecule convey precise information. As Richard Dawkins has acknowledged, “the machine code of the genes is uncannily computer-like.” Or as Bill Gates has noted, “DNA is like a computer program, but far, far more advanced than any software ever created.”

The Cambrian period is marked by an explosion of new animals exemplifying new body plans. But building new animal body plans requires new organs, tissues, and cell types. And new cell types require many kinds of specialized or dedicated proteins (e.g., animals with gut cells require new digestive enzymes). But building each protein requires genetic information stored on the DNA molecule. Thus, building new animals with distinctive new body plans requires, at the very least, vast amounts of new genetic information. Whatever happened during the Cambrian not only represented an explosion of new biological form, but it also required an explosion of new biological information.

Is it plausible that the neo-Darwinian mechanism of natural selection acting on random mutations in DNA could produce the highly specificarrangements of bases in DNA necessary to generate the protein building blocks of new cell types and novel forms of life? 

According to neo-Darwinian theory, new genetic information arises first as random mutations occur in the DNA of existing organisms. When mutations arise that confer a survival advantage, the resulting genetic changes are passed on to the next generation. As such changes accumulate, the features of a population change over time. Nevertheless, natural selection can only “select” what random mutations first generate. Thus the neo-Darwinian mechanism faces a kind of needle-in-the-haystack problem—or what mathematicians call a “combinatorial” problem. The term “combinatorial” refers to the number of possible ways that a set of objects can be arranged or combined. Many simple bike locks, for example, have four dials with 10 digits on each dial. A bike thief encountering one of these locks faces a combinatorial problem because there are 10 × 10 × 10 × 10, or 10,000 possible combinations and only one that will open the lock. A random search is unlikely to yield the correct combination unless the thief has plenty of time.

Similarly, it is extremely difficult to assemble a new information-bearing gene or protein by the natural selection/random mutation process because of the sheer number of possible sequences. As the length of the required gene or protein grows, the number of possible base or amino-acid sequences of that length grows exponentially. 

Here’s an illustration that may help make the problem clear. Imagine that we encounter a committed bike thief who is willing to search the “sequence space” of possible bike combinations at a rate of about one new combination per two seconds. If our hypothetical bike thief had three hours and took no breaks he could generate more than half (about 5,400) of the 10,000 total combinations of a four-dial lock. In that case, the probability that he will stumble upon the right combination exceeds the probability that he will fail. More likely than not, he will open the lock by chance.

But now consider another case. If that thief with the same limited three hour time period available to him confronted a lock with ten dials and ten digits per dial (a lock with ten billion possible combinations) he would now have time only to explore a small fraction of the possible combinations—5,400 of ten billion—far fewer than half. In this case, it would be much more likely than not that he would fail to open the lock by chance.

These examples suggest that the ultimate probability of the success of a random search—and the plausibility of any hypothesis that affirms the success of such a search—depends upon both the size of the space that needs to be searched and the number of opportunities available to search it. 

In Darwin’s Doubt, I show that the number of possible DNA and amino acid sequences that need to be searched by the evolutionary process dwarfs the time available for such a search—even taking into account evolutionary deep time. Molecular biologists have long understood that the size of the “sequence space” of possible nucleotide bases and amino acids (the number of possible combinations) is extremely large. Moreover, recent experiments in molecular biology and protein science have established that functional genes and proteins are extremely rare within these huge combinatorial spaces of possible arrangements. There are vastly more ways of arranging nucleotide bases that result in non-functional sequences of DNA, and vastly more ways of arranging amino acids that result in non-functional amino-acid chains, than there are corresponding functionalgenes or proteins. One recent experimentally derived estimate places that ratio—the size of the haystack in relation to the needle—at 1077non-functional sequences for every functional gene or protein. (There are only something like 1065 atoms in our galaxy.)

All this suggests that the mutation and selection mechanism would only have enough time in the entire multi-billion year history of life on Earth to generate or “search” but a miniscule fraction (one ten trillion, trillion trillionth, to be exact) of the total number of possible nucleotide base or amino-acid sequences corresponding to a single functional gene or protein. The number of trials available to the evolutionary process turns out to be incredibly small in relation to the number of possible sequences that need to be searched. Thus, the neo-Darwinian mechanism, with its reliance on random mutation, is much more likely to fail than to succeed in generating even a single new gene or protein in the known history of life on earth. In other words, the neo-Darwinian mechanism is not an adequate mechanism to generate the information necessary to produce even a single new protein, let alone a whole new Cambrian animal….

