NONE DARE CALL IT INSANITY

Who is David Mathis? David Mathis is one of the pastors of Cities Church in Minneapolis /St. Paul, Minnesota, and also works as the executive editor at “Desiring God,” an organization founded by John Piper, a popular speaker and author. Both Mathis and Piper are confirmed, certified, and card-carrying Calvinists.

Calvinism is a theological system with seriously troubling beliefs, one of which David Mathis articulated on August 30, 2007, in a 4-part series on "How to Talk about God's Sovereignty Over Sin." He wrote:  “. . . it seems to me that it is not wrong to say that God causes evil and sin.” Whoa! Are there those who agree with that idea, or is he out on the fringe somewhere?

Yes, other Calvinists agree: “God wills all things that come to pass...God desired for man to fall into sin...God created sin.” (R.C. Sproul, Jr.) “All things that happen...come to pass because God ordained them...every evil thought, word, and deed in all of history....He has foreordained everything...the mistake of a typist —even sin....” (Palmer)

One Calvinist, endeavoring to mitigate the force of teaching that God is the cause of evil writes, “God decrees everything, foreordains everything, causes everything, including sin, all of which are accurate. However, the Calvinists that teach these things also say and teach that this does not make God the author of sin.” The problem with that self-contradictory statement is obvious: how God can foreordain, decree, and cause sin without being its author? Calvinists cannot escape the logical consequences of their teaching by simply denying it to be so.

This teaching leads to some monstrous conclusions such as it was God who planned and foreordained 9-11 for His self-glorification. From that perspective, to declare that 9-11 was a horrible event is to besmirch God’s plan. Going by this reasoning, the distinction between good and evil is blurred because God is the cause of both.

When it’s all said; when it’s all done, the Calvinist is left proclaiming that God causes the evil He forbids." As pastor Andy Stanley says, "Their answer to that is to throw it into the mystery bucket." And none within that system dare to call it "insanity."

No wonder historian Will and Durant wrote of Calvin: “We shall always find it hard to love the man who darkened the human soul with the most absurd and blasphemous conception of God in all the long and honored history of nonsense.”