TULIP (Calvinism)

How the Cults Redefine Biblical Terms

Published by Papa Giorgio

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

The Riddle of Semantics

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Click to enlarger

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

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

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

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

Summary

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I will introduce each excerpt.

Section Introduction — “His Writing”

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

The question Coate ultimately puts before the reader is simple:

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

His Writing

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

—C. S. Lewis, on Calvin’s Institutes

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

NOTES

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

Section Introduction — “Its Twisting of Scripture”

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

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

The central question Coate raises in this section is therefore:

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

Its Twisting of Scripture

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

—Norman L. Geisler and Ron Rhodes

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

—George Bryson

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Leading Calvinist James Whites believes that:

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

He continues:

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

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

McDowell concludes that cults reinterpret the Bible:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Geisler also says:

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

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

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

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

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

NOTES

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

Section Introduction — “Its Ignoring of Scripture”

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

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

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

The question Coate places before the reader is:

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

Its Ignoring of Scripture

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

NOTES

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

Section Introduction — “Its Twisted Terminology”

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

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

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

Coate closes by returning to a principle emphasized by Hanegraaff:

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

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

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

Its Twisted Terminology

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

—Hank Hanegraaff

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

—George Bryson

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Geisler provides another example of problematic Calvinist terminology:

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

Similarly,

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Lawrence Vance, as well, deduces the following:

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

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

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

NOTES

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

Section Introduction — “The Calvinist Redefinition of Biblical Language”

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

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

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

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

In short:

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

Resources for the above

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

Does Calvinism Leave Room For Genuine Choice (video added)

Published by Papa Giorgio

IS “PASSING OVER” AN ACTIVE CHOICE BY GOD?

Within the Calvinist system itself:

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

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

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

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

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

IS COMPATIBILISM DETERMINISTIC?

Yes.

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

Bottom line in the MacArthur / Reformed framework:

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

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

JOHNNY MAC’s TRANSCRIPT

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

BOTTOM LINE:

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

JOHNNY MAC’s TRANSCRIPT 2.0

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

CS Lewis: Our White Being God’s Black

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

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

Frank Turek Rightly Notes Calvinism’s “Islam god Problem”

Published by Papa Giorgio
  • “The main problem in my view of the five point Calvinist view is that it makes God more like Allah than Yahweh.” – Frank Turek

Yep. See my:

The “Connective Tissue” Between Islam and Calvinism

Did they go too FAR?

In this panel discussion, Frank Turek, Allen Parr, Michael Jones (Inspiring Philosophy), and Braxton Hunter engage in a thoughtful conversation surrounding Calvinism, divine sovereignty, and Romans 9.

At the center of the discussion is the tension many Christians feel when reading Romans 9 – how to understand election, God’s sovereignty, and human responsibility without flattening the text into a system. Is Paul teaching determinism? Is he speaking about corporate election and historical purposes? Or is there a deeper synthesis that holds both divine sovereignty and genuine human response together?

Whether you are Reformed, non-Reformed, or simply trying to understand Romans 9 more clearly, this discussion highlights the key issues that continue to shape evangelical theology today.

Calvinism Undermines the Gospel

Published by Papa Giorgio

It is almost demonic. How do you say that Calvary, Christ’s finished work, the Word of God, and the Gospel shared with people is useless, non effective…. without saying it? This is how:

  • Calvinism assumes that without the intervention of God no one will ever want Christ. Left to themselves, no one will ever choose Christ.

— R.C. Sproul (Chosen By God, p. 34)

Leaving Calvinism By God’s Decree (Memevangelsit)

Published by Papa Giorgio

[BTW, I love this post because it show just how “off” Calvinism is, and how it undermines any Biblical commands and categories.]

Here is the original (to the left) with an edit by whom I assume are Calvinistic in their leaning (to the right). I say this because they are saying that Satan is driving out solid Biblical teaching via that Calvinist teachers:

Which got me thinking. The person did not realize it, but they undercut their own argument.

How?

This is how [I created a larger cartoon – click to enlarge]:

Satan’s ultimate ambition is to usurp God’s position (Isaiah 14:13-15, 2 Thes. 2:3,4).

Right?

However, John Calvin notes:

  • “[W]e infer that God was the author of that trial of which Satan and wicked robbers were merely the instruments.”
  • “Therefore, whatever men or Satan himself devise, God holds the helm, and makes all their efforts contribute to the execution of His judgments”
  • “That men do nothing save at the secret instigation of God, and do not discuss and deliberate on anything but what He has previously decreed with Himself, and brings to pass by His secret direction, is proved by numberless clear passages of Scripture”
  • “That men do nothing save at the secret instigation of God, and do not discuss and deliberate on anything but what He has previously decreed with Himself, and brings to pass by His secret direction, is proved by numberless clear passages of Scripture”
  • “not that He intends to teach wicked and obstinate man to obey spontaneously, but because He bends them to execute His judgments, just as if they carried their orders engraven on their minds. And hence it appears that they are impelled by the sure appointment of God.”

Etc, etc. (Institutes 1.18.1. and 1.18.2.).

  • … 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

  • …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…

— John Piper and Justin Taylor, eds., Suffering and the Sovereignty of God

  •  “Therefore, whatever men or Satan himself devise,” argues Calvin, “God holds the helm, and makes all their efforts contribute to the execution of his judgments.” (Calvin, 1.18.1.)

Satan is said to blind the minds of those who believe not (2 Cor. 4:4). So, you note that the “blinding by Satan” is by spitting out the ingested Calvinist acolytes. However, Satan is ultimately irrelevant since the elect still get saved and the non-elect still go to the lake of fire for eternity. The Devil is God’s Devil (to summarize Martin Luther) and never operates outside the Lord’s decree (Sproul). The Devil is God’s servant (Piper, MacArthur).

So, the change in the cartoon is really a defeater. It undercuts any point trying to be made.

In other words, you are saying God put Calvinism into the person. And God took Calvinism out of the person.

To circle back: God would be usurping Himself.

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.”

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.

Double Predestination | Geoffrey D. Robinson

Published by Papa Giorgio

This is an excerpt from Geoffrey D. Robinson’s book, Saved by Grace Through Faith or Saved by Decree? A Biblical and Theological Critique of Calvinist Soteriology (Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock, 2022), pages 171-184.

g) Double Predestination?

From within a Calvinistic perspective, Sproul is surely correct when he says: “Given that the Bible teaches both election and particularism, we cannot avoid the subject of double predestination. The question then is not if predestination is double, but how it is double.”205

Double predestination, a term mainly relevant to those committed to Calvinism, is the term used by theologians to describe the nature of God’s predestinating work of electing some for salvation and damning the rest. There are two main ways this choosing of God is considered to work. The first, held by consistent Calvinists and mainly found in earlier (post-Reformation) Calvinistic writers, views God as positively choosing those whom he unconditionally elects for salvation and positively choosing those whom he selects for hell. Merely for convenience I will call this form of predestination “symmetric predestination.” In the other form of this doctrine, God positively chooses unconditionally the elect for salvation and the rest he leaves in their sin to take the consequences of unforgiven sin, hell. Again, for convenience, I will call this “asymmetric predestination.”206

John Calvin is a good example of symmetric predestination:

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 the other of these ends, we say that he has been predestined to life or to death.207

The Westminster Confession of 1646 likewise strongly affirms symmetric predestination: “By the decree of God, for the manifestation of his glory, some men and angels are predestinated unto everlasting life; and others foreordained to everlasting death.”208 In more recent times Wright is an example of a proponent of symmetric predestination: “God cannot logically choose some for salvation without at the same time choosing to reject others, even though they are no more sinful. This, of course, is the doctrine of reprobation taught today by all consistent Calvinists.”209 For Lorraine Boettner, “the doctrine of absolute Predestination logically holds that some are foreordained to death as surely as others are foreordained to life. . . . We believe that from all eternity God has intended to leave some of Adam’s posterity in their sins, and that the decisive factor in the life of each is to be found only in God’s will.”210

Much more common among contemporary Calvinists is asymmetric predestination. For such thinkers, symmetric predestination jeopardizes God’s goodness. Sproul is typical: “Reprobation is the flip side of election, the dark side of the matter that raises many concerns. It is the doctrine of reprobation that has prompted the label of `horrible decree: It is one thing to speak of God’s gracious predestination to election, but quite another to speak of God’s decreeing from all eternity that certain unfortunate people are destined for damnation.”211 Grudem too expresses the same reservations about symmetric predestination:

In many ways the doctrine of reprobation is the most difficult of all the teachings of Scripture for us to think about and to accept, because it deals with such horrible and eternal consequences for human beings made in the image of God. The love that God gives us for our fellow human beings and the love that he commands us to have toward our neighbor cause us to recoil against this doctrine, and it is right that we feel such dread in contemplating it.212

Grudem helpfully summarizes the asymmetric predestination position when he says that “reprobation is the sovereign decision of God before creation to pass over some persons, in sorrow deciding not to save them, and to punish them for their sins, and thereby to manifest his justice.”213 While God positively decides who will be saved, he only passes over the rest (the reprobate) who are consequently punished for their sins. Horton echoes the same logic: “God only has to leave us to our own devices in the case of reprobation, but it requires the greatest works of the triune God to save the elect.”214 Bruce Ware argues similarly: “In brief, reprobation is conditional, i.e., based on what sinners have done and deserve, whereas election is unconditional, i.e., based on the unmerited grace and favor of God despite what sinners have done and deserve. . . . None of what has been argued above militates against the fact that God has ordained both evil and good, both sin and obedience, both reprobation and election.”215

Before critiquing the Calvinist’s notion of symmetric predestination and asymmetric predestination, I want to briefly examine a few scriptures appealed to by Calvinists to justify the idea of God predestinating the reprobate.

Proverbs 16:4

“The Lord has made everything for its own purpose, Even the wicked for the day of evil.”

Berkhof in his Systematic Theology cites this verse to justify the all-comprehensiveness of God’s sovereign decree: “The decree includes whatsoever comes to pass in the world . . . whether it be good or evil” and includes the wicked acts of men.216 Superficially, it is easy to see why appeal is made to Prov 16:4 for does it not say that God’s purpose includes the wicked for a day of evil? However, as always, context and genre must be brought to bear to truly understand this (and any other) verse. The first thing to notice is that the saying is a proverb which, by definition, expresses a general truth. And what is the general truth being expressed in this verse (and the preceding verses)? It is that, despite what may appear on the surface, ultimately it is God who rules. In this case, God’s rulership (purpose) includes the punishment of evildoers in the end. “The general meaning is that there are ultimately no loose ends in God’s world: everything will be put to some use and matched with its proper fate. It does not mean that God is the author of evil: James 1:13,17).”217 A good historical example of this proverb is the punishment of Babylon for their iniquity (Jer 25:12) after the king of Babylon’s wickedness has been used by God to punish disobedient Judah (Jer 25:7-9).

Isaiah 45:7

“The One forming light and creating darkness, causing well-being and creating calamity; I am the Lord who does all these.”

Grudem comments on this verse, “Isaiah 45:7, which speaks of God `creating evil, does not say that God himself does evil, but should be understood to mean that God ordained that evil would come about through the willing choices of his creature.”218 However the evil comes about, according to Grudem, God ordains the evil; it must therefore happen because God wills it to happen.

The Hebrew word that Grudem translates as evil has, like all words, a range of meanings.219 The Hebrew Lexicon of Brown et al., for example, cites evil, distress, misery, injury, calamity, adversity.220 In its context this verse underscores God’s sovereignty to confirm his ability to call the Persian King Cyrus (Isa 45:1-4) to effect God’s purpose for ancient exilic Israel, that they be granted permission to return to Jerusalem. The phrase causing well-being and creating calamity is typically assumed by Calvinistic scholars to express God’s all-determining decretal will whereby all that happens in the universe is an outworking of God’s ordaining before the creation of the world—in Grudem’s words, “God ordained that it [the evil] would come about, both in general terms and in specific details.”221 Yet there is nothing in the verse itself that would indicate that such divine actions are the result or consequence of some preordained, detailed plan. The text merely says that God does these things—how or why he does it is not specified. Is there any portion of Scripture that might indicate why God might choose to act in such a way as to bring “calamity”? Yes. The covenant blessings and curses that comprise a very important part of the Mosaic covenant (Lev 26, Deut 28) clearly indicate that God will bring blessings (“causing well-being”) for covenant loyalty by Israel, and God will bring disaster in the form of judgments (“creating calamity”) for covenant disloyalty. Far from the outworking of an unconditional overarching decree that ordains all that unfolds in history, Isa 45:7 is a reminder of what God can do, and has done, in response to human actions and choices. This is simply the kind of God he is; he reacts negatively to human sin whether that sin be the idolatry of ancient Israel, or the wickedness of people who suppress the truth in unrighteousness (Rom 1:18).

Romans 9:18

“So then He has mercy on whom He desires, and He hardens whom He desires.”

Earlier in this chapter when discussing the significance of Rom 9:10-16, we concluded that yes, God does choose unconditionally—but his choosing is not for salvation but for service. God has the right to choose which individuals to call and use in the service of his redemptive purposes for the world. Furthermore, Paul’s argument concerning God’s right to choose how salvation would be applied to the Jews (by grace, not ethnicity [vv. 6-81), and who will play key roles in his redemptive purposes (Isaac, Jacob, Pharaoh [vv. 7-171), extends all the way down to v. 18. Consequently, this verse is to be understood within a context of election to service, not salvation. Calvinists are quite right to see God exercise his sovereign right to choose, but they are mistaken in seeing the choosing in terms of God’s selecting some individuals for salvation and selecting (either directly or indirectly) some individuals for perdition.222

A word about the words mercy and hardens. These words are usually, especially by Calvinists, understood in salvific terms. God has saving mercy on some (the elect) and he hardens others (the reprobate) so that they cannot believe or are left in their unbelief. However, as always, the meaning assigned words is governed by the context,223 and as we have seen, the context here has to do with God’s choosing some for a task of service and rejecting others for that task. “‘Having mercy’ in this context refers not to saving mercy but to the favor of being chosen by God to play some role in the working out of his redemptive purposes (see v. 15). Whether one is conscious of being chosen and used is irrelevant; even whether one is saved or not is irrelevant (see Isa 45:4-5 concerning Cyrus).”224 Similarly with the hardening: because God wanted to use Pharaoh in a negative way, to impede Israel’s exodus from Egypt, God hardened his heart for that specific purpose (v. 17). The hardening of v. 18 expresses God’s providential working at a crucial point in redemptive history, as well as God’s judgment on an individual’s persistent rebellious unbelief. In short, this verse (Rom 9:18) cannot be used to support the Calvinist’s contention regarding God’s unconditional choosing of the elect for salvation, and the reprobate for damnation.

