Love and goodness

I'd like to make yet another observation about the recent interview with Jerry Walls:

https://www.spreaker.com/user/veracityhill/episode-10-the-order-of-salvation?

Observe how Jerry slides back and forth between God's goodness and God's universal love as synonymous concepts.  For instance, he says:

Is God perfectly good? Is God perfectly loving? So the issue is, is this compatible with the goodness of God, the love of God? And Calvinists simply have no intelligible way of making sense of how God loves everybody (34-36 min. mark). 

Notice how that interjects a systematic equivocation into his argument. For him, to deny God's universal love is equivalent to denying God's goodness. Hence, if Calvinists have no intelligible way to make sense of how God loves everyone, they have no intelligible way to make sense of God's goodness. 

But the problem with casting his argument in those terms is that it confounds an internal critique of Calvinism with an external critique of Calvinism. From what I can tell, Jerry is attempting to show that Calvinism is inconsistent. Reformed theology can't consistently affirm the universal love of God. 

When, however, Jerry treats universal love and goodness as interchangeable or mutually inclusive, he is tacitly switching from an internal critique to an external critique. According to Jerry's theological frame of reference, universal love and goodness are synonymous or inseparable. But it doesn't follow that they are equivalent or mutually inclusive in Calvinism. 

Hence, this would not be an inconsistency that's internal to Calvinism, but an inconsistency between Calvinism and Jerry's brand of freewill theism. Jerry is manufacturing a point of tension in Calvinism by imputing to Calvinism an assumption that's not a Reformed assumption, but rather an assumption imported from Jerry's theological frame of reference. 

Suppose, for the sake of argument, that Calvinism has no intelligible way to affirm God's universal love. That, however, wouldn't begin to demonstrate that a denial of God's universal love entails a corresponding denial of God's goodness on Calvinist grounds. Rather, Jerry is implicitly judging Calvinism by his own theological yardstick at this juncture.

Presumably, Jerry commits this blunder because, for him, equating divine goodness with universal love is so engrained that he can't separate the two in his own thinking. When, however, a philosopher evaluates an opposing viewpoint, it's incumbent on the philosopher to practice critical detachment. He must be able to grasp and describe the opposing viewpoint on its own terms before he's in a position to evaluate it. It's a two-step process. First you expound the opposing viewpoint, then you assess the opposing viewpoint. 

There's nothing inherently wrong with judging the other side by your own standards–although, if you take that approach, you assume a burden of proof to justify your standard of comparison. But you can't allow your own viewpoint to infect your interpretation of the opposing viewpoint. Interpretation and evaluation are distinct steps. And if you attempt to mount an internal critique of the opposing viewpoint, if your aim is to expose a point of internal tension in the opposing viewpoint, you must at all cost avoid smuggling your own normative assumptions into the exposition. Otherwise, you see your own face at the bottom of the well. This is typical of Jerry's slipshod analysis when it comes to Calvinism. He conflates his normative assumptions with the preliminary step of exposition, which results in begging the question.