Back to Chapter 6 – What’s At Stake? The Character of God and the Truth of the Gospel
For many, their primary objection to Calvinism is with its implications for the character of God. For the non-Calvinist, Calvinism impugns the character of God. New Testament professor Glen Shellrude writes an excellent chapter titled “Calvinism and Problematic Readings of New Testament Texts Or, Why I am Not a Calvinist” in the work Grace for All: The Arminian Dynamics of Salvation. He points out several ways in which Calvinism contravenes what Scripture tells us about the character of God. He mentions the moral exhortations God gives us in Scripture and observes,
“If these exhortations are read within the framework of theological determinism, then the implication is that the extent of the believer’s obedience is determined by what God has ordained for them at any moment; it is never by the person in his exercise of the gift of grace-empowered libertarian freedom. Since God’s grace is “irresistible,” when Christians sin it is ultimately because God withheld the grace that would have enabled obedience. When Christians divorce their spouses, refuse to forgive, are self-centered, give into temptation, bring shame on the Gospel, and abuse their wives or children, then the explanation must be that in these instances God has withheld the grace enabling obedience to the moral exhortations of Scripture because he wanted these sins to be committed.
It would appear that the positive function of moral exhortations is to inform believers what obedience will look like in those times when God ordains that they will be obedient. In those times when God withholds the grace that would enable obedience, the moral exhortations function as an indictment on the behavior which God ordains…These conclusions are necessary deductions from the Calvinist view that God ordains everything that happens and that God’s grace is always irresistible. As Williams and Peterson put it, “God sovereignly directs and ordains…our sinful acts as well as the good that we do.”[1]
God also gives believers affirmations, warnings, and encouragements, but Shellrude observes,
“…in the Calvinist reading of Scripture, the motivational effectiveness of many Scriptural statements is dependent on the reader being deceived. God’s people are motivated to faithful service and discipleship with the promise of eschatological blessing when in fact God has already determined the precise experience of blessing and rebuke that will be true of each person. Believers are promised that God will enable them to resist temptation when in reality he has already determined that in many situations they will give in to temptation and sin. The warnings against apostasy motivate believers to persevere in their faith when in reality apostasy is a theoretical impossibility. God assures his people that he will enable them to be renewed in their thinking while simultaneously ordaining that they embrace a wide range of erroneous ideas. The promise is made that the Spirit will enable obedience when in reality God only intends that believers have a very limited experience of obedience. In these and many other instances, the effectiveness of Scriptural affirmations is dependent on the reader being deceived, i.e. reading them on the assumption of libertarian freedom.”[2]
As to the “revealed will” of God that we are to obey and the “secret will” of God that refers to all things which he has predetermined to occur, Shellrude observes that,
“The result is a view of God that represents him as having two distinct wills which are deeply conflicted and contradictory.”[3]
Shellrude also states that Calvinists,
“…typically affirm that God loves each and every person (though some dissent on this point) while simultaneously ordaining that the majority of those he “loves” will have no opportunity to avoid the horror of eternal separation. Calvinism affirms that God is pure holiness while simultaneously ordaining and rendering certain all the sins and evils in human experience. Calvinists claim God holds people responsible for their choices even though every single choice has been choreographed by God and people can never do other than what God has ordained they do…Each of these positions is logically and morally offensive as well as being without parallel in human experience. If human parents were to act with respect to their children in any way similar to how Calvinists claim God acts then those parents would be declared moral monsters.
Some Calvinists are honest enough to admit the incoherence of their interpretations and theology. Shellrude continues,
Edwin Palmer acknowledges the absurdity of what Calvinism affirms: “He [the Calvinist] realizes that what he advocates is ridiculous….The Calvinist freely admits that his position is illogical, ridiculous, nonsensical and foolish.”[4] However he argues that the Scriptural evidence requires one to embrace this intrinsically absurd view of God. If God has created us with a rational and moral discernment which to some extent mirrors his own, then the cluster of logical and moral absurdities inherent in the Calvinist system suggests that there is a problem with the theology itself. The appropriate response is not to celebrate absurdity, or as is more commonly done, to appeal to mystery, but rather to rethink the theology in light of the totality of the Scriptural evidence.”[5]
We must observe this clear instance of the hermeneutical divide. Logical and moral coherence are essential elements in Shellrude’s hermeneutic. That is, he considers the logical and moral incoherence of Calvinism to be indicative of the Calvinist’s misinterpretation of Scripture. Yet Calvinists, like Palmer, simply ignore their problems of logical and moral incoherence. For them, these have no interpretive significance in respect to determining whether their interpretations are valid. Palmer holds to a hermeneutic of incoherence.
