I, Robot

HENRY SAID:

“As I pointed out in another post, it is Steve Hays who tried to turn it into a contest of determining which view was more loving.”

To the contrary, one of Henry’ standard objections to Calvinism is that Calvinism is allegedly less loving than Arminianism.

This is, of course, a stock Arminian objection to Calvinism. So it’s not the only time I’ve dealt with it. But Henry is recycling this objection, so I’ll respond accordingly.

“Concerning what is most loving as I said before I do not know what is most loving in many cases and that is not the issue here.”

Not surprisingly, Henry would prefer to evade this issue. Disputants only want to debate the perceived strong points of their own system as well as perceived weak points of the opposing system. If allowed to, they will arbitrarily limit the scope of the discussion.

So, Henry wants to discuss what is more loving, but not what is most loving. Yet this is illogical.

If what is more loving is better than what is less loving, then what is most loving is better than what is more loving.

The fact that Henry can’t defend Arminian theology as the most loving option undercuts his appeal to Arminian theology as the more loving option. For if Arminianism is better than Calvinism because Arminianism is the more loving, then universalism is better than Arminianism because universalism is the most loving.

Henry would like to artificially confine this discussion to a debate between Arminianism and Calvinism rather than Arminianism and universalism, in part because it’s easier to fight on one front rather than two, and especially because universalism trumps Arminianism on its own grounds.

“If that is the way you are going to frame it: that our sinful actions (which would include the unbeliever rejecting the gospel message and the believer sinning) will LIMIT THE IMPACT OF GOD’S LOVE. Then this will be a ‘problem’ for both the noncalvinist and the Calvinist.”

It’s not problem for Calvinism, since God foreordained the fall. Both the sinful believer and the sinful unbeliever are doing precisely what God predestined them to do. And God’s love for the elect has exactly the effect that God intended for the elect.

“God’s nature is love and while we sense it less when we sin, His love nevertheless is always directed at us and coming at us.”

Several problems:

i) Love is not God’s only attribute.

ii) Divine attributes need to be defined in Scriptural terms.

iii) In Arminian theology, God’s love is “coming at us” and bouncing off us. It’s directed at us by God, and redirected away from us by our libertarian resistance.

“Again, if our sinful actions in some way lessen the **impact** of God’s love, then that occurs whether you are a noncalvinist or a Calvinist.”

It doesn’t lessen the impact of God’s redemptive love of the elect. God loves the elect, and his love for the elect results in their salvation.

“I am not convinced that we should talk about our actions as in some way limiting the exercise of a divine attribute.”

Meaning that when you back Henry into a corner with his own premise, he beings to complain.

“When we sin are we also limiting the exercise of divine sovereignty which is a divine attribute?”

If you’re an Arminian, yes; if you’re a Calvinist, no.

“And if not, then how is that we are able to limit the exercise of the attribute of divine love but not the attribute of divine sovereignty?”

Because an Arminian will give a different answer than a Calvinist. Sin doesn’t limit the exercise of divine sovereignty for a Calvinist since sin is, itself, an expression of divine sovereignty. The fall of Adam (and Lucifer), as well as every attendant consequence thereof, was decreed by God as a means to a greater good.

“In the context of a relationship, acts of love by one of the parties can make a lot of difference regardless of how the other party sometimes reacts or responds to these acts of love…And yet with persistent acts of love positive changes in the relationship were effected. The power of loving acts should never be underestimated, especially when those loving acts are flowing from a loving God.”

Observe that an Arminian can only speak of God’s grace in the optative or subjunctive rather than the indicative—unlike Calvinism.

Follow the weasel words: love “can” make a “lot” of difference. Love should not be “underestimated.”

Notice what he doesn’t say: the love of God makes all the difference.

Arminian grace is optative grace or subjunctive grace. Reformed grace is indicative grace.

“Looking at our own coming to the Lord, some will be able to tell a story of how God started reaching out to them in love and at first they ignored or rejected these overtures by the Lord. But with time their resistance broke down and they realized how much the Lord loved them.”

In Reformed theology, regeneration is irresistible. Regeneration is immediate grace.

But in Reformed theology, the means of grace, such as the preaching of the word, is resistible.

There is nothing in the “story” of conversion at odds with Reformed theology. And conversion is broader than regeneration.

“It is ironic that Hays once again completely misrepresents things here. Jesus himself even spoke in parables about how God sends out the invitations to the world. And in these parables it does not speak of the people being unable to even respond to the invitation because they were **corpses**. Instead it says they understood the invitation but rejected it and made excuses. The same thing sometimes happens when we evangelize. It is not that the person does not understand what we are saying (especially when the Spirit is working on them or has been working on them). Rather, they get the message, but then start making excuses as to why they are rejecting it. Corpses last time I checked cannot dialogue with you, nor can they give you reasons why they are rejecting Jesus.”

