So, the Calvinist’s interpretive problems not only persist but increase as we examine doctrine after doctrine. The Bible everywhere speaks of the relationship between God and man in terms of contingency, conditionality, responsibility, and culpability, especially regarding faith and unbelief. It also is marked by potentiality and possibility. Salvation is a possibility for all on the basis that God has worked a salvation that is described as a free gift that can be received by faith. In that the Holy Spirit is at work in the hearer of the true “good news,” there exists the real possibility of responding positively to it. That is God’s intention and desire (1 Tim. 2:1-6), and the Spirit works to that end. To believe is what every sinner is called to do and enabled to do because the Spirit works through the truth of the gospel message on behalf of the hearer. And if God calls all to believe, and his word is true, that is, he is not duplicitous in that this call to believe only applies to some and not others, then you may be assured that his salvation applies to you and you may believe and be saved. There is no eternal decree by which you may possibly have been excluded from salvation. If you are not saved, it is because you are rejecting the Spirit’s work and the gospel of Jesus Christ. God loves you! Come, confess your sins, and put your faith in Jesus for salvation.
“For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life. For God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but to save the world through him. (Jn. 3:16-17, NIV)
God says to you,
“Come now, let us settle the matter,”
says the Lord.
“Though your sins are like scarlet,
they shall be as white as snow;
though they are red as crimson,
they shall be like wool.” (Isa. 1:18, NIV)
Each sinner has a substantially free will. This is the dynamic between God, salvation, the sinner, and faith that we find throughout Scripture. Calvinist soteriology cannot accommodate this thoroughly biblical dynamic. Rather, Calvinist soteriology distorts the nature of the interaction between God and sinners with respect to salvation. Only the degree to which the Calvinist remains inconsistent in his preaching and teaching compared to his theology can the God of truth by the Spirit of truth use their words in the hearts of sinners in their ministry and evangelism. But this inconsistency and incoherence between word and theology is damaging to the gospel, the credibility of the Calvinist speaker and is not worthy of the God of truth.
Indeed, the Calvinist’s inconsistency between what they proclaim as the gospel message and their underlying soteriological doctrines is one reason non-Calvinists know it is false. But interestingly, many non-Calvinists also see this inconsistency as a reason not to make much of Calvinism. If Calvinists more often than not adopt a non-deterministic, free-will theology when presenting salvation to people or in their preaching and teaching ministries, then the non-Calvinist figures to “let sleeping dogs lie.” And as long as the evangelistic message is the same “good news” the non-Calvinist preaches, many non-Calvinists are willing to forgo any critique of Calvinism. They reason, “What difference does their Calvinist theology make, as long as their gospel message is correct. As far as practical ministry goes, what does it matter if their theology is inconsistent with their gospel message. Besides, they are our brothers and sisters in Christ. We must not be divisive. That is what matters most.” This is the practical, utilitarian approach of the non-Calvinist to the matter. But this is short-sighted. We should also be concerned about the truth. It makes a big difference that our words are consistent with our stated theological beliefs. That’s what integrity means. And we need to be concerned about truth because God is a God of truth. Also, true brotherhood in Christ is dependent upon coming closer to the truth of Scripture. This is why this is ultimately a hermeneutical issue. Ministry that is truly Christian should not tolerate incoherence, inconsistency, and contradiction among one’s theological doctrines and also between their theological beliefs and spoken word. There is enough hypocrisy in the world. We must not become acclimated to duplicity in the evangelical church, especially under the guise of a piety whose incoherence is excused by the claim that cannot fathom the will and ways of God. The words of Jerry Walls and Joseph Dongell are applicable here.
“There is a lot at stake in this controversy, and it is altogether understandable that its participants express strong feelings. What is at stake is nothing less than the question of how we are saved from our sins and granted eternal life – a question toward which no believer can rationally be indifferent. If we don’t care about this question, we just don’t understand! Indeed, the issue is deeper still, for it concerns the ultimate matter of how God is truly worshipped and glorified. Furthermore, far-reaching practical implications for life and ministry flow from what we believe are the answers to these questions. Earnest discussion is both appropriate and desirable if it helps us get at the truth. The widespread doctrinal indifference of our times is in part a failure to recognize the important role of argument and even controversy in the church…when the truth concerning matters of great importance is at stake, indifference is hard to understand and defend.” (Jerry L. Walls & Joseph R. Dongell, Why I am Not A Calvinist, (IVP: Downers Grove, 2004), 18.)