[….]

Of course, many scientists dismiss intelligent design as “religion masquerading as science.” But the case for intelligent design is not based upon religious or scriptural authority. Instead it is based upon scientific evidence and the same method of scientific reasoning that Darwin himself used in the Origin of Species. 

In rejecting the theory as unscientific by definition, evolutionary biologists reveal a deep a priori commitment to methodological naturalism—the idea that scientists must limit themselves to materialistic explanations for all things. Yet, we know from experience that certain types of events and structures—in particular, information-rich structures—invariably arise from minds or personal agents. Indeed, no thinking person would insist that the inscriptions on the Rosetta stone, for example, were produced by strictly materialistic forces such as wind and erosion. Yet, by insisting that all events in the history of life must be explained by reference to strictly materialistic processes evolutionary biologists preclude consideration of a designing intelligence in the history of life, regardless of what the evidence might indicate. 

This commitment to a wholly materialistic account of the origins of life also helps to explain the reluctance to criticize the Darwinian theory publicly. Many evolutionary biologists fear that if they do so they will aid and abet the case for intelligent design—a theory they disdain as inherently unscientific. Those of us who support the theory of intelligent design advocate a more open approach to scientific investigation. Not only do we think the public has a right to know about the problems with evolutionary theory, we also think that the rules of science should allow scientists to “follow the evidence wherever it leads”—even if it leads to conclusions that raise deep and unwelcome metaphysical questions.

(AMERICAN SPECTATOR)

Can you believe in God and science at the same time? Many claim that belief in religion is at odds with “the science” of today. But is that really true? In this five-part series, Stephen Meyer, Senior Fellow at the Discovery Institute, attempts to answer this existential question.

Series “Broken Out”

  1. Are Religion and Science in Conflict? — Science and God | Does belief in God get in the way of science? The idea that science and religion are inevitably in conflict is a popular way of thinking today. But the history of science tells a different story.
  2. How Did the Universe Begin? — Science and God | Was the universe always here, or did it have a beginning? If so, how did it start? Mankind has debated these questions for centuries and has only recently begun to find some answers. And those answers may point to some even more intriguing conclusions.
  3. Aliens, the Multiverse, or God? — Science and God | Even staunch Darwinists have acknowledged that life in the universe displays an appearance of design, rather than being created out of random chance. If that’s true, where did that design come from? In other words, does a design require a designer?
  4. What Is Intelligent Design? — Science and God | Chances are if you’ve heard anything about intelligent design, you’ve heard that it’s faith-based, not science-based. Is that true? Or does modern science, in fact, point us in the direction of a designing intelligence?
  5. What’s Wrong with Atheism? — Science and God | Is there any meaning to life? Or is life nothing more than a cosmic accident? Scientific atheists claim the latter, but ironically, it’s science itself that suggests the former.

How Polygamy Hurts Society, Hurts Men, and Hurts Women

Published by Papa Giorgio

(Originally posted December 2013 – Media Fixed)

How Polygamy Hurts Society

by Making Girls/Women Chattel,

and Stopping Boys from Turning

into Healthy, Productive Men

Where Does Liberty Spring From?

…“Monogamy seems to direct male motivations in ways that create lower crime rates, greater wealth (GDP) per capita and better outcomes for children,” Henrich concludes. But what’s more surprising than his conclusions is his speculation that monogamy is at the root of democracy and equality.”…. ~ Canadian scholar Joseph Henrich

In talking to a few people, I have noticed that they simply assume that polygamy is a valid lifestyle… that no harm, when compared to the ideal of one-man-and-one-woman in a marriage raising children. They do not know any history and why empires and countries have devolved in the past, nor do they follow logical arguments to their conclusions. (Here is the TinyURL for this post: http://tinyurl.com/k3o247o)

For instance, I had a conversation with a man I know (he is a man, but speaks on topics of importance as a boy) who simply stated, “I see no problem with it [being legalized], it doesn’t harm me personally.” He then asked what would “harm him.

