Leighton Flowers

Calvinism’s God Is Too Small | Planes and Boats Edition

Published by Papa Giorgio

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A. W. Pink

“God not only knew the end from the beginning, but He planned, fixed, predestinated everything from the beginning. And, as cause stands to effect, so God’s purpose is the ground of His prescience.” (Teaching Resources International)

DUMMY DIALECT: “God knows the future because God planned the future.”

— Source: Teaching Resources International

Source: A. W. Pink, The Attributes of God, chapter 4, “The Foreknowledge of God.”

Loraine Boettner 

“Foreordination in general cannot rest on foreknowledge; for only that which is certain can be foreknown, and only that which is predetermined can be certain. […] and God foreknows only because He has pre-determined. His foreknowledge is but a transcript of His will as to what shall come to pass in the future, and the course which the world takes under His providential control is but the execution of His all-embracing plan.” (Christian Classics Ethereal Library)

DUMMY DIALECT: “God knows what will happen because God has already decided what will happen.”

— Source: The Reformed Doctrine of Predestination, p. 99 (PDF of Chapter)

James White — debate with A. K. Richardson

“Okay. How many free choices of human beings do you think were involved from the time of Adam downward to the cross that could bring about that exact—the exact people—the high priests, the Romans, Pilate, Herod? I can’t imagine [the] hundreds of millions and literally billions of free choices, and yet their result was fixed. How does that not demonstrate that God’s decree does in fact determine the actions of mankind in time?”

DUMMY DIALECT: “God has to determine the choices in order to guarantee the outcome.”

AK RESPONDS:

Well, first of all, nothing’s too hard for God. I mean, billions and zillions and bajillions of free will choices seems like a lot to us. [….] So I don’t know that, all these millions and millions of free will choices seems like a lot to us, but it doesn’t to God. I don’t think he does.

— Source: James White / A. K. Richardson debate | RPT’s RUMBLE

I want to compare this to my post dealing with my memorized routine when Mormons come to my door. Here is the summary of this presentation:

When Mormon missionaries come to the door, I begin by establishing from Mormon teaching that Heavenly Father is an exalted being who exists within an eternally existing cosmos. I then work through the implications: matter, space, time, intelligences, and the governing laws of reality are not ultimately created by God but precede or exist independently of him. Consequently, laws governing things such as gravity, biology, mathematics, morality, and logic impose themselves upon Mormon deity rather than being realities that God Himself ultimately authored. In this framework, God is therefore not the ultimate, self-existent Creator standing above and sustaining all reality, but a powerful being who exists and operates within a larger, preexisting reality. The punchline of the routine is that the Mormon concept of God is ultimately finite, contingent, and constrained by the very cosmic order in which he exists—in other words, “your God is too small.”

Similarly, I believe Calvinism falls into the same man-made trap.

The Calvinist conception of divine sovereignty raises a different kind of limitation. If God’s sovereignty is defined as the exhaustive determination of everything that comes to pass, then God’s purposes are guaranteed by determining the very thoughts, desires, decisions, and actions through which those purposes are accomplished. As the Good News Apologetics chapter argues, Calvinist determinism makes God the cause of every historical event down to its smallest details, including human attitudes, beliefs, desires, decisions, and actions; in this framework, divine sovereignty effectively becomes theistic determinism.

James White’s argument illustrates the practical implication: if the crucifixion was fixed from eternity, how could billions of genuinely free human choices possibly produce that exact outcome? His answer is that God’s decree “does in fact determine the actions of mankind in time.” In other words, God guarantees the victory by controlling the entire chessboard.

But is determining every move really necessary for an omnipotent God to accomplish His purposes? A greater conception of sovereignty allows God to give His creatures genuine freedom—including the freedom to sin, rebel, resist, and make choices God does not approve—while remaining completely capable of accomplishing His ultimate purposes through and even in spite of those choices. The Good News Apologetics chapter makes this distinction explicitly, arguing that biblical sovereignty does not require God to predetermine everything, but can include God sovereignly establishing the boundaries of creation while granting human beings substantial self-determination.

A.W. Tozer captures this understanding particularly well:

God can sovereignly decree that man be free to make moral choices without decreeing which choices he will make. When man chooses evil, he has not thwarted God’s sovereign will, because God’s decree was not that man choose a particular action, but that man be genuinely free to choose.

As Tozer puts it,

“Man’s will is free because God is sovereign. A God less than sovereign could not bestow moral freedom upon His creatures.”

In other words, genuine human freedom is not evidence that God has surrendered control; it can actually be evidence of a greater sovereignty—one in which God is confident enough in His own power to permit His creatures to make real choices without having to determine those choices Himself.

Tozer’s ocean-liner illustration makes the distinction even clearer. The ship has a predetermined destination, yet the passengers aboard it are not robots whose every movement has been programmed. They can eat, sleep, talk, read, walk the deck, or do countless other things as they please, while the ship continues steadily toward its appointed destination. Tozer’s point is that freedom and sovereignty do not contradict one another. God’s sovereign purposes can establish the ultimate destination without requiring Him to predetermine every action of every passenger along the way.

This provides a striking contrast to the deterministic model: the deterministic God guarantees the destination by controlling the passengers; the sovereign God described by Tozer guarantees the destination while allowing the passengers genuine freedom along the journey.

This is precisely the point of Leighton Flowers’ chess analogy.

One chess master guarantees victory by controlling both sides of the board; the other allows his opponents to make genuinely free moves and nevertheless defeats every opponent because he is simply better at the game. Both arrive at victory, but only one demonstrates the ability to remain sovereign in the presence of genuine opposition. Flowers’ point is that God’s victory over evil does not have to come from controlling or manipulating every evil action that occurs. God can permit evil choices while possessing the wisdom, power, and goodness to overcome them, redirect their consequences, and ultimately accomplish His purposes. The question, then, is not whether God can guarantee His victory, but why He would have to determine every move in order to do so.

A God who must control the board to win demonstrates control; a God who can allow genuine freedom and still unfailingly accomplish His purposes demonstrates something far greater—omnipotence. The first says, in effect,

“I must determine the moves so that I can guarantee the outcome.”

The second says,

“Make your moves. I am still God.”

The first guarantees victory by eliminating the possibility of genuine opposition; the second demonstrates that genuine opposition cannot ultimately threaten God’s purposes. The greater display of sovereignty is not God’s inability to lose because He controls every move, but God’s ability to permit real freedom, endure real rebellion, confront real evil, and still bring His sovereign purposes to pass.

As Tozer’s ocean liner illustrates, the destination can be certain without every passenger’s movement being predetermined. And as Flowers’ chess master illustrates, victory can be certain without controlling the opponent’s hand. That is not a diminished sovereignty. It is sovereignty confident enough to let creation move freely while God remains completely capable of bringing history exactly where He intends it to go.

In a sense the Determinist states:

“If God doesn’t determine every move, He might not accomplish His purposes.”

To which the reply is:

“Why would an omnipotent God need to control the moves of His creatures in order to accomplish His purposes?”

The Flight

Imagine that you decide to take a trip. You call a travel agent and say, “I’d like to book a flight.” The first question the agent asks is simple: “What is your destination?”

“Where are you going?”

You tell the agent your destination, because a trip has to have somewhere it’s going. The destination is the terminus—the point toward which the journey is headed. Whether you’re traveling by airplane, train, or ship, the travel agent needs to know where you’re ultimately going.

Now suppose the agent tells you, “Your destination has already been decided. Your ticket has been booked, your destination has been fixed, and your arrival point has been established before you ever began the journey.”

That’s essentially the basic idea behind the word predestination. Destination tells us where we’re going; predestination means that the destination has been determined beforehand. In the theological sense, the ultimate destinations are heaven and hell. According to the Calvinist understanding, God determined those destinations before we were born—even before the creation of the world. From eternity, God decided to save some people unto everlasting blessedness and to pass over others, allowing them to perish in their sins.

But now consider something important about the analogy: knowing and fixing the destination does not, by itself, tell us everything that happens during the journey.

You board the airplane. You take your seat. Someone else gets up and walks to the restroom. Another passenger reads a book. Someone talks to the person beside him. Another passenger sleeps through the flight. Someone orders a drink. Someone decides to look out the window. Hundreds of individual decisions and movements occur during the flight, yet the plane continues toward its destination.

The destination remains fixed.

The passengers are still moving.

The question is whether the certainty of the destination requires the determination of every movement made by every passenger along the way.

That is where the analogy becomes important for the debate over divine sovereignty and human freedom. Does God have to determine every human thought, desire, decision, and action in order to guarantee His ultimate purposes? Or is God sufficiently sovereign, wise, and powerful to establish His purposes while allowing His creatures genuine freedom along the journey?

A predetermined destination does not necessarily imply a predetermined journey.

ADAPTED FROM:

  • R. C. Sproul, Chosen by God (Wheaton, IL: Tyndale House Publishers, 1986; rev. ed. 1997/2011), chap. 2, “Predestination and the Sovereignty of God,” p 22.
  • R.C. Sproul, “All Christians Believe in Predestination: The Classic Collection with R.C. Sproul,” YouTube, approximately 11:55–14:15, accessed August 15, 2026.

This will be our bridge Tozer’s ocean liner and Flowers’ chessboard.

The Sailing

Tozer’s ocean liner makes the distinction even clearer: the ship has a predetermined destination, but the passengers are not predetermined. They are free to move about the ship as they please, while the ship continues steadily toward its appointed port.

Imagine two ships sitting in the harbor. Both ships represent Christ. Both are headed toward the same ultimate destination: the blessings God has prepared for those who are “in Christ”—holiness and blamelessness, adoption into God’s family, redemption and forgiveness, an inheritance, and the fulfillment of God’s purpose. The question isn’t whether God provides the ship or whether the destination is ultimately in His hands. The question is who determines which passengers actually board.

In the Calvinist understanding, God chooses the passengers before the voyage ever begins. The passenger does not ultimately determine whether he will board; God has chosen him for salvation and effectually calls him. That calling changes the person’s heart and desires so that he willingly comes to Christ. So the Calvinist can rightly say, “Nobody is forced into heaven against his will.” The person boards willingly—but his willingness itself is the result of God’s prior determining work. God chooses the passenger, God changes the passenger’s disposition, and the passenger then willingly boards. The elect cannot finally refuse the call because God’s grace ensures that they will come.

In the Provisionist understanding, God provides the ship and announces the destination to everyone. Christ is the provision of salvation, and God genuinely invites people to come. His grace precedes the response and enables sinners to respond to the Gospel, but God does not determine which individuals will exercise that response. The person can genuinely say yes—or genuinely say no. Those who trust Christ board the ship and are thereby found “in Christ.” Those who reject the invitation remain outside. The destination and all the blessings belonging to those in Christ are God’s provision; entering into that relationship occurs through faith.

That means the disagreement is not really “forced boarding versus voluntary boarding.” Both sides say the believer boards willingly. The deeper question is: Who determined the willingness? Calvinism says God determined the person who would board and, through effectual calling, ensured that person’s willing response. Provisionism says God graciously enables the response and genuinely invites all, but leaves the decision itself undetermined. In one model, God determines the passenger and guarantees the boarding; in the other, God provides the ship and guarantees that His purposes are not threatened by the passenger’s choice.

And this brings us back to the larger question of sovereignty. If God must determine which passengers will board in order to guarantee His ultimate purposes, then God’s sovereignty is expressed through controlling the passenger. But if God can provide Christ to all, genuinely allow people to accept or reject Him, and still accomplish everything He has purposed, then His sovereignty is expressed through His ability to remain completely sovereign without determining the passenger’s choice.

The question becomes: Does an omnipotent God need to determine every person’s decision in order to accomplish His purposes—or is He powerful enough to let people make real choices and still bring His ship safely into port?

Well?

THE TOWER

Previous Posts:

Pastor Cucuzza on Election, Foreknowledge, and Predestination

Correcting the “Reformed” Interpretation of Ephesians 2:8-9 (+)

Ephesians 1:4-5 explained without Exhaustive Divine Determinism (EDD), and free will involvement.

[….]

Whosoever Believes in Christ Will Become Chosen IN CHRIST (Ephesians 1:3-14) | By Dr. Leighton Flowers, Soteriology101

How one comes to be in Christ is by hearing the Gospel and believing, and then you’re marked in Christ. God has destined beforehand that if you are in Christ (i.e. if you believe in Christ), you will be saved.

This analogy really helps people to see it from this vantage point.

If a storm was coming and a messenger was sent from God saying that a huge storm like no other was coming through and everybody was going to perish. God has placed a Fortress in the middle of the city, and anybody who gets into this Fortress will live. Anybody who stays outside The Fortress will surely die.

The storm comes. Everybody who believes the messenger and gets into The Fortress lives, and everybody outside The Fortress dies. So you could rightly say that it was predestined that those people in The Fortress would live, and it was predestined (and determined beforehand) that everybody outside The Fortress would die.

Notice I have not said anything about God destining who would and would not get into The Fortress. Choosing to run to The Fortress, that is your responsibility.

Well, Christ is our Fortress. So the warning is, if you get into Christ through faith, here are the spiritual blessings that he has destined beforehand: (1) he will save you, (2) he will conform you, (3) he will bring you to where he wants you to be in your Christian walk through circumstances in life, and (4) he will let you live a life participating in the Spirit. But it’s your responsibility to put your faith in him, to trust in him.

It so valuable to understand we do hold to a robust teaching of the doctrine of predestination. We believe the doctrine of predestination. Our source of hope is in the fact that I know my adoption is coming because God has predestined for my adoption according to Romans 8:23, and that God has predestined for those who choose to believe in Christ to be adopted. We eagerly await for our adoption and the redemption of our bodies.

So how do I know I am going to be adopted, and will be brought up to the mansion God has prepared for me? I know that because God has predestined beforehand that spiritual blessing for those who put their faith in Christ. So your responsibility is to put your faith in Christ, get into His Fortress, and then you will live. If you remain outside The Fortress then you will surely die but that’s your fault, not because God didn’t really love you, not because you were created from the womb to be destined for destruction, not because God is demonstrating his wrath through you or created you to to be an object of his wrath. Those teachings are just baggage that’s been added on to the teachings of the Church years after the first century. They were not even introduced into the Church until Augustine, in the fifth century, taught these concepts.

And when you begin to just tear that wrong stuff off that baggage that’s been put on to the Scripture, the Gospel is so much more simple it is so clear, it is so beautiful, and yes it maintains God’s sovereignty and his goodness and his grace, and your responsibility in the whole process. Doesn’t it show the love that God has for everyone by giving them the same Fortress to come into.

The people did not build the Fortress themselves by entering it. God provides the Fortress for all the world. You choose to come in that Fortress, or you choose to stay outside where death and destruction are certain.

“Dead Men Don’t Grab” | The Irresistible and Effectual Call

Published by Papa Giorgio

(One almost used Sliding Thumbnail that I rejected, but like. Here is the one I chose to use, just bigger than the slider one.)

A friend on the Effe Bee (Facebook) asked a good question about the premise the graphic you see directly to the right:

  • There’s some truth to Sproul’s finished statement is there not?

(And for those not in the thick of the theological weeds, it may seem a somewhat tenable position.) So I wanted to share a longer response with him as well as discuss some other recent graphics I have made for the larger audience.

I actually agree with the first half of Sproul’s statement. Salvation is entirely dependent upon God’s grace from beginning to end. Where I disagree is with his definition of that grace.

Sproul says I must first be regenerated by an effectual act of the Spirit before I can believe.

Traditional Baptists and Provisionists say God graciously initiates salvation, provides Christ, gives the gospel, convicts and draws the sinner, and enables the response — but the sinner’s faith is genuinely a response that can be either accepted or resisted.

So the disagreement isn’t whether salvation is of the Lord. It’s whether God’s grace determines the response or graciously enables the response.

This is really dealing with the Calvinist’s twisting of Total Depravity into an ontological form of Total Inability. Dr. Leighton Flowers deals with this in this older video titled “The Biblical use of the term ‘DEAD'”

Which brings me to another graphic I made:

Again, this is ripping a 1st century idiom out of context. It is almost “Cultish” in how it is done. Here Micah Coate explains this idea a little:

Despite Calvinism’s highly acclaimed standard of quality exegesis, the account of Jesus raising Lazarus from the dead is often used as a textual illustration supporting Calvin’s doctrine of Total Depravity. This is a hermeneutical mistake. The student of the Bible should beware when any doctrine, let alone essential doctrine, is supported from a narrative story that lacks any instruction, especially when a particular belief is set against a number of other clear teachings. This reading of Scripture is comparable to the practice of Jehovah’s Witnesses, who pull a number of erroneous doctrines from the poetic books of Proverbs and Ecclesiastes.

This way of using Scripture is one of the characteristics of a cult. Josh McDowell writes that cults often claim that:

. . . the Scriptures are their final source of authority; [however,] we find they [cults] consistently misuse the Scriptures to establish their own peculiar beliefs. This is accomplished chiefly by quoting texts out of context while omitting other passages relevant to the subject.

Calvinist R. C. Sproul actually validates McDowell’s statement, in his book What Is Reformed Theology? In the chapter “Monergistic Regeneration,” Sproul fails to cite a single verse showing that the Bible supports this belief. Instead, Sproul gives the reader a class in Latin and Greek terminology with such words as monergism, synergism, operative grace, and cooperative grace. Instead of making a sound case for monergistic regeneration, all Sproul does is pull a heretical doctrine of salvation from the simple story of Lazarus, saying, “Perhaps a good illustration of Monergistic, life-giving power is the raising of Lazarus from the dead.” Sproul tries to provide a biblical foundation for his peculiar belief at the expense of “quoting texts out of context while omitting other passages relevant to the subject.” Because of this hermeneutical mistake, his example and thoughts on the monergistic resurrection are incorrect.

 

The usual argument given in defense of Total Depravity lies in a question: Because the Bible depicts man as being dead apart from God, how can he choose to have faith in the Gospel of Jesus on his own? Although many Calvinist authors pose this question as a foundation for their doctrine, it is not logically or biblically sound. By pulling doctrine from the Lazarus account, Calvinists have dug themselves into a mess of unanswerable theological questions.

The Lazarus Problem:
When a Narrative Becomes a Doctrine

One of the most familiar Calvinist illustrations of Total Depravity and regeneration is the raising of Lazarus in John 11. The argument is easy to understand: Lazarus was physically dead, therefore he could do nothing to contribute to his resurrection. Jesus alone called him from death to life. R.C. Sproul explicitly uses Lazarus in this way, explaining that regeneration is the sovereign work of the Holy Spirit and comparing the effectual call to Jesus’ command, “Lazarus, come out.”

Sproul then gives the Reformed order of salvation as:

effectual calling → regeneration → faith → justification → sanctification → glorification

That is an important distinction because Sproul is not merely saying that Lazarus illustrates God’s power to give life. He is using the Lazarus narrative to illustrate a particular doctrine of the order of salvation. According to this system, the sinner is spiritually dead and therefore cannot believe until God first regenerates him. Regeneration produces the faith by which the person believes. Sproul himself contrasts this with the more common evangelical understanding that a person believes in Christ and is then born again, which I picture here:.

JOHN 11:1-40 (CSB)

LAZARUS DIES AT BETHANY

1 Now a man was sick—Lazarus from Bethany, the village of Mary and her sister Martha. 2 Mary was the one who anointed the Lord with perfume and wiped his feet with her hair, and it was her brother Lazarus who was sick. 3 So the sisters sent a message to him: “Lord, the one you love is sick.”

4 When Jesus heard it, he said, “This sickness will not end in death but is for the glory of God, so that the Son of God may be glorified through it.” 5 Now Jesus loved Martha, her sister, and Lazarus. 6 So when he heard that he was sick, he stayed two more days in the place where he was. 7 Then after that, he said to the disciples, “Let’s go to Judea again.”

8 “Rabbi,” the disciples told him, “just now the Jews tried to stone you, and you’re going there again?”

9 “Aren’t there twelve hours in a day?” Jesus answered. “If anyone walks during the day, he doesn’t stumble, because he sees the light of this world. 10 But if anyone walks during the night, he does stumble, because the light is not in him.”

11 He said this, and then he told them, “Our friend Lazarus has fallen asleep, but I’m on my way to wake him up.”

12 Then the disciples said to him, “Lord, if he has fallen asleep, he will get well.”

13 Jesus, however, was speaking about his death, but they thought he was speaking about natural sleep. 14 So Jesus then told them plainly, “Lazarus has died. 15 I’m glad for you that I wasn’t there so that you may believe. But let’s go to him.”

16 Then Thomas (called “Twin”) said to his fellow disciples, “Let’s go too so that we may die with him.”

THE RESURRECTION AND THE LIFE

17 When Jesus arrived, he found that Lazarus had already been in the tomb four days. 18 Bethany was near Jerusalem (less than two miles away). 19 Many of the Jews had come to Martha and Mary to comfort them about their brother. 20 As soon as Martha heard that Jesus was coming, she went to meet him, but Mary remained seated in the house.

21 Then Martha said to Jesus, “Lord, if you had been here, my brother wouldn’t have died. 22 Yet even now I know that whatever you ask from God, God will give you.”

23 “Your brother will rise again,” Jesus told her.

24 Martha said to him, “I know that he will rise again in the resurrection at the last day.”

25 Jesus said to her, “I am the resurrection and the life. The one who believes in me, even if he dies, will live. 26 Everyone who lives and believes in me will never die. Do you believe this?”

27 “Yes, Lord,” she told him, “I believe you are the Messiah, the Son of God, who comes into the world.”

JESUS SHARES THE SORROW OF DEATH

28 Having said this, she went back and called her sister Mary, saying in private, “The Teacher is here and is calling for you.”

29 As soon as Mary heard this, she got up quickly and went to him. 30 Jesus had not yet come into the village but was still in the place where Martha had met him. 31 The Jews who were with her in the house consoling her saw that Mary got up quickly and went out. They followed her, supposing that she was going to the tomb to cry there.

32 As soon as Mary came to where Jesus was and saw him, she fell at his feet and told him, “Lord, if you had been here, my brother wouldn’t have died!”

33 When Jesus saw her crying, and the Jews who had come with her crying, he was deeply moved in his spirit and troubled. 34 “Where have you put him?” he asked.

“Lord,” they told him, “come and see.”

35 Jesus wept.

36 So the Jews said, “See how he loved him!” 37 But some of them said, “Couldn’t he who opened the blind man’s eyes also have kept this man from dying?”

THE SEVENTH SIGN: RAISING LAZARUS FROM THE DEAD

38 Then Jesus, deeply moved again, came to the tomb. It was a cave, and a stone was lying against it. 39 “Remove the stone,” Jesus said.

Martha, the dead man’s sister, told him, “Lord, there is already a stench because he has been dead four days.”

