WHY I'M NOT A CALVINIST PART I

Now...he [God] arranges all things by his sovereign counsel, in such a way that individuals are born, who are doomed from the womb to certain death, and are to glorify him by their destruction. So wrote John Calvin. 

If there ever was a statement that would give a couple second thoughts about having a family, that would would rank near the top. That declaration is one reason the historian Will Durant wrote, "We shall always find it hard to love the man, John Calvin, who darkened the human soul with the most absurd and blasphemous conception of God in all the long and honored history of nonsense." 

In this first article on the subject of why I'm not a Calvinist, I would start, not by picking the TULIP, but by taking a look at a text that's  the sign-off of Luke's second volume, Acts, chapter 28 and verses 23-31.

 Paul's in Rome awaiting his trial and while he's there, he's under house arrest living in "his own rented quarters." He'll stay in that situation for two years. During those 24 months, Paul is active with a capital "A." His daily routine consists of "welcoming the large numbers who came to him," (vss. 23, 30) engaging in "explaining," "testifying," trying to persuade," "preaching" and "teaching the Lord Jesus Christ."

The reaction to this hurricane of activity was that "some were being persuaded but others would not believe." What Paul is doing is what we call apologetics, a defense of the faith. Persuasion involves apologetics. The text points out that Paul did this "from morning until evening." That's as active as you can get.

With apologetics and persuasion come disagreements and arguments as verse 25 records. The problem with the word "arguments" is that it's a pejorative term, bringing to mind name-calling, yelling, and rudeness. But Christian persuasion and argumentation is not like that as Peter points out in I Peter 3:15 where he says that making a defense of the faith is to be done "with gentleness and reverence."  

Be that as it may, Acts 28:24 is of import for the title of this essay. Luke writes "others would not believe." Luke doesn't write, "others could not believe," but that "others would not believe."

According to the introductory statement by Calvin, there have been billions and billions of people born into the world for whom it was impossible for them to believe. As he said, "They were doomed from the womb." Therefore, they couldn't believe.

This idea has led into a cul-de-sac of despair. One example would be Calvinist John Piper's counsel to a defeated and discouraged letter writer who asked, "I have wanted to believe in Jesus and I've tried and tried to believe, but I just can't. What am I to do?" 

 Pastor Piper's answer wasn't encouraging. He paused with his head down and then said, "You can't believe because God hasn't given you the ability to believe."

To put this in the framework of Calvin's statement, Piper was saying that this letter writer could be one of that innumerable host who have been "doomed from the womb."

Piper, Calvinist that he is, blamed God for the questioner's problem. He had to; the system of Calvinism, imposed on the Bible, made him give that answer. 

The fact that they would not believe puts the blame squarely on them, not God, and is reminiscent of what Jesus said about Jerusalem, "Jerusalem, Jerusalem, . . . how often I wanted to gather your children together, just as a hen  gathers her young under her wings, and you were unwilling!" 

Calvinism, having God as the cause of everything, leads to difficult problems such as one author has written, "Did God cause Moses to argue with Him in Exodus 4, to the point that God's anger burned against him?  Did God cause the Israelites, when they were being led by Moses out of Egypt, to complain about His care for them, to worship the golden calf, to anger Him so much that He punished them with death in the desert?  So God, for His pleasure, causes people to argue and rebel, and then He gets angry about it and punishes them!?!  Interesting!  Sounds more like the actions of an irrational mythological Greek god than the God of the Bible."

 This reminds us of another text, this one in Romans 1: "They are without excuse." But if God created them doomed from the womb, they would have an excuse. 

In the Old Testament we read of Joshua's drawing a line in the sand by saying, "Choose you this day whom you will serve." They had a genuine choice. According to Calvin, they didn't have a choice, so was Joshua teasing them?