A liberal society might, then, find it prudent to ignore homosexuality. It might well deem it unwise to peer into private bedrooms. However, this is not the issue before us. Today the demand is that homosexuality be endorsed and promoted with the full power of the law. This would require us to abandon the standard of nature, the one standard that can teach us the difference between freedom and slavery, between right and wrong…. (Read More)…. In Reynolds v. United States (1878) the Court rejected the Mormons’ free exercise argument on the grounds that even though “Congress was deprived of all legislative power over mere opinion,… [it] was left free to reach actions [such as polygamy] which were in violation of social duties or subversive to the public good.” What the Court meant by this is that certain institutions and ways of life, such as marriage and the family, are essential to the preservation of civil society. (Read More)

I made multiple points throughout the conversation that many things he does “harms him” that he would not think do. For instance, he knows people personally affected by legislating laws via a vote towards a specific party. He knows two people, personally, that he works with that because of Obamacare lost their policies. One can afford to pay substantially more for his new coverage (thus, having less capital to invest in the company), and the other cannot afford a new policy. The point being that any change in legislation (small or large) has direct consequences to many.

Let us say that single-motherhood brought on by the father walking out on his responsibility and is rewarded for this action by being subsidized for his choice (see Thomas Sowell’s classic 1980 debate about the dynamics of welfare with Pennsylvania Secretary of Welfare, Helen O’Banion). Now, we KNOW the many consequences of fatherless homes (crime, delinquency, drug use, not finishing education, etc), even Obama admits this… higher tax rates and land taxes are incurred to pay for the jails, these persons also creating at a higher rate fatherless homes, and the like. Our co-worker in the shop had his biological father killed at an ATM… any bets on the murderers family structure? The statistics are on my side. So the question becomes this: “which of the two should government support in order to have a society that is best for the safety, well being, productivity, of its citizens?”

Another legislative act talked about in the shop after this conversation about polygamy took place, are politicians listening to environmental activists and legislating the regular light-bulb illegal. In January it will be officially against the law to sell most forms of the standard — incandescent — light-bulb (BREITBART).  The idea is that if we use higher efficiency bulbs we will “save the planet” from those evil* fossil fuel emissions. (*I picture blood dripping from the word as well as evil laughter off in the distance somewhere.)

The problem? In every bulb that researchers tested they found that the protective coating around the light creating ‘phosphor’ was cracked, allowing dangerous ultraviolet rays to escape (RPT). You got it… through legislation, the power of government has made many people, in their own homes mind you, at a far greater risk for skin-cancer. A risk that this Irish-man knows all too well. What sounded good and altruistic, “saving the planet,” ironically has deadly consequences.

The question[s] coming from this event that made my home more dangerous is this: “Is a government big enough to tell me, the consumer, what light-bulb I can-and-cannot buy… is this good for liberty, or bad for liberty?”; “Is this a threat to or a bolstering of  this experiment in freedom and self-governance the Founders started?”

“Of all tyrannies, a tyranny exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It may be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron’s cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.” — CS Lewis

“The nine most terrifying words in the English language are, ‘I’m from the government and I’m here to help’.” — Ronald Reagan

I pointed out as well that society, while not outlawing same-sex relationships (see quote to the right), should not raise these relationships to the status of the ideal, that is, heterosexual, monogamous, marriages. Whether you believe in evolution or creation… the best environment for children to be raised is the hetero one[all things being equal]. This doesn’t mean there are not great single or gay parents… but there is an ideal that we know works… and was honed throughout mankind’s time on earth (naturally or Divinely inspired). We know. for instance, that polygamy increases “crime, prostitution and anti-social behavior. Greater inequality between men and women. Less parental investment in children. And, a general driving down of the age of marriage for all women” (Canadian study used in court, quoted more further below).

So the question becomes this: “which of the two should government support in order to have a society that is best for the safety, well being, productivity, of its citizens?” In other words, when society puts its stamp of approval on something, making other forms of “marriage” equal in worth to society as the hetero one, is that a net benefit to the health of society, or a net detraction from it?

I made a few points as found in my Cumalative Case against same-sex marriage which likewise apply to polygamy. In other words, we can see some detrimental aspects to relationships that are “less than” the ideal, and the results have different effects on society.

The conservative asks three questions the liberal, as we will see, does not ask:

1) compared to what?
2) at what cost?
3) what hard-evidence do you have?

I mentioned statistics of the jail population being from a less than ideal family structure, the jealousies in polygamous marriages and broken families. I asked as well if he (this person I know) knew about what philosophical/family structures the liberty he enjoys came from. After all this, I think he missed the point, because he told me, “this is MY belief… you can’t laugh [fault me] at my beliefs.” And the point is this:

A person may think polygamy (or other legislative rulings/laws) do not affect them, but when given evidence on how it can or does effect them AND the people involved — more negatively than the traditional family structure… you cannot then substitute your opinion in the place of facts. Society should support that structure that is best to raise children in, period. Same-sex “marriages,” single-motherhood/fatherhood, show devolution when compared to [everything being equal] the nuclear family structure.

