Calvinism is Strange Indeed

[Candlepower]

God ordains every event in human history. It is still the case that people fail to come to God only because they do not desire to do so.

From whence come those sinful desires? Oh yes, you told us: they are ordained by God. So, God is the cause of man’s sinful desires, you say, which keep him from God’s salvation. A perfect Catch-22.

CT presents here the heart of the Calvinist’s inconsistent and contradictory position. He classifies those whom God has ordained not to desire to come to Him as failures because…here comes the Catch…they do not desire to come to Him. The non-Calvinist logically responds, “But how can they possibly desire to come to God when they were ordained not to desire to come to Him? Are they not doing precisely what you claim God ordained them to do? How is that a failure? Are they not, like the apple tree that produces apples, actually succeeding in their purpose? You are saying that God is like a man who plants an apple tree, and then destroys it because it produces apples!”

Would you think a man to be reasonable who throws a stone and calls it a failure because it drops to earth instead of floating up? That man’s problem is that he has invented a law contrary to God’s Law of Gravity. He is out of touch with reality. This is the same philosophical stuff from which were woven Calvin's doctrines of God’s sovereignty and man’s salvation. And when their obvious inconsistencies are challenged, Calvinists counter with philosophical musings and secret mysteries that only they, the elite elect, can understand.

Calvin saw himself as a champion for God’s sovereignty. Actually, his philosophy presented a shrunken view of God's sovereignty by insisting that the omniscient, omnipotent Creator of the universe is not smart enough or powerful enough to rule His universe while allowing man an area of genuine choice and, therefore, genuine responsibility. Calvin's view of God was that He is just not competent to handle all the complexity that Free Will would entail. It would be just too messy. Plus, he mistakenly viewed puny man’s Free Will as somehow an actual threat to God’s position…as if man (unleashed) could eventually unseat God from His throne! Calvin saw God as less potent than He is, and man as more powerful than he is. It’s as if he was afraid on God’s behalf that man might usurp Him. Really?

The fact is that God is competent to rule the world in which he has given man genuine free will, genuine choice, and genuine responsibility. Scripture teaches that this is what He has sovereignly decreed. God is not, as Calvin presented Him, a puppeteer in a box.

[CThomas]

Thank you for the reply. A couple points.

1. I may be wrong but I would prefer you not claim that I am being deceitful. I wouldn't even leap to that conclusion about a heathen, let alone a Christian. I'll charitably assume that you have a good faith disagreement with me and not impute sinister motives to you.

2. I don't know whether Calvinism is right or wrong, but I feel confident that attacks against it like the one you make are based on confusion. I'm confident that there is no equivocation of the sort you claim going on here. And it saddens me that no matter how hard I try to convey these points I have a hard time getting back responses deeper than the level of "if God causes x then man cannot be responsible for x." I appreciate that you don't see the point here, but it seems perfectly clear to me that there is no logical or theoretical problem with a situation where God causes a person to intentionally and willfully desire to commit sin and then justly punish the man for committing that sin, because the man's sinful conduct comported with the man's own evil desires. If that's not the case then I would need to see some argument besides a simple assertion to persuade me, but I seldom get anything more than a simple assertion like yours, and on those occasions I have read deeper discussions of the issue I have personally found them deeply unpersuasive. But I remain open to evaluating any argument I come across in the future.

Best,

CT

[CThomas]

Reapectfully, I kind of scratch my head when I read these questions, because the answers seem obvious and fully compatible with Calvinism. Paragraph 2: the non-Calvinist asks how the reprobate can come to God under the Calvinist framework. The answer is that they will not because they don't want to. That's a "can't" in one sense, because nobody can change his own fundamental psychological makeup without divine intervention. But in another sense it's a "won't", not a "can't", because the impediment is the person's own psychological proclivities, not anything else. Then you ask if we would morally fault a stone for falling. The answer, obviously, is that we don't fail to fault a stone because it's path is determined. Rather, we don't fault a stone because it is a non-conscious inanimate object incapable of any conscious thought or awareness, let alone moral reflection. Obviously that is not true of human beings, whether Calvinism is true or false.

God ordains every event in human history. It is still the case that people fail to come to God only because they do not desire to do so.

From whence come those sinful desires? Oh yes, you told us: they are ordained by God. So, God is the cause of man’s sinful desires, you say, which keep him from God’s salvation. A perfect Catch-22.

CT presents here the heart of the Calvinist’s inconsistent and contradictory position. He classifies those whom God has ordained not to desire to come to Him as failures because…here comes the Catch…they do not desire to come to Him. The non-Calvinist logically responds, “But how can they possibly desire to come to God when they were ordained not to desire to come to Him? Are they not doing precisely what you claim God ordained them to do? How is that a failure? Are they not, like the apple tree that produces apples, actually succeeding in their purpose? You are saying that God is like a man who plants an apple tree, and then destroys it because it produces apples!”