Contrary to Calvinism, the salvation accomplished by God’s grace “in Christ,” which is offered to all and can be received by faith, is what makes the “good news” good. God has provided a salvation that we could not provide for ourselves and offers it to all sinners as a free gift to be received simply by faith (Rom. 3:23, 5:15-17; Eph. 2:8). We need to look no further than Christ himself for salvation. The hope that is found in Christ is not “I hope God will save me” but the hope of a salvation that we assuredly have. We have the sure hope of all the blessings that the salvation God accomplished in Christ brings (cf. Eph. 1). We are assured that God in Christ has accomplished our salvation and applied that salvation to us when we believed. Jesus is the expression of God’s love and salvific intention for all sinners. The Calvinist doctrines of a sovereign theistic determinism, total inability, and unconditional election throw any assurance that any particular sinner can be saved, including you or me, into the dark abyss of uncertainty. Whether or not one is among the elect is a persistent unknown and is antithetical to the salvific will and intention of God to provide salvation for all sinners demonstrated in Christ’s death on the cross. Paul clearly states, “But God demonstrates his own love for us in this: While we were still sinners, Christ died for us.” (Rom. 5:8, NIV)
Furthermore, we have seen that the Calvinist doctrines force the Calvinist to misconstrue any genuinely human response of faith as a meritorious work and contribution to one’s own salvation. We can see that this is a faulty conclusion that is based upon Calvinist presuppositions. They are forced to define faith through the lens of their deterministic definitions of the biblical doctrines of soverignty and election or predestination. Thus, God has ordained and causes all things. Therefore, the sinner cannot believe unless they are among the elect. Only these elect persons will experience God’s irresistible grace and regeneration. And only then will they be granted faith by God. If this were not the case, if the sinner were responsible to exercise faith in God and Jesus as a genuine response of their own will, the Calvinist would consider this to be a contribution or work the sinner makes to their salvation. But this, of course, is not the biblical testimony to the nature of faith. It is to read into the texts about faith the Calvinist’s deterministic doctrines of total inability, unconditional election and irresistible grace. Faith, according to Scripture, although an act of the will, is an act of the will characterized by absolute surrender of one’s will to God, his way of salvation, and his lordship over one’s life. Therefore, even though faith involves a free will decision, it is by definition antithetical to “works” or merit.” Faith is precisely that surrendering, acknowledgment, and submission to that salvation that God has accomplished on our behalf – that objective salvation that is found in Christ – which we could never achieve for ourselves. This is what makes salvation “all of God” and “all of grace.” But only the person themselves can offer up such surrender and assent to God’s saving grace. Faith, far from being meritorious or a contribution to our salvation, is simply the one and only appropriate response to that saving work God accomplished on our behalf precisely because it is, by definition, non-meritorious. Paul always places faith in contrast to “works,” indicating that he does not consider the response of faith which comes as a free decision of the will upon hearing the gospel message as meritorious. Given a completed saving work on our behalf, eternally designed, purposed, planned, and brought about in time “in Christ,” all we can do is believe. All the sinner is called to do is put their trust in Christ for salvation. But the sinner does this, not God.
If God is free, and thought it best to incorporate a human response into his plan of salvation, we should respect that divine freedom and wisdom in doing so without feeling the need to bolster and secure God’s glory by theological extrapolations upon man’s sinful nature and God’s sovereignty that ultimately render these biblical truths incoherent. We need not feel compelled to protect God’s sovereignty from human freedom or artificially enhance his glory by denying that faith is a free response of the will to God when God himself does not feel threatened by such human freedom with respect to his sovereignty or glory. We need not ignore the divine creation of human beings with true agency or force the plan of salvation into a mold that we perceive would further God’s glory. Even if stemming from spiritual and godly motives, this certainly smacks of an overly zealous “humility” that has within it an ironic tinge of pride and merit all its own. At worst it has the marks of a Pharisaical “hedge” being placed around “the glory of God.” But Jesus condemned such extra-biblical, man-made protections for their propensity towards harshness, legalism, and preventing the true principles of the Old Testament law and biblical religion to rise to the surface and lead the people into the truth. Calvinism smacks of this kind of Pharisaical, religious satisfaction of having “given God all the glory in salvation” by annihilating human freedom while making “faith” something divinely caused within a select number God has already regenerated by virtue of a divine deterministic sovereignty and unconditional election. And this of course requires the Calvinist to presuppose their own unconditional election to salvation. They must presume God has chosen them and they are special to him as opposed to all others (perhaps the worst characteristic of the Pharisees). Given unconditional election, salvation amounts to a grand presumption. All such Pharisaical hedges in the New Testament only functioned to deny access to the truth of God’s love and salvation. This Calvinistic hedge does the same. It places salvation outside the possibility for many in the name of protecting “the sovereignty of God.” It has also pushed many away from true Christianity. According to the Calvinist’s logic, if our inability to provide for our own salvation glorifies God, then “total inability” to even respond to God’s salvation at all would glorify him even more. Saving grace gets transformed from its biblical definition of God providing for our salvation when we did not deserve it and could do nothing for ourselves, into “sovereign grace” in which “grace” is reduced to a decision God made in eternity past as to whom to save out of all underserving sinners. In contrast, biblical grace is the grace that is found and can be accessed in Christ by faith. Grace is now a known disposition of God toward all sinners made universal and available in the person and work of Christ. God’s grace came to all of us in Jesus, therefore, in looking to Jesus, God’s grace and salvation is to be found.
