WHY I'M NOT A CALVINIST PART III

 

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.

A fundamental teaching of Calvinism is God controls our decisions and we're responsible for what He makes us do. That sounds contradictory. A Calvinist will say, "It's an apparent contradiction." 

He realizes that it's 4th down and 99 yards to go, so what does he do? He does what any coach would do: he punts with three words: "It's a mystery." He will follow by saying, "I don't know the answer. There's no explanation. 

So what does the Calvinist tell us what to do? John MacArthur advises, "Just endure the pain." Those struggling with the "pain" might say a better word is "torture." 

Let's put it this way: if I said, "God can sin." Every one would say, "God can't sin because He's perfectly good; He's the absolute moral standard." 

 In reply, I said, "That's true, God is perfectly good, and He also sins." You would rightly think that I had lost my mind and you'd call the nice men in the white coats to take me to a facility for observation and eventual incarceration. Why would you do that?

You'd call them because I believe in two mutually contradictory statements, statements like"God controls our decisions but we're responsible for what He makes us do." But what if I then said to the nice men in the white coats, "What I said only looks like a contradiction to you, but not to me because I'm infinitely wiser than you." 

 That's what the Calvinist is saying, "It only looks contradictory to us, but it's not contradictory to God." That answer means, "There are two different realms of reason and yours is suspect." 

Yet in Isaiah 1, we read where God says to Israel, "Come, let us reason together." The Lord is challenging Israel to a formal trial. In the light of Israel's condition (vv. 2-17), there was only one reasonable course of action. There aren't two realities of reasoning or else man and God couldn't reason together. 

MacArthur said, "We all have little pea brains. Therefore, when you inderstand [that the statement has no logical explanation] then you understand Calvinism, you got it! There's no need to buy another book or listen to another CD, you got it!" He's saying, "If you see that the statement doesn't make sense, you understand Calvinism."

What's going on here is that Calvinism makes truth fluid. Contradictions are how we know we've come to a false conclusion. We operate that way every day. If you were to ask, "How is it possible for God to be perfectly good and sin?" and I were to reply, "I don't know, it's a mystery. Who am I to reduce God to a human level of understanding." Then I've made truth fluid. That's what truth becomes when you punt to mystery when there's a clear contradiction. This is post-modernism come into the church.  

Post modernism involves "leaving the certainty of a single, integrated, and sense-making narrative, and entering into a period cut adrift from certainty, plunged into multiple, incompatible, heterogeneous, fragmented, contradictory and ambivalent meanings." According to post modernism, Calvinism is correct even when it teaches contradictory, mutually exclusive views. Of course, in post modernism, everyone is right.

In logic, according to the law of non-contradiction, "a thing cannot be both correct and incorrect at the same time. A car can't be blue and not blue at the same time. A man cannot be running and not running at the same time. These are contradictions. 

Contradictions are two opposing statements which means they're opposites, they oppose one another. As we apply this to reality, a person cannot be both alive and dead at the same time and in the same sense." ("The Apologetic")

It's interesting that, according to the Calvinists themselves, in every single Q/A session this question always comes up: "How can God control our every decision, but we're responsible for what He makes us do?" The fact is, they admit that they all struggle with this question, a question, for which, as they admit, "There is no answer."

MacArthur went on to say, "I can't resolve this. You can't figure it out." This sounds like a plea for people to stop thinking. But as he admits, we Calvinists can't stop thinking about it. It's impossible. As he said to one questioner, "You'll struggle with it until the day you die. This question doesn't go away. You'll still have this question after I explain it to you. You're not going to get an answer. You're not going to be satisfied with what I tell you." 

Calvinism doesn't bring joy, but life-long pain; by saying there's no answer, by admitting you're not going to get satisfaction, Calvinism isn't good news.