DEAD AS A DOORNAIL
First, we have to dispense with an idea that people have
about these modern Athenians, an idea that comes from Calvinism. One of the
five major points of Calvinism is Total Depravity (TD). The way the Calvinist
defines the term is that the Decaturite is like a dead body in a mortuary when
it comes to spiritual matters. They get this from an exaggerated definition of what
it means to be “dead in trespasses and sins” (Eph. 2).
Since he’s spiritually dead, Calvinism says, he can’t
respond to any gospel presentation or call to trust Christ. From their
viewpoint, response is impossible, just as any response from a dead person is out
of the question. They go so far as to say that you may as well be speaking to
that dead body in the mortuary. He can’t hear; he can’t understand; he can’t
respond.
TOXIC IDEA
This point in Calvinism has repercussions, one of which is
that, according this idea, God must regenerate a person before he can trust
Christ. Wait. What? God must regenerate
a lost person, then He gives him the faith to trust Christ? Yes, the Calvinist will
agree with that statement. A well-known Calvinist, R. C. Sproul relates this
experience:
One of the most dramatic moments in
my life for the shaping of my theology took place in a seminary classroom. One
of my professors went to the blackboard and wrote these words in bold letters:
"Regeneration Precedes Faith."
These words were a shock to my
system. I had entered seminary believing that the key work of man to effect
rebirth was faith. I thought that we first had to believe in Christ in order to
be born again. I use the words in order here for a reason. I was thinking in
terms of steps that must be taken in a certain sequence. I had put faith at the
beginning.
We note that Sproul calls faith a “work,” but the Bible
never does and says outright that faith is not a work in Romans 4:4-5. By
Calvinism’s definition of TD, he’s logically forced to agreeing with blackboard
statement of the professor. But we see the illogical of it when we realize that
if regeneration comes before faith, then for a split second, we have a born
again unbeliever who rejects Christ.
Yet the biblical order is 1) hear the gospel 2) trust Christ
then 3) regeneration. (Romans 10:14, 17).
MORE TOXICITY
Another repercussion of this can be illustrated by a
Christian doctor in Dallas whose waiting room was filled with evangelistic
Christian literature in the form of various tracts. Upon being convinced of the
TD of man and therefore being convinced that his unsaved patients were unable
to respond to any revelation from God, he removed all the literature. This
isn’t an isolated case: entire churches who’ve bought into Calvinism have seen
their missions giving and outreach dry up.
Is this Calvinistic definition of TD biblical? Is the
Decaturite so completely dead that he can’t respond to God’s revelation?
The Calvinist is, as apologist Dr. Norman Geisler points
out, exaggerating man’s TD; instead of seeing it as extensive (infecting every
facet of his personhood), he sees as intensive from his misunderstanding of spiritual
death. Spiritual death doesn’t mean the unbeliever is totally unable to respond
to the gospel.
Spiritual death means separation from God, just as physical
death means the separation of the soul and the spirit from the body. Though
spiritually dead, the lost person can
do things, for example, he can sin; he can choose life (Deut. 30:19-20; he can choose
to serve God (Josh. 24:15; Is. 1:18-19); he can reject Christ’s words (Jn.
5:39-40); he can reject God’s revelation (Jn. 7:17, 37-39; Matt. 11:28; 22:3) The
mortuary analogy doesn’t hold up under biblical/real life scrutiny.
REAL LIFE
Let’s look at real-life examples. In Genesis, we see God’s
going to Adam and Eve, now lost and separated from Him, spiritually dead and He
confronted them with their sin. The reason He went to them was to get a
positive response, just as He went to Cain to get a positive response. He sent
multitudinous prophets to Israel who confronted the nation with God’s
revelation, expecting them to respond positively to it. Christ and the apostles
confronted the lost and all of that activity assumes the possibility of a
positive response.
In the Bible, we run into many unsaved who, in that unsaved
state, without being regenerated, were responding to God in a positive way:
John and Andrew upon hearing John the Baptist, went to meet Jesus; Nathaniel,
upon hearing about Jesus went to see Him, as did Nicodemus. The Ethiopian
official, unsaved, was reading Isaiah 53, wanting to know what it meant when he
met Philip; Cornelius was praying and giving when he met Peter.
The Decaturite is expected to respond positively to natural
revelation—what he sees in the night sky--and is without excuse if he doesn’t
(Ps. 19:1; Rom. 1:18-20). The Decaturite has a God consciousness, yet he
suppresses that knowledge (Romans 1). Every atheist has a God-consciousness—you
have to be conscious of God’s existence to deny it.
In addition, the Decaturite has a God-given moral code, knowledge
of what’s right and wrong; it’s stamped in his DNA (Rom. 2:15). That knowledge
leads him into an insurmountable problem, but that will await next week.
We know a great deal about the Decaturite.
TO BE CONTINUED
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