This is addressed to all our Calvinist friends on the forum.
I am interested in some clarification. Mark (tartanarmy) accused Mike (MDH) of misrepresentation.
Yes I did, and for good reason Steve.
Mike stated, and I quote
Did not God decree everything that would ever happen, and am I not totally depraved because of this?
Now, it is quite obvious to me, that any standard work on Calvinism including the readily available confessions and creeds answer this misrepresentation and if Mike wants to be semi-reasonable he might avail himself the effort to rightly represent what we believe.
I mean, Mike could have said,
God from all eternity did by the most wise and holy counsel of his own will, freely and unchangeably ordain whatsoever comes to pass; yet so as thereby neither is God the author of sin; nor is violence offered to the will of the creatures, nor is the liberty or contingency of second causes taken away, but rather established.
Westminster Confession of Faith Chapter 3 on God’s Decree
In accordance with this decision he graciously softens the hearts, however hard, of his chosen ones and inclines them to believe, but by his just judgment he leaves in their wickedness and hardness of heart those who have not been chosen.
Canons of Dort Article 6: God's Eternal Decision
Calvinists have also often accused me of not understanding, or of misrepresenting, their views.
You have, and
even recently admitted as much regarding the whole Supra/Infra thing, and yet you used that misrepresentation to smear RC Sproul, which I think you did not repent of. He had it right, you had it wrong, and yet the whole tone of your point against Sproul in your lecture about Calvinism
at that particular point was based upon your own ignorance of that subject.
Now, I can assure you that neither Mike nor I have any interest in misrepresentation (I know him quite well, and can vouch for his integruty, intelligence and humility).
As a teacher, I hold you to a higher standard, and would at the very least, hope that you would rebuke others who misrepresent, regardless of what side they are on. All the vouching in the world makes no difference when one side is misrepresented, willingly or unwillingly, even while claiming that truth is the motive. That being so, then so much more effort and being careful is required, right?
Our interest is in the truth, and the best way for us to assess whether or not Calvinism is true would not be to deliberately misrepresent it, and then to reject the misrepresentation of our own making. How could such a policy advance our grasp of truth?
I agree, but for some reason,
Calvinists do find this to be true far too often. I have been discussing these matters for years and have yet to come across even one Non Calvinist who would and certainly should put in the effort to actually understand where we as Calvinists are coming from. It happens all the time sadly!
Here's my problem. I am not the sharpest knife in the drawer, but I am not more dull than the average. Over the past twenty years, I have read the Calvinists with great interest, and often with great sympathy, in order to give them a fair hearing, to assess the truth-value of their statements and the quality of their exegesis. I really want to know if there is something they understand that I do not.
That is admirable, and I take my hat off to you Steve. That is why, I am rather hoping for a full on debate series between you and James. I believe both of you will make the effort, preparation and time to spend on this very important issue, especially for the benefit of the Church and the Saints.
I am talking about a fully recorded live debate in person, at a Church somewhere, Over 5 nights, the whole thing recorded and distributed by DVD to the Churches.
I have no denominational loyalties, so I have no reason to have a closed mind in my research.
Me too. When denominationalism becomes more important than scriptural, biblical, Christian truth, then part of the battle is well and truly lost.
Today, when I represent a Calvinist point, I am doing my best to represent it exactly as I have drawn it from the Calvinist writers themselves. Often, I am quoting them verbatim. Yet, in critiquing their exegesis or their logic, I am invariably told that I am not understanding, or am misrepresenting their views.
Actually, the problem happens when you use your own “logic”. Now hear me out on this.
Are you following their logic, or are you taking what they say, then immediately switch to your own defence against what they are saying?
I mean, there is nothing wrong with arguing against a position by finding fault in your opponents logic, or what you think are the logical implications, but it becomes an issue when you “first” do that before accurately stating and interacting with what they say.
You need to interact with their position, which means
taking their best arguments, accurately representing those arguments, showing that you understand them, and then refute the arguments using scripture, exegesis and your own method.
So my question is, am I simply dull, or are Calvinists poor communicators?