Honesty is sometimes the best policy. One could say have said, “you know what, I never heard that before, let me think this over.” Or one can even say, “You are right… it does affect me, and it harms specifically the people involved… I don’t care.” So my friend should really have said this entering into to adults talking about a recent ruling in our United States:

“I see no problem with it [being legalized], it doesn’t harm me personally… and no matter what evidence you can show me of how the less than ideal family structure [traditional marriage] causes more incarceration, drug use, torn families, stresses on liberty, and the like… I am firm in ‘my opinion that opinion‘ trumps reality. MY reality IS fact. I do not wish to participate in possibly being wrong on a position [based only in my immediate understanding with no input from history, social scientists, statistics, or the like], or being mature enough to enter adulthood by taking in previously unknown evidence and testing it against my opinion, thus evolving or changing/challenging my previously held [actually — newly found] position based on evidence or differing points of conclusions based on others knowledge of history, social scientists, statistics, the cults, or the like.”

Or, put another way: “These are my unfounded, unassailable thoughts that I am sharing with you.” To engage in this type of conversation with a person who holds to this form of firm-absolutism is more a commentary on said person than the topic brought up in the shop.

...Politically Correct Emoting

Political correctness is the invention of Western intellectuals who feel guilty about the universal triumph of Western values and economic prosperity…. “In the long run of history, political correctness will be seen as an aberration in Western thought. The product of the uniquely unchallenged position of the West and unrivalled affluence, the comparative decline of the West compared to the East is likely to spell its demise. Finally, Western minds may be free again to reason rather than just emote, to pursue objective truth rather than subjective virtue.” — The Retreat of Reason, page 87

A person who practices this way of thinking is like a child telling the group of adults they like chocolate cake (or turtles). It is a form of emoting oneself to others. To which I would simply respond,

➯ “thank-you for sharing [emote, act-out] your unassailable position with us, but please, in the future abstain from adult conversation.”

Alternatively, if you do wish to emote, be prepared to not be taken seriously, ignored… or even derided a bit.

What advice do I have? Cut down on video games and pick up a goddamn book! “…growing into a mature man with a stature measured by Christ’s fullness. Then we will no longer be little children, tossed by the waves and blown around by every wind of pop-culture and shallow thinking…” (Ephesians 4;14, PapaG’s version).

An adult would formulate Sowell’s questions something like this:

1) How do polygamous marriages compare to traditional marriages?
2) What are the costs incurred by such choices? Are there any harmful effects to the

a.) persons involved as well as to the
b.) society and
c.) societies founding principles that have given us the freedoms we currently enjoy?

Is there a loss of or a gain in freedom in this indigenous structure? Are young girls more or less protected from predators or exploitation or used to gain affluence?
3) I have come to a firm conclusion on a subject I just heard of, HOW have I come to my conclusion? Is this new to mankind, or have past cultures practiced this? What were their outcomes?

The above is just an example of where “Stage-Two“ thinking can get you.

This thinking ~ thank God! ~ is the keystone to a healthy/well-balanced faith that is separate from but that interacts and can even change the culture it finds itself in (link in pic).

Lets see if we can shed some light on the history behind many freedoms assumed or freedoms not realized today, under-girded by the family structure via this “ethos” we speak of, Christianity:

Paul, who often gets a bad rap for his perceived low view of women, considered at least twelve women coworkers in his ministry.* Paul clearly had a high view of women: “There is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus.” The earliest Christians recited these remarkable, countercultural words as a baptismal confession. Widows, far from being abandoned, were cared for, and older women were given a place of honor. In light of all of this, is it any wonder “the ancient sources and modern historians agree that primary conversion to Christianity was far more prevalent among females than males”?

In recent history, Christians were responsible for the banning of three despicable practices inflicted upon women around the world. Christian missionaries pressured the Chinese government to abolish foot binding in 1912. This practice was done for the sole reason of pleasing men— “it made a woman with her feet bound in an arch walk tiptoe and sway seductively.” In 1829 the English outlawed the Indian practice of suttee, in which widows were burned alive on the funeral pyres of their husbands, because of Christianity’s teaching regarding widows and women. Finally, Western countries influenced by a Christian view of women and sexuality have condemned clitoridectomy (female genital mutilation), a gruesome practice that is still common in Muslim countries in Africa and the Middle East.

