Back to Chapter 5 – The Nature and Scope of the Calvinist Difficulties
1. Calvinist universal divine causal determinism makes God the author and cause of all evil. God is responsible for all the evil in the world.
The Calvinists’ definition of God’s eternal decree is that He ordained “whatsoever comes to pass.” It is a definition of divine sovereignty that logically requires the conclusion that God directly causes all things to occur as they do. God is thereby made the author and cause of all evil. This is, of course, incoherent with God’s sinless nature, holiness, purity, goodness, and love.
2. On Calvinism, God is evil.
Consistent with the Calvinists’ universal divine causal determinism, which has God as the author and cause of evil, this entails that God is evil.
Little more needs to be said here. The scriptures and our moral intuitions clearly tell us that God cannot be the author and cause of evil thoughts, desires, and actions. But that is what Calvinism entails. The divine predetermination of evil acts, which is a logical requirement of Calvinism, is obviously inconsistent with the biblical witness to the just, pure, good, loving, and holy character of God in whom “there is no darkness at all.”[25]
We are not referring here to the suffering that God may cause due to his just judgment upon sin. This is not the same as portraying God as the predeterminer and cause of all evil thoughts, desires, and actions.
3. Calvinism removes our moral frame of reference, making God capricious and arbitrary.
Calvinists believe that out of all sinners undeserving of salvation, God has chosen some and not others to be saved for reasons unknown to us. Why God would choose one sinner over another when all things are equal with respect to all sinners is unknown to us. That God would actually intend that certain persons he had predetermined to exist would exist for eternal damnation is not only beyond reason, it is against both reason and morality as rooted in God’s very nature. If our moral intuitions about what God must be like in his moral nature and reasoning are mistaken, then, as C. S. Lewis puts it, “God is we know not what.” [26]
This is ultimately and inevitably to maintain that God is capricious and arbitrary in his moral nature and reasoning. Of course, there are times we need to be reoriented to the will and ways of God, but we expect them to always be in accord with his revealed nature. Perhaps we even need to have the faith to believe in circumstances that contain unknowns. But faith is not blind trust in a capricious being. As Lewis reminds us, we do not expect a complete reversal of our moral bearings when thinking about God. Struggling with the goodness of God as a result of the death of his wife Joy, he asks,
“Or could one seriously introduce the idea of a bad God, as it were by the back door, through a sort of extreme Calvinism? You could say we are fallen and depraved. We are so depraved that our ideas of goodness count for nothing; or worse than nothing – the very fact that we think something good is presumptive evidence that it is really bad. Now God has in fact – our worst fears are true – all the characteristics we regard as bad: unreasonableness, vanity, vindictiveness, injustice, cruelty. But all these blacks (as they seem to us) are really whites. It’s only our depravity that makes them look black to us.
And so what? This, for all practical (and speculative) purposes sponges God off the slate. The word good, applied to Him, becomes meaningless: like abracadabra. We have no motive for obeying him. Not even fear. It is true we have his threats and promises. But why should we believe them? If cruelty is from his point of view “good,” telling lies may be “good” too. Even if they are true, what then? If His ideas of good are so very different from ours, what he calls “Heaven” might be what we should call Hell, and vice-versa. Finally, if reality at its roots is so meaningless to us – or, putting it the other way round, if we are such total imbeciles – what is the point of trying to think either about God or about anything else? This knot comes undone when you try to pull it tight.”[27]
- Calvinism’s exhaustive theistic determinism undermines personal responsibility and culpability for one’s actions.
In a deterministic universe, whether theistic or materialistic, genuine human freedom, defined as a person being the sole source of their actions and having the ability to do otherwise, is eradicated. The “ought = can” which is inherent in the concepts of responsibility and culpability is rendered meaningless. “Ought” implies “can,” but the freedom necessary for the “ought” and “can” to be meaningful is rendered logically impossible within theistic determinism and a compatibilist view of “freedom.” Objective morality, and therefore responsibility and culpability, are all undermined by Calvinistic determinism.
- God predetermines and causes Christians to sin.