A seminary professor like Henry ought to have the minimal sophistication to realize that the Bible uses different metaphors to illustrate different truths. Henry is like the liberal who reduces the gospel to the Sermon on the Mount or the parable of the prodigal son.

Some metaphors speak of the unregenerate as dead in sin. They are dead in the sense that they require spiritual revival from an external agent to bring them back to life. A corpse is not self-resuscitating.

Other metaphors speak of the unregenerate as enslaved to sin. They are very much alive, but unable to free themselves from the shackles of sin.

“Steve Hays, like Gene Bridges, wants to have me saying or arguing that God always does the most loving thing for everyone always. I have never said this nor do I believe it yet they keep trying to put words in my mouth. Here is yet another attempt to force the creation of a straw man (not what I do say or believe but what they want me to say or believe so they can attack it).”

What Gene and I are doing is to take his position to its logical extreme. This is a traditional and perfectly respectable form of argumentation.

Because Henry lacks the intellectual honesty to accuratetly represent the implications of his own position, someone else will have to do it for him.

“Steve Hays brought up the issue of which is more loving Calvinism or noncalvinism. The concept of what is **most loving** was not the issue. I addressed the issue of what is more loving, arguing that noncalvinism is more loving than Calvinism. If the argument is which is **more loving** (Calvinism or noncalvinism) then I am under no burden or necessity to argue for what is **most loving**.”

Is Henry dense? “More loving” is a wedge issue. One may introduce the comparative to then leverage the superlative.

“Monergists because they believe in exhaustive determinism and deny the existence of free will, explain the coming of a person to faith in Jesus Christ as being TOTALLY AND UNILATERALLY A WORK OF GOD.”

Of course, Calvinism doesn’t deny freewill. It only denies libertarian freedom.

“Scripture seems to suggest that we are **saved** when we respond in faith and are regenerated.”

Two problems:

i) John Murray, Herman Ridderbos, and Tom Schreiner (among others) have argued for the priority of regeneration to faith. Henry ignores their argumentation.

ii) As Gene already pointed out, Henry has a sloppy habit of oscillating between colloquial and dogmatic usage.

“So in the monergistic scheme the person is saved first without any actions on his part, and then regeneration causes faith to occur.”

No, in a monergistic scheme the person is first regenerated, then regeneration results in faith.

“Consider the metaphor often invoked by Calvinists themselves. The monergist believes that God chooses to have a relationship with what is initially a corpse. The corpse being dead can in no way relate to God whatsoever. So the corpse must first be made alive, then a relationship can occur.”

True.

“(Calvinists often use the story of Lazarus being raised to support this notion).”

No, that’s being used as an illustration, not a prooftext.

“Steve Hays also admits that part of salvation is synergistic: ‘Sanctification has a cooperative aspect, although it’s not in the libertarian sense’.”

Henry suffers from reading incomprehension. I specifically denied synergism. “Cooperation” is not a synonym for “synergism.”

Henry, in his linguistic naiveté, doesn’t appreciate the difference between the etymology and meaning.

He seems to think that because words like “synergism” (or “cooperation”) are compound words, they simply mean what the root plus the prefix apparently means.

But words often have more than one meaning. And some words are technical terms with a specialized meaning.

“In Calvinism the “relationship” between God and his people is not a relationship involving freely performed actions by both parties.”

Notice that Henry is imposing his tendentious definition onto words like “freely.” There’s no argument, here. Just his question-begging assertions.

“In a freely chosen and loving relationship both parties make uncoerced nonconstrained choices which make the relationship a good and healthy one.”

Another one of Henry’s problems is that he doesn’t even know the meaning of English words. “Coercion” implies a point of resistance or psychological tension between the subject of the action and the object of the action.

A textbook example is acting at gunpoint. If you have a gun to your head, this forces you to do something that you would otherwise refrain from doing.

But there is no coercion in regeneration. Regeneration operates at a subliminal level. The object of regeneration is unconscious of the cause. He is only conscious of its effect.

Likewise, there’s nothing coercive about predestination. The object of predestination is unaware of what God has decreed him to do (in advance of the fact). So there’s no point of tension between what he does and what he was decreed to do. He cannot resist what he cannot know to resist.

“If everything is predetermined and free will and choices do not make up the relationship. Then the relationship between God and man (assuming that God predetermines everything, that free will does not exist, that we can never do otherwise than in fact we were predetermined to do in any and every set of affairs) is then like a puppet master and his puppet or a computer programmer and his computer.”

It’s obvious that Henry has never seen Bride of Chucky, or Colossus: The Forbin Project. Clearly there are some serious lacunae in the seminary curriculum wherever he happens to teach.

“If every action of a puppet is controlled by the puppet master, every aspect of the puppet’s being is controlled by the puppet master (which would include their consciousness, mental states, desires, beliefs, memories, thinking, deliberating, etc. Etc. Etc.”

But, of course, this is precisely where the analogy breaks down. At the critical point of comparison, since puppets, unlike humans, lack these mental properties. (Unless we make an exception for Chucky—in which case the analogy breaks down at another point)

“While these actions by the puppet would **not** properly be described as coerced, these actions are all constrained by the puppet master. The relationship is not one involving persons freely choosing their actions towards each other.”

Waiving his flawed analogy, it’s quite true that there’s a fundamental asymmetry between the creature and the Creator. This is not a relationship between peers. We don’t make God react in a certain way by how we act. God is not like a distraught lover who is waiting for the phone to ring: “Will she call back? Oh, dear, what should I do next?”

“Or it would be like a computer programmer who was able to preprogram a conscious and intelligent computer robot to do whatever the programmer had preprogrammed it to do. Again, the robot’s actions would not be coerced but they would be completely controlled and constrained by the programmer.”

Lt. Commander Data would deeply resent Henry’s speciesistic hate-speech.

Robots are people, too! Clearly they need to add I, Robot to the curriculum at Henry’s backwoods seminary.

Thankfully, Calvinism has never been susceptible to this cybernetic bigotry. Centuries before Asimov, Calvin wrote the textbook on robopsychology.

If Henry continues to defame his fellow, cybernetic citizens, he will be Terminated!

“In either case whether it is the conscious puppet or conscious robot completely controlled and predetermined, I would not consider these to be real relationships of freely chosen love and trust as is true in the saving relationship between God and human persons.”

Now he’s slandering the all-American gynoid next door. If the Stepford Wives bring a class action suit against his Arminian chauvinist piggery, he’ll only has himself to blame.

“Hays says that left to our own resources fallen sinners will reject God. But that is just the point, God does not leave us to ourselves.”

Ah, yes. He throws us a rope and then takes a lunch break.

“I define synergism as requiring the actions of both persons, monergism as requiring the actions of only one person.”

This is a simplistic, nonstandard definition.

“God nevertheless took the initiative in developing the relationship with us by sending Jesus to die for our sins before we ever had any relationship with Him.”

It’s so much better if God took the initiative in his empty gestures.

“Yes, we should do whatever we can to save people from life threatening circumstances involving suicide. I personally believe that if someone is seriously considering suicide that they are not in a rational state, are not in a right state of mind, but are ‘out of their minds’, so I would have no hesitation in intervening ‘against their will’ or without informed consent…In a situation where a person is in the act of suicide the context is different and informed consent may be suspended.”

Which is, of course, exactly how the Bible describes the mental state of the unregenerate (cf. Titus 3:3-5).

“God developing a saving relationship with us and intervening to prevent a person’s suicide are two very different contexts.”

It’s different in the sense that we’re arguing, at one level, from the lesser to the greater. If it’s right to unilaterally intervene in order to save someone from death, then why is it wrong to unilaterally intervene in order to save someone from damnation?

At another level, we’re arguing from the greater to the lesser. In the case of a suicidal man or woman, it may be necessary to take coercive measures.

By contrast, predestination and regeneration are not coercive. So if there are circumstances under which even coercive intervention is right, then why is unilateral intervention which falls short of coercion wrong?

“God does not coerce us or constrain or manipulate or trick or con us into a personal relationship with us.”

Once again, this is a tendentious distortion of the Reformed position.

At the same time, there are situations in which it’s right to trick or con someone. You may lie to a suicidal man to talk him down from the ledge. You do it for his own good.

“God does not speak about love so much because He is wimpy and sentimental but because He desires us to have quality relationships with Him and others.”

Actually, the Arminian God is like something out of a Harlequin romance. Our Fabio in heaven.

“Persons who are into love are into ‘informed consent’, persons who are into selfish control and power are into coercion. A coerced and forced relationship of love is an oxymoron.”

This is stock, Arminian rhetoric. I’d add that it’s also out of touch with the realities of sexual passion and infatuation, where—for better or worse—lovers are often overpowered by their feelings for each other and swept along by the heat of the moment.

How is it that Arminians know so little about human nature, especially in matters of the heart? Did Henry grow up within a Shaker community?

“In my analogy of the lifeguard since I am talking about salvation and God developing a loving relationship in such a context, informed consent is important and necessary.”

Even at a human level, this is utter nonsense. Take parents and children, or siblings. How they feel about one other is normally quite involuntary. For better or worse, they have precious little control over their feelings.

Is Henry a clone? Did he grow up inside a giant Petri dish? No human contact apart from rubber gloves? How is it that Henry, like other Arminians, is so obvious to social psychology? So clueless about the world around them?