Romans 9:21

“Or does not the potter have a right over the clay, to make from the same lump one vessel for honorable use and another for common use?”

Calvinists tend to see Rom 9:7-29 as a whole, as Paul sustaining his explanation for the implied question behind Rom 9:1-5, namely, why aren’t the Jews being saved in (supposed) fulfillment of Old Testament promises? The Calvinist answer is that God has the right whom to save and whom to not save. Romans 9:21 summarizes that contention. Michael Horton is typical of this perspective: In “Romans 9, God is said to be free to choose and to reject, to save and to harden, `to make out of the same lump one vessel for honorable use and another for dishonorable use (Rom 9:21):” 225

A key to understanding Rom 9:21 is Rom 9:6: “But it is not as though the word of God has failed. For they are not all Israel who are descended from Israel.” Fundamental to Paul’s concern for his lost ethnic brethren (fellow Jews) is the idea of two Israels-physical Israel (those descended from Israel/Jacob) and spiritual or true Israel. In vv. 7-18 the focus has been on God’s dealings with physical Israel, his calling the nation to a work of service in the redemptive outworking of God’s salvific purposes for the world. But now in vv. 19-29 the focus shifts to true Israel, those within physical Israel (the one lump of v. 21) who will actually enjoy salvation and be “for honorable use” for God (v. 21), and also be “vessels of mercy” (v. 23). This latter group have always been a remnant within physical Israel (v. 27-29).

As Cottrell notes, “A major part of this section [vv. 19-29] is the fact that the calling and saving of spiritual Israel was all along a part of the very purpose for the existence of ethnic Israel. In other words, it has always been God’s sovereign purpose to distinguish between the two Israels.”226 Bearing this in mind, we can paraphrase and expand the meaning of Rom 9:21 as: “Does not God have a right over the nation of Israel, to make from within the one nation one group that would enjoy salvation and another group that would function as the vehicle of God’s redemptive purposes?” The fact of the two groups is established in vv. 19-29, but the basis upon which God distinguishes between the two is discussed in 9:3o-10:21. The fact of the two groups lies in God’s unconditional intent to call a saved people from within the ethnic nation; the basis of the saved people’s existence is conditional upon an exercise of faith in God. It is clear from the above analysis that Rom 9:21 does not support the idea that God determines whoever will be personally saved or lost.

1 Peter 2:7—8

“This precious value, then, is for you who believe; but for those who disbelieve, `The stone which the builders rejected, this became the very corner stone,’ and, a stone of stumbling and a rock of offense; for they stumble because they are disobedient to the word, and to this doom they were also appointed.”

Grudem, in typical Calvinistic fashion, commenting on the last clause, says: “Amazing as it may seem, even the stumbling and disobedience of unbelievers have been destined by God.”227 John Piper likewise makes it clear that he understands v. 8 to mean that God (pre)destined the unbelievers to not obey the word.228

In order to understand Peter’s teaching here, it is necessary to capture the flow of thought in the larger context. In the passage (1 Pet 2:4-1o) Peter identifies two groups of people. On the one hand are the Christians he is writing to and “who believe” and, on the other hand, “those who disbelieve” (v. 7). Here, as throughout the New Testament, belief in Christ and in God’s word is crucial in demarking the two classes of people. These two groups hold two very different attitudes to Christ. For believers Christ is “a living stone” (v. 4) who is “precious in the sight of God” (v. 4) and recognize Christ as “a precious cornerstone” (v. 6). For unbelievers, however, Christ is “a stone of stumbling and a rock of offense” (v. 8a). The attitude toward Christ is markedly different for the two groups. The believers are “coming to Him as to a living stone” (v. 4) and glory in Christ’s preciousness (vv. 4, 6, 7); in strong contrast, unbelievers reject Christ (vv. 4, 7). As a consequence of the two sharply differing attitudes and approaches to Christ, God’s cornerstone, the two groups experience two sharply contrasting outcomes. Believers are being built up as a spiritual house, offer spiritual sacrifices to God (v. 5), and are not ultimately disappointed (v. 6b). Unbelievers, because of their disobedience to the word (gospel) by contrast, stumble over Christ who, for them, has become “a stone of stumbling and a rock of offense” (v. 8a).

By way of preliminary observation, we may note that even though the Greek does not explicitly make the causal connection between the disobedience of the unbelievers and their stumbling in v. 8 (“they stumble because they are disobedient”) most translators recognize the implied connection and accordingly include it in their translation of v. 8.229 Furthermore, the word doom in the NASB translation of v. 8 above is not in the Greek.230 Unfortunately, the grammatical construction of the phrase “to this they were also appointed” does not resolve the question as to what the disbelievers were appointed.

Because of the textual ambiguity of 1 Peter 2:8, grammatically the passage may be construed either as supporting, or as not supporting, the doctrine of positive reprobation. The matter hinges on the reference assumed for the phrase “to which they were appointed.” Was the appointing to disobedience, or to both stumbling and disobedience, or to stumbling as the consequence of disobedience? All three assumptions have their advocates, and all are admissible grammatically.231

One way to resolve the issue is to examine elsewhere within Peter’s letter whether he hints at God having appointed or destined the unbelief itself. This is easy to answer: nowhere within the letter is such divine action stated.232 On the other hand, are there indications within the rest of the letter that God reacts negatively against unbelief and evil? The answer to this is also clear; there are at least four other passages where God is said to react negatively toward unbelievers. In 1 Pet 3:12 God is said to set his face “against those who do evil.” In 4:5, Peter reminds his readers that the sinful practices of the Gentiles will be held accountable to God on the day of judgment. In 4:18, it is implied that severe judgment awaits “the godless man and the sinner.” Finally, in 5:5, Peter tells his readers that believers are to clothe themselves with humility because “God is opposed to the proud.” So, we may conclude, on the basis of Peter’s teaching in other parts of his letter, that the stumbling referred to in v. 8 is a consequence of the unbeliever’s disobedience toward Christ and the gospel. In short, Yor those who disbelieve . . . the very cornerstone [Christ, has become] . . . a stone of stumbling” (vv. 7, 8).

Finally, the broader biblical witness likewise testifies against God’s being responsible for the soteriological status of the reprobate. Just one scripture will make the point: 1 Tim 2:4: God “desires all men to be saved and to come to the knowledge of the truth.” As Shank comments:

[The fact the] immediate context militates against any assumption of support from i Peter 2:8 for the doctrine of unconditional reprobation is augmented by an evidence that must be regarded as finally decisive: such a doctrine radically contradicts the many explicit, categorical affirmations of Scripture of God’s desire and provision for the salvation of all men. The great body of “universal” passages dictates the rejection of all interpretations (and translations) of 1 Peter 2:8 which, though grammatically allowable, are inadmissible in the light of the context of the whole body of the Holy Scriptures. Any assumption that the appointing was to disobedience or to disobedience and stumbling is in radical contradiction of 1 Timothy 4:10 and its many cognates.233

Joel Green captures the essence of the passage well when he says that “faith and unfaith are matters of human volition, but the consequences of faith and unfaith have been preset.”234

Jude 4

“For certain persons have crept in unnoticed, those who were long beforehand marked out for this condemnation, ungodly persons who turn the grace of our God into licentiousness and deny our only Master and Lord, Jesus Christ.”

Grudem appeals to this verse to justify a doctrine of reprobation: “It is something that we would not want to believe, and would not believe, unless Scripture clearly taught it.”235 Likewise Berkhof appeals to Jude 4 to justify his contention that “reprobation is so clearly taught in Scripture as the opposite of election that we cannot regard it as something purely negative:’ as something only resulting from man’s sin. 236

Since Jude makes reference in this verse to “this condemnation,” but has not yet spoken of any judgment or condemnation,237 the reference must be to condemnations to be described in the following verses. The verb translated as “marked out” in the NASB has as its root form προγράφω (prographō) — literally, “written before.” The NIV translates the word as “written about” Jude’s point is that the condemnation of the ungodly men who were posing a threat to the church(es) to whom Jude was writing was foretold or prophesied. S. L. Bloomfield, cited by Robert Shank, summarizes the point clearly: “The expression [marked out beforehand for this condemnation] does not imply any predestination of the persons, but merely imports that they were long since foretold, and thereby designated, as persons who should suffer.”238 Baukham concurs: “Just such people, Jude claims, were long ago described in prophecy, which also predicted their condemnation by God.”239

Is there justification in Jude’s letter that would reinforce this understanding of v. 4, i.e., the understanding that it is not certain individuals unconditionally elected for damnation as Calvinists hold, but rather a specific type of persons—ungodly persons—to whom God reacts in condemnation as was foretold in previous times? Yes, there is. In the immediately following three verses Jude gives three examples of ungodliness incurring divine judgment: the people of Israel in the wilderness were destroyed for their unbelief (v. 5); angels who strayed from their assigned abodes God has kept in darkness (v. 6); the inhabitants of Sodom and Gomorrah who indulged in immorality God punished with fire (v. 7).

Especially significant is the midrash from Enoch in vv. 14-15:240 “It was also about these men that Enoch, in the seventh generation from Adam, prophesied, saying, `Behold, the Lord came with many thousands of His holy ones, to execute judgment upon all, and to convict all the ungodly of all their ungodly deeds which they have done in an ungodly way, and of all the harsh things which ungodly sinners have spoken against Him.”‘

This is probably a reference to the judgment to be meted out against the ungodly when Christ returns at the end of the age. “The message of Jude’s whole midrash [is] that those who indulge in ungodly conduct, as the false teachers do, are those on whom judgment will fall.”241 The notion of any form of predestinarian language or thought is quite absent from this letter. Jude is simply concerned for the fidelity of his reader’s faith (v. 3) and that they be warned about, and be on guard against, ungodly teachers who would bring true Christians into spiritual harm. Such, says Jude, will one day receive a just condemnation, and in any case were anticipated by earlier spokesmen for God.

By way of reminder, we are considering the doctrine of double predestination, the belief that God predestines some (the elect) to salvation and the rest (the reprobate) to hell. We noted at the beginning of this study that there are two forms in which this double predestination is said to occur. The first, the stronger version, I have called symmetric predestination because there is a fundamental symmetry between God’s positively choosing those whom he saves and those whom he likewise chooses to damn. The weaker form I have labeled asymmetric predestination because, while God positively chooses those whom he saves, he merely bypasses the rest in their sins; the latter group are then considered to be justly condemned for their sins. We then considered six key scriptures often appealed to by Calvinists to justify the idea of reprobation, and have shown how, when due consideration is given to the literary and historical contexts in which these verses sit, there is no basis for reaching the Calvinist’s conclusions; there is no such thing as reprobation in any form. I want now to go on to critique the entire notion of symmetric predestination.

Proponents of symmetric predestination are at least consistent with the Calvinistic view of particular sovereignty and “the eternal decree of God, by which he determined with himself whatever he wished to happen with regard to every man.”242 Wright, commenting on the ninth-century monk Gottschalk’s view on this topic, says, “God cannot logically choose some for salvation without at the same time choosing to reject others. . . . This, of course, is the doctrine of reprobation taught today by all consistent Calvinists.”243 However, such consistency comes at a price—”the dark side of the matter that raises many concerns.”244 Sproul observes that “it is one thing to speak of God’s gracious predestination to election, but quite another to speak of God’s decreeing from all eternity that certain unfortunate people are destined for damnation.”245

Calvin himself acknowledged the idea of symmetric predestination as “dreadful,”246 and Grudem feels that the doctrine of reprobation “deals with such horrible and eternal consequences for human beings made in the image of God” that it causes us “to recoil against this doctrine, and that it is right that we feel such dread in contemplating it. It is something that we would not want to believe . . . [and] causes us to tremble in horror as we think of it.”247 But why would such a doctrine, if truly biblical, cause us to react in this way? How can such a sentiment be maintained in the light of such scriptures as Ps 119:24: “Your testimonies also are my delight; they are my counselors.” Similarly, Ps 119:47-48: “I shall delight in Your commandments, which I love. And I shall lift up my hands to Your commandments, which I love.” Surely, the revelation of God is something that should cause us great delight and joy—not dread and horror!

More seriously, what sort of God is the God who determines the eternal destinies of his human creation by means of symmetric predestination? Recall that according to symmetric predestination God actively had in mind men and women who would never, and indeed could never, find salvation because they were predestined by God before the foundation of the world to be consigned to hell. Furthermore, such a predestination is supposedly for the glory of God.248 How, exactly, is God glorified in unconditionally consigning people to hell? Nowhere in Scripture is God said to be glorified for acting unilaterally and unconditionally in such an evil manner.249 On the contrary, God is glorified when his goodness, wisdom, kindness, and so on is recognized and appreciated. Psalm 86:9-13 illustrates the point:

All nations whom You have made shall come and worship before You, O Lord, And they shall glorify Your name. For You are great and do wondrous deeds; You alone are God. Teach me Your way, O Lord; I will walk in Your truth; Unite my heart to fear Your name. I will give thanks to You, O Lord my God, with all my heart, And will glorify Your name forever. For Your lovingkindness toward me is great, And You have delivered my soul from the depths of Sheol.