40 Jesus said to her, “Didn’t I tell you that if you believed you would see the glory of God?”

In other words, the stated emphasis surrounding the miracle is belief. The miracle is presented as a revelation of Christ’s identity and glory that calls people to faith. That is quite different from using the event as a technical illustration that regeneration must occur before anyone can believe. (SOTERIOLOGY 101)

The problem becomes even more apparent when we recognize that Scripture uses “dead” in several different metaphoric contexts. The material in Calvinism: A Biblical and Theological Critique identifies people as spiritually dead, sick, blind, lovers of darkness, and dead, but argues that Scripture does not require “dead” to mean an inability to repent and believe. It specifically points to Adam and Eve hearing and responding to God after their fall, the prodigal son being described as dead and lost while returning to his father, and Jesus’ statement in John 5:24 concerning the spiritually dead who hear and believe.

That brings us directly to the Prodigal Son. Jesus says of the son, “This son of mine was dead and is alive again; he was lost and is found.” Yet the “dead” son is not portrayed as a motionless corpse. He comes to his senses. He recognizes his condition. He changes his mind. He decides to return. He gets up and goes to his father. Then his father receives him and restores him. The point isn’t that the son saved himself—he didn’t. The father is the one who restores the relationship. But the story certainly doesn’t require us to understand “dead” as meaning incapable of responding.

If you right click with your mouse and “Open Link In New Tab”, that is an expandible graphic.

This is exactly the point made in the Soteriology 101 material. The argument isn’t that “dead doesn’t mean dead.” The argument is that dead is being used idiomatically, and therefore we need to determine what the biblical metaphor means rather than automatically equating spiritual death with a physical corpse. The Prodigal is called “dead/lost” and then “alive/found,” which is presented as an illustration of separation through rebellion rather than innate moral inability. The same article points to Revelation 3, James 1, Romans 7, Ephesians 2, and Colossians 2 as passages that complicate the assumption that “dead” means an inability to respond positively to God. (SOTERIOLOGY 101)

The Colossians passage is particularly interesting. Paul says that believers were “raised up with Him through faith.” The argument drawn from this is that being made alive and faith are not necessarily related in the Calvinist sequence of regeneration → faith. Likewise, the broader biblical material repeatedly commands people to repent and believe. Acts 17:30 says that God “commands all people everywhere to repent.” The critique argues that these commands make better sense as genuine calls to sinners who, through God’s gracious enablement, can respond, rather than as commands that only become possible after an irresistible regeneration that God grants to some and withholds from others.

And this is where the “dead men don’t grab” illustration becomes less decisive than it first appears. Of course a literal corpse cannot grab a life preserver. But nobody is claiming that spiritually dead people are physically dead. The question is what spiritual death means. If “dead” automatically means the total inability to respond to God, then that definition needs to be demonstrated from Scripture rather than simply assumed from the Lazarus story. Ronnie Rogers’ formulation is useful here: God’s sufficient call, together with His grace enablement, is sufficient for anyone to receive salvation. He identifies those enablements as including God’s love, the revelation of His power, Christ’s provision, the conviction of the Holy Spirit, God’s teaching, the gospel, and God’s drawing.

There is also a fascinating internal problem with using Lazarus as the complete picture of the unregenerate sinner. Lazarus did absolutely nothing to help Jesus raise him from the dead—but he also did absolutely nothing to resist Jesus. If Lazarus is the perfect picture of the spiritually dead sinner, then the analogy would seem to demonstrate an inability to do anything in response to God, whether positive or negative. Yet Calvinism simultaneously describes the unregenerate person as actively rebelling against God, loving darkness, following sinful desires, and committing acts that displease Him. The Lazarus analogy therefore cannot, by itself, establish all of the conclusions Calvinism wants to draw from it. The narrative demonstrates Christ’s sovereign power over death; it does not explain every aspect of the sinner’s moral response to God’s grace.

So the real issue isn’t whether God gives life. He does. It isn’t whether salvation is dependent upon God’s grace. It is. And it certainly isn’t whether anyone can save himself. Nobody can. The actual question is much narrower and much more important:

Does “dead in sin” mean that a sinner is incapable of responding to God’s gracious revelation until after regeneration, or does it describe the sinner’s lost, separated, rebellious condition while God’s grace enables him to respond?

That is where the two systems part company.

AGAIN:

The Calvinism: A Biblical and Theological Critique material explicitly frames the distinction as Total Depravity understood as the inability to save oneself versus Total Depravity understood as the inability to repent and believe. To be clear, Calvinists appeal to the doctrine of total depravity to claim that sinners are unable to repent and trust Christ apart from the monergistic work of regeneration.

The distinction is not between believing that humanity is sinful and believing that humanity is not sinful. Both sides affirm the devastating effects of sin and humanity’s absolute dependence upon God’s grace. The real question is what “Total Depravity” means with respect to a person’s response to the gospel. As Adam Harwood explains, the Traditional Statement denies that Adam’s sin resulted in the “incapacitation” of anyone’s free will. It does not claim that sinners can save themselves; rather, it affirms that no sinner can achieve salvation through his own effort and that salvation is received through a response to the Holy Spirit’s drawing through the gospel.

That distinction is critical to the Lazarus argument. Calvinism takes spiritual death to mean that sinners cannot repent and believe until God first regenerates them. The Traditional Baptist position instead understands sinners as genuinely lost and unable to save themselves, while God’s grace calls and enables them to respond. Harwood notes the significance of the Bible’s repeated calls for people to repent and believe: if God calls all people to repent and gives open invitations to respond in faith, the Traditional Statement argues that people must actually be capable of responding. In other words, “dead in sin” does not have to mean “incapable of responding to God’s gracious invitation.” It can describe the sinner’s desperate, lost, and sinful condition while still leaving room for God’s grace to enable a genuine response.

And that is why I think the Lazarus argument deserves much more scrutiny than it usually receives.

Jesus certainly raised Lazarus from the dead.

But Lazarus was not raised to teach us the mechanics of regeneration.

He was raised as a sign revealing who Jesus is, and Jesus explicitly connected the event with belief.

Harwood’s chapter explicitly says the disagreement is not whether salvation is by grace. The Traditional Statement says no sinner is remotely capable of achieving salvation through his own effort. The disagreement is whether God’s grace enables a response or must first regenerate the person so that the response becomes inevitable.

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When we take that narrative and make it the foundation for a doctrine that says regeneration must precede faith, we have moved from what the text says to what a theological system wants the text to illustrate. That is precisely the hermeneutical question raised by Micah Coate’s critique:

  • Are we allowing Scripture to establish the doctrine, or are we taking a narrative and making it carry a doctrine that the narrative itself never teaches?

The issue, then, isn’t whether Lazarus was really dead.

He was.

The issue is whether every spiritually dead person is therefore a spiritual Lazarus—unable to hear, unable to respond, and unable to believe until God first regenerates him.

That conclusion has to come from Scripture. Lazarus doesn’t say it.

You want an example of how a healthy theology uses the Lazarus even? Remember Jesus said:

“This sickness will not end in death but is for the glory of God, so that the Son of God may be glorified through it.”

“I’m glad for you that I wasn’t there so that you may believe.”

“I am the resurrection and the life. The one who believes in me, even if he dies, will live. Everyone who lives and believes in me will never die. Do you believe this?”

“Didn’t I tell you that if you believed you would see the glory of God?”

Here is how the story of Lazarus is used in Professor Harwood’s systematic work:

SIGNS AND MIRACLES

Another means of special revelation attested in Scripture is signs and miracles, which are sometimes called God’s mighty acts or signs and wonders. 18 Signs and miracles were acts of God that occurred outside God’s normative providential care and were meant to testify that God was at work. The Bible is filled with examples of signs and miracles. For example, God intervened to provide children to women such as Sarah, Hannah, and Mary, who otherwise would not have become pregnant. 19 God demonstrated signs through Moses so people would know God had appeared to Moses and was speaking through him (Exod 4:1–9). When Pharaoh refused to listen to Moses despite God’s many signs and wonders, Egypt experienced “mighty acts of judgment” (Exod 7:4).

Signs and wonders characterized the events surrounding Jesus’s conception and birth as well as his public ministry. Mark records an episode that demonstrates a reason for miracles during Jesus’s ministry. While Jesus was teaching in a home crowded with listeners, a paralytic man was lowered through the roof. Jesus declared the man’s sins were forgiven and explained the reason he healed the man was to demonstrate his authority to forgive sin —something only God can do (Mark 2:1–12). This episode of physical healing reveals how the miracle brought more than physical relief and a demonstration of God’s compassion for the individual; the miracle pointed people to a greater truth, that Jesus had the authority to forgive sin. John’s Gospel contains several miracles called “signs” (Grk. sēmeia ), which revealed Jesus’s glory (John 2:11), including turning water to wine (John 2:1–11), healing an official’s son (4:43–54), healing a man at Bethesda (5:1– 15), feeding five thousand (6:1–14), walking on water (6:16–21), restoring a man’s sight (9:1–12), and raising Lazarus (11:1–44). The greatest sign in John’s Gospel, as in the other Gospels, is the resurrection of Jesus from the grave.

[….]

The person and work of Christ can be seen in a variety of ways in John’s Gospel. Jesus is the preexistent and divine Word who became flesh, was rejected by his creation, in whom is life, and who reveals the Father (1:1–18). The Gospel presents eight witnesses to the divinity of Christ: John the Baptist (1:34), the works of Christ (5:36), the Father (v. 37), the Scriptures (v. 39), Christ himself (8:14), the Holy Spirit (15:26), believers (v. 27), and the author of the Gospel (19:35). 15 The seven miracles, also called signs, revealed God’s glory in Jesus and resulted in the disciples trusting him (2:11). The seven signs are changing water into wine (2:1–11), healing the official’s son (4:43–54), healing the man at Bethesda (5:1–15), feeding the five thousand (6:1–14), walking on water (vv. 16–21), healing the man born blind (9:1–12), and raising Lazarus (11:1–44). Jesus identified himself in seven “I am” statements with Yahweh, the covenant name of God: the bread of life (6:35); the light of the world (8:12); the door (10:7); the good shepherd (vv. 11–14); the resurrection and the life (11:25); the way, the truth, and the life (14:6); and the true vine (15:1).

Adam Harwood, Christian Theology: Biblical, Historical, and Systematic (Bellingham, WA: Lexham Academic, 2022), 88–89, 398.

Professor Harwood used the story as Jesus intended it; R.C. Sproul, John MacArthur, James White, and others, did and do not..

More from Professor Flowers book, Drawn by Jesus:

Dead In Sin

Are we born dead like Lazarus, a corpse rotting in the tomb (a link scripture never draws), or are we dead like the Prodigal, a loved one separated due to his own rebellion? Scripture seems to support the latter, not the former (Luke 15:32).

The fact is that the scriptures metaphorically address our condi­tion as a sickness far more than as deadness. (Jer 17:9, 23; Mk 2:17; Lk 5:31; Mt 9:12; Ps 38:3; Is 64:6; etc) And when speaking metaphoric­ally of deadness, it is never described as a morally incapacitated con­dition from birth due to the Fall, but instead as a condition of being separated from God by our own rebellion.

For instance, the Prodigal was “dead” or “lost” then “alive” or “found,” demonstrating that the term “dead” is idiomatic for “separ­ated by rebellion,” not “innate moral inability” (Luke 15:24). Just as our soul is separated from our body when we die so too sinful hu­manity is separated from God by his rebellion. Look what scripture teaches,

When tempted, no one should say, “God is tempting me.” For God cannot be tempted by evil, nor does he tempt anyone; but each person is tempted when they are dragged away by their own evil desire and enticed. Then, after desire has conceived, it gives birth to sin; and sin, when it is full-grown, gives birth to death. (James 1 :1 3-1 5)

Are we born “dead,” according to James? Or is death birthed in those who sin after it is “full grown?” What did Paul say?

What shall we say, then? Is the law sinful? Certainly not! Never­theless, I would not have known what sin was had it not been for the law. For I would not have known what coveting really was if the law had not said, “You shall not covet.” But sin, seizing the op­portunity afforded by the commandment, produced in me every kind of coveting. For apart from the law, sin was dead. Once I was alive apart from the law; but when the commandment came, sin sprang to life and I died. I found that the very commandment that was intended to bring life actually brought death. For sin, seizing the opportunity afforded by the commandment, deceived me, and through the commandment, put me to death. (Romans 7:7-11)

Are we born “dead,” according to Paul? Or was it through the com­mandment, after “sin sprang to life,” that death came? In contrast, the metaphor of illness is quite prevalent throughout the scriptures:

For while we were still weak, at the right time Christ died for the ungodly. (Romans 5:6)

The heart is more deceitful than all else. And is desperately sick; Who can understand it? (Jeremiah 1 7:9)

And hearing this, Jesus said to them, “It is not those who are healthy who need a physician, but those who are sick; I did not come to call the righteous, but sinners. (Mark 2:1 7)

There is no soundness in my flesh because of Your indignation; There is no health in my bones because of my sin. (Psalms 38:3)

For all of us have become like one who is unclean, And all our righteous deeds are like a filthy garment; And all of us wither like a leaf, And our iniquities, like the wind, take us away. (Isaiah 64:6)

We are sick and in need of a Physician. We are cursed and in need of His cure. His life-giving truth is sufficient to accomplish the pur­pose for which He sent it, “…so that you may believe…and by believ­ing may have life in His name” (John 20:31).

Is Not Able By His Own Strength

Given that we cannot draw our next breath if not by the gracious good pleasure of our Sovereign Lord, I’m not sure how this qualifica­tion helps clarify our point of contention. God gives us all we have, including our ability to make choices. In other words, we all affirm that God must enable choice. We do not all agree that such enabling will dictate which choice will be made. As A.W. Tozer so eloquently taught,

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?” Man’s 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.

To Convert Himself

In response to a doctor’s diagnosis, is recognizing your need for a heart transplant and submitting to the doctor’s will to perform the surgery equal to performing the surgery yourself? Of course not. An Ethiopian cannot change his own skin, nor can a leopard change his own spots (Jeremiah 13:23), but that does not even imply that they cannot recognize and submit to this needed change when confronted by the only One who is able to bring about such change.

Or Prepare Himself Thereunto

Can the powerful, Spirit-wrought truth of God’s inspired Word prepare him thereunto? Does one’s ability to resist such preparation and enabling work somehow negate that the work is sufficient to accomplish its given purpose?

Here is a brief rebuttal of the most common proof texts used by Calvinists to support their teaching on “Total Inability.” Much more could be and has been written on each of these texts from the non-Calvinistic perspective, but for the sake of brevity, here is a summary of the rebuttals:

The LORD saw that the wickedness of man was great in the earth, and that every intention of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually. (Genesis 6:5)

Nothing at all is stated about man’s inability to respond to God’s own revelation. Please read all of Genesis chapter 6 and make a case as to how that supports the Calvinistic premise. Here is just a taste of the context:

The Lord saw how great the wickedness of the human race had become on the earth, and that every inclination of the thoughts of the human heart was only evil all the time. The Lord regretted that he had made human beings on the earth, and his heart was deeply troubled.

As one Calvinist on a recent podcast inquired in response to this passage, “Why didn’t God just elect more people instead of becoming `deeply troubled?'” That is a good question that every Calvinist must deal with when confronted with a text like this. The natural reading simply does not align with deterministic philosophy.

None is righteous, no, not one; no one understands; no one seeks for God. (Romans 3:1O-11)

No one is righteous according to the works of the law. No one is able to attain righteousness by law through works. But how does that prove no one is able to obtain righteousness by grace through faith? In verse 21 of this same chapter, Paul introduces the means for man to obtain righteousness, which is separate from the law. Calvin­ists seem to think that proof of our inability to earn righteousness through our own works likewise proves our inability to trust in the imputed righteousness of Christ. Proving that the lost cannot seek God does not prove that they are unable to respond to a God who is ac­tively seeking to save the lost.

For the mind that is set on the flesh is hostile to God, for it does not submit to God’s law; indeed, it cannot. Those who are in the flesh cannot please God. You, however, are not in the flesh but in the Spirit, if in fact the Spirit of God dwells in you. Anyone who does not have the Spirit of Christ does not belong to him. (Romans 8:7-9)

Mankind’s inability to submit to God’s law does not prove their inability to trust in Christ, who fulfilled the law for mankind. Man­kind’s inability to please God while acting in the flesh does not prove mankind’s inability to respond to the spiritual appeal of God so as to receive His Spirit.

If I warn my rebellious son, saying, “You cannot please me by acting selfishly,” does that suggest the child is unable to heed my warning, humble himself, and repent of acting selfishly? Of course not. It only suggests that as long as my child continues to rebel and act according to his pride, he will not please me.

This verse says nothing of our innate inability to respond to God’s powerful truth and appeal to humble ourselves so as to be reconciled. Each individual has the choice to remain in their fleshly pride or respond to the Spirit’s call to humble themselves. If you choose the former, you cannot please God.

The natural person does not accept the things of the Spirit of God, for they are folly to him, and he is not able to understand them because they are spiritually discerned. (1 Corinthians 2:14)

So, the lost man needs someone to spiritually discern the “deep things of God” (vs. 10), right? What are the means God uses to help us discern spiritual truths? Is not the very epistle that Paul is writing to the carnal believers in Corinth a means for “spiritual discernment?” And since the “brethren” in the Corinthian church are “not able to receive” these same “deep things of God” (1 Corinthians 3:1-3), one would be hard-pressed to suggest that Paul intended to teach that no one is able to understand the simple “milk” of the gospel’s appeal for reconciliation (2 Corinthians 5:20).

Again, this text never suggests that mankind is born unable to respond positively to God’s clearly revealed gospel appeal. It only affirms that the mystery of the gospel must be revealed to us in order for us to understand it, which it has been. As Paul states, “When you read this, you can perceive my insight into the mystery of Christ, which was not made known to the sons of men in other generations as it has now been revealed to his holy apostles and prophets by the Spirit” (Ephesians 3:4).

Neither side of this soteriological debate suggests that lost men can understand the deep spiritual truths of God apart from the means God has chosen to reveal these mysteries. So, the question is whether God’s means of discernment through the apostle’s writings is a sufficient work of discernment that enables those who hear it to understand and respond.

No one can come to me unless the Father who sent me draws him. (John 6:44a)

We all agree with this statement. But what are the means that God draws men to Himself? Even White agrees that God draws them by teaching them. As mentioned earlier, in Romans 10:14-15 Paul asks:

How, then, can they call on the one they have not believed in? And how can they believe in the one of whom they have not heard? And how can they hear without someone preaching to them? And how can anyone preach unless they are sent?

Follow the Order:

God Sends: Who does He send? His apostles, the remnant reserved from Israel to be His inspired messengers (Acts 10:40-41). The rest of the Israelites are being judicially hardened in their rebellion tem­porarily while Christ is on earth (Romans 11:7; 25). Jesus speaks to them in parables so that they cannot understand and repent (Mark 4:11-12). He does this to ensure the crucifixion that He has predeter­mined will come to pass (Acts 2:23). It is not until after Christ is lifted up that he sends out His Spirit-filled messengers to preach the gospel to all peoples (Acts 1:8) in order to draw all men to Himself (John 12:3 2).

Apostles Preach: What do they preach? The powerful gospel ap­peal (Romans 1:16; 10:8; 2 Corinthians 5:20), which is alive, active and able to cut through to the soul of man (Hebrews 4:12). Remem­ber this is the powerful gospel that is being hidden in parables from most of Israel while Christ is on earth in order to prevent them from repenting before the right time (Matthew 13:11; 16:20). Proof that God used persuasive means to convince chosen messengers from Is­rael to go and proclaim His message is not proof that God uses inward irresistible means to convince preselected hearers to believe their message (John 20:30-31).

Hearers Hear: Who are the hearers? Anyone who is not being judicially hardened, like Israel was at that time. Only those who are being blinded from seeing the light are unable to see the light, and that blinding (judicially hardening) is not a condition from birth but a condition unique to Israel at that time as judgment for their rebel­lion.

Hearing is how they can believe: As Paul states in the following verses, “faith comes from hearing the message,” which parallels what John taught in John 20:31: “…these are written that you may believe that Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of God and that by believing, you may have life in his name.” The only reason that a hearer would not be enabled to respond to the life-giving truth of God’s appeal is if they are being prevented from seeing, hearing, or understanding the mes­sage, a condition of someone being judicially hardened by God (“hid­den from their eyes”).

Believing is how they can call: One who has heard the powerful gospel appeal calling us to repentance and faith is able to believe. The believer is able to call on Christ in repentance in order to find forgive­ness and life. Mankind must repent in order to live! (Ezekiel 18:32)

The historical context of John 6 must be in view to understand the author’s intention. Jesus is purposefully blinding most Israelites, due to their self-righteous rebellion, from the truth of His identity to prevent their repentance for a time. All the while, He is drawing His preselected apostles and genuine believers from Israel to be the foundation for His church. In other words, in Christ’s audience, there are some who are being judicially hardened from Israel for a good reason (unbelief) and others who are being drawn from Israel for a good reason (belief) in order to ensure God’s purpose in electing Israel would be fulfilled.

Support Drawn from Other Passages In John’s Gospel

And I, if I am lifted up from the earth, will draw all men to Myself. (John 12:32)

The differentiation between the Father’s drawing in John 6 and the Son’s drawing in John 12, as expounded upon earlier, is a signifi­cant contextual point that must be considered in this discussion. The emphasis on the Father’s drawing in John 6 highlights the divine ac­tion of God inviting and enabling faithful God-fearing individuals to come to Jesus.

On the other hand, in John 12:32, Jesus emphasizes His own agency in drawing all people to Himself, but only after His res­urrection. This distinction highlights the harmonious collaboration between the Father and the Son in their work of salvation, underscor­ing the unity and purpose within the Godhead given at the proper time. By emphasizing His role in drawing people to Himself, Jesus reinforces His divinity and authority as the central figure in the re­demptive plan of God, offering all people the means to be reconciled with God through His sacrificial death and resurrection.

Jesus answered them, “I told you, and you do not believe; the works that I do in My Father’s name, these testify of Me. “But you do not believe because you are not of My sheep. “My sheep hear My voice, and I know them, and they follow Me; and I give eternal life to them, and they will never perish; and no one will snatch them out of My hand. “My Father, who has given them to Me, is greater than all; and no one is able to snatch them out of the Father’s hand. “I and the Father are one.” (John 10:25-30)

If we understand “My sheep” to refer to “those I have uncondi­tionally elected for effectual salvation before the foundation of the world,” then this passage might appear to support the Calvinistic doctrine. However, there is nothing in this context to indicate that is what Jesus is referring to by using the analogy of being His “sheep.” The intended audience of Jesus’ words in John 10:26 are Israelites who have become hardened and indifferent to the voice of God. It is because of their refusal to listen and respond to the Father’s voice that they are now unable to recognize and accept the voice of Jesus, who speaks the same truth (John 6:45).