Indeed, any propensity to boasting or somehow robbing God of glory is not inherent in the biblical understanding of a free will response of faith. If you understand faith, even when it must come from the sinner as his or her decision of the will, as a “work” or your contribution to your salvation in which you can boast, you do not understand salvation nor faith. The overwhelming biblical evidence reveals that faith is not a predetermined spiritual manifestation that God grants only to certain people he has predestined to save. There is no textual evidence to support the idea that faith, if it is not part of an unconditional election, would be a meritorious human contribution to one’s own salvation. I know of no textual evidence that teaches that the enhancement of the glory of God is linked to making faith part of a comprehensive soteriology of theistic determinism. Nothing could be further from the biblical portrayal of the nature of faith. God does not require our assistance to artificially bolster his glory, especially when the result wreaks havoc with the logical, moral, and epistemological coherence of the biblical teaching on salvation.
We need to view the human faith response in light of the whole teaching of a salvation that glorifies God. God glorifies himself “in Christ.” (Jn. 17; 12:28, cf. 43; Lu. 9:28-36) We take it that in the wisdom of God he thought it best to establish the application of salvation on the basis of a free human response of faith. This decision regarding a free will response also glorifies God. That God designed salvation to become “effective” in us by our response of faith, is precisely the admission that one cannot merit or contribute to their salvation. That is the wisdom of God. Faith is the forfeiting of all human works, devices, schemes, and means of “self-salvation.” The nature of faith as a response of the human will, which is the way God has decreed salvation to be appropriated by the sinner to themselves, glorifies God. It glorifies God in the fact that God has provided for the salvation of each and every sinner and yet he allows them the dignity of choosing to accept or reject that salvation. Those who accept it are saved, and that surely glorifies God. Those who reject it, forfeit their salvation, but this still glorifies God because he graciously provided salvation for them and continues to hold it out to them. Moreover, God is glorified in their rejection in having them remain under condemnation and his judgment, which in the end will be just. God is glorified by this administration of justice. So, God’s glory is in everything that he has accomplished in salvation. His love, his grace, and his justice, all redound to his glory.
Therefore, to confuse faith with works or misconstrue faith as meritorious or one’s contribution to salvation, is a serious biblical error and only diminishes God’s glory because it distorts the gospel message. For by the fact that Calvinism withdraws faith into the unknowable recesses of a decision of God made in eternity past regarding the eternal destiny of every person, and obscures Christ as the object of personal faith in whom God’s saving grace is accessible to sinners, it blocks all access to this grace of God and the knowledge of salvation (Rom. 5:1, 2). If God is most glorified in the gospel, then to the degree Calvinism distorts the gospel is the degree to which it diminishes God’s glory. 1
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1 For two recent sermons on the Calvinist understanding of the doctrine of predestination listen to Erwin W. Lutzer, “The Gift of Predestination, Part 1,” June 30, 2023 – https://www.moodymedia.org/radio-programs/running-to-win-25/the-gift-of-predestination-part-1-1/ and “The Gift of Predestination, Part 2,” July 3, 2023 – https://www.moodymedia.org/radio-programs/running-to-win-25/the-gift-of-predestination-part-2-1/ Last accessed July 8, 2023.
Lutzer offers the standard Calvinist understanding of predestination from Ephesians 1. Listen carefully as to how he addresses the legitimate issues and questions his position raises, the incoherence in his position and how he seeks to avoid being disingenuous in his speech. Most importantly, note how his Calvinist doctrines stifle a vibrant, personal, invitational evangelism by eviscerating the gospel of its “good news.” Lutzer presents an “if you find that God is working in your heart to give you faith, then you know you are among those predestined to salvation” message. That is, of course, not the biblical gospel. Lutzer will use the term “gospel,” but what could he possibly mean by that? I would be very interested to hear what his definition and explanation is of “the gospel” as “good news” that is consistent with his Calvinist doctrine of predestination.
The Truth of the Gospel 