I do not know for sure, as I do not know who you have communicated with. I don’t think you are dull at all, just too quick to find the weakest arguments to respond to rather than the best arguments that are out there. You simply are too quick at arguing against Calvinism, rather than sitting back, taking the best arguments in, and then interacting with them.
Most of the Arminians who are contributing posts here have some intelligence and some acquaintance with Calvinism--even if only from conversations with "street-Calvinists" (as opposed to scholarly proponents). If these street-Calvinists consistently misrepresent their own views, then, again, their teachers must not be adept in transmitting their beliefs.
Whatever a street Calvinist is or even a street Arminian is besides the point. I am sure there are people on both sides who really ought to remain silent more often, but be that as it may, let us “here and now” and in this upcoming debate, do our best to grasp the other sides position as best as we can.
We can’t do any better than that.
I suspect, however, (since I have read their teachers), that most of the street-Calvinists are speaking exactly as the most learned Calvinists do. Why is it, when we repeat their own words back to them, we are accused of misrepresentation?
That is not true Steve. My above quote from your friend Mike is just one example.
There are myriad’s of examples in the writings of Dave Hunt recently, Geisler, Half the SBC every time they address the subject, The Caners at Liberty University and your own statements addressed by Dr White recently on his Dividing line programme, although he would not put you in the same light as some of these others, as you seem to be far less emotive than some of these guys.
Why, for example, do we keep thinking that God being "the first efficient cause" of sin, means that this is essentially the same as being the "author" of sin?
That is a very good question and a quick microwave answer does the subject no justice.
I will give a short answer but it will lead to more discussion I am certain, but that is ok.
Some reformed men have no issue saying that God is the author of sin, but are quick to add the caveat that God, in bringing into existence sin, is not the active participant in sin, in that He is not bringing about sin for sins sake, but rather in order to have a good and holy purpose in bringing it about.
He creates originally perfect people with freedom from sin, but not freedom from God.
There is no law in scripture that condemns God for bringing sin into His creation is there?
I mean, God is God, and we have no right to bring in our sense of ethics (no matter how much it seems to be noble and no matter how much it seems to be vindicating even God’s holiness) into the equation of this important subject called Theodicy. To scripture we go to investigate these matters, and scripture is not silent upon this subject.
Why does it seem to us that God "ordaining all things" means that everything (including our depravity) is ordained by God? What are we missing?
If that is all you were stating then fine, at least we have a starting point for discussion, but that is
decidedly not what transpires. The Non Calvinist immediately jumps into this great big defence, that attempts to rescue God from some horrible charge that the Calvinist has never even made!
In fact, the Calvinist has not even said anything at this point that entails the logical implications made by the Non Calvinist. It happens every time.
So to answer your question, what is missing is patience.
Patience to grasp what the Calvinist is saying when he states that God ordains everything, including our depravity etc.
We need to slow down and really think the implications (and there are many for sure!) rather than go off half cocked with an answer, or even worse, inflame the situation so that dialogue ceases before the conversation gets anywhere productive.
I am trying here to answer you Steve, as best I can.
For example, Mark wrote:
"No Calvinist teaches that we are depraved merely because God decrees everything! How does such a misrepresentation facilitate intelligent reasonable discussion on these issues?"
Hopefully we would all believe that half a truth is not the whole truth, therefore a lie, right?
If we leave out some ingredients, our bread shall not rise, so to speak.
When a Non Calvinist repeats the above comment in that particular way, 9 out of 10 times the Non Calvinist assumes that God has merely made man to sin and then presents this idea that big bad god has exerted his big bad sovereign will on poor old robotic man without a real conscious will with desires and the ability to choose, with zero reference to purpose, fallen nature nor secondary means, whereby God is establishing a plan with actions and unfolding events leading to His plan in history.
No, I have never got the impression the Non Calvinist is meaning any of that.
But we thought Calvinism teaches that the fall of man was sovereignly decreed by God before man existed (regardless which "lapsarian" position one takes, "the decree of the fall" is always in the mix).
Just bear in mind that the lapsarian ideas are pretty much an argument in semantics IMHO, but all views present man as a fallen creature, but I digress.