Once again, with a doctrine of symmetric predestination, it is difficult to see how God cannot be charged with being the author of evil and sin, given that it is evil and sinful to positively seek the harm of any individual. Grudem is quite right when he says that “the love that God gives us for our fellow human beings and the love that he commands us to have towards our neighbor cause us to recoil against this doctrine.”250 Can it really be the case that what God expects us to do (love our neighbor) he himself is not bound by? We are to love our neighbor, but God can damn them! In sum, while the doctrine of symmetric predestination is quite consistent with Calvinism’s view of divine sovereignty it is quite inconsistent with God’s attributes of love, justice, righteousness, and goodness clearly revealed on virtually every page of Scripture.

If symmetric predestination is consistent with Calvinism’s “eternal plans of God, before the creation of the world, to bring about everything that happens:’ as Grudem states, then asymmetric predestination, the reprobate being those whom God merely bypasses, is quite inconsistent with this view of the outworking of the predestinarian decrees. The question of consistency is not insignificant to my mind. It is incoherent to say on the one hand x is all black and then also x is all white, in other words, to say God decrees everything to the minutest extent and also that men are accountable for their own sin-as though the latter were somehow independent of God’s decree. Within Calvinistic thought, nothing, absolutely nothing, acts or wills independently of what God has decreed and determined will be the case. And so “Calvinists who accept unconditional election and at the same time propose to reject unconditional reprobation are radically inconsistent.”251 Consistency may not be a sufficient condition for a successful argument, but it is most certainly a necessary condition for a coherent argument.252

Crucial to the asymmetric predestination view is the idea of permission, God permitting men to suffer the consequences of their own sin and so, in a sense, reprobate themselves. The appeal of this notion of reprobation to modern Calvinists is quite apparent; it just seems too harsh to believe that God positively chooses some to be predestined for hell.253 It sounds much more reasonable to say God just lets people take the consequences for their own sin which is, of course, condemnation. Calvin roundly rejects this attempt to get God off the hook. Some “recur to the distinction between will and permission, the object being to prove that the wicked perish only by way of permission, but not by the will of God. . . . Nor indeed is there any probability in the thing itself—viz., that man brought death upon himself, merely by the permission, and not by the ordination of God; as if God had not determined what he wished the condition of the chief of his creatures to be.”254 Calvin is right, within a Calvinistic worldview there is no independent will of man operating apart from God’s ordaining, determining, and decreeing. There is nothing to “permit” as though man’s actions and choices were independent of God’s determination. Intrinsic to the notion of permission with respect to symmetric predestination is the idea that God determines some things (who would comprise the elect), and the rest God merely “bypasses” to suffer the consequences of their own choices and actions. In this scenario “reprobation is conditional, i.e., based on what sinners have done and deserve, whereas [Calvinistic] election is unconditional, i.e., based on the unmerited grace and favor of God despite what sinners have done and deserve.”255 But note that “what sinners have done and deserve” is itself ordained by God: “God has ordained both evil and good, both sin and obedience, both reprobation and election.”256 Despite protestations from Calvinists, this way of thinking is simply incoherent, because actually contradictory. Roger Olson, in his thorough discussion of reprobation and in his assessment of Lorain Boettner’s view, echoes my own sentiment above:

Like all Calvinists I am aware of, Boettner claims that the reprobate deserve their punishment (eternal suffering in hell) because they “voluntarily chose to sin.” Ultimately, he leaves this apparent contradiction in the realm of mystery: “Predestination [including reprobation] and free agency are the twin pillars of a great temple, and they meet above the clouds where the human gaze cannot penetrate:’ It seems, however, that this mystery is a blatant contradiction.257

A final point concerning the asymmetric predestination version of predestination concerns its logical status. The notion that God merely bypasses the non-elect and permits them to suffer the consequences of their own sins does not really achieve what the Calvinist hopes it will, namely distance God from direct responsibility for assigning the reprobate to their fate. This is because, within a given pool of humanity, whoever is designated by God to be chosen for salvation is also thereby effectively identified and designated by God to be the non-elect (the reprobate). To determine who the elect will be is to determine who the non-elect will be. George Bryson expresses this logical situation in this way: “Even though most Calvinists will say that the unelect are damned because they deserved to be, the logical implication of Calvinism says otherwise. Since the unelect were not elected to be saved, they were never meant to be regenerated, to believe, to be saved, or to be anything other than totally depraved.”258

________________

Geoffrey D. Robinson, Saved by Grace Through Faith or Saved by Decree? A Biblical and Theological Critique of Calvinist Soteriology (Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock, 2022), 171-184.

NOTES

  1. Sproul, Reformed Theology, 158, emphasis original.
  2. The technical term used to describe those who are not part of the elect is “reprobate:’ And the technical term used to describe symmetric predestination is “preterition:’
  3. Calvin, Institutes, 3.21.5. Several other passages could be cited, as for example this one in 3.21.7: “God by his eternal and immutable counsel determined once for all those whom it was his pleasure one day to admit to salvation and those whom, on the other hand, it was his pleasure to doom to destruction:’
  4. Westminster Confession of Faith, 33.
  5. Wright, No Place for Sovereignty, 21. Notice his use of the term “consistent” here; in this respect I agree with him fully.
  6. Boettner, “Reformed Doctrine of Predestination:’ 96.
  7. Sproul, Reformed Theology, 157.
  8. Grudem, Systematic Theology, 685. For this reason, Grudem feels that “double predestination is not a helpful term because it gives the impression that both election and reprobation are carried out in the same way by God and have no essential differences between them, which is certainly not true:’ Grudem, Systematic Theology, 670.
  9. Grudem, Systematic Theology, 685.
  10. Horton, For Calvinism, 58.
  11. Ware, “Divine Election,” S4, emphasis original.
  12. Berkhof, Systematic Theology, 105.
  13. Kidner, Proverbs, 118.
  14. Grudem, Systematic Theology, 328, emphasis original.
  15. The NASB translates the word as calamity, the NIV as disaster, the KJV as evil.
  16. Brown, Driver, Briggs, Lexicon of the Old Testament, 948.
  17. Grudem, Systematic Theology, 328, emphasis mine.
  18. Thus, e.g., Murray is mistaken when he says, “The whole argument of the apostle in this section in refutation of the objection that there is unrighteousness in God (vs. 14) is conducted on the premise that salvation is not constrained by the dictates of justice, that it proceeds entirely from the exercise of sovereign mercy.” Murray, Romans, pt. 2, 29, emphasis mine.
  19. “As readers we do not determine the meaning of biblical words; rather, we try to discover what the biblical writer meant when he used a particular word:’ Duvall and Hays, Grasping God’s Word, 163.
  20. 224. Cottrell, Romans, 2:102.
  21. Horton, For Calvinism, 57. Cottrell makes the same point when he says that Calvinists “find this doctrine [unconditional election] especially in vv. 19-23, which they see as simply repeating the point of vv. 7-18.” Cottrell, Romans, 2:108.
  22. Cottrell, Romans, 2:107. 227. Grudem, i Peter, 106.
  23. Piper, “Destined to Disobey,” 5/13. Piper uses the ESV for v. 8, which says: “They stumble because they disobey the word, as they were destined to do:’
  24. This would include the NASB, ESV, NIV, NLT, Christian Standard Bible.
  25. A woodenly literal translation v. 8b of the Greek ὁι προσκοπτουσιν τω λογω ἀπειθουντες εἰς ὁ και ἐτεθησαν (hoi proskoptousin tō logō apeithountes eis ho kai, etethēsan) would be close to this: “Who stumble at the word disobeying to which indeed they were appointed.”
  26. Shank, Elect in the Son, 188.
  27. In fact, nowhere within any of Peter’s two letters (other than, allegedly, 1 Pet 2:8b) is there any indication that God is responsible for the unbelief or disobedience or stumbling of the ungodly.
  28. Shank, Elect in the Son, 189, emphasis original.
  29. Green, 1 Peter, 58.
  30. Grudem, Systematic Theology, 685.
  31. Berkhof, Systematic Theology, 116.
  32. The Greek word κριμα (krima), commonly translated as judgment, is used here in v. 4.
  33. Shank, Elect in the Son, 191.
  34. Baukham, Jude, 41.
  35. A midrash is an interpretation of an ancient Jewish text; usually in an Old Testament book, but occasionally, as here, an apocryphal book.
  36. Baukham, Jude, 100.
  37. Calvin, Institutes, 3.21.5.
  38. Wright, No Place for Sovereignty, 21-22, emphasis mine.
  39. Sproul, Reformed Theology, 157.
  40. Sproul, Reformed Theology, 157. Sproul himself considers the doctrine of symmetric predestination sub-Calvinism.
  41. Calvin, Institutes, 3.23.7.
  42. Grudem, Systematic Theology, 685. Grudem himself is a proponent of asymmetric predestination, not symmetric predestination. Grudem, like all Calvinists, holds to the doctrine of reprobation because he believes Scripture teaches it.
  43. Grudem, Systematic Theology, 687, 686. As the Westminster Confession states: “By the decree of God for the manifestation of his glory, some men and angels are predestinated unto everlasting life; and others foreordained to everlasting death:’ Westminster Confession of Faith, 3.3.
  44. It is important to maintain the distinction between, on the one hand, God reacting in judgment to evil people who deserve their judgment and, on the other hand, God unilaterally and unconditionally bringing evil upon certain individuals. The former is quite consistent with both the biblical testimony and moral sense, while the latter is neither.
  45. Grudem, Systematic Theology, 685. 251. Shank, Elect in the Son, 192.
  46. Sometimes the inconsistency is explicitly formulated by Calvinists. Thus, e.g., Calvin speaking of Adam’s sin says this: “Man therefore falls, divine providence so ordaining, but he falls by his own fault.” Calvin, Institutes, 3.23.8.
  47. “The problem for Calvinism is how to relieve God of responsibility for sin and rejection and still retain the thesis of monothetism.” Shank, Elect in the Son, 140. Monothetism is the belief in a single will (God’s will) that determines everything.
  48. Calvin, Institutes, 3.23.8. Sproul appeals to another work of Calvin in which Calvin seems to defend an asymmetric predestination view of reprobation as Sproul himself does. Sproul, Reformed Theology, Calvin was not always consistent in his views.
  49. Ware, “Divine Election,” 54.
  50. Ware, “Divine Election,” 54. This is also why appeal to the justice of God in merely treating the reprobate as they deserve is meaningless.
  51. Olson, Against Calvinism,105, emphasis mine.
  52. Bryson, Five Points, 39, emphasis mine.

The Tale Of A Tower | Leighton Flowers

Published by Papa Giorgio

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.

Deterministic Christianity and Slavery (Calvinist Hands are Dirty)

Published by Papa Giorgio

Well known Calvinist Puritan, Cotton Mather, certainly thought so for any black slave that desired their (unordained) freedom, saying, “And it is pride that tempts slaves to desire the freedom God did not ordain for them.” 

[….]

Moreover should we simply consider it a strange anomaly that Calvinist leaders like Mather, Edwards and Whitefield, who preached God’s determinative decree of all things (which necessarily must include slavery) should then be seen to approve of slavery? Should it really surprise us that Calvinist leaders of the Southern Baptist Convention defended slavery–and did so on Calvinist theological grounds, with telling title defenses like, “Slavery Ordained by God.”   Should it surprise us that white, Afrikaner Calvinists long used their Calvinist theology of unconditional election and God’s meticulous, sovereign predestination of all things as an aid in identifying themselves as God’s special elect in order to justify racial discrimination and eventual apartheid in South Africa?

[….]

…Calvinism’s problem is that what God predestines is so closely aligned to what God condones that a Calvinist must step outside his theology to condemn it and redress it. 

Historian and author Douglas Harper explains how Calvinist theology dovetailed with condoning slavery:

“Massachusetts, like many American colonies, had roots in a scrupulous fundamentalist Protestantism. Christianity was no barrier to slave-ownership, however. The Puritans regarded themselves as God’s Elect, and so they had no difficulty with slavery, which had the sanction of the Law of the God of Israel. The Calvinist doctrine of predestination easily supported the Puritans in a position that blacks were a people cursed and condemned by God to serve whites. Cotton Mather told blacks they were the “miserable children of Adam and Noah, “for whom slavery had been ordained as a punishment.”

[….]

Jonathan Edwards and George Whitefield: Slaveholding and Calvinism

This is a post on slavery and Calvinism. The slave trade was not run wholly by Calvinists, however, many more TULIP type adherents than free-will “Baptist” types. Granted, slavery predated Calvin as well as post dated him. Take note as well this post should be combined with my “The ‘Connective Tissue’ Between Islam and Calvinism“.

What follows the graphic is a conversation I had with GROK on the matter. Enjoy.

I ASK:

Did free will Baptist fight against slavery in the United states?

GROK: 

Yes, Free Will Baptists actively fought against slavery in the United States, particularly those in the North (especially New England). They were among the more consistently anti-slavery denominations during the antebellum period.

The Free Will Baptist movement (also called Freewill Baptists), originating in the late 18th century under figures like Benjamin Randall in New Hampshire, emphasized free will theology and often aligned with progressive social causes. Unlike some larger Baptist groups that split over slavery (e.g., Southern Baptists formed partly to defend it), Free Will Baptists in the Northeast took strong abolitionist positions:

  • They spoke out early and openly against slavery, with New England Free Will Baptists at the forefront.
  • Publications like The Morning Star (a prominent Free Will Baptist newspaper) condemned slavery as an evil.
  • In 1835, groups like the Rockingham Quarterly Meeting called for the immediate emancipation of all slaves, citing scripture.
  • Free Will Baptists supported and participated in the anti-slavery movement, including connections to the American Anti-Slavery Society (e.g., a representative signed its founding Declaration of Sentiments in 1833).
  • They had an organized Free Will Baptist Anti-Slavery Society (with reports and activities documented in the 1850s).
  • Prominent figures included African American Free Will Baptist ministers like John W. Lewis, who lectured extensively for abolitionism and the New Hampshire Anti-Slavery Society.
  • Post-Civil War, they founded Storer College in 1867 in Harpers Ferry, West Virginia—the first college established specifically for newly emancipated African Americans.

