WHY I'M NOT A CALVINIST PART II

 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. 

Meagan Phelps trusted Christ as her savior. She moved among a circle of Christian friends.

 That's when it happened: she came into contact with Calvinism through Romans 9:11-13: "For though the twins [Jacob and Esau] were not yet born and had not done anything good or bad, so that God’s purpose according to His choice would stand, not because of works but because of Him who calls, it was said to her, “The older will serve the younger.” Just as it is written: “Jacob I have loved, but Esau I have hated.”

Those verses, as Calvinism taught her to view them, ignited a fire storm of doubt in her heart as well as an intellectual battle which was leading her to overturn her concept of God's loving the world according to John 3:16. If she didn't find some answers to the questions her racing mind was producing, the results would be catstrophic.

"How could God hate someone before they were ever born." "How could God create human beings for the purpose of torturing them in hell forever and ever?" Those questions needed answering.

Let's let Meagan relate what it was like back in those days of her spiritual crisis. She said of Calvinism, "This is why I'm not a Christian anymore. What Calvinism is telling me is that God created some people as vessels of His wrath who were made for the express purpose of destruction, being in hell forever."

She continues, "I was told that whatever you do is foreordained by God and He is the cause of it all that you do and that you can't resist His will. Therefore, whatever you do that's wrong, God is the cause of it and then He turns around and punishes you for doing what He's foreordained for you to do. This is evil."

Another author echoed the same sentiments: "Calvinists say that God punishes man for what man can’t help and that God supposedly commands men to do something men can’t do and then turns around and judges those men for what they can’t do."

She relates that she was in a desperate situation and that she began to ask questions. Then, in amazement and disappointment, she said, "I was told, 'You can't ask that question. Who are you to question God?'" 

That's one of the stock answers of the Calvinists when they run into a Meagan Phelps--"You can't question God." But Meagan wasn't questioning God; she was questioning Calvinism's viewpoint on Romans 9.

She said, "There was no explanation that made any sense to me. My questions and how I felt didn't matter to them."

Where is Meagan today? She's left Christianity, telling people, "I'm not a Christian any more." But she goes farther, saying, "I'm an atheist." 

She's not alone in her departure. The singer, Derek Webb, who once wrote songs promoting Calvinism is now an atheist and to one who was trying to persuade him to come back into the fold, he used Calvinism against him, telling him, "I don’t need your persuasion because if God has predetermined me to be a reprobate there’s nothing that you can do to change that."

Tim Stratten states his experience in evangelism, "What I discovered was that many of the atheists I was talking to had been raised in the church and had been taught Calvinism. 

"Moreover, they held to a view called, 'theological determinism.' Simply stated it means: God causally determines and controls all things. This led so many to see God as the author of evil. If God was even slightly evil, then He was not perfectly good, and if God is not perfectly good, then He is not worthy of worship. Since God, by definition, is worthy of worship, they concluded that God does not exist at all."

One author expounded on Meagan's dilemma: "Calvin believed that God's absolute decree to predestine an individual to eternal death was not a wonderful or glorious thing, instead Calvin confessed that it was a dreadful and horrible decree. Is it not a horrible decree that God would create something for eternal perdition? And it is dreadful and horrible indeed! How could we respond in any other way than to say such a final ends (sic) is horrible and dreadful! The possibility that God would create any person for eternal death calls into question the goodness of God. The best Calvinists scholars who affirm Calvin's doctrine of double predestination admit that is a "mystery" how God may make such an absolute decree and predestine anyone to hell." Is it a mystery or a contradiction? It's no mystery once we see that God created man with free will.

Calvinism doesn't necessarily lead to atheism for everyone, but it presents a dreadful and horrible picture of God, a picture that has led many a Meagan into making shipwreck of the faith. 

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.

SUFFERING WITH THE KING JAMES BIBLE

 There's a text in the King James Bible that has provided fodder for the critics of Scripture and needlessly so. The verse concerns an incident in the life of the great prophet Elisha just after the translation of his mentor Elijah to heaven without seeing our ancient enemy physical death. 