As we look at Acts 28, we also see another facet of New Testament evangelism: what Paul's doing puts a dagger through the heart of that trite and tough-sounding expression, "I just give them the gospel and let the chips fall where they may." Paul's methodology was a far cry from that. We read that he explained, testified, tried to persuade, preached, and taught the Lord Jesus Christ. That's not letting the chips fall where they may, that's using apologetics morning and night to persuade. He would never quit until a person said, "Leave me alone."

When the problems of Calvinism arise, such as "How can God create billions of people for whom it is impossible for them to receive Christ, myriads who are doomed from the womb and yet hold all of them responsible and punish them forever for their rejection?" Calvinists have a stock answer, as John MacArthur says: "I don't know; I'm not God; it's a mystery."

Like so many other aspects of Calvinism, it isn't a mystery; it's a contradiction. There's a simple way to solve the problem: the greatest gift God gave man is free will.

YOU HAVEN'T WHAT?

 Vincent Bugliosi (bool-YO-see) became world-famous for his prosecution and conviction of Charles Mason and his demonic "family" of killers who butchered movie star Sharon Tate, her unborn baby, Abigail Folger, Voytek Frykowski, and hair stylist Jay Sebring on August 9, 1969. 

Bugliosi was also an author who produced a massive 1,632 page tome titled, "Reclaiming History: The Assassination of President John F. Kennedy." In the book, he delivers a thorough and pains- taking examination showing all the conspiracy theories which cite the guilty parties as being the Mafia, Castro, Vice President Johnson, Texas oil men, the CIA, and the FBI to be nonsense by folks out to make a buck or two. His conclusion is that the communist Lee Harvey Oswald committed the murder of the President all by himself as the evidence shows.

In his travels here and abroad to speak about his book, he would open his presentation by asking for a show of hands as to how many in his audience believed that there was a conspiracy and that the Warren Report is filled with errors. Many a hand would grab the air. Then he would ask, "How many of you think Oswald acted alone?" Fewer folks would raise their hands. 

By the time he started asking the question, the Oliver Stone movie, "JFK," had come out which portrayed the assassination as being carried out by a whole host of conspirators and it had a tremendous influence on people around the world. Bugliosi said of the movie, "It's one lie after another."

Then Bugliosi would deliver the coups de grace to those who'd raised their hands indicating that the Warren Report was filled with errors and the report got it all wrong. He asked that group for one more show of hands, "How many of you have read the Warren Report?" Crickets. Nobody. 

Wait. They said, conditioned by the movie, "The Warren Commission report is full of errors and is a cover-up." But they hadn't read it. What?

We see the same thing when people consider the Bible: "It's full of errors." The Bible is THE BOOK which is the foundation of our Western civilization. Western Civilization was built on two verses from which all our blessings and rights flow. Only two verses: Genesis 1:26-27: "Then God said, “Let Us make mankind in Our image, according to Our likeness; and let them rule over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the sky and over the livestock and over all the earth, and over every crawling thing that crawls on the earth.” So God created man in His own image, in the image of God He created him; male and female He created them."

The Bible is our foundational book for our civilization and fewer and fewer have read it? If the Bible goes, so does the underpinning of western civilization. There's been a 60-year movement to bring about its demise, a movement which started on January 15, 1987, when Jesse Jackson and around 500 protesters marched down Palm Drive, Stanford University’s grand main entrance, chanting “Hey hey, ho ho, Western Civ has got to go.”

One of America's founding documents declares that the human being is not here by chance but as a special creation by a Creator; as Thomas Jefferson wrote in the Declaration of Independence, "We [not just Jefferson but "we," the Founding Fathers] hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights . . ."

Contrast Genesis 1:26-27 with those cultures and political beliefs built on rejecting the Genesis account and we find that such philosophies and cultures have slain their millions: from Lenin to Stalin, from Mao to Castro, they have lined up and executed millions, millions, and more millions of their own people. From Hitler's Youth to Mao's Red Guards we see that human life is held to be, not dirt cheap, but less than dirt cheap. Wherever such a rejection of Genesis 1 goes, it erects the monuments of mass graves, starving masses, political prisoners, torture chambers, and concentration camps. 