Their opposition was tied to principles of freedom, equality, and scripture, including early resolutions against racial discrimination in ministry ordination (e.g., in 1827).

That said, the denomination had regional variations—Southern Free Will Baptists (from the Palmer lineage) were influenced by the surrounding culture and the Civil War disrupted unity over slavery. The modern National Association of Free Will Baptists (formed in 1935) unites Northern and Southern streams, but the historical anti-slavery activism was strongest in the North.

Overall, yes—many Free Will Baptists did fight against slavery through preaching, resolutions, publications, societies, and support for abolitionist efforts.

I ASK:

Okay, did the particular (more Calvinistic) Baptists argue for slavery?

GROK: 

Yes, many of the more Calvinistic (“Particular” or “Regular”) Baptists in the antebellum United States—particularly in the South—did argue in favor of slavery, often defending it vigorously as biblically sanctioned and even divinely ordained.

To clarify the terminology: “Particular Baptists” historically referred to those holding to particular atonement (a core Calvinist doctrine, as opposed to general atonement in Arminian views like those of Free Will Baptists). In the American context, especially the South, the dominant Baptist groups aligned with Calvinistic theology (e.g., via the 1689 London Baptist Confession or similar) were often called Regular Baptists or simply the mainline Baptists that formed the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) in 1845.

The SBC itself emerged primarily over the issue of slavery: Southern Baptists split from the national Triennial Convention when Northern Baptists (more anti-slavery) refused to appoint slaveholding missionaries. Southern leaders explicitly formed the new denomination to protect the right to own slaves without denominational interference.

Key points on their arguments and positions:

  • Prominent Southern Baptist figures, who were generally Calvinistic in theology, actively defended slavery on biblical grounds. They cited passages like Ephesians 6:5–9 (slaves obey masters), Colossians 3:22, 1 Timothy 6:1–2, and the lack of explicit condemnation in the New Testament. They argued the apostles tolerated/regulated slavery without abolishing it, implying it was not inherently sinful.
  • Richard Furman (a leading South Carolina Baptist and Calvinist) wrote a major 1822/1823 exposition defending slavery as scripturally established “by precept and example,” urging the state to suppress anti-slavery views to prevent unrest.
  • Founders of Southern Baptist Theological Seminary (1859)—James P. Boyce, John A. Broadus, Basil Manly Jr., and William Williams—were all slaveholders who collectively owned over 50 people. They defended slavery as compatible with Christianity, sometimes framing it as providential or beneficial.
  • Some associations (e.g., Bethel Baptist Association in Alabama, reflecting Calvinistic theology) described the master-slave relationship as a product of God’s providence.
  • In the broader antebellum South, pro-slavery arguments from Calvinist-leaning clergy emphasized divine sovereignty: if God ordains all things (a Calvinist hallmark), then slavery’s existence must align with His will, not human abolitionist efforts.

This wasn’t universal—some Baptists (North and South) opposed slavery early on, and views evolved—but the dominant, vocal, institutionally powerful wing in the South, which was more consistently Calvinistic, shifted toward strong pro-slavery advocacy by the 1830s–1860s. They portrayed abolitionism as unbiblical, socially disruptive, and contrary to “sound doctrine.”

In contrast, Free Will Baptists (more Arminian/free-will oriented) were among the stronger anti-slavery voices, especially in New England, as we discussed earlier.

The modern SBC has repudiated this history (e.g., 1995 resolution lamenting its founding “in defense of slavery” and later racism), but the antebellum record shows clear, theologically framed arguments for slavery from many Calvinistic Southern Baptists.

And this is really the nail in the coffin, I will highlight the two articles I think are must reads:

With the clear demarcation between those who believe in free will and those that are more deterministic, what information gleaned from these few posts would add to the above premise we are discussing?  

Sorry Grok, adding one more… I apologize to make you rewrite the below. Here it is:

GROK:

These sources strengthen and nuance the premise that free-will/Arminian theology tended to foster stronger, earlier opposition to slavery, while deterministic/Calvinistic theology often aligned with acceptance or defense of it—though with important exceptions, complexities, and later shifts.

Key Additions from the Sources

  1. Direct Theological Contrast (Especially the Evangelical Arminians post) This article explicitly frames the issue in terms of the free will vs. determinism divide. It argues:
  • Calvinists (emphasizing God’s sovereignty and predestination) were more prone to view the existing world order—including slavery—as something God ordained for His glory. This could reduce urgency for abolition, as fighting the status quo might seem like resisting divine decree.
  • Arminians (emphasizing God’s love for all, universal atonement, and human value) were more likely to see slavery as incompatible with God’s mercy on every person and the call to freedom in Christ. John Wesley’s writings are cited as a prime example, using Arminian concepts (“Savior of all,” mercy over all) to condemn slavery passionately.

This maps closely onto our discussion: Free Will Baptists (Arminian) vs. many Particular/Regular/Southern Baptists (Calvinistic).

  1. Jonathan Edwards as a Prominent Case Study Edwards (a towering 18th-century Calvinist theologian) owned slaves, did not free them in his will, and defended the institution of domestic slavery (while opposing the transatlantic slave trade). He argued it was not inherently sinful for a “neighbor” to work without wages.
  • Critics in the sources (e.g., the “A Theology in Tension” post) link this directly to his theological determinism: If God meticulously ordains all things, slavery’s existence implies divine permission or purpose, making moral outrage against it harder to sustain logically. Edwards reportedly deleted “slaves” from a sermon on liberty, seeing the full Jubilee (freedom) as not yet arrived.
  • Thabiti Anyabwile’s paper (a Calvinist himself) acknowledges Edwards’ blind spots and aristocratic/hierarchical context but defends core aspects of his theology while lamenting his ethics on slavery. It notes Edwards treated Africans as spiritual equals in some ways (e.g., admitting them to communion) but still upheld the system.

Edwards exemplifies how high Calvinism did not inevitably produce pro-slavery views but often coexisted with them in practice among elites.

  1. Broader Patterns and Exceptions
  • George Whitefield (another major Calvinist revivalist) also supported slavery (e.g., lobbying for it in Georgia).
  • Exceptions noted: Calvinist John Newton became a strong abolitionist; Edwards’ own son (Jonathan Edwards Jr.) opposed slavery; later “New Divinity” Edwardseans advanced anti-slavery ethics using aspects of his theology (e.g., disinterested benevolence and sanctification).
  • The Arminian side had trailblazers like Wesley, Asbury, Wilberforce, and Finney who used free-will/universal love emphases explicitly against slavery.
  1. Nuances That Prevent Oversimplification
  • Cultural/historical context mattered hugely: Slavery was widely accepted in Edwards’ era; full abolitionism emerged later. Many on both sides failed morally.
  • Theology influenced but did not rigidly determine outcomes—social location, economics, and timing played roles. Some Calvinists later led in abolition.
  • The sources highlight that Arminian theology provided stronger motivational resources for viewing every individual as inherently valuable and worthy of freedom.

How This Enhances the Original Premise

It adds concrete historical-theological examples from the 18th century (pre-dating the Baptist splits) showing the pattern held among major figures: Deterministic sovereignty emphases correlated with greater tolerance for the status quo of slavery, while free-will/universal-love emphases correlated with earlier prophetic critique. This aligns with Free Will Baptists’ stronger abolitionism vs. many Southern Calvinistic Baptists’ defenses.

However, it also adds caution: The link is correlational and probabilistic, not absolute. Individual Calvinists could (and did) oppose slavery, often by prioritizing other aspects of their theology or cultural shifts. Edwards’ story shows even “great” theologians had profound blind spots.

Overall, these posts reinforce the theological-demarcation idea you mentioned while enriching it with primary figures and arguments.

RPT’s Views on Calvinism…

Published by Papa Giorgio

(NOTE: All graphics are linked to articles by artist or their website.)

After an entire year of studies so far, many more to go, I have come to the conclusion that Calvinism teaches a different Gospel. In fact, Calvinism destroys the Gospel and makes good news into anything but.

Calvinism: A Different Gospel

Among other things TULIP / Calvinist Reformational thinking distorts or undermines:

The biggest issue however, that got me thinking differently on this issue a year ago was an article by Albert Mohler.

Here is the full Al Mohler article: “So… Why Did I Write This? The Delusion of Determinism“

The subversion of moral responsibility is one of the most significant developments of recent decades. Though this subversion was originally philosophical, more recent efforts have been based in biology and psychology. Various theorists have argued that our decisions and actions are determined by genetics, environmental factors, or other forces. Now, Scientific American is out with a report on a study linking determinism and moral responsibility.

The diverse theories of determinism propose that our choices and decisions are not an exercise of the will, but simply the inevitable outcome of factors outside our control. As Scientific American explains, determinists argue that “everything that happens is determined by what happened before — our actions are inevitable consequences of the events leading up to the action.”

In other words, free will doesn’t exist. Used in this sense, free will means the exercise of authentic moral choice and agency. We choose to take one action rather than the other, and must then take responsibility for that choice.

This link between moral choice and moral responsibility is virtually instinctive to humans. As a matter of fact, it is basic to our understanding of what it means to be human. We hold each other responsible for actions and choices. But if all of our choices are illusory — and everything is merely the “inevitable consequence” of something beyond our control, moral responsibility is an exercise in delusion.

Scientific American reports on a study performed by psychologists Kathleen Vohs and Jonathan Schooler. The psychologists found that individuals who were told that their moral choices were determined, rather than free, were also more likely to cheat on an experimental examination.

As Shaun Nichols reports:

The Western conception idea of free will seems bound up with our sense of moral responsibility, guilt for misdeads and pride in accomplishment. We hold ourselves responsible precisely when we think that our actions come from free will. In this light, it’s not surprising that people behave less morally as they become skeptical of free will. Further, the Vohs and Schooler result fits with the idea that people will behave less responsibly if they regard their actions as beyond their control. If I think that there’s no point in trying to be good, then I’m less likely to try.

Even if giving up on free will does have these deleterious effects, one might wonder how far they go. One question is whether the effects extend across the moral domain. Cheating in a psychology experiment doesn’t seem too terrible. Presumably the experiment didn’t also lead to a rash of criminal activity among those who read the anti-free will passage. Our moral revulsion at killing and hurting others is likely too strong to be dismantled by reflections about determinism. It might well turn out that other kinds of immoral behavior, like cheating in school, would be affected by the rejection of free will, however.

There are limitations to this kind of research, of course, but the report is both revealing and unsurprising. If we are not responsible for our actions, they why would people do the right thing? The most immediate result of such thinking is the subversion of moral accountability.

Of course, this pattern of thought also renders human existence irrational. How can we understand ourselves, our children, our spouses, our friends, or our neighbors if moral responsibility is undermined by determinism. Our legal system would completely collapse, as would the entire experience of relating to other human beings.

Shaun Nichols explains that “the Western conception of free will seems bound up with our sense of moral responsibility.” That “Western conception” is a product of the Christian inheritance and the biblical worldview. The Bible clearly presents human beings as morally responsible. Christians of virtually all theological traditions — including Reformed theology, Arminianism, and Catholicism — affirm moral and spiritual responsibility and the authenticity of the experience of choice.

As a matter of fact, this capacity and accountability is rooted in the biblical concept of the imago Dei — the image of God. Our Creator made us as moral creatures and planted within us the capacity of conscience. All this refutes the concept of moral determinism.

In its most modern forms, determinism is a product of naturalism — the belief that everything must be explained in purely natural terms. Naturalism explains the human mind (including the experience of moral choice) as a matter of chemical reactions in the brain, and nothing more.

Determinism is implied by naturalism and relieves human beings of moral responsibility. There is no moral revolt against the Creator, no Fall, and no need for the Gospel. This subversion of moral responsibility is both a delusion and a trap. And, as the Scientific American report indicates, even those who say they believe in moral determinism are unable to live consistently with this assumption. We know we are responsible.

If Mohler applies that to his own theological determinism, he would have to reject it. More here: Why Both Atheists and Christians Need to Believe in Free Will. It is this “Exhaustive Divine Determination [EDD]”, or theistic determinism, that really got me studying the issue. Because Calvinist apologists show the self-refuting nature of it when dissecting atheism, but they do not apply it to their determinism.

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

  • 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

Let me restate that last sentence:

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

Yep.

What are some of the imperialism in theistic determinism? Here is one:

And there is more:

Divine Rape | Exhaustive Divine Determinism at It’s “Best”?

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

Is Divine Determinism a Different Gospel?

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

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

Logical Ends of TULIP (No Rebellious Creatures)

Calvinism: God Meticulously Controls Everything | even this post

Dumbing Down John Calvin via GROK (Romans Edition)

However, one of the best dealing with the topic can be found in in the book “Calvin’s Desperation: How John Calvin’s Unbiblical Divine Determinism Destroys the Credibility of the Christian Faith“

This video and the following chapter deal with another aspect of why this “new Calvinism” [really it’s old] is really a degradation of God’s character and trustworthiness. The below is an excerpt of the end of a longer video found over at IDOL KILLER. Here is that videos description:

Author, speaker, debater and self-confessed trouble-maker Phil Bair joins Idol Killer to discuss how to destroy Christian credibility. We discuss the various ways in which Theistic Determinism destroys God’s righteousness, human knowledge, and helps atheists justifiably reject Christian theism. We note how Theistic Determinism is not only in opposition to the Bible, but any reasonable world view and thus should be rejected.