A.W. Tozer writes,
“What is God like? What kind of God is he? How may we expect him to act toward us and toward all created things? Such questions are not merely academic. They touch the far-in reaches of the human spirit, and their answers affect life and character and destiny.”[6]
Tozer also states,
“That our idea of God correspond as nearly as possible to the true being of God is of immense importance to us….Only after an ordeal of painful self-probing are we likely to discover what we actually believe about God.
A right conception of God is basic not only to systematic theology but to practical Christian living as well. It is to worship what the foundation is to the temple; where it is inadequate or out of plumb the whole structure must sooner or later collapse. I believe there is scarcely an error in doctrine or a failure in applying Christian ethics that cannot be traced finally to imperfect and ignoble thoughts about God.”[7]
According to Tozer, what is at stake here are matters “that affect life, character, and destiny.”
Professor Scot McKnight writes the foreword in Austin Fischer’s book, Young, Restless, and No Longer Reformed. He relates Fischer’s conclusions about the nature of the Calvinist God who predetermines all things.
“No one, [Fischer] learned, can look Auschwitz in the face and not wonder how such a colossal act of barbaric evil can square with a God who determines all things. No one, he also learned, can stare at the prospects of hell in the traditional sense and not wonder about the goodness of God – or at least ask “Why?” And why would God create so many – the numbers stagger – knowing that most (again in the traditional Calvinist sense) will be there suffering forever and ever? In other words, he learned he had to believe some really horrible things about God to sustain his Calvinism. As Austin says it, “And this is what happened to me at the core of the black hole of self-glorifying deity: the lights went out and I was left sitting in the dark in an absurd universe with an enigmatic deity of naked power.
And that God, he concluded, was not the God of the Bible.”[8]
The Calvinist/non-Calvinist controversy reveals diametrically opposed conceptions about the nature of God and his sovereignty. Indeed, I affirm with Fischer that it can be convincingly argued that the God of Calvinist determinism is not the God of the Bible.
So, what is God truly like? Tozer, for one, does not think the Calvinist idea of God corresponds as nearly as possible to the true being of God. The major problem we have already identified is the Calvinist definition of God’s sovereignty as a universal divine causal determinism. Tozer writes,
“Here is my view: God sovereignly decreed that man should be free to exercise moral choice, and man from the beginning has fulfilled that decree by making his choice between good and evil. When he chooses to do evil, he does not thereby countervail the sovereign will of God but fulfills it, inasmuch as the eternal decree decided not which choice the man should make but that he should be free to make it. If in His absolute freedom God has willed to give man limited freedom, who is there to stay His hand or say, “What doest thou?” Man’s will is free because God is sovereign. A God less than sovereign could not bestow moral freedom upon His creatures. He would be afraid to do so.”[9]
He adds,
“Certain things have been decreed by the free determination of God, and one of these is the law of choice and consequences. God has decreed that all who willingly commit themselves to His Son Jesus Christ in the obedience of faith shall receive eternal life and become sons of God. He has also decreed that all who love darkness and continue in rebellion against the high authority of heaven shall remain in a state of spiritual alienation and suffer eternal death at last.