We read in II Kings 2 these words: "And he went up from thence unto Bethel: and as he was going up by the way, there came forth little children out of the city, and mocked him, and said unto him, Go

up, thou bald head; go up, thou bald head. And he turned back, and looked on them, and cursed them in the name of the Lord. And there came forth two she bears out of the wood, and tare forty and two children of them." (KJV)

Wait. What? "Little children" being cursed by the prophet for a harmless teasing and they get ripped apart by bears for that? Did not the translators see something wrong with that scenario? Did they not connect any dots back to the Exodus and realize that God did not hold anyone under the age of 20 responsible for the rebellion on the way to the land of promise. That text alone would have told them that something was amiss with the translation, "little children."

Had they only turned back to Genesis 37:2, they would have figured it out. In that text, they would have found the same Hebrew word that they translated "little children" and found that it specifically referred to a young adult of 17. Hardly a "little child." It was a word used of those young men in Israel who were qualified for the draft, again, hardly a "little child." 

Elisha was confronted with young adults, pagans, who were threatening him, mocking the translation of God's prophet by chanting, "Go up, you baldhead! Go up, you baldhead!” They were a pagan, idol-worshiping mob, outnumbering him and capable of killing him. This incident occurred in Bethel, a center of idolatry in Israel; it was one of the places where the golden calf was. 

Elisha's approach triggered a mass demonstration against him by many young men.  "Baldhead" is a term of disrespect. The idolaters challenged Elisha to "go up" to heaven as Elijah had done—if Elisha could!

These youths were typical of a nation that mocked the messengers of God, hated God's Word, and belittled His prophets. Elisha wasn't motivated by personal pride but by a desire for God's glory, He pronounced God's curse on them for their disrespect of His prophet and Himself. 

They had been warned that God is not to be mocked and that warning came in Leviticus 26:21-22: "Yet if you show hostility toward Me and are unwilling to obey Me, I will increase the plague on you seven times according to your sins. I will also let loose among you the animals of the field, which will deprive you of your children and eliminate your cattle, and reduce your number so that your roads become deserted."

The translators of the King James unwitting wrote a disastrous translation, that has caused a misunderstanding for hundreds of years.

THE BALLAD OF THE TEENAGE QUEEN

"There's a story in our town
Of the prettiest girl around
Golden hair and eyes of blue
How those eyes could flash at you."

(From "The Ballad of the Teenage Queen")

 So goes the first verse of the song, "The Ballad of the Teenage Queen," made popular in 1958. We might use that first verse as a metaphor for those pretty stories that float through our churches in all their sermonic glory. These stories have golden hair and eyes of blue which make them irresistible to the homelitician in a Saturday night search for the inspiring illustration that carries an emotional impact. Here is one of those stories:

"Shortly after Dallas Theological Seminary was founded in 1924, it almost folded. It came to the point of bankruptcy. All the creditors were ready to foreclose at twelve noon on a particular day. That morning, the founders of the school met in the president’s office to pray that God would provide the desperately needed funds to keep the school open. 

 "In that prayer meeting was Harry Ironside. When it was his turn to pray, he said in his refreshingly candid way, 'Lord we know that the cattle on a thousand hills are Thine. Please sell some of them and send us the money.'

"Just about that time, a tall Texan in boots and an open-collar shirt strolled into the business office. “Howdy!” he said to the secretary. 'I just sold two carloads of cattle over in Fort Worth. I’ve been trying to make a business deal go through, but it just won’t work. I feel God wants me to give this money to the seminary. I don’t know if you need it or not, but here’s the check,' and he handed it over.

"The secretary took the check and, knowing something of the critical nature of the hour, went to the door of the prayer meeting. and timidly tapped. Dr. Lewis Sperry Chafer, the founder and president of the school, answered the door and took the check from her hand. When he looked at the amount, it was for the exact sum of the debt. Then he recognized the name on the check as that of the cattleman. Turning to Dr. Ironside, he said, 'Harry, God sold the cattle.'” 

The story is lovely; it qualifies because of its hair of gold and eyes of blue. Irresistible to the max. However, it's a glurge. It's been circulated all over Christendom from pulpit to pulpit. The problem is, it's a fabrication. (The one part that is true is that Chafer, having stubbornly copied the financial policies of George Mueller, had driven the school into a huge debt that left faculty members unpaid and creditors knocking at the door.) 