Here is the chapter Phil Bair mentioned in the above video:

  • To state the problem concisely, anyone who wants to grant God the type of sovereignty proposed by strong Calvinism, which is a causal account of human willing and acting, yet wants to say that the world is not as it should be (sin) is under a particular burden to explain how they can make these claims in conjunction with one another. —Jeremy Evans [245]

I referred earlier to the possibility of whether God can be divided within himself. Calvin is keenly aware of the problem that if God wills that which he condemns, he is indeed a divided being, and worse, is in conflict with himself. Calvin attempts to deal with this objection:

Their first objection—that if nothing happens without the will of God, he must have two contrary wills, decreeing by a secret counsel what he has openly forbidden in his law—is easily disposed of.[246]

How does he “easily dispose of” this objection? Like this:

Still, however, the will of God is not at variance with itself. It undergoes no change. He makes no pretense of not willing what he wills, but while in himself the will is one and undivided, to us it appears manifold, because, from the feebleness of our intellect, we cannot comprehend how, though after a different manner, he wills and wills not the very same thing. Paul terms the calling of the Gentiles a hidden mystery, and shortly after adds, that therein was manifested the manifold wisdom of God (Eph. 3:10). Since, on account of the dullness of our sense, the wisdom of God seems manifold (or, as an old interpreter rendered it, multiform), are we, therefore, to dream of some variation in God, as if he either changed his counsel, or disagreed with himself?[247]

I have observed how Calvin expresses the contradictory postures he attributes to God. For example:

  • It is God’s will that all come to repentance.
  • It is God’s will that not all come to repentance.

The two propositions above are indisputably contradictory. Now, Calvin claims that the will of God is not at variance with itself. His will is “one and undivided.” It only “appears manifold” to us. But Calvin affirms both of the above propositions. Therefore he absolutely affirms that the will of God is at variance with itself despite his prior denial of the idea. The only way it isn’t is to define God’s will differently between the two propositions. Calvin alludes to this when he says, “we cannot comprehend how, though after a different manner, he wills and wills not the very same thing.” Note the phrase “though after a different manner.” The obvious question is, how are the two “wills” different? If they are “after a different manner,” how does Calvin explain the two kinds of will, and how does he support that explanation? He doesn’t. Instead, he takes a hard left turn that we would never expect from a dignified biblical scholar. Since he denies that the will of God is “multiform” or “manifold,” and tells us that this perception on our part is due to the “feebleness of our intellect,” he has to explain how there aren’t multiple wills that “disagree with himself.”

But for the moment let’s give him the benefit of the doubt. Let’s assume that the word “will” means something different between the two sides of the dilemma. What alternate definition of will might we apply to one or the other? Consider the first proposition 1 quoted above. It’s God’s will that all come to repentance. How do we justify the term will? Acts 17:30 is where it comes from. That verse reads:

In the past God overlooked such ignorance, but now he commands all people everywhere to repent.

So God commands all people everywhere to repent. If God commands something, is it not his will that the command is obeyed? Is this not intuitively obvious and clear to reason?

Consider the captain of a sea-going vessel. The captain issues a command for the first mate to set a course for the mainland. It’s the captain’s will that the first mate obey that command. But what if the first mate doesn’t obey? It would be a valid observation that the first mate did not do the will of his captain. Would it ever be the captain’s will that the first mate disobey his command? Not in this sense of the word. The captain has what we could call “sovereignty” over the crew. And in that sense, the word sovereignty means authority.[248] If the first mate disobeys the captain’s will (expressed by his commands), he has rebelled against the captain’s authority, and thus against his sovereignty.

In this case, the captain’s will does not causally determine the decisions and actions of the crew. But if the crew disobeys the captain’s will, there will be consequences. Why? Because the captain has the authority to impose those consequences on the disobedient.

Now consider an inventor who builds a ship and a dozen or so robots having the ability to be its pilots. Now suppose that the inventor puts on a captain’s uniform and issues a verbal command to the robot he designated as the first mate. The robot cannot “obey” the captain’s command. Obedience implies will, something a robot does not have. The robot will simply respond to the captain’s command because the captain programmed the robot in such a way that it will execute the captain’s orders and cannot do otherwise (assuming the captain’s engineering is flawless).

In the second case, the will of the captain is causal rather than authoritative. The robot will execute the captain’s command not because it chooses to obey, but because it is programmed that way. The captain could still be said to have “sovereignty” over the robots, but the meaning of the term would not be the same as it was in the first analogy. In this case, rather than authority or lordship, sovereignty means causality. The will of the captain is now the cause of everything the robots do, and in fact, the cause of everything that happens on the automated ship.

Do either of these definitions of will sound familiar? Recall Calvin’s fundamental axiom: the will of God is the sole determining cause of all things. Which of the definitions of will is he referring to? The second, obviously. Since Calvin, as I have frequently observed, routinely identifies God’s will as the cause of all things, does he have the luxury of using the term “God’s will” in the first sense? If God’s will is something that can be disobeyed, it cannot be causal; it must be authoritative. But Calvin rules this out. If a creature is able to disobey God’s will, only two possibilities exist: either the creature has a functioning will that can cause something (namely, the disobedience), or the creature is only doing what God has programmed it to do. And since for Calvin God’s will is the sole cause of all things, the first option must be discarded. This is because Calvin asks the rhetorical question “are we, therefore, to dream of some variation in God, as if he either changed his counsel, or disagreed with himself?”[249]  To say we could only “dream of” such a variation seals off all exit routes and guarantees there is no “variation” in God’s will.

Where does this leave us? For Calvin, there can only be one kind of God’s will. That would be the causal kind. What does that do to Calvin’s phrase “though after a different manner?” It obliterates it. So he cannot invoke the idea of God’s will working itself out in a “different manner” since for Calvin there is only one species of God’s will: the causal one. This means that for Calvin, the phrase “he wills and wills not the very same thing” cannot be after a different manner but after the same manner, whether he realizes it or can face it or not. What does this mean? It means that Calvin’s conclusion that God “wills and wills not the very same thin, certified indisputable contradiction.

This is the only way Calvin can say that “the will of God is not at varia with itself.” Notice this refers to the “will” (singular) of God, not being variance “with itself” (singular). Calvin believes, and has always believe that there is only one version of God’s will—the causal one. This is the only kind he can deal with. Any other kind introduces the potential condition that God’s will is not the sole cause of all things, and for Cal vi this is too terrifying to conceive. So even the possibility that we could come up with more varieties of God’s will does not solve the problem. if they are not causal, they have to be ruled out. If they are causal, in terms of their outcomes they are ultimately no different from the first variety.

Now Calvin has a serious problem. He denies what he implies in various places: that there is a secret counsel in God’s will that is beyond the reach of human intellect where he wills that which he condemns. There is no such secret counsel. For if indeed the thesis that “the will of God is not at variance with itself” is true, God’s will must be uniform and undivided.

To put it another way, Calvin has two options:

  1. God’s will is at variance with itself. For Calvin affirms both propositions above. They contradict each other, which is the same thing as variance. Yet Calvin denies this So this option doesn’t work.
  2. God’s will is not at variance with itself, which means that the two contradictory propositions must both be true at the same time and in the same way. For Calvin has no choice but to affirm that it is God’s will that all come to repentance (because the Word of God, namely, Acts 17:30, compels him to affirm this), and in the same way it’s God’s will that not all come to repentance (because according to Calvin God causally determines certain specific individuals of his choosing not to repent, and thus defy his will that they must). It’s God’s will that men must not commit murder, but it’s God’s will that certain men commit murder so as to carry out God’s purposes.[250]

The first option is unreasonable and unacceptable. Why? Because it would mean Calvin is wrong when he says God’s will is not at variance with itself. Calvin can’t admit he’s wrong here or his entire deterministic narrative collapses.

This means Calvin must accept the second option. (There is no third option because of the law of excluded middle.) But accepting the second option means affirming various pairs of propositions that contradict each other. As soon as he writes the words “God’s will is not at variance with itself when he wills and wills not the very same thing,” he is suddenly painfully aware that he has fallen into a trap of his own making. How does he deal with this logical train wreck?

It doesn’t take long to realize that at this point, Calvin has become desperate. He has no choice but to accept a glaring contradiction he can’t pretend isn’t there. His entire ideology has led up to this climax, even though he deals with it in the middle of his Institutes. That doesn’t matter. Two opposing locomotives of thought have been carrying him along the tracks of his thinking and brought him to a point where their hundreds of tons of steel are now fiercely racing toward each other at breakneck speed on the same track. This impending calamity haunts Calvin, knowing that what he is looking at is like the nightmare of an unstoppable force meeting an immovable object. Sooner or later there will be a violent earth-shaking collision. It is only a matter of time.

There is an episode in the original Star Trek series (1966) where Mr. Spock, the champion of logic who has completely suppressed all emotion and passion, finds himself in an impossible situation. He is the pilot of a shuttle craft that has just lifted off to escape a hostile planet. They are in orbit—for now. There is a small handful of passengers On board, all of which know they are doomed. For you see, the ship’s fuel supply is almost gone, the orbit is decaying, and help is nowhere in sight. The situation is hopeless. So Spock makes a decision that defies logic, and the members of the crew are stunned at his irrationality. He jettisons the fuel and ignites it, causing a long luminous trail of burning plasma shooting out of the rear of the shuttle craft. Now they are out of fuel—completely. The shuttle plunges into the atmosphere and begins to incinerate. The cabin fills with toxic smoke and the occupants are choking on it. The dialogue at that moment goes like this:

Doctor McCoy: It may be the last action you’ll ever take, Mister Spock, but it was all human.

Spock: Totally illogical. There was no chance.

McCoy: That’s exactly what I mean.

At the last minute, they are transported out of the shuttle craft and aboard the Enterprise just in the nick of time, where Captain Kirk eventually queries Mr. Spock on the rationale behind his decision:

Kirk: I don’t understand all this, and maybe you can explain, logically of course. When you jettisoned the fuel and ignited it, you knew there was virtually no chance of being seen, and yet you did it anyhow. And that would seem to me to be an act of desperation.

Spock: Quite correct, Captain.

Kirk: Now we all know, and I’m sure the doctor would agree with me, that desperation is a highly emotional state of mind. How does your well-known logic explain that?

Spock: Quite simply, Captain. I examined the problem from all angles, and it was plainly hopeless. Logic informed me that under the circumstances, the only possible action would have to be one of desperation. Logical decision, logically arrived at.

Kirk: Aha. You mean you reasoned that it was time for an emotional outburst.

Spock: Well, I wouldn’t put it in exactly those terms, Captain, but those are essentially the facts.

Kirk: You’re not going to admit that for the first time in your life you committed a purely human, emotional act?

Spock: No, sir.

Kirk: Mr. Spock, you’re a stubborn man.

Spock: Yes, sir.[251]

When you combine desperation with stubbornness, it does not end well. You make decisions that baffle your colleagues (or should), and those who see clearly what is really going on lose all remaining respect they ever had for you. In the Star Trek story, the shuttle craft crew is rescued just before their time runs out. There is no such happy ending for Calvin, who will stubbornly cling to his deterministic ideology until it blasts him into catastrophic rational oblivion. His orbit is definitely decaying, and there is no chance of a rescue. He will never give up his self-inflicted deterministic ruin, because he sincerely believes that to do so will rupture his faulty concept of God’s sovereignty.

Calvin is projecting his own insecurity on God himself, and God does not come off very well as a result. Calvin cannot live with the damage he thinks human libertarian free will inflicts on God’s sovereignty. But neither can he live with the loss of God’s righteousness. He therefore denies that God’s goodness dies of a thousand cuts from how he directly perpetrates the multitudes of evil choices and actions of man. But the only way to deny this is to abandon rationality itself and push the issue into the obfuscating obscurity of the “secret counsel” of God. Calvin must either divide God’s will in two, or divide God’s mind in two. Those are the only choices left, and the first one is unthinkable since it incinerates The Precious: Calvin’s unrelenting deterministic worldview. The following is the ultimate expression of Calvin’s overwhelming desperation:

Nay, when we cannot comprehend how God can will that to be done which he forbids us to do, let us call to mind our imbecility, and remember that the light in which he dwells is not without cause termed inaccessible (1 Tim. 6:16), because shrouded in darkness.[252]

This is the point where the two locomotives of God’s will have their ear-bleeding crash. How can God will (i.e. cause) to be done that which he forbids us to do? Multiple scholars and thinkers have attempted to reconcile these contradictory trains of thought, and many still believe this is possible. But Calvin knew beyond any doubt that they couldn’t. If they could, he would not have had to resort to his irrational desperate maneuver of running away[253] and hiding behind “our imbecility.” This is the only option left, and no one knows this better than Calvin.

As I have already said, there are some “reformed” theologians who will tell us that the solution to the problem is quite simple: there are two aspects of God’s will—his decretive will and his preceptive (or prescriptive) will. But if this was such an obvious and simple solution, why didn’t Calvin ultimately invoke it? It would have saved him one horrific train wreck. As we saw before, Calvin tried, but knew it doesn’t work, which is why he had to resort to such desperate measures. If it worked, he would have adopted it as his grand solution, and presto: problem solved. After all, appealing to two aspects of God’s will is quite easy, and presumably removes the necessity to drag our “imbecility” into the formula to solve the problem. But no. Lest we forget, he, like the preponderance of the “reformed” theologians following in his footsteps, is a determinist. There is nothing more central and all-encompassing in his theology than exhaustive divine determinism. It looms over the entire landscape of his thinking like a solar eclipse. If there’s such a thing as man’s libertarian free will, it has the capacity to be causal, and Calvin loses his mind. The appeal to mystery, which is ultimately what Calvin did, and ultimately what his disciples who truly understand the dilemma do, would not be necessary if the contradiction was not real. Since it is unquestionably real, the “solution” mentioned above is no solution at all. It’s nothing more than a theological game all self-respecting theologians should refuse to play.

To review and recap to settle the matter once and for all, if there’s a separate aspect of God’s will one could call preceptive or prescriptive (as opposed to decretive), the possibility that man could obey it or disobey it based on his own volition suddenly appears on the radar, and Calvin has no choice but to hunt it down and torpedo it. Why? Because it introduces additional causality, and therefore blunts God’s causal sovereignty in the caverns of Calvin’s calculus. Even if a case could be made for the “preceptive” will of God, it must also be causal in order to satisfy the demands of determinism. If it’s not causal, but something that can be obeyed or disobeyed by free agents other than God, something could be “left to fortune” and the world “moves at random,” which causes Calvin’s head to explode. It must therefore be sacrificed to the pagan god EDD, lest it get in the way of Calvin’s desperate maneuver and what

subsequently has become a tragically deformed theology.