Would you think a man to be reasonable who throws a stone and calls it a failure because it drops to earth instead of floating up? That man’s problem is that he has invented a law contrary to God’s Law of Gravity. He is out of touch with reality. This is the same philosophical stuff from which were woven Calvin's doctrines of God’s sovereignty and man’s salvation. And when their obvious inconsistencies are challenged, Calvinists counter with philosophical musings and secret mysteries that only they, the elite elect, can understand.

Calvin saw himself as a champion for God’s sovereignty. Actually, his philosophy presented a shrunken view of God's sovereignty by insisting that the omniscient, omnipotent Creator of the universe is not smart enough or powerful enough to rule His universe while allowing man an area of genuine choice and, therefore, genuine responsibility. Calvin's view of God was that He is just not competent to handle all the complexity that Free Will would entail. It would be just too messy. Plus, he mistakenly viewed puny man’s Free Will as somehow an actual threat to God’s position…as if man (unleashed) could eventually unseat God from His throne! Calvin saw God as less potent than He is, and man as more powerful than he is. It’s as if he was afraid on God’s behalf that man might usurp Him. Really?

The fact is that God is competent to rule the world in which he has given man genuine free will, genuine choice, and genuine responsibility. Scripture teaches that this is what He has sovereignly decreed. God is not, as Calvin presented Him, a puppeteer in a box.

[CThomas]

I should have answered your last point. I don't know any Calvinists who think that Calvinism is true because God isn't powerful enough to have done it a different way. That just seems like a complete red herring. Obviously the claim is that Calvinism describes the way God has chosen to act, not that it was the result of some constraint on His abilities. If you really believe that Calvinists think that and are not simply truing to score some sort of rhetorical point against them then I think you should give Calcinism another look with a fresh mind.

[psimmond]

CThomas wrote: I appreciate that you don't see the point here, but it seems perfectly clear to me that there is no logical or theoretical problem with a situation where God causes a person to intentionally and willfully desire to commit sin and then justly punish the man for committing that sin, because the man's sinful conduct comported with the man's own evil desires.

The last clause in the quotation above is irrelevant. You might just as well put the period where the comma is after the word "sin" since man's conduct as well as his evil desires were caused by God. So we are left with "I appreciate that you don't see the point here, but it seems perfectly clear to me that there is no logical or theoretical problem with a situation where God causes a person to intentionally and willfully desire to commit sin and then justly punish the man for committing that sin." To which I would say, "Really?"

[CThomas]

I guess I could see why you find the sentence less persuasive if you arbitrarily truncate my reasoning in the manner you propose!

[psimmond]

If it were arbitrary, I'd agree with you. Your comments make me think you really do not understand Calvinism. Under Calvinism, the truncated version is identical to the original in meaning.

[TheEditor]

it seems perfectly clear to me that there is no logical or theoretical problem with a situation where God causes a person to intentionally and willfully desire to commit sin and then justly punish the man for committing that sin, because the man's sinful conduct comported with the man's own evil desires.

I can make no rational sense of this at all that comports with the slightest meaning of the word justice. Let me see if I can dope this out:

As a man I have a weakness or desrie for illicit sexual relations. My wife is aware of this. Though I recognize this inclination, my wife leaves pornographic literature lying around, ("God caus[ing] a person to intentionally and willfully desire to commit sin") then, puts a gun to my head demanding that I commit an act of adultery (God ordaining every event in human history). I do, and she divorces me, because I 'freely chose' to cheat on her. That is a puzzler.

Regards, Brenden.

[robbyyoung]

Hi All and God Bless,

I'm not a Calvinist, however, I do not subscribe to the sanctity of the "Freewill" arguement either. God constantly interferes and disrupts our "freewill", even to the extreme point of life or death. God has the advantage to know all things and this clearly makes all the difference.

God Bless.

[CThomas]

it seems perfectly clear to me that there is no logical or theoretical problem with a situation where God causes a person to intentionally and willfully desire to commit sin and then justly punish the man for committing that sin, because the man's sinful conduct comported with the man's own evil desires.

I can make no rational sense of this at all that comports with the slightest meaning of the word justice. Let me see if I can dope this out:

As a man I have a weakness or desrie for illicit sexual relations. My wife is aware of this. Though I recognize this inclination, my wife leaves pornographic literature lying around, ("God caus[ing] a person to intentionally and willfully desire to commit sin") then, puts a gun to my head demanding that I commit an act of adultery (God ordaining every event in human history). I do, and she divorces me, because I 'freely chose' to cheat on her. That is a puzzler.

Regards, Brenden.

The answer is that these are precisely the two types of cause that the Calvinist (or at least this Calvinist) is distinguishing. The wife in your example influences the man's conduct by taking his psychology as a given and then modifying his environment to cause him to stumble. As your hypothetical progresses, the wife moves on to external compulsion, using a firearm to coerce behavior that the man would prefer not to engage in. This is the polar opposite of what we're saying God does, which merely "causes" the outcome by letting the man do what the guy wants to do anyway. Look, this whole set of issues is complicated and difficult, and I'm not trying to convince you to become a Calvinist. My ambition here is much more modest. I just want you to see that these sort of arguments that attempt to dismiss Calvinism on casual a priori grounds without doing the hard work of exegesis are wrong, and rest upon a confusion.