This is not due to an inherent condition from birth that predis­poses them to hate and reject God’s appeals for reconciliation, nor is it because God is withholding the necessary grace for them to believe. On the contrary, the Jews had become calloused through persistent unbelief; otherwise, they could have seen, heard, understood, and turned to God for healing (as demonstrated in John 12:39-40 and Acts 28:23-28). Jesus describes their spiritual condition in this con­text as follows:

You pore over the Scriptures because you think you have eternal life in them, and yet they testify about me. But you are not willing to come to me so that you may have life (John 5:39-40).

It is important to observe the sequence of events here: the Jews chose to reject the Scriptures, resulting in their denial of the oppor­tunity for life. Jesus did not imply, “I have refused to make you alive so that you would be compelled to come to me.” He put the blame solely upon them for their unwillingness to come when they were presented with that opportunity.

During that time, the Jewish people had become stubborn and entrenched in their rebellion, which explains why they were unable to perceive, hear, and respond to their own Messiah. However, those who had not succumbed to this hardening of heart, and instead listened to and learned from the Father (like Cornelius in Acts 10) would believe in the Son and follow Him – recognizing His voice, much like a sheep responds to its shepherd (see also John 6:45).

Prior to Christ’s coming, if someone believed the Father, they would also believe His Son, for the Father and Son are One. Con­versely, if one refused to listen to the Father before the incarnation, they would likewise be unresponsive to the teachings of the Son. The followers of the Father (often referred to as “sheep” during that era) also became followers of the Son. Those who rejected the guidance of the Father were not considered among His sheep, and that is why they refused to follow the Son. This clarifies Jesus’ statement to them, “But you do not believe because you are not of my sheep” (John 10:26).

In essence, Jesus is conveying this message: “Because you have chosen not to follow the Father, you will not follow me, His Son, either.” When Jesus says, “You are not my sheep,” He is essentially saying, “You do not align yourself with God, nor have you listened and learned from Him (as referenced in John 6:45). Hence, you will not heed my calling as the Shepherd sent by Him, who represents the very same truth.” This is reflected in the following statement by Jesus:

If God were your Father, you would love Me, because I came from God and I am here. For I didn’t come on my own, but He sent me (John 8:42).

Jesus is not implying, as the Calvinistic doctrine would suggest, that their unbelief stems from both Him and the Father rejecting them and withholding the necessary grace to believe since before the world was established. This notion contradicts Luke 19:41-42, where

 Jesus weeps over Israel because they are now unable to see the truth of His identity as their Messiah.

Why would God need to conceal the truth of Christ from those who were born unable to believe? Additionally, why would Jesus urge those who were not His followers to ponder the implications of His miracles if they were utterly incapable of accepting the truth?

If I am not doing my Father’s works, don’t believe me. But if I am doing them and you don’t believe me, believe the works. This way, you will know and understand that the Father is in me and I in the Father (John 10:37-38, emphasis added).

God was not withholding some special grace necessary for them to believe. This notion gives them too much credit and portrays them as victims rather than morally accountable rebellious sinners. They reject a loving God who declares, “all day long I have held out my hands” (Romans 10:21) and “wanted to gather your children to­gether, as a hen gathers her chicks under her wings” (Matthew 23:37; Isaiah 30:15).

I came across this first graphic, and this is the “Calvinist ‘front’ story”… I explain the rest of the story behind the scenes with the second one that follows:

John Piper’s Theistic “Dust Particle” Determinism (Soto 101)

Published by Papa Giorgio

(Updated with some graphics) A definition from that fits Calvinism via the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy and the current understanding of reformed theologies …. “Reformed” theologies:

  • I hate using “Reformed” because many Reformers (like Philip Melanchthon and Balthasar Hubmaier as some examples) thought differently than the “Pipers,” MacArthur’s,” and “Calvins” of their time and today. So Calvinism is a better term: John MacArthur was a “Calvinist Baptist,” not a “Reformed Baptist.” Understand the difference with a distinction? — RPT

Foreknowledge and Free Will (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)

Fatalism is the thesis that human acts occur by necessity and hence are unfree. Theological fatalism is the thesis that infallible foreknowledge of a human act makes the act necessary and hence unfree. If there is a being who knows the entire future infallibly, then no human act is free.

Fatalism seems to be entailed by infallible foreknowledge by the following informal line of reasoning:

For any future act you will perform, if some being infallibly believed in the past that the act would occur, there is nothing you can do now about the fact that he believed what he believed since nobody has any control over past events; nor can you make him mistaken in his belief, given that he is infallible. Therefore, there is nothing you can do now about the fact that he believed in a way that cannot be mistaken that you would do what you will do. But if so, you cannot do otherwise than what he believed you would do. And if you cannot do otherwise, you will not perform the act freely.

The same argument can be applied to any infallibly foreknown act of any human being. If there is a being who infallibly knows everything that will happen in the future, no human being has any control over the future.

This theological fatalist argument creates a dilemma for anyone who thinks it important to maintain both (1) there is a deity who infallibly knows the entire future, and (2) human beings have free will in the strong sense usually called libertarian. But it has also fascinated many who have not shared either of these commitments, because taking the argument’s full measure requires rethinking some of the most fundamental questions in philosophy, especially ones concerning time, truth, and modality. Those philosophers who think there is a way to consistently maintain both (1) and (2) are called compatibilists about infallible foreknowledge and human free will. Compatibilists must either identify a false premise in the argument for theological fatalism or show that the conclusion does not follow from the premises. 

Another recent example that came across my desk (earbuds at work). Dr. Theodore Zachariades stating that God wills [causes, not just permits] a man to be unfaithful to his wife in his comment on becoming a Calvinist via Ephesians 1.

  • God works all things after the Council of His will. Even keeping those kings who want to commit adultery from committing so! And when He wants to, he orders those to commit adultery when he wants to! (Video)

Now that that is out of the way, on to the videos…

I isolated the Piper quote from the video that follows it:

QUESTION: Has God predetermined every tiny detail in the universe, such as dust particles in the air? And then I should add here, including all our besetting sins.

PIPER RESPONDS: Yes, which means yes, every horrible thing and every sinful thing is ultimately governed by God and. That’s a problem, but the center of the solution to the problem is a choice. You have to make about the cross

(BTW, more on Piper can be found in this excellent journal article title (PDF), “I Believe In Divine Sovereignty,” by Thomas H. McCall)

JUMP TO tull transcript at bottom.

Here are some of the comments on the original SOTERIOLOGY 101 video on their YouTube Channel [below]:

  • God determines every single thing even dust but you have to make the decision about the cross What????
  • So Calvinism teaches , “God commands you to obey, but has SECRETLY predestined you to DISOBEY, so He can burn you forever because you were a reprobate ‘before you were born, or had done anything either good or bad’.”
  • Piper who doesn’t believe in free will choice says “the solution to the problem is a CHOICE you have to make about a cross” 😂😂 how anyone can listen to this incoherent nonsense I’ll never know.
  • Piper: ” the center of the solution is a choice YOU have to make about the cross”? Does he mean I make a choice? Or God determines what choice I make??
  • If God is determining what man wants to do then also blinding and hardening doesn’t Jesus refute that reasoning when talking about how a kingdom divided against itself cannot stand? Matt. 12:25,26
  • Piper didn’t look like he wholeheartedly believed what he was saying.

Dr. Leighton Flowers, Director of Evangelism and Apologetics for Texas Baptists, confronts the Calvinist’s appeal to the Crucifixion as their proof that God predetermines all moral evil, specifically playing off John Piper’s use of Acts 4:27-28 as justification for his deterministic interpretation of the Bible.

Here is the descriptive story told at SOTO 101:

…When we object to the concept of divine determinism (God’s sovereign work to bring about all things whatsoever that come to pass) and you appeal to the crucifixion as your proof that God brings about all moral evil, are you saying that God is sovereignly working so as to redeem the very sins He sovereignly worked to bring about? Is Calvary just about God cleaning up His own mess — redeeming His own determinations?

Appealing to God’s sovereign work to ensure the redemption of sin so as to prove that God sovereignly works to bring about all the sin that was redeemed is a self-defeating argument. It would be tantamount to arguing that because a police department set up a sting operation to catch a notorious drug dealer, that the police department is responsible for every single intention and action of all drug dealers at all times. Proof that the police department worked in secretive ways to hide their identities, use evil intentions, and work out the circumstances in such a way that the drug dealer would do what they wanted him to do (sell drugs) at that particular moment in time does not suggest that the police are in anyway responsible for all that drug dealer has done or ever will do. We celebrate and reward the actions of this police department because they are working to stop the drug activity, not because they are secretly causing all of it so as to stop some of it. Teaching that God brings about all sin based on how He brought about Calvary is like teaching that the police officer brings about every drug deal based on how he brought about one sting operation.

Yes, at times the scriptures do speak of God “hardening” men’s hearts (Ex. 7; Rm. 9), blinding them with a “spirit of stupor” (Rm. 11:8) and delaying their healing by use of parabolic language (Mk. 4:11-12, 34; Matt. 16:20), and He always does so for a redemptive good. But the reason such passages stand out so distinctly from the rest of scripture is because of their uniqueness. If God worked this way in every instance these texts would make no sense. After all, what is there for God to harden, provoke, or restrain if not the autonomous will of creatures?

If everything is under the meticulous control of God’s sovereign work what is left to permit and/or restrain except that which He is already controlling? Is God merely restraining something that He previously determined? Why blind eyes from seeing something the were “naturally” predetermined not to see? Why put a parabolic blind fold on a corpse-like dead sinner incapable of seeing spiritual truth? These are questions many Calvinists seem unwilling to entertain at any depth.

FULL PIPER TRANSCRIPT:

Q: Has God predetermined every tiny detail in the universe, such as dust particles in the air and all of our besetting sins?

A. Yes.

There’s a great quote from Spurgeon about dust motes. You may not even know what a dust mote is, but when I get up in the morning in my room, there’s a window to the side of the bed, and a beam of light will be shining through it at certain times of the year when I get it.

Now when I look through the dark I see nothing. But when I look through the beam I see the dust in the room. It’s flying around, and I say, “I’m breathing that stuff!?” Yes, you are. And Spurgeon says that every one of those particles is keeping its position and moving through the air by God’s appointment.

Now the reason I believe that is because the Bible says, “The dice are thrown in the lap, and every decision is from the Lord” (Proverbs 16:33). Proverbs 16 has a bunch of these verses in it.

Why would he choose “the die is cast into the lap”? It’s because he’s trying to think of the most random thing he could think of. And he says that. So randomness is not random to God.

God is not the least taxed by keeping every sub-nuclear particle in its place. I used to say electrons, but now there’s something smaller than electrons. Everything in the middle of the molecule moving, and the electrons—he’s got them all in orbit, just like he has the planets in orbit.

So the macro-world and micro-world are all managed by God. Which means, Yes, every horrible thing and every sinful thing is ultimately governed by God.

That’s a problem, but the center of the solution is a choice you have to make about the cross. This is what has centered me, anyway: When you go to Acts 4:27-28 and you read that Herod and Pontius Pilate and the Gentiles and the Jews were all gathered together to do what God’s hand and God’s plan had predestined to take place in the killing of Jesus, you have God’s plan and hand predestining the most horrible sins ever committed.

Pilate’s choices, the soldiers’ cruel mockery, the piercing of his side, the cries, “Crucify him! Crucify him!”—these few hours in history were the climax of the worst wickedness that has ever been performed on the planet or ever will be. And God planned it so that we might be saved from those sins.

In other words, what the devil did in unleashing all of that was commit suicide. And I pray that when you contemplate believing in a sovereign God who governs the dust motes, the waves (including tsunamis)—when you contemplate believing in a totally sovereign God, I pray that you will center it right on the cross. Because you’ll go crazy otherwise. You will!

These things have driven people mad. But it won’t drive you mad if you say, “He loves me. And he governed the most wicked thing that ever happened in the world, the crucifixion of my Savior and my God.” If you stay right there and then just work out from there as far as your mind can handle, then you’ll be safe. Your mind will be safe and your heart will be safe, because you’ll be kept humble.

People get very arrogant with these kinds of doctrines. They can use them to club people. But if you stay with the cross, you won’t.

Just one more thing on this. This is right off my front burner, because a lot of us at Bethlehem are reading through Acts. We just read in chapter 2 where Peter said in the sermon to the people who had killed Jesus, “You acted in ignorance”—he didn’t forgive them for that; he said they have to repent—”You acted in ignorance, but God fulfilled what he had promised by the prophets, that the Christ must suffer.” What that said to me, again, was that these people didn’t know what they were doing, but God knew what he was doing.

So the crucifixion of his Son was, quoting Isaiah 53:10, the bruising by the Father of the Son. Therefore the worst sin that was ever committed was ordained by God. And the answer is yes. He controls everything, and he does it for his glory and our good.

Calvinist Misinterpretation of Genesis 6:5

Published by Papa Giorgio

This will be a short post. I came across a graphic that I figured I would correct… I will pop a short video between the original and my fix:

… Problem with the Calvinistic Understanding of Genesis 6:5 and Genesis 8:21

First, the texts are not statements about the sinful condition of all people throughout time, but are specifically about the people who lived at the time of the flood.

Second, the statements in these verses are not saying that men are inherently wicked in everything they do, but that the people at that time became wicked in everything they did. This is seen in part to the mysterious pairing of the sons of God and the daughters of men in Genesis 6:1-4, but also to the fact that when the evil intentions of mankind is described, it is their violent actions that are specifically mentioned (Genesis 6:11-13).

The truth that humanity became evil is further supported by the Hebrew word for “intent” (Heb. yetzer) in Genesis 6:5 and “imagination” in Genesis 8:21 is the same word used in Genesis 2:7, 19 to describe how God “formed” man from the dust of the ground. The point is that just as God formed man to be good, now man is “forming” his thoughts and his actions to be only evil. Humanity was not evil inherently, but was forming himself to be evil continually.

Furthermore, if Genesis 6:5 meant that mankind had always been evil continually (since the fall of Adam and Eve), there would be no explanation for why God was only now upset at their evil, and was only now acting to stop the spread of violence upon the earth (Genesis 6:6-7).

If mankind had always been this way, God’s sorrow at the state of mankind and His decision to allow the flood waters to cover the earth make no sense. If mankind had always been this evil, then God should have always felt this way….

(REDEEMING GOD)

The Grace Calvinists and Arminians Miss

Published by Papa Giorgio

This has been updated (7/24/2026)
This is the thumbnail in my “slider” for the curious

This first graph is what got me thinking about this update, and I will fix what I see is wrong with it in a bit:

One of the most common misconceptions about Provisionism—and one of the reasons I’ve updated this post—is the assumption that Provisionists believe the Gospel alone functions as the only means by which God graciously enables people to respond to Him. While the Gospel is God’s supreme and saving revelation, Provisionism has always affirmed that God graciously reveals Himself and calls humanity through multiple means, including creation, conscience, providence, the convicting work of the Holy Spirit, Scripture, and ultimately the proclamation of the Gospel.

The disagreement with Calvinism and Arminianism is not whether God enables, but what Scripture teaches about the nature of that enabling and whether mankind is born with an inherited inability that requires a special grace before one can respond in faith.

The issue is that the above column subtly reduce Provisionism’s doctrine of grace to “the Gospel alone” as though the Gospel were merely information that unaided sinners evaluate. That’s not how Leighton Flowers or most thoughtful Provisionists describe it.

Provisionism doesn’t deny that God enables; it denies that He gives a special, universally distributed prevenient grace that restores a lost faculty of faith. Instead, God has provided a multitude of gracious means by which He reveals Himself and calls sinners.

For example, God’s gracious revelation includes:

  • Creation (Romans 1:18–20)
  • Conscience (Romans 2:14–15)
  • Providence and God’s kindness (Acts 14:17; Romans 2:4)
  • The convicting ministry of the Holy Spirit (John 16:8–11)
  • The inspired Word of God (2 Timothy 3:15; Hebrews 4:12)
  • The preaching of the Gospel (Romans 10:14–17)
  • The testimony of believers (2 Corinthians 5:20)
  • God’s patient appeals throughout history (Acts 17:26–31)

The Gospel is the climax of God’s provision, not the entirety of it.

Provisionists argue that God has graciously provided everything necessary for people to respond to Him through His self-revelation in creation, conscience, providence, the convicting ministry of the Holy Spirit, the inspired Scriptures, and especially the proclamation of the Gospel. Rather than a universal prevenient grace restoring an innate inability, Provisionists see these God-ordained means as sufficient to render every person genuinely accountable before Him.

Soteriology 101 is right when they emphasizes the Gospel because Romans 10 and the Great Commission are about how people come to saving faith:

Article Two says:

“We deny that any sinner is saved apart from a free response to the Holy Spirit’s drawing through the Gospel.”

Article Four says:

“…providing atonement, in freely offering the Gospel in the power of the Holy Spirit…“

Article Eight says:

“…accepting or rejecting God’s gracious call to salvation by the Holy Spirit through the Gospel.”

Article Ten says:

“…the proclamation of the Gospel is God’s means of bringing any person to salvation.”

Amen!

I am angling a slightly different question that Soto 101’s Statement of Faith, which simply asks [even if unsaid]: “How does God save people?”

What I am saying retroactively applies to times prior to Calvary and the Gospel and the spread of it across the world, as well as to those who have not heard the Gospel presented. This is RPT’s question:

  • How has God graciously revealed Himself throughout history so that every person is morally accountable before Him while also providing His saving revelation according to His redemptive plan?

Those are not identical questions. Romans 1 and Romans 2 aren’t explaining how someone is regenerated. They’re explaining why everyone is “without excuse.”

This covers:

  • Adam through Noah.
  • Abraham and the patriarchs.
  • Israel under the Law.
  • Native Americans before European contact.
  • Modern unreached people groups.
  • Those of us who have heard the Gospel.

Your Native American article raises precisely the kind of question that illustrates this continuity: What about those who lived centuries before the Gospel reached the Americas? The New Testament doesn’t give a detailed answer about every case, but it consistently affirms two truths:

  1. God has never left Himself without witness (creation, conscience, providence, etc.). Acts 14:17 is especially explicit: “Yet He did not leave Himself without witness…” Romans 1–2 makes the same point regarding accountability.
  2. The Gospel is God’s appointed means of proclaiming salvation under the New Covenant (Romans 10), while salvation itself has always been through Christ, even for those who lived before His incarnation (Hebrews 11).

MORE HERE:

  • What About Those Who Never Hear the Gospel? (Apologetic Press)
  • What About Those Who’ve Never Heard the Gospel? (Be Thinking)
  • Are Those Who Have Not Heard the Gospel Damned? RPT Q&A +More (RPT)

Provisionism’s doctrine of divine provision is not limited to the post-Pentecost proclamation of the Gospel. Throughout redemptive history, God has graciously revealed Himself through creation, conscience, providence, and His promises, rendering humanity accountable while progressively revealing His plan of redemption. Though salvation has always been through Christ alone, the Gospel is God’s appointed means of bringing people to saving faith under the New Covenant.

My Re-Write:

Provisionists affirm that the Holy Spirit draws sinners through the Gospel unto salvation. At the same time, Provisionism recognizes that God has never left Himself without witness. Through creation (Rom. 1:18–20), conscience (Rom. 2:14–15), providence (Acts 14:17; 17:24–31), the convicting ministry of the Holy Spirit (John 16:8–11), and ultimately the proclamation of the Gospel, God graciously reveals Himself, rendering every person without excuse and genuinely responsible for his or her response to His revelation. Saving faith comes through the Gospel (Rom. 10:17), but God’s gracious self-revelation is broader than the Gospel alone.

This is how I describe it on my X ARTICLE to bolster the idea:

Throughout history, God has graciously revealed Himself in many ways, including:

  • Creation
  • Conscience
  • Providence
  • Covenants
  • The Prophets
  • The convicting work of the Holy Spirit
  • The incarnation of Christ
  • The proclamation of the gospel

These expressions of God’s self-revelation are not rigid stages through which every person passes in the same sequence. Rather, they represent the many ways God has made Himself known throughout redemptive history, often overlapping in a person’s life and always finding their fullest expression in the person and work of Jesus Christ. At Calvary, God’s self-revelation reached its clearest expression, where His holiness, justice, love, and grace were displayed in the sacrificial death and victorious resurrection of His Son.

Physicist Michael Guillen’s testimony illustrates this beautifully. As a committed atheist, it was not one isolated event that brought him to Christ. Rather, his understanding was gradually shaped by the wonder of creation, the limits of scientific materialism, his search through competing worldviews, meaningful relationships, and ultimately the witness of Scripture.

His journey reminds us that God often draws people through many converging streams of revelation, each pointing beyond itself until they find their fulfillment in Jesus Christ.

(I just want to give a shout out to Provisionist Perspective for encouraging me to do an X version of my post)

  • Within the Non-Calvinist camp, there are at least two nuanced views on how God allows sinners to respond in faith. The first view is the Arminian view — which says that God’s work of grace (prevenient grace) for all people is needed to enable any sinner to freely choose to respond in faith to the Gospel message. The second view is the Provisionist View — which says that the Gospel message itself [see more below]  is God’s work of grace so that when it is preached to all people, any sinner can freely choose to respond in faith. The proclamation of the Gospel is powerfully sufficient enough to bring salvation to those who will believe. While the Arminian and the Provisionist each have a different take on why all humans can respond to God’s offer, these two views both affirm the importance of God’s initiative of grace to invite all sinners to salvation. (from the book Grace For All: Understanding God’s Plan of Salvation).

— Michael R. Cariño

The “More Below”

Grace Enablements

Includes but are not limited to: God’s salvific love for all (John 3:16), God’s manifestation of his power so that all may know he is the Sovereign (Isa 45:21–22) and Creator (Rom 1:18–20), which assures that everyone has opportunity to know about him. Christ paying for all sins (John 1:29), conviction of the Holy Spirit (John 16:7–11), working of the Holy Spirit (Heb 6:1–6), enlightening of the Son (John 1:9), God’s teaching (John 6:45), God opening minds and hearts (Luke 24:45; Acts 16:14; 26:17–18;), and the power of the Gospel (Rom 1:16), without such redemptive grace, no one seeks or comes to God (Rom 3:11).

Because of these gracious provisions and workings of God, man can choose to seek and find God (Jer 29:13; Acts 17:11–12). Moreover, no one can come to God without God calling (Acts 2:39), drawing (John 6:44), and that God is drawing all individuals (John 12:32). The same Greek word for draw, helkuō, is used in both verses. “About 115 passages condition salvation on believing alone, and about 35 simply on faith.” Other grace enablements may include providential workings in and through other people, situations, and timing or circumstances that are a part of grace to provide an opportunity for every individual to choose to follow Christ.

