Back to Chapter 6 – What’s At Stake? The Character of God and the Truth of the Gospel
Most Christian leaders and laypeople are willing to ignore the negative intellectual and hermeneutical ramifications of Calvinism in the name of Christian love and to avoid ecclesial division. And as long as Calvinists preach and teach inconsistently with their own theology, non-Calvinists are content to leave well enough alone. But this is not an acceptable response for the thinking Christian and is a reason why the controversy continues. We just will not face the crux of the matter. Certainly, we ought to take the biblical mandates to work towards love and unity seriously. But surely such commands and exhortations cannot be used to justify interpretive and theological incoherence, inconsistency, and contradiction, especially when these distort the gospel as “good news.” Surely we ought to be about the task of seeking and speaking the truth in love concerning the core message of the biblical revelation – the message of the “good news” of salvation in Jesus Christ.
But most evangelicals, along with their leadership, are in denial of the fact that they are embracing two mutually exclusive soteriologies which entail incompatible views on the nature of God and the gospel message. They are in denial about the logical entailments of these views, as well as the hermeneutical implications of thinking that incompatible positions can both be what Scripture teaches. This is a faulty hermeneutic. According to a sound hermeneutic, what is logically entailed is that the non-Calvinist and Calvinist theologies cannot both be the truth of Scripture. Calvinist Greg Gilbert writes,
“There would be nothing healthy at all in Christians who couldn’t care less how we define and understand the gospel. On the other hand, I think the energy generated by discussion about the gospel points to a general fog of confusion that swirls around it these days. When you come right down to it, Christians just don’t agree on what the gospel is – even Christians who call themselves evangelical.” (Gilbert, 2010, p. 17)
This is an honest and accurate statement. One that is rare coming from a Calvinist. In contrast to this confusion, we have a biblical mandate to pursue and preserve doctrinal and gospel truth. Certainly, we need to speak the truth in love, but the only kind of love worth having is the kind that will not sacrifice intellectual integrity in the search for the truth we are to speak to one another. Calvinist John MacArthur states,
“Indifference, timidity, compromise, and nonresistance are all ruled out as options for Christians when the gospel is under attack.” (MacArthur, 2007, p. xxv)
I agree. Therefore, this intellectual and theological relativism just won’t do. Two mutually exclusive views on soteriology, the nature of God, and the gospel message cannot both be true. It doesn’t hold intellectually, and it doesn’t comport with the doctrines of the inspiration and authority of Scripture. The Scriptures do not testify to inconsistent or contradictory “truths.”
Hence, to remedy this situation, we need to revive the discipline of hermeneutics and argue that the canons of reason and the law of non-contradiction are indispensable to a proper and sound hermeneutic. We need to press for intellectual, logical, moral, theological, and gospel clarity. We need to pursue logical and moral clarity to arrive at the truth, not only about the gospel, but about the nature of God and his relationship to us, for the character of God is also at stake in this controversy. I contend that when a hermeneutic that includes coherence, consistency, and the law of non-contradiction is applied to the texts in this controversy, then the Calvinist’s interpretations and theology will be found to be unbiblical.
Read the next section – The Character of God
References
Gregory D. Gilbert, What is the Gospel? (Wheaton: Crossway Books, 2010), 17.
John MacArthur, The Truth War: Fighting for Certainty in an Age of Deception (Nashville: Thomas Nelson, 2007) p. xxv
Back to Chapter 6 – What’s At Stake? The Character of God and the Truth of the Gospel
The Truth of the Gospel 