Calvinism, no, Orthodox Christianity has always taught that God decreed the fall!
I know of no Arminian (in the truest sense of the term) who denies that God decreed the fall of man.
This is perhaps where other Calvinists are discerning your own particular bent at this point, to your orthodoxy and a leaning to Open Theism for example. Not that I am calling you an Open Theist, not yet anyway!
How on earth does man possess an innate ability to do anything apart from God’s power?
Does not scripture clearly teach that in Christ all things consist and are held together, and does not scripture teach that God works out all things according to His will and purpose?
Calvin even went as far as to say that bread itself would not nourish us, if it were not for the very power of God working upon both the bread and our bodies receiving the nutrients from it.
That may seem strange to some, but for those who believe in a God who is God over everything, there is no dilemma here or some strange idea or human philosophy at work, and certainly there is no biblical reason to fight against such a teaching.
It all depends on what presupposition one works from.
I have never read a biblical defence from a Non Calvinist writer that can account for not only how God knows the future, but how the future can even be certain, apart from God’s control thereof.
Does God just throw the dice and everything just ends up the way it does, and that is the answer for reality as we know it? Where is God involved in any of this?
Even if we just accept “bare permission” from God, and all that “so called” libertarian free will entails, are you answering anything from your own position?
If God merely has foreknowledge of future events, did He create knowing exactly what would transpire in all of History, including the very damnation of all those in Hell?, and if so, how can you attack Calvinists for saying that God has a plan and purpose for the very same end result that you have according to the same outworking of History?
In other words, God purposed to create a world and to put unfortunate humans in it who, by His certain decree, would inevitably fall--leading to the depravity of the human race, and the damnation of most.
This is what I mean. You say “unfortunate” humans as if that reflects the biblical anthropology.
God originally created humans upright, perfect, sinless but certainly not free from God, hence capable of sinning.
God has the only “free” will in the universe.
For reasons best known to Himself, He decided that in His plan for humanity, man would fall into sin, and He would save some (a huge number btw!) and pass by others, according to His own reasons. These are the reprobate, who perish in “their” sins, which “they” love and live and move and have “their” being, hating God at every turn, preferring the desires of “their” own wicked hearts.
Does that mean that God made them evil?
Certainly not, but He did create them with the absolute guarantee that they would fall and become captives to the nature we now possess through disobedience.
As long as you maintain, as scripture does, that Man in every point, pre and post fall, has a real will that functions and acts according to it’s nature, and is not some kind of robot, as is so often ignorantly suggested, you will not stray too far from understanding these issues.
And of course the most important thing is that God is sovereign.
He is God and can do as He pleases, and if that leads you to consider the idea that man is “unfortunate” in any sense, then so be it.
God Himself has stated “that” in certain regards, it would have been best for certain men never to have been born at all, but God decided otherwise didn’t He?
Even according to your own view, He created John Doe, knowing full well John Doe will end up in Hell, even before John Doe was born nor did any good or evil, right?
He is the Potter and we are His clay. The clay does not tell the Potter what to do.
We do not say this as an attempt to parody Calvinism, but merely to take at face value what it sounds like the words used by Calvinists actually mean.
Yes, words do mean something, but they form sentences, which form whole statements, and it is honest and proper to get a grasp of the big idea rather than attack the words before they have been grasped in contexts.
If all people who reject Calvinism were unregenerates, or were Christians of an inferior intellect to those who embrace it, or were biblically illiterate, or did not know Greek, or could not frame a logical syllogism, or were agenda-driven to dethrone the sovereign God, etc.--- then it would be fair to say that Arminians are to be blamed for their failure to understand the Calvinist concepts.
That is an interesting statement Steve, but at the end of the day, none of that counts for a hill of beans.
Salvation is the work of God upon a sinner. It is a “revelation” by God to “the sinner”. It is monergistic not synergistic, and therefore things like intelligence, bias, knowledge of Greek etc, are irrelevant.
God can reveal truth to a baby in the womb with brain damage or the smartest intellect in the world through His Word faithfully preached. The other things are merely helpful tools to aide us.