AGAIN:

  • “But what’s more surprising than his conclusions is his speculation that monogamy is at the root of democracy and equality” — Canadian scholar Joseph Henrich

Sean McDowell and Jonathan Morrow, Is God Just a Human Invention? And Seventeen Other Questions Raised by the New Atheists (Grand Rapids, MI: Kregel Publications, 2010), 230-231.

Historian Alvin Schmidt points out how the spread of Christianity and Christian influence on government was primarily responsible for outlawing infanticide, child abandonment, and abortion in the Roman Empire (in AD 374); outlawing the brutal battles-to-the-death in which thousands of gladiators had died (in 404); outlawing the cruel punishment of branding the faces of criminals (in 315); instituting prison reforms such as the segregating of male and female prisoners (by 361); stopping the practice of human sacrifice among the Irish, the Prussians, and the Lithuanians as well as among other nations; outlawing pedophilia; granting of property rights and other protections to women; banning polygamy (which is still practiced in some Muslim nations today); prohibiting the burning alive of widows in India (in 1829); outlawing the painful and crippling practice of binding young women’s feet in China (in 1912); persuading government officials to begin a system of public schools in Germany (in the sixteenth century); and advancing the idea of compulsory education of all children in a number of European countries.

During the history of the church, Christians have had a decisive influence in opposing and often abolishing slavery in the Roman Empire, in Ireland, and in most of Europe (though Schmidt frankly notes that a minority of “erring” Christian teachers have supported slavery in various centuries). In England, William Wilberforce, a devout Christian, led the successful effort to abolish the slave trade and then slavery itself throughout the British Empire by 1840.

In the United States, though there were vocal defenders of slavery among Christians in the South, they were vastly outnumbered by the many Christians who were ardent abolitionists, speaking, writing, and agitating constantly for the abolition of slavery in the United States. Schmidt notes that two-thirds of the American abolitionists in the mid-1830s were Christian clergymen, and he gives numerous examples of the strong Christian commitment of several of the most influential of the antislavery crusaders, including Elijah Lovejoy (the first abolitionist martyr), Lyman Beecher, Edward Beecher, Harriet Beecher Stowe (author of Uncle Tom’s Cabin), Charles Finney, Charles T. Torrey, Theodore Weld, William Lloyd Garrison, “and others too numerous to mention.” The American civil rights movement that resulted in the outlawing of racial segregation and discrimination was led by Martin Luther King Jr., a Christian pastor, and supported by many Christian churches and groups.

There was also strong influence from Christian ideas and influential Christians in the formulation of the Magna Carta in England (1215) and of the Declaration of Independence (1776) and the Constitution (1787) in the United States. These are three of the most significant documents in the history of governments on the earth, and all three show the marks of significant Christian influence in the foundational ideas of how governments should function.

Wayne Grudem, Politics According to the Bible [Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 2010], 49-50.

From My Book:

Social commentator and radio show host, Dennis Prager, takes note that males tend to be “rule oriented.” The implication being that Western culture is heavily influenced in the Judeo-Christian standards of moral code — this, he says, is ironic… that, in the name of feminism women are attempting to emasculate the God of Western religious morality.  “For if their goal is achieved, it is women who will suffer most from lawless males.”[1]  This is seen in the history of pagan cultures and their tendency to crumble under the weight of licentiousness and the lowly place women had in it.  Christianity raised women out of these “pagan cultures in which polygamy, arranged marriages, and oppression of women predominated, the church promoted the idea of monogamous marriage by free consent of both spouses.”[2]

[1] Dennis Prager, Think a Second Time (New York, NY: Regan Books, 1995), 249.
[2] Harold Berman, Law and Revolution: The Formation of the Western Tradition (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,  1983), 226.

So…

…what [if any] are the negative affects of polygamy on society? Are there any secular, progressive, arguments against it? We will explore this a bit here as the main topic of this post. To wit, the later point is the first I wish to deal with right now… and it shows a lack of asking the above three questions any conservatively minded libertarian would. Take note that equality is the guiding force in this short — honest — look by a group of decidedly progressive persons:

That’s right. Trying to argue against something as arbitrary as a number (e.g., marriage is between two people) once you have argued against a clear delineation that nature has honed, such as gender… is useless. Gay Patriot eruditely explains that is one, then the other (take note the emphasized portion near the end):

…Commenter Richard Bell notes the following: Judge Cites Same-Sex Marriage in Declaring Polygamy Ban Unconstitutional.