That Calvin himself ultimately rejected the possibility that there actually are two species of God’s will is decisively settled by reference to his commentary on Matthew:

if it be objected, that it is absurd to suppose the existence of two wills in God, I reply, we fully believe that his will is simple and one; but as our minds do not fathom the deep abyss of secret election, in accommodation to the capacity of our weakness, the will of God is exhibited to us in two ways.[254]

This excerpt from Calvin’s commentary puts the final seal on the issue: God’s will is “simple and one.” It is not divided, and this ontological split of God’s will into two different halves is a myth. It only seems to us that there are “two wills in God.” It is the same will “exhibited to us in two ways” because “our minds do not fathom the deep abyss of secret election” (a restatement of his never-ending fallacy of begging the question).

But suppose we ignore for the moment Calvin’s indisputable affirmation that God’s will is unquestionably simple and one, and that the concept of two versions of God’s will is a fable. If the preceptive will of God is not causal, the decretive will of God, as I stated earlier, still remains the sole determining cause of all things, including the fact of man’s disobedience to God’s moral and soteriological imperatives. In other words, God’s decretive will is directly and unalterably causing man’s disobedience to his “preceptive will,” removing man from the whole equation entirely. So again, adding an additional species of God’s will changes nothing. And if the preceptive will is causal, we are right back where we started—the entire effort to differentiate between the two is futile, and the rational dilemma remains. Therefore the paltry attempt to split God’s will in half like this is a dead end. Calvin would rather take the option of trashing reason than allow his deterministic ideology to disintegrate as he stares down the barrel of a devastating contradiction.

But how valid is this option? Recall my earlier treatment of the cognitive barrier. We saw that the border between God’s intellect and man’s does not lie along the contours of the laws of logic, but between the limits of man’s comprehension and God’s infinite wisdom. But what Calvin is attempting here is to say that God can reconcile a hard logical contradiction behind the curtain of his “inaccessible” intellect ‑- inaccessible because it is “shrouded in darkness.”[255] This means that Calvin rejects the idea that the cognitive barrier is not located where the laws of logic prevail. He thinks logic is the very locus of the cognitive barrier. Beyond the barrier, God can violate the laws of logic to his heart’s content, expressing the agenda of his dark irrational alter ego lurking somewhere in the godhead, ready to burst into the light whenever some confused theologian somewhere feels the need to embrace abject imbecility.

If we recall the discussion of what happens if God or creation can vitiate rationality, I said there was a reason for bringing it up. If there is a part of God’s mind that can circumvent the laws of logic, the door is open to all sorts of contradictions of the central principles of the nature of reality, the relationship between God and creation, and the reliability of revelation. By embracing the concept of God’s dual mental cavities where one is rational and the other is anti-rational, Calvin has opened this door, and released a panoply of disasters from which there is no recovery. Once this door is open, it can never be closed. The entire superstructure of Christian theism completely breaks down.

Most criminals are desperate, and Calvin’s desperation has driven him to commit the perfect rational crime. He breaks the laws of logic by affirming two contradictory propositions, and demands that God cover for him—giving him a bullet-proof alibi: we puny humans are just too stupid to understand how these contradictory propositions can all be true. But God is so brilliant that he can resolve the unresolvable conundrum on Calvin’s behalf. And since the solution God is expected to provide to bail Calvin out of logic jail is allegedly beyond the cognitive barrier, Calvin doesn’t even have to explain how it works. It’s God’s problem now—if you have an objection, talk to him. Of course, if you do, based on Calvin’s misplacement of the boundaries of the cognitive barrier, no one can guarantee which of the divine schizophrenic personalities you’ll be addressing. In this context, Calvin has just removed himself from the category of serious biblical scholar and his move toward a disappointing form of anti-intellectualism is complete.

But desperate times call for desperate measures. I have seen a similar pattern where some theologians (who consider themselves “reformed”) embrace a bewildering array of irrational and mutually contradictory positions that reveal a disturbing trend that is emblematic of a growing contempt for sound philosophical principles within the orbit of hermeneutics and exegesis. What the Body of Christ needs right now is a renewed recognition that the Word of God is never philosophically inept, the protests of certain anti-philosophical debating opponents notwithstanding. / would strongly suggest that there are some aspects of what is called “reformed” theology that are in dire need of reform. To take what is irrational and correct its incoherent errors is one of the highest expressions of reform we can achieve. I must also restate the fundamental principle I articulated earlier in this volume: anything that violates basic rationality by affirming two contradictory propositions is automatically at war with God’s divine Logos.

In his book The God Who Is There, Francis Schaeffer defends his fundamental thesis that the current gap between the generations is caused by a shift in the concept of truth.[256] Prior to the advent of the gap, almost everyone in our society remained loyal to the law of non-contradiction: that A cannot be non-A at the same time in the same way. But since then, the concept of truth has undergone a fundamental transformation. This is partly due to the influence of the dialectic methodology[257] for arriving at what’s true and false—an approach that finds its roots in the ideas of German philosopher GWF Hegel. Hegel influenced Karl Marx, who influenced the West—and especially the modern-day West—to the point where truth and rationality have become so severely weakened that they have almost reached the point of extinction.

On its face, it is difficult to comprehend the widespread popularity of John Calvin’s incoherent deterministic philosophy. I believe the deterioration of the concept of truth in the West that Schaeffer articulated could be a significant part of the answer. How else can we account for the propensity of so many people of faith to swallow the self‑

contradictory sophistry of Calvinism? If truth is no longer truth in the classical sense, the abandonment of the very categories of true and false is not far behind. I am not suggesting that Calvin was influenced by this shift—it occurred long after he departed this vale of tears. He didn’t accept his contradictions because of the modern erosion of the concept of truth. He accepted them for a different reason: misguided as he was, he sincerely believed God could clean up his reckless logical wet spill with divine brute force and mystery. But this recent emergence of postmodernism could easily be part of the reason why his self-contradictory doctrines find so much sympathy in today’s world. For Calvin, to squander the rules of inference grounded in the divine mind can be justified by appealing to the “secret counsel” of God—which here means cheating while no one is looking. For too many souls in our century, it’s not even called cheating any more.

FOOTNOTES

[245] Jeremy A. Evans, Whosoever Will, 266.

[246] Calvin, Institutes, Book 1, Chapter 18, Section 3, Paragraph 2.

[247] Ibid.

[248] Or lordship.

[249] Calvin, Institutes, Book 1, Chapter 18, Section 3, Paragraph 2.

[250] There may be a temptation to challenge this narrative by saying God occasionally commands his people to kill other human beings within the context of God’s judgment against them. But this is not an example of murder. It is therefore irrelevant to the present discussion.

[251] Star Trek, The Galileo Seven (1967).

[252] Calvin, Institutes, Book 1, Chapter 18, Section 3, Paragraph 2, emphasis mine.

[253] Calvin’s maneuver is a sad reminder of the strategy of the cowardly knights in Monty Python and the Holy Grail: “RUN AWAY!”

[254] John Calvin, Commentary on Matthew, 631.

[255] And all along we’ve been led to believe that God is light, and in him there is no darkness at all (1 John 1:5).

[256] Francis Schaeffer, The Cod Who Is There, 33.

[257] The Socratic Method is often referred to in the literature as the “dialectic method.” This is not what I am referring to here.

Calvinism makes the Word of God null and void through this determinism:

 

I worked with CHATGPT to redesign this next “Calvinist Toon”

This next section is from Ronnie W. Rogers, Reflections of a Disenchanted Calvinist: The Disquieting Realities of Calvinism (Bloomington, IL: WestBow Press, 2016), 86-97. [Chpt 13, “Preaching of the Gospel” | PDF]

As a pastor, I am intensely concerned with what is included in preaching of the gospel. I realize that all Christians are concerned, and rightly so, but because I do this week in and week out, it is of utmost importance not only to understand the gospel, but to articulate the gospel message in such a way that it clearly reflects what the Scripture teaches and what I believe. I offer the following to elucidate my understanding of the call to preach the gospel.

  1. I affirm the mandate to preach the gospel to everyone (John 6:44, 12:32; Revelation 22:17); that “God was well-pleased through the foolishness of the message preached to save those who believe” (1 Corinthians 1:21). Further, I affirm that the proclamation of the gospel that appeals to the heart and mind in persuasiveness, aided by divine enablements of grace, may result in salvation for anyone who hears.

The means of this grace enablement include but are not limited to: Gods’ salvific love for all (John 3:16), God’s manifestation of His power so that all may know He is the Sovereign (Isaiah 45:21-22) and Creator (Romans 1:18-20), which assures that everyone has opportunity to know about Him. Christ paying for all sins (John 1:29), conviction of the Holy Spirit (John 16:7-11), working of the Holy Spirit (Hebrews 6:1-6), enlightening of the Son (John 1:9), God’s teaching (John 6:4S), God opening hearts (Acts 16:14), and the power of the gospel (Romans 1:16), without such redemptive grace, no one seeks or comes to God (Romans 3:11). Further, I believe that man, because of these gracious provisions and workings of God, can choose to seek and find God (Jeremiah 29:13; Acts 17:11-12). Moreover, no one can come to God without God drawing (John 6:44), and that God is drawing all men, individuals (John 12:32). The same Greek word for draw, helkuo, is used in both verses.” About 115 passages condition salvation on believing alone, and about 35 simply on faith.”[96]Other grace enablements may include providential workings in and through other people, situations, and timing or circumstances that are a part of grace to provide an opportunity for every individual to choose to follow Christ.

John Piper asked the question, “What message would missionaries rather take than the message: Be glad in God! Rejoice in God! Sing for joy in God! …God loves to exalt himself by showing mercy to sinners.”[97] My answer to this question, the truth that when anyone hears this glorious message, is that same someone has a chance, by the grace and mercy of God, to receive the truth of the message by faith. Further, without opportunity for all sinners to accept, that message should be changed to say, “some can be glad in God if He predestined you” or “God loves to exalt Himself by showing mercy to some sinners.” This is the actual message of Calvinism, a disquieting reality, and I would appreciate their due diligence always to make that clear.

I affirm that a truly good faith offer seems to necessitate a willingness to tell a person that Christ died for them. For example, Paul said to the Corinthians, “For I delivered to you as of first importance what I also received, that Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures” (1 Corinthians 15:1-3). Thus, he told them Christ died for “our” sins when they were lost. Peter preached to the Jews saying, “For you first, God raised up His Servant and sent Him to bless you by turning every one of you from your wicked ways” (Acts 3:26). The blessing is the “turning every one of you from your wicked ways,” i.e. salvation. Notice that the blessing is not corporate—Israel—but for “every one” who turns from wickedness, which clearly implies that they can and should. In addition, our Lord said concerning His blood, “And in the same way He took the cup after they had eaten, saying, ‘This cup which is poured out for you is the new covenant in My blood” (Luke 22:20, italics added). When He said that, Judas was sitting there, verse 21.

Commenting on Acts 3:26, John MacArthur says, “All the rich blessings of salvation and all the covenant promises were available. Peter’s hearers could only obtain them, however, by turning from their wicked ways. Repentance was the key that unlocked everything. Peter had clearly shown that the claims of Jesus were consistent with Old Testament prophecy, so that it was a compelling case for his hearers to respond in repentance and belief Tragically, most of Peter’s audience refused to repent. Like their fathers before them, they hardened their hearts and failed to enter God’s rest (Hebrews 3:8; 4:3). As a result, within the lifetime of many in the audience the nation would be destroyed. And those who refused to turn from their sins would find themselves ‘cast out into the outer darkness’ (Matthew 8:12), where they will `pay the penalty of eternal destruction, away from the presence of the Lord and from the glory of His power’ (2 Thessalonians 1:9). Such a fate awaits all those in every age and place who refuse to repent and receive God’s gracious offer of salvation in Jesus Christ.”[98] (italics added)

Now I unconditionally agree with MacArthur’s explanation of this verse; however, his Calvinism turns the otherwise precise interpretation of this verse into double-talk. His comments give every appearance that he believes that, as this Scripture clearly teaches, “All the rich blessings of Salvation…were available” and these could and should repent, but they did not because “[they] refused to repent …. [and] they hardened their hearts.” He deems their refusal to be a tragedy.

From a non-Calvinist interpretation, it is indeed an eternal tragedy, but from a Calvinist perspective, it is not. Because according to Calvinism’s unconditional election, irresistible selective regeneration, and monergistic salvation, their non-repentance was exactly what God desired and predetermined that they could only do; they will spend eternity in torment, as He also desired. They will serve as predetermined monuments of His wrath. Furthermore, they did not refuse to repent, in any sense of being able to have chosen to do otherwise. As an incontrovertible fact of Calvinism, they did the only thing they could do; thereby proving they were not the elect. Moreover, everyone of God’s elect who heard this was selectively regenerated against his will so that he would unavoidably believe in the Messiah. From his Calvinism, there can be nothing tragic about this event, for everything went according to God’s plan, a disquieting reality, whereas, from a non-Calvinist perspective, it is tragic indeed, and heart wrenchingly so. For they have truly rejected “the rich blessings of salvation” which God had made available through grace-enabled faith.

  1. I disaffirm that while I am commanded to preach the power of the gospel—the good news—to the entire world, God has predetermined to make that power unavailable to the entire audience of the message and has limited it to only those chosen by God apart from faith (Acts 16:31­32, Romans 10:13). It seems that the message to the Philippian jailer, if Paul were a Calvinist, should have been, “Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ, which is the only thing you can do if you have been selected and the one thing you cannot do if you have not been selectively regenerated; consequently, while belief is necessary for salvation, it is not for you to worry about; you should worry about things you can do something about.” Apart from mere obedience and process, the underlying message of Calvinism allows no room for urgency or passionate and emotional pleading either toward or with the unsaved to repent, because all who are predestined to repent will and those who are not cannot repent, i.e., irresistible grace. This is a disquieting reality.