Audiences admitted to Bugliosi they'd never read the Warren Report and now generations have never read Genesis 1, the Gospel of John, or THE BOOK itself; yet they say, "It's full of errors."

I WAS NOT A GOOD FATHER

Back in the 1950s, Steve Allen was a household name. He was a multi-talented television personality, radio personality, musician, composer, actor, comedian, and writer. In 1954, he achieved national fame as the co-creator and host of The Tonight Show, which was the first late night television talk show. 

Mr. Allen was a television pioneer who invented the format of what we take for granted today as late night television, minus the acidic political diatribes. He came up with the concept of an introductory monologue followed by music and celebrity interviews. 

He was different from what we see today in another respect: he was intellectually oriented also originating a TV program called, "Meeting of the Minds,"which aired on PBS from 1977 to 1981. The show featured actors playing guests (Socrates, Plato, etc.) who had significant roles in world history. The guests would interact with each other, playing their parts and with Steve Allen as the moderator, discussing philosophy, religion, history, science, and many other topics. (That sounds like TV from another planet today. (Cerebral)

Before his death on October 30, 2000, Steve Allen talked about his role as a father, confessing, "I was not a good father." But before we get into that, we need to hear his explanation of his earlier life. Steve was a youth during the Great Depression of the 1930s, a time so difficult that it's unimaginable to our pampered lives today. He characterized it as a time when "everybody was poor." 

Steve's father died when Allen was an infant, so he never knew nor had a father. He left home during his teenage years and began roaming around the western United States. He said that he left with $7 and spent $1 a day on food, running out of money in a week. He said that having no food makes a person do unthinkable things--he became a beggar, asking strangers for a dime or a quarter. 

The national anthem of the Great Depression was the 1932 song, "Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?" which is on YouTube. The song spoke the truth as Allen's life demonstrated. 

Some gave, others had empty pockets too. He said that he was reduced to eating garbage and was grateful when he found some, such as the time the found an empty can with a few beans in it. Brushing and blowing away the ants, it was with joy he ate the meager contents.

He said that the depression did something to his generation: they swore that their children would never have to live like they did, so they went about encouraging their children to have savings accounts and giving them things that they themselves weren't able to have which was a natural reaction to their lives in the "Dirty Thirties" as those terrible times were called. 

Mr. Allen said that his generation received all kinds of training, but no instruction in two things: how to be a good husband and a good father. He said that a man should take a wife and be married to her for the rest of his life and that was a good thing. (He didn't.) But other than that, being a husband and being a father--there was no training whatsoever. He compared it to being pushed into the deep waters of marital and family life without knowing how to swim and being told, "Good luck."

He said that his idea of being a good father was to tell your kids you love them, give them a hug, and that was it. Later, he came to realize that was not sufficient, although good in and of itself, but woefully lacking. 

This where Steve Allen and the Bible come into play. The Bible gives the believer the instruction he needs to be both a good husband and a good father: it begins in Ephesians 5:18: "And do not get drunk with wine, in which there is debauchery, but be filled with the Spirit." 

This filling is letting the Holy Spirit, who indwells the believer, control him. We do this by trusting and obeying the Lord as His Word directs. That is the filling of the Holy Spirit. From that foundational premise, the believer has access to Deuteronomy 6:4-9 and the book of Proverbs with its instructions to fathers.

But here's the problem, one of Mr. Allen's own making: when it came to the Bible, he "drew on the expertise of biblical scholars, theologians, and philosophers to demonstrate that fundamentalist assumptions about the reliability and authenticity of the Bible as the inviolable Word of God simply have no rational or factual basis." 

 He believed that the Bible "contained errors, inconsistencies, and self-contradictions." One might take a guess that "the expertise of the biblical scholars" he consulted was that of those of the higher critical liberal persuasion, not the expertise of Walvoord, Ryrie, Chafer, or Geisler, each one available to him. This is normally the case when experts are sought and quoted; fallen man chooses the wrong ones. 

It's sad that Steve Allen lived with the fact that he was not a good father.