I find that Non Calvinists actually place way more weight on things like philosophy, human reason etc whether or not they are formally trained in it or not.
The whole concept of “libertarian” free will is a major case in point.
The idea that man is free from constraint, especially that of God, is not taught in scripture, but is part of every philosophy there ever has been, including ancient and modern thought.
Calvinists are not guilty of espousing libertarian philosophy. If scripture taught it, we would teach it, but such a concept of human freedom cannot be found within the pages of scripture, hence it is projected there by every person who has been traditionally taught to accept it.
You are a smart man Steve. It is a bit like Post Modernism.
Who today, even in the Church, cannot escape it’s influence?
It is very pervasive and we need to be on guard against it.
All we are saying is “Libertarian freedom” is of the same mould.
We are born Arminians in that sense! From suckling on our mothers breasts as babies, we breath in libertarian freedom from the get go.
It was the very thing that God used in the undoing of our first parents ironically!
The notion that we can operate without constraints or be influenced by them.
But since this is not the case, it may be:
a) that Calvinists (unlike the writers of the scriptures themselves) have few spokesmen who can enunciate their position in a manner understandable to people of average intelligence; or
b) that Calvinism is not the clear teaching of scripture.
Or perhaps another option is,
(c) All of the reasons, maybe even one, from what I have thus far said in this reply to you.
My immediate last couple of points regarding human anthropology above spring to mind.
I have never understood, for example, why Calvinists often explain the reason these doctrines were not understood before Augustine as being that the first ten generations of Christians did not have the time to think long and hard about the subject (that is, they were concentrating on solving Christological heresies, and had not the versatility to consider the topics of salvation and grace in the same centuries).
What is your point exactly?
It is not as if we do not take our position right back to scripture itself, is it?
Do you think we just want to have history on our side? That is a very far second for us next to scripture.
The whole issue of the reformation was what? Well, you would know the whole thing hinged upon the nature of Man and his will. That was the issue to Luther and the reformers, and it is the issue today as well.
If we were doing all of this again today, the vast majority of evangelicals (Non Calvinists) would side with Rome (Luther- Protestant “Bondage of the will” vs Erasmus- Roman Catholic “Freedom of the will”) and such must be stated clearly, for many Non Calvinists perhaps are ignorant of this history and perhaps just think the whole reformation was about indulgences and smacking nails of protest upon a certain German Church door.
Regarding the early Church- ten generations idea you mention, from what we know of way back then, there were huge issues to be dealt with, including persecution to state the obvious.
You sure don’t find many so called believers today denying the Trinity or claiming Jesus was created or some such thing. Those who do are by far in the vast minority in professing Christendom.
I could easily imagine faithful Christians today, if exposed to such heresies as these, being side-tracked for good reason into attacking such things, don’t you?
Then again, maybe not today! I just remembered what the evangelical landscape is like these days.
This does not ascribe to the church fathers of the first four centuries much intelligence, since, in my mere 35 years of adult ministry, I have had more than adequate time to put together, in my own theology, a Christology sufficient to refute an Arian, as well as to wrestle with, systemetize and analyze every bit of scriptural data pertaining to many other theological questions (e.g., soteriology, eschatology, demonology, pneumatology, ecclesiology). I am not claiming that I know as much as anyone does on all these topics, nor even that my views must be the right ones. All I am saying is that a single lifetime affords more than enough opportunity for a man to read through the scriptures fifty or more times, and to draw comprehensive systems of understanding on many issues.
Fair enough, but rather subjective don’t you think?
I mean, those guys back then did what they did with whatever came their way, both good and bad mostly bad. Where scripture was followed, the Church triumphed, when it was trodden underfoot, the Church suffered. Nothing has essentially changed in principal.
I do often wonder how we today would fare if transported back to that time.
The fact we can boast in our own studies achieved today, maybe smacks of just how easy we might actually have it, compared to those early Christians.
What was wrong with those guys living in the first four centuries?
Nothing as far as I know. Maybe they were trying to just live long enough to leave this earth with a decent testimony and not bow the knee to baal and every other onslaught at every side or maybe they just embraced error after error.