Calvinism is not devoid of passion for seeing the lost come to Christ. Nevertheless, if logic prevails, it is only a vertical passion. That is to say, it is a passion to carry out the mandate of God, to be used by God to gather His elect. It cannot be a Holy Spirit led horizontal passion, which is a burden, love and hurt for all of the lost of the world, or even each particular individual, to come to know Christ. For God, according to Calvinism, does not even have such passion. A consistent Calvinist’s passion is not actually toward the individual but always toward God, which some Calvinists would revel in as vindicating Calvinism; however, that is only true if the Scripture supports such, and I do not think it does. Further, if Calvinism is true, unless the Calvinist knows that God has truly drawn him to one of His elect—which seems impossible to objectively know—the Calvinist needs to refuse to give in to horizontal passion because it can only be mere human sentiment or satanic influence, both of which would actually be contrary to God’s passion.

Paul clearly had a vertical passion for God, but equally clear was his horizontal passion for the lost. He said, “I am telling the truth in Christ, I am not lying, my conscience testifies with me in the Holy Spirit, that I have great sorrow and unceasing grief in my heart. For I could wish that I myself were accursed, separated from Christ for the sake of my brethren, my kinsmen according to the flesh, who are Israelites” (Romans 9:1-4a).

Paul’s passion for his fellow Jews who were rejecting Christ and therefore headed for hell was inconsolable. Although he knew that he could not relinquish his salvation, and even if he did that would not cause others to receive salvation, he did actually love them so deeply and hurt so profoundly for them that he would have surrendered his own salvation and home in heaven for an eternity in the hollows of hell for their sake. This is truly the love of God ( John 3:16) and of Jesus who died willingly for all (John 1:29). Paul’s love for his lost countrymen was of the sacrificial quality that is seen in God who loved the fallen and rebellious human race and therefore, “He who did not spare His own Son, but delivered Him over for us all (Romans 8:32). It is seen in Jesus “who gave Himself as a ransom for all” (1 Timothy 2:6), and therefore sacrificed everything that was rightfully His for this same undeserving humanity. And it is seen in Paul in that he would willingly give up the greatest love and future ever known for his countrymen.

This kind of passion and desire for the lost is exceedingly convicting and constantly challenges me to unreservedly disdain and resist excusing my own jejune love for the lost. Of course, if God has elected only some of the Jews for whom Paul so passionately grieved, then Paul’s passion and burden seem at best nothing more than a misdirected human sentimentalism that is quite contrary to the heart and love of God; possibly even the sin of arrogance. For how can Paul be led by the Holy Spirit who, according to Calvinism, cares not one whit about the final destiny of some of those Paul is so deeply concerned about.

Calvinism’s passion cannot logically, being consistent with Calvinism, be toward the lost in the same way as the simple reading of the Scripture conveys God’s, Christ’s, Paul’s or others’ passion toward all, each person, the lost of the world. If a Calvinist is so disposed, it is an inconsistency with Calvinism rather than a corollary of Calvinism. This is a disquieting reality. As a Calvinist, I would have denied—double-talked my way out of—the truthfulness of this conclusion, but as a disenchanted Calvinist, its undeniableness is indubitable.

This is not to say that Calvinists do not claim to be justified in having passion for the lost and a sense of urgency in reaching them. Regarding God’s secret will to deliver some by unconditional election, J.I. Packer says, “But this does not help us to determine the nature of the evangelistic task, nor does it affect our duty to evangelize universally and indiscriminately. The doctrine of God’s sovereignty in grace has no bearing on these things.” [99] (italics added)

The proposition that either God loves every individual and grace enables each person with an opportunity to receive forgiveness or that God only loves some enough to unconditionally elect them to salvation and loves the rest of the world to hell, and then saying that this has “no bearing” on evangelism is the apotheosis of double-talk. Furthermore, “indiscriminately” intimating or telling people that God loves them and desires for them to be saved is not a message sanctioned by God, according to Calvinism, since He does not so love everyone. They may well seek to justify their doing so, but they cannot claim that God is leading them to do so.

With regard to urgency, Packer says, “the belief that God is sovereign in grace does not affect the urgency of evangelism …. And we who are Christ’s are sent to tell them of the One—the only One—who can save them from perishing. Is not their need urgent? …. If you knew that a man was asleep in a blazing building, you would think it a matter of urgency to try and get to him, and wake him up, and bring him out. The world is full of people who are unaware that they stand under the wrath of God: is it not similarly a matter of urgency that we should go to them, and try to arouse them, and show them the way of escape?”[100]

My heart is truly saddened each time I read such double-talk. First, if truth prevails, the Calvinist must not only tell the lost that Christ is the only One who can save them from perishing, but also the devastating news that the “only One” may have been more pleased to damn them to hell—time will tell, i.e. que sera sera. Second, I agree that their need is urgent, perilously so, and that it is the good and loving thing to rescue sleeping men from blazing buildings, and analogically to arouse the lost who stand under the wrath of God by showing them the way of escape. However, that is not the gospel of Calvinism because according to Calvinism, God does not love everyone that much. How can the Calvinist be so deluded, or believe we are so credulous, to believe that he can love more than God? All the Calvinist can honestly say is, here is the way of escape for some and the rest must burn. It is indeed odd and misleading for Calvinists to attribute a greater passion to themselves for rescuing people who are perishing than they claim for God.

Packer argues that their being the non-elect “should make no difference in our actions. In the first place, it is always wrong to abstain from doing good for fear that it might not be appreciated …. our calling as Christians is not to love God’s elect, and them only, but to love our neighbor, irrespective of whether he is elect or not. Now, the nature of love is to do good and to relieve need. If, then, our neighbor is unconverted, we are to show love to him as best we can by seeking to share with him the good news without which he must needs perish.”[101] (italics added) That there are non-elect and elect must make a difference in actions if one is going to be led by the Holy Spirit who does not love everyone enough to offer salvation that can be accepted by all. I agree “the nature of love is to do good and to relieve need.” However, the Calvinist cannot claim that it is showing our unconverted neighbors love to share the gospel since God, who is love, does not and actually withholds the very love and deliverance some of our neighbors need. Moreover, the Calvinist gospel is definitely not good news to the non-elect, and no amount of double-talk can make it so, a disquieting reality.

He further claims, “The belief that God is sovereign in grace does not affect the genuineness of the gospel invitations, or the truth of the gospel promises. Whatever we may believe about election, and, for that matter, about the extent of the atonement, the fact remains that God in the gospel really does offer Christ and promise justification and life to ‘whosoever will’. `Whosoever shall call upon the name of the Lord shall be saved.”[102] Actually God, according to Calvinism, does not offer Christ and a genuine promise of justification and life to whosoever because only some whosoevers can actually believe. Moreover, in what meaningful sense can an offer that has been sovereignly predetermined to be absolutely unavailable to some who hear be touted as real and genuine? To do so is to egregiously transmogrify those words into the bafflegab of all bafflegab; therefore, to the non-elect, it is neither a genuine or real offer, but rather a crushing illusion and a disquieting reality.

Piper says, “The doctrine of irresistible grace means that God is sovereign and can overcome all resistance when he wills.”[103] It is vitally important to recognize that the Calvinist, as well as Piper’s position, is actually stronger than this with regard to salvation. Their position is that not only does the doctrine of irresistible grace mean that God can overcome, but it actually means He will or must. And later in the same document Piper says, “Irresistible grace never implies that God forces us to believe against our will ….On the contrary, irresistible grace is compatible with preaching and witnessing that tries to persuade people to do what is reasonable and what will accord with their own best interests.”[104] With all due respect to Piper, this is the very kind of obfuscating verbal gymnastics that causes such confusion about the harsh realities of Calvinism. This is a disquieting reality.

Of course, technically speaking, Piper is correct. God does not force faith upon anyone, and I have never contended that Calvinism teaches that He does. However, He does in fact, according to the doctrine of irresistible grace, invincibly impose a new nature upon the elect against their will by means of “irresistible grace” so they will necessarily choose to believe. Furthermore, persuasion, prayers, preaching, etc., have nothing to do with assuring, aiding or impeding the imposition of a new nature because it is a sovereign monergistic act of God, irrespective of anything done by humans or angels. The Calvinist’s response that what they do is a part of the process, or obedience, does not change the nature of the irresistible imposition of a new nature. Steve Lemke comments, “The Synod of Dort insisted that such attempts at moral persuasion of unsaved persons was wasted time.”[105]

When Calvinists respond that witnessing, praying, persuasion, etc., are a part of the process of God bringing people to salvation, they do not mean the same thing as a disenchanted or non-Calvinist saying that God uses such because we mean that they are actual substantive and integral parts of enabling grace. In contrast, according to Calvinism’s soteriology, nothing contributes one whit to the change of the elect’s nature except the monergistic, selective, irresistible, regenerative act of God. Therefore, as far as the process for what leads up to that act, God could have replaced whatever did happen with having His chosen Calvinists to recite the code of Hammurabi in tongues backwards or the national anthem of Bangladesh in Swahili, because nothing actually substantively matters except unconditional election, followed by irresistible grace in selective regeneration. That is a disquieting reality.

I am well aware of the answers to this by Calvinism, but is it not a little disingenuous to proclaim the message without telling the listeners the all too often undisclosed truth of Calvinism? If I preached to the jailer and said Paul’s words, underlying that message would be the truth that the jailer, or any jailer who heard the message, should and could repent, and that is what I believe Paul clearly believed and meant. However, if a Calvinist said it, the underlying message would be that “although I told you to believe you can’t until you are regenerated and if you are regenerated you will believe” and that is a quite different gospel.[106] This is a disquieting reality.

Again, my concern here has nothing to do with whether someone believes it is a good faith offer on the part of the Calvinist, but whether the person hearing it has a real chance to be saved or not. That is to say, if all of the Scriptures that seem to indicate God really wants everyone to be saved and has provided for that possibility are what they appear to be, and if Calvinists really believe what they say, which is that He really does not want everyone saved because according to irresistible grace, if He did, they would be; they should make sure their message makes that clear because it is an extraordinarily important and an indispensable component of their belief and message. Thus, I am satisfied that Calvinists may possibly make a good faith offer because they do not know who the elect are, and that is not my concern here. I am concerned with the idea that some believe that claim exonerates God from appearing to make a real offer because He does know. Therefore, while it is crucial that my offer of the gospel is in good faith, it is infinitely more vital that God’s offer of the gospel is one of good faith as well.

I further disaffirm that God wants the gospel presented to all, and calls on all to repent, but has no intention of those offers of the gospel being real chances for salvation except for some.[107] I believe we should replace the term general call with the more biblically coherent term sufficient call. The sufficient call, along with God’s grace enablement, is sufficient for anyone and everyone to receive salvation. The sufficient call is simply the proclamation of the good news to the world. It is the call of God on men and women everywhere to heed the call to repent and believe the gospel before it is everlasting too late (Acts 17:30-31). It is the call of the Great Commission (Matthew 28:18-20). It is the message preached by Jesus and His disciples (Mark 6:12, 8:35; Luke 3:18, 4:18; Acts 8:12, 8:37, 13:32, 13:38-40, 16:10, 21:28; Romans 1:16, 10:8; Revelation 22:17). Whereas, the efficacious call is received after the sufficient call is heeded, resulting in regeneration and consummating in salvation for those whom God foreknew, predestined, called, justified, and glorifies (Romans 8:28-30).

The means of this grace enablement include but are not limited to: Gods’ salvific love for all (John 3:16), God’s manifestation of His power so that all may know He is the Sovereign (Isaiah 45:21-22) and Creator (Romans 1:18-20), which assures that everyone has opportunity to know about Him. Christ paying for all sins (John 1:29), conviction of the Holy Spirit (John 16:7-11), working of the Holy Spirit (Hebrews 6:1-6), enlightening of the Son (John 1:9), God’s teaching ( John 6:45), God opening hearts (Acts 16:14), and the power of the gospel (Romans 1:16), without such redemptive grace, no one seeks or comes to God (Romans 3:11). Further, I believe that man, because of these gracious provisions and workings of God, can choose to seek and find God (Jeremiah 29:13; Acts 17:11-12). Moreover, no one can come to God without God drawing (John 6:44), and that God is drawing all men, individuals (John 12:32). The same Greek word for draw, helkuo, is used in both verses.” About 115 passages condition salvation on believing alone, and about 35 simply on faith.”[108] Other grace enablements may include providential workings in and through other people, situations, and timing or circumstances that are a part of grace to provide an opportunity for every individual to choose to follow Christ.

Those whom God foreknew would, once graciously enabled to exercise faith or not exercise faith in Christ, trust His salvation message, quite unlike Adam did in the garden, receive the efficacious call that consummates His gracious and genuine offer of salvation. That God foreknows and predestines those whom He foreknows “to be conformed to the image of His Son” is not a point of contention. Neither is the reality that God efficaciously calls those He predestined to “be conformed to the image of His Son” by sanctification, justification, and glorification because salvation requires not only enabling grace, but also sustaining and completing grace. The point of disagreement with my Calvinist friends is whether foreknowledge means, “to know beforehand” or “determine”. I believe that the evidence points to it meaning to know beforehand rather than to determine beforehand. Further, to use verses such as Romans 8:28 or 1 Corinthians 1:24 in order to prove that the effectual call of God is as the Calvinist explains it is to read into the text more than is warranted. They simply assume their answer rather than prove it.

Thus, in contradistinction to Calvinism, I maintain that God made salvation available to everyone through His grace enablements via the sufficient call of the gospel. As a result, because of God’s grace enablements, anyone can accept by faith the sufficient call or reject it. If a person accepts the sufficient call, he receives the efficacious call that consummates salvation. Therefore, the efficacious call is the consummation of salvation for all who believe rather than the initiation in order for some to believe. God sovereignly determined the order and purpose of the two calls. Consequently, being predestined to salvation is not a requirement for receiving the sufficient call of the gospel; it is a requirement for receiving the efficient call of the gospel.