 According to a 1978 letter from Dr. John F. Walvoord, in answer to an inquiry regarding this story, he dispelled the answer to this prayer as saving the day at DTS and set the record straight. He wrote:

"Actually, he (Dr.Ironside) made a remark about the cattle on a thousand hills belonging to the Lord and he hoped that someone would donate cattle to the seminary. Out of this, however, the seminary received one steer which was used in our dining room to help feed our students. I was not there at the time, but I understand that this was the response. It had nothing to do with paying off our debt, as the story was told.

"The story was circulated around the country, and in the process of circulation it accumulated some additional points that were not exactly correct." 

There are stories like that and they're glurges--stories such as the football player and his blind father in the bleachers, NASA's computers and Joshua's longest day, the atheist professor and the failure of the dropped beaker (or chalk) to break, and the camel's going through the Camel Gate in Jerusalem. 

The telling of these stories that sound too good to be true, once discovered to be fallacious, put a dent in the speaker's credibility, what Aristotle said was one of the three essential traits a persuasive speaker must have, his ethos. 

So the moral is that there are enough true stories of faith and prayer moving mountains that we ought not give skeptics glurge tales which can be easily discredited. Before repeating such stories, check them out as best you can.

 

 

THE AUTHOR WHO DIDN'T UNDERSTAND WHAT HE WROTE

 

Russell Kirk (1918-1994) authored thirty-two books on political theory, the history of ideas, education, cultural criticism, and supernatural tales. Both Time and Newsweek described him as one of America’s leading thinkers, and The New York Times acknowledged the scale of his influence when it wrote that Kirk’s 1953 landmark book, The Conservative Mind, “gave American conservatives an identity and a genealogy and catalyzed the postwar movement.”

One of those 32 tomes is a massive one that chews up 475 pages of wood pulp titled "The Roots of American Order." At the back of the book there's a "Suggested Reading List" for each of the twelve chapters. The list begins on page 479 and ends on 503. That's a lot of books for supplemental reading. Even the casual reader can see that we're not dealing with a dummy. Au contraire, we're dealing with Russell Kirk, a scholar's scholar. 

But yet, one might wonder if he really understood what he wrote in "The Roots of American Order." The reason we ask is because of what he wrote on page 149 in contrast to what he wrote on page 151, a scant three pages later. In the chapter titled, "The Genius of Christianity," he quotes from the book of Acts so the reader can listen to Paul's conversation with Agrippa. 

Paul is giving his account of his Damascus Road experience, a testimony which Paul ends by telling Agrippa what the resurrected Christ told him the purpose of his calling was, ". . . to open their eyes so that they may turn from darkness to light, and from the power of Satan to God, that they may receive forgiveness of sins and an inheritance among those who have been sanctified by faith in Me."

That statement is clear: to turn from darkness to light, and from the power of Satan to God, to have forgiveness of sins and an inheritance requires only faith in Christ. (Acts 28:16). Paul mentions nothing other than that. That's what Kirk copied from his New Testament. The problem is, did he understand what he copied from the Bible? 

When the reader casts his eyes on the last sentence of the second paragraph, on page 151, Kirk writes, "Through repentance and obedience, and the operation of God's grace, redemption is possible." The reader notes that "faith in Me" has dropped out since being inscribed three pages earlier. But that's not all.

Kirk cited Paul as saying that redemption is "by faith in Me [Christ]." The alert reader has to ask, "Which is it? From whence does this redemption come? Through faith or "through repentance, obedience, and the operation of God's grace? 

As that famous line in a movie says, "What we have here is a failure to communicate." On one page, redemption comes in one way and then three pages later it comes another way but by the rules of sane logic, both can't be right. If it's by faith, it can't be by obedience and if it's by obedience, it can't be by grace. We have a train wreck of logic here. 

And this brings us to the point: Russell Kirk was a scholar extraordinaire. But he's like everybody else: when scholars leave their field of expertise, they're as dumb as the rest of us.