Interestingly, the judge’s 91-page opinion cites a series of legal precedents that have gradually redefined marriage, and limited the ability of the state to define it. Almost as though there had been some kind of negative gradient, and the law had been gravitationally drawn to the lower end of the gradient as a result of the lack of adhesion on that gradient.

(Breitbart) In his 91-page opinion in Brown v. Buhman, on Dec. 13, U.S. District Judge Clark Waddoups struck down Utah’s law making polygamy a crime. In so doing, he may have opened Pandora’s Box.

As a condition for becoming a state in 1896, Congress required Utah to outlaw polygamy, which is marriage between three or more persons. This case involved a family of fundamentalist offshoots of nineteenth-century Mormonism. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints disavowed polygamy in 1890, and again in 1904, but some splinter groups continue the practice.

Waddoups’ opinion would not only cover such groups, however, but also Muslims or anyone else who claims a right—religious or otherwise—to have multiple-person marriages. He notes that the Supreme Court ruled against polygamy in its 1878 case Reynolds v. U.S., but said he cannot simply rest upon that decision “without seriously addressing the much developed constitutional jurisprudence that now protects individuals from the criminal consequences intended by legislatures to apply to certain personal choices.” (read more)

Since marriage is no longer about creating a stable environment for children, and has become (and this mainly the fault of heterosexual liberals) about personal fulfillment, validation, and access to social benefits, there literally is no constraint on how much more broadly it can be redefined.

Take note that religious freedom IS enumerated specifically in the Constitution, whereas… marriage between same genders and multiple partners is not. Why mention this? Because in order to get “equality” as the progressive left sees it, religious positions will need to be expunged. In doing so, one ends without liberty, freedom, and the like.

The American Trinity:

“Socialism values equality more than liberty” ~ Prager

Here you find agreement between people who you would assume would be at odds with each-other, but share a love for both:

✂ tradition of [all] cultures (“tradition means giving a vote to most obscure of all classes, our ancestors. It is the democracy of the dead” ~ G.K. Chesterton) [even Grecian thinkers argued for heterosexual unions];
✂ what made societies collapse in the past (our Founders were students of history);
✂ and what is the best ideal for our experiment in freedom.

This next great commentary comes from two people who you would never think would be in such agreement… a conservative evangelical apologist, and a libertarian gay-man. The commentary is about a different case, but is similar in many ways. Here is conservative apologist, Frank Turek, making a point about a similar case:

  • “…imagine a homosexual videographer being forced to video a speech that a conservative makes against homosexual behavior and same sex marriage. Should that homosexual videographer be forced to do so? Of course not! Then why Elane Photography?….”

Now, here is the libertarian, conservative, guy[s] I know who blogs — GayPatriot:

  • “…it’s a bad law, a law that violates natural human rights to freedom of association and to freely-chosen work. It is not good for gays; picture a gay photographer being required by law to serve the wedding of some social conservative whom he or she despises.”

Again, if “for ‘a’,” it must be applied to “b.” What comes from this ILLIBERAL EGALITARIANISM  is a TOTALITARIAN view that all must think alike. But lets get to some of the harms this does to our society. Lets start with a well-known Canadian [gay] sociologist who is against raising same-sex marriage to that of equal status of heterosexual marriage. I am not here arguing against same-sex marriage, I do that elsewhere… but we are taking Paul Nathanson’s premise and applying it to polygamy:

One of the most respected Canadian sociologist/scholar/homosexual, Paul Nathanson, writes that there are at least five functions that marriage serves–things that every culture must do in order to survive and thrive. They are:

1. Foster the bonding between men and women
2. Foster the birth and rearing of children
3. Foster the bonding between men and children
4. Foster some form of healthy masculine identity
5. Foster the transformation of adolescents into sexually responsible adults

Note that Nathanson considers these points critical to the continued survival of any culture. He continues “Because heterosexuality is directly related to both reproduction and survival, … every human societ[y] has had to promote it actively . … Heterosexuality is always fostered by a cultural norm” that limits marriage to unions of men and women. He adds that people “are wrong in assuming that any society can do without it.”

…read more…

Polygamy, likewise, breaks down this OH-SO-IMPORTANT aspect that is crucial to a healthy society.