It is interesting to me that even Jacob Arminius called Calvin's works more edifying than the Early Church Fathers!
Why were the church fathers so unutterably dull and lacking in versatility as to be unable to (theologically) walk down the street and chew gum at the same time? In my judgment, they were smarter than most of us are, and they read biblical Greek as their first language (one area that I have not even begun to master).
No argument from me there, except to suggest that speaking the language was perhaps something to do with actually learning the language in a culture where such was necessary.
Why were there ten whole generations during which these biblical scholars described what we would today recognize as Calvinism,
The argument supporting the doctrines of grace as outlined by Calvinism is not one which finds great support or unity in the writings of the early church prior to Augustine, but then again neither does any system of soteriology find great agreement or support in those writings.
First and foremost, Calvinists believe that the Bible itself teaches the doctrines of grace, and of course the Bible predates all the church fathers including those ten whole generations.
Prior to Augustine, there was very little written about the doctrines of salvation that did not simply quote or paraphrase the Bible itself.
How one interprets these writings depends almost entirely on how one interprets the biblical texts they quote.
The early church was generally more concerned with bigger issues as you mentioned, such as: the nature of God (which they finally determined to be Trinitarian); the nature Christ (whom they finally determined to be fully man and fully God); gnosticism; surviving and lapsing under persecution; church government; etc.
At the same time, there is also no proof that anyone held to any other well-defined system of salvation. We may guess that such systems did exist, but that they simply did not make it into the preserved writings.
and referred to it as Manicheianism?
What? Manichaeanism was a warmed-over version of the old Gnosticism of Marcion which taught that the visible world was created by an evil Demiurge, not the true God.
In fact, the accusation of Manichaeanism is one that the Catholics appear to have used universally to smear all dissenting and evangelical sects in the Middle Ages, including the Waldenses.
(CHAPTER NINE -- WERE THE WALDENSES MANICHAEANS? THE WALDENSES WERE INDEPENDENT BAPTISTS
An Examination of the Doctrines of this Medieval Sect By Thomas Williamson)
And are you suggesting this Catholic argument is yet again valid to use against Calvinists today?
I do not claim that the fathers got everything right, but it certainly seems weak to suggest that the reason they rejected Calvinism for so long is that they didn't have enough time to sort it out (they even had better manuscripts of the New Testament than we have).
Man, having better manuscripts ought to solve it, right? I think that a wee bit naive given the insight given of man in Holy Writ!
I do not see the early Church as being against a robust doctrine of God’s utter sovereignty nor do I read them as if they were embracing the heresies of Palagianism which was to come, nor the state of affairs at the necessary Council of Orange down the track in the 6th century.
We are not trying to mis-characterize Calvinism. However, if Calvinism is true, but the majority of Christians throughout history (from the second century onward) have been unable to characterize it properly, then it does not seem to be very clearly presented, either by the authors of scripture or by the Calvinist proponents.
I do not pretend to have the ability to convince you otherwise Steve, but I can urge you to at the very least try a wee bit better at interacting with what Calvinists do say, i.e. actually interact with their best arguments.
Take them apart and present the right exegesis, just make sure it is exegesis though, that is all I ask.
I read reformed writers who do exactly that with your views all the time.
Interact with Calvin, Warfield or Owen or Turettin, Hodge, Witsius, Edwards, Rutherford, Beza, Luther, Haldane, Boston, Bunyan, Gill, Knox, Toplady, Newton, Spurgeon, Murray, Lloyd Jones, Pink, Piper, White, to name but a few that come immediate to my mind.
P.S. If you have indeed read Jonathan Edwards' "Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God" lately, and can honestly say that the portrayal of God there reminds you of anything Jesus would preach to the sinners of His day, I think we really do have a great gulf fixed between us and our Calvinist brethren--one that it is amazing to see crossed by anyone, going either direction!
Amazing!
Mark
, and interpret the same information more than one way, using reason to determine which of the interpretation makes the most sense is the correct thing to do. I suspect you use reason all the time when interpreting scripture. 
to respond.