These are grace enablements in at least three ways; first, they are provided by God’s grace rather than deserved by mankind; second, the necessary components for each and every individual to have a genuine opportunity to believe unto salvation are provided or restored by God; third, they are provided by God without respect to whether the individual will believe or reject, which response God knew in eternity past.

The offer of the Gospel is unconditional, but God sovereignly determined to condition the reception of the offer upon grace-enabled faith; therefore, faith is not reflective of a work or virtue of man, but of God’s sovereign plan of salvation by grace through faith (Eph 2:8). This indicates faith is the means to being regenerated and saved, not the reason for being saved. This truth of Scripture does not imply God is held captive to the choice of man, but rather it demonstrates God in eternity coextensively determined to create man with otherwise choice and provide a genuine offer of salvation, which can be accepted by grace-enabled faith or rejected. Additionally, to fulfill this plan, God is not obligated to disseminate the Gospel to people he knows have rejected the light he has given them (Rom 1:18–23) and will also reject the Gospel; although he may still send the Gospel to them.

IMPORTANT?

Why I think this is important. The North American Missions Board (NAMB) essentially states:

People have not heard the Gospel.

Therefore, they are condemned because they never heard it.

Provisionism does not begin by asking, “What happens to those who never hear the Gospel?”

It first asks, “Has God graciously revealed Himself sufficiently to every person to hold them morally accountable?”

Scripture repeatedly answers that He has. From creation and conscience to providence and the convicting work of the Holy Spirit, God has never left Himself without witness (Acts 14:17). The Gospel is God’s appointed means of proclaiming salvation through Christ, but His gracious self-revelation has never been limited to the Gospel era or to places where missionaries have already arrived.

NAMB says:

  • “people who never have an opportunity to hear the Gospel stand condemned.”

To which I ask: Are they condemned because they never heard the Gospel?

Another version (thanks B.J.)

William Lane Craig:

WLC’s view is anathema to NAMB, sadly. And this is the evidence of the rot of Calvinism.

Here is my chart on the differences broadly speaking:

CLICK TO ENLARGE – right click and choose:
“Open Image In New Tab” and it be at it’s largest

Too Depraved To Respond To The Gospel?

Published by Papa Giorgio

As far as the Scripture is concerned, it is very clear that faith and believing come first and the new birth follows. The Scripture is replete, lucid, and compelling in teaching that the order is faith prior to regeneration, and faith is a gift that God endowed man with in creation not in selective regeneration; moreover, God is working in order to give men and women a real chance to trust Him unto salvation (John 16:8). Salvation is offered as a free gift (Romans 6:23) to all who are in need of forgiveness (Romans 5:15, 18), and people are summoned to act upon the offer by accepting the gift by—grace-enabled—faith (John 1:12). “Never does the Bible say, ‘Be saved in order to believe; instead, repeatedly, it commands, ‘Believe in order to be saved.’” (GEISLER)

If God has decided in eternity past which individuals he will not save, then those individuals cannot be thought of either as being truly loved by God or as being the objects of his saving intentions. Calvinists protest that it is simply a mystery as to how God loves people he wills to condemn before they are ever born. Some assert that God has two wills, one “hidden” and one “revealed,”108 or two kinds of love,109 but most Southern Baptists view these answers as having neither a biblical nor logical basis. Moreover, Calvinists’ affirmation of “single predestination” over against “double predestination” as a method for absolving God of the charge of actively causing the lost to spend eternity in hell is unconvincing. To say that God merely passes over the lost rather than actively causing their perdition is both a distinction without a difference110 and a flat refusal to own the implications of the Calvinist system.111

108. Piper, “Two Wills,” 107–24; Grudem, Systematic Theology, 683–84.

109. MacArthur, “Does God love,” par. 4–5.

110. If I have the ability and opportunity to rescue someone who is drowning, then I have an obligation to render aid. If I simply stand aside and let them die, then I am morally culpable. Calvinist objections that the sinner is already dead will not suffice. If I have the ability and opportunity to regenerate a spiritually dead person but do not, then my culpability is the same.

111. Keathley, Salvation and Sovereignty, 148–49.

This statement by MacArthur is “anti-Gospel.”

It negates the power of the Word.

In the end this is what MacArthur is saying if you take into account his Calvinism:

  • God by means of divine decree determines all peoples decisions/actions
  • Potter by means of molding determines all pots decisions,actions,shapes, etc…
  • Programmer by means of preprogramming determines the Avatars/Robots decisions and actions
  • Puppeteer by means of strings determines all the puppets movements, actions, decisions
  • Author by means of writing a story determines all characters decisions, actions

This life in Calvinism has everything completely and fully scripted with every thought, action, deed. Welcome to the world of the avatar. The world of make belief – sounds much like the world of Walt Disney.

(Berean Apologetics)

The “gospel” according to Calvinists is akin to a “cosmic lottery” then.

In a post detailing misreading’s of Scripture, I end with this:

TO SUMMARIZE:

  • If the “T” is correct, there is no rebellion against God’s will. Add the “U” and the “I,” the Gospel is rendered meaningless. It is sad, but it is a logical outgrowth of those. The Word of God, the Gospel message sent to a dying and sick world is secondary, Calvary becomes moot. Your hope can only be in if you won the cosmic lottery.

So when the unbeliever stands before God and Romans 1:19-20 is in the thought of our Holy God, when the words come out of said unbelievers mouth,

“I could not believe in your salvific offer because of my nature which you ensured. I suspect you won’t torture a cow [cows are biologically designed to eat grass] for eternity because your command was to eat meat, but ensured their nature was vegetarian.

What should God’s response be?

Are We PRE-PROGRAMMED To Reject The Gospel?
Dr. Leighton Flowers | John MacArthur | Calvinism

Dr. Leighton Flowers, Director of Evangelism and Apologetics for Texas Baptists, responds to John MacArthur on whether we are pre-programmed to reject the Gospel or not. Check out the full video here:    

Not only does this “pre-programming” dilute Scripture and it’s clear teaching, but it dilutes truth as well!

  • Preprogrammed definition: (of instructions or data) programmed into an electronic device to control future action. “the drones are designed to follow a preprogrammed route at the push of a button” (Berean Apologetics)

(Adapted from another comment) This is why Christians need to put on the whole armor of God to protect us against becoming infected By malware. We need to put on the Girdle of Truth! May we stand firm in the truth of Your Word so we will not be a victim of Satan’s lies.

RONNIE ROGERS completes the idea simply with the two views compared:

Compatibilism
Determinism and moral responsibility are compatible; hence, the name. This compatibility is not achieved by compatibilism being less deterministic than hard determinism. Rather, it is achieved by defining free choice to mean as long as a person chooses according to his greatest desire, he can be considered to have made a free choice for which he is morally responsible; even though given the same past, he cannot choose differently in the moral moment of decision.

Consequently, the difference between compatibilism (soft determinism) and hard determinism is not to be found in the levels of the deterministic nature of each because they are the same. Rather, the difference is compatibilism contends people are morally responsible for their choices if they are made according to their greatest desire, and hard determinism says they are not.

Therefore, moral responsibility is the product of defining free choice as a person acting in accordance with his greatest desire even though the desire is determined. I frequently find Calvinists who affirm soft determinism and disavow hard determinism because they think soft determinism is not as unflinchingly deterministic as hard determinism. That kind of thinking is based upon a misunderstanding of compatibilism.

Libertarianism
Man is not determined. He has the actual ability to choose between accessible options, at least in some scenarios. Libertarians contend determinism is not compatible with moral responsibility. Man possesses actual otherwise choice and can, therefore, act or refrain in the moral moment of decision even with the same past within a given range of options. Extensivism contends God endowed man with this ability, which is an aspect of being created in the image of God. [2] God determines the range of options. Adam’s range of options before the fall was greater than humanity’s options after the fall. The range of options available before the fall was the result of creative grace.

Fallen man can still choose between options. He did not lose his libertarian moral freedom, but the range of options is less than man had before the fall. Since the fall, man has lost the ability to make choices that are inherently righteous or spiritually restorative (making one right with God) based solely on creative grace. To make an inherently righteous or spiritually restorative choice, God had to provision redemptive grace, grace enablements.

For compatibilism to be the biblically reflective approach to understanding Scripture (what the Bible actually portrays and teaches), Calvinists would have to explain why the Bible, from Genesis 2 through Revelation 22, is absolutely permeated with verses, events, challenges, commands, offers, and judgments that clearly reflect that people have libertarian free will. That is to say; they can choose to act one way or differently in a myriad of passages (Gen 2:17-3:24; Josh 24; Jer 32; Mark 10:17-31; Rev 22:17-21).

Libertarian freedom allows for both determined events (events uninfluenced by human choice) and undetermined events (events influenced or caused by human choice) in which people choose between options. And whatever they did choose, they could have chosen differently even with the same past.

Compatibilism, Calvinism, requires that everything is determined, and if there is even one verse (I believe there are hundreds if not thousands that do so) that demonstrates the person had the freedom to choose differently than he chose, in the moral moment of decision, Calvinism and compatibilism collapse into an unbiblical perspective.

Consequently, unless a person can demonstrate the Bible teaches only micro-determinism (every verse that speaks of choosing reflects only a predetermined choosing wherein the appearance of having the freedom to choose differently is an illusion), he should totally and quickly disavow Calvinism. If a person chooses to remain a Calvinist, he is integrity bound to speak consistently with the micro-determinism of his position. In my book, Does God Love All or Some? I demonstrate that Calvinism’s view of moral freedom is absolutely in conflict with the teaching of Scripture when we consider all the Scripture.

What makes the micro-determinism in Calvinism, compatibilism, so difficult to detect is that Calvinists often interpret, talk, and teach the Scripture libertarianly. Meaning, they do so as though there is an undetermined choice involved, i.e., man can choose among the options available in the passage, and whatever he does choose, he could have chosen differently. Now, while that is true to the Scripture, it is in absolute contradiction to compatibilism, Calvinism.

Therefore, if a Calvinist is not going to live, speak, teach, interpret Scripture, and pray in a way that is consistent with micro-determinism so that both the Calvinist and the one whom he engages understands his deterministic perspective, he should disavow Calvinism.

(Emphasis added)

And that is the bottom line. If you adopt the Calvinist “TULIP,” you jettison truth. Truth in Scripture, truth in God, truth in reality, and truth in reason.

I believe I do understand Calvinism very well and that is why I argue that it cannot be put into the service of evangelism because there is no “good news” in the Calvinist soteriological doctrines. As such, Calvinism is not “evangelical,” which means “to bring good news.” When Calvinist’s do evangelism that have to abandon their soteriology and preach a non-Calvinist version of the gospel which is truly “good news,” but inconsistent with their Calvinist “doctrines of grace.” I argue against Calvinism because ultimately the truth of the gospel is at stake. (Source)

Calvary becomes moot.

The Gospel becomes moot.

A humorous look into the above via HOPPERS CROSSING:

A man has just entered heaven and is being given a guided tour by St. Peter. As they walk past a certain group of people, Peter tells him to be extra-quiet and not to disturb them. The man asks why and Peter replies, “They’re the Calvinists. They think they are the only ones here!”

A Calvinist is about to enter heaven. There are two lines, one labelled “Chosen” and the other “Free will”. He decides that the “Chosen” line is the one for him and lines up. When his turn comes, he is asked why he joined that line. He replies that he chose to join it.

“No!” he is told. “This is only for those who do not choose. You have to go to the other line. It’s the one for those who choose.”

So he lines up at the “Free will” line. When he gets to the official at the head of the line, he is asked, “Why did you join this line?”

He replies, “Because I was told to join it.”

“Then,” replies the official, “You’re in the wrong line. This is only for those who choose to join it.”

Is God the “devil” Behind Satan? | The Redundancy Argument (TRA)

Published by Papa Giorgio

I sent a friend the video of Dr. Theodore Zachariades stating that God wills [causes, not just permits] a man to be unfaithful to his wife.

  • God works all things after the Council of His will. Even keeping those kings who want to commit adultery from committing so! And when He wants to, he orders those to commit adultery when he wants to! (Video)

My friend dismissed this person as a hyper-Calvinist. But as the video below notes, using his definition of a “hyper Calvinist,” A.W. Pink, John Piper, Jeff Durbin, James White, and many-many more, would thus be considered the same. Because of the age restriction, the video must be watch on YouTube, link in pic.

When I asked him: “Question RW, is Piper, Calvin, White and Durbin hyper-Calvinists?” He simply replied “Fishing Bait.” But this is an interesting phenomena… and after decades of encountering Mormons and J-Dubs, the disconnect is the same. I get links and not actualizing on statements made when challenged. When shown a person who follows to the end the logical conclusion of theistic determinism found in Calvinism, the person who is the Calvinist is dismissed as a “hyper-Calvinist” by their fellow Calvinist’s if they are challenged. When that label is then applied rightly to others for the same reason — meaning, using RW’s definition of what a hyper-Calvinist is — then all these others have said worse; and would be by definition, hyper-Calvinists.

Two quick examples. 1st John Calvin, then, John Piper:

John CALVIN:

… how foolish and frail is the support of divine justice afforded by the suggestion that evils come to be, not by His will but by His permission. . . . It is a quite frivolous refuge to say that God otiosely permits them, when Scripture shows Him not only willing, but the author of them. . . . Who does not tremble at these judgments with which God works in the hearts of even the wicked whatever He will, rewarding them nonetheless according to desert? Again it is quite clear from the evidence of Scripture that God works in the hearts of men to incline their wills just as he will, whether to good for His mercy’s sake, or to evil according to their merits.

John Calvin, “The Eternal Predestination of God,” 10:11

John Piper:

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).

John Piper and Justin Taylor, eds., Suffering and the Sovereignty of God (Wheaton, IL: Crossway Books, 2006), 42. (FULLER QUOTE VIA THIS PDF)

John Lennox notes in his wonderful book,  “Determined to Believe? The Sovereignty of God, Freedom, Faith, and Human Responsibility,” that Martin Luther struggled with the consequences of this form of thought:

Martin Luther at the time of the Reformation. In his book The Bondage of the Will, written in response to Erasmus’ essay On Free Will, Luther said:

[The] omnipotence and foreknowledge of God, I repeat, utterly destroy the doctrine of “free-will”… Doubtless it gives the greatest possible offence to common sense or natural reason, that God, Who is proclaimed as being full of mercy and goodness, and so on, should of His own mere will abandon, harden and damn men, as though He delighted in the sins and great eternal torments of such poor wretches. It seems an iniquitous, cruel, intolerable thought to think of God; and it is this that has been such a stumbling block to so many great men down through the ages. And who would not stumble at it? I have stumbled at it myself more than once, down to the deepest pit of despair, so that I wished I had never been made a man. (That was before I knew how health-giving that despair was, and how close to grace.)

In this passage Luther seems to be aware that there is a deep moral problem with aspects of his view… [RPT: before redefining “grace” that is – almost like what is, is.]

Calvinism’s [T.U.L.I.P.] Logical Conclusion Displayed

In a reference in that above book is this paper: “I Believe In Divine Sovereignty,” by Thomas H. McCall in Trinity Journal (TRINJ 29:2 [Fall 2008]), 209-210. Of which I excerpt:

… He [John Piper] works long and hard to illustrate this [theistic determinism] from Rom 9:1-23, which he concludes is about the purposes of God being preserved “by means of the predestination of individuals to their respective eternal destines.”11 And we are not to think that God is righteous in spite of such action—instead we are to see that God is righteous because of this action, for the “heart of Paul’s defense” is this: “in choosing unconditionally those on whom he will have mercy and those whom he will harden God is not unrighteous, for in this ‘electing purpose’ he is acting out of a full allegiance to his name and esteem of his glory.”12

This all-determining action of God notably includes predestination and election, but it extends far beyond—it extends to everything. God determines all events that occur in the universe, including all demonic and satanic action.13 As Mark R. Talbot puts it, God creates, sends, instigates, and moves others to do evil, because “nothing that exists or occurs falls outside God’s ordaining will.”14 Talbot makes the point with relentless and unmistakable clarity:

Nothing, including no evil person or thing or event or deed. God’s foreordination is the ultimate reason why everything comes about, including the existence of all evil persons and things and the occurrence of any evil acts or events.15

Make no mistake: “when even the worst of evils befall us, they do not ultimately come from anywhere other than God’s hand.”16 …

NOTES:

11. John Piper, The Justification of God: An Exegetical and Theological Study of Romans 9:1-23 (Grand Rapids: Baker, 1993), 218, cf. 56-73.

12. Ibid., 219.

13. On this see John Piper, “Suffering and the Sovereignty of God: Ten Aspects of God’s Sovereignty Over Satan and Satan’s Hand in It,” in Suffering and the Sovereignty of God, 19-30. Piper here uses the rather confusing (given his determinism) language of “permission.” By my lights, what he means when he says that God “permits” something is this (a) God determines it to occur and then (b) does not act so as to override his previous ordination. Regarding talk of “permission,” I think that John Calvin’s approach is more consistent, [….]  see John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion I.xviii.1, and John S. Feinberg, No One Like Him: The Doctrine of God (Wheaton: Crossway, 2001), 696.

14. Mark R. Talbot, “‘All the Good That Is Ours in Christ: Seeing God’s Gracious Hand in the Hurts Others Do to Us,” in Suffering and the Sovereignty of God, 43 (41-43), emphasis original.

15. Ibid., 43-44.

16. lbid., 47.

Dave Hunt is right to say that Calvin uses unbiblical positions in dealing with this Augustinian determinism:

There is yet another question that troubles many: If man is free to choose between options, would that not in itself deny both God’s sovereignty and His foreknowledge? Luther claimed that this question was the very heart of the Reformation and of the gospel itself. In fact, Luther dogmatically insisted that it was impossible for God to foreknow the future and for man at the same time to be a free agent to act as he wills.

Believing firmly in God’s foreknowledge, Luther wrote an entire book titled The Bondage of the Will, to prove that the very idea of man’s free will is a fallacy and an illusion. Several reasons have already been given as to why Luther was wrong on this point, and that issue will be dealt with further in the next chapter.

Though Calvin took so much from Augustine, like Luther he also rejected the Augustinian belief that God could foreknow the future, while at the same time man could have a free will. According to Calvin, foreknowledge leaves no room whatsoever for free will, because foreknowledge is the same as predestination:

If God merely foresaw human events, and did not also arrange and dispose of them at his pleasure, there might be room for agitating the question [of free will] … but since he foresees the things which are to happen, simply because he has decreed them, they are so to happen, it is vain to debate about prescience. …

If this frigid fiction [of free will] is received, where will be the omnipotence of God, by which, according to his secret counsel on which everything depends, he rules over all? (Calvin, Institutes, III: xxiii, 6–7.)

Calvin repeatedly uses such unbiblical and utterly fallacious reasoning.

The Calvinist assumes a contradiction between sovereignty and free will that doesn’t exist. The fact that God is able to allow man freedom of choice, while still effecting His purposes unhindered, is all the more glorifying to His sovereign wisdom, power, and foreknowledge.

And one last point on this via MONERGISM.COM:

  • In order to understand this better theologians have come up with the term “compatibilism” to describe the concurrence of God’s sovereignty and man’s responsibility. Compatibilism is a form of determinism and it should be noted that this position is no less deterministic than hard determinism. — John Hendryx (John Hendryx is the creator and editor of Monergism.com | SEE: “We are not Determinists!” for more)

Here is A.W. Tozer’s take of the above:

  • 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.

Tozer is saying that the Calvinist God is too small. Something I run through with Mormon Elders if they decide to come into my home to discuss further their “mission.” Not just too small as in Mormonism, but a character deficient God is what we see in Calvinism.

One of the single strongest philosophical critiques of exhaustive Calvinistic determinism is that it isn’t merely, “God ordaining evil.” That’s been debated for centuries. It’s that once every thought, desire, temptation, deception, warning, and response is exhaustively decreed, enormous portions of Scripture become functionally redundant.

Glen Shellrude makes this point from dozens of New Testament angles—not just Satan, but exhortations, warnings, prayer, false teaching, perseverance, church discipline, evangelism, and moral responsibility.

The Redundancy Problem in Exhaustive Calvinistic Determinism

The Redundancy Argument (TRA)

Theological determinism, as commonly defined within Reformed theology, is the belief that God unconditionally decreed every event in history. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy summarizes the position as the view that God determines every event that occurs in the history of the world, whether described as His decree, providential control, or efficacious will. Under this understanding, nothing—including every human decision, temptation, belief, unbelief, deception, repentance, or act of faith—could ever occur differently than God eternally ordained.

This creates what may be called the Redundancy Problem. If mankind is already born morally incapable of responding positively to God’s revelation apart from irresistible grace, then many of Scripture’s mechanisms for explaining unbelief become strangely unnecessary. Why does Satan need to blind minds already born incapable of seeing? Why would God judicially harden people who are supposedly already hardened by nature? Why speak in parables to conceal truth from those who could never understand it anyway? Why send strong delusion upon people who were already unable to believe? These biblical actions make perfect sense as judicial acts against previously resistible rebels, but they appear redundant if Total Inability already guarantees the identical outcome.

The redundancy extends far beyond Satan. Throughout the New Testament believers are warned against false teachers, exhorted to persevere, commanded to resist temptation, urged to pray, rebuked for sin, corrected for doctrinal error, and called to repentance. Yet under exhaustive theological determinism, God not only ordains every warning but also ordains every false doctrine, every deception, every act of apostasy, every sinful choice, and every response to those warnings. As Glen Shellrude observes, if theological determinism is consistently applied, God choreographs both the rise of heresy and the degree to which believers either resist or embrace it. Likewise, God ordains every act of obedience and every act of disobedience, every success and every failure, rendering many of Scripture’s exhortations and warnings functionally descriptive of God’s decree rather than genuine appeals capable of being either accepted or rejected.

The issue is not merely philosophical—it is exegetical. Scripture repeatedly portrays Satan as actively blinding unbelievers (2 Corinthians 4:4), false teachers as genuinely deceiving the church, and believers as capable of resisting deception through faithful perseverance. Those realities fit naturally within a framework in which people are accountable moral agents who may either receive or suppress God’s revelation. However, if every thought, temptation, deception, rejection, and response has already been immutably determined by divine decree, then Satan’s blinding activity, warnings against apostasy, calls to repentance, and commands to resist error appear to accomplish nothing that had not already been guaranteed from eternity. In that sense, Satan becomes less a genuine adversary than an unnecessary middleman carrying out a script whose outcome could never have been otherwise.

The result is that Scripture’s repeated appeals to “hear,” “repent,” “believe,” “beware,” “stand firm,” “do not be deceived,” and “choose” lose much of their ordinary force. The biblical narrative consistently presents these as meaningful appeals directed toward responsible hearers, whereas exhaustive theological determinism necessarily understands them as elements within an already settled decree. The irony is striking: the very worldview intended to magnify God’s sovereignty can unintentionally render many of Scripture’s warnings, explanations, and even Satan’s own ministry logically redundant.

The Redundancy Argument Against Exhaustive Theological Determinism

P1

If every human thought, desire, temptation, deception, belief, and response is exhaustively determined by God’s eternal decree, then no secondary means can alter or further secure the predetermined outcome.

P2

Scripture presents secondary means—Satan’s blinding, judicial hardening, parables concealing truth, warnings against apostasy, false teachers, exhortations, rebukes, and calls to repentance—as genuine means affecting people’s responses.

P3

If those responses are already exhaustively determined and cannot occur otherwise, these secondary means do not function to change or secure any outcome that was not already guaranteed.

Conclusion

Therefore, under exhaustive theological determinism, many of Scripture’s stated means—including Satan’s blinding ministry—become functionally redundant.

[Hat-Tip, Adapted via Freethinking Ministry]

Satan is Exhibit A in a much larger pattern. The same logic applies to:

  • Satan blinding minds.
  • God hardening hearts.
  • Jesus speaking in parables to conceal truth.
  • Warnings against false teachers.
  • Commands to repent.
  • Calls to believe.
  • Exhortations to persevere.
  • Church discipline.
  • Appeals to resist temptation.

This broader framing also aligns well with the point Glen Shellrude develops:

  • if exhaustive determinism is assumed, many New Testament warnings and appeals become difficult to understand as genuine means of influencing human response because the responses are already fixed by decree.

QUOTE:

Warnings to Believers

Related to the above point are the frequent warnings in the New Testament about embracing erroneous teaching. Jesus warns about false prophets (e.g., Matt. 7:15-20), Paul warns the Philippian church about the dangers of both Judaizers and libertines (Phil. 3:2­21), and the Colossian church about a theology that is somewhat difficult to reconstruct precisely (Col. 2:16-23). In his letter to the Galatians he rebukes Christians for embracing a Judaizing theology, and in the Johannine epistles, John rebukes those who embrace a theology that again is difficult to reconstruct precisely. When read within the framework of theological determinism, the conclusion is that God choreographed all the details of these heretical theologies as well as the extent to which believers would resist or embrace false teaching or realign themselves with truth when they stumbled.

In Rev. 14:9-13 believers are warned not to compromise when persecuted. Those who fail to heed this warning and deny their faith will come under eschatological judgment, while those who remain faithful to the point of death will “rest from their labor” (i.e. will experience eschatological salvation). Elsewhere Revelation explicitly states that God extends the grace that will enable believers to remain faithful in a tribulation context (e.g., Rev. 7:1­8; 11:1-2). Revelation 14:9-13 assumes that believers can exercise their grace-empowered libertarian freedom by choosing either to defend their faith or to deny it. However, based on Calvinist assumptions, God is the one who decided “before the foundation of the world” how each believer would choose.

In a similar vein, philosophical determinism (atheism/evolutionary paradigms). In what follows — quote’wise — if this is true fore secular forms of determinism, then so to it applies to THEISTIC DETERMINISM:

Atheists reject evidence as illusory…

Why?

Because they “have to.”

Donald C. Abel in his book, Fifty Readings in Philosophy, asks us to imagine for a moment that you walking along and come to a fork in the road. One street is called Divinity Avenue, the other Oxford Street. Assuming you have to walk down one of them, there is a confrontation of choice.  Continuing he says,

  • Now, I ask you seriously to suppose that this ambiguity of my choice is real; and then to make the impossible hypothesis that the choice is made twice over, and each time falls on a different street. In other words, imagine that I first walk through Divinity Avenue, and then imagine that the powers governing the universe annihilate ten minutes of time with all that it contained, and set me back at the door of this hall just as I was before the choice was made. Imagine then that, everything else being the same, I now make a different choice and traverse Oxford Street. You, as passive spectators, look on and see the two alternative universes; one of them with me walking through Divinity Avenue in it, the other with the same me walking through Oxford Street. Now, if you are determinists, you believe one of these universes eternally impossible, because of the intrinsic irrationality or accidentality somewhere involved in it. However, looking outwardly at these universes, can you say which is the impossible and accidental one, and which the rational and necessary one?

Donald C. Abel, Fifty Readings in Philosophy (New York, NY: McGraw-Hill, 1994), 296.

  • “He thus acknowledged the need for any theory to allow that humans have genuine freedom to recognize the truth. He (again, correctly) saw that if all thought, belief, feeling, and choice are determined (i.e., forced on humans by outside conditions) then so is the determinists’ acceptance of the theory of determinism forced on them by those same conditions. In that case they could never claim to know their theory is true since the theory making that claim would be self-referentially incoherent. In other words, the theory requires that no belief is ever a free judgment made on the basis of experience or reason, but is always a compulsion over which the believer has no control.”

Roy A. Clouser, The Myth of Religious Neutrality: An Essay on the Hidden Role of Religious Belief in Theories (Notre Dame, IN: Notre Dame University Press, 2005), 174.

The implications of strict naturalism are grim or even counterintuitive. For example, Bertrand Russell affirmed that any philosophy hoping to stand must ultimately take for granted the (naturalistic) picture of unguided causes and accidental collocations of atoms and must be built on the “firm foundation of unyielding despair.” When it comes to naturalism’s implications for morality, naturalist Kai Nielsen contends that reason can’t bring us to morality; this picture ”is not a pleasant one,” and that reflecting on it ”depresses me.” When it comes to consciousness, naturalist Daniel Dennett considers it an illusion- -something fellow-atheist Thomas Nagel finds utterly confused:

  • You may well ask how consciousness can be an illusion, since every illusion is itself a conscious experience …. So it cannot appear to me that I am conscious though I am not … the reality of my own consciousness is the one thing I cannot be deluded about …. The view [of Dennett] is so unnatural that it is hard to convey …. Dennett asks us to turn our backs on what is glaringly obvious. … And he asks us to do this because the reality of such phenomena is incompatible with the scientific materialism that in his view sets the outer bounds of reality. He is, in Aristotle’s words, ”maintaining a thesis at all costs.”

Jaegwon Kim acknowledges the stark picture painted by the naturalistic brush. Naturalism is ”imperialistic; it demands ‘full coverage’ … and exacts a terribly high ontological price.”

Paul Copan and Charles Taliaferro (editors), The Naturalness of Belief: New Essays on Theism’s Rationality (New York, NY: Lexington Books, 2019), viii

I could go on, but you get the point. To fashion the issue for you to see, Jaegwon Kim could have said:

  • Theistic determinism is ”imperialistic; it demands ‘full coverage’ … and exacts a terribly high ontological price.” (added for emphasis) 

What is this price? Here is just one example… God vs. God:

Here is a Facebook post I recently posted:

  • “What is there for God to harden, provoke, or restrain if not the autonomous will of creatures?”

If God knows the future because He planned the future [Sproul, Piper, MacArthur, etc.], when God hardens, provokes, or restraines…. is He working against Himself?

If the “T” of TULIP [total depravity] is a reality, wouldn’t hardening, provoking, or restraining someone be the same thing as digging up bodies in a cemetery and putting blindfolds on the rotting cadavers?

In other words, does He plan the abuse of a child just to redeem that act in some way to bring glory to Himself? Is Satan superfluous?

Are all the prescriptions in the Bible making God out to be duplicitous – since he has planned our actions thru determinitive means?

You could not argue that “evil” is really “evil.” Eastern philosophies run into the same problems as the atheist’s/evolutionist’s I just noted above. The Calvinist runs into the same issue. And it is a distortion of Christianity (T.U.L.I.P.):

(Eph 1:11) “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).

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

Or…

Is it more like Tozer notes — which lowers man’s position by making him/her responsible to God’s law; and keeps God’s holiness and glory intact as He truly redeems or judges such actions (is He judging Himself in Calvinism? Working against His own will? Secretly?)

TOZER:

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?’ Man’s 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.

There is an analogy of two chess players. As you walk up on one professional chess player, he is sitting on one side of the bench, and at the end of his move he gets up walks to the other side, sits down, thinks a moment and makes his move. This process is repeated until the game is over and the chess player wins.

Guaranteed.

When you ask him why he is playing chess alone, he says to ensure his victory. Or as Piper notes in his book astonished by God: “…the reason God knows the future is because he plans the future and accomplishes it.”

You wouldn’t think too highly of his skills, would you? As you walk down the road a bit further, you come across another chess master. This time however, there is a line of players, world famous chess players, lined up as far as the eye could see. As you watched, the one chess player was handily beating every player that sat before him. Player after player.

With whom would you be more impressed with?

And it is this perceived contradiction that leads Calvinists to a polluting of God’s character, which A.W. Tozer tackles in his book, Knowledge of the Holy. Here is a excerpt…. I changed a couple words to read better:

… 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.

Calvinism’s Conflation | Flowers and Tozer

Published by Papa Giorgio

Dr. Leighton Flowers discusses the unnecessary issue of doublethink on the Calvinistic system. (The full video is HERE.)

This first graphic is from Leighton Flowers discussion of the circles in the following article:

THE CONFLATION OF THE CALVINIST

In my reading of a book critique (written by Calvinistic scholar Broughton Knox in reply to an Arminian scholar Howard Marshall) I happened upon another prime example of the Calvinistic conflation that we have discussed a number of times. Knox wrote:

“The Pelagian mind is inclined to ascribe, shall we say, 5% to God and 95% to man, the semi-Pelagian 50%-50%, while the evangelical Arminian, such as our writer, 95% to God and 5% to man. Yet, after all, it is this last 5% which makes the difference between heaven and hell, so that man is, in the end, his own saviour.”

I must ask this vital question: What exactly are these percentages representing? We (non-Calvinistic “pelagians”) are ascribing 95% OF WHAT to God?

95% of man’s desires?

95% of man’s sin?

95% of man’s choices?

95% of Christ’s provision of atonement?

95% of salvation?

95% of WHAT!?!

It seems to me that in the well-meant effort of the Calvinist to ascribe all good things to God they have unintentionally also ascribed all bad things to Him. So, while the Calvinist seems most concerned with making sure mankind takes no credit for their salvation, the non-Calvinist seems more concerned with a recognizably good and Holy God. I suspect both men have a noble purpose in their pursuits, but as with most disputes the balance is somewhere in the middle.

But this balance cannot be seen in dividing vaguely defined percentages of what is to be ascribed to God and to man. Salvation is 100% of God. Merely affirming the responsibility of mankind to accept and/or reject God’s appeals for reconciliation does not in any way affect that percentage.

Only when a Calvinist, like Knox in the quote above, conflates man’s choice to humbly repent in faith with God’s choice to save whosoever does so are these types of dilemmas created. In other words, Calvinists have created a dilemma by conflating two choices as if they were one and calling them both “salvation.”

For instance, the prodigal son’s choice to return home is distinct from the father’s choice to redeem him once he arrives. To treat those two distinct choices as if they were one in the same [i.e. under the meticulous control of the father] creates an unnecessary dilemma.

Likewise, a sinner’s choice to repent in response to God’s appeals for reconciliation is distinct from God’s choice to provide those means of reconciliation through Christ’s blood. Thus, God is always the decisive cause of who He saves and the means by which He saves them. And mankind is the decisive cause of his own sin and his choice to repent of it. Only by conflating these two distinct choices is the Calvinistic dilemma really a dilemma at all.

God is 100% responsible for his choices.

Man is 100% responsible for his choices.

There is no dilemma here.

These next two “circle graphs” are based on chapter two (God’s Part and Man’s)of A.W. Tozer’s book, “Paths to Power.” The only difference between the two is one is basic, the one that follows chapter two is the same, but jazzed up. And if you are not picking up what Tozer is laying down, he is calling out [in the future] the Pipers, MacArthurs, Sprouls, etc.; as well as concurrent authors like A.W. Pink.

Here is chapter two (also, the PDF):

Failure to distinguish the part of God from the part of man in salvation has prevented countless seekers from finding peace, and left whole sections of the Church of Christ powerless for long periods of time.

Let it be boldly stated that there are some things which only God can do, and for us to attempt to do them is to waste our efforts; and there are other things Which only man can do, and for us to ask God to do them is to waste our prayers. It is vain for us to try to do the work which can only be done by sovereign grace; it is equally vain for us to implore God to do what has been commanded by sovereign authority.

Among the things which only God can do, of first importance to us is the work of redemption. Atonement was accomplished in that holy place where none but a divine Saviour could come. That glorious work owes nothing to the effort of any man; the best of Adam’s race could add nothing there. It was all of God, and man could simply have no part.

Redemption is an objective fact. It is a work potentially saving, wrought for man, but done independent of and exterior to the individual. Christ’s work on Calvary made atonement for every man, but it did not save any man.

Salvation is personal. It is redemption made effective toward the individual. Salvation is the work of God in the heart, made possible by the work of God on the Cross. Both the once-done work of redemption and the many-times-multiplied work of salvation are in the class of things which only God can do. No man can forgive his own sins; no man can regenerate his own heart; no man can declare himself justified and clean. All this is the work of God in man, flowing out of the work which Christ has already done for man. Universal atonement makes salvation universally available, but it does not make it universally effective toward the individual.

If atonement was made for all men, why are not all saved? The answer is that before redemption becomes effective toward the individual man there is an act which that man must do. That act is not one of merit, but of condition. And it is an act of eternal importance to us because its non-fulfillment prevents us from receiving the effective work of Christ in personal salvation. This act of appropriating salvation is one which only man can do.

The orthodoxy of our day is afraid to face this truth. We have been schooled in the doctrine of grace, and we fear to state things so baldly lest we rob grace of its glory and detract from the finished work of Christ. But it is a mistake to speak softly on a subject so vital to the soul. We should get the distinction clear and then be as bold as the truth compels us to be. We need not fear that we shall steal away the glory of God by honoring the truth He Himself has revealed. Failure to distinguish God’s part from man’s has resulted in mental confusion and moral inaction among Christians. Assurance and power require that we know and do the truth as revealed to us in the Sacred Word.

In the things-which-God-cannot-do category is this: God cannot do our repenting for us. In our efforts to magnify grace we have so preached the truth as to convey the impression that repentance is a work of God. This is a grave mistake, and one which is taking a frightful toll among Christians everywhere. God has commanded all men to repent. It is a work which only they can do. It is morally impossible for one person to repent for another. Even Christ could not do this. He could die for us, but He cannot do our repenting for us.

God in His mercy may “incline” us to repent and by His inworking Spirit assist us to repent; but before we can be saved we must of our own free will repent toward God and believe in Jesus Christ. This the Bible plainly teaches; this experience abundantly supports. Repentance involves moral reformation. The wrong practices are on man’s part, and only man can correct them. Lying, for instance, is an act of man and one for which he must accept full responsibility. When he repents he will quit lying. God will not quit for him; he will quit for himself.

When stated thus frankly everything seems obvious enough, and we may wonder how reasonable persons could expect someone else to relieve them of their personal obligation to repent. In practice, however, and under the pressure of strong religious emotion, things are not so plain as one might suppose. The fact is, the “all has been done, you can do nothing” emphasis has caused no end of confusion among seekers everywhere. People are told they must surely perish because of what they are, not because of what they do; what they do does not enter into the picture at all. And furthermore, they can do nothing in the direction of salvation; even to suggest such a thing is to offend God: is not the horrible example of Cain enough to prove that? So, they are tossed helplessly between the first Adam and the last Adam. One did their sinning for them and the other has done everything else. Thus, the nerve of their moral life is cut and they sink back in despair, afraid to move lest they be guilty of sinful self-effort. At the same time they are deeply troubled with the knowledge that there is something seriously wrong with their religious lives. The remedy is to see clearly that men are not lost because of what someone did thousands of years ago; they are lost because they sin individually and in person. We will never be judged for Adam’s sin, but for our own. For our own sins we are and must remain fully responsible until they have been brought for disposition to the Cross of Jesus. The idea that we can delegate repentance is an erroneous inference drawn from the doctrine of grace wrongly presented and imperfectly understood.

Another thing God cannot do: He cannot believe for us. Faith is a gift of God, to be sure, but whether or not we shall act upon that faith lies altogether within our own power. We may or we may not, as we choose. True belief requires that we change our attitude toward God. It means that we not only acknowledge His trustworthiness but go on to trust His promises and obey His commandments. That is Bible faith; anything less is self-deception. Where God is the object of faith He cannot be the subject also. The repentant sinner is the subject, and as such he must put his faith in Christ as his Saviour. This he must do for himself. God may help him, He may wait long and be patient, but He can never take his place and do the act for him.

The day when it is once more understood that God will not be responsible for our sin and unbelief will be a glad one for the Church of Christ. The realization that we are personally responsible for our individual sins may be a shock to our hearts, but it will clear the air and remove the uncertainty. Returning sinners waste their time begging God to perform the very acts He has sternly commanded them to do. He will not argue with them; He will simply leave them to their disappointment. Unbelief is a great sin; or more accurately stated, it is an evidence of sins unconfessed. Repent and believe is the order. Faith will follow repentance, and salvation will be the outcome.

Any interpretation of free grace which relieves the sinner of responsibility to repent is not of God nor in accordance with revealed truth. Nor is God responsible to help us to repent. He owes us nothing but justice. The only man who actually gets his just deserts is the man who dies in sin and goes unblessed to judgment. All others are objects of unearned mercy. To wait for God to help us to repent, or to believe that He is morally obliged to do so, is to misunderstand the whole plan of salvation.

Just what has all this to do with the lack of power in our churches? Very much indeed. Millions begin their religious lives without understanding their moral duty to God. They try to believe without having first repented. They try to have faith without intending to bring their lives into moral conformity with the will of God. Consequently, they are not clear about anything. They are full of doubts and hidden perplexities. They are secretly disappointed with their lives, and are for the most part joyless and without enthusiasm. It is hard to extract much delight from uncertainty.

There is no use exhorting such would-be Christians to seek power; no use talking to them about the surrendered life. They simply cannot understand it. They listen to the sermon and then go their way, waiting in vain for God to do the things He has commanded them to do. Until this is corrected we can hope for very little power in our churches.

  • Within the Non-Calvinist camp, there are at least two nuanced views on how God allows sinners to respond in faith. The first view is the Arminian view — which says that God’s work of grace (prevenient grace) for all people is needed to enable any sinner to freely choose to respond in faith to the Gospel message. The second view is the Provisionist View — which says that the Gospel message itself [see more below]  is God’s work of grace so that when it is preached to all people, any sinner can freely choose to respond in faith. The proclamation of the Gospel is powerfully sufficient enough to bring salvation to those who will believe. While the Arminian and the Provisionist each have a different take on why all humans can respond to God’s offer, these two views both affirm the importance of God’s initiative of grace to invite all sinners to salvation. (from the book Grace For All: Understanding God’s Plan of Salvation).

— Michael R. Cariño

The “More Below”

Grace Enablements

Includes but are not limited to: God’s salvific love for all (John 3:16), God’s manifestation of his power so that all may know he is the Sovereign (Isa 45:21–22) and Creator (Rom 1:18–20), which assures that everyone has opportunity to know about him. Christ paying for all sins (John 1:29), conviction of the Holy Spirit (John 16:7–11), working of the Holy Spirit (Heb 6:1–6), enlightening of the Son (John 1:9), God’s teaching (John 6:45), God opening minds and hearts (Luke 24:45; Acts 16:14; 26:17–18;), and the power of the gospel (Rom 1:16), without such redemptive grace, no one seeks or comes to God (Rom 3:11).

Because of these gracious provisions and workings of God, man can choose to seek and find God (Jer 29:13; Acts 17:11–12). Moreover, no one can come to God without God calling (Acts 2:39), drawing (John 6:44), and that God is drawing all individuals (John 12:32). The same Greek word for draw, helkuō, is used in both verses. “About 115 passages condition salvation on believing alone, and about 35 simply on faith.” Other grace enablements may include providential workings in and through other people, situations, and timing or circumstances that are a part of grace to provide an opportunity for every individual to choose to follow Christ.

These are grace enablements in at least three ways; first, they are provided by God’s grace rather than deserved by mankind; second, the necessary components for each and every individual to have a genuine opportunity to believe unto salvation are provided or restored by God; third, they are provided by God without respect to whether the individual will believe or reject, which response God knew in eternity past.

The offer of the gospel is unconditional, but God sovereignly determined to condition the reception of the offer upon grace-enabled faith; therefore, faith is not reflective of a work or virtue of man, but of God’s sovereign plan of salvation by grace through faith (Eph 2:8). This indicates faith is the means to being regenerated and saved, not the reason for being saved. This truth of Scripture does not imply God is held captive to the choice of man, but rather it demonstrates God in eternity coextensively determined to create man with otherwise choice and provide a genuine offer of salvation, which can be accepted by grace-enabled faith or rejected. Additionally, to fulfill this plan, God is not obligated to disseminate the gospel to people he knows have rejected the light he has given them (Rom 1:18–23) and will also reject the gospel; although he may still send the gospel to them.

Evanescent or Temporal Grace | Deity of Deception

Published by Papa Giorgio

Gavin Ortlund Defends Calvinist Assurance—Does It Work?

  • This is a clip from a longer youtube reaction video to ‪@TruthUnites‬‘ defense of Calvinism. For the full reaction click here:     In this video Tim and Josh (with guest Phil) discuss Gavin Ortlund’s defense of the Calvinist position on assurance and how… some things just don’t add up.

Here is the Calvinist doctrine Temporal Grace, as taught by John Calvin:

temporal faith

“Let no one think that those [who] fall away…were of the predestined, called according to the purpose and truly sons of the promise. For those who appear to live piously may be called sons of God; but since they will eventually live impiously and die in that impiety, God does not call them sons in His foreknowledge. There are sons of God who do not yet appear so to us, but now do so to God; and there are those who, on account of some arrogated or temporal grace, are called so by us, but are not so to God.” (Concerning the Eternal Predestination of God, p.66, emphasis mine)

And,

“Experience shows that the reprobate are sometimes affected in a way so similar to the elect that even in their own judgment there is no difference between them. Hence, it is not strange, that by the Apostle a taste of heavenly gifts, and by Christ himself a temporary faith is ascribed to them. Not that they truly perceive the power of spiritual grace and the sure light of faith; but the Lord, the better to convict them, and leave them without excuse, instills into their minds such a sense of goodness as can be felt without the Spirit of adoption …. there is a great resemblance and affinity between the elect of God and those who are impressed for a time with a fading faith …. Still it is correctly said, that the reprobate believe God to be propitious to them, inasmuch as they accept the gift of reconciliation, though confusedly and without due discernment; not that they are partakers of the same faith or regeneration with the children of God; but because, under a covering of hypocrisy they seem to have a principle of faith in common with them. Nor do I even deny that God illumines their mind to this extent …. there is nothing inconsistent in this with the fact of his enlightening some with a present sense of grace, which afterwards proves evanescent.” (3.2.11, Institutes, emphasis mine)

Calvin adds: 

“Yet sometimes He also causes those whom he illumines only for a time to partake of it; then He justly forsakes them on account of their ungratefulness and strikes them with even greater blindness.” (Institutes of Christian Religion, 3.24.8, emphasis mine)

Therefore, by “some arrogated or temporal grace,” God “illumines only for a time” the alleged non-elect in order to overcome his Total Inability and thus temporarily think that he was “of the predestined.” Realize that Calvin taught the doctrine of Temporal Grace because he needed to plug a hole in his theology, such as how to explain passages such as Matthew 7:21-23, where the perishing, that is, those who are being condemned to Hell, had performed miraculous things that spiritually dead people are not supposed to be able to do, according to the Calvinistic doctrine of Total Inability. Calvin’s answer for such instances was a temporary grace. 

John Calvin again:

“Whoever has sinned, I shall delete him from the book of life. … But the meaning is simple: those are deleted from the book of life who, considered for a time to be children of God, afterwards depart to their own place, as Peter truly says about Judas (Acts 1:16). But John testifies that these never were of us (1 Jn 2:19), for if they had been, they would not have gone out from us. What John expresses briefly is set forth in more detail by Ezekiel (13:9): They will not be in the secret of My people, nor written in the catalogue of Israel. The same solution applies to Moses and Paul, desiring to be deleted from the book of life (Ex 32:32; Rom 9:3): carried away with the vehemence of their grief, they prefer to perish, if possible, rather than that the Church of God, numerous as it then was, should perish. When Christ bids His disciples rejoice because their names are written in heaven (Lk 10:20), He signifies a perpetual blessing of which they will never be deprived. In a word, Christ clearly and briefly reconciles both meanings, when He says: Every tree which My Father has not planted will be rooted up (Mt 15:13). For even the reprobate take root in appearance, and yet they are not planted by the hand of God.” (Concerning the Eternal Predestination of God, pp.151-152, emphasis mine) 

John Calvin comments on Hebrews 6:4-6: 

“…God certainly bestows His Spirit of regeneration only on the elect, and that they are distinguished from the reprobate in the fact that they are re-made in His image, and they receive the earnest of the Spirit in the hope of an inheritance to come, and by the same Spirit the Gospel is sealed in their hearts. But I do not see that this is any reason why He should not touch the reprobate with a taste of His grace, or illumine their minds with some glimmerings of His light, or affect them with some sense of His goodness, or to some extent engrave His Word in their hearts. Otherwise where would be that passing faith which Marks mentions (4.17)? Therefore there is some knowledge in the reprobate, which later vanishes away either because it drives its roots less deep than it ought to, or because it is choked and withers away.” (Calvin’s New Testament Commentaries: Hebrews and I and II Peter, p.76, emphasis mine) 

Calvinist, Mark Talbot: 

“Now of course, nothing, that I, nor anyone else, can say can guarantee that anyone will continue to believe. Faith is a gift of God that we cannot produce.”  (Sin and Suffering in Calvin’s World, emphasis mine)

In other words, the fact that you believe today is no guarantee that you will still believe tomorrow, or the next day, or the day after. You can only hope for the best, that your ordained fate is better than others, and that your grace is not a temporary grace, here today and gone tomorrow. Mark Talbot explicitly offers no illusion for your hope of tomorrow. There is nothing that you can do, but hope for the best. It’s completely out of your hands and completely in God’s hands. If you should find yourself an unbeliever tomorrow, your gift has run out.

One member of The Society of Evangelical Arminians: 

“The Calvinist’s assurance is obliterated by the fact that God ordains the illusory salvation of the seemingly-saved folks. This makes them a special sub-set of the damned. In Calvinism, God glorifies Himself by damning the ‘eternally reprobate.’ But the seemingly-saved folks have the unique privilege of ‘glorifying’ God in their earthly lives, by appearing to be saved on their way to Hell. Because God has pre-ordained this, there is nothing any apparently saved person can do. God has ordained the illusion! Of course, this brings up another question: Why is the God (who is Himself truth) ordaining such an illusion? How can God be truthful if He unconditionally pre-ordains illusions? And what kind of God could or would ordain such an illusion for the sake of His glory?” (SEA, emphasis mine)

One member of The Society of Evangelical Arminians: 

“For every person who has ever followed Jesus and then forsaken his name, we have to conclude that God ordained that said person would be eternally damned, but on their way to being damned, God ordains the illusion of redemption in Christ, in that they would come to know Jesus, exhibit kingdom fruit, and then apostatize, all for the sake of divine glory.” (emphasis mine)

​QUESTION: If there is a Temporal Grace, then how do Calvinists know whether this will some day apply to them?

ANSWER: If they stop persevering, then that is how they know, according to Calvinist, Erwin Lutzer. 

Calvinist, Erwin Lutzer: 

“Historic Calvinism stresses the ‘perseverance of the saints,’ namely that true believers never fall away, and if they do, it is not for long. If a person fails to continue in the faith, he is giving proof that he was never saved.” (The Doctrines That Divide, p.231, emphasis mine)

Arminian, Robert Shank: 

“In other words, the only real evidence of election is perseverance, and our only assurance of the certainty of persevering is—to persevere!” (Elect in the Son, p.214, emphasis mine)

Dave Hunt: 

“It is Calvinism that in effect offers salvation by works because it looks to works for assurance of salvation. Biblically, assurance comes by faith in the promise of eternal life in Christ made by ‘God, who cannot lie…before the world began’ (Titus 1:2).” (Debating Calvinism, p.416, emphasis mine)

QUESTION: How do Calvinists know if they are of the Calvinistically elect?

ANSWER: They presume it. …..

Read the rest at:

What is Evanescent Grace? 

| and |

Calvinist Complaints: Arminianism teaches “Conditional Security”)

The Puritan’s Died Fearful

This is why the Puritan’s never slept well in the security of their salvation. Pastor Andy Woods notes this in a truncated presentation:

Although there can be some abuse from Free Grace types, I thought this quick post illuminates Pastor Woods comments:

… You may remember that the Puritans were English Protestants in the 16th and 17th centuries who believed the English Reformation hadn’t gone far enough. They objected to Roman Catholic influences in the Church of England and wanted a purer church with purer doctrine (hence the name “Puritan”). Thus, they separated to form independent or dissenting congregations, with many fleeing to Holland and then to New England looking for religious freedom (at least for themselves, if not for others).

As Grenz explains, the Puritans were concerned with “the quest for certainty of personal election” (Grenz, Revisioning Evangelical Theology, p. 23). They wanted to be sure that they were saved. Why was that? Why did that become an area of particular doubt for them?

Simply put, it was due to the doubts created by their Calvinism:

“This movement developed a new kind of piety in response to anxieties produced by the Calvinist doctrine of election, which in Puritanism made the problem of assurance of salvation existentially central. In contrast to medieval paradigms, Calvinism couched the question of personal salvation in terms of God’s mysterious election. While this theology protected divine sovereignty, it offered no clear criteria whereby a believer could be assured of elect status” (Revisioning, p. 39).

As Grenz explains, many tried to ground their certainty of being elect in outward behavior, which had the opposite effect:

“As helpful as they may be, in the end no sincerity of profession of faith, no degree of faithful attendance at the sacraments, no accumulation of outward evidences of sanctified living could suffice as marks of election” (Grenz, Revisioning, p. 39).

Since looking at outward behavior didn’t give them the assurance they sought, the Puritans looked for inward evidence. Grenz continues:

“the Puritans did devise one definitive mark of election: the inward experience of God’s saving grace. The attendant emphasis on conversion that this move engendered led eventually—at least in devotional literature—to an emphasis on a subjective mark of salvation, the inner, conscious experience of the new birth. Assurance of elect status, therefore, became the product of a believer’s ability to narrate a testimony to a personal conversion experience” (Grenz, Revisioning, p. 39).

This emphasis on having a “new birth” conversion experience became one of the central features of preaching during the Great Awakenings in America. Men like John Wesley (representing Arminians) and George Whitfield (representing Calvinists) emphasized the necessity of conversion and having “the New Birth.” People who had that experience during the revival meetings began to distinguish themselves from people who hadn’t, leading to the question, “Are you really saved?” ….

How Did Assurance Become a Debate?

In discussing this with Grok and Chat-GPT, I got a hybrid breakdown of two sources:

The “P” of TULIP

Calvinism’s doctrine of the Perseverance of the Saints does not ultimately provide the confident assurance of salvation that many assume it does. While Calvinism teaches that all of God’s elect will persevere to the end, assurance is often grounded not merely in faith in Christ but in the believer’s ability to demonstrate a lifetime of continuing faith, obedience, and holiness. Since only those who endure to the end are proven to be truly elect, the believer is left asking not simply, “Do I believe in Christ?” but also, “Will my faith ultimately prove genuine?”

According to these critics, this creates a built-in tension within the Calvinist system. If those who fall away are explained as never having been truly saved, then every professing Christian must consider whether his own faith might eventually prove to be temporary or spurious. Rather than resting entirely upon Christ’s finished work and His promises, assurance becomes linked to future perseverance that has not yet occurred.

The concern is reflected in several recurring themes:

  • Assurance is tied to visible perseverance, holiness, and good works rather than resting solely on God’s promises to believers.
  • Numerous Calvinist theologians, including John Calvin, John Murray, A.W. Pink, and others, stress that present faith is not sufficient unless one continues faithfully to the end.
  • Calvin’s doctrine of “temporary faith” or “evanescent grace” introduces the possibility that someone may appear converted for years and still not be among the elect.
  • Apostasy is interpreted as evidence that a person was never truly saved, causing believers to question whether their own faith is genuine.
  • Personal testimonies such as R.C. Sproul’s famous struggle with the question, “What if you are not one of the redeemed?” are cited as examples of the doubt this system can produce.
  • Biblical examples such as David, Peter, Solomon, and the carnal Corinthians are presented as evidence that true believers can fail seriously without proving themselves lost.

For these reasons, critics argue that Calvinism’s doctrine of perseverance functions less as a doctrine of assurance and more as a doctrine of ongoing self-examination. The believer’s focus can shift from Christ’s completed work to the search for evidences of election within his own life. In their view, the result is a form of assurance mixed with uncertainty, because the final proof of genuine salvation is not known until life’s race has been completed.

Thus, both sources conclude that Calvinism’s “P” in TULIP, though intended to safeguard eternal security, ultimately undermines it. Instead of offering believers settled confidence in Christ’s promise of eternal life, it replaces assurance with an ongoing test of endurance, leaving many to wonder whether they possess saving faith at all. True assurance, they contend, is found not in examining whether one has persevered enough, but in trusting Christ’s promise that all who believe in Him have eternal life here and now.

Dr. Leighton Flowers walks through a recent sermon entitled, “The Most Hated Christian Doctrine” by Dr. John MacArthur.

Faith Alone Thru Christ Alone

  • Flowers agrees with MacArthur that humanity is sinful and in need of grace, but argues that Calvinism wrongly transforms human rebellion into God-decreed inability, thereby undermining genuine responsibility, the universal offer of the gospel, and the biblical teaching that people receive life by believing rather than believe because they have already been given life.

The below video is Dr. Leighton Flowers’ response to John MacArthur’s sermon “The Most Hated Christian Doctrine.” While Flowers agrees with MacArthur that humanity is deeply sinful and incapable of saving itself, he argues that MacArthur goes beyond biblical depravity and imports the Calvinistic doctrine of Total Inability—the belief that people are born unable to respond positively to God’s revelation unless first regenerated by irresistible grace. Throughout the discussion, Flowers repeatedly distinguishes between people being unwilling because of rebellion and people being unable because of an innate condition decreed by God. He contends that passages such as John 5, John 6, John 8, Acts 28, and John 12 are addressing hardened, rebellious Israelites who became calloused through persistent rejection of God’s revelation, not describing the universal condition of every person from birth. According to Flowers, Calvinists mistakenly turn judicial hardening passages into proof texts for a doctrine of universal moral inability.

The larger theme of the video is the defense of human responsibility and the sufficiency of God’s revelation. Flowers argues that Calvinism ultimately makes unbelief trace back to God’s decree rather than to the sinner’s own rejection of truth. He repeatedly challenges MacArthur’s claim that unbelievers “cannot believe” by asking whether such inability is self-inflicted through rebellion or divinely determined from birth. Flowers maintains that God’s grace genuinely enables all people to respond to the gospel, that faith is not a meritorious work but a response to God’s gracious initiative, and that salvation remains entirely by grace even though individuals are responsible for whether they trust Christ. The video therefore centers on a fundamental disagreement: Calvinism teaches that people need new life in order to come to Christ, whereas Flowers argues that Scripture consistently presents people as coming to Christ in order to receive life.

Ultimately, as I see it, God is a deceiver in Calvinistic theology.

God the Cause

To bolster my point and not just make blanket statements, Dr. Theodore Zachariades shows that God wills [causes, not just permits] a man to be unfaithful to his wife.

  • God works all things after the Council of His will. Even keeping those kings who want to commit adultery from committing so! And when He wants to, he orders those to commit adultery when he wants to! (Video)

He gets that from John Calvin:

… how foolish and frail is the support of divine justice afforded by the suggestion that evils come to be, not by His will but by His permission. . . . It is a quite frivolous refuge to say that God otiosely permits them, when Scripture shows Him not only willing, but the author of them. . . . Who does not tremble at these judgments with which God works in the hearts of even the wicked whatever He will, rewarding them nonetheless according to desert? Again it is quite clear from the evidence of Scripture that God works in the hearts of men to incline their wills just as he will, whether to good for His mercy’s sake, or to evil according to their merits.

John Calvin, “The Eternal Predestination of God,” 10:11

John Piper:

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).

John Piper and Justin Taylor, eds., Suffering and the Sovereignty of God (Wheaton, IL: Crossway Books, 2006), 42. (FULLER QUOTE VIA THIS PDF)

More at my: Is God the “devil” Behind Satan? | Sovereign Puppeteer | and | Is Divine Determinism a Different Gospel?

MEMEVANGELIST (Facebook) just posted this doozy of a meme that I want to unpack here. I will post the original and then my updated version with some explanation.

Here is the original.

And here is some explanation for those not picking up what was shared.

The meme is trying to compress several Calvinist debates into one short point, so it’s pretty difficult to follow unless you know the background.

Here’s what it is getting at.

The First Issue: Unconditional Election vs. Assurance

Calvinism teaches:

  • God chose the elect before creation.
  • The elect will certainly be saved.
  • The non-elect will certainly be lost.
  • Election is unconditional (not based on foreseen faith).

The immediate question becomes:

“How do I know I’m one of the elect?”

That question has haunted Calvinism from Calvin onward.

The Second Issue: Evanescent Grace

The meme references “Evanescent Grace.”

This is a concept Calvin discussed. Calvin observed that some people:

  • appear converted,
  • appear faithful,
  • appear regenerated,
  • appear to persevere,

… and yet ultimately fall away.

So Calvin argued that some people experience something that resembles saving grace but is not actually saving grace.

In the Institutes he describes temporary believers who receive impressions of grace that later vanish.

Hence: Evanescent Grace

“Temporary grace.”

“Vanishing grace.”

“A faith that looks real but isn’t.”

The Problem Created

If Calvin is correct, then:

  • strong faith is not proof you’re elect,
  • assurance is not proof you’re elect,
  • perseverance today is not proof you’re elect,

because a person under “evanescent grace” can appear identical to a true believer for years.

So the question becomes:

How can anyone know they are elect before the end?

What the Meme Is Really Asking

The meme’s logic is:

  1. Election is unconditional.
  2. The elect are certainly saved.
  3. Some non-elect people may temporarily look saved.
  4. Therefore certainty of salvation cannot prove election.
  5. Therefore how do I know I am elect?

That is the “question that drives us, Neo.”

Here is my remake:

Again,

  • “If temporary believers can look exactly like true believers, then how is anyone supposed to know they are elect before they die?” — The Assurance Problem in Calvinism 

That’s really what the meme is trying to highlight: not election itself, but the tension between unconditional election and assurance of salvation when Calvin’s doctrine of evanescent grace is taken seriously.

CALVARY DISAPPEARS INTO A COSMIC LOTTERY OF ELECTION.

God Even Determines Your Prayers | Wayne Grudem & Calvinism

Published by Papa Giorgio

Does the way Jesus teaches prayer fit more naturally with a worldview in which our requests genuinely matter, or with a worldview in which every request and every answer was already unalterably fixed before creation? If every prayer and every answer has already been exhaustively determined, what purpose is served by Jesus spending so much time teaching us how to pray?

The entire SOTERIOLOGY 101 Podcast can be heard HERE. Sot 101’s description:

  • Again we address the impractical implications of Calvinism. This time by unpacking Wayne Grudem’s teaching about the purpose and function of prayer. If God has determined all things then why pray? Does God really respond to us when we pray or is that just an illusion? Let’s dive in.

QUESTIONER – SANDY:

You were so persuasive, Wayne, a few weeks ago that I have become a happy evangelical Calvinist. And so in my mind, this raises the issue of God’s sovereignty. And I wonder if in that illustration on the board, I’m looking at that and I am visually putting a sort of umbrella of God’s transcendent, eternal, immutable sovereignty over all of that. So that, because otherwise, and maybe it’s just my split pea-sized brain not able to understand what you’re saying, but otherwise it sounds like God is vacillating in His intent and plans in response to whether or not we pray. And I doubt that that’s what you’re saying. So tell me now, as a fellow happy, evangelical Calvinist, how God’s transcendent, eternal, immutable sovereignty fits in all.

GRUDEM:

I think God planned before the foundation of the world, I think God planned that Moses would pray and that he would answer. But Moses didn’t know that. Okay? What Moses knew is he’s supposed to pray. I think God planned before the foundation of the world that Amos would pray and that God would answer. But it was still real. I mean, this intercession of Moses is still real. And if you do not have, because you do not ask, that’s true. And asking you will receive. Knock and it will be open. God didn’t set up the world to work in some way that we have to pray for Him to grant things, but He did. And then, yes. In his secret, unchangeable, eternal plan, yes, I think when I look back on all of it, I’ll say that he planned it, but I don’t know that. What I do know is if I pray, he answers, and if I don’t, he won’t.

The central argument can be summarized as:

If God unconditionally decreed both the prayer and the answer, then the prayer cannot be the real cause of the answer in the ordinary sense.

That’s very close to the objection you heard raised against Grudem.

The Moses Problem (Exodus 32)

The commentator makes an interesting point: Grudem says Moses didn’t know the eternal decree. But then Moses’ experience of prayer appears to be more realistic than the Calvinist explanation.

Moses believed:

  • God announced judgment.
  • Moses interceded.
  • God relented.

Exodus presents the narrative exactly that way. The Calvinist explanation becomes:

  • God decreed the announcement.
  • God decreed the intercession.
  • God decreed the relenting.

The question then becomes:

Is the biblical narrative showing what really happened, or is it only describing how it appeared from Moses’ perspective?

Where the Lord’s Prayer Comes In

This is where Calvinists prayer understanding connect:

“Give us this day our daily bread.”

On Grudem’s model:

  • God eternally decreed whether you receive daily bread.
  • God eternally decreed whether you pray for daily bread.
  • God eternally decreed the answer.

The Calvinist answer is:

God ordained prayer as the means.

The non-Calvinist answer is:

The language sounds like a genuine petition affecting a genuinely contingent outcome.

The Lord’s Prayer assumes that God is:

  • Listening.
  • Caring.
  • Responding.
  • Providing.
  • Forgiving.
  • Leading.
  • Delivering.

The entire prayer is relational.

Does the prayer read more naturally as a conversation with a Father who genuinely responds to His children, or as participation in a script whose every line was already fixed before the world began?

Why is the entire prayer structured around requests if requests have no bearing on what occurs? Why teach believers to ask for forgiveness if the granting of forgiveness is already fixed regardless of the request?

THE LORD’S PRAYER

Our Father in heaven,

May Your name be hallowed by those whom You have eternally decreed to hallow it.

May Your kingdom come exactly as You have immutably ordained from before the foundation of the world.

May Your will be done, because it cannot possibly be otherwise.

Give us this day the bread You have already decreed we will receive whether through our asking or not, though You have also decreed that we would ask for it.

Forgive us our debts, because You have already determined from eternity which debts would be forgiven and which sinners would remain under condemnation.

As we forgive our debtors according to the measure of sanctification You have irresistibly produced within us.

Lead us not into the temptations You have eternally ordained for our good and Your glory, though we acknowledge that those temptations cannot fail to occur if You have decreed them.

But deliver us from the evil You have likewise ordained to accomplish Your sovereign purposes.

For Yours is the kingdom, and the power, and the glory, because all things without exception have been decreed by You and come to pass exactly as ordained.

Amen, which You also decreed before the foundation of the world.

GRAPHICS to further elucidate:

Prayer & Calvinism with Ronnie Rogers

Pastor Ronnie Rogers is back with us today to discuss his new book “IF ONLY YOU WOULD ASK: Praying God’s Conditional Promises” This book is a MUST READ for anyone curious, confused, or convinced about Calvinism’s (mistaken) determinism.

 

 

R.C. Sproul’s View of Double Predestination (Babies and Hell)

Published by Papa Giorgio

R.C. Sproul’s Statement on Predestination (from Chosen by God):

“What predestination means, in its most elementary form, is that our final destination, heaven or hell, is decided by God not only before we get there, but before we are even born. It teaches that our ultimate destiny is in the hands of God. Another way of saying it is this: From all eternity, before we ever live, God decided to save some members of the human race and to let the rest of the human race perish. God made a choice–he chose some individuals to be saved unto everlasting blessedness in heaven and others he chose to pass over, to allow them to follow the consequences of their sins into eternal torment in hell.” (Chosen By God, p.22, emphasis mine)

This is double predestination in practice, even if Sproul calls the active-positive version for reprobation a caricature.

  • If the elect cannot fail to be saved,
  • and the reprobate cannot be saved because God withholds the only grace capable of producing faith,
  • then what practical difference remains between active reprobation and passive reprobation?

Elect infants, dying in infancy, are regenerated, and saved by Christ, through the Spirit, who works when, and where, and how He pleases: so also are all other elect persons who are incapable of being outwardly called by the ministry of the Word.

– Westminster Confession of Faith (WCF) 10.3

“Holy Spirit can save an infant by changing his heart, giving grace, and applying the merit of Christ to him. The Westminster divines certainly believed that babies can be saved. They did not teach that all infants are necessarily saved; rather, they taught that only an undetermined number of elect infants are saved. Obviously, an elect infant is going to be saved, and any saved infant is elect, but the divines did not speculate on which infants those would be.”