Unmentioned Boys:

This is from the documentary “Banking on Heaven: Polygamy in Heartland of the American West,” and is a small portion that talks about the harm of polygamy to boys. We know of the harm to women and girls… but this aspect is often not realized. Boys who have no fathers because the men need less boys to get more wives.

We know about the damages to women in these polygamous families (see some resources below), but these family structures have consequences for men as well. This “trickle up” negative affect, then, brings us to this larger question involved in this “rubber stamp of approval” by society on “less than” the ideal:

➯ “is polygamy good or bad for the liberty, freedom [and the like], for the following generations?”

There are many resources showing the deleterious effects of polygamy on men and women. Two resources not pictured in my resources are Sons of Perdition (which is a digital download and follows the lives of three boys) and a movie (YouTube) from a ministry I highly recommend, Sacred Groves. What is pictured above are:

  1. Escape, by Carolyn Jessop;
  2. Stolen Innocence: My Story of Growing Up in a Polygamous Sect, Becoming a Teenage Bride, and Breaking Free of Warren Jeffs, by Elissa Wall;
  3. Shattered Dreams: My Life as a Polygamist’s Wife, by Irene Spencer

And DVD’s: Lifting the Veil of Poplygamy; ABC News Primetime Escaping Polygamy; and, Banking on Heaven.

Girls As Chattel | Polygamy’s Consequences

(For the above video) This is a combination of excerpts, both audio and video from the following sources:

  • NPR: Talk of the Nation | “’Sons Of Perdition,’ Exiles From Jeffs’ Church”  (June 24, 2010)
  • LAW & CRIME | Sexy Darling: Polygamist Cult Leader Allegedly Had Phone Sex with Underage Wives in Jail (March 8, 2023)
  • LAW & CRIME | Polygamist Cult ‘Prophet’ Faces Kidnapping Charges for Towing Underage Girls in Trailer with Wives (February 1, 2023)

Here is a great interview with a woman who was in a polygamous community for many years, it is long, but to understand why something is or may be bad to society’s “net goals,” one needs to spend time reading, watching, reflecting, and the like (see more interviews of people personally impacted by polygamy and the cults, here):

In a recent dealing with this in our neighbor to the north, well known Canadian scholar Joseph Henrich pointed out the following facts about this “net benefit” in regards to the traditional understanding of hetero marriages involving one-man-and-one-woman:

POLYGAMY IS HARMFUL TO SOCIETY, SCHOLAR FINDS

…Increased crime, prostitution and anti-social behaviour. Greater inequality between men and women. Less parental investment in children. And, a general driving down of the age of marriage for all women.

These are some of the harms of polygamy (or more correctly, polygyny, since it is almost always men marrying more than once) that are outlined in a 45-page research paper by noted Canadian scholar Joseph Henrich, filed Friday in B.C. Supreme Court.

Henrich is uniquely qualified to look at polygamy’s harm. He’s a member of the departments of economics, psychology and anthropology at the University of British Columbia and holds the Canada Research Chair in Culture, Cognition and Coevolution.

But he’d never really thought about it until this year when Craig Jones approached him. Jones is the lead lawyer in the B.C. government’s constitutional reference case, which will be heard in November by B.C. Supreme Court Chief Justice Robert Bauman.

[….]

Another social harm that Henrich says is consistent regardless of whether researchers use data from 19th-century Mormon communities or contemporary African societies is that children from polygynous families have considerably lower survival rates. It seems polygynous men, rather than investing in their offspring, use their money to add wives.

“Monogamy seems to direct male motivations in ways that create lower crime rates, greater wealth (GDP) per capita and better outcomes for children,” Henrich concludes.

But what’s more surprising than his conclusions is his speculation that monogamy is at the root of democracy and equality.

He argues that as the idea of monogamy spread through Europe during the 15th century, king and peasant alike had the same rules and the idea of equality gained a foothold — at least among men.

With reduced competition for women, men began loosening their tight control over wives and daughters.

And with fewer unmarried men, the pool of soldiers that had previously been harnessed by warring rulers was reduced.

Even though this compelling argument goes far beyond the scope of the trial, it may make it even harder for polygamy’s advocates to convince the judge that its practice is benign.

…read more… (ORTHODOX CHRISTIANITY | VANCOUVER SUN)

When the above debate was happening in Canada, our radio talk-shows here in the states discussed the matter in-depth. Here is one such show from Michael Medved on the topic This is either from 2009 or 2011’ish: