WARNING: Jerry Walls Ahead

Wintery Knight has posted a recent Jerry Walls video, “Jerry Walls lectures on objections to Reformed Theology”, with the comment, “WARNING: This lecture is a very sharp and pointed critique of Calvinist theology. Viewer discretion is advised”.

I have good friends who are Arminians (I know the retort: “friends don’t let friends be Arminians”), and so normally I don’t take much interest in these types of discussions. I like WK and I wanted to see what he found so compelling. But after watching this video, I can’t understand how anybody can take Jerry Walls seriously, at least from a theological perspective. I left the following comment:

I was not impressed. Walls begins with TULIP, but genuine Reformed theology begins with very careful prolegomena and the doctrines of God and Scripture. If an Arminian wants to try to score an easy win against Calvinists, I guess a caricature of TULIP is a good place to start. But if an Arminian really wants to understand the genuine Reformed faith, he must start way earlier in Reformed systematics.

As it is, Walls’s big trump card is “the character of God”, but without an analysis of the Reformed Doctrine of God, Walls’s “character” is something of his own making.

I would disagree, too, that his description of TULIP was accurate. It was accurate within the bounds of stereotypes, but I think his whole simplified message is wrong-headed.

What I find most alarming is that he gets an audience for this kind of thing among evangelical Christians.

For just one response, see Steve Hays’s critique of Walls’s article in Philosophia Christi:

http://triablogue.blogspot.com/2012/10/impugning-god.html