– R.C. Sproul, Truths We Confess: A Systematic Exposition of the Westminster Confession of Faith (Sanford, FL: Reformation Trust, 2019), 321.

Sproul conforms his support for the ideas in the WCF:

One of the most important confessions of faith ever penned, particularly in the English-speaking world, is the Westminster Confession of Faith. By the confession’s own statements, no confession written by uninspired authors is to be taken as having supreme authority over the believer. Confessions cannot bind the conscience in the manner that the Word of God can and does. At the same time, though human confessions and creeds are penned by fallible people without the benefit of the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, the profound level of theological and biblical precision manifest in the Westminster Confession of Faith is awe-inspiring. (Ibid., xvii.)

[….]

The Westminster Confession is the most precise and accurate summary of the content of biblical Christianity ever set forth in a creedal form. Creeds such as the Belgic Confession, the Heidelberg Catechism, and the Scots Confession should be highly regarded, but no historic confession surpasses in eloquence, grandeur, and theological accuracy the Westminster Confession of Faith. (Ibid., xix)

Critiquing the matter via CHAT:

The Internal Tension

Sproul writes:

“The Westminster divines certainly believed that babies can be saved. They did not teach that all infants are necessarily saved; rather, they taught that only an undetermined number of elect infants are saved.”

The immediate question is:

If only elect infants are saved, what happens to non-elect infants?

Historically, Westminster does not explicitly answer that question. Critics argue that the silence is revealing. If the Confession intended to teach universal infant salvation, it could have said:

“All infants dying in infancy are saved.”

Instead it says: “Elect infants.” Sproul defends that wording rather than correcting it.

Critique #1: Election Becomes the Ultimate Divider

Sproul affirms:

  • unconditional election,
  • total inability,
  • monergistic regeneration,
  • and reprobation.

Therefore, infant salvation cannot be based upon:

  • personal faith,
  • conscious belief,
  • repentance,
  • or moral innocence.

It must ultimately rest on election.

Critics respond:

If election alone determines which infants are saved, then election alone determines which infants are not saved.

Thus the question becomes: Why would God elect some infants and not others? Sproul never provides a clear answer.

Critique #2: Original Guilt Creates the Problem

Sproul consistently taught:

  • Adam’s guilt is imputed to humanity,
  • infants are fallen,
  • infants need Christ’s grace.

Critics agree infants need grace but ask:

Does inherited guilt alone make an infant deserving of eternal punishment?

Many opponents argue Scripture consistently ties judgment to:

  • knowledge,
  • personal rebellion,
  • actual transgression.

Examples often cited:

  • Deuteronomy 1:39
  • Isaiah 7:15-16
  • Jonah 4:11
  • Romans 4:15

The criticism is:

Sproul imports Augustine’s doctrine of inherited guilt and then must wrestle with implications Augustine himself embraced.

Critique #3: The Moral Character of God

This is probably the most emotionally and philosophically powerful objection.

If:

  • an infant never consciously sins,
  • never rejects God,
  • never suppresses truth,
  • never commits personal acts of rebellion,

Yet could still be damned, Critics ask:

What meaningful sense of justice remains?

This is where many critics invoke the same concern raised by Juncker regarding determinism:

If moral categories are detached from personal responsibility, words like justice become difficult to understand.

FULLER QUOTE:

“If determinism is true then either God is evil and the author of evil or all talk of good and evil, of praise and blame, of moral responsibility, and of justice is meaningless and incomprehensible with reference to God. That is, if God can cause or determine evil and yet remain good, and if God can punish those who do exactly and only what He has meticulously caused and determined them to do and yet remain just, then we have no idea who God is or what He might or might not do or what Scripture could possibly mean when it calls Him ‘good’ and ‘just.'”

— Günther H. Juncker, “The Dilemma of Theistic Determinism“

The objection becomes:

Eternal punishment without personal rebellion appears inconsistent with ordinary moral reasoning and the biblical portrayal of God’s fairness.

Critique #4: Westminster Creates an Unnecessary Problem

Many critics argue Westminster itself created the issue. The Confession says:

“Elect infants.”

Critics ask why not simply say:

“Infants dying in infancy are saved through Christ”?

Mohler, Warfield, and Spurgeon essentially move in that direction. Sproul, however, insists the Westminster divines intentionally did not teach universal infant salvation. Critics argue:

That commitment to confessional precision ends up preserving a theological possibility that Scripture never explicitly teaches.

Critique #5: Sproul’s Loyalty to Westminster

This critique becomes stronger when paired with Sproul’s own statements:

“The Westminster Confession is the most precise and accurate summary of the content of biblical Christianity ever set forth in a creedal form.”

and

“One of the most important confessions of faith ever penned…”

Because Sproul viewed Westminster so highly, critics argue he was reluctant to depart from its language regarding elect infants even when later Reformed theologians moved toward affirming universal infant salvation.

The Strongest One-Sentence Critique

The strongest critique is probably this:

By affirming unconditional election, inherited guilt, and Westminster’s doctrine of “elect infants,” Sproul leaves open the possibility that some infants are not elect and therefore not saved, a conclusion many critics believe is inconsistent with both the justice and goodness of God as revealed in Scripture.

Exhaustive Determinism:

Sproul affirms that God ordains whatsoever comes to pass (echoing Westminster):

He knows all things that will happen because he ordains everything that does happen. This is crucial to our understanding of God’s omniscience. He does not know what will happen by virtue of exceedingly good guesswork about future events. He knows it with certainty because he has decreed it.

The Westminster Confession avers: “God from all eternity, did, by the most wise and holy counsel of His own will, freely, and unchangeably ordain whatsoever comes to pass. . . .”

This statement refers to God’s eternal and immutable decretive will. It applies to everything that happens. Does this mean that everything that happens is the will of God? Yes. Augustine qualified this answer by adding the words, “in a certain sense.” That is, God ordains “in some sense” everything that happens. Nothing that takes place is beyond the scope of his sovereign will. The movement of every molecule, the actions of every plant, the falling of every star, the choices of every volitional creature, all of these are subject to his sovereign will. No maverick molecules run loose in the universe, beyond the control of the Creator. If one such molecule existed, it could be the critical fly in the eternal ointment. As one grain of sand in the kidney of Oliver Cromwell changed the course of English history, so one maverick molecule could destroy every promise God has ever made about the outcome of history.

— What Is Reformed Theology, p. 172

Sproul’s view functionally equivalent to Calvin’s broader decretive will, even if he rejects “equal ultimacy” (symmetrical positive-positive reprobation where God actively works sin in the reprobate the same way He works faith in the elect). Sproul’s inconsistency is “too embarrassed to follow Calvinism to its logical extreme” and pleading ignorance/mystery on hard questions (e.g., the fall of Adam/Eve).

Calvin (Institutes 3.21.5): Explicitly symmetric language —

“some are preordained to eternal life, others to eternal damnation… created for one or the other of these ends.”

Sproul: Rejects the symmetrical mode (equal ultimacy / positive-positive) as sub-Calvinist or a caricature that makes God the author of sin. He prefers asymmetric (positive election + negative reprobation/preterition: God passes over the non-elect, leaving them in their sin). Yet critics [like myself] argue this is rhetorical softening — because Sproul still affirms:

  • God’s decree covers all events.
  • Reprobation is part of the eternal decree before creation.
  • The non-elect are chosen to be passed over before birth.

Sproul’s distinctions, while rhetorically softer than Calvin’s, do not ultimately escape the force of double predestination or exhaustive determinism.

… The issue here seems to be how one defines “ordains” or “foreordains.” Calvinists I debate on the internet consistently argue that “ordain” means to decree. I ask them, “Did God decree the Holocaust?” “Did God decree the killing fields of Cambodia?” “Did God decree every act of rape, torture and murder that has ever taken place?” And they say yes! Unbelievable.

What about Calvin on this issue? You deny he was supralapsarian, claiming God’s positive-positive, double-predestination, but excerpts from his writings strongly suggest that was his position. Calvin was quite straightforward on saying God decreed the Fall, writing:

…whence does it happen that Adam’s fall irremediably involved so many peoples, together with their infant offspring, in eternal death unless because it so pleased God?…The decree is dreadful indeed, I confess. Yet no one can deny that God foreknew what end man was to have before he created him, and consequently foreknew because he so ordained by his decree…God not only foresaw the fall of the first man, and in him the ruin of his descendants, but also meted it out in accordance with his own decision.” (Institutes of the Christian Religion, 3.23.7)

That seems to go beyond mere “permission.” He also wrote:

The predestination by which God adopts some to the hope of life, and adjudges others to eternal death, no man who would be thought pious ventures simply to deny….By predestination we mean the eternal decree of God, by which he determined with himself whatever he wished to happen with regard to every man. All are not created on equal terms, but some are preordained to eternal life, others to eternal damnation; and, accordingly, as each has been created for one or other of these ends, we say that he has been predestinated to life or to death (Institutes of the Christian Religion 3.21.5).

We also read:

From this it is easy to conclude how foolish and frail is the support of divine justice afforded by the suggestion that evils come to be not by [God’s] will, but merely by his permission. Of course, so far as they are evils, which men perpetrate with their evil mind, as I shall show in greater detail shortly, I admit that they are not pleasing to God. But it is a quite frivolous refuge to say that God otiosely [= idly] permits them, when Scripture shows Him not only willing but the author of them…Who does not tremble at these judgments with which God works in the hearts of even the wicked whatever He will, rewarding them nonetheless according to desert. Again, it is quite clear from the evidence of Scripture that God works in the hearts of men to incline their will just as he will, whether to good for his mercy’s sake, or to evil according to their merits.” (Concerning the Eternal Predestination of God, 177)

Other famous Calvinists say, for example,

“The Sovereignty of God over all, and his independency, clearly shew, that whatever is done in time is according to his decrees in eternity.” (John Gill, A Body of Doctrinal and Practical Divinity, p. 173)

Or

“As a builder draws his plan before he begins to build, so the great Architect predestined everything before a single creature was called into existence.” (Arthur Pink, The Doctrines of Election and Justification, p.9)

Or

“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.” (Jerome Zanchius, The Doctrine of Absolute Predestination, p. 88)

So, by claiming supralapsarianism is “anti-Calvinism,” you are dismissing not only prominent Calvinists from the past, but also Calvin himself. …

(JOHN WAGNER letter to R.C. SPROUL)

Jerry Walls’s observation at this point is apt:

    • [T]heological compatibilists [RPT: like Grudem, Sproul, MacArthur, and the like] often make claims and engage in rhetoric that naturally lead people to conclude that God loves them and desires their salvation in ways that are surely misleading to all but those trained in the subtleties of Reformed rhetoric. . . . Such language loses all meaning, not to mention all rhetorical force, when we remember that on compatibilist premises God could determine the impenitent to freely repent, but has chosen instead to determine things in such a way that they freely persist in their sins.

Why No Classical Theist – Let Alone Orthodox Christian – Should Ever Be a Compatibilist (PDF)

God’s refusal to determine the repentance of sinners when it is within his power to do so can be called nothing other than immoral. Damning certain people by withholding something freely given to others is not glorious.

MORE: Is Double Predestination and Active Reprobation, Equal Ultimacy? (good critique of Sproul)

Sproul and Calvin say it is indeed a horrible decree. Sproul’s honesty at this point would be refreshing if his conclusions weren’t so disturbing:

  • “The nasty problem for the Calvinist [is] . . . . If God can and does choose to insure the salvation of some, why then does he not insure the salvation of all? . . . The only answer I can give to this question is that I don’t know. . . . One thing I do know. If it pleases God to save some and not all, there is nothing wrong with that.” On the contrary, it is the very definition of wrong.” (Fuller Quote)

Here is Sproul’s chapter 58 from his book, Essential Truths of the Christian Faith, I will add some emphasis:

PREDESTINATION AND REPROBATION

Every coin has a flip side. There is also a flip side to the doctrine of election. Election refers to only one aspect of the broader question of predestination. The other side of the coin is the question of reprobation.

God declared that He loved Jacob but hated Esau. How are we to understand this reference to divine hatred?

Predestination is double. The only way to avoid the doctrine of double predestination is to either affirm that God predestinates everybody to election or that He predestinates no one to either election or reprobation.

Since the Bible clearly teaches predestination to election and denies universal salvation, we must conclude that predestination is double. It includes both election and reprobation. Double predestination is unavoidable if we take Scripture seriously. What is crucial, however, is how double predestination is understood.

Some have viewed double predestination as a matter of equal causation, where God is equally responsible for causing the reprobate not to believe as He is for causing the elect to believe. We call this a positive-positive view of predestination.

The positive-positive view of predestination teaches that God positively and actively intervenes in the lives of the elect to work grace in their hearts and bring them to faith. Likewise, in the case of the reprobates, He works evil in the hearts of the reprobate and actively prevents them from coming to faith. This view has often been called “hyper-Calvinism” because it goes beyond the view of Calvin, Luther, and the other Reformers.

The Reformed view of double predestination follows a positive-negative schema. In the case of the elect, God intervenes to positively and actively work grace in their souls and bring them to saving faith. He unilaterally regenerates the elect and insures their salvation. In the case of the reprobate He does not work evil in them or prevent them from coming to faith. Rather, He passes over them, leaving them to their own sinful devices. In this view there is no symmetry of divine action. God’s activity is asymmetrical between the elect and the reprobate. There is, however, a kind of equal ultimacy. The reprobate, who are passed over by God, are ultimately doomed, and their damnation is as certain and sure as the ultimate salvation of the elect.

The problem is linked to biblical statements such as those regarding God’s hardening of Pharaoh’s heart. That the Bible says God hardened Pharaoh’s heart is beyond dispute. The question remains, how did God harden Pharaoh? Luther argued for a passive rather than an active hardening. That is, God did not create fresh evil in Pharaoh’s heart. There was already enough evil present in Pharaoh’s heart to incline him to resist the will of God at every turn. All God ever has to do to harden anybody is to remove His restraining grace from them and give them over to their own evil impulses. This is precisely what God does to the damned in hell. He abandons them to their own wickedness.

In what sense did God “hate” Esau? Two different explanations are offered to solve this problem. The first explains it by defining hate not as a negative passion directed toward Esau but as simply the absence of redemptive love. That God “loved” Jacob simply means that He made Jacob the recipient of His unmerited grace. He gave Jacob a benefit that Jacob did not deserve. Esau did not receive the same benefit and in that sense was hated by God.

The first explanation sounds a bit like special pleading to get God off the hook for hating somebody. The second explanation gives more strength to the word hate. It says simply that God did in fact hate Esau. Esau was odious in the sight of God. There was nothing in Esau for God to love.

Esau was a vessel fit for destruction and altogether worthy of God’s wrath and holy hatred. Let the reader decide.

Summary

  1. Predestination is double; it has two sides to it.
  2. Some teach that God is equally responsible for election and reprobation. This is characteristic of hyper-Calvinism.
  3. The Reformed view of double predestination reflects a positive-negative schema.
  4. God passively, not actively, hardened Pharaoh’s heart.
  5. God hated Esau in the sense of failing to give him a blessing of grace or in the sense of abhorring him as a vessel fit for destruction.

Biblical passages for reflection:

Exodus 7:1-5
Proverbs 16:4
Romans 9
Ephesians 1:3-6
Jude 1:4

In other words, as The Encyclopedia of The Reformed Faith (page 144), and later the The Westminster Handbook to Reformed Theology (page 87) clearly says:

The Reformed approach to divine freedom is nowhere more apparent than in the doc­trine of the eternal decrees: God freely wills the existence and preservation of the created order and freely determines the eternal destiny of all creatures, solely on the ground of God’s goodness and solely for the sake of God’s ultimate glory. In creation and providence, God encounters no barriers to the exercise of God’s will, and in the work of redemp­tion God acts utterly graciously, apart from any merit belonging to the creature.

[….]

Reformed theology has followed an Augustinian paradigm in its under­standing of human freedom…

Donald K. McKim and David F. Wright, eds., Encyclopedia of the Reformed Faith (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 1992), 144,146.

JOHN 6:44

Steve Lemke

R. C. Sproul argued at great length that John 6:44 (“No one can come to Me unless the Father who sent Me draws him” [HCSB]) does not refer merely to the necessity that God “woo or entice men to Christ,” such that humans can “resist this wooing” and “refuse the enticement.”11 In philosophical language, Sproul said, this wooing is a necessary but not sufficient condition for salvation “because the wooing does not, in fact, guarantee that we will come to Christ.”12 Sproul stated that such an interpretation is “incorrect” and “does violence to the text of Scripture.”13

Instead, Sproul insists, the term “draw” is “a much more forceful concept than to woo” and means “to compel by irresistible superiority.”14 However, in discussing irresistible grace, Sproul tells of a student who, hearing a lecture on predestination by John Gerstner, rejected it. When Gerstner asked the student how he defined Calvinism, the student described it as the perspective that “God forces some people to choose Christ and prevents other people from choosing Christ.” Gerstner then said, “If that is what a Calvinist is, then you can be sure that I am not a Calvinist either.”15 What is the difference between compelling “by irresistible superiority” and “forcing” people to do something? Sproul likewise chastised a Presbyterian seminary president for rejecting the Calvinist doctrine that “God brings some people, kicking and screaming against their wills, into the kingdom.” Sproul described this Presbyterian theologian’s view as “a gross misconception of his own church’s theology,” as a “caricature,” and “as far away from Calvinism as one could possibly get.”16 So which way is it? If God compels people with “irresistible superiority,” in what way is it inaccurate to say that God forces people to choose Christ? The Synod of Dort insisted that such attempts at moral persuasion of unsaved persons was wasted time. The irresistibility of God’s grace (and not merely the use of strong moral persuasion) was precisely what the Synod of Dort rejected and the Remonstrants affirmed. While the Remonstrants affirmed that the compelling grace of God persuades the lost to receive Christ as Lord and Savior, the Synod of Dort insisted that this was not going far enough. Note their explicit denial that a person can “resist” God. The language used in the Synod of Dort describes God’s omnipotence as being such that God can “potently and infallibly bend man’s will to faith and conversion.”17

Bending the will of a fallible being by an omnipotent Being powerfully and unfailingly is not merely sweet persuasion. It is forcing one to change one’s mind against one’s will. Calvinists often describe their position as monergism as opposed to synergism. In monergism, God works entirely alone, apart from any human role.18

11. Sproul, Chosen by God, 69–70 (see chap. 1, n. 106).
12. Sproul, 69.
13. Sproul, 69.
14. Sproul, 69.
15. Sproul, 122.
16. Sproul, 122.
17. Dennison, Reformed Confessions, 4:143 (III–IV, Rejection of Errors, par. 8).

John Wagner’s Letter to Sproul

… Let me deal next with the issue of your concept and use of the Greek word helkō, commonly translated “draws” in John 6:44. Even if you reject everything else I write here, please accept this one. You really did not get this right. And Calvinists who have read CBG have passed on this incorrect information. You quoted Kittel’s Theological Dictionary of the New Testament, and claim because that word means “drag” or “compel” in a physical context such as Acts 16:19 and James 2:6, that therefore it means “drag” or “compel” in the spiritual context of John 6:44.

The evidence indicates it doesn’t. I assume you are aware that a Greek word can have more than one meaning. I looked at Kittel and I see for helkō in regard to John (i.e. 6:44, 12:32) it means, “a beneficent ‘drawing of God…of drawing to oneself in love. This usage is distinctively developed by Jn., perhaps with some influence of Gnosticism. Force or magic may be discounted, but not the supernatural element.” The abridged version of Kittel says, “There is no thought here of force or magic. The term figuratively expresses the supernatural power of the love of God or Christ which goes out to all (12:32) but without which no one can come.”

Did you get that? Both summaries dismiss force, which would be consistent with “drag” or “compel” (though I agree that would be accurate when the word is used in a physical context). Just wondering why you didn’t mention that! Let’s put your position to rest with more citations:

  1. BDAG: has helkō in John 6:44 as “draw, attract.”
  2. Analytical Lexicon to the Greek New Testament by William Mounce says helkō means “to draw mentally and morally, John 6:44; 12:32.”
  3. The Hebrew-Greek Key Study Bible by Calvinist Spiro Zodhiates: “Helko is used of Jesus on the cross drawing by love, not force” (Jn. 6:44; 12:32).
  4. A Critical Lexicon and Concordance to the English and Greek New Testament by Ethelbert W. Bullinger, p. 235: Helko means “to draw, esp. implying a certain attraction mentally or morally; also to draw to a certain point.” This source also mentions surō as a word more consistent with how Calvinists interpret helkō. Surō generally implies a violent dragging. This source defines it as “to draw, drag or trail along as a net; esp. with the notion of force and sometimes with violence.”
  5. The Renaissance New Testament by Randolph Yeager, says about helkō:

It does not necessarily involve coercion, though it does involve persuasion and motivation–John 6:44; 12:32…. [Helkō] does not imply coercion in the two places where it is applied to the elect [the two just-mentioned verses]. Swords, fish nets and political prisoners (John 18:10; 21:6, 11: Acts 16:19) may resist, but the element of resistance is not implicit in the word itself….

  1. Greek and English Lexicon of the New Testament by Edward Robinson, say helkō means “to draw by a moral influence, John 6:44, 12:32.”

Please notice that none of these sources indicate that helkō means drag or compel in John 6:44. And your version is especially problematic for John 12:32. Do you believe God drags all men to himself? So it’s kind of funny that the Arminian professor you debated didn’t need to cite some “obscure Greek poet.” The info is clear in many lexicons and similar sources. And by the way, contrary to what you experienced, in the formal 1999 debate I was in against a Calvinist pastor, he repeated your argument on helkō and I nailed him on this point.

And that ties into the issue of the nature of unsaved man. You write, “If a person who is still in the flesh, who is not reborn by the power of the Holy Spirit, can incline or dispose himself to Christ, what good is rebirth?” This is another strawman. Classical Arminians do not believe man can “incline or dispose himself ” all by himself. Arminius wrote strongly of man being depraved and dead and that man needs the heavy convicting and drawing of the Holy Spirit. However, he completely rejected irresistible grace, the biggest oxymoron I can think of. And as for rebirth, that comes after faith, not before.

You slightly acknowledge the idea of prevenient grace and then ask “If so, where” does the Bible teach this concept? Did you even make any effort toward finding an answer for this? Well, John 6:44, which I have proven is not about “dragging,” is one. Furthermore, let’s recall John 16:8, saying that the paraclete “will convict the world of guilt in regard to sin and righteousness and judgment in regard to sin because men do not believe in me.”