I also disaffirm that the whole mission enterprise is merely obedience, an endeavor that has no real effect upon anyone’s opportunity to receive or reject the gospel and salvation. This disaffirmation is in direct contrast with Calvinism because from a Calvinist view, it does not matter if anyone ever witnesses—beyond being merely a part of the salvific process or only an act of obedience. Moreover, I disaffirm that the Calvinist’s answer that preaching the gospel is the means by which God saves is either satisfactory or adequate if, as the Calvinist believes, salvation is monergistic, and prior to monergistic regeneration, any and every appeal to the heart and mind is meaningless to the person addressed by the Calvinist. Regeneration is an act totally against the person’s will, mind and heart regardless of what he hears or has not heard. This is a disquieting reality.

The Calvinist is right to say that a person is not forced to trust God against his will because according to the doctrine of “irresistible grace”, along with a compatibilist view of free will, God changes the nature of a person by regenerating him, and the changed person then freely chooses to believe in Christ. However, the irresistible change of the nature via regeneration, which results in the free exercise of faith, is an act that is invincibly forced upon the unsaved. Thus, since regeneration is a part of salvation, and according to Calvinism, regeneration is imposed against the will of the unsaved prior to faith; Calvinists err in saying or implying that salvation is by faith alone. This is a disquieting reality. This is a subtle but crucial distinction in understanding how Calvinists feel free to say that a person freely exercises faith in Christ even though he is also irresistibly drawn. When these two essential components of Calvinism’s salvific process are fully understood, the heraldic sign “saved by faith” becomes tarnished. This is a disquieting reality.

I disaffirm that any person cannot repent, or by the grace of God, answer the call of the gospel, which is in fact the ultimate meaning of Calvinism because Calvinists believe that prior to regeneration a person cannot repent and after regeneration they cannot not repent. Further, I disaffirm that preaching out of mere obedience to God is the picture presented in Scripture, where Jesus (Matthew 23:37-39) and Paul (Acts 17:4, 18:4, 18:13; 2 Corinthians 5:11) passionately sought to persuade and were emotional because they spoke to people who would not repent or might not repent. Their passionate appeals seem disingenuous if they actually knew certain ones could come and they would, and certain ones could not come and they would not, and nothing could ever change that or even affect it in the most infinitesimal degree. Moreover, I disaffirm that it is an escapable reality of Calvinism that God must desire those who go to hell to be in hell because everyone He regenerates is saved from hell and the ones He chooses not to regenerate must go to hell. This is a disquieting reality. I wish they would preach this more often so that it could be compared to the quite contrary picture of God in the Scripture.

Why don’t all true Calvinists regularly stand in the pulpit and celebrate their doctrine that selective regeneration precedes faith by saying repeatedly to those who are listening that you cannot be saved unless God regenerates you: if He does you will be saved, if He doesn’t you will not, and nothing can change that or add to it? To preach repent and believe in any way that steers one away from the aforementioned truth of Calvinism is, at best misleading, and at times even deceptive because people cannot believe prior to regeneration and if they are regenerated, they will believe. This is a disquieting reality.

The Calvinist may answer, “We preach believe and repent because we are commanded to.” I would agree, but God also commands us to “speak the truth in love.” Therefore, Calvinists should tell everything they really believe and guard against misleading people to think that Christ loves all of them and they can really receive salvation. They should at least do this as fiercely as they guard their understanding of God’s sovereignty or the TULIP. Some Calvinists do this, and I appreciate and respect them for doing so. I am not referring to them. That the Scripture says to preach the gospel is true, but it does not affirm irresistible grace or the experience of the new birth prior to exercising faith.

FOOTNOTES

[96] Chafer, Systematic Theology, vol. VII, 273-274.

[97] Piper, Let the Nations Be Glad, 33.

[98] John MacArthur, Acts (Chicago: Moody Press, 1994, c1996), 123.

[99] J.I Packer, Evangelism and the Sovereignty of God (Downers Grove, IL., InterVarsity Press, 1961), 97.

[100] Ibid., 98-99.

[101] Ibid., 99.

[102] Ibid., 100.

[103] J. Piper and the Bethlehem Baptist Church staff, “What We Believe About the Five Points of Calvinism,” as quoted in Allen and Lemke, Whosoever Will, 112. [RPT: the full fifth chapter is here for an excellent read.]

[104] Ibid.

[105] Allen and Lemke, Whosoever Will, 113.

[106] I am not making a reference to Galatians 1:6, nor implying heresy in the Calvinist message. I simply mean that some can be saved and some cannot, in contrast with the message that everyone can be saved by faith, is a very different message.

[107] Thomas R. Edgar has written an extensive article on this issue which is worth reading: THE MEANING OF PROGINWSKW (“FOREKNOWLEDGE”). Found at Chafer Theological Seminary | and at Evangelical Arminians | as well as RPT.

[108] Chafer, Systematic Theology, vol. VII, 273-274.

Calvinism: A Different Gospel

Published by Papa Giorgio

It is hard for me to sit quiet and hear person’s I adore talk about the gospel and salvation, and they put meaning behind these ideas/words when ultimately they reject these meanings. One of the [many] reasons I reject TULIP [theistic determinism] is because IT rejects the sufficiency of the living Word of God (the Gospel), as well as Calvary (the lynchpin to the Gospel).

The Gospel of God vs. The Gospel of Calvinism (Ronnie Rogers)

…. Calvinists may respond that they believe the gospel is the “power of God to everyone who believes.” By which they seem to mean, when you believe, you will experience the power of God, and that is true for everyone who believes. But, hidden in this explanation is that while this is trivially true, it is not an actualizable truth as it stands (that the listener can benefit from or by simple faith) without UE, IG, and SR, so one can and will believe, all of which is reserved for the elect and withheld from the non-elect.

As it stands in Scripture, the gospel is portrayed and understood by those who hear it to be sufficiently imbued by God’s power to save the most wretched of sinners if they only believe. Therefore, I beseech Calvinists to be more forthcoming in their gospel encounters with the lost about the other Calvinist requirements, by telling the listener what else must happen before they can believe and experience the power of the gospel—that is, the whole nature of the gospel according to Calvinism. Please fully explain to those who reject the gospel why they did so according to Calvinism. Do not let them leave with a false notion that it was because they rejected the gospel when they should have, and could have, accepted it. It was not just an act of the grace-enabled will, as they think and Scripture testifies.

The biblical gospel is simple and clear (John 3:16; 1 Cor 15:1–4). Anyone can believe and be saved by simply believing this revelation—the gospel—in which resides the power of God almighty to overcome any and all obstacles to salvation by faith. Calvinists should be equally clear about their quite different full understanding of the gospel of Christ. As Calvinists, please tell those whom you evangelize that belief in the gospel is the effect of God’s eternal and unconditional election, the internal efficacious call of God reserved for only the elect, and the renewing pre-faith work of God (regeneration or some form of renewal) of some, rather than what it is in Scripture and the minds of most, if not all, that hear the good news; that believing the gospel is the activating event that results in salvation and all that entails. Contrary to the biblical simple gospel, Calvinism’s gospel should only be shared in a way that listeners understand the gospel is not good news for everyone, and its real good news is that if you accept it, you can know you are one of the elect.

Therefore, according to Calvinism, hearing and believing in the gospel is not the sufficient call to move sinners from being a lost hell-bound sinner to being a child of God by faith. That requires the person to be elected in eternity past, a recipient of the internal efficacious call, and selectively regenerated by God. All of that empowers one to respond positively to the external call of the gospel, without which the gospel is incapable of doing anything except confirming the irreversible state of the damned.

Any veneer of Calvinism that even suggests, or leaves the listener thinking they have a choice to believe or not believe the gospel, is deception, because only after those monergistic renewal works can one truly believe the gospel unto salvation. Moreover, believing the gospel is not the turning point in a person’s eternal destination; it is actually the conduit that brings the truth to a person whose turning point in their life was being unconditionally elected in eternity past, from which believing the gospel is a result. Calvinism undermines the intelligibility of God so that the message derived from a normal reading of Scripture in light of Calvinism makes God appear indecipherable unless one possesses the Calvinist code. …..

Is God’s Word Enough?

Billy Wendeln, of the Bible Brodown is back to talk about God’s witness of Himself to the world and what the Bible teaches us about the sufficiency of the Divine revelation made known to all people.

FREE THINKING MINISTRIES discussed if “Calvinism a Different Gospel?“, to which they discussed the lowering of God’s

… Notable Calvinist scholar, Matthew J. Hart, is clear: “Calvinists . . . are theological determinists. They hold that God causes every contingent event, either directly . . . or indirectly.” Since human thoughts and states of belief are contingent events, this means that God, according to Calvinistic determinism, causes each and every thought and belief, including all of our false and evil beliefs. In his work titled The Providence of God, Paul Helm — who many consider to be the world’s leading Calvinist philosopher — explains where our thoughts come from according to his Calvinistic view:

  • “Not only is every atom and molecule, every thought and desire, kept in being by God, but every twist and turn of each of these is under the direct control of God. He has not, as far as we know, delegated that control to anyone else.”

If these scholars are correct in their assessment of Calvinism (that Calvinism entails exhaustive determinism), then I contend that Calvinism — the view that God determines all things about humanity — promotes the following incorrect views:

1- A low view of God.

As I’ve explained elsewhere, if exhaustive divine determinism is true, then God is a deity of deception and an untrustworthy source of theological beliefs. 

2- A low view of God’s word.

Based on the transfer of trust principle, if God is an untrustworthy source of theological beliefs, then why should we trust a book authored by a deity of deception that is full of theological statements you are supposed to believe?  If God is untrustworthy, so is a book he inspired. Thus, appealing to Bible verses or to the original Greek does nothing to escape this presupposed false and low view of God and His word. 

3- A low view of man.

Man does not have the ability to reason free from antecedent conditions which are sufficient to necessitate all of his thoughts and beliefs. Man is nothing but a caused cause or a passive cog (a puppet) who is always tethered to prior deterministic forces. 

Thus, on this view, man does not have the active power to infer better beliefs in a deliberative circumstance. He is merely a passive cog who is determined (by something or someone else) to believe truth or to believe falsities.  

4- A low view of sin.

The definition of sin is to “miss the mark.” However, there is no missing the mark if God determines all things about humanity. Everyone always hits the mark perfectly — exactly as God determined. 

5- A low view of the gospel.

This, in my opinion, is the deal-breaker. Calvinism is a low view of the gospel. The gospel literally means “the good news.” Here’s how Christianity has traditionally understood this “good news” with the help of the G.O.S.P.E.L. acronym:

G – God–a perfect being–created all people to be in an eternal loving relationship with Him (that is the objective purpose of life – this is why humanity exist).(Psalm 100:3)

O – Our sins (emphasis on “our”) infect us and separate us from God (like oil and water, necessary perfection and infection do not mix). (Romans 3:23)

S – Sins cannot be removed by good deeds (there’s nothing we as infected people can do about it – we need a miracle). (Isaiah 64:6)

P – Paying the price for sin, Jesus died and rose again (this is that miracle – Jesus paid it all). (Romans 5:8)

E – Everyone who freely trusts in Christ alone – and has not rejected His offer of love and grace – has eternal life (John 3:16).

L – Life with Jesus starts now and lasts forever (to infinity . . . and beyond). (John 10:28)

But Calvinism literally preaches a different gospel. Consider Paul’s words in Galatians 1: 6-8:

  • “I am astonished that you are so quickly deserting him who called you in the grace of Christ and are turning to a different gospel— not that there is another one, but there are some who trouble you and want to distort the gospel of Christ. But even if we or an angel from heaven should preach to you a gospel contrary to the one we preached to you, let him be accursed.”

Here’s the Calvinist’s different G.O.S.P.E.L.*:

G* – God created a few people to be with him. Most people were created for the specific purpose of eternal suffering in Hell.

Right off the bat, we see that this is not the Gospel message that has been preached in Scripture or through the history of the Christian Church. At the least, it’s a radically different message than what most Christians have had in mind over the past 2,000 years when sharing the good news.

It gets worse . . .

O* – Our separation from God is caused and determined by God.

Let that sink in! 

S* – Sins are illusory.

As noted above, no one ever misses the mark (the definition of sin), but everyone does exactly what God determines us to do. Every arrow hits the bulls eye. 

P* – Paying the price for what God caused and determined all people to do, Jesus died and rose again.

At least Calvinists and non-Calvinist Christians all affirm the historical resurrection (but so do Mormons). 

E* – Everyone who God determines to go to heaven goes to heaven; everyone else (the majority of humanity) is determined to suffer in the fires of hell.

Unless, of course, the Calvinist affirms universalism and argue that allpeople are given irresistible grace and determined to go to heaven. Calvinists can also affirm annihilationism and contend that eternal separation from God is still determined by God (so the problem still remains), but there is no eternal conscious suffering. Both views are typically rejected by most Calvinists. 

L* – Life in hell lasts forever.

Does this sound like “good news”? No, in fact, it’s horrible news to the vast majority of humanity. Calvinism is not the message of Christianity. It is a distorted understanding of the gospel that ought to be rejected by Christ followers. ….

(READ MORE VIA FTM!)

Calvinism: A Different Gospel

If Calvinists, Molinists, and Arminians are all Christians, why does Tim Stratton spend so much time arguing about free will, divine providence, and salvation? The answer might make some angry or uncomfortable. But if we are committed to truth, we should have an open dialogue and respectful conversations. Stratton believes that Calvinism contains within itself several problems that must be addressed. He agues that Calvinism presents us with a low view of God, a low view of God’s word, and a low view of the Gospel! (To name a few.) Because of this and other reasons, it is reasonable to conclude that Calvinism presents a different Gospel, which we ought to vehemently reject.