…There is freedom to choose which side we shall be on but no freedom to negotiate the results of the choice once it is made.”[10]
So here again, the crux of the matter emerges. A resolution to this controversy is possible, but only if we can agree that our God-given principles of reason and moral intuitions are essential to the interpretive process and reliable indicators of interpretive validity. To have an exegesis, which is necessary for getting at an author’s intent, does not necessarily secure an accurate understanding of the author’s true intent. It has to be a correct exegesis. And to be confident that one’s exegesis is correct, it must be subject to superintending hermeneutical principles. One of these principles is coherence. Again, McKnight writes,
“I had Austin’s experience. As a college student, I fell in love with the architecture of Calvinism. I read a sermon from Spurgeon each day for months and months, I read John Owen bit by bit, and John Brown on Hebrews, and I drank in the wine of Calvinism until I was inebriated in the best sense of the word. I loved it – I loved its fine lines of thinking, and I think what I liked best is that it both put me in my place and God in his, and I liked that sense of all things being where they ought to be. Until I encountered passages in the Bible that shook that theology to the core.
I had been star-struck by Calvinist theologians and still was, but I found the exegesis less than compelling. Passage after passage convinced me that while the big picture – God’s glory in the face of Christ – was as good as our theology can get, the finer nuances just didn’t work with how the Bible frames the freedom of God’s love and human responsiveness. …I still read Calvin and Piper and Edwards, but with a hermeneutic of suspicion.”[11]
When McKnight says, “I encountered passages in the Bible that shook that theology to the core” and that Calvinism “just didn’t work with how the Bible frames the freedom of God’s love and human responsiveness,” he means that he found the Calvinists’ interpretations of certain texts to be inconsistent or contradictory with other texts of Scripture.
For many, the fact that Calvinism impugns the character of God is enough for them to reject it. I submit that we need to continue to thoroughly and honestly think through both exegetically and philosophically the problematic implications of Calvinism with respect to the character of God. We need to highlight this serious problem in Calvinist theology.
But Calvinism also has negative effects on the nature of salvation and the content of the gospel. There are profoundly negative ramifications for the gospel as “good news” when the doctrines of an eternal divine decree, sovereignty, and election are defined in terms of a universal divine causal determinism. This determinism not only has adverse implications for the character of God and human freedom and responsibility, but also a knowledge of God’s salvific will and saving relationship to us. That message must remain the truly “good news” that it is. To this issue we now turn.
Read the next section – Walls, Dongell, and Allen on the Importance of the Controversy
Back to Chapter 6 – What’s At Stake? The Character of God and the Truth of the Gospel
Footnotes
[1] “Peterson and Williams, Not an Arminian, 161. To restate an earlier point, this is a mainstream Calvinist position, not some extreme “hyper-Calvinism.”
Glen Shellrude, “Calvinism and Problematic Readings of New Testament Texts Or, Why I am Not a Calvinist,” Grace for All: The Arminian Dynamics of Salvation, Clark H. Pinnock and John D. Wagner eds., (Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock, 2015), 31-32.
[2] Glen Shellrude, Grace for All, 45.
[3] Glen Shellrude, Grace for All, 46.
[4] Edwin Palmer, The Five Points of Calvinism (Grand Rapids: Baker, 1972), 106.
[5] Glen Shellrude, “Calvinism and Problematic Readings of New Testament Texts Or, Why I am Not a Calvinist” in Grace for All: The Arminian Dynamics of Salvation, Clark H. Pinnock and John D. Wagner, eds., (Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock, 2015), 46-47.
[6] A. W. Tozer, The Knowledge of the Holy, (San Francisco: Harper & Row, Publishers, 1961), 21.
[7] A. W. Tozer, The Knowledge of the Holy, (San Francisco: Harper & Row, Publishers, 1961), 10..
[8] Austin Fischer, Young, Restless, No Longer Reformed: Black Holes, Love, and a Journey In and Out of Calvinism, (Eugene: Cascade Books, 2014), xi.
[9] A. W. Tozer, The Knowledge of the Holy, (San Francisco: Harper & Row, Publishers, 1961), 117-118.
[10] Ibid. 119.
[11] Austin Fischer, Young, Restless, No Longer Reformed: Black Holes, Love, and a Journey In and Out of Calvinism, (Eugene: Cascade Books, 2014), x – xi.
The Truth of the Gospel 