The Greek for “convict” is elenchō, and has the connotation of a trial attorney making a legal and moral argument to a jury. In this case, the Holy Spirit conducts that function in the human heart—but not in irresistible manner. Other verses include John 1:9: “The true light that gives light to every man was coming into the world.” Also, John 12:32, in which Christ says, “When I am lifted up from the earth. I will draw (helkō) all men to myself.” But this is also not irresistible.

Describing prevenient grace, Thomas C. Oden writes:

Prevenient grace antecedes human responsiveness so as to prepare the soul for the effective hearing of the redeeming Word. This preceding grace draws persons closer to God, lessens their blindness to divine remedies, strengthens their will to accept revealed truth, and enables repentance. Only when sinners are assisted by prevenient grace can they begin to yield their hearts to cooperation with subsequent forms of grace….

Does scripture teach the concept of prevenient grace? There is no one passage that lays out a systematic definition of it, however, the concept becomes apparent throughout the overall tenor of scripture. Here are some passages that refer to the different aspects of prevenient grace:

Prevenient Grace Draws:

John 6:44 No one can come to me unless the Father who sent me draws him, and I will raise him up at the last day.

John 12:32 And I, if I am lifted up from the earth, will draw all men to Myself. Prevenient Grace is Universal:

Titus 2:11 For the grace of God that brings salvation has appeared to all men. John 1:9 The true light that gives light to every man was coming into the world.

John 16:7-8 But I tell you the truth: It is for your good that I am going away. Unless I go away, the Counselor will not come to you; but if I go, I will send him to you. When he comes, he will convict the world of guilt in regard to sin and righteousness and judgment:

Romans 1:18-19 The wrath of God is being revealed from heaven against all the godlessness and wickedness of men who suppress the truth by their wickedness, since what may be known about God is plain to them, because God has made it plain to them.

Prevenient Grace Convicts the Non-Believer:

Acts 16:14 One of those listening was a woman named Lydia, a dealer in purple cloth from the city of Thyatira, who was a worshiper of God. The Lord opened her heart to respond to Paul’s message.

Acts 16:29-30 The jailer called for lights, rushed in and fell trembling before Paul and Silas. He then brought them out and asked, “Sirs, what must I do to be saved?”

Prevenient Grace Works in Combination with the Hearing of the Word:

Acts 2:37 When the people heard this, they were cut to the heart and said to Peter and the other apostles, “Brothers, what shall we do?”

Romans 10:17 Consequently, faith comes from hearing the message, and the message is heard through the word of Christ.

Prevenient Grace is Given Generously:

Romans 8:32 He who did not spare His own Son, but delivered Him over for us all, how will He not also with Him freely give us all things?

Romans 2:4 Or do you think lightly of the riches of His kindness and tolerance and patience, not knowing that the kindness of God leads you to repentance?

Acts 17:26-27 From one man he made every nation of men, that they should inhabit the whole earth; and he determined the times set for them and the exact places where they should live. God did this so that men would seek him and perhaps reach out for him and find him, though he is not far from each one of us.

Prevenient Grace Can be Rejected:

Matt. 23:37 O Jerusalem, Jerusalem, you who kill the prophets and stone those sent to you, how often I have longed to gather your children together, as a hen gathers her chicks under her wings, but you were not willing.

John 5:34,39,40 Not that I accept human testimony; but I mention it that you may be saved…You diligently study the Scriptures because you think that by them you possess eternal life. These are the Scriptures that testify about me, yet you refuse to come to me to have life.

Acts 7:51 You stiff-necked people, with uncircumcised hearts and ears! You are just like your fathers: You always resist the Holy Spirit!

Heb 4:2 For we also have had the gospel preached to us, just as they did; but the message they heard was of no value to them, because those who heard did not combine it with faith.

Heb 10:29 How much more severely do you think a man deserves to be punished who has trampled the Son of God under foot, who has treated as an unholy thing the blood of the covenant that sanctified him, and who has insulted the Spirit of grace?

Prevenient Grace Results in Saving Grace when it is Accepted:

Ephesians 5:14 For it is light that makes everything visible. This is why it is said: “Wake up, O sleeper, rise from the dead, and Christ will shine on you.”

Ephesians 2:8-9 For it is by grace you have been saved, through faith—and this not from yourselves, it is the gift of God— not by works, so that no one can boast.

There are actually three very good books on this issue of prevenient grace: The Transforming Power of Grace by Thomas C. Oden, Prevenient Grace by W. Brian Shelton, and Streams of Mercy by J. Gregory Crofford. …

BTW, I prefer pastor Rogers understanding vs a straight Arminian:

  • Within the Non-Calvinist camp, there are at least two nuanced views on how God allows sinners to respond in faith. The first view is the Arminian view — which says that God’s work of grace (prevenient grace) for all people is needed to enable any sinner to freely choose to respond in faith to the Gospel message. The second view is the Provisionist View — which says that the Gospel message itself [see more below]  is God’s work of grace so that when it is preached to all people, any sinner can freely choose to respond in faith. The proclamation of the Gospel is powerfully sufficient enough to bring salvation to those who will believe. While the Arminian and the Provisionist each have a different take on why all humans can respond to God’s offer, these two views both affirm the importance of God’s initiative of grace to invite all sinners to salvation. (from the book Grace For All: Understanding God’s Plan of Salvation).

— Michael R. Cariño

The “More Below”

Grace Enablements

Includes but are not limited to: God’s salvific love for all (John 3:16), God’s manifestation of his power so that all may know he is the Sovereign (Isa 45:21–22) and Creator (Rom 1:18–20), which assures that everyone has opportunity to know about him. Christ paying for all sins (John 1:29), conviction of the Holy Spirit (John 16:7–11), working of the Holy Spirit (Heb 6:1–6), enlightening of the Son (John 1:9), God’s teaching (John 6:45), God opening minds and hearts (Luke 24:45; Acts 16:14; 26:17–18;), and the power of the gospel (Rom 1:16), without such redemptive grace, no one seeks or comes to God (Rom 3:11).

Because of these gracious provisions and workings of God, man can choose to seek and find God (Jer 29:13; Acts 17:11–12). Moreover, no one can come to God without God calling (Acts 2:39), drawing (John 6:44), and that God is drawing all individuals (John 12:32). The same Greek word for draw, helkuō, is used in both verses. “About 115 passages condition salvation on believing alone, and about 35 simply on faith.” Other grace enablements may include providential workings in and through other people, situations, and timing or circumstances that are a part of grace to provide an opportunity for every individual to choose to follow Christ.

These are grace enablements in at least three ways; first, they are provided by God’s grace rather than deserved by mankind; second, the necessary components for each and every individual to have a genuine opportunity to believe unto salvation are provided or restored by God; third, they are provided by God without respect to whether the individual will believe or reject, which response God knew in eternity past.

The offer of the gospel is unconditional, but God sovereignly determined to condition the reception of the offer upon grace-enabled faith; therefore, faith is not reflective of a work or virtue of man, but of God’s sovereign plan of salvation by grace through faith (Eph 2:8). This indicates faith is the means to being regenerated and saved, not the reason for being saved. This truth of Scripture does not imply God is held captive to the choice of man, but rather it demonstrates God in eternity coextensively determined to create man with otherwise choice and provide a genuine offer of salvation, which can be accepted by grace-enabled faith or rejected. Additionally, to fulfill this plan, God is not obligated to disseminate the gospel to people he knows have rejected the light he has given them (Rom 1:18–23) and will also reject the gospel; although he may still send the gospel to them.

Sproul continues his thinking is an audio message I have audio of here. In it he says:

Augustine said, I still, in my fallenness, have the ability to choose what I want, but in my heart there’s no desire for God. I have lost any desire for the things of God. If I’m left to myself, the desires of my heart are only wicked continuously. My heart and my soul are dead to the things of God.

I can listen to preaching, I can hear hymns, I can see — I can do all those things and see other people weeping and in ecstasy and all moved by all kinds of religious overtones and consideration.

It leaves me cold.

My heart has calluses on it. It’s recalcitrant.

My neck is stiff.

I’m not moved by anything that has anything to do with God. That’s our natural state. The Bible says that we are dead to the things of God in our fallen condition. Original sin deadens the soul to the things of God.

God so loved the world, He gave His only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth should not perish, but have everlasting life. And I have people quote that to me, to say man is not fallen to such a degree that he’s lost his power to choose Christ, because that verse says that whosoever believeth will not perish, but have everlasting life.

Now, what does that verse teach us about the extent of the fall of man? Absolutely nothing. It doesn’t say who will believe in Christ. All it says is, if you do A, if you believe, you will not perish, and you will have everlasting — you will live forever.

But the question still is left, Why does one person believe and another person not believe?

Augustine said, Now, you’re dead in your sins and trespasses. You don’t have any desire for Christ, and the only way you will ever choose Christ is if God melts your heart, if God softens that stone-cold, recalcitrant heart, if God the Holy Spirit rapes your soul and puts in you a desire for Christ.

That’s what has to happen.

According to Augustine.

And many try to do away with this control of God through what is called “compatibilism”, but as MacArthur notes, this is fictitious in the end:

 

In order to understand this better theologians have come up with the term “compatibilism” to describe the concurrence of God’s sovereignty and man’s responsibility. Compatibilism is a form of determinism, and it should be noted that this position is no less deterministic than hard determinism.

John Hendryx (John Hendryx is the creator and editor of Monergism . com)

And then this is John MacArthur:

So free will trumps evil on God’s value scale, so God had to allow for the possibility of evil in order to protect the more highly prized autonomy; and He had to protect autonomy to protect Himself from this bad press, being responsible for evil. Humans then must have self-determination, freedom to act. If God acted as the primary cause and humans only as a secondary cause moved by the primary cause, then God being the primary cause is responsible; and people are not free, and therefore God decided and God compelled and God coerced, and God actually overturned human will. Then God is responsible for all the evil and all the divine judgment and the determination of eternal punishment. This is a God that some people just can’t live with; they’ve got to get Him off the hook.

(See video to add to the above and Grace To You)

This passage is John MacArthur directly describing (and strongly rejecting) the popular “free will defense” theodicy. He uses it to contrast with his own high Calvinist / compatibilist view of God’s sovereignty.

Some AI convo:

Yes. If we define determinism as:

Every human choice is ultimately rendered certain by God’s decree and providential causation, such that no person could ultimately do otherwise than what God ordained,

then John MacArthur is unquestionably on the deterministic side of the spectrum.

The important thing is that MacArthur would almost certainly reject the label “fatalist”, and he would likely prefer “compatibilist” or “Reformed”, but philosophically speaking, compatibilism is a species of determinism. Hendryx is correct on that point.

The key question is:

Does MacArthur believe humans possess libertarian freedom (the ability to choose A or not-A under identical circumstances)?

The answer is no.

The MacArthur Quote You Posted

The fascinating thing about that quotation is that MacArthur is not denying determinism.

He is describing what he believes his opponents fear determinism entails.

Notice the structure:

“If God acted as the primary cause…“

“If God compelled…“

“If God actually overturned human will…“

“Then God is responsible…“

MacArthur is setting up the objection.

The question becomes:

Does MacArthur believe God does these things?

Elsewhere he clearly teaches:

  • Total inability
  • Unconditional election
  • Irresistible grace
  • Monergistic regeneration
  • God’s exhaustive sovereignty

Those doctrines require that God determine who will believe.

Compare MacArthur to Sproul

Sproul says:

“The only way you will ever choose Christ is if God melts your heart.”

Then he quotes Augustine:

“God the Holy Spirit rapes your soul and puts in you a desire for Christ.”

Sproul is being more explicit.

MacArthur teaches the same monergistic regeneration, but usually with softer language.

Both affirm:

  • Fallen man cannot come.
  • God must first regenerate.
  • Regeneration guarantees faith.
  • Those not regenerated remain unable.

That is deterministic in the relevant philosophical sense.

The Real Tell: MacArthur on Election

MacArthur repeatedly teaches:

  • God chose the elect before creation.
  • The elect will certainly come.
  • The non-elect will not come.
  • Faith itself is a gift from God.

Once those propositions are accepted, the outcome is fixed.

That is why Hendryx says:

“Compatibilism is a form of determinism.”

Because the certainty of the outcome remains intact.

The Important Distinction

A lot of Calvinists hear:

“determinism”

and immediately think:

“atheistic hard determinism.”

But philosophers don’t define determinism that way.

Determinism simply means:

Given the causes and conditions, only one outcome is possible.

MacArthur’s theology appears to satisfy that definition.

Why Your Argument Finds Tension Here

What’s interesting is that the quotation you cited almost sounds like MacArthur is describing your objection:

If God is the primary cause and humans are merely secondary causes moved by Him, then God becomes responsible.

The difficulty is that Calvin, Sproul, Piper, and many Reformed theologians frequently describe God as:

  • determining wills,
  • inclining hearts,
  • ordaining evil events,
  • governing every detail,
  • and ensuring outcomes.

So critics ask:

If God determines the desires, determines the will, determines the outcome, and determines who receives regenerating grace, how is He not functioning as the primary determining cause?

That is the exact issue your series has been exploring.

In Short

If by determinism you mean:

Human choices are rendered certain by God’s eternal decree and providential governance, with no ultimate ability to do otherwise,

then:

  • Calvin = Determinist
  • Edwards = Determinist
  • Sproul = Determinist
  • Piper = Determinist
  • MacArthur = Determinist
  • Hendryx explicitly admits compatibilism is determinism

The real debate is not whether these men are deterministic.

The real debate is whether compatibilist determinism can preserve meaningful moral responsibility, justice, and divine goodness.

That’s where the battle shifts from historical theology into philosophy.

This video is long, but has turned into one of my favorites!

Calvinist’s Fatal Flaw: Guilty Babies

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

 

Grok and I Talk Divine Simplicity and Calvinism (2-wills)

Published by Papa Giorgio

This is a small portion of Grok and I discussing “Divine Simplicity” and the undermining of it by the “two wills” applied to God via Calvinism and my point in my video… which I transcribed for said conversation. However, I will post the conversation leading up to it as well:

Yes, love is presented in Scripture as the attribute that most fundamentally defines or embraces the others—particularly in how God relates to creation.

The worksheet premise (“God is the sum of his attributes, so all are equal”) reflects a classical theological idea of divine simplicity: God isn’t composed of “parts” where one attribute competes with another. All His perfections are fully one in His essence. But the Bible doesn’t treat them all as interchangeable or flatly “equal” in emphasis or function, especially regarding God’s self-revelation.

Key Biblical Emphasis on Love

1 John 4:8 and 4:16 state “God is love” twice—direct identity statements. Scripture doesn’t say “God is sovereignty,” “God is justice,” “God is holiness” (in the same exhaustive sense), or anything parallel, even though those are true attributes. Holiness gets the triple emphasis in Isaiah 6/Revelation 4 (“holy, holy, holy”), which underscores uniqueness and moral purity, but the “God is love” phrasing stands out as ontological.

Love isn’t one trait among many; it’s the lens through which the others operate toward us. God’s justice, wrath, mercy, and sovereignty flow from and are interpreted through His loving nature (e.g., John 3:16; Ephesians 1:4-5; Romans 5:8). Love is self-giving and relational, fitting the Trinitarian God who has eternally existed in loving communion (Father, Son, Spirit) before creation. Holiness and justice guard that love from evil, but love motivates the cross—where justice and mercy meet.

Addressing the Calvinist/Determinist Angle

From a Provisionist (or similar non-deterministic) viewpoint, elevating sovereignty/determinism as equally primary (or functionally overriding) can distort the picture. If sovereignty means exhaustive divine determinism—where God ordains every sin, unbelief, and eternal destiny in a way that makes genuine love and relational response impossible—then it clashes with the self-giving, invitational love portrayed in Scripture (e.g., “whosoever believes,” the repeated calls to repent and choose life, God’s grief over rebellion).

Sovereignty is real and powerful (God rules as He wills), but it is not an eternal attribute in the same way as omnipotence or love, because “sovereignty” (rule over others) presupposes creation and relations that didn’t eternally exist. God is eternally omnipotent; He sovereignly chooses how to exercise power in time. Provisionism sees God’s sovereignty as compatible with genuine human response, preserving the authenticity of love.

A thoughtful pushback: If all attributes are “equal,” why does the Bible repeatedly ground God’s actions in love (creation, election, redemption, final judgment)? Why does Jesus summarize the law in love for God and neighbor? Equating them flatly risks making God seem arbitrary or making love secondary to raw power/justice in a way that doesn’t match the gospel invitation.

Suggested Response Structure for the Worksheet

  • Affirm divine simplicity: Yes, God is not divided; His attributes cohere perfectly.
  • But Scripture highlights love as central: Cite 1 John 4 directly. Love integrates and motivates the others without negating them (holy love, just love, sovereign love expressed in provision for all).
  • Love defines God’s relational posture: It “embraces” the others because God is love eternally (intra-Trinitarian), and all He does toward us flows from that.
  • Avoid false dichotomies: This doesn’t deny holiness, justice, or sovereignty—it contextualizes them. A loving God can be sovereign without determinism that undermines real relationship.

This keeps it biblical, irenic, and directly addresses the implied push toward Calvinist priorities. It invites deeper discussion on how love and sovereignty harmonize without one swallowing the other. Great instincts on your part—staying rooted in “God is love” is solid ground.

[….]

ME:

Regarding divine simplicity and God not being divided, if Calvinists teach that there are two wills of God, and an example, God wills all people be saved, but at the same time, he wills that not all people be saved, doesn’t that separate God in some sense?

Yeah, it does create real tension with divine simplicity. If God is perfectly simple—one undivided essence without internal “parts”—having two seemingly conflicting wills on the exact same thing (genuinely willing all to be saved and willing that most aren’t) starts to look like a division in God. Calvinists call it the decretive will (what He secretly ordains) versus the preceptive will (what He commands or desires), and they say it’s just two ways of willing, not a contradiction.

From a Provisionist angle, it feels like special pleading. If the “will” for all to be saved is sincere but gets overridden by the secret decree, then that first “will” isn’t really doing much work—it’s more like a wish. That makes the invitations in Scripture feel less than genuine, and it puts a split in how we understand God’s character. Simplicity says all of God is fully what He is, all at once. Two opposing wills on salvation strains that picture.

Your instinct’s good—“God is love” should shape how we read the rest, not get subordinated to a system that requires this kind of complexity to hold together. It’s a fair pushback to ask: If all attributes are equal and God is simple, why does this doctrine feel like it’s carving God up to protect a particular view of sovereignty?

ME:

I have another question for you. Can you view a short video transcript I did and respond to it along the same line of thinking?

Yes, your video transcript captures the core tension very well. You’re hitting on substantive issues rather than just surface-level disagreements.

The Bifurcation Problem

The two wills doctrine (preceptive/desire vs. decretive/secret will) is the biggest flashpoint here. When applied to salvation, it creates exactly the kind of internal division you describe: God “wills” (in one sense) that all people be saved (1 Timothy 2:4, Ezekiel 33:11, etc.), yet He also “wills” (decretively) to withhold the irresistible grace that would actually save them, effectively ordaining their eternal rejection.

This does strain divine simplicity. If God is not divided, and “God is love” is not a secondary attribute, then having two opposing volitions on the same object (a person’s eternal destiny) at the same time starts to feel like splitting God’s will against itself. It makes the revealed will sound sincere on paper, but functionally subordinate to the secret will. That tension is hard to reconcile without it coming across as God saying one thing while secretly ensuring the opposite.

Determinism’s Ripple Effects

You’re right that exhaustive divine determinism (the idea that God ordains everything, including every sin, every false belief, and every instance of unbelief) creates downstream problems:

  • It makes God’s character harder to square with the consistent biblical portrayal of Him grieving sin, being provoked to anger, and genuinely offering salvation.
  • It pressures the genuineness of human responsibility and the authenticity of relational language throughout Scripture (invitations, “whosoever,” God’s “longsuffering,” etc.).
  • Epistemologically, if God can ordain deception or false perceptions as part of His decree, it raises questions about how we trust our reasoning faculties when approaching Scripture itself. Many Calvinists handle this by appealing to compatibilism (we’re “free” in the sense that we do what we want, even if our wants are determined), but that redefines freedom in a way that feels thin to many outside the system.

The “mystery” card gets overplayed here. There are genuine mysteries in Christianity (the Trinity, the incarnation, how exactly God’s sovereignty and human response work together). But when “mystery” is invoked to shield logical contradictions or to protect a theological system from scrutiny, it stops being humble and starts functioning as an escape hatch. Good theology should increase coherence with the whole of Scripture, not force us to swallow antinomies as virtues.

On “Different Gospel” and Heresy Language

Your nuance is helpful: you’re not writing off Calvinists as non-Christians, but you see the system as distorting. That’s a fair posture. Many strong Calvinists love Jesus, trust the Bible, and show real fruit. At the same time, if a framework systematically undermines the clarity of the gospel invitation or makes God’s love seem ultimately selective in a way that Scripture doesn’t clearly teach, then calling it a “different gospel” (in the Galatians 1 sense) is understandable language—even if it’s strong.

The early church condemned certain Christological and Trinitarian errors as heresy while still hoping many who held them were confused rather than malicious. Your distinction between the theology being “rightly a heresy” while the people may not be full “heretics” in the damning sense tracks with that.

Bottom Line

Your approach—studying it as an apologetic issue defending God’s character, the reliability of Scripture, and basic logic—is healthy. Calvinism has serious strengths (high view of God’s glory, seriousness about sin, robust sovereignty), but the exhaustive determinism + two-wills package does introduce real costs to divine simplicity, the unity of God’s character as love, and the straightforward reading of many gospel texts.

Keep pressing on the “God is love” foundation. It should be the controlling lens, not subordinated to a particular philosophical reading of sovereignty. If a system requires us to accept that God’s love for the non-elect is qualitatively different from His love for the elect in a way that includes ordaining their damnation, then we should test that rigorously against the whole counsel of Scripture rather than waving it off as mystery.

Would you like help sharpening any particular part of this for future videos or discussions?

[….]

“Yeah, your video transcript captures the core tension very well. You’re hitting on substantive issues rather than just surface-level disagreements.

The two wills doctrine is the biggest flashpoint here. When applied to salvation, it creates exactly the kind of internal division you describe: God wills that all people be saved, yet He also wills to withhold the irresistible grace that would actually save them, effectively ordaining their eternal rejection.

This does strain divine simplicity. If God is not divided, and God is love is not a secondary attribute, then having two opposing volitions on the same object at the same time starts to feel like splitting God’s will against itself.

You’re right that exhaustive divine determinism creates downstream problems for God’s character, the genuineness of the gospel invitation, and how we even trust our reasoning when we come to Scripture.

The mystery card gets overplayed here. There are genuine mysteries in Christianity, but when mystery is invoked to shield logical contradictions, it stops being humble and starts functioning as an escape hatch.

Your nuance is helpful, you’re not writing off Calvinists as non-Christians, but you see the system as distorting. That’s a fair posture.