I’ve had my eye on this article that basically seeks to warn Southern Baptists of ministries such as the Founders that have “crept” into the church. In so doing, the anonymous authors of “BaptistFire” explore what they believe to be “deceitfulness” on the part of the “tactics” of certain Calvinists. I wish to deal with this article quite extensively so that these anonymous authors will not complain that I have ignored any of their arguments. Every Scripture citation will be explored; every assertion will be questioned. Therefore, today we’ll only look at the opening paragraph, and I’ll only be responding to the first sentence:
“Crept in Unawares …”
Calvinists want to take over your Southern Baptist church
a BaptistFire special report
(Updated: Sept. 26, 2005)What Calvinists Believe
Calvinists do not believe that God loves everyone (contrary to John 3:16). They do not believe that God wants to save everyone (contrary to 1 Tim. 2:4). Most do not believe that Jesus died for the sins of the whole world. (contrary to 1 John 2:2). Not only are these doctrines contrary to the Bible they are contrary to what the vast majority of Southern Baptists believe.
This section is entitled inappropriately. Rather than being titled “What Calvinists Believe,” it should be titled “What Calvinists Don’t Believe,” for each of these statements starts, in the negative, with “they do not believe…” Obviously, the anonymous author had no intention of honestly explaining to the readers the doctrines of Calvinism in this section. Rather, this is simply another means of casting the Doctrines of Grace into the negative light, telling us the ways that they are supposedly unscriptural. But let’s look at each of these (this post will only focus on the first):
Calvinists do not believe that God loves everyone (contrary to John 3:16).
This is simply two false, unqualified assertions in the same sentence:
1. This anonymous author fails to distinguish between different kinds of love. He (or she) simply incorrectly states that “Calvinists do not believe that God loves everyone.” He doesn’t distinguish between redemptive love and a love that comes from common grace. Do Calvinists believe that God redemptively loves those whom he condemns, so that God must be eternally disappointed because he failed to save those whom he wanted to save? Well, no. But if God did not love his creation enough to impart to it common grace; the human race, in its depravity, would have murdered itself out of existence by now. To live in a world in which common grace is absent would certainly be a terrifying experience.
It is certainly noteworthy that people like the contributors of “BaptistFire” wish to make the Creator lower than the creature. Why is it that it is good and right for us to distinguish in our love, but wrong for God? Why is it right for me to love my wife in a manner that is different in extent and intensity than how I love other women, but wrong for God to love his church differently than those who are not his people? The answer is that synergism is a soteriology that is constantly seeking to dethrone the King and place man as ruler of his own destiny. In essence, the Creator is brought lower than the creature.
2. The anonymous author states that the Reformed doctrine is “contrary to John 3:16.” Firstly, John 3:16, contrary to this contributor’s assertion, does not state “God loves everyone in the same way.” Rather, it starts by stating that God loves “the world.” It is, of course, assumed that the terms “world” and “every single person” are equal. But you simply won’t find that in John’s writings. When John tells us not to love “the world” (1 John 2:15), is he telling us to not love “every single person”? Or when in verse 17 of chapter 3 John states that God sent his Son “into the world” does he mean that God sent his Son “into every single person”? Surely the knee-jerk, dogmatic notion that the only definition of “world” is “every single person” is an unwarranted assumption. What, then, determines the definition? Context. God’s love for “the world” results in something. And what is that? It results in the saving of those who believe ( πας ο πιστευων). God sent his Son with the purpose that (ινα, “hina”) all of the believing ones (πας ο πιστευων) might be saved. So God’s love is love that extends to a certain group, not love that is generically spread over the earth like peanut butter that results in the salvation of no one apart from the autonomous will of man.
In addition, we should certainly begin to wonder what type of love it is that these anonymous “BaptistFire” contributors are promoting. What kind of love is it that would grant autonomy to depraved creatures? Apparently, God’s will to allow people to authoritatively choose their own condemnation trumps his will to save them. In order to avoid universalism, hidden beneath the supposedly noble principle that God wills to save every individual is God’s somehow-stronger will to grant them autonomy. While the anonymous “BaptistFire” authors love to promote the emotion-targeted viewpoint that God does not have the freedom to love and save whom he pleases, as he pleases, what they really love about synergism is the synergism; though they might claim that the supposedly “chief attribute” of God is love, what they really like about God is the notion that he has released them from the absolute sovereignty of his will and replaced it with a will that desires most to see man exercise his will autonomously. For the synergistic God, what he wants most is not to see everyone saved, but to see everyone exercise his will in an ultimately authoritative manner–whether that results in their condemnation or in, if by some reason in them, their salvation. To use a Dave-Huntian expression, “What love is this?” I cited this Steve Hays quote in my article “The Philosophy of Monergism” recently:
[Synergists] … say that the Augustinian tradition subordinates the love of God to the will of God … But this is not what distinguishes the Augustinian tradition from the Arminian tradition. The distinction is between intensive and extensive love, between an intensive love that saves its loved ones, and an extensive love that loves everyone in general and saves no one in particular. Or if you really wish to cast this in terms of willpower, it’s the distinction between divine willpower and human willpower. Or, to put the two together, does God will the salvation of everyone with a weak-willed, ineffectual love, or does God love his loved ones with a resolute will that gets the job done?
The God of Calvin is the good shepherd, who names and numbers his sheep, who saves the lost sheep and fends off the wolf. The God of Wesley is the hireling, who knows not the flock by name and number, who lets the sheep go astray and be eaten by the wolf. Which is more loving, I ask?
We’ll look at the next sentence in the next post, and hopefully then we’ll be able to cover more ground 
They also have no sense of irony, as they are the ones who crept in. Teaching Arminianism, or 1/2 point Calvinism as I prefer to call it, would have originally get you booted out of a SBC seminary, yet they have gone on to embrace the Pelagian heresy with open arms. They also like to do theology at the kindergarden level, never bothering to grow up to the meat of the word. No doubt they wish to protect the SBC from those terrible Founders heresies, like God being sovereign and all, while embracing the proper modernist ones, like the ID movement or evolution. (And yes Virginia they are both equally wrong, either Genesis one is true or it isn't, and if it is then both ID and evolution must be wrong)
ReplyDeleteStill, the most amazing thing to me is that these folks argue like unbelievers, so I guess rebellion has the same traits across the board. Whether disussing origins or free-willism I find plenty of cross-pollinization. Their philosophical outlook strikes me as much the same. Now to find myself allied with ungodly arguments would give me pause, but hey, that's just me. Keep up the good work!
Good stuff, Evan. Very good. The ignorance of people like that is more than appalling - it is insidiously wicked. God spare us from it.
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