If God has predetermined and therefore causes “whatsoever comes to pass,” then what do we make of God causing Christians to sin, contrary to clear passages such as James 1:13, and yet God exhorts Christians to avoid sinning, along with the promise that they will not be tempted beyond their ability to resist sinning? (1 Cor. 10:13) And how is this coherent with the “unpardonable sin” which we take to be an unbelieving rejection of Jesus and the salvation God accomplished and offers in him by faith? (Mt. 12:31-32; Lk. 12:10) God causes people to commit the “unpardonable sin” of unbelief.
- Calvinists are disingenuous when they state they can tell unbelievers, “God loves you,” “Jesus died for you,” and “Come to Christ, believe and be saved!”
These statements are false or meaningless as they are heard by the non-elect. These statements and their connotations of an offer of salvation to the non-elect are disingenuous, given their underlying theology that salvation is only for a limited number of predetermined, chosen ones. For it to be a true and sincere offer of salvation, no non-elect person could hear that offer.
On Calvinism, if the offer of salvation and the call to faith inherent in the gospel message is a word from God to the sinner, and the sinner hearing it is not among the elect, then God is being disingenuous and false to that person. God is offering them something he does not will that they receive. God is lying to them.
- Calvinism is indifferent to the correspondence theory of truth with respect to the gospel.
What is true corresponds to the way something really is. When we speak the truth, we are telling it like it is. In light of the Calvinist doctrines of an eternal decree and predestination, either what is being said is true or it is not true with respect to the hearer. And there are only two alternatives. The hearer is unalterably either among the elect or the non-elect. He will either be caused by God to believe or not. He will either experience the “effectual call” or not. The ethical concern here lies in the fact that it is God speaking in the gospel message, and He is the God of truth, and His word, which is being heard by all, is truth. Therefore, if the words “God loves you” and “Jesus died for you” can be said to any person, then they must indeed be true for all persons. If they can be said to all sinners, then they must be true for all sinners. God’s word must correspond to reality for it to be true. So if God says “I love you” or “Jesus died for you” or “Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ and you will be saved,” then these must be true statements with respect to the hearer, and hence, they must be a real possibility. We can see that this is not so in Calvinism. The gospel, as a message from God himself, is a lie to the non-elect.
- The Calvinist claim that in some sense God loves the non-elect is not only unconvincing, but it is also absurd.
Some Calvinists assert that God loves the non-elect as well as the elect. For God to create certain persons for the very purpose of assigning them to an eternity of punishment and separation from Himself can in no way be understood to be the expression of love to those persons. It is impossible to define loving a person as predestining them to eternal separation from oneself and eternal punishment in hell.
- Calvinism is not the gospel as biblically defined, that is, as “good news.”
It is impossible to find “good news” in a message that tells sinners that there are only certain people that God has chosen for salvation, while all others he has predestined to eternal death.
Given our total inability, no sinner can respond positively to God. For you to be saved, you must be among those unconditionally elected. Therefore, Jesus died only for the elect. The atonement is limited. There is nothing you can do to be saved. God must effectual work in you by an irresistible grace, causing you to be regenerated or “born again,” and then you will believe, that is, if you are one of his elect. You will then be preserved by God and persevere in the faith to the end.
- The Calvinist “doctrines of grace” are not “good news” for the non-elect.
If the biblical definition of the “gospel” is “good news,” then the gospel message is not “good news” to the non-elect who hear it. The “good news” is at least that you are a sinner, God loves you, that Jesus died for you, and that through believing in Christ you can be saved. There is a sure hope for you in this life and the next. It is found in the person and work of Christ, who died for all of us as sinners that we might be redeemed and reconciled to God. Those who believe in him have everlasting life. To all who hear the gospel message, there is the imperative to repent and believe. God invites, calls, and offers eternal salvation to all.
Yet, when this message is heard by the non-elect, they cannot receive what God is offering them because he has not chosen them and therefore will not cause them to be saved. The “good news” does not apply to them. God is being duplicitous to the non-elect. It is not “good news” for the non-elect, and therefore, as such, it cannot be the gospel message for them. For them, by God’s own decision and action, the “gospel” becomes devoid of meaning. Is that possible?
Go to the next section: Existential and Epistemological Concerns
Back to Chapter 5 – The Nature and Scope of the Calvinist Difficulties
